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Title: Sons of fire, Vol. II.
Author: M. E. Braddon
Release date: January 22, 2025 [eBook #75174]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1895
Credits: Peter Becker, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONS OF FIRE, VOL. II. ***
SONS OF FIRE
A Novel
By Mary Elizabeth Braddon
THE AUTHOR OF
"LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN,"
"ISHMAEL," ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES_
VOL. II.
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO.
LIMITED
STATIONERS' HALL COURT
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
I. FATE INTERVENES
II. "BEFORE THE NIGHT BE FALLEN ACROSS THY WAY"
III. WHILE LEAVES WERE FALLING
IV. "LET NO MAN LIVE AS I HAVE LIVED"
V. "CHANCE CANNOT CHANGE MY LOVE, NOR TIME IMPAIR"
VI. AT EVENSONG
VII. "THE DEAD MAN TOUCH'D ME FROM THE PAST"
VIII. "WHAT WAS A SPECK EXPANDS INTO A STAR"
IX. "A WHITE STAR MADE OF MEMORY LONG AGO"
X. "AND THAT UNREST WHICH MEN MISCALL DELIGHT"
XI. "WHO KNOWS WHY LOVE BEGINS?"
XII. "THAT WAY MADNESS LIES"
SONS OF FIRE.
CHAPTER I.
FATE INTERVENES.
The return of Geoffrey Wornock made no essential difference in the
lives of the lovers. Suzette continued her organ practice; Allan
continued his visits to the Manor House; and Suzette and Allan were
much oftener Mrs. Wornock's companions than her son, whose restless
temper did not allow of his remaining long in any one place, and for
whom monotony of any kind was intolerable.
He stayed in London for a week buying horses, and having brought home
a string of four, every one supposed to be matchless, he began hunting
with the vigour of a man whose appetite for that British sport had
only been sharpened by paper-chases and polo in the tropics. Not
content with the South Sarum, he travelled up and down the line, hunted
with the Vine from Basingstoke, and with the H. H. from Winchester. He
was up and away in the grey November mornings after a seven-o'clock
breakfast, and seldom home in time for an eight-o'clock dinner.
On the days when there was no hunting to be had, he flung himself
into the delights of the music-room with all the ardour of a musical
fanatic, and Allan and Suzette were content to listen in meek
astonishment to performances which were far above the drawing-room
amateur, although marked by certain imperfections and carelessnesses
which seemed inevitable in a player whose ardour was too fitful for the
drudgery of daily practice.
These musical days were the bright spots in Mrs. Wornock's existence,
the chief bond of union between mother and son; as if music were the
only spell which could hold this volatile spirit within the circle of
domestic love.
"I like my mother to accompany me," said Geoffrey. "I have played with
some prodigious swells, but not one of them has had her sympathetic
touch, her instantaneous comprehension of my spontaneities. They
expected me to be faultily faultless, instead of which I play de Beriot
as Chopin used to play Chopin, indulging every caprice as to time."
Geoffrey was occasionally present when one of the organ lessons was
in progress. He was interested, but not so much so as to sit still
and listen. He carried Allan off to the billiard-room, or the stable,
before the lesson was half over.
"What a happy little family we are," he said laughingly one day, as he
and Allan were strolling stablewards. "My mother is almost as fond of
your _fiancée_ as if she were her daughter."
"Your mother is a very amiable woman, as well as a gifted woman."
"Gifted? yes, that's the word. She is all enthusiasm. There have been
no spiritualists or supernatural people here lately, I suppose?"
"No."
"I'm glad of that. My poor mother loses her head when that kind of
people are in the way. She is ready to believe in their nonsense. She
wants to believe. She wants to see visions and dream dreams. She has
secluded herself from the world of the living, and she would give
half her fortune if she could bring the dead into her drawing-room.
Poor dear mother! How many weary hours she has spent waiting for
materializations that have never materialized! I have never been able
to convince her that all her spiritualistic friends are pretenders and
comedians. She tells me she knows that some are charlatans; but she
believes that their theories are based upon eternal truths. She rebukes
my scepticism with an appeal to the Witch of Endor. I dare not shock
her by confessing that I have my doubts even about the Witch of Endor."
He had a way of making light of his mother's fancies and eccentricities
which had in its gaiety no touch of disrespect. Gaiety was the chief
characteristic of his temperament, as it was with Suzette. He brought a
new element of mirthfulness into the life at Discombe Manor; but with
this happy temperament there was the drawback of an eager desire for
change and movement which disturbed the atmosphere of a house whose
chief charm to Allan's mind had been its sober quiet, its atmosphere of
old-world peace.
Allan studied this young man's character closely, studied him and
thought of him much more than he wanted to think of him, and vainly
struggled against an uneasy feeling that in every superiority of this
new acquaintance there lurked a danger to his own happiness.
"He is handsomer than I am," mused Allan, in one of his despondent
moods. "He has a gayer temper--Suzette's own temper--which sees all
things in the happiest light. I sit and watch them, listen to them,
and feel myself worlds away from them both; and yet if she were free
to-morrow he could never love her as I love her. There, at least, I am
the superior. He has no such power of concentration as I have. To his
frivolous nature no woman could ever be all in all."
These despondent moods were luckily not of long duration. On Suzette's
part there had not been the faintest sign of wavering; and Allan felt
ashamed of the jealous fears which fell ever and anon like a black
cloud across the sunny prospect of his life. However valiantly he might
struggle against that lurking jealousy, there were occasions upon which
he could not master it, and his darkest hours were those during which
he sat in the music-room at Discombe, and heard Suzette and Geoffrey
playing concertante duets for violin and piano. It seemed to him as the
violinist bent over the pretty dark head, to turn a leaf, or to explain
a passage in the piano score, that for these two there was a language
which he knew not, a language in which mind spoke to mind, and perhaps
heart to heart. Who could keep the heart altogether out of the question
when that most eloquent of all languages was making its impassioned
appeal? Every long-drawn legato chord upon the Strad, every delicate
diminuendo of the sighing strings, the tremulous bow so lightly held in
the long lissom fingers, sounded like an avowal.
"I love you, I love you, I love you," sobbed the violin; "how can
you care for that dumb brute yonder, while I am telling my love in
heavenliest sounds, in strains that thrill along every nerve, and
tremble at the door of your heart? How can you care for that dumb dog,
or care how you hurt him by your inconstancy?"
Possessed by these evil fancies, Allan started up from his seat in
a remote window, and began to pace the room in the midst of a de
Beriot sonata, to which Suzette had been promoted after a good deal of
practice in less brilliant music.
"What's the matter, old fellow?" asked Geoffrey, noting that impatient
promenade; "was I out of tune?"
"No, you were only too much in tune."
"How do you mean? I don't understand----"
"Is it likely you can understand me--or I you?" cried Allan,
impetuously. "You have a language which I have not, a sense which
is lacking in me. You and Suzette are in a paradise whose gate I
can't open. Don't think me an envious, churlish kind of fellow, if I
sometimes grudge you your happiness."
"But, my dear Allan, you are fond of music--you like listening----"
"No, I don't. I have had too much listening, too much of being out of
it. Put on your hat, Suzette, and come for a walk. I am tired to death
of your de Beriot."
Mrs. Wornock was sitting a little way from the piano, reading. She
looked up wonderingly at this outburst. Never before had Allan been
guilty of such rough speech in her presence. Never before had he spoken
with such rude authority to Suzette.
"If our music has not the good fortune to please you, I would suggest
that there are several rooms in this house where you would not hear
it," said Geoffrey, laying down his fiddle.
All the brightness had faded from his countenance, leaving it very
pale. Suzette looked from one to the other with an expression of
piteous distress. The two young men stood looking at each other,
Allan flushed and fiery, Geoffrey's pallid face fixed and stern, with
an anger which was stronger than the occasion warranted. They were
sufficiently alike to make any ill-will between them seem like a
brother's quarrel.
"You are very good, but I would rather be out-of-doors. Are you coming,
Suzette?"
"Not till I have finished the sonata," she answered quietly, with a
look which reproved his rudeness, and then began to play.
Geoffrey took up his fiddle, and the performance was resumed as if
nothing had happened.
Mrs. Wornock rose and went to Allan.
"Will you come for a stroll with me, Allan?" she asked, taking up the
warm Indian shawl which lay on a chair near the window. "It is not too
cold for the garden."
He could not refuse such an invitation as this, though it tortured him
to leave those two alone at the piano. He opened the window, wrapped
Mrs. Wornock in her shawl, and followed her to the lawn.
"Allan, why were you angry just now?" she asked.
"Why? Perhaps I had better tell you the truth. I am miserable when I
see the woman I love interested and enthralled by an art in which your
son is a master--and of which I know hardly the A, B, C. I ask myself
if she can care for a creature so inferior as I am--if she can fail to
perceive his superiority."
"Jealous, Allan! Oh, I am so sorry. It was I who proposed that they
should play duets. It was not Geoffrey's idea. I thought it would
encourage Suzette to go on practising. You don't know the delight a
pianist feels in accompanying a violin----"
"I think I can imagine it. Suzette takes very kindly to the concertante
practice."
"She has improved so much since I first knew her. She has such a talent
for music. It never occurred to me that you could object."
"It never occurred to you that I could be a jealous fool. You might
just as well say that, for no doubt you think it."
"Yes, I think you are foolish to be jealous. Suzette is as true as
steel; and I don't believe Geoffrey has the slightest inclination to
fall in love with her."
"Not at this moment, perhaps; but who knows what tender feelings
those dulcet strains may bring? However, Suzette will be leaving the
neighbourhood, I hope, in a few days."
"Leaving us, you hope!"
"Yes. My mother has written to invite her to Fendyke. She is to see the
White Farm, and get acquainted with all our Suffolk neighbours, who
declare themselves dying to see her, while I am shooting my father's
pheasants."
"You are both going away then? I shall miss you sadly."
"You will have Geoffrey."
"One day out of six, perhaps. He will be hunting or shooting all the
rest of the week."
"We shall not be away very long. I don't suppose General Vincent will
spare us his daughter for more than a fortnight or three weeks."
"Suzette told me nothing about the invitation."
"She has not received the letter yet. The post had not come in when she
left home. I met the postman on my way here, and read my letters as I
came along. De Beriot has been too absorbing to allow of my telling
Suzette about my mother's letter to me. Shall we go back? Unless that
sonata is interminable, it must have come to an end before now."
Mrs. Wornock turned immediately. She saw Allan's uneasiness, and
sympathized with him. They went back to the music-room, where there
was only silence. Suzette had left the piano, and had put on her hat
and jacket. Geoffrey was still standing in front of the music-stand,
turning the leaves of the offending sonata.
"Good-bye, dear Mrs. Wornock," said Suzette, kissing her friend. "Now,
Allan, I am quite ready."
Allan and Geoffrey shook hands at parting, but not with the usual
smiling friendliness.
"How could you be so dreadfully rude, Allan?" Suzette said with a
pained voice, as they walked away from the house. "You were quite
hateful."
"I know that. I am astounded at my own capacity for hatefulness."
"I shall play no more concertante duets, though I have enjoyed them
more than anything in the way of music. It was only the most advanced
pupils at the Sacré Cœur who ever had accompanying lessons--and such
happiness never fell to my share."
"I should be very sorry to interfere with your--happiness; but I think,
Suzette, if you cared for me half as much as I care for you, you would
understand how it hurts me to see you so completely in sympathy with
another man, and happy with a happiness which I cannot share."
"Why should you not share our happiness, Allan? You are fond of music,
I know."
"Fond of music--yes; but I am not a musician. I cannot make music as
that young man can. I cannot speak to you as he speaks to you, in that
language which is his and yours, and not mine. I am standing outside
your world. I feel myself thrust far off from you, while he is so near."
"Allan!" cried Suzette, with a smile that was a pale shadow of her old
sportiveness, "can you actually be jealous?"
"I'm afraid I can."
"Jealous about a man who is nothing to me except my dear friend's son.
You know how fond I am of Mrs. Wornock--the only real friend I have
made since I left the convent--and you ought to understand that I like
her son for her sake. And I have been pleased to take my part in the
music they both love. But that is all over now. I will not allow myself
to be misconstrued by you, Allan. There shall be no more duets."
They were still in Mrs. Wornock's domain, in a wooded drive where the
leafless branches overarched the way; and the scene was lonely enough
and sheltered enough to allow of Allan taking his sweetheart to his
breast and kissing her in a rapture of penitent love.
"My darling, forgive me! If I did not know the pricelessness of my
treasure, I should not be so full of unworthy fears. We won't stop the
duets for ever, Susie. I must get accustomed to the idea of a gifted
wife, who has many talents which I have not. But I hope your musical
studies at Discombe may be suspended for a month or so. When you go
home, you will find a letter from my mother inviting you to Fendyke.
She loves you already, and she wants to know more of you, so that you
may really be to her the daughter she has been wishing for ever since
I was born. You will go, won't you, Suzette, if the good General will
spare you; and I think he will?"
"Are you to be there too?"
"Yes, I am to be there; but you shall not see too much of me. Ours
is a shooting county, and I shall be expected to be tramping with my
gun nearly every day. I think you will like Fendyke. The house is a
fine old house, and the neighbourhood is pretty after a fashion, just
as some parts of Holland and Belgium are pretty--sleepy, contented,
prosperous, useful."
He walked home with her and stayed to luncheon, so as to secure
General Vincent's consent upon the spot. This was obtained without
difficulty. The General, having had to dispense with his daughter for
at least three-fourths of her existence, was not dependent upon her for
society, though he liked to see the bright young face smiling at him
across the table at his luncheon and his dinner, and he liked to be
played to sleep after dinner, or to have Suzette as a listener when he
was in the mood for talking. The greater part of his life was spent
out-of-doors--hunting, shooting, fishing, golfing--so that he could
afford to be amiable upon this occasion.
"Yes, yes, Suzette, accept the invitation, by all means. The change
will do you good. Lady Emily is a most estimable person, and it is only
right that you should become better acquainted with her."
"I am very fond of her already," said Suzette. "Then I am really to go,
Allan? Lady Emily suggests Saturday--three days from now."
"Well, you are ready, I suppose," said her father. "You have the frocks
and things that are necessary."
"Yes, father, I think I have frocks enough; unless you are dreadfully
fashionable in Suffolk, Allan."
"The less said about our fashion the better. If you have a stout
cloth skirt short enough to keep clear of our mud, that is all you
need trouble about. I suppose I shall be allowed to escort Suzette,
General?"
"Well, yes, I don't see any objection to your taking care of her on
the journey; but I have very lax notions of etiquette. I must ask my
sister. Suzie will take her maid, of course; and Suzie's maid is a
regular dragon."
* * * * *
Allan walked homeward with a light step and a light heart. The idea of
having Suzette as a visitor in his own home, growing every day nearer
and dearer to his parents, was rapture. No more concertante duets, no
more long-drawn sobbings and sighings on the Stradivarius! He would
have his sweetheart all to himself, to pace the level meadow paths, and
saunter by the modest river, and loiter by rustic mills and bridges,
which Constable may have painted. And in that atmosphere of homely
peacefulness he might draw his sweetheart closer to his heart, win her
more completely than he had won her yet, and persuade her to consent to
a nearer date for their marriage than that far-off summer of the coming
year. He counted much on home influences, on his mother's warmhearted
affection for the newly adopted daughter.
"A telegram, sir," said the servant who opened the door, startling him
from a happy day-dream. "It came nearly an hour ago."
Allan tore open the envelope and glanced carelessly at the message,
expecting some trivial communication.
"Your father is dangerously ill. Come at once. I am writing to
postpone Miss Vincent's visit.--Emily Carew."
CHAPTER II.
"BEFORE THE NIGHT BE FALLEN ACROSS THY WAY."
A sudden end to a happy day-dream. A hurried preparation and a swift
departure. Allan had just time to write to Suzette while his servant
was packing a portmanteau and the dog-cart horse was being harnessed
for the drive to the station.
He loved his father too well to have room for any selfish thoughts
about his own disappointment; but he tried to be hopeful and to think
that his mother's alarm had exaggerated the evil, and that the word
"dangerously" was rather the expression of her own panic than of the
doctor's opinion. It was only natural that she should summon him, the
only son, to his father's sick-bed. The illness must be appalling in
its suddenness; for in her letter, written on the previous day, she had
described him as in his usual health. The suddenness of the attack was
in itself enough to scare a woman of Lady Emily's temperament.
Allan telegraphed from Liverpool Street, and was met at the quiet
little terminus, where the tiny branch line came to an end on the edge
of a meadow, and a hundred yards from a rustic road. The journey to
Cambridge had been one of the swiftest, the twenty miles on the branch
line of the slowest; a heart-breaking journey for a man whose mind was
racked with fears.
It was dark when he arrived; but out of the darkness which surrounded
the terminus there came the friendly voice of a groom and the glare of
carriage-lamps.
"Ah, is that you, Moyle? Is my father any better?"
His heart sank as he asked the question, with agonizing dread of the
reply.
"No, sir; I'm afraid he ain't no better. The doctor from Abbeytown is
coming again to-night. Will you drive, sir?"
"No. Get me home as fast as you can, for God's sake!"
"Yes, sir. I brought your old bay mare. She's the fastest we've got."
"Poor old Kitty! Good to the last, is she? Get on."
They were bowling along the level road behind bay Kitty, the first
hunter Allan had bought on his own account in his old college days,
when his liberal allowance enabled him to indulge his taste in
horseflesh. Kitty had distinguished herself in a small way as a
steeplechaser before Allan picked her up at Tattersall's, and she was
an elderly person when he came into his fortune; so he had left her in
the home stables as a general utility horse.
Kitty carried him along the road at a splendid pace, and hardly
justified impatience even in the most anxious heart.
His mother was waiting in the porch when he alighted.
"Dear mother," he said, as he kissed and soothed her and led her into
the house, "why do you stand out in the cold? You are shivering."
"Not with cold, Allan."
"Poor mother! Is he very ill? Is it really so serious?"
"It could not be more serious, Allan. They thought this morning that he
was dying. They told me--to be prepared--for the worst."
The sentence was broken by sobs. She hid her face on her son's breast
and sobbed out her grief unchecked by him, only soothed by the gentle
pressure of his arm surrounding and, as it were, protecting her from
the invincible enemy.
"Doctors are such alarmists, mother; they often take fright too soon."
"Not in this case, Allan; I was with him all through his sufferings.
I saw him struggling with death. I knew how near death was in those
dreadful hours. It is his heart, Allan. You remember Dr. Arnold's
death--how we have cried over the story in Stanley's book. It was
like that--sudden, intense suffering. Yesterday he was sitting in his
library, placid and at ease among his books. We dined together last
night. He was cheerful and full of interesting talk. And this morning
at daybreak he was fighting for his life. It was terrible."
"But the danger is past, mother. The struggle is over, please God, and
he will be well again."
"Never, never again, Allan. The doctors hold out little hope of that.
The awful agony may return at any hour. The mischief is deep seated. We
have been living in a fool's paradise. Oh, my dear son, I never knew
how fondly I have loved your father till to-day. I thought we should
grow old together, go down to the grave hand-in-hand."
"Dear mother, hope for the best. I cannot think--remembering how young
a man he seemed the other day at Beechhurst--I cannot think that we
are to lose him."
Tears were streaming down Allan's cheeks, tears of which he was
unconscious. He dearly loved the father whose mild affection had
made his childhood and youth so smooth and easy, the father who had
understood every youthful desire, every unexpressed feeling, who in his
tenderness and forethought had been as sympathetic as a loving woman.
"Oh, Allan, you will find him aged by ten years since those happy
days at Beechhurst. One day of suffering has altered him. It seems as
if some invisible writing--the lines of disease and death--had come
suddenly out upon his face--lines I never saw till this day."
"Mother, we won't despair. We are passing through the valley of the
shadow of death, perhaps--but only passing through. The fight may be
hard and bitter; but we shall conquer the enemy; we shall carry our
dearest safely over the dark valley. May I see him? I will be very
calm and quiet. I am so longing to see him, to hold his dear hand."
"We ought to wait for the doctors, Allan. They both warned me that he
must be kept as quiet as possible. He is terribly exhausted. They will
be here at eleven o'clock. It might be safer to wait till then."
"Yes, I will wait. Who is with him now?"
"A nurse from the Abbeytown hospital."
"And he is out of pain, and at rest?"
"He was sleeping when I left him--sleeping heavily, worn out with pain,
and under the influence of opium."
"Well, we must wait. There is nothing to be done."
Mother and son waited patiently, almost silently, through the slow
hours between eight and eleven. They sat together in Lady Emily's
morning-room, which was next to the sick man's bedroom. There was a
door of communication, and though this was shut, they could hear if
there were much movement in the adjoining room.
Lady Emily mooted the question of dinner for the traveller. She urged
him to go down to the dining-room and take some kind of meal after his
journey; but he shook his head with the first touch of impatience he
had shown since his arrival.
"You will wear yourself out, Allan?" she remonstrated.
"No, mother--there is plenty of wear in me. I almost hate myself for
being so strong and so full of life while he is lying there----"
Tears ended the sentence.
At last the hands of the clock, which mother and son had both been
watching, pointed to eleven, and the hour struck with slow and silvery
sound. Then came ten minutes of expectancy, and then the cautious tread
of the family practitioner and the consulting physician coming upstairs
together.
Allan and his mother went out to the corridor to see them. A few
murmured words only, and the two dark figures vanished through the door
of the sick-room, and mother and son were alone once more, waiting,
waiting with aching hearts and strained ears, that listened for every
sound on the other side of the closed door.
The doctors were some time with the patient, and then they went
downstairs, and were closeted together in the library for a time
that seemed very long to those who waited for the result of their
consultation. Those anxious watchers had followed them downstairs, and
were standing beside the expiring fire in the hall, waiting as for
the voice of fate. The dining-room door was open. A table laid for
supper, with glass and silver shining under the lamplight, and the glow
of a blazing fire, suggested comfort and good cheer--and seemed to
accentuate the gloom in the hearts of the watchers.
What were they talking about, those two in the closed room yonder,
Allan wondered. Was their talk all of the sufferer upstairs, and the
means of alleviating pain and staving off the inevitable end? or did
they wander from that question of life and death to the futilities of
everyday conversation--and so lengthen out the agony of those who were
waiting for their verdict? At last the door opened, and the two doctors
came out into the hall, very grave still, but less gloomy than they had
looked in the morning, Lady Emily thought.
"He is better--decidedly better than he was twelve hours ago," said the
physician. "We have tided over the immediate peril."
"And he is out of danger?" questioned Allan, eagerly.
"He is out of danger for the moment. He may go on for some time without
a recurrence of this morning's attack; but I am bound to tell you that
the danger may recur at any time. What has happened must be regarded--I
am sorry to be obliged to say it--as the beginning of the end."
There was a silence, broken only by the wife's stifled sobs.
"My God, how sudden it is! and you say it is hopeless?" said Allan,
stunned by the sentence of doom.
"To you the thing is sudden; but the mischief is a work of many years.
The evil has been there, suspected by your father, but never fully
realized. He consulted me ten years ago, and I gave him the best advice
the case allowed--prescribed a regimen which I believe he carefully
followed--a regimen which consisted chiefly in quietness and careful
living. I told him as much as it was absolutely necessary to tell,
taking care not to frighten him."
"You did not tell me that he was a doomed man," Lady Emily said
reproachfully.
"My dear lady, to have done that would have been to lessen his chance
of cheerful surroundings, to run the risk of sad looks where it was
most needful he should find hopefulness. Besides, at that stage of
the disease, one might hope for the best--even for a long life, under
favourable conditions."
"And now--what is the limit of your hope?" asked Allan.
"I cannot measure the sands in the glass. Another attack like that of
to-day would, I fear, be fatal. It is a wonder to me that he survived
the agony of this morning."
"And you have told us--that agony may return at any hour. Nothing you
can do can prevent its recurrence?"
"I fear not; but we shall do the uttermost."
"May I see him?"
"Not till to-morrow. He is still under the influence of an opiate.
Let him rest for to-night undisturbed by one agitating thought. His
frame is exhausted by suffering. Mr. Travers will be here again early
to-morrow; and if he find his patient as I hope he will find him, then
you and Lady Emily can see him for a few minutes. But I must beg that
there may be no emotional talk, and that he may be kept very quiet all
to-morrow. I will come again early on Saturday."
Mother and son hung upon the physician's words. He was a man whom both
trusted, and even in this great strait the idea of other help hardly
occurred to either. Yet in the desire to do the uttermost, Allan
ventured to say--
"If you would like another opinion, I would telegraph for any one you
might suggest--among London specialists."
"A specialist could do nothing more than we have done. The battle is
fought and won so far--and when the fight begins again the same weapons
will have to be used. The whole college of physicians could do nothing
to help us."
And then the doctors went into the dining-room, the physician to
fortify himself for a ten-mile drive, the family practitioner to
prepare himself for the possibilities of the night. Allan went in with
them, at his mother's urgent request, and tried to eat some supper; but
his heart was heavy as lead.
He thought of Mrs. Wornock--remembering that pale face looking out
of the autumn night, so intense in its searching gaze, the dark grey
eyes seeming to devour the face they looked upon--his father sitting
unconscious all the while--knowing not how near love was--the romantic
love of his younger years, the love which still held all the elements
of poetry, the love which had never been vulgarized or out-worn by the
fret and jar of daily life.
He would die, perhaps, without ever having seen the face of his early
love, without ever having heard the end of her history--die, perhaps,
believing that she had given him up easily because she had never
really cared for him. The son had felt it in somewise his duty to keep
those two apart for his mother's sake; but now at the idea that his
father might die without having seen his early love or heard her story
from her own lips, it seemed to him that he had acted cruelly and
treacherously towards the parent he loved.
There was a further improvement in the patient next morning, and Allan
spent the greater part of the day beside his father's bed. There was to
be very little conversation; but Allan was told he might read aloud,
provided the literature was of an unemotional character. So at his
father's request Allan read Chaucer, and the quaint old English verse,
with every line of which the patient was familiar, had a soothing and
a cheering influence on the tired nerves and brain. There was progress
again the day after, and the physician and local watch-dog expressed
themselves more than satisfied. The patient might come downstairs on
Sunday--might have an airing on the sunniest side of the garden, should
there be any sunshine on Monday; but everything was to be done with
precautions that too plainly indicated his precarious condition.
"Do you take a more hopeful view than you did the other night?" Allan
asked the physician, after the consultation.
"Alas! no. The improvement is greater than I expected; but the
substantial facts remain the same. There is deep-seated mischief, which
may culminate fatally at any time. I should do wrong to conceal the
nature of the case--or its worst possibilities--from you. It is best
you should be prepared for the end--for Lady Emily's sake especially,
in order that you may lighten the blow for her."
"And the end is likely to come suddenly?"
"Most likely--better perhaps that it should so come. Your father is
prepared for death. He is quite conscious of his danger. Better that
the end should be sudden--if it spare him pain?"
"Yes, better so. But it is a hard thing. My father is not forty-eight
years of age--in the prime of life, with a fine intellect. It is a hard
thing."
"Yes, it is hard, very hard. It seems hard even to me, who have seen so
many partings. I think you ought to spare your mother as much as you
can. Spare her the agony of apprehension; let her have her husband's
last days of sunshine and peace. But it is best that you should know.
You are a man, and you can suffer and be strong."
"Yes, I can suffer. He seemed so much better this morning. Might he not
go on for years, with the care which we shall take of him?"
"He might--but it is scarcely probable."
"We were to have had a young lady visitor here to-day," said Allan,
with some hesitation, "the lady who is to be my wife. Her visit has
been postponed on account of my father's illness; but I am very anxious
that she should know more of my father and mother, and I have been
wondering if next week we might venture to have her here. She is very
gentle and sympathetic, and I know her society would be pleasant to my
father."
"I would not risk it, Mr. Carew, if I were you."
"You think it might be bad for my father?"
"I think it might be hazardous for the young lady. Were a fatal end to
come suddenly, you would not like the girl you love to be subjected to
the horror of the scene, to be haunted perhaps for years by the memory
of that one tragic hour. There is no necessity for her presence here.
You can go and see her."
"Yes, and risk being absent in my father's dying hours."
"Better that risk than the risk of her unhappiness, should the end
come while she were in the house."
"Yes, I suppose that is so; but I can't help hoping that the end may be
far off."
The doctor pressed his hand in silence, and nodded good-bye as he
stepped into his carriage. It was not for him to forbid hope, even if
he knew that it was a delusive hope.
CHAPTER III.
WHILE LEAVES WERE FALLING.
Fondly as he loved his betrothed wife, Allan felt that affection and
duty alike forbade him to leave his father while the shadow of doom
hung over the threshold, while there could be no assurance from day
to day that the end would not come before sundown. There had been
enough in the physician's manner to crush hopefulness even in the most
sanguine breast; and it was in vain that Allan tried to argue within
himself against the verdict of learning and experience. He knew in
his inmost heart that the physician was right. The ordeal through
which George Carew had passed had changed him with the change that too
palpably foreshadows the last change of all. In the hollow eyes, the
blue-veined forehead and pale lips, in the inert and semi-transparent
hands, in the far-off look of the man whose race is run and who has
nothing more to do with active life, Allan saw the sign manual of the
destroyer. He had need to cherish and garner these quiet days in his
father's company, to hang fondly on every word from those pale lips,
to treasure each thought as a memory to be hereafter dear and sacred.
Whatever other love there might be for him upon this earth--even the
love of her whom he had made his second self, upon whom he depended for
all future gladness--no claim could prevail against the duty that held
him here, by the side of the father whose days were numbered.
"I am so glad to have you with me, Allan," Mr. Carew said, in the grave
voice which had lost none of its music, though it had lost much of
its power. "It seems selfish on my part to keep you here, away from
that nice girl, your sweetheart; but though you are making a sacrifice
now----"
"No, no, no," interrupted Allan, "it is no sacrifice. I had rather be
here than anywhere in the world. Thank God that I am here, that no
accident of distance has kept me from you."
"Dear boy, you are so good and true--but it is a sacrifice all the
same. This is the spring-time of your life, and you ought to be with
the girl who makes your sunshine. It is hard for you two to be parted;
and I should like her to be here; only this is a house of gloom. God
knows what might happen to chill that young heart. It is better that
you and I should be alone together, prepared for the worst: and in the
days to come, in the far-off days, you will be glad to remember how
your love lightened every burden for your dying father."
"Father, my dear father!"
The son uttered words of hope, declared his belief that Heaven would
grant the dear patient renewed strength; but the voice in which he
spoke the words of cheerfulness was broken by sobs.
"My dear Allan, don't be down-hearted. I am resigned to the worst that
can happen. I won't say I am glad that the end is near. That would be
base ingratitude to the best of wives, to the dearest of sons, and
to Providence which has given me so many good things. This world and
this life have been pleasant to me, Allan; and it does seem hard to be
called away from such peaceful surroundings, from the home where love
is, even though through all that life there has run a dark thread. I
think you have known that, Allan. I think that sensitive nature of
yours has been conscious of the shadow on my days."
"Yes, I have known that there was a shadow."
"A stronger character would have risen superior to the sorrow that has
clouded my life, Allan. I have no doubt that some of the greatest and
many of the most useful men the world has known have suffered just such
a disappointment as I suffered in my early manhood, and have risen
superior to their sorrow. You remember how Austin Caxton counsels his
son to live down a disappointed love--how he appeals to the lives of
men who have conquered sorrow? 'You thought the wing was broken. Tut,
tut, 'twas but a bruised feather.' But in my own case, Allan, the
wing _was_ broken. I had not the mental stamina, I had not the power
of rebound which enables a man to rise superior to the sorrow of his
youth. I could not forget my first love. I gave up a year of my life
to the search for the girl I loved--who had forsaken me in a foolish
spirit of self-sacrifice because she had been told that my marriage
with her would be social ruin. She was little more than a child in
years--quite a child in ignorance of the world, and of the weight
and measure of worldly things. We were both cruelly used, Allan. My
mother was a good woman, and a woman who would do nothing which she
could not reconcile to her conscience and her own ideas of piety. She
acted conscientiously, after her own narrow notions, in bringing about
the parting which blighted my youth, and she thought me a wicked son
because for two years of my life I held myself aloof from her."
"And in all that time could you find no trace of your lost love?"
"None. I advertised in English and Continental newspapers, veiling my
appeal in language which would mean little to the outside world though
it would speak plainly to her. I wandered about the Continent--Italy,
Switzerland--all along the Rhine, and the Danube, to every place
that seemed to offer a chance of success. I had reason to believe
that she had been sent abroad, and I thought that her exile would be
fixed in some remote district, out of the beaten track. It may be
that my research was conducted feebly. I was out of health for the
greater part of my wanderings, and I had no one to help me. Another
man in my position might have employed a private detective, and might
have succeeded where I failed. I was summoned home by the news of my
mother's dangerous illness, and I returned remorseful and unhappy.
At the thought that she might die unforgiving and unforgiven, my
resentment vanished. I recalled all that my mother had been to my
childhood and boyhood, and I felt myself an ungrateful son. Thank God,
I was home in time to cheer her sick-bed, and to help towards her
recovery by the assurance of my unaltered affection. I found that she
too had suffered, and I discovered the strength of maternal love under
that outward hardness, and allied with those narrow views which had
wrecked my happiness. In my gladness at her recovery from a long and
dangerous illness, I began to think that the old heart-wound was cured;
and when she suggested my marriage with Emily Darnleigh, my amiable
playfellow of old, I cheerfully fell in with her views. The union was
in every respect suitable, and for me in every respect advantageous.
Your mother has been a good and dear wife to me, and never had man
less reason to complain against Fate. But there has been the lingering
shadow of that old memory, Allan, and you have seen and understood; so
it is well you should know all."
Allan tearfully acknowledged the trust confided in him.
"When I am gone, if you care to know the story of my first love, you
will find it fully recorded in a manuscript which was written some
years ago. Heaven knows what inspired me to go over that old ground,
to write of myself almost as I might have written of another man.
It was the whim of an idle brain. I felt a strange sad pleasure in
recalling every detail of my brief love-story--in conjuring up looks
and tones, the very atmosphere of the commonplace surroundings through
which my sweet girl and I moved. No touch of romance, no splendour of
scenery, no gaiety of racecourse or public garden made the background
of our love. A dull London street, a dull London parlour were all we
had for a paradise, and God knows we needed no more. You will smile at
a middle-aged man's folly in lingering fondly over the record of his
own love-story, instead of projecting himself into the ideal world
and weaving a romance of shadows. If I had been a woman, I might have
found a diversion for my empty days in writing novels, in every one of
which my sweetheart and I would have lived again, and loved and parted
again, under various disguises. But I had not the feminine capacity
for fiction. It pleased me to write of myself and my love in sober
truthfulness. You will read with a mind in touch with mine, Allan;
and though you may smile at your father's folly, there will be no
scornfulness in your smile."
"My dear, dear father, God knows there will be no smile on these lips
of mine if I am to read the story--after our parting. God grant the day
for that reading may be far off."
"I will do nothing to hasten it, Allan. Your companionship has renewed
my pleasure in life. You can never know how I missed you when this
house ceased to be your home. It was different when you were at
the University--the short terms, the short distance between here
and Cambridge, made parting seem less than parting. But when you
transferred yourself to a home of your own, and half a dozen counties
divided us, I began to feel that I had lost my only son."
"You had but to summon me."
"I know, I know. But I could not be so selfish as to bring you away
from your pleasant surroundings, the prettier country, the more
genial climate, your hunting, your falconry, your golf, and your new
neighbours. A sick man is a privileged egotist; but even now I feel I
am wrong in letting you stay here and lose the best part of the hunting
season--to say nothing of that other loss, which, no doubt, you feel
more keenly, the loss of your sweetheart's society."
"You need not think about it, father, for I mean to stay. Please regard
me as a fixture. If you keep as well next week as you are to-day, I
may take a run to Wilts, just to see how Suzette and her father are
getting on, and to look round my stable; but I shall be away at most
one night."
"Go to-morrow, Allan. I know you are dying to see her."
"Then, perhaps, to-morrow. You really are wonderfully well, are you
not?"
"So well that I feel myself an impostor when I am treated as an
invalid."
"I may go then; but it will only be to hurry back," said Allan.
His heart beat faster at the thought of an hour with Suzette--an hour
in which to look into the frank bright face, to see the truthful eyes
looking up at him in all confidence and love, to be assured that three
weeks' absence had made no difference, that not the faintest cloud had
come between them in their first parting. Yes, he longed to see her,
with a lover's heart-sickness. Deeply, tenderly as he treasured every
hour of his father's society, he felt that he must steal just as much
time from his home duty as would give him one hour with Suzette.
He pored over time-tables, and so planned his journey as to leave
Fendyke in the afternoon of one day, and to return in time for luncheon
the day after. This was only to be effected by leaving Matcham at
daybreak; but a young man who was in the habit of leaving home in the
half-light of a September dawn to ride ten miles to a six-o'clock meet
was not afraid of an early train.
He caught a fast evening train for Salisbury, and was at Matcham
soon after eight. He had written to General Vincent to announce his
intention of looking in after dinner, apologizing in advance for so
late a visit. His intention was to take a hasty meal, dress, and drive
to Marsh House; but at Beechhurst he found a note from the General
inviting him to dinner, postponed till nine o'clock on his account; so
he made his toilet in the happiest mood, and arrived at Marsh House ten
minutes before the hour.
He found Suzette alone in the drawing-room, and had her all to himself
for just those ten minutes which he had gained by extra swiftness
at his toilet. For half those minutes he had the gentle fluttering
creature in his arms, the dark eyes full of tears, the innocent heart
all tenderness and sympathy.
"Why would not you let me go to you, Allan?" she remonstrated. "I
wanted to be with you and Lady Emily in your trouble. I hope you
don't think I am afraid of sickness or sorrow, where those I love are
concerned."
"Indeed, dearest, I give you credit for all unselfishness. But I was
advised against your visit. The hazard was too awful."
"What hazard, Allan?"
"The possibility of my father's sudden death."
"Oh, Allan, my poor, poor boy! Is it really as bad as that? How sad for
you! And you love him so dearly, I know."
"I hardly knew how dearly till this great terror fell upon me. Nothing
less than my love for a father whom I must lose too soon--whom I may
lose very soon--would have kept me from you so long, Suzette. And now
I am only here for a few hours, to see you, to hear you, to hold you
in my arms, and to assure myself that there is such a person; to make
quite sure that the Suzette who is in my thoughts by day and in all my
dreams by night is not a brilliant hallucination--the creature of my
mind and fancy."
"I am very real, I assure you--full of human faults."
"I hope you have a stray failing or two lurking somewhere amongst your
perfections; but I have not discovered one yet."
"Ah, Allan, Love would not be Love if he could see."
"Tell me all your news, Suzie. What have you been doing with yourself?
Your letters have told me a good deal--dear bright letters, coming
like a burst of sunshine into my sad life--but they could not tell me
enough. I suppose you have been often at Discombe?"
"Yes, I have been there nearly every day. Mrs. Wornock has been ill and
depressed. She will not own to being ill, and I could not persuade
her to send for the doctor. But I don't think she could be in such low
spirits if she were not ill."
"Poor soul!"
"She is so sympathetic, Allan. She has been as keenly interested in
your poor father's illness as if he were her dearest friend. She has
been so eager to hear about his progress, and has begged me to read the
passages in your letters which refer to him. She is so tender-hearted,
and enters so fully into other people's sorrows."
"And you have been much with her, and have done all in your power to
cheer her, no doubt."
"I have done what I could. We have made music together; but she has not
taken her old delight in playing, or in listening to me. She has become
dreamy and self-absorbed. I am sure she is out of health."
"And her son, for whose company she was pining all the summer? Has not
he been able to cheer her spirits?"
"I hardly know about that. Mr. Wornock is out hunting all day and every
day. He has increased his stud since you left, and hunts with three
packs of hounds. He comes home after dark, sometimes late for dinner.
He and his mother spend the evening together, and no doubt that is her
golden hour."
"And has Wornock given up his violin practice?"
"He plays for an hour after dinner sometimes, when he is not too tired?"
"And your musical mornings? Have there been no more of those--no more
concertante duets?"
"Allan, I told you that there should be no more such duets for me."
"You might have changed your mind."
"Not after having promised. I considered that a promise."
"Conscientious soul! And you think me a jealous brute, no doubt?"
"I don't think you a brute."
"But a jealous idiot. My dearest, I don't think I am altogether wrong.
A wife--or a betrothed wife--should have no absorbing interest outside
her husband's or her sweetheart's life; and music is an absorbing
interest, a chain of potent strength between two minds. When I heard
those impassioned strains on the fiddle, and your tender imitations on
the piano, question and answer, question and answer, for ever repeating
themselves, and breathing only love----"
"Oh, Allan, what an ignoramus you are! Do you suppose musical people
ever think of anything but the music they are playing?"
"They may not think, but they must feel. They can't help being borne
along on that strong current."
"No, no; they have no time to be vapourish or sentimental. They have to
be cool and business-like; every iota of one's brain-power is wanted
for the notes one is playing, the transitions from key to key--so
subtle as to take one by surprise--the changes of time, the syncopated
passages which almost take one's breath away----Hark! there is my
aunt. Father asked her in to support me. Uncle Mornington is in London,
and she is alone at the Grove."
"I think we could have done without her, Suzie."
Mrs. Mornington's resonant voice was heard in the hall while she was
taking off her fur cloak, and the lady appeared a minute later, in a
serviceable black-velvet gown, with diamonds twinkling and trembling in
her honiton cap, jovial and hearty as usual.
"You poor fellow! I'm very glad to see you," she said, shaking hands
with Allan. "I hope your father is better. Of course he is, though, or
you wouldn't be here. It's five minutes past nine, Suzie, and as I am
accustomed to get my dinner at half-past seven, I hope your cook means
to be punctual. Oh, here's my brother, and dinner is announced. Thank
goodness!"
General Vincent welcomed his future son-in-law, and the little party
went into the cosy dining-room, where Suzette looked her prettiest in
the glow of crimson shaded lamps, which flecked her soft white gown and
her pretty white neck with rosy lights. Conversation was so bright and
cheerful among these four that Allan's thoughts reverted apprehensively
now and again to the quiet home in Suffolk and the dark shadow hanging
over it. He felt as if there were a kind of treason against family
affection in this interlude of happiness, and yet he could not help
being happy with Suzette. To-morrow, in the early grey of a winter
morning, he would be on his way back to his father.
After dinner Mrs. Mornington established herself in an armchair close
to the drawing-room fire, and had so much to say to her brother about
Matcham sociology that Allan and his sweetheart, seated by the piano
at the other end of the room, were as much alone as if they had been
in one of the Discombe copses. No better friend than a piano to lovers
who want to be quiet and confidential. Suzette sat before the keyboard
and played a few bars now and then, like a running commentary on the
conversation.
"You will say all that is kind and nice to Mrs. Wornock for me?" Allan
said, after a good deal of other and tenderer talk.
"Yes, I will tell her how kindly you spoke of her; but the best thing I
can tell her is that your father is better. She has been so intensely
interested about him. I have felt very sorry for her since you went
away, Allan."
"Why?"
"Because I cannot help seeing that her son's return has not brought her
the happiness she expected. She has been thinking of him and hoping for
his coming for years--empty, desolate years, for until she attached
herself to you and me she had really no one she cared for. Strange, was
it not, that she should take such a fancy to you, and then extend her
friendly feeling to me?"
"Yes, it was strange, undoubtedly. But I believe I owe her kindly
feeling entirely to my very shadowy likeness to her son."
"No doubt that was the beginning; but I am sure she likes you for your
own sake. You are only second to her son in her affection; and I know
she is disappointed in her son."
"I hope he is not unkind to her."
"Unkind! No, no, he is kindness itself. His manner to his mother is
all that it should be; affectionate, caressing, deferential. But he is
such a restless creature, so eager for change and movement. Clever and
amiable as he is, there is something wanting in his character; the want
of repose, I believe. He hardly ever rests; and there is no rest where
he is. He excites his mother, and he doesn't make her happy. Perhaps
it is better for her that he is so seldom at home. She is too highly
strung to endure his unquiet spirit."
"You like him though, don't you, Suzette, in spite of his faults?"
"Oh, one cannot help liking him. He is so bright and clever; and he
has all his mother's amiability; only, like her, he has just a touch
of eccentricity--but I hardly like to call it that. A German word
expresses it better; he is _überspannt_."
"He is what our American friends call a crank," said Allan, relieved to
find his sweetheart could speak so lightly of the man who had caused
him his first acquaintance with jealousy.
CHAPTER IV.
"LET NO MAN LIVE AS I HAVE LIVED."
Allan went back to Suffolk, and Suzette's life resumed its placid
course; a life in which she had for the most part to find her own
amusements and occupations. General Vincent was fond and proud of his
daughter; but he was not a man to make a companion of a daughter,
except at the social board. If Suzette were at home at twelve o'clock
to superintend the meal which he called tiffin, and in her place in
the drawing-room a quarter of an hour before the eight-o'clock dinner;
if she played him to sleep after dinner, or allowed herself to be
beaten at chess whenever he fancied an evening game, she fulfilled the
whole duty of a daughter as understood by General Vincent. For the
rest he had a supreme belief in her high principles and discretion.
Her name on the tableau in the parlour at the Sacré Cœur had stood
forth conspicuously for all the virtues--order, obedience, propriety,
truthfulness. The nuns, who expect perfection in the young human
vessel, had discovered no crack or flaw in Suzette.
"She has not only amiability and kindness of heart," said the Reverend
Mother, at the parting interview with the pupil's father, "she has
plenty of common sense, and she will never give you any trouble."
When the General took his daughter to India, there had been some talk
of a companion-governess, or governess-companion, for Suzette; but
against this infliction the girl herself protested strongly.
"If I am not old enough or wise enough to take care of myself, I will
go back to the convent," she declared. "I would rather take the veil
than submit to be governed by a 'Mrs. General.' I had learnt everything
the nuns could teach me before I left the Sacré Cœur. I am not going
to be taught by an inferior teacher--some smatterer, perhaps. Nobody
can teach like the sisters of the Sacré Cœur."
General Vincent had been preached at by his female relatives on this
subject of the governess-companion. "Suzette is too young and too
pretty to be alone," said one. "Suzette will get into idle habits if
there is no one to direct her mind," said another. "A girl's education
has only begun when she leaves school," said a third, as gloomy in
their foreshadowing of evil as if they had been the three fatal
sisters. But the General loved his daughter, and when withdrawing her
from the convent had promised her that her life should be happy; so he
abandoned an idea that had never been his own.
"A Mrs. General would have been a doosid expensive importation," he
told his friends afterwards, "and I knew there would be plenty of nice
women to look after Suzie."
Suzette had proved quite capable of looking after herself, unaided by
the nice women; indeed, her conduct had been--or should have been--a
liberal education to more than one of those nice women, who might have
found their matronly exuberances of conversation and behaviour in a
manner rebuked by the girl's discretion and self-respect. Suzette
passed unsmirched through the furnace of a season at Simla, and a
season at Naini Tal, and came to rustic Wiltshire with all the frank
gaiety of happy girlhood, and all the _savoir faire_ which comes of
two years' society experience. She had been courted and wooed, and had
blighted the hopes of more than one eligible admirer.
When she came to Matcham, there was again a question of chaperon or
companion. The odious word governess was abandoned. But it was said
that Indian society was less conventional than English society, and
that what might be permitted at Simla could hardly be endured at
Wiltshire; and again Suzette threatened to go back to her convent if
she were not to be trusted with the conduct of her own life.
"If I cannot take care of myself I am only fit for a cloister," she
said. "I would rather be a lay sister, and scrub floors, than be led
about by some prim personage, paid to keep watch and ward over me, a
hired guardian of my manners and my complexion."
Mrs. Mornington, who was less conventional than the rest of the
General's womankind, put in her word for her niece.
"Suzette wants no chaperon while I am living within five minutes'
walk," she said. "She can come to me in all her little domestic
difficulties; and as for parties, she is not likely to be asked to any
ceremonious affair to which I shall not be asked too."
Mrs. Mornington had been as kind and helpful as she had promised to
be; and in all domestic cruxes, in all details of home life, in the
arrangement of a dinner or the purchase of household goods Suzette had
taken counsel with her aunt. The meadows appertaining to the Grove
and to Marsh House were conterminous, and a gate had been made in the
fence, so that Suzette could run to her aunt at any hour, without hat
or gloves, and without showing herself on the high-road.
"If ever we quarrel, that gate will have to be nailed up," said
Mrs. Mornington. "It makes a quarrel much more awful when there is
a communication of that kind. The walling up of a gate is a public
manifesto. If ever we bar each other out, Suzette, all Matcham will
know it within twenty-four hours."
Suzette was not afraid that the gate would have to be nailed up. She
was fond of her aunt, and fully appreciated that lady's hard-headed
qualities; but although she went to her aunt Mornington for advice
about the gardener and the cook, the etiquette of invitations and
the law of selection with reference to a dinner-party, it was to
Mrs. Wornock she went for sympathy in the higher needs of life; it
was to Mrs. Wornock she revealed the mysteries of her heart and her
imagination.
"I seem to have known you all my life," she told that lady; "and I am
never afraid of being troublesome."
"You never can be troublesome," Mrs. Wornock answered, looking at
her with admiring affection. "I don't know what I should do without
you, Suzette. You and Allan have given my poor worn-out life a new
brightness."
"Allan! How fond you are of Allan," Suzette said, musingly. "It
seems so strange that you should have taken him to your heart so
quickly--only because he is like your son."
"Not only on that account, Suzette. That was the beginning. I am fond
of Allan for his own sake. His fine character has endeared him to me."
"You think he has a fine character?"
"Think! I know he has. Surely you know him too, Suzie. You ought to
have learnt his value by this time."
"Yes, I know he is good, generous, honest, and true. His love for his
father is very beautiful--and yet he found time to come all this way to
spend an hour or two with unworthy frivolous me."
"He did not think that a sacrifice, Suzie, for he adores you."
"You really think so--that he cares as much as that?"
"I am very sure that he loves with his whole heart and mind, as his
father--may have done before him."
"Oh, his father would have been in earnest, I have no doubt, in any
affection; but I doubt if he was ever tremendously in love with Lady
Emily. She is all that is sweet and dear in her frank homely way, but
not a person to inspire a _grande passion_. Allan's father must have
loved and lost in his early youth. There is a shade of melancholy in
his voice and manner--nothing gloomy or dismal--but just that touch of
seriousness which tells of deep thoughts. He is a most interesting man.
I wish you could have seen him while he was at Beechhurst. I fear he
will never leave Fendyke again."
Mrs. Wornock sighed and sat silent, while Suzette went to the piano and
played a short fugue by their favourite Sebastian Bach--played with
tender touch, lengthening out every slow passage in her pensive reverie.
There had been no more concertante duets. Geoffrey had entreated her
to go on with their mutual study of De Beriot and the older composers,
Corelli, Tartini, and the rest; but she had obstinately refused.
"The music is difficult and tiring," she said.
This was her first excuse.
"We will play simpler music--the lightest we can find. There are plenty
of easy duets."
"Please don't think me capricious if I confess that I don't care
about playing with the violin. It takes too much out of one. I am too
anxious."
"Why should you be anxious? I am not going to be angry or disagreeable
at your _brioches_--should you make any."
She still refused, lightly but persistently; and he saw that she had
made up her mind.
"I begin to understand," he said, with an offended air; and there was
never any further talk of Suzette as an accompanist.
Geoffrey was seldom at home in the daytime after this refusal, and
life at the Manor dropped back into the old groove. Mrs. Wornock and
Suzette spent some hours of every day together; and, now that the
weather often made the garden impossible, the organ and piano afforded
their chief occupation and amusement. Suzette was enthusiastic, and
pleased with her own improvement under her friend's guidance. It was
not so much tuition as sympathy which the elder woman gave to the
younger. Suzette's musical talent, since she left her convent, had been
withering in an atmosphere of chilling indifference. Her father liked
to be played to sleep after dinner; but he hardly knew one air from
another, and he called everything his daughter played Rubinstein.
"Wonderful fellow that Rubinstein!" he used to say. "There seems no end
to his compositions; and, to my notion, they've only one fault--they're
all alike."
Suzette heard of Geoffrey, though she rarely saw him. His mother talked
of him daily; but there was a regretful tone in all her talk. Nothing
at Discombe seemed quite satisfactory to the son and heir. His horses
were failures. The hunting was bad--"rotten," Geoffrey called it, but
could give no justification for this charge of rottenness. The sport
might be good enough for the neighbours in general; but it was not good
enough for a man who had run the whole gamut of sport in Bengal, under
the best possible conditions. Geoffrey doubted if there was any hunting
worth talking about, except in the shires or in Ireland. He thought of
going to Ireland directly after Christmas.
"He is bored and unhappy here, Suzette," Mrs. Wornock said one morning,
when Suzette found her particularly low-spirited. "The life that suits
Allan, and other young men in the neighbourhood, is not good enough
for Geoffrey. He has been spoilt by Fortune, perhaps--or it is his sad
inheritance. I was an unhappy woman when he was born, and a portion of
my sorrow has descended upon my son."
This was the first time she had ever spoken to Suzette of her past life
or its sorrows.
"You must not think that, dear Mrs. Wornock. Your son is tired of this
humdrum country life, and he'll be all the better and brighter for a
change. Let him go to Ireland and hunt. He will be so much the fonder
of you when he comes back."
Mrs. Wornock sighed, and began to walk about the room in a restless way.
"Oh, Suzette, Suzette," she said, "I am very unhappy about him! I don't
know what will become of us, my son and me. We have all the elements of
happiness, and yet we are not happy."
* * * * *
It was a month after the little dinner at Marsh House, and Suzette
and her sweetheart had not met since that evening. There had been no
change for the better in Mr. Carew's condition; and Allan had felt it
impossible to leave the father over whose dwindling hours the shadow of
the end was stealing--gently, gradually, inevitably. There were days
when all was hushed and still as at the approach of doom--when the
head of the household lay silent and exhausted within closed doors, and
all Allan could do was to comfort his mother in her aching anxiety.
This he did with tenderest thoughtfulness, cheering her, sustaining
her, tempting her out into the gardens and meadows, beguiling her to
temporary forgetfulness of the sorrow that was so near. There were
happier--or seemingly happier--days when the invalid was well enough to
sit in his library, among the books which had been his life-companions.
In these waning hours he could only handle his books--fondle them, as
it were--slowly turning the leaves, reading a paragraph here and there,
or pausing to contemplate the outside of a volume, in love with a
tasteful binding, the creamy vellum, or gold-diapered back, the painted
edges, the devices to which he had given such careful thought in the
uneventful years, when collecting and rebinding these books had been
the most serious business of his life. He laid down one volume and took
up another, capriciously--sometimes with an impatient, sometimes with
a regretful, sigh. He could not read more than a page without fatigue.
His eyes clouded and his head ached at any sustained exertion. His
son kept him company through the grey winter day, in the warm glow of
the luxurious room, sheltered by tapestry portières and tall Indian
screens. His son fetched and carried for him, between the book-table by
the hearth and the shelves that lined the room from floor to ceiling,
and filled an ante-room beyond, and overflowed into the corridor.
"My day is done," George Carew said with a sigh. "These books have been
my life, Allan, and now I have outlived them. The zest is gone out of
them all; and now in these last days I know what a mistake my life has
been. Let no man live as I have done, and think that he is wise. A life
without variety or action is something less than life. Never envy the
student his peaceful meditative days. Be sure that when the end is near
he will look back, as I do, and feel that he has wasted his life--yes,
even though he leave some monumental work which the world will treasure
when he is in the dust--monument more enduring than brass or marble.
The man himself, when the shadows darken round him, will know how much
he has lost. Life means action, Allan, and variety, and the knowledge
of this glorious world into which we are born. The student is a worm
and no man. Let no sorrow blight your life as mine has been blighted."
"Dear father, I have always known there was a cloud upon your life--but
at least you have made others happy--as husband, father, master----"
"I have not been a domestic tyrant. That is about the best I can say
for myself. I have been tolerably indulgent to the kindest of wives.
I have loved my only son. Small merits these in a man whose home-life
has been cloudless. But I might have done better, Allan. I might have
risen superior to that youthful sorrow. I might have taken my dear
Emily closer to my heart, travelled over this varied world with her,
shown her all that is strangest and fairest under far-off skies instead
of letting her vegetate here. I might have gone into Parliament, put
my shoulder to the wheel of progress--helped as other men help, with
unselfish toil, struggling on hopefully through the great dismal
swamp of mistake and muddle-headedness. Better, far better, any life
of laborious endeavour, even if futile in result, than the cultured
idlers' paradise--better far for me, since in such a life I should
have forgotten the past, and might have been a cheerful companion in
the present. I chose to feed my morbid fancies; to live the life of
retrospection and regret; and now that the end has come, I begin to
understand what a contemptible creature I have been."
"Contemptible! My dear father, if every student were so to upbraid
himself after a life of plain living and high thinking, such as you
have led----"
"Plain living and high thinking are of very little good, Allan, if they
result in no useful work. Plain living and high thinking may be only a
polite synonym for selfish sloth."
"Father, I will not hear you depreciate yourself."
"My dear son! It is something to have won your love."
"And my mother. Is it not something to have made her happy?"
"For that I must thank her own sweet disposition. My reproach is that I
might have made her happier. I have wronged her by brooding over an old
sorrow."
"She has not been jealous of the love that came before you belonged to
her. She loves and honours you."
"Far beyond my merits. Providence has been very good to me, Allan."
There was a silence. More books were asked for and brought, languidly
opened, languidly closed, and laid aside. Yes, the zest had gone out
of them. The languor of excessive weakness can find no beauty even in
things most beautiful.
CHAPTER V.
"CHANCE CANNOT CHANGE MY LOVE, NOR TIME IMPAIR."
Suzette endured her lover's absence with a philosophical cheerfulness
which somewhat surprised her aunt.
"Upon my word, Suzie, I am half inclined to think that you don't care
a straw for Allan," Mrs. Mornington exclaimed one day, when her niece
came singing across the wintry lawn, crisp under her footsteps after
the morning frost.
Suzette looked angrier than her aunt had ever seen her look till this
moment.
"Auntie, how can you say anything so horrid? Not care for Allan!
When he is in sad trouble, too! This morning's letter gives a most
melancholy account of his father. I fear the end must be near. It was
horrid of me to come running and singing over the grass; but these
frosty mornings are so delicious. Look at that glorious blue sky!"
"And when all is over, Allan will come back to you, I suppose? I must
say you have endured the separation in the calmest way."
"Why should I make myself unhappy? I know that it is Allan's duty to be
at Fendyke. The only thing I regret is that I can't be there too, to
help him to bear his sorrow."
"And you do not mind being parted from him. You can live without him?"
Suzette smiled at the sentimental question from the lips of her
practical aunt, whose ideas seemed rarely to soar above the daily cares
of housekeeping and the considerations of twopence as against twopence
halfpenny.
"I have had to live without him over twenty years, auntie."
"Yes, but I thought that the moment a girl was engaged she found life
impossible in the absence of her sweetheart."
"I think that kind of girl must be very empty-headed."
"And your little brains are well furnished--and then you have Mrs.
Wornock and her son to fill up your days," said Mrs. Mornington, with a
searching look.
"I have Mrs. Wornock, and I like her society. I see very little of Mrs.
Wornock's son."
"Where is he, then? I thought he was at the Manor."
"He is seldom at home in the daytime, and I am never there in the
evening."
"And so you never meet. You are like Box and Cox. So much the more
satisfactory for Allan, I should say."
"Really, aunt, you are in a most provoking mood this morning. I'm
afraid the butcher's book must be heavier than you like."
It was Tuesday--Mrs. Mornington's terrible day--the day on which
the tradesmen's books came up for judgment; a day on which the
cook trembled, and even the housemaids felt the electricity in the
atmosphere.
"I never like the butcher's book," said the lady; "but that isn't what
set me thinking about you and Allan. I have been thinking about you for
ever so long. I'm afraid you are not so fond of him as you ought to be."
"Auntie, you have no right to say that."
"Why not, pray, miss?"
"Because, perhaps, if you had not urged me to accept him, I might not
have said 'Yes' when he asked me the second time. Oh, pray don't look
so frightened. I am very fond of him--very fond of him. I know that he
is good and true and kind, and that he loves me better than I deserve
to be loved, and thinks me better than I am--cleverer, prettier,
altogether superior to my work-a-day self. And it is very sweet to
have a lover who thinks of one in that exalted way. But I am not
romantically in love, auntie. I don't believe that it is in my nature
to be romantic. I see the bright and happy side of life. I see things
to laugh at. I am not sentimental."
"Well, I dare say Allan can get on without sentiment, so long as he
knows you like him better than anybody else in the world; and now, as
there is no reason whatever for delay, the sooner you marry him the
better."
"I am afraid he will lose his father before long, auntie; and then he
can't marry for at least a year."
"Nonsense, child. He won't be a widow. I dare say Lady Emily will be
marrying when the year is out. Three months will be quite long enough
for Allan to wait. You can make the wedding as quiet as you like."
Suzette did not prolong the argument. The subject was too remote to
need discussion. Mrs. Mornington went back to her tradesmen's books,
and Suzette left her absorbed in the calculation of legs and sirloins,
and the deeper mysteries of soup meat and gravy beef.
* * * * *
Christmas had come and gone, a very tranquil season at Matcham, marked
only by the decoration of the church and the new bonnets in the
tradespeople's pews. It was a dull, grey day at the end of the year,
the last day but one, and Suzette was walking home in the early dusk
after what she called a long morning with Mrs. Wornock, a long morning
which generally lasted till late in the afternoon. But these mid-winter
days were too short to allow of Suzette walking home alone after tea;
so unless her own or her aunt's pony-carriage were coming for her, she
left the Manor before dusk.
To-day Mrs. Wornock had been sadder even than her wont, as if saddened
by the last news from Fendyke, and sorrowing for Allan's loss; so
Suzette had stayed longer than usual, and as she walked homeward the
shadows of evening began to fall darkly, and the leafless woods looked
black against the faint saffron of the western sky. The sun had shown
himself, as if reluctantly, an hour before his setting.
Presently in the stillness she heard horses' hoofs walking slowly on
the moist road, and the next turn in the path showed her Geoffrey
Wornock, in his red coat, leading his horse.
It was the first time they had met since her refusal to play any
more duets with him, and, without knowing why, she felt considerable
embarrassment at the meeting, and was sorry when he stopped to shake
hands with her, stopped as if he meant to enter into conversation.
"Going home alone in the dark, Miss Vincent?"
"Yes; the darkness comes upon one unawares in these short winter days.
I stayed with Mrs. Wornock because she seemed out of spirits. I am glad
you are home early to cheer her."
"That is tantamount to saying you are glad I have lamed my horse. I
should be on the other side of Andover, in one of the best runs of the
season, if it were not for that fact. When one is thrown out, the run
is always quite the best--or so one's friends tell one afterwards."
"I am sorry for your horse. I hope he isn't much hurt?"
"I don't know. Lameness in a horse is generally an impenetrable
mystery. One only knows that he is lame. The stable will find half a
dozen theories to account for it, and the vet will find a seventh, and
very likely they may all be wrong. I'll walk with you to the high-road
at least."
"And give the poor horse extra work. Not for the world!"
"Then I'll take him on till I am within halloo of the stables, and then
come back to you, if you'll walk on very slowly."
"Pray don't! I am not at all afraid of the dusk."
"Please walk slowly," he answered, looking back at her and hurrying on
with his horse.
Suzette was vexed at his persistence; but she did not want to be rude
to him, were it only for his mother's sake. How much better it would
have been had he gone straight home to cheer that fond mother by his
company, instead of wasting his time by walking to Matcham, as he would
perhaps insist upon doing.
He looked white and haggard, Suzette thought; but that might only
be the effect of the evening light, or it might be that he was tired
after a laborious day. She had not much time to think about him. His
footsteps sounded on the road behind her. He was running to overtake
her. It occurred to her that she might turn this persistence of his
to good account. She might talk to him about his mother, and urge him
to spend a little more of his time at home, and do a little more to
brighten that lonely life.
"I met one of the lads," he said, "and got rid of that poor brute."
"I am so sorry you should think it necessary to come with me."
"You mean you are sorry that I should snatch a brief and perilous
joy--half an hour in your company--after having abstained from pleasure
and peril so long."
"If you are going to talk nonsense, I shall go back to the house and
ask your mother to send me home in her brougham."
"Then I won't talk nonsense. I don't want to offend you; and you are
so easily offended. Something offended you in our duets. What was
it, I wonder? Some ignorant sin of mine? some passage played _troppo
appassionato_? some _cantabile_ phrase that sounded like a sigh from an
over-laden heart! Did the music speak too plainly, Suzette?"
"This is too bad of you!" exclaimed Suzette, pale with anger. "You take
a mean advantage of finding me alone here. I won't walk another step
with you!"
She turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction as she spoke;
but she was some distance from the house, at least ten minutes' walk,
and her heart sank at the thought of how much Geoffrey Wornock could
say to her in ten minutes. Her heart was beating violently, louder
and faster than she had ever felt it beat. Did it matter so much what
nonsense he might talk to her--idle breath from idle lips? Yes, it
seemed to her to matter very much. She would be guilty of unpardonable
treason to Allan if she let this man talk. It seemed to her as if
these wild words of his--mere rodomontade--made an epoch in her life.
He seized her by the arm with passionate vehemence, but not roughly.
"Suzette! Suzette! you must--you shall hear me!" he said. "Go
which way you will, I go with you. I did not mean to speak. I have
tried--honestly--to avoid you. Short of leaving this place altogether,
I have done my uttermost. But Fate meant us to meet, you see. Fate
lamed my horse--the soundest hunter of them all. Fate sent you by
this lonely path at the nick of time. You shall hear me! Say what you
like to me when you have heard. Be as hard, as cruel, as constant to
your affianced lover as you please; but you shall know that you have
another lover--a lover who has been silent till to-night, but who
loves you with a love which is his doom. Who says that about love and
doom? Shakespeare or Tennyson, I suppose. Those two fellows have said
everything."
"Mr. Wornock, you are very cruel," she faltered. "You know how
sincerely I am attached to your mother, and that I wouldn't for
the world do anything to wound her feelings, but you are making it
impossible for me ever to enter her house again."
"Why impossible? You are trembling, Suzette. Oh, my love! my dear, dear
girl, you tremble at my touch. My words go home to your heart. Suzette,
that other man has not all your heart. If he had, you would not have
been afraid to go on with our music. If your heart was his, Orpheus
himself could not have moved you."
"I was not afraid. You are talking nonsense. I left off playing because
Allan did not like to see me absorbed in an occupation which he could
not share. It was my duty to defer to his opinion."
"Yes, he heard, he understood. He knew that my heart was going out to
you--my longing, passionate heart. He could read my mystery, though you
could not. Suzette, is it hopeless for me? Is he verily and indeed the
chosen? Or do you care for him only because he came to you first--when
you knew not what love means? You gave yourself lightly, because he
is what people call a good fellow. He cannot love you as I love you,
Suzette. Love is something less than all the world for him. No duty
beside a father's sick-bed would keep me from my dearest, if she were
mine. I would be your slave. I could live upon one kind word a month,
if only I might be near you, to behold and adore."
He had released her arm, but he was walking close by her side, still in
the direction of the Manor House, she hurrying impetuously, trying to
conquer her agitation, trying to make light of his foolishness, and yet
deeply moved.
"You are very unkind," she said at last, with a piteousness that was
like the complaint of a child.
"Unkind! I am a miserable wretch pleading for life, and you call
me unkind. Suzette, have pity on me! I have not succumbed without
a struggle. I loved you from the hour we met--from that first hour
when my heart leapt into a new life at the sound of your voice. On
looking back, it seems to me now that I must have so loved you from
the beginning. I can recall no hour in which I did not love you. But I
have fought the good fight, Suzette. Self-banished from the presence
I adore, I have lived between earth and sky, until, though I have
something of the sportsman's instinct, I have come almost to hate the
music of the hounds and the call of the huntsman's horn, because in
every mile my horse galloped he was carrying me further from you, and
every hour I spent far afield was an hour I might have spent with you."
"It is cruel of you to persecute me like this."
"No, no, Suzette; you must not talk of persecution. If I am rough and
vehement to-night, it is because I am resolute to ask the question that
has been burning on my lips ever since I knew you. I will not be put
off from that. But once the question asked and answered I have done,
and, if it must be so, you have done with me. There shall be no such
thing as persecution. I am here at your side, your devoted lover--no
better man than Allan Carew, but I think as good a man, with as fair
a record, of as old and honourable a race, richer in this world's
gear; but that's not much to such a woman as Suzette. It is for you to
choose between us; and it is not because you said yes to him before you
had ever seen my face that you are to say no to me, if there is the
faintest whisper in your heart that pleads for me against him."
She stood silent, her eyelids drooping over eyes that were not
tearless. His words thrilled her, as his violin had thrilled her
sometimes in some lingering, plaintive passage of old-world music. His
face was near hers, and his hand was on her shoulder, detaining her.
The intellectuality, the refinement of the delicately chiselled
features, the pallor of the clear complexion were intensified by the
dim light. She could not but feel the charm of his manner.
He was like Allan--yet how unlike! There was a fascination in this
face, a music in this voice, which were wanting in Allan, frank, and
bright, and honest, and true though he was. There was in this man just
the element of poetry and unreasoning impulse which influences a woman
in her first youth more than all the manly virtues that ever went to
the making of the Christian Hero.
Suzette had time to feel the power of that personal charm before she
collected herself sufficiently to answer him with becoming firmness.
For some moments she was silent, under the influence of a spell which
she knew must be fatal to her peace and Allan's happiness, should she
weakly yield. No, she would not be so poor, so fickle a creature. She
would be staunch and true, worthy of Allan's love and of her father's
confidence.
"Why, if I were to palter with the situation," she thought--"if I were
to play fast and loose with Allan, my father might think he had been
mistaken in trusting me without a chaperon. He would never respect me
or believe in me again. And Allan? What could Allan think of me were I
capable of jilting him?"
Her heart turned cold at the idea of his indignation, his grief, his
disgust at a woman's perfidy.
She conquered her agitation with an effort, and answered her daring
lover as lightly as she could. She did not want Geoffrey to know how he
had shaken her nerves by his vehement appeal.
She knew now, standing by his side, with that eloquent face so near her
own, that musical voice pleading to her--she knew how often his image
had been present to her thoughts at Discombe Manor, while he himself
was away.
"It is very foolish of you to waste such big words upon another man's
sweetheart," she said. "Pray believe that when I accepted Allan Carew
as my future husband, I accepted him once and for ever. There was no
question of seeing some one else a little later, and liking some one
else a little better. There may be girls who do that sort of thing;
but I should be sorry that anybody could think me capable of such
inconstancy. Allan Carew and I belong to each other for the rest of our
lives."
"Is that a final answer, Miss Vincent?"
"Absolutely final."
"Then I can say no more, except to ask your forgiveness for having said
too much already. If you will go on to the house, and talk to my mother
for a few minutes, I'll go to the stables and order the brougham to
take you home. It is too dark for you to walk home alone."
There was no occasion for the brougham. A pair of lamps in the drive
announced the arrival of Miss Vincent's pony-cart, which had been sent
to fetch her.
CHAPTER VI.
AT EVENSONG.
The windows were darkened at Fendyke. The passing bell had tolled
the years of the life that was done, sounding solemnly and slowly
across the level fields, the deep narrow river, the mill-streams and
pine-woods, the scattered hamlets lying far apart on the great flat,
where the sunsets linger late and long. All was over, and Allan had
to put aside his own sorrow in order to comfort his mother, who was
heart-broken at the loss of a husband she had idolized, with a love so
quiet and unobtrusive, so little given to sentimental utterances, that
it might have been mistaken for indifference.
She wandered about the darkened house like some lost soul in the dim
under-world, unable to think of anything, or to speak of anything but
her loss. She looked to Allan for everything, asserted her authority in
no detail.
"Let all be as he wished," she said to her son. "Let us think only of
pleasing him. You know what he would like, Allan. You were with him so
much towards the last. He talked to you so freely. Think only of him,
and of his wishes."
She could not divest herself of the idea that her husband was looking
on at all that happened, that this or that arrangement might be
displeasing to him. She was sure that he would wish the sternest
simplicity as to the funeral. His own farm-labourers were to carry
him to his grave, and the burial was to be at dusk. He had himself
prescribed those two conditions. He wished to be laid in his grave at
set of sun, when the hireling's daily toil was over, and the humblest
of his neighbours could have leisure to follow him to his last bed. And
then he had quoted Parson Hawker's touching lines:--
"Sunset should be the time, they said,
To close their brother's narrow bed.
'Tis at that pleasant hour of day
The labourer treads his homeward way;
His work is o'er, his toil is done,
And therefore at the set of sun,
To wait the wages of the dead,
We lay our hireling in his bed."
Those lines were written for the tillers of the earth; but George
Carew's thoughts of himself were as humble as if he had been the
lowest of day labourers. Indeed, in those closing hours of life,
when the record of a man's existence is suddenly spread out before
him like the scroll which the prophet laid before the king, there is
much in that comprehensive survey to humiliate the proudest of God's
servants, much which makes him who has laboured strenuously despair
at the insufficiency of the result, the unprofitableness of his
labour. How, then, could such a man as George Carew fail to perceive
his unworthiness?--a man who had let life go by him, who had done
nothing, save by a careless automatic beneficence, to help or better
his fellow-men, to whom duty had been an empty word, and the Christian
religion a lifeless formula.
* * * * *
The Squire of Fendyke was laid to rest in the pale twilight of early
March, the winter birds sounding their melancholy evensong as the
coffin was lowered into the grave. The widow and her son stood side by
side, with those humbler neighbours and dependents clustering round
them. No one had been bidden to the funeral, no hour had been named,
and the gentry of the district, whose houses lay somewhat wide apart,
knew nothing of the arrangements till afterwards. There were no empty
carriages to testify to the decent grief which stays at home, while
liveried servants offer the tribute of solemn faces and black gloves.
Side by side, Lady Emily and her son walked through the grounds of
Fendyke to the churchyard adjoining. The wintry darkness had fallen
gently on those humble graves when the last "Amen" had been spoken, and
mother and son turned slowly and sadly towards the desolate home.
Allan stayed in his mother's sitting-room till after midnight, talking
of their dead. Lady Emily found a sad pleasure in talking of the
husband she had lost, in dwelling fondly upon his virtues, his calm and
studious life, his non-interference with her household arrangements,
his perfect contentment with the things that satisfied her.
"There never was a better husband, Allan," she said, with a tearful
sigh, "and yet I know I was not his first love."
* * * * *
"Not his first love. Alas! no, poor soul," mused Allan, when he had
bidden his mother good night, and was seated alone in front of his
father's bureau, alone in the dead middle of the night, steeped in the
concentrated light of the large shaded lamp, while all the rest of the
room was in semi-darkness.
"Not his first love! Poor mother. It is happy for you that you know not
how near that first love was to being the last and only love of your
husband's life. Thank God, you did not know."
Often in those quiet days while his father was gradually fading out of
life, Allan had argued with himself as to whether it was or was not his
duty to reveal Mrs. Wornock's identity with the woman to whom George
Carew had dedicated a lifetime of regret, and so to give his father
the option of summoning that sad ghost out of the past, of clasping
once again the vanished hand, and hearing the voice that had so long
been unheard. There would have been rapture, perhaps, to the dying
man in one brief hour of re-union; but that hour could not give back
youth, or youthful dreams. There would have been the irony of fate in
a meeting on the brink of the grave; and whatever touch of feverish
gladness there might have been for the dying in that brief hour, its
after consequences would have been full of evil for the mourning wife.
Better, infinitely better, that she should never know the romance of
her husband's youth, never be able to identify the woman he loved, or
to inflict upon her own tender heart the self-torture of comparison
with such a woman as Mrs. Wornock.
For Lady Emily, in her happy ignorance of all details, that early love
was but a vague memory of a remote past, a memory too shadowy to be the
cause of retrospective jealousy. She knew that her husband had loved
and sorrowed; and she knew no more. It must needs be painful to her
to identify his lost love in the person of a lady whom her son valued
as a friend, and to whom her son's future wife was warmly attached.
Allan had felt therefore that he was fully justified in leaving Mrs.
Wornock's story unrevealed, even though by that silence he deprived the
man who had loved her of the last tearful farewell, the final touch of
hands that had long been parted.
He was full of sadness to-night as he turned the key in the lock, and
lifted the heavy lid of the bureau at which he had so often seen his
father seated, arranging letters and papers with neat, leisurely hands,
and the pensive placidity which characterized all the details of his
life. That bureau was the one repository for all papers of a private
nature, the one spot peculiarly associated with him whom they had laid
in the grave at evensong. No one else had ever written on that desk, or
possessed the keys of those quaintly inlaid drawers.
And now the secrets of the dead were at the mercy of the survivors,
so far as he had left any trace of them among those neatly docketted
papers, those packets of letters folded and tied with red tape, or
packed in large envelopes, sealed, and labelled.
Allan touched those packets with reverent hands, glanced at their
endorsement, and replaced them in the drawers or pigeon-holes as he had
found them. He was looking for the manuscript of which his father had
told him; the story of "a love which never found its earthly close."
Yes, it was here, under his hand; a thin octavo, bound in limp morocco,
a manuscript of something less than a hundred pages, in the hand he
knew so well, the small, neat hand that, to Allan's fancy, told of the
leisurely life, the mind free from fever and fret, the heart that
beat in slow time, and had long outlived the quick alternations of
passionate feeling. Allan drew his chair nearer the lamp, and began to
read.
CHAPTER VII.
"THE DEAD MAN TOUCH'D ME FROM THE PAST."
"I wonder how many lives there are like mine in this prosperous England
of ours, eminently respectable, comfortable, and altogether protected
from the worst hazards of fate, happy even, according to the standard
measure of happiness among the squirearchy of England--and yet cold and
colourless. I wonder how many men there are in every generation who
drift along the slow current of a sluggish river, and who call that
monotonous progress living. Up the river with the rising tide; down
the river with the ebbing tide; up and down, to and fro, between level
banks that are always the same, with never a hill and never a crag to
break the monotony of the outlook.
"We have a river within a stone's throw of my gates which always seems
to me the outward and visible sign of my inward and spiritual life,
a river that flows past farms and villages, and for any variety of
curve or accident of beauty might just as well be a canal--a useful
river bearing the laden barges down to the sea, a river on which a
pleasure-boat is as rare as a kingfisher on its banks. And so much
might be said of my life; a useful life within the everyday limits
of English morality; but a life that nobody will remember or regret,
outside my own household, when I am gone.
"This is no complaint that I am writing, to be read when I am in my
grave by the son I hope to leave behind me. Far be such a thought
from me the writer, and from him the reader. It is only a statement,
a history of a youthful experience which has influenced my mature
years, chiefly because on that boyish romance I spent all the stock
of passionate feeling with which nature had endowed me. It was not
much, perhaps, in the beginning. I was no Byronic hero. I was only an
impulsive and somewhat sentimental youth, ready to fall in love with
the first interesting girl I met, but not to find my Egeria among the
audience at a music-hall, or in a dancing garden.
"Do not mistake me, Allan. I have loved your mother truly and even
warmly, but never romantically. All that constitutes the poetry, the
romance of love, the fond enthusiasm of the lover, vanished out of my
life before I was three and twenty. All that came afterwards was plain
prose.
"It was in the second year of my university life, and towards the
end of the long vacation, that I allowed myself to be persuaded to
attend a _séance_ to be given by some so-called spiritualists in the
neighbourhood of Russell Square. Mr. Home, the spiritualist, had
been frightening and astonishing people by certain unexplainable
manifestations, and he had been lucky enough to number among his
patrons and disciples such men as Bulwer Lytton, William and Robert
Chambers, and others of almost equal distinction. To the common herd
it seemed that, there must be some value in manifestations which could
interest and even convince these superior intellects; so, with the
prestige of Home's performances, and with an article in the _Cornhill
Magazine_ to assist them, the people near Russell Square were doing
very good business.
"Twice, and sometimes three times a week, they gave a _séance_, and
though they did not take money at the doors, or advertise their
entertainment in the daily papers, they had their regular subscribers
among the faithful, and these subscribers could dispose of tickets of
admission among the common herd. As two of the common herd, Gerald
Standish and I got our tickets from Mrs. Ravenshaw, a literary lady
of Gerald's acquaintance, who had written a spiritualistic novel, and
was a profound believer in all the spiritualistic phenomena. Her vivid
description of the dark _séance_ and its wonders had aroused Gerald's
curiosity, and he insisted that I, who was known among the men of my
year as a favourite pupil of the then famous mathematical coach,
should go with him and bring the severe laws of pure science to bear
upon the spirit world.
"I was incurious and indifferent, but Gerald Standish was a genius, and
my particular chum. I could not, therefore, be so churlish as to refuse
so slight a concession. We dined together at the Horseshoe Restaurant,
then in the bloom of novelty; and, after a very temperate dinner, we
walked through the autumn dusk to the quiet street on the eastward side
of Russell Square, where the priest and priestess of the spirit-world
had set up their temple.
"The approach of the mysteries was sadly commonplace, a shabby hall
door, an airless passage that smelt of dinner, and for the temple
itself a front parlour sparsely furnished with the most Philistine of
furniture. When we entered, the room was empty of humanity. An oil-lamp
on a cheffonier by the fireplace dimly lighted the all-pervading
shabbiness. The scanty moreen curtains--lodging-house curtains of
the poorest type--were drawn. The furniture consisted of a dozen or
so of heavily made mahogany chairs with horse-hair cushions, a large
round table on a massive pedestal, supported on three clumsily carved
claws, and a bookcase against the wall facing the windows, or I should
say rather a piece of furniture which might be supposed to contain
books, as the contents were hidden by a brass lattice-work lined with
faded green silk. The gloom of the scene was inexpressible, and seemed
accentuated by a dismal street cry which rose and fell ever and anon
from the distance of Hunter or Coram Street.
"'We are the first,' Gerald whispered, a fact of which I did not
require to be informed, and for which he ought to have apologized,
seeing that he had deprived me of my after-dinner coffee, and dragged
me off yawning, full of alarm lest we should be late.
"Gradually, and in dismal silence, diversified only by occasional
whisperings, about a dozen people assembled in the dimness of
the dreary room. Among them came Mrs. Ravenshaw and her jovial,
business-like husband, who seated themselves next Gerald and me, and
confided their experiences of past _séances_. The lady was full of
faith and enthusiasm. The gentleman was beginning to have doubts.
He had heard things from unbelievers which had somewhat unsettled
him. He had invested a good many half-guineas in this dismal form of
entertainment, and had wasted a good deal of time in bringing his
gifted wife all the way from Shooter's Hill, and, so far, they had
got no forwarder than on the first _séance_. They had seen strange
things. They had felt the ghastly touch of hands that seemed like
dead hands, and which ordinary people would run a mile to avoid. That
heavy mahogany table had shuddered and thrilled under the touch of
meeting hands; had lifted itself like a rearing horse; had throbbed
out messages purporting to come from the dead. Strange sounds had been
in the air; angelic singing, as of souls in Elysium; and some among
the audience had gone away after each _séance_ touched and satisfied,
believing themselves upon the threshold of other worlds, feeling their
commonplace lives shone upon by supernal light, content henceforward to
dwell upon this dull cold earth, since they were now assured of a link
between earth and heaven.
"Mrs. Ravenshaw, as became an imaginative writer, was of this
idealistic temperament, receptive, confiding; but her husband was a
man of business, and wanted to see value for his money. He explained
his views to me in a confidential voice while we waited. 'Yes,
they had undoubtedly seen and heard strange things. They had seen
bodies--living human bodies--floating in the air--yes, floating in the
frowsy atmosphere of this shabby parlour, atmosphere which it were base
flattery to call "air." They had enjoyed this abnormal experience; but,
after all, how is the cause of humanity, or the march of enlightenment
to be advantaged by the flotation of an exceptional subject here and
there? If everybody could float, well and good. The gain would be
immense, except for boot-makers and chiropodists, who must suffer for
the general weal. But for mediumistic persons, at the rate of one per
million of the population, to be carried by viewless powers on the
empty air was of the smallest practical use. An improvement in the
construction of balloons would be infinitely more valuable.'
"We waited nearly an hour in all--we had arrived half an hour before
the stated opening of the _séance_, and we waited five and twenty
minutes more, and were yawning and fidgeting hopelessly before the door
opened, and a dismal-looking man with a pallid face and long hair, came
into the room, followed by a slovenly woman in black, with bare arms,
and a towzled, highly artistic flaxen head. He bowed solemnly to the
assembled company, looked from the company to the woman, and murmured
in a sepulchral voice, 'My wife,' by way of general introduction.
"The flaxen-headed lady seated herself at the large round table, and
the dark-haired vampire-like man crept about the room inviting his
audience to take their places at the same mystic table. We formed a
circle, hand touching hand, the long-haired professor on one side of
the table, the flaxen wife on the other. Gerald and I were separated by
the width of the table, and the enthusiastic novelist and her practical
husband were also as far apart as circumstances would permit.
"My next neighbour on the right was a tall, burly man with a strong
North of Ireland accent, a captain in the mercantile marine, Mrs.
Ravenshaw informed me. The people who met in this dreary room had come
by some knowledge of one another's social status and opinions, although
conversation was sternly discouraged as offensive to the impalpable
company we were there to cultivate. A gloomy silence, and a vaguely
uncomfortable expectancy of something ghastly were the prevailing
characteristics of the assembly.
"Mrs. Ravenshaw had informed me that the seaman on my right was an
unbeliever, and that he courted the spirits only with the malicious
desire of doing them a bad turn. There had been the premonitory
symptoms of a row on more than one occasion, and he had been the source
and centre of the adverse feeling which had shown itself at those times.
"My left-hand neighbour was an elderly woman in black, who looked like
a spinster, and who, instead of the bonnet of everyday life, wore a
rusty Spanish mantilla, and a black velvet band across her high narrow
forehead, confining braids of chestnut hair whose artificial origin was
patent to every eye. As the _séance_ progressed she frequently shed
tears. Mrs. Ravenshaw, who was in her confidence, whispered to me that
this lady came there to hold mystic converse with an officer in the
East-India Company's Service, to whom she had been betrothed thirty
years before, and who had died in Bengal, after marrying the daughter
of a native money-lender and an English governess. It comforted his
devoted sweetheart to hear from his own lips, as it were, that he had
led a wretched existence with his half-caste wife, and had never ceased
to repent his inconstancy to his dearest Amanda. Amanda was the name
of the lady in the mantilla, Amanda Jones. It amuses me to recall these
details, to dwell upon the opening of a scene which I entered upon so
casually, and which was to exercise so lasting an influence upon my
life.
"The _séance_ proceeded after the vulgar routine of such mysteries
in England and in America. We sat in the frowzy darkness, and heard
each other's breathing as we listened to the mysterious rappings, now
here, now there, now high, now low, as of some sportive dressmaker
rapping her thimbled finger on table, or shutter, or ceiling, or
wall. We heard strange messages thumped out, or throbbed out by the
excitable mahogany, which became more and more vehement, as if the
beating of our hearts, the swift current of blood in all our arteries
were being gradually absorbed by that vitalised wood. The German
woman translated the rappings into strange scraps of speech, which
for some of the audience were full of meaning--private communications
from friends long dead, allusions to the past, which were sometimes
received in blank wonder, sometimes welcomed as proof irresistible of
thought-transference between the dead and the living. The mighty dead,
with names familiar to us all, condescended to hold communion with us.
Spinosa, Bacon, Shelley, Sir John Franklin, Mesmer--a strange mixture
of personalities--but, alas! the feebleness of their communications
gave a crushing blow to the theory of a progressive existence beyond
the grave.
"'I should like to know how it's done,' said the sea-captain, suddenly,
in an aggressive voice, which irreverent interruption the professor and
some of the audience rebuked by an indignant hush.
"The whole business wearied me. I was moved to melancholy rather than
to laughter as I realized the depth of human credulity which was
indicated by the hushed expectancy of the dozen or so of people sitting
round a table in the dark in a shabby Bloomsbury lodging-house, and
expecting communications from the world after death--the inexplicable
shadow-land of which to think is to enter into the regions of all that
is most serious and solemn in human thought--through the interposition
of a shabby charlatan who took money for the exhibition of his power.
"I sat in the darkness, bored and disgusted, utterly incurious,
desiring nothing but the close of the manifestations and escape into
the open air, when suddenly, in a faint light, which came I knew not
whence, I saw a face on the opposite side of the circle of faces, a
face which assuredly had not been among the audience before the lamp
was darkened at the beginning of the _séance_. Yet so far as my sense
of hearing, which was particularly acute, could inform me, no door had
opened, no footstep had crossed the floor since we had seated ourselves
at the table, and had formed the circle, hand touching hand.
"This hitherto unseen face had a wan and mournful beauty which at once
changed my feelings from apathy to interest. The eyes were of a lovely
blue, and were remarkable for that translucent brilliancy which is
rarely seen after childhood; the features were delicate to attenuation,
and, in the faint light, the cheeks looked hollow and colourless, and
even the lips were of a sickly pallor. The loveliness of those large
ethereal eyes counterbalanced all want of life and colour in the rest
of the face, which, had those eyes been hidden under lowered lids,
might have seemed the face of the dead. I looked at it, awe-stricken.
Its presence had in one instant transformed the scene of vulgar
imposture to a temple and a shrine. I watched and waited, spell-bound.
"There were subdued whisperings round the table, and a general
excitement and expectancy which indicated the beginning of a more
enthralling performance than the vagabond rappings on table and
wainscot, or even the furtive and flying touch of smooth cold hands.
"For some minutes, for an interval that seemed much longer than it
really was, nothing happened.
"The face looked at us--or, rather, looked beyond us; the pale lips
were parted as in prayer or invocation; the long yellow hair streaming
over the shoulders gleamed faintly in the dim, uncertain light, which
came and went from some mysterious source. The door opening on the
entrance hall was behind my side of the table, and I have little doubt
that the curiously soft and searching light, which fluttered every
now and then across the circle and lingered on the face opposite, was
manipulated by some one outside the door.
"Presently there came a shower of raps--here, there, everywhere, on
ceiling, wainscot, doors, above our heads, under our feet--while a
strain of organ music, so softly played as to seem remote, crept into
the room, and increased the confusion of our senses, distracted past
endurance by those meaningless rappings.
"Suddenly a young woman at the end of the table gave a hysterical cry.
"'She is rising, she is rising!' she said. 'Oh, to think of it, to
think of it! To think how He rose--He whom they had slain--and
vanished from the loving eyes of His disciples! She is like the angels
who gather round His throne. Who can doubt now?'
"'It's humbug, and we all know it's humbug,' grumbled the sea-dog on
my right. 'But it's clever humbug; and it isn't easy to catch them
napping.'
"'Hush!' said the professor's wife indignantly. 'Watch her, and be
silent.'
"We watched. I had not once taken my eyes from that pale, spiritual
face, with the eyes that had a look of seeing things in an immeasurable
distance--the things that are not of this earth. Suddenly the dreamy
tranquillity of the countenance changed to violent emotion, an ecstatic
smile parted the pale lips, and, for the first time since I had been
conscious of her presence, those exquisite lips spoke.
"'It is coming, it is coming!' she cried. 'Take me, take me, take me!'
And then from speech to song seemed a natural transition, as she sang
in a silver-sweet soprano--
"'Angels ever bright and fair,
Take, oh take me to your care.'
"As that lovely melody floated through the room, the slender, girlish
form was wafted slowly upward with steady, gradual motion, until it
hovered halfway between the ceiling and the floor, the long white robe
flowing far below the feet, the golden hair falling below the waist.
Nothing more like the conventional idea of an angelic presence could
have offered itself to the excited imagination. The figure remained
suspended, the arms lifted, and the semi-transparent hands scattering
flowers, while we gazed, enthralled by the beauty and gracefulness of
that strange vision, and for the moment the hardest of us, even the
sea-dog at my side, was a believer.
"Nothing so beautiful could be false, dishonest, ignoble. No; whatever
the rest of the _séance_ might be, this at least was no vulgar
cheat. We were in the presence of a mysterious being, exceptionally
gifted--human, perhaps; but not as the common herd are human.
"I was weak enough to think thus. I had abandoned myself wholly to the
glamour of the scene, when the sea-dog started to his feet, as the
girl gave a shrill cry of fear. She hung for a moment or two over the
table, head downward, and fell in a heap between two of the seated
spectators, her head striking against the edge of the table, her long
hair streaming wide, and faint moanings as of acute pain issuing from
her pallid lips.
"In an instant all was noise and confusion. The sea-captain struck
a match, Mr. Ravenshaw produced an end of wax candle, and everybody
crowded round the girl, talking and exclaiming unrestrainedly.
"'There, now; didn't I tell you so? All a cheat from beginning to end.'
"'He ought to be prosecuted.'
"'Nobody but fools would have ever believed in such stuff.'
"'Look here!' cried the sea-captain, 'she was held up by a straight
iron rod which passes through the floor, and a cross-bar, like a
pantomime fairy. She was strapped to the cross-bar, and the strap broke
and let her go. She's the artfullest hussy I ever had anything to do
with; for I'll be hanged if she hadn't almost taken me in with that
face and voice of hers. 'Waft me, angels,' and looking just like an
angel, and all the time this swindler was strapping her on to the iron
bar.'
"The swindler defended himself angrily, in a jumble of German and
English, getting more German as he grew more desperate. They were
all clamouring round him. The flaxen-headed Frau had slipped away in
the beginning of the skirmish. The golden-haired girl had fainted--a
genuine faint, apparently, whatever else might be false--and her head
was lying on Mrs. Ravenshaw's shoulder; that lady's womanly compassion
for helpless girlhood being stronger even than her indignation at
having been hoaxed.
"'Give us back our money!' cried three or four voices out of the
dimness. 'Give us back our money for the whole series of _séances_!'
"'Half-guinea tickets! Dear enough if the thing had been genuine!'
"'An impudent swindle!'
"'Will somebody run for the police?' said the sea-captain. 'I'll stay
and take care they don't give us the slip. Who'll go?'
"There were half a dozen volunteers, who began to grope their way to
the door.
"'One's enough,' said the sea-captain. 'Take care that fellow doesn't
make a bolt of it.'
"The warning came too late. As he spoke, spirit-lips blew out the
candle which Mr. Ravenshaw was patiently holding above the group of
fainting girl and kindly woman, like one of the living candlesticks in
the 'Legend of Montrose,' and the room was dark. There was a sound of
scuffling, a rush, the door opened and shut again, and a key turned in
the lock with decisive emphasis.
"'Done!' cried the sea-captain, making his way to the curtained window.
"It was curtained and shuttered, and the opening of the shutters
occupied some minutes, even for the seaman's practised hands. There
were bolts--old-fashioned bolts--with mechanism designed to defy
burglary, in the days when wealth and fashion inhabited Bloomsbury. Wax
matches sputtered and emitted faint gleams and flashes of light here
and there in the room. Two or three people had found their way to the
locked door, and were shaking and kicking it savagely, without effect.
"At last the bolts gave way, the deft hands having found the trick
of them. The seaman flung open the shutters, and the light of the
street-lamp streamed into the room.
"The girl was still unconscious, lying across two chairs, her head on
the novelist's shoulder.
"'Shamming, no doubt,' said the seaman.
"'No, no; there is no acting here,' said the lady. 'Her face and hands
are deadly cold. Ah, she is beginning to recover. How she shudders,
poor child!'
"A long-drawn, shivering sob broke from the white lips, which I could
see faintly in uncertain light from the street-lamp. The seaman was
talking to some one outside, asking him to send the first policeman he
met, or to go to the nearest police-office and send some one from there.
"'What's the matter?' asked the voice outside. 'Anybody hurt?'
"'No; but I want to give some one in charge.'
"'All right,' said the voice; and then we heard footsteps hurrying off.
"'Whom are you going to give in charge?' asked Mr. Ravenshaw, in his
calm, practical way. 'Not this shivering girl, surely. The other birds
are flown.'
"'She may shiver,' retorted the seaman angrily. 'I shall be glad to see
her shiver before the beak, to-morrow. He'll talk to her. Shivering
won't get over _him_. He's used to it. Of course she's fainted. A woman
can always faint when she finds herself in a difficulty. We'll have her
up for obtaining money upon false pretences, all the same.'
"The united efforts of three or four of the party had burst open the
door of the room, and everybody except the little group about the
girl--myself among them--made for the street door, which was not locked.
"A couple of policemen arrived a few minutes afterwards, and thereupon
began a severe inspection of the house from cellar to garret. They
found an old woman in a back kitchen, who explained that the dining
and drawing-room floors, and the front kitchen were let to the
table-turning gentleman and his wife, and the young lady who lived with
them. They had occupied the rooms nearly three months, had paid some
rent, but were considerably in arrear. The landlord, who occupied the
second floor, had gone into the country to see a sick daughter. Two
young men lodged in the attics--printer's readers--but they were seldom
in before eleven.
"In a word, the old woman, who was general drudge and caretaker, was
alone in the basement with a plethoric spaniel, too old and obese to
bark, and a tabby cat. All the rest of the house was empty of human
life.
"The policemen and the late believers in Herr Kaltardern's occult
powers explored every corner of the rooms which the Germans and their
accomplice had inhabited. The personal belongings of the three were
of the slightest, the Kaltarderns' sole possession being a large
carpet bag of ancient and obsolete fashion, and a brush and comb.
The room occupied by the girl was clean and tidy, and contained a
respectable-looking wooden trunk.
"The machinery of the imposture stood confessed in this investigation.
The bookcase was a dummy piece of furniture which concealed a door
of communication between the front and back rooms. Door of room, and
door of bookcase, the front of which opened in one piece, were both so
artfully padded with baize as to open and shut noiselessly; and it was
by this means that the tricksters had been able to bring their innocent
accomplice into the room unobserved, or to go in and out themselves
while the sceptical among their audience might be watching the only
obvious entrance to the room. In the kitchen below the iron rod and
the hole through the ceiling plainly indicated the means by which the
girl had been lifted off her feet. The transverse bar was attached to
the rod in the room above, by the noiseless hands of the professor.
"All this I heard afterwards from Gerald, who took an active part in
the investigation. For myself, while the inquisitive explorers were
tramping in and out of the rooms above and below, I remained beside the
two good people who were caring for the helpless sharer in the foolish
show--accomplice or victim, as the case might be.
"I had found and relighted the lamp, and by its light Mrs. Ravenshaw
and I examined the girl's forehead, which had been severely cut in her
fall. While we were gently drying the blood which stained her eyelids
and cheeks, she opened her eyes and looked at us with a bewildered
expression.
"'Oh, how my head aches!' she moaned. 'What was it hurt me like that?'
"'You were hurt in your fall,' I answered. 'Your head struck the edge
of the table.'
"'But how could I fall? How could they let me fall?'
"'The strap round your waist broke, and you fell from the iron bar.'
"She looked at me in amazement--simulated, as I thought--and it
distressed me to think that fair young face should be capable of such a
lying look.
"'What strap? The spirits were holding me up--wafting me towards the
sky.'
"'Very likely,' I answered, picking up the broken strap and showing it
to her; 'but the spirits couldn't manage it without a little mechanical
aid. And the mechanical aid was not as sound as it ought to have been.'
"The girl took the strap in her hands, and looked at it and felt it
with an expression of countenance so full of hopeless bewilderment that
I began to doubt my previous conviction, to doubt even the evidence
of my senses. Could any youthful face be so trained to depict unreal
emotion? Could so childlike a creature be such a consummate actress?
"'Was this round my waist?' she asked, looking from me to the
kind-hearted woman whose arms were still supporting her slender,
undeveloped figure.
"'Yes, this was round your waist, and by this you were strapped to this
iron bar here. You see, the rod passes through the floor. The cross-bar
must have been fastened to it while you were singing. My poor child,
pray do not try to sustain a falsehood. You are so young that you are
hardly responsible for what you have done. You were in these people's
power, and they could make you do what they liked. Pray be candid with
us. We want to befriend you if we can, do we not, Mrs. Ravenshaw?'
"'Yes, indeed we do, poor thing!' answered the lady heartily. 'Only be
truthful with us.'
"'Indeed, I am telling the truth,' the girl protested tearfully. 'I
did not know of that strap, or of the iron rod. They told me I was
gifted--that I was in communion with my dear dead father, when I felt
my soul uplifted--as I have felt it often and often, sitting singing to
myself, alone in my room. I have felt as if my spirit were soaring away
and away, upward to that world beyond the skies where my father and my
mother are. I have felt as if, while my body remained below, my spirit
were floating upward and upward, away from earth and sorrow. I told the
Frau how I used to feel, because I believed in her. She brought me into
communion with my father. He used to rap out messages of love; and she
taught me how to understand the spirit language. That was how I came to
know her. That was how I was willing to go with them and join in their
_séances_.'
"'I begin to understand,' said I. 'They told you that you were gifted,
and that you had a power of floating upward from the floor to the
ceiling?'
"'Yes. It came upon me unawares. They asked me to sing, and to let my
spirit float towards heaven as I sang. I always used to feel like
that of an evening in our church in the country. I used to feel my
soul lifted upward when I sang the _Magnificat_. And one night at a
_séance_, soon after we came to London, I was singing, and I felt
myself floating upward. It seemed as if some powerful hands were
holding me up; and I felt round me in the half-darkness, and there was
no one near. I was moving alone, without any visible help; and I felt
that it was the passionate longing of my spirit to approach the spirit
of my dead father which was lifting me up. And, oh, was it only that
horrid strap and that iron rod?' she exclaimed, bursting into tears.
'How cruel--how cruel to cheat me like that!'
"She had evidently no thought of the public who were cheated, or of
her own position as a detected impostor, or the tool and accomplice of
impostors. Her tears were for the dream so rudely broken.
"The tramping in and out of rooms was over by this time. The majority
of the audience were leaving the house, the sea-dog loud in his
disgust and indignation till the last moment.
"'I should have liked to give that young hussey in charge,' he said in
a loud voice as he passed the half-open door, evidently arguing with
some milder-tempered victim; 'but, as you say, she's little more than a
child, and no magistrate would punish her.'
"I breathed more freely when I heard the street door bang behind this
gentleman and the policemen.
"'They're all gone except ourselves,' said Gerald. 'The gifted German
and his wife have shown us a clean pair of heels, and there's only an
old charwoman in the basement. She tells me your young friend there
came from the country--somewhere in Sussex--and always behaved herself
very nicely. The old woman seems fond of her.'
"'Yes, she was always kind to me,' said the girl.
"'Was she? Well, I hope she'll be kind to you now you're left high and
dry,' said Gerald. 'These people won't come back any more, I take it.
They travel in light marching order--a grubby old carpet bag, and a
brush and comb which would account for the lady's tangled head. They
won't come back to fetch _those_, at the risk of being had up for
obtaining money upon false pretences. And what's to become of you, I
wonder?'--to the girl. 'Have you any money?'
"'No, sir.'
"'Any friends in London?'
"'No.'
"'Any friends in the country--in the place you left?'
"'Not now. No one would be kind to me now. There was a kind lady who
wanted to apprentice me to her dressmaker when my father died, and I
was left quite alone; but I hated the idea of dressmaking; and one
night there was a spiritualistic _séance_ at the school-house, and I
went, because I had heard of messages from the dead, and I thought if
it were possible for the dead to speak to the living, my father would
not leave me without one word of consolation. We loved each other so
dearly; we were all the world to each other; and people said the dead
had spoken--had sent messages of love and comfort. So I went to the
dark _séance_, and I asked them to call my father's spirit; and there
was a message rapped out, and I believed that it was from him; and
next day I met Madame Kaltardern in the street, and I asked her if
the messages were really true; and she said they were true, and she
spoke very kindly to me, and asked me if I would like to be a medium,
and said she was sure I was gifted--I could be a clairvoyant if I
liked--she could see from the shape of my eyes that I had the power,
and it would be a great pity for me not to use it. She said it was a
glorious life to be in constant communion with great spirits.'
"'And you thought you would like it better than dressmaking?' said Mrs.
Ravenshaw, sympathetically.
"'It was of my father I thought. He had been dead such a short time.
Sometimes I could hardly believe that he was dead. When I sat alone in
the firelight, I used to fancy he was in the room with me; I used to
speak to him, and beg him to answer me.'
"'And were there any raps then?' asked the practical Ravenshaw.
"'No, never when I was alone. The Kaltarderns came back after
Christmas, and there was another _séance_, for the benefit of the
Infirmary, and I went again; and Madame told me my father was speaking
to me. He rapped out a strange message about the organ. I was to bid
good-bye to the organ of which I was so fond; for I had a gift that was
greater than music; and I was to go with those who could cultivate that
gift. So the next day, when Madame Kaltardern asked me to go away with
them, and promised to develop my mediumistic power, I consented to go.
I was to be like their adopted daughter. They were to clothe me and
feed me, but they were to give me no money. A gift like mine could not
be paid for with money. If I tried to make money by my power, I should
lose it. I did not want money from them. I wanted to be brought into
communion with the spirit world, with my father whom I loved so dearly,
and with my mother, who died when I was eight years old, and with my
little sister Lucy, who died soon after mother--the little sister I
used to nurse. My only world was the world of the dead. And, oh, was it
all trickery--all? Those messages from father and mother--those baby
kisses, so soft, so quick, so light; the hand upon my forehead--the
hand of the dead--touching me and blessing me! Was it all false, all
trickery?'
"She rocked herself to and fro sobbing, unconsolable at the thought of
her vanished dream-world.
"'I'm afraid so, my dear,' said Ravenshaw, kindly. 'I'm afraid it was
all humbug. You have been duped yourself, while you have helped to
dupe others. It was uncommonly clever of them to get an unconscious
accomplice. And now what is to be done with this poor thing? That is
the question,' he concluded, appealing to his wife and me.
"'Yes, that's the question with a vengeance,' said Gerald. 'We can't
leave her in this house in the care of a deaf old woman, to bear the
brunt of the landlord's anger when he comes home and finds the birds
flown and his arrears of rent the baddest of bad debts. Poor child! we
must get her away somehow. Have you no friends in the country who would
give you a home?' he asked the girl.
"'No,' she answered, fighting with her sobs. 'People were very kind to
me just at first after my father's death; and then I think they got
tired of me. They said I was helpless; I ought to have been able to put
my hand to something useful. The only thing I cared for was music. I
used to sing in the choir; but it was only a village church, and the
choir were only paid a pound a quarter. I couldn't live upon that; and
I couldn't play the organ well enough to take my father's place. And
then Miss Grimshawe, a rich old lady, offered to apprentice me to a
dressmaker; but I hated the idea of that. Dressmakers' girls are so
common; and my father was a gentleman, though he was poor. When I told
Miss Grimshawe I was going away with the Kaltarderns, she was very
angry. She said I should end badly. Everybody was angry. I can never go
back to them; they would all turn from me.'
"Mr. Ravenshaw looked suspicious; Mrs. Ravenshaw looked serious;
and even I asked myself whether the girl's story, so plausible, so
convincing to my awakened interest, might not, after all, be a tissue
of romance, which sounded natural, because it had been recited so often.
"Gerald was the most business-like among us.
"'What is your name?' he asked.
"'Esperanza Campbell.'
"'Esperanza? Why, that's a Spanish name!'
"'My mother was a Spaniard.'
"'So! And what is the name of the village where your father played the
organ?'
"'Besbery, near Petworth.'
"'Besbery!' repeated Gerald, pencilling memoranda on his linen cuff.
'Do you remember the name of the vicar, or rector?'
"'There was only a curate-in-charge--Mr. Harrison.'
"'Very good,' said Gerald.' Now, what we have to do is to get this poor
young lady into a decent lodging, where the landlady will take care
of her till we can help her to find some employment, or respectable
situation, not mediumistic. I suppose it would hardly be convenient
to you to take her home with you, and keep her for a week or so, Mrs.
Ravenshaw?' Gerald inquired, as an afterthought.
"Mrs. Ravenshaw hastened to explain that, with children,
nursery-governess, and spinster aunt, every bed in her house at
Shooter's Hill was occupied.
"'We have not known what it is to have a spare bedroom for the last
three years,' she said.
"'Babies have accumulated rather rapidly,' said Ravenshaw. Poor
creature, how my careless, independent bachelorhood pitied him! 'And
every second baby means another servant. If one could only bring them
up in a frame, like geranium cuttings!'
"'I think I know of a lodging-house where Miss Campbell could find a
temporary home, not far from here,' I said.
"'Think you know?' cried Gerald, impatiently. 'You can't think about
knowing; you know or don't know. Where is it?'
"'In Great Ormond Street.'
"'Capital--close by. I'll go and get a cab. Miss Campbell, just put
your traps together, and--and do up your hair, and get on a gown,'
looking at her flowing robe and dishevelled hair with evident distaste,
'while I'm gone.'
"He was out of the room in a moment.
"'Are you sure the house is perfectly respectable, Mr. Beresford?'
inquired Mrs. Ravenshaw, who, as a fiction-weaver, no doubt let her
imagination run upon the horrors of the great city and the secret
iniquities of lodging-house keepers, from Hogarth's time downwards.
"I told her that I could trust my own sister to the house in Great
Ormond Street, which was kept by my old nurse and my father's old
butler, who had retired from service about five years before, and had
invested their savings in the furnishing of a spacious old-fashioned
house in a district where rents were then low, for the accommodation
of all that is most respectable in the way of families and single
gentlemen.
"'I can vouch for my old nurse Martha as one of the best and kindest of
women, as well as one of the shrewdest,' I said.
"The girl heard this discussion unmoved and uninterested by the trouble
we were taking on her behalf. Her sobs had subsided, but she was crying
silently, weeping over the cruel end of a dream which had been more to
her than all the waking world. She told me afterwards how much and how
real that dream had been to her.
"Mrs. Ravenshaw went to her room with her, and helped her to exchange
the long white alb-like garment for a tidy black gown, on which the
crape trimming had grown rusty with much wear. I can see her now as she
came back into the lamplight in that plain black gown, and with her
yellow hair rolled into a massive coil at the back of her head, the
graceful figure, so girlish, so willowy in its tall slenderness, the
fair pale face, and dark-blue eyes heavy with tears.
"She had a poor little black-straw hat in her hand, which she put on
presently, before we went downstairs to the cab. Gerald and I carried
her box. There was no one to object to its removal. The old woman in
the basement made no sign. One of the printers let himself in with a
latch-key while we were in the hall, looked at us curiously, and went
upstairs without a word.
"Mrs. Ravenshaw kissed Esperanza, and wished her a friendly good night,
promising to do what she could to help her in the future; and then she
and her husband hurried away to catch the last train to Shooter's Hill."
CHAPTER VIII.
"WHAT WAS A SPECK EXPANDS INTO A STAR."
"Had the landlady of the house in Great Ormond Street been anybody in
the world except my old nurse, I doubt if any philanthropic purpose
would have inspired me with the boldness to carry through the work
I had undertaken. To appear before the average lodging-house keeper
within half an hour of midnight, and with such a _protégée_ as
Esperanza Campbell upon my hands, would have required the courage
of a lion; and I was at that time a particularly shy and sensitive
young man, brought up in the retirement of a country house and in the
society of a mother whom I loved very dearly, but, as we are told to
love God, with fear and trembling. My constitutional shyness, the
natural outcome of narrow surroundings, had kept me from making friends
at the University, and I believe it was sheer pity that had prompted
Gerald Standish to take me under his wing. His kindness was rewarded by
finding me a likable companion, whose character supplied some of the
qualities which were wanting in his bright and buoyant disposition. We
were real friends; and remained friends until the end of his too-brief
life.
"So much to explain that it was only my confidence in my old nurse's
indulgence which enabled me to cut the knot of the difficulty in
disposing of Esperanza Campbell.
"My faithful Martha and her excellent husband were sleeping the sleep
of the just in a ground-floor room at the back of the house, while
their maid-servant slumbered still more soundly in a back attic.
Happily Martha was a light sleeper, had trained herself to wake at
the lightest cry in seasons of measles or whooping-cough, teething or
infantile bronchitis; so my second application to the bell and knocker
brought a prompt response. Bolts were drawn, a key was turned, a chain
was unfastened, the door was opened a couple of inches, and a timid
voice asked what was wanted.
"'It is I, Martha, George Beresford. I've brought you a lodger.'
"'Oh, come now, Mr. George, that's one of your jokes. You've been to
the theatre, and you're playing a trick upon me. Go home now, do, like
a dear young gentleman, and come and have a cup of tea with me some
afternoon when you've got half an hour to spare.'
"'Martha, you are keeping a very sweet young lady out in the cold. For
goodness' sake, open the door, and let me explain matters.'
"'Can't she take her in?' asked Gerald, impatiently, from the cab.
"Martha opened the door, and exhibited herself reluctantly in her
casual costume of flannel dressing-gown and tartan shawl.
"'What _do_ you mean, Mr. George? What can you mean by wanting
lodgings for a young lady at this time of night?'
"'Sounds queer, don't it?' said Gerald, who had bounded up the steps
and burst into the wainscoted hall, lighted only by the candle Martha
was carrying. 'The fact is, we're in a difficulty, and Mr. Beresford
assures me you can get us out of it.'
"And then in fewest words and with most persuasive manner he explained
what we wanted, a home and a protector for a blameless young girl
whom the force of circumstances had flung upon our hands at half-past
eleven o'clock in the evening. Somehow we must get rid of her. She was
a gentleman's daughter, and we could not take her to the workhouse.
Reputation, hers and ours, forbade that we should take her to an hotel.
"Not a word did Gerald say about table-turning or spirit-rapping. He
was shrewd enough to guess that any hint at the _séance_ would have
prejudiced honest Martha against our charge.
"'I'm sure I don't know what to do,' said Martha; and I could see that
she was suspicious of Gerald's airy manner, and doubtful even of me.
'My husband's fast asleep. He isn't such a light sleeper as I am. I
don't know what he would say----'
"'Never mind what he would say,' interrupted Gerald. 'What you have
to say is that you'll take Miss Campbell in and give her a tidy room
somewhere--she ain't particular, poor thing!--and make her comfortable
for a week or two while she looks out for a situation.'
"'Oh, she's on the look-out for a situation, is she?' said Martha,
evidently mollified by the idea of a bread-winning young person. 'You
see, Mr. George,' she went on, appealing to me, 'in London one can't
be too particular. This house is what Benjamin and I have to look to
in our old age; we've put our little all into it; and if the young
lady happened to be rather dressy; or sang comic songs; or went to the
theatre in cabs; or had gentlemen leave letters for her; why, it would
just be our ruin. Our first floor is let to one of the most particular
of widow ladies. I don't believe there's a more particular lady in
London.'
"'My dear Martha, do you think I'm a fool or a knave? This girl is a
village organist's daughter----'
"'Ah, Mr. George, they must all begin,' said Martha, shaking her head
philosophically.
"'She is in mourning for her father--an orphan--friendless and
unhappy----'
"'As for conduct, propriety, and all that kind of thing, I'll answer
for her as if she were my own sister,' put in Gerald, in his splendidly
reckless way; 'and that being the case, I hope you are not going to
keep the poor young lady sitting out there in a cold cab till to-morrow
morning.'
"Martha listened to Gerald, and looked at me.
"'If you're sure it's all right, Mr. George,' she murmured, 'I'd do
anything in the world to oblige you; but this house is our all----'
"'Yes, yes,' Gerald exclaimed impatiently. 'You told us that before.
Bring her in, George. It's all settled.'
"This was a happy stroke, for old Martha would have stood in the hall
with her guttering candle and in her deshabille of flannel and tartan
debating the matter for another quarter of an hour; but when I brought
the pale girl in her black frock up the steps, and handed her into the
old woman's care, the motherly heart melted in a moment, and hesitancy
was at an end.
"'Poor young thing; why, she's little more than a child! How pale and
cold you look, poor dear. I'll go down and light a bit of fire and warm
a cup of broth for you. My second floor left the day before yesterday.
I'll soon get the bedroom ready for you.'
"'That's as it should be,' said I. 'You'll find yourself safe and
comfortable here, Miss Campbell, with the kindest woman I know. I'll
call in a few days, and see how you are getting on.'
"I slipped a couple of sovereigns into my old nurse's palm as I wished
her good night. The cabman brought in the poor little wooden trunk,
received a liberal fare, and went his way in peace, while Gerald and
I walked to the Tavistock, glad to cool down after the evening's
excitement.
"'What an adventure!' said he. 'Of course I always knew it was humbug,
but I never thought it was quite such transparent humbug.'
"'That girl would have taken any one in,' said I.
"'What, because she's young and pretty, after a rather sickly fashion?'
"'No, because she was so thoroughly in earnest, and believed in the
thing herself.'
"'You really think she was a dupe and not an accomplice?'
"'I am sure of it. Her distress was unmistakable. And at her age, and
with her imaginative nature----'
"'What did you know of her nature?' he asked sharply.
"The question and his manner of asking it pulled me up suddenly, as a
dreamer of morning dreams is awakened by the matter-of-fact voice of
the servant who comes to call him.
"What did I know of her? What assurance had I that her sobs and
lamentation, her pathetic story of the father so loved and mourned,
were not as spurious as the rest of the show, as much a cheat as the
iron rod and the leather strap? How did I know? Well, I could hardly
have explained the basis of my conviction, but I did know; and I would
have staked my life upon her honesty and her innocence.
"I woke next morning to a new sense of responsibility. I had taken this
helpless girl's fate into my hands, and to me she must look for aid in
chalking out a path for herself. I had to find her the means of earning
her daily bread, reputably, and not as a drudge. The problem was
difficult of solution. I had heard appalling descriptions of the lot of
the average half-educated governess--the life harder, the pay less,
than a servant's. Yet what better than a nursery governess could this
girl be? at her age, and with her attainments, which I concluded were
not above the ordinary schoolgirl's. The look-out was gloomy, and I
was glad to shut my eyes to the difficulties of the situation, telling
myself that my good Martha would give the poor child a comfortable home
upon very moderate terms--such terms as I could afford to pay out of my
very moderate allowance, and that in a month or two something--in the
language of the immortal Micawber--would turn up.
* * * * *
"There was but another week of the Long, a week which under ordinary
conditions I should have spent with my widowed mother at her house in
the country, but which I decided to spend in London, accepting Gerald's
invitation to share his rooms in Arundel Street, and do a final round
of the theatres; an invitation I had previously declined. During that
week I was often in Great Ormond Street, and contrived to learn a
great deal more about Esperanza's character and history. Of her history
all she had to tell; of her character, which to me seemed transparent
as a forest streamlet, all I could divine. I called in Ormond Street on
the second day of her residence there, and found good Nurse Martha in
the best possible humour. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and she
insisted that I should stop for a cup of tea, and as tea-making--that
is to say, the art of producing a better cup of tea than anybody else
could produce from the same cannister, kettle, and teapot--had always
been a special talent of Martha's, I was glad to accept her hospitality.
"Miss Campbell had gone for a little walk round the squares, she
informed me.
"'She doesn't care about going out,' explained Martha; 'she'd rather
sit over a book or play the harmonium. But I told her she must take an
airing for her health's sake.'
"I was disappointed at not finding Esperanza in the tidy back parlour
to which Nurse Martha ushered me--a room of exemplary neatness and
snugness, enlivened by those living presences which always make for
cheerfulness--vulgar as we may deem them--a glass tank of gold fish,
a canary bird, and a magnificent tabby cat, sleek, clean, luxuriously
idle, in purring contemplation of the bright little fire in the
old-fashioned grate, that grate with hobs which reminded me of my
nursery deep in the heart of the country.
"'Now you sit down in Blake's armchair, Mr. George, and let's have
a talk over missy. I shouldn't have taken those two sovereigns from
you the night before last if I hadn't been all of a muddle with the
suddenness of the thing. I don't want to be paid in advance for doing a
kindness to a helpless girl.'
"'No, Martha; but since the helpless girl was on my hands, it's only
right I should pay you somehow, and we may as well settle that question
at once, as it may be several weeks before Miss Campbell is able to
find a suitable situation.'
"'Several months, more likely. Do you know how young she is, Mr.
George?'
"'Eighteen.'
"'Eighteen last birthday--only just turned eighteen, and she's much
younger than most girls of eighteen in all her ways and thoughts. She's
clever enough with her hands, poor child. Nothing lazy or lolloping
about her--made her own bed and swept and tidied her own room without
a word from me; but there's a helplessness somewhere. I believe the
weakness is in her thoughts. I don't know how she'll ever set about
getting a situation--I don't know what kind of situation she's fit for.
She's much too young and too pretty for a governess.'
"'Not too young for a nursery-governess, surely.'
"'A nursery-governess means a nursery-maid without a cap, Mr. George. I
shouldn't like to see her brought to that. I've taken to her already.
Benjamin says, with her sweet voice and pretty face, she ought to go on
the stage.'
"I was horrified at the idea.
"'Martha, how can you speak of such a thing? Have you any idea of what
the life of a theatre means for an inexperienced girl--for a beautiful
girl, most of all?'
"'Oh, I've heard there are temptations; but a prudent young woman can
take care of herself anywhere, Mr. George; and an imprudent young woman
will go wrong in a country parsonage, or in a nunnery. If Miss Campbell
is to earn her own living, she'll have to face dangers and temptations,
go where she may. She'll have to take care of herself, poor child.
There'll be nobody else to take care of her. I've heard that young
women are well looked after in the better class of theatres--at Mr.
Charles Kean's, for instance. I knew a young person that used to walk
on in _Louis the Eleventh_--dressed as a page, in blue and gold--and
she told me that Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean was _that_ particular----'
"'The Keans are making a farewell tour in Australia, and will never go
into management again, Martha. You are talking nonsense.'
"Poor Martha looked crestfallen at this reproof.
"'I dare say I am, Mr. George; but, for all that, I don't think Miss
Campbell will ever do much as a governess. It isn't in her. There's a
helplessness, and a bendingness, and droopingness, if I may say so,
about her character that won't do for a governess. The only mistress
that would keep her is the kind of mistress that would make a slave of
her.'
"'Hard lines,' I said, getting up and walking about the little back
parlour.
"It was a third room quite at the back of the substantial Georgian
house; and there was scant space for my restlessness between the old
square piano, which served as a sideboard, and the fireplace by which
my dear old Martha sat looking at me with a perturbed countenance.
"I began to think I had let myself in for a bad thing. What was I to do
with this girl, whose fate I had in some measure taken into my hands?
It had seemed easy enough to bring her to this quiet shelter, which she
might leave in a week or so, braced up and ready to fight her battle
of life--the battle we all have to fight somehow--a self-supporting
young woman. Self-supporting, that was the point. I now remembered with
terror that there is a large class of persons upon this earth whom not
even the scourge of poverty can make self-supporting; a vast multitude
of feeble souls who resign themselves from the beginning of things to
drift upon the stream of life, and are never known to strike out and
swim for any shore, and so drift down to the ocean of death. Of these
are the poor relations for whom something is for ever being done, and
who never do anything for themselves; of these the feeble scions of
patrician family trees, who are always waiting for sinecures under
Government.
"God help her, poor soul, if she was one of these invertebrates; and
God help me in my responsibility towards her.
"I was an only son; the heir to a small estate in Suffolk, and an
income of something under three thousand a year. I was not quite
twenty years of age, and I had to maintain myself at the most
expensive college in Cambridge on an allowance that many of the rich
young men with whom I associated would have considered abject penury. I
was not in a fast set. I did not hunt--indeed, with my modest income,
hunting would have been impossible; but I was not without tastes which
absorbed money; the love of choice books and fine engravings, the fancy
for curios picked up here or there, the presence of which gave interest
to my rooms, and, perhaps, helped to reconcile me to many long hours
within closed doors. I had hitherto been most careful to live within
my income, for I knew that it was as much as my mother could afford to
give me, taking into consideration her devotion to the estate which
was to be mine by-and-by, and the maintenance and improvement of which
had been to her as a religion. Her model cottages, her home-farm,
the village church, to whose every improvement her purse had largely
contributed, these were the sources of expenditure which kept her
comparatively poor, and which forbade any kind of extravagance on my
part.
"All these facts were in my mind that afternoon as I paced the narrow
bounds of old Martha's sitting-room.
"'She will have to get her living,' I said severely, as the result of
these meditations, which showed me no surplus income for philanthropy.
"Had my mother been as some men's mothers, I might naturally have
contemplated shifting the burden upon her shoulders. I might have told
her Esperanza's story, and handed Esperanza over to her care as freely
as if I had picked up a stray cat or dog. But my mother was not one of
those soft, impressionable women who are always ready to give the reins
to sentiment. She was a good woman, and devoted much of her life and
means to doing good, but her benevolence was restricted to the limits
of her parish. She would hardly listen to a tale of sorrow outside her
own village.
"'We have so much to do for our own people, George,' she used to tell
me; 'it is folly to be distracted by outside claims. Here we know our
return for every shilling we give. We know the best and the worst about
those we help.'
"Were I to tell her Esperanza's story, her suggestions for helping me
out of my difficulty would be crueller than old Martha's. She would be
for sending the girl into service as a housemaid, or for getting her an
assisted passage to the Antipodes on an emigrant ship.
"Martha came to my rescue in my trouble now as she had done many a
time when I wore a kilt, and when my naked knees had come into abrupt
collision with a gravel path or a stony beach.
"'She'll have to be older and wiser before she gets her own living, Mr.
George,' said Martha; 'but don't you trouble about her. As long as I've
a bed or a sofa to spare, she can stop with me and Benjamin. Her bite
and sup won't hurt us, poor thing, and I don't want sixpence from you.
She shall stop here free gratis, Mr. George, till she finds a better
home.'
"I gave my old nurse a hug, as if I had been still the boy in the
Macdougal kilt.
"'No, no, Martha; I'm not going to impose on your generosity. I shall
be able to pay you _something_. Only I thought you might want two or
three pounds a week for her board, and I could not manage that for an
indefinite period."
"'Two or three pounds! Lor, Mr. George, if that's your notion of
prices, Cambridge land-ladies must be 'arpies. Why, I only get two
guineas for my drawing-room floor, as a permanency, and lady-tenants
even begrudge half a crown extra for kitchen fire. Let her stop here as
long as she likes, Mr. George, and never you think about money. It's
only her future I'm thinking of, for there's a helplessness about her
that----Ah, there she is,' as the hall door slowly opened. 'I gave her
my key. She's quite one of us already.'
"She came quietly into the room, and took my offered hand without
shyness or embarrassment. She was pale still, but the fresh air had
brought a faint tint of rose into the wan cheeks. She looked even
younger and more childlike to-day in her shabby mourning frock and poor
little black straw hat than she had looked the night before last. Her
strong emotion then had given more of womanliness to the small oval
face. To-day there was a simplicity in her aspect, as of a trusting
child who took no thought of the future, secure in the kindness of
those about her.
"I thought of a sentence in the gospel. 'Consider the lilies how they
grow.' This child had grown up like a lily in the mild atmosphere of
domestic love, and had been the easy dupe of a delusion which appealed
to her affection for the dead.
"'I called to see if you were quite comfortable and at home with Mrs.
Blake,' I said, far more embarrassed by the situation than Esperanza
was.
"'Yes, indeed I am,' she answered in her sad sweet voice. 'It is so
nice to be with some one so kind and clean and comfortable. The Frau
was not _very_ unkind; but she was so dirty. She gave us such horrid
things to eat--the smell of them made me ill--and then she said I was
affected and silly, and the Herr used to say I might starve if I could
not eat their food. It made me think of my happy home with father,
and our cosy little tea-table beside the fire. We did not always have
dinner,' she added naively; 'neither of us cared much for that.'
"She hung over old Martha's shoulder with affectionate familiarity, and
the horny old hand which had led my infant steps was held up to clasp
hers, and the withered old face smiled.
"'See how she gets round us,' said Martha, nodding at me. 'Benjamin is
just as bad. And you should hear her play the 'armonian of an evening,
and sing 'Abide with me.' You'd hardly hear her without shedding tears.'
"'Do you think you can be happy here for a few weeks?' I asked.
"'Yes, as happy as I can be anywhere without father. I dreamt of him
last night--such a vivid dream. I know he was near me. It was something
more than a dream. I heard his voice close beside my pillow calling
my name. I know his spirit was in the room. It isn't because the Herr
and his wife were cheats that there is _no_ link between the living
and the dead. I know there is a link,' she insisted passionately, her
eyes brimming with sudden tears. 'They are not dead--those we dearly
love--only removed from us. The clay is gone; the soul is hovering
near, blessing, comforting us.'
"She sobbed out her grief, hiding her face upon Martha's substantial
shoulder. I could speak no word of consolation; nor would I for worlds
have argued against this fond hallucination, the dream of sorrowing
love.
"'I shall not see thee. Dare I say
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land,
Where first he walk'd when clasp't in clay?
No visual shade of some one lost,
But he, the Spirit himself, may come
Where all the nerve of sense is numb;
Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.'
"I quoted those lovely lines in a low voice as I walked softly up and
down the darkening room; and then there was silence save for soothing
wordless murmurs from Martha, such murmurs as had served to hush my own
baby sorrows.
"'There's the kettle just on the boil,' cried the great soul, cheerily,
when Esperanza's sobs had ceased; 'and I know Mr. George must be
wanting his cup of tea.'
"She rose and bustled about in her dear old active way. She lit a
lamp--an inartistic cheap paraffin-lamp, but the light was cheerful.
The tea-table arranged by Martha was the picture of neatness. She set
Esperanza the feminine task of making toast. The poor child had the
prettiest air of penitence as she kissed Martha's hand, and then knelt
meekly down, with the fireglow crimsoning the alabaster face and neck,
and shining on the pale gold hair and rusty black frock.
"'I'm afraid I'm very troublesome,' she said apologetically; 'but,
indeed, I'm very grateful to you, sir, for taking care of me that
dreadful night, and to dear Mrs. Blake for all her kindness to me.'
"'Mrs. Blake is the quintessence of kindness. I am very glad to think
you can live happily here until she or I can find some nice situation
for you.'
"She had been smiling softly over her task, but her face clouded in an
instant.
"'A situation. That's what everybody said at Besbery! We must find her
a situation. And then Miss Grimshaw wanted me to be a dressmaker.'
"'You shall not be a dressmaker. I promise that.'
"'But, oh, what am I to be? I don't know half enough for a governess.
I couldn't teach big girls German and French and drawing. I couldn't
teach little boys Latin. And that's what everybody wants of a
governess. I've read the advertisements in the newspapers.'
"'And as to being a nursery-governess, why, it's negro slavery!' said
Martha.
"'I wouldn't mind the drudgery, only I hate children!" said Esperanza.
"This avowal shocked me. I looked at the soft, childlike countenance,
and the speech seemed incongruous.
"'I have never had anything to do with children since my sister Lucy
died,' she explained. 'I shouldn't understand them, and they would
laugh at me and my fancies. After Lucy's death, I lived alone with
father, always alone, he and I. The harmonium and the organ in the
church close by were our only friends. Our clergyman was just civil to
father, but I don't think he ever liked him. I heard him once tell the
Bishop that his organist was an eccentricity. An eccentricity! That was
all he could say about my father, who was ever so much cleverer than
he.'
"She said this with pride, almost with defiance, looking me in the
face as if she were challenging me to dispute the fact.
"'Was your father very clever?' I asked her, keenly interested in any
glimpses of her history.
"'Yes, I am sure he was clever, much cleverer than the common run of
people. He loved music, and he played beautifully. His touch upon the
old organ made the church music sound angelic. Now and then there was
some one in the church--some stranger--who seemed to understand his
playing, and who was astonished to find such an organist in a village
church--an out-of-the-way village like ours. But for the most part
people took no notice. It didn't seem to matter to them whether the
choir sang well or badly; but when they sang false it hurt father just
like bodily pain.'
"'Did he teach you to play?'
"'A little. But he wasn't fond of teaching. What I know of music I
found out chiefly for myself--just sitting alone at the organ, when I
could get one of the choir boys to blow for me, touching the keys, and
trying the stops, till I learnt something about them. But I play very
badly.'
"'Beautifully! beautifully!' ejaculated Martha. 'You draw tears.'
"'You sang in the choir, I think?' I said.
"'Yes; there were four young ladies, and a lady's-maid with a contralto
voice, and I was the sixth. There were about a dozen men and boys, who
sat on the other side of the chancel. People said it was a good choir
for a village church. Father was so unhappy when we sang badly that we
could not help trying hard to sing well.'
"I remembered those seraphic soprano notes in Handel's thrilling
melody, and I could understand that at least one voice in the choir had
the heavenly ring.
"'Well,' I said at last, 'we must hope for the best. Something may turn
up that will suit you better than governessing. And in the mean time
you can make yourself happy with my old nurse. I can answer for it
she'll never be unkind to you.'
"'I'm sure of that. I would rather stay here and be her servant than go
among strangers.'
"'What, wear an apron and cap and wait upon the lodgers?' I said,
laughing at the absurdity of the idea. She seemed a creature so far
removed from the useful race of neat-handed Phyllises.
"'I should not mind.'
"The clock in the hall struck six, and I had promised Gerald to
be ready for dinner at half-past, as we were to go to a theatre
afterwards--the Adelphi, where Jefferson was acting in _Rip Van
Winkle_. I had to take a hurried leave.
"'Don't you worry yourself about _her_, Mr. George,' said Martha, as
she let me out at the street door; ' I'll keep her as long as ever you
like.'
"I told Martha that I should send her a little money from time to time,
and that I should consider myself in her debt for a pound a week as
long as Miss Campbell stayed with her.
"'She'll want a new frock, won't she?' I asked. 'The one she wears
looks very shabby.'
"'It looks what it is, Mr. George. It's all but threadbare, and it's
the only frock she has in the world, poor child! But don't you trouble
about that either. You gave me two sovereigns. One of those will buy
the stuff, and she and I can make the frock. I've cut out plenty of
frocks in my day. I used to make all your mother's frocks once upon a
time.'
"In the bloom of her youth she had nursed my mother; she had nursed
me in her sturdy middle life; and now in her old age she was ready
and willing to care for this girl for whose fate I had made myself
responsible.
"Gerald received me with his customary cheeriness, though I was ten
minutes after the half-hour, and the fried sole had frizzled itself to
dryness by that delay.
"'I've some good news for you!' he exclaimed, in his exuberant way.
'It's all right.'
"'What's all right?'
"'Your _protégée_. I've written to the parson at Besbery. The story she
told us was gospel truth.'
"'I never thought it was anything else.'
"'Ah, that's because you're over head and ears in love with her,' said
Gerald.
"I felt myself blushing furiously, blushing like a girl whose secret
penchant for the hero of her dreams stands revealed. Of course I
protested that nothing was farther from my thoughts than love; that
I was only sorry for the girl's loneliness and helplessness. Gerald
obviously doubted me; and I had to listen to his sage counsel on the
subject. He was my senior by two years, and claimed to be a man of the
world, while I had been brought up at my mother's apron-string. He
foresaw dangers of which I had no apprehension.
"'There is nothing easier to drop into than an entanglement of that
sort,' he said. 'You had much better fall in love with a ballet-girl.
It may be more expensive for the moment, and there may be a bigger
rumpus about it, but it won't compromise your future.'
"This friendly remonstrance had no effect upon my conduct during the
few remaining days of the long vacation. I went to Ormond Street
a second and a third time in the course of those few days. I took
Esperanza to an afternoon concert at the St. James's Hall, and enjoyed
her ecstasy as she listened to Sainton and Bottesini. For her, music
was a passion, and I believe she sat beside me utterly unconscious of
my existence, with a soul lifted above earth and all earthly feelings.
"'You were happy while the music lasted,' I said, as we walked back to
Ormond Street, by a longish round, for I chose the quietest streets
rather than the nearest way.
"'More than happy,' she answered softly. 'I was talking with my
father's spirit.'
"'You still believe in the communion of the dead and the living,' I
said, 'in spite of the tricks your German friends played upon you?'
"'Yes,' she answered steadfastly, 'I still believe. I shall always
believe there is a bridge between earth and heaven--between the world
we can see and touch and the world we can only feel with our hearts and
minds. When I hear music like that we heard just now--those long-drawn
singing notes on the violin, those deep organ tones of the 'cello--I
feel myself carried away to a shadowy world where I know my father and
mother are waiting for me. We shall all be together again some day, and
I shall know and understand, and I shall feel her light touch upon my
forehead and my hair as I have felt it so often in my dreams.'
"She broke down, crying softly as she walked by my side. I soothed her
as well as I could, soothed her most when I talked of those she had
lost, questioning her about them. She remembered her mother dimly--a
long, last illness, a pale and wasted face, and gentle hands and loving
arms that used to be folded round her neck as she nestled against
the sick-bed. That sick-room, and the dim light of wintry afternoons,
and the sound of the harmonium as her father played soft music in an
adjoining parlour, were things that seemed to have lasted for years.
She could not look behind them. Her memory of mother and of home
stopped on the threshold of that dimly lighted room.
"Her father was a memory of yesterday. He had been her second self, the
other half of her mind.
"'He believed in ghosts,' she said, 'and in second sight. He has often
told me how he saw my mother coming downstairs to meet him, with a
shroud showing faintly above her white summer gown, the night before
she broke a blood-vessel and took to her bed in her last illness.'
"'An optical delusion, no doubt; but it comes natural to a Scotchman to
believe such things. He should not have told you.'
"'Why not? I like to know that the world we cannot see is near us.
I should have died of loneliness if I had not believed my father's
spirit was still within reach. I don't mind about those people being
impostors. I begin to think that the friends we have lost would hardly
talk to us through the moving up and down of wooden tables. It seems
such a foolish way, does it not?'
"'Worse than foolish; undignified. The ghosts in Virgil move and talk
with a stately grandeur; Shakespeare's ghosts are kingly and awful.
They strike terror. It has remained for the nineteenth century to
imagine ghosts that flit about a shabby parlour and skip from side
to side of the room and flutter round a table, and touch, and rap,
and tap, and pat with viscous hands, like the touch of a toad. Samuel
Johnson would not have sat up a whole night to see a table heaved up
and down, or to be touched on the forehead by a chilly, unknown hand.'
"'I don't care what you say about those things,' she answered
resolutely. 'There is a link between life and death. I don't know what
the link is; but though my father may be dead to all the world besides
he is not dead to me.'
"I did not oppose stubborn common sense to this fond delusion. It might
be good for her to believe in the things that are not. The tender fancy
might bridge over the dark gulf of sorrow. I tried to divert her mind
to lighter subjects--talked to her of this monstrous London of which
she knew nothing, and of which I knew very little.
"On the following evening I took Esperanza and my old nurse to a
theatre, a form of entertainment in which Martha especially delighted.
I was not very happy in my choice of a play. Had I taken my _protégée_
to see Jefferson, she would have been touched and delighted. Unluckily
I chose another theatre where a burlesque was being played which was
just a shade more vulgar than the average burlesque of those days.
Esperanza was puzzled and disgusted. I discovered that her love of
music was an exclusive passion. She cared for nothing else in the way
of art. I tried her with a picture-gallery, only to find her ignorant
and indifferent. Two things only impressed her in the whole of the
National Gallery--a landscape of Turner's, and a portrait by Reynolds,
in which she fancied a resemblance to her father.
"My last Sunday before term began was spent almost entirely with
Esperanza. I accepted Martha's invitation to partake of her Sunday
dinner, and sat at meat with dear old Benjamin for the first time in my
life, though I had eaten many a meal with his worthy wife in the days
when my legs reached a very little way below the table and my manners
were in sore need of the good soul's supervision--happy childish days,
before governess and lesson-books had appeared upon the scene of my
life; days in which life was one long game of play, interrupted only by
childish illnesses that were like bad dreams, troubled and indistinct
patches on the fair foreground of the childish memory. The good
Benjamin ate his roast beef in a deprecating and apologetic attitude,
sitting, I fear, uncomfortably, on the edge of his chair. Esperanza ate
about as much solid food as a singing bird might have done; but she
looked stronger and in better health than on the night of the _séance_,
and she looked almost happy. After the roast beef and apple-tart, I
took her to an afternoon service at St. Paul's, where the organ-music
filled her with rapture.
"'I shall come here every Sunday,' she said, as we left the cathedral.
"I entreated her not to go so far alone, and warned her that the
streets of London were full of danger for youth and inexperience; but
she laughed at my fears, assuring me that she had walked about the
meadows and coppices round Besbery ever since she could remember, and
no harm had ever befallen her, though there were hardly any people
about. I told her that in London the people were the danger, and
exacted her promise that she would never go beyond the immediate
neighbourhood of Great Ormond Street by herself. I gave her permission
to walk about Queen's Square, Guilford Street, and Mecklenburgh Square.
The neighbourhood was quiet and respectable.
"'I am bound to obey you,' she answered meekly. 'I owe you so much
gratitude for your goodness to me.'
"I protested against gratitude to _me_. The only friend to whom she
owed anything was my dear old nurse.
"I had a great terror of the perils of the London streets for a girl
of her appearance. It was not so much that she was beautiful, but
because of a certain strangeness and exceptional character in her
beauty which would be likely to attract attention and arouse curiosity.
The dreamy look in the large violet eyes, the semi-transparent pallor
which suggested an extreme fragility, the unworldliness of her whole
aspect were calculated to appeal to the worst instincts of the
prowling profligate. She had an air of helplessness which would invite
persecution from the cowardly wretches who make the streets of a great
city perilous for unprotected innocence.
"She was ready to promise anything that would please me.
"'I do not care if I never go out,' she said simply. 'The lady who
lives in the drawing-room has a harmonium, and she has told me I may
play upon it every day--all day long, when she is out; and she has a
great many friends, and visits a good deal.'
"'Oh, but you must go out-of-doors for your health's sake!' I
protested. 'Martha or Benjamin must go with you.'
"'They have no time to go out-of-doors till after dark, poor things!
they are so busy; but they will take me for a walk sometimes of an
evening. I shall make them go out, for their own sakes. You need not
feel anxious about me; you are too kind to think of me at all.'
"I could not help feeling anxious about her. I felt as if I were
responsible for everything that could assail or hurt her; that every
hair of her head was a charge upon my conscience. Her health, her
happiness, her talents and tastes and fancies--it was mine to care
for all these. My _protégée_, Standish called her. In this farewell
walk through the dull Sunday streets, in the dull October twilight, it
seemed as if she were much more than my _protégée_--my dearest, most
sacred care, the purpose and the promise of my life.
"To-night we were to say good-bye. We were to have parted at the door
in Great Ormond Street; but, standing on the doorstep, waiting for the
opening of that inexorable door, which would swallow her up presently,
like a tomb, I felt all at once that I could not sacrifice this last
evening. Standish was dining out. There would only be loneliness and
a roast chicken awaiting me at half-past seven. The chicken might
languish, uneaten; the ghosts might have the dull, commonplace room;
I would finish the evening with Martha's tea and toast, and hear
Esperanza sing her favourite numbers of Handel and Mendelssohn, to the
accompaniment of an ancient Stoddart piano, a relic of the schoolroom
in my Suffolk home, the piano on which my mother took her first
music-lesson.
"It was an evening in Elysium. A back parlour is sometimes large enough
to contain paradise. I did not question my own heart, or analyze my
beatific sensations. I ascribed at least half my happiness to Handel
and Mendelssohn, and that feeling of exaltation which only sacred
music can produce. There were no anxious questionings in my mind till
after I had said good-bye to Esperanza--good-bye, till the third week
in December--and had left the house. Those uneasy questionings were
inspired by my dear old Martha, who opened the hall door for me, and
said gravely, as I shook hands with her--
"'It would never do, Mr. George. I know what kind of lady your mother
is, as well as anybody. It would never do.'
"I did not ask her what it was that would never do; but I carried a new
sense of trouble and difficulty out into the autumn wind.
CHAPTER IX.
"A WHITE STAR MADE OF MEMORY LONG AGO."
"'It would never do.' Those words of Martha's--so earnestly spoken by
the kind soul who cared for me almost as tenderly as a mother cares
for her own--haunted me all through the rapid run to Cambridge, walked
the quadrangles of Trinity with me, tramped the Trumpington Road upon
my shoulders, like that black care which sits behind the traveller.
'It would never do.' No need to ask my good Martha for the meaning of
that emphatic assertion. I knew what shape her thoughts had taken as
she watched me sitting by the little square piano--the old, old piano,
with such a thin, tinkling sound--listening to that seraphic voice, and
looking at that delicate profile and exquisite colouring of faintly
flushed cheek, lifted eye, and shadowy hair. My old nurse had surprised
my secret almost before I knew it myself; but, by the time I was back
in my shabby ground-floor sitting-room at Trinity, I knew as well as
Martha knew that I had let myself fall deep in love with a girl whom I
could never marry with my mother's approbation. I might take my own way
in life and marry the girl I loved; but to do so would be to forfeit my
mother's affection, to make myself an outcast from her house.
"'I know what kind of a lady your mother is,' said Martha, in her
valedictory address.
"Was I, her son, likely to be ignorant of the mother's character, or
unable to gauge the strength of her prejudices--prejudices that seemed
so much a part of her nature as to form a strong argument against
Locke's assertion that there are no innate ideas? Indeed, in reading
that philosopher's famous chapter, it always seemed to me, that if the
average infant had to begin the A B C of life at the first letter,
my mother must be a 'sport' or exception to the general rule, and
must have been born with her brain richly stocked with family pride
and social distinctions. In all the years I had lived with her I had
never seen her unbend to a servant, or converse on equal terms with
a tradesman. She had a full appreciation of the value of wealth when
it was allied with good birth; but the millionaire manufacturer or
the lucky speculator belonged to that outer circle of which she knew
nothing, and of which she would believe no good.
"I was her only son; and she was a widow. I owed her more than most
sons owe their mothers. I did not stand as number four or five in
a family circle, taking my share in the rough and tumble of family
life. My mother had been all in all to me; and I had been all in all
to her. I had been her friend and companion from the time I was able
to understand the English language, the recipient of all her ideas,
her likes and dislikes--from the early stage when the childish mind
unconsciously takes shape and bent from the mind of the parent the
child loves best. From my seventh year I was fatherless, and all that
is sacred and sweet in home life began and ended for me with the word
mother.
"My mother was what Gerald Standish called 'a masterful woman,' a
woman to whom it was natural to direct and initiate the whole business
of life. My father was her opposite in temperament,--irresolute,
lymphatic; and I think he must have handed her the reins of home
government before their honeymoon was over. I remember him just well
enough to remember that he left the direction of his life wholly to
her; that he deferred to her judgment, and studied her feelings in
every detail of his existence; and that he obviously adored her.
I don't think he cared very much for me, his only child. I can
recall no indication of warmth of feeling on his part, only a placid
indifference, as of one whose affection was concentrated upon a single
object, and whose heart had no room for any other image. He spoke of
me as 'the boy,' and looked at me occasionally with an air of mild
wonder, as if I were somebody else's son, whose growth took him by
surprise. I never remember his expressing any opinion about me, except
that I had grown since he looked at me last.
"His feeling about me being thus tepid, it was hardly surprising that
he should make what many people have called an unjust will. I have
never disputed its justice, for I loved my mother too much to complain
of the advantages of power and status which that will gave her.
"She was an heiress, and her money had cleared my father's estate from
heavy encumbrances, and no doubt he remembered this when providing for
her future. He was her senior by five and twenty years, and foresaw a
long widowhood for her.
"The entail ended in his own person, so he was free to dispose of his
property as he liked. He left my mother tenant for life; and he left me
five hundred a year, chargeable upon the estate, which income was only
to begin when I came of age. Till my one-and-twentieth birthday I was
dependent upon my mother for everything.
"I told myself that I had to cut my own path in life, and that I must
be the architect of my own fortune.
"My mother's income, under her marriage settlement, was considerable,
and this, in addition to a rent-roll of between two and three thousand
a year, made her a rich woman.
"Assuredly I was not in a position to make an imprudent marriage,
since my power to maintain a wife and family in accord with my own
ideas of a gentleman's surroundings must depend for a considerable
time upon my mother's liberality. I had made up my mind to go to the
Bar, and I knew how slow and arduous is the road to success in that
branch of the legal profession; but far nearer than mere questions of
interest was the obligation which filial love laid upon me. My mother
had given me the devotion of years, had made me the chief object of
her thoughts and her hopes, and I should be an ungrateful wretch if I
were to disappoint her. I knew, alas! that upon this very question of
marriage she cherished a project that it would distress her to forego,
and that there was a certain Lady Emily whom I was intended to marry,
the daughter of a nobleman who had been my father's most intimate
friend, and for whom my mother had a greater regard than for any of our
neighbours.
"Knowing this, and wishing with all my heart to do my duty as a son to
the best of mothers, I could but echo Martha's solemn words--
"'It would never do.'
"No, 'it would never do.' The seraphic voice, the spiritual
countenance, the appealing helplessness, which had so moved my pity,
must be to me as a dream from which I had awakened. Esperanza's fate
must rest henceforward with herself, aided by honest Martha Blake, and
helped, through Martha, from my purse. I must never see her again. No
word had been spoken, no hint had been given of the love which it
was my bounden duty to conquer and forget. I could contemplate the
inevitable renunciation with a clear conscience.
"I worked harder in that term than I had worked yet, and shut my door
against all the allurements of undergraduate friends and all the
pleasures of university life. I was voted churlish and a muff; but I
found my books the best cure for an unhappy love; and though the image
of Miss Campbell was oftener with me than the learned shade of Newton
or the later ghost of Whewell, I contrived to do some really good work.
"My mother and I wrote to each other once a week. She expected me to
send her a budget of gossip and opinion, and it was only in this term
that I began to feel a difficulty in filling two sheets of note-paper
with my niggling penmanship. For the first time in my life, I found
myself sitting, pen in hand, with nothing to say to my mother. I
could not write about Esperanza, or the passionate yearning which I
was trying to outlive. I could hardly expatiate upon my mathematical
studies to a woman who, although highly cultivated, knew nothing of
mathematics. I eked out my letter as best I could, with a laboured
criticism upon a feeble novel which I had idly skimmed in an hour of
mental exhaustion.
"I looked forward apprehensively to my home-going in December, fearing
that some change in my outward aspect might betray the mystery of my
heart. The holiday, once so pleasant, would be long and dull. The
shooting would afford some relief perhaps, and I made up my mind to
tramp the plantations all day long. At Cambridge I had shirked physical
exercise; in Suffolk I would walk down my sorrow.
"A letter from my mother, which reached me early in December, put an
end to these resolves. She had been somewhat out of health all through
November; and her local medical man, who was old and _passé_, had only
tormented her with medicines which made her worse. She had therefore
decided, at Miss Marjorum's earnest desire, upon spending my vacation
in London; and Jebson, her trusty _major domo_, had been up to town,
and had found her delightful lodgings on the north side of Hyde Park.
She would await me, not at Fendyke, but in Connaught Place.
"Connaught Place--within less than an hour's walk of Great Ormond
Street! My heart beat fast and furiously at the mere thought of that
propinquity. Martha's latest letter had told me that all attempts at
finding a situation for my _protégée_ had so far been without result.
Martha and her charge had visited all the agencies for the placing
of governesses and companions, and no agent had succeeded in placing
Esperanza. Her education was far below the requirements of the least
exacting employer. She knew very little French, and no German; she
played exquisitely, but she played by ear; of the theory of music she
knew hardly anything. Her father, an enthusiast and a dreamer, had
filled her with ideas, but had taught her nothing that would help her
to earn a living.
"'Don't you fret about her, Mr. George,' wrote Martha. 'As long as
I have a roof over my head, she can make her home with me. Her bite
and sup makes hardly any difference in the week's expenses. I'm only
sorry, for her sake, that she isn't clever enough to get into a nice
family in some pretty country house, like Fendyke. It's a dull life for
her here--a back parlour to live in, and two old people for her only
companions.'
"I thought of the small dark parlour in the Bloomsbury lodging-house,
the tinkling old piano, the dull grey street; a weary life for a girl
of poetic temperament reared in the country. That letter of Martha's,
and the fact of being within an easy walk of Great Ormond Street, broke
down my resolution of the last two months. I called upon Martha and
her charge on the morning after I left Cambridge. I thought Esperanza
looked wan and out of health, and could but mark how the pale, sad
face flushed and brightened at sight of me. We were alone for a
few minutes, while Martha interviewed a butcher, and I seized the
opportunity. I said I feared she was not altogether happy. Only unhappy
in being a burden to my friends, she told me. She was depressed by
finding her own uselessness. Hundreds of young women were earning their
living as governesses, but no one would employ her.
"'No lady will even give me a trial,' she said. 'I'm afraid I must look
very stupid.'
"'You look very lovely,' I answered hotly. 'They want a commoner clay.'
"I implored her to believe that she was no burden to Martha or to me.
If she could be content to live that dull and joyless life, she was at
least secure of a safe and respectable home; and if she cared to carry
on her education, something might be done in the way of masters; or she
might attend some classes in Harley Street, or elsewhere.
"She turned red and then pale, and I saw tears trembling on her long
auburn lashes.
"'I am afraid I am unteachable,' she faltered, with downcast eyes.
'Kind ladies at Besbery tried to teach me; but it was no use. My
mind always wandered. I could not keep my thoughts upon the book I
was reading, or on what they told me. Miss Grimshawe, who wanted to
help me, said I was incorrigibly idle and atrociously obstinate. But,
indeed, it was not idleness or obstinacy that kept me from learning. I
could not force myself to think or to remember. My thoughts would only
go their own way; and I cared for nothing but music, or for the poetry
my father used to read to me sometimes of an evening. I am afraid Miss
Grimshawe was right, and that I ought to be a dressmaker.'
"I glanced at the hands which lay loosely clasped upon the arm of the
chair in which she was sitting. Such delicately tapering fingers were
never meant for the dressmaker's workroom. The problem of Esperanza's
life was not to be solved that way.
"I did not remain long on this first morning; but I went again two days
afterwards, and again, until it came to be every day. Martha grumbled
and warned me of my danger, and of the wrong done to Esperanza, if I
were to make her care for me.
"'I don't think there's much fear of that,' added Martha. 'She's too
much in the clouds. It's you I'm afraid of. You and me knows who mamma
wants you to marry, don't us, Mr. George?'
"I could not gainsay Martha upon this point. Lady Emily and I had
ridden the same rocking-horse; she riding pillion with her arms clasped
round my waist, while I urged the beast to his wildest pace. We had
taken tea out of the same toy tea-things--her tea-things--and before I
was fifteen years of age my mother told me that she was pleased to see
I was so fond of Emily, and hoped that she and I would be husband and
wife some day, in the serious future, just as we were little lovers now
in the childish present.
"I remember laughing at my mother's speech, and thinking within myself
that Emily and I hardly realized my juvenile idea of lovers. The
romantic element was entirely wanting in our association. When I talked
of Lady Emily, later, to Gerald Standish, I remember I described her as
'a good sort,' and discussed her excellent qualities of mind and temper
with an unembarrassed freedom which testified to a heart that was at
peace.
"I felt more mortified than I would have cared to confess at Martha's
blunt assurance that Esperanza was too much in the clouds to care
about me; and it may be that this remark of my old nurse's gave just
the touch of pique that acted as a spur to passion. I know that after
two or three afternoons in Great Ormond Street, I felt that I loved
this girl as I could never love again, and that henceforward it would
be impossible for me to contemplate the idea of life without her.
The more fondly I loved her, the less demonstrative I became, and my
growing reserve threw dust in the elderly eyes that watched us. Martha
believed that her warning had taken effect, and she so far confided in
my discretion as to allow me to take Esperanza for lamp-lit walks in
the Bloomsbury squares, after our cosy tea-drinking in the little back
parlour. The tea-drinking and the walk became an institution. Martha's
rheumatics had made walking exercise impossible for her during the last
month. Benjamin was fat and lazy.
"'If I didn't let the poor child go out with you, she'd hardly get a
breath of fresh air all the winter. And I know that I can trust you,
Mr. George,' said Martha.
"'Yes, you can trust me,' answered I.
"She might trust me to breathe no word of evil into the ear of her I
loved. She could trust me to revere the childlike innocence which was
my darling's highest charm. She could trust me to be loyal and true
to Esperanza. But she could not trust me to be worldly-wise, or to
sacrifice my own happiness to filial affection. The time came when I
had to set my love for Esperanza against my duty to my mother and my
own interests. Duty and interest kicked the beam.
"Oh, those squares! those grave old Bloomsbury squares, with their
formal rows of windows, and monotonous iron railings, and stately
doorways, and clean doorsteps, and enclosures of trees, whose blackened
branches showed leafless against the steely sky of a frosty evening!
What groves or streams of paradise could be fairer to us two than
the dull pavements which we paced arm-in-arm in the wintry greyness,
telling each other those thoughts and fancies which seemed in their
intuitive sympathy to mark us for predestined life-companions. Her
thoughts were childishly expressed sometimes; but it seemed to me
always as if they were only my thoughts in a feminine guise. Nothing
that she said ever jarred upon me; and her ignorance of the world and
all its ways suggested some nymph or fairy reared in the seclusion of
woodland or ocean cave. I thought of Endymion, and I fancied that his
goddess could have been scarcely less of the earth than this fair girl
who walked beside me, confiding in me with a childlike faith.
"One night I told her that I loved her. We had stayed out later than
usual. The clock of St. George's Church was striking nine, and in
the shadowy quiet of Queen's Square my lips met hers in love's first
kiss. How shyly and how falteringly she confessed her own secret, so
carefully guarded till that moment.
"'I never thought you could care for a poor girl like me,' she said;
'but I loved you from the first. Yes, almost from the very first. My
heart seemed frozen after my father's death, and your voice was the
first that thawed it. The dull, benumbed feeling passed away, and I
knew that I had some one living to love and care for and think about as
I sat alone. I had a world of new thoughts to interweave with the music
I love.'
"'Ah, that music, Esperanza! I am almost jealous of music when I see
you so moved and influenced by it.'
"'Music would have been my only consolation if you had not cared for
me,' she answered simply.
"'But I do care for you, and I want you to be my wife, now at once--as
soon as we can be married.'
"I talked about an immediate marriage before the registrar. But,
willing as she was to be guided by me in most things, she would not
consent to this.
"'It would not seem like marriage to me,' she said, "if we did not
stand before the altar.'
"'Well, it shall be in a church, then; only we shall have to wait
longer. And I must go back to Cambridge at the end of this week. I must
get an exeat, and come up to London on our wedding-day, and take you
home in the evening. I shall have a quiet home ready for my darling,
far from the ken of dons and undergraduates, but within an easy
distance of the 'Varsity.'
"I explained to her that our marriage must be a secret till I came
of age next year, or till I could find a favourable opportunity of
breaking the fact to my mother.'
"'Will she mind? Will she be angry?' asked Esperanza.
"'Not when she comes to know you, dear love.'
"Although I knew my mother's strong character, I was infatuated enough
to believe what I said. Where was the heart so stony that would not
warm to that fair and gentle creature? Where the pride so stubborn
which that tender influence could not bend?
"I had the banns put up at the church of St. George the Martyr, assured
that Martha's rheumatism and Benjamin's lethargic temper would prevent
either of them attending the morning service on any of the three
fateful Sundays. If Martha went to church at all, she crept there in
the evening, after tea. She liked the gaslights and the evening warmth,
the short prayers, and the long sermon, and she met her own class among
the congregation. I felt tolerably safe about the banns.
"Had my mother been in good health, it would have been difficult for
me to spend so many of my evenings away from home; but the neuralgic
affection which had troubled her in Suffolk had not been subjugated by
the great Dr. Gull's treatment, and she passed a good deal of her life
in her own rooms and in semi-darkness, ministered to by a lady who had
been a member of our household ever since my father's death, and whose
presence had been the only drawback to my home happiness.
"This lady was my mother's governess--Miss Marjorum--a woman of
considerable brain power, wide knowledge of English and German
literature, and a style of pianoforte playing which always had the
effect of cold water down my back. And yet Miss Marjorum played
correctly. She introduced no discords into that hard, dry music,
which seemed to me to have been written expressly for her hard and
precise finger-tips, bony knuckles, and broad, strong hand, with a
thumb which she boasted of as resembling Thalberg's. In a difficult
and complicated movement Miss Marjorum's thumb worked wonders. It was
ubiquitous; it turned under and over, and rapped out sharp staccato
notes in the midst of presto runs, or held rigid semibreves while the
active fingers fired volleys of chords, shrilled out a six-bar shake,
or raced the bass with lightning triplets. In whatever entanglement
of florid ornament Liszt or Thalberg had disguised a melody, Miss
Marjorum's thumb could search it out and drum it into her auditors.
"Miss Marjorum was on the wrong side of fifty. She had a squat figure
and a masculine countenance, and her voice was deep and strong, like
the voice of a man. She dressed with a studious sobriety in dark cloth
or in grey alpaca, according to the seasons, and in the evening she
generally wore plaid poplin, which ruled her square, squat figure into
smaller squares. I have observed an affinity between plain people and
plaid poplin.
"Miss Marjorum was devoted to my mother; and antagonistic as her nature
was to me in all things, and blighting as was her influence upon the
fond dream of my youth, I am bound to record that she was conscientious
in carrying out her own idea of duty. Her idea of duty unhappily
included no indulgence for youthful impulses, and she disapproved of
every independent act of mine.
"My evening absences puzzled her.
"'I wonder you can like to be out nearly every evening when your mother
is so ill,' she remarked severely, on my return to Connaught Place
after that glimpse of paradise in Queen Square.
"'If I could be of any use to my mother by staying at home, you may be
sure I should not be out, Miss Marjorum,' I replied, rather stiffly.
"'It would be a satisfaction to your mother to know you were under her
roof, even when she is obliged to be resting quietly in her own room.'
"'Unfortunately my mathematical coach lives under another roof, and I
have to accommodate myself to his hours.'
"This was sophistication; but it was true that I read mathematics with
an ex-senior wrangler in South Kensington every other day.
"'Do you spend _every_ evening with your coach?' asked Miss Marjorum,
looking up suddenly from her needlework, and fixing me with her cold
grey eye.
"'Certainly not. You know the old saw--"All work and no play----"'
"'And how do you amuse yourself when you are not at South Kensington? I
did not think you knew many people in London.'
"'That is because I know very few people whom you know. My chief
friends are the friends of my college life--not the worthy bucolics of
Suffolk.'
Miss Marjorum sighed, and went on with her sewing. She delighted
in the plainest of plain work--severest undergarments of calico or
flannel. She had taken upon herself to supply my mother's poorer
cottage-tenants with under-clothing--a very worthy purpose; but I could
not help wishing she had deferred a little more to the universal sense
of beauty in her contributions to the cottagers' wardrobes. Surely
those prison-like garments must have appalled their recipients. My
inexperienced eye noted only their ugliness in shape and coarseness of
texture. I longed for a little trimming, a softer quality of flannel.
"'I am afraid they must hurt the people who get them,' I said one day,
when Miss Marjorum exhibited her bale of flannel underwear.
"'They are delightfully warm, and friction promotes circulation and
maintains the health of the skin,' she replied severely. 'I don't know
what _more_ you would have.'
"It irked me not a little to note Miss Marjorum's suspicious air when
she discussed my evening occupations, for I knew she had more influence
over my mother than any one living, and I fancied that she would not
scruple to use that influence against me. I had lost her friendship
long ago by childish rudenesses, which I looked back upon with regret,
but which I could not obliterate from her memory by the studious
civilities of later years.
"I went back to Cambridge, and my mother and her devoted companion left
Connaught Place for Brighton, Dr. Gull having strongly recommended
sea-air, after exhausting his scientific means in the weary battle with
nerve pain. It was a relief to me, when I thought of Esperanza, to know
that Miss Marjorum was fifty miles away from Great Ormond Street. Those
suspicious glances and prying questions of hers had frightened me.
"_When_ I thought of Esperanza!--when was she not the centre and
circumference of my thoughts? I worked hard; missed no lecture;
neglected no opportunity; for I had made up my mind to win the game of
life off my own bat; but Esperanza's image was with me whatever I was
doing. I think I mixed up her personality in an extraordinary fashion
with the higher mathematics. She perched like a fairy upon every curve,
or slid sylph-like along every line. I weighed her, and measured her,
and calculated the doctrine of chances about her. She became in my
mind the ruling, and to common eyes, invisible spirit of the science of
quantity and number.
"Could this interval between the asking in church and my wedding-day
be any other than a period of foolish dreaming, of fond confusion and
wandering thoughts? I was not twenty-one, and I was about to take a
step which would inevitably offend my only parent, the only being to
whom I stood indebted for care and affection. In the rash hopefulness
of a youthful passion, I made sure of being ultimately forgiven; but,
hopeful as I was, I knew it might be some time before I could obtain
pardon. In the meanwhile, I had an income which would suffice for a
youthful _ménage_. I would find a quiet home for Esperanza at one of
the villas on the Grandchester Road till I had taken my degree, and
then I should have to begin work in London. Indeed, I had fixed in my
own mind upon a second-floor in Martha's roomy old house, which would
be conveniently near the Temple, where I might share a modest set
of chambers with a Cambridge friend. In the deep intoxication of my
love-dream, Great Ormond Street seemed just the most delightful spot in
which to establish the cosy home I figured to myself. It would be an
infinite advantage to live under my dear old nurse's roof, and to know
that she would watch over my girl-wife while I sat waiting for briefs
in my dingy chambers, or reading law with an eminent junior.
"I had asked Esperanza on the night of our betrothal whether she
thought we could live upon five hundred a year. A ripple of laughter
preluded her reply.
"'Dear George, do you know what my father's income was?' she asked.
'Sixty-five pounds a year. He paid fifteen pounds a year for our
cottage and garden--such a dear old garden--and we had to live and
clothe ourselves upon the other fifty pounds. He was very shabby
sometimes, poor darling; but we were always happy. Though I seem so
helpless in getting my own living, I think I could keep house for you,
and not waste your money. Five hundred a year! Why, you are immensely
rich!'
"I told her that I should be able to add to our income by the time we
had been married a few years, and then we would have a house in the
country, and a garden, and a pair of ponies for her to drive, and cows
and poultry, and all the things that women love. What a happy dream
it was, and how the sweet face brightened under the lamplight as she
listened to me.
"'I want nothing but your love,' she said; 'nothing. I am not afraid of
poverty.'
"The three weeks were gone. I got an exeat, and went up to London by an
early train. I had directed Esperanza to meet me at the church, whose
doors we had so often passed together in our evening walks, and where
we had knelt side by side one Sunday evening. She was to take Martha to
church with her; but not till the last moment, not till they were at
the church door, was she to tell my old nurse what was going to happen,
lest an idea of duty to the mother should induce her to betray the son.
"The air was crisp and bright, and the wintry landscape basked in the
wintry sun between Cambridge and Stratford; but the dull greyness
of our metropolitan winter wrapped me round when I left Bishopsgate
Street, and there was a thin curtain of fog hanging over my beloved
Bloomsbury when my hansom rattled along the sober old-world streets
to the solid Georgian church. I sprang from the cab as if I had worn
Mercury's sandals, told the man to wait, ran lightly up the steps,
pushed back the heavy door and entered the dark temple, hushed and
breathless. How solemn and cold and ghostly the church looked, how grey
and pale the great cold windows. The fog seemed thicker here than in
the streets outside; and the dreary fane was empty.
"I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes to eleven. I had entreated her
to be at the church at least ten minutes before the hour; and I felt
bitterly disappointed that she had not anticipated the appointment.
"Her last letter was three days old. Could she be ill? could any evil
thing have happened? I hurried back to the church door, intending to
get into my cab and drive to Ormond Street. I changed my mind before
I had crossed the threshold. I might miss her on the way--drive by
one street while she and Martha were walking in another. Again, there
was something undignified in a bridegroom rushing off in search of
his bride. My place was to wait in the church. I had seen a good many
weddings in our parish church in Suffolk, and I knew that the bride was
almost always late. Yet, in spite of this experience, I had expected
my bride in advance of the appointed time. She had no wreath of
orange-blossoms, no bridal veil to adjust, no doting mother, or sister
bridesmaids to flurry and hinder her under the pretence of helping.
She had no carriage to wait for. Her impatience to see me after nearly
three weeks should have brought her to the church earlier than this.
"Then I remembered Martha. No doubt she was waiting for Martha. That
good soul was interviewing the butcher, or adjusting her Paisley shawl,
while I was fretting and fuming in the church. I had no best man to
reason with my impatience and keep up my spirits. My best man was to be
the parish clerk, and he had not yet appeared upon the scene. I saw a
pew-opener creeping about, a pew-opener in the accustomed close black
bonnet and sober apparel. Esperanza's bridesmaid! Martha would have to
give her away.
"I took a turn round the church, looked at the monuments, and even
stood still to read a tablet here and there, and knew no more of the
inscription after I had read it than if it had been in choice Assyrian.
"I opened the heavy door and went out on the steps, and stood watching
a stray cab or a stray pedestrian, dimly visible through the thickening
fog. I looked at my watch every other minute, between anger and
despair. It was five minutes to eleven. The curate who was to marry us
passed me on the steps and went into the church, unsuspecting that I
was to be the chief actor in the ceremony. I stood looking along the
street, in the only direction in which my bride was to be expected, and
my heart sickened as the slow minutes wore themselves out, till it was
nearly a quarter-past eleven.
"I could endure this no longer. My hansom was waiting on the opposite
side of the street. I lifted my finger, and signed to the driver to
come over to me. There was nothing for it but to go to Great Ormond
Street, and discover the cause of delay.
"Before the man could climb into his seat and cross the road, a
brougham drove sharply up to the church steps--a brougham of dingy
aspect, driven by a man whose livery branded him as a flyman.
"I was astonished at the fly, but never doubted that it brought me my
dear love, and my heart was light again, and I ran to greet her with a
welcoming smile.
"The carriage door was sharply opened from within, and my mother
stepped out and stood before me, tall and grave, in her neat dark
travelling dress, her fine features sharp and clear in the wintry gloom.
"'Mother!' I exclaimed aghast.
"'I know I am not the person you expected, George,' she said quietly.
'Badly as you have behaved to me, I am sorry for your disappointment.'
"'Where is Esperanza?' I cried, unheeding my mother's address.
"It was only afterwards that her words came back to me--in that long
dull afterwards when I had leisure to brood over every detail in this
agonizing scene.
"'She is safe, and in good hands, and she is where you will never see
her again.'
"'That's a lie!' I cried. 'If she is among the living, I will find her.
If she is dead, I will follow her.'
"'You are violent and unreasonable; but I suppose your romantic
infatuation must excuse you. When you have read this letter, you will
be calmer, I hope.'
"She gave me a letter in Esperanza's writing. We had moved a few paces
from the church steps while we talked. I read the letter, walking
slowly along the street, my mother at my side.
"'DEAREST,
"'I am going away. I am not to be your wife. It was a happy dream,
but a foolish one. I should have ruined your life. That has been
made clear to me; I love you far too dearly to be your enemy. You
will never see me again. Don't be unhappy about me. I shall be well
cared for. I am going very far away; but if it were to the farthest
end of the earth, and if I were to live a hundred years, I should
never cease to love you, or learn to love you less.
"'Good-bye for ever,
"'ESPERANZA.'
"'I know whose hand is in this,' I said,--'Miss Marjorum.'
"'Miss Marjorum is my true and loyal friend, and yours too, though you
may not believe it.'
"'Whoever it may be who has stolen my love away from me, that person
is my dire and deadly foe. Whether the act is yours or hers, it is the
act of my bitterest enemy, and I shall ever so remember it. Look here,
mother, let there be no misunderstanding between you and me. I love
this girl better than my life. Whatever trick you have played upon her,
whatever cajoleries you and Miss Marjorum have brought to bear upon
her, whatever false representations you may have made, appealing to her
unselfishness against her love, you have done that which will wreck
your son's life unless you can undo it.'
"'I have saved my son from the shipwreck his own folly would have
made of his life,' my mother answered calmly. 'I have seen what these
unequal marriages come to--before the wife is thirty.'
"'It would be no unequal marriage. The girl I love is a lady.'
"'A village organist's daughter, by her own confession totally without
education. A pretty, delicate young creature with a certain surface
refinement, I grant you; but do you think that would stand the wear
and tear of life, or counterbalance your humiliation when people asked
questions about your wife's antecedents and belongings? People, even
the politest people, _will_ ask those questions, George. My dear, dear
boy, the thing you were to have done to-day would have been utter ruin
to your social existence for the next fifty years. You will never be
rich enough or great enough to live down such a marriage.'
"'Don't preach to me,' I cried savagely. 'You have broken my heart.
Surely that is enough for you.'
"I broke away from her as she laid her hand upon my arm--such a shapely
hand in a dark grey glove. I remembered even in that moment of anguish
and of anger how my dear love had often walked by my side, gloveless,
shabbier than a milliner's apprentice. No, she was not of my mother's
world; no more was Titania. She belonged to the realm of romance and
_féerie_; not to Belgravia or Mayfair.
"I ran back to the spot where the hansom still waited for me, jumped
in, and told the man to drive to Great Ormond Street. I left my mother
standing on the pavement, to find her way back to her carriage as she
could, to go where she would.
"I knocked at the lodging-house door loud enough to wake the Seven
Sleepers. I pushed past the scared maid-servant, and dashed into
Martha's parlour. She was sitting with her spectacles on her nose
poring over a tradesman's book, and with other books of the same kind
on the table before her.
"'Martha, this is your doing,' I said. 'You betrayed me to my mother!'
"'Oh, Mr. George, forgive your old nurse that loves you as if you were
her own flesh and blood. I only did my duty by you and my mistress. It
would never have done.'
"She called me 'dear,' as in the old nursery days. Tears were streaming
down her withered cheeks.
"'It was you, then?'
"'Yes, it was me, Mr. George, leastways me and Benjamin. We talked it
over a long time before he wrote the letter to my mistress at Brighton.
Sarah came home from church on Sunday dinner-time. The drawing-rooms
were dining out, and the second floor is empty, so there was nothing to
hinder Sarah's going to church. She came home at dinner-time, and told
me you and Esperanza Campbell had been asked in church--for the third
time. You might have knocked me down with a feather. I never thought
she could be so artful. I talked it over with Benjamin, and he posted a
letter that night.'
"'And Miss Marjorum came up from Brighton next morning, and came to see
Esperanza?'
"'How did you know that, Mr. George?'
"'I know Miss Marjorum.'
"'Yes, it was Miss Marjorum that came. She asked to see Esperanza
alone, and they were shut up together for over an hour, and then
the bell was rung, and Miss Marjorum told the girl to pack up Miss
Campbell's things, bring her box down to the hall, and when she had
done that, to fetch a four-wheeler. Sarah was nearly as upset as I was,
but she and I packed the things between us--such a few things, poor
child--and carried the box downstairs, and I waited in the hall while
Sarah ran for the cab. And presently Esperanza came out of the parlour
with Miss Marjorum, and put on her hat and jacket, and then came to bid
me good-bye.
"'She put her arms round my neck and kissed me; and though I had done
my duty by you and your ma, Mr. George, I felt like Judash. "It was
right of you to tell," she said; "it was only right--for his sake," and
Miss Marjorum hurried her down the steps and into the cab before she
could say another word. I do believe the poor dear child gave you up
without a murmur, Mr. George, because she knew that it would have been
your ruin to marry her.'
"'Bosh! That had been drummed into her by Miss Marjorum. You have done
me the worst turn you ever did any one in your life, Martha; and yet
I thought if there was anybody in the world I could trust it was you.
Where did the cab go--do you know that?'
"'Charing Cross Station. I heard Miss Marjorum give the order.'"
CHAPTER X.
"AND THAT UNREST WHICH MEN MISCALL DELIGHT."
Allan went back to Matcham sobered by grief, and longing for the
comfort his betrothed could give him, the comfort of sympathy and
gentle words, the deeper comfort in the assurance of her love.
Suzette looked very pale in her black frock when Allan appeared at
Marsh House after his bereavement. They stood side by side in the
grey light of a hopelessly dull day, finding but little speech in the
sadness of this first meeting.
"My darling, you have been grieving for my grief," he said tenderly,
looking into the dark eyes, noting the tired look as of many tears, the
sharper line of the cheek, the settled pallor, where a lovely carmine
had been wont to come and go like warm light.
"My dearest, you have lost all your roses--and for my sake. For me
those dear eyes have known sleepless nights, those lovely cheeks have
grown pinched and pale."
"Do you think that I could help being sorry for you, Allan?" she
murmured, with downcast eyelids.
"You had no other cause for sorrow, I hope?"
"No, no; only in every life there are saddening intervals. I was sorry
for your sake--sorry that I was never to see your father again. I liked
him so much, Allan. And then somehow I got into a low-spirited way, and
old Dr. Podmore gave me a tonic which made my head ache. I don't know
that it had any other effect."
"Suzette, it was cruel of you not to tell me that you were ill."
"Oh, I was not to say ill. Why should I worry you about such nonsense?
I was only below par. That is what Dr. Podmore called it. But please
don't talk about me, Allan. Talk to me of yourself and of your poor
mother. She is coming to stay with you, I hope?"
"Yes, she is coming to me next week. How is Mrs. Wornock? Do you go to
her as much as ever?"
"Almost as much. She seems so dependent upon me for companionship, poor
soul. I am the only girl she has taken to--as people say."
"What a wise woman to choose the most charming girl in the world."
"If you said in the Matcham world, it would not be a stupendous
compliment."
"Nay, I mean the world. I challenge the universe to produce me a second
Suzette. And Geoffrey, your violin player, has he been much at home?"
"Not very much. Please don't call him my violin player. I have not
played a single accompaniment for him since you objected. I have been
very dutiful."
"Don't talk of duty. It is love that I want, love without alloy; love
which, being full of foolishness itself, can forgive a lover's baseless
jealousy."
"Allan, have I ever been unforgiving?"
"No, you have borne with my tempers. You have been all that is kind
and sweet--but I sometimes wish you would be angry with me. Would that
there were a girl in Matcham handsome enough to admit of your jealousy!
How desperately I would flirt with that girl!"
Her wan smile was not encouraging.
"Is he still as devoted to his fiddle? Does he talk of Tartini,
Spontini, de Beriot, as other men talk of Salisbury or Gladstone?"
"I have seen very little of him; but he is a fanatic about music. He
inherits his mother's passion."
"His poor mother," sighed Allan.
"She is so fond of you--almost as fond as she is of her own son."
"That's not possible, Suzie."
"Well, the son must be first, of course; but, indeed, she is very fond
of you, Allan."
"Dear soul, it is for old sake's sake. I'll tell you her poor little
innocent secret, Suzie. You, who are the other half of my soul, have a
right to know all things which gravely interest me. Only you must be
discretion itself; and you must never breathe a word of Mrs. Wornock's
story to my mother."
And then he sat down by her side in the comfortable corner by the
old-fashioned fireplace, fenced off from all the outer world by a
Japanese screen, on which Choti and an army of smaller devils grinned
and capered against a black satin background, and he told her tenderly,
but only in outline, the story of his father's first love, and
Esperanza's all-too-willing sacrifice.
"It was generous--but a mistake," he said in conclusion. "She gave up
her own happiness, dashed away the cup of joy when it was at her lips.
She was nobly unselfish, and she spoilt two lives. Such sacrifices
never answer."
"Do you really believe that, Allan?" asked Suzette, looking at him with
a startling intensity.
"I really do. I have never known a case in which self-surrender of that
kind has ended well. A man and woman who love each other should be true
to each other and their mutual love. All worldly considerations should
be as naught. If a man truly loves a beggar-girl, let him marry her;
and don't let the beggar-girl jilt him because she thinks he would do
better by marrying a duchess."
"But if two people love each other--who are otherwise bound and
fettered, who cannot be happy without breaking older ties----"
"Ah, that is a different thing. Honour comes into the question,
and there must be sacrifices. This world would be a pandemonium if
inclination went before honour. I am talking of love weighed against
worldly wisdom, against poverty, against rank, race, wealth. You
can understand now why Mrs. Wornock's heart went out to me from the
beginning of our acquaintance--why she has accepted me almost as a
second son."
Allan's Matcham friends were enthusiastic in their welcome, and cordial
in their expressions of sympathy. It may be that the increase of means
and importance which had come to him by his father's death was no small
factor in the opinion of the village and its environs. A man who had
an estate in Suffolk, and who lived at Matcham for his own pleasure,
was a personage; and Matcham gossip did not fail to exaggerate the
unseen Suffolk estate, and to talk of the Beechhurst property as a
mere bagatelle, a windfall from a maternal uncle, hardly worth talking
about, as compared with Fendyke and its vast acreage.
"Lady Emily has the house and home-farm for her life," Mrs. Mornington
explained, with the privileged air of Allan's intimate friend; "but the
bulk of the estate passes at once to Mr. Carew. My niece has done very
well for herself, after all."
The last words, carelessly spoken, implied that in the first instance
Mr. Carew had been rather a poor match for Miss Vincent.
"I suppose this sad event will delay the marriage?"
"For two or three months, perhaps. They were to have been married
at midsummer, when Suzette will come of age; but she tells me she
would not think of marrying Allan till at least half a year after his
father's death. She talked of a year, but that would be simply absurd.
The wedding can be as quiet as they like."
"Yes, of course," murmured assenting friends, sipping Mrs. Mornington's
Ceylon tea, and despondently foreseeing the stern necessity of wedding
presents, without even the poor compensation of champagne, ices,
wedding-cake, and a crowd of fine gowns and new bonnets. They were to
have positively no equivalent for their money.
* * * * *
Suzette had pleaded hard for a year's delay.
"It would be more respectful to him whom you have lost; and it would be
more pleasing to your mother," she said.
"No, Suzette, my mother would rather see me happy than sacrifice my
happiness to conventionality. Half a year is a long time for a man
whose life seems a thing of shreds and patches, waiting the better
fuller life that he longs for. I shall remember my dear father with no
less affection; I shall no less regret his loss; when you and I are
one. We can be married quietly at nine o'clock in the morning, before
Matcham people have finished breakfast, with only your father and aunt,
and my mother, for witnesses; and we can slip away from the station
in the fresh September morning on the first stage of our journey to
Como. Such a lovely journey at that season, Suzie! It will still be
summer in Italy, and we can stay late in October, till the grapes are
all gathered and the berceaus are getting bare, and then we can come
back to Matcham to our own cosy fireside, and amuse ourselves with the
arrangement of our house. It will be as new to me as it will be to you,
Suzie, for only when you are its mistress will it be home."
Suzette could hardly withhold her consent, her lover being so earnest.
It was settled that the marriage should take place early in September;
and this being decided, the current of life flowed smoothly on, Allan
spending more of his days at Marsh House, The Grove, and Discombe, than
in his own house, except when Lady Emily was with him.
Discombe was by far the most delightful of these three houses in
out-of-door weather, pleasant as were Mrs. Mornington's carefully
tended grounds and shrubberies, her verandah and spacious conservatory.
The gardens at Discombe had that delicious flavour of the old world,
and that absolute seclusion which can never be enjoyed in grounds that
are within ear-shot of a high-road. At Discombe the long grass walks,
the walls of ilex and of yew, the cypress avenues, and marble temples
were isolated amidst surrounding woods, nearly a mile away from the
traffic of everyday life. There was a sense of quiet and privacy here,
compared with which Marsh House and the Grove were scarcely superior
to the average villa in a newly developed suburb.
The seasons waxed and waned; the month of May, when the woodland walks
round Discombe were white with the feathery bloom of the mountain ash,
and golden with the scented blossoms of the yellow azalea; and June,
which filled the woodland avenues with a flush of purple rhododendrons,
masses of bloom, in an ascending scale of colour from the deep bass of
darkest purple to the treble of palest lilac; and July, with her lap
full of roses that made the gardens as brilliant as a picture by Alma
Tadèma.
"I always tell the gardeners that if they give me roses I will forgive
them all the rest," said Mrs. Wornock, when Allan complimented her upon
her banquet of bloom; arches of roses, festoons of roses, temples built
of roses, roses in beds and borders, everywhere.
"But your men are model gardeners; they neglect nothing."
In this paradise of flowers Allan and Suzette dawdled away two or
three afternoons in every week. Discombe seemed to Allan always
something of an enchanted palace--a place upon which there lay a
glamour and a spell, a garden of sleep, a grove for woven paces and
weaving hands, a spot haunted by sad sweet memories, ruled over by the
genius of love, faithful in disappointment. Mrs. Wornock's personality
gave an atmosphere of sadness to the house in which she lived, to the
gardens in which she paced to and fro with slow, meditative steps; but
it was not an unpleasing sadness, and it suited Allan's mood in this
quiet summer of waiting, while grief for the loss of his father was
still fresh in his mind.
Lady Emily came to Discombe on several occasions, and now that Mrs.
Wornock's shyness had worn off--with all those agitations which were
inevitable at a first meeting--the two women were very good friends. It
was difficult for any one not to take kindly to Lady Emily Carew, and
she on her side was fascinated by a nature so different from her own,
and by that reserve force of genius which gave fire and pathos to Mrs.
Wornock's playing.
Lady Emily listened with moistened eyes to the Sonata Pathetica, and
Mrs. Wornock showed a cordial interest in the Blickling Park and
Woodbastwick cows--which gave distinction to the Fendyke dairy farm.
"Pure white, with lovely black muzzles--and splendid milkers!"
protested Lady Emily. "I was taught that thing you play, dear Mrs.
Wornock; but my playing was never good for much, even when I was having
two lessons a week from poor Sir Julius. He was only Mr. Benedict when
he taught me, and he was almost young."
Geoffrey made meteoric appearances at Discombe during those quiet
summer months, and his presence seemed to make everybody uncomfortable.
There was a restlessness--a suppressed fever about him which made
sensitive people nervous. Dearly though his mother loved him, and
gladly as she welcomed his reappearance upon the scene of her life,
she was always fluttered and anxious while he was under her roof.
His leave expired early in July, but instead of joining his regiment,
which had returned to England, and was now quartered at York, he sent
in his papers, without telling his mother or anybody else what he was
doing, and he would not reconsider his decision when asked to do so by
his colonel. He told his mother one morning at breakfast, in quite a
casual way, that he had left the army.
"Oh, Geoffrey!" she exclaimed, with a shocked look.
"I hope you are not sorry. I thought it would please you for me to be
my own master, able to spend more of my life with you."
"Dear Geoffrey, I am very glad on that account; but I'm afraid it is a
selfish gladness. It was better for you to have a profession. Everybody
told me so years ago, when I was so grieved at your going into the
army."
"That is a way everybody has of saying smooth things. Well, mother, I
am no longer a soldier. India was pleasant enough--there was a smack
of adventure, a possibility of fighting--but I could not have endured
garrison life in an English town. I would rather mope at home."
"Why should you mope, Geoff?"
"Yes, why? I am free to go east, west, north, and south. I suppose
there need be no moping now?"
"But you will be often at home, won't you, dear? Or else I shall be no
gainer by your leaving the army."
"Yes, I will be here as often, and as much as--as I can bear it."
He had risen from the breakfast-table, and was walking up and down the
room, with that light careless step of his which seemed in perfect
harmony with his tall slim figure. He was very pale, and his eyes were
brighter than usual, and there was a quick restlessness in the smile
that flashed across his face now and then.
"Do I bore you so much, Geoffrey?" his mother asked, with a wounded
look.
"You bore me? No, no, no! Oh, surely you know how the land lies. Surely
this fever cannot have been eating up my heart and my strength all this
time without your eyes seeing, and your heart sympathizing. You _must_
know that I love her."
"I feared as much, my poor Geoffrey."
No name had been spoken; yet mother and son understood each other.
"You feared! Great God, why should it be a reason for fear? Here am
I, young, rich, my own master--and here is she as free as she is
fair--free to be my wife to-morrow, except for this tie which is no
tie--a foolish engagement to a man she never loved."
"Has she told you that?"
"Not she. Her lips are locked by an over-strained sense of honour.
She will marry a man for whom she doesn't care a straw. She will be
miserable all her life, or at best she will have missed happiness, and
on her deathbed she will boast to her parish priest, 'I kept my word.'
Poor pretty Puritan! She thinks it virtue to break my heart and grieve
her own."
"You have told her of your love, Geoffrey?"
"Yes."
"That was dishonourable."
"No more than it was to love her. I am a lump of dishonour; I am made
up of lies; but if she had an ounce of pluck, there need be no more
falsehood. She has only to tell him the truth, the sad simple truth. 'I
never loved you. I have let myself be persuaded into an engagement, but
I never loved you.'"
"That would break Allan's heart."
"It would be bad to bear, no doubt, but not so bad as the gradual
revelation that must come upon him in the years after marriage. She may
be able to deceive him now--to delude him with the idea that she loves
him; but how about the long winter evenings by their own fireside, and
the dull nights when the rain is on the roof? A woman may hide her want
of love before marriage; but, by Heaven, she can't hide it after! God
help him when he finds that he has a victim, and not a wife!"
"Poor Allan! But how do you know she does not care for him--or that she
cares for you?"
"How do I know that I live and breathe, that this is I?" touching
himself, with an impatient tap of those light restless fingers. "I
know it. I have known it more or less from the time we played those
duets--the dawn of knowledge and of love. To know each other was to
love. We were born for each other. Allan, with his shadowy resemblance
to me, was only my forerunner, like the man one sees in the street, the
man who reminds one of a dear friend, half an hour or so before we meet
that very friend. Allan taught her to like the type. She never loved
him. In me she recognizes the individual, fated to love her and to be
loved by her."
"Dear Geoffrey, this is mere guess-work."
"No! It is instinct, intuition, dead certainty. I tell you--once,
twice, a thousand times, if you like--she loves me, and she doesn't
love him. Tax her with it, pluck out the heart of her mystery. This
hollow sham--this simulacrum of love must not go on to marriage. Talk
to her, as woman to woman, as mother to daughter. I tell you it must
not go on. It is driving me mad."
"I will do what I can. Poor Allan! So good, so true-hearted!"
"Am I false-hearted or vile, mother? Why should Allan be all in all to
you?"
"He is not all in all. You know you are the first, always the first in
my heart; but I am deeply grieved for Allan. If what you tell me is
true, he is doomed to be most unhappy. He is so fond of her. He has
placed all his hopes of happiness upon his marriage--and they are to be
married in little more than a month. It will be heartless to break it
off."
"If it isn't broken off, there will be a tragedy. I will thrust myself
between them at the altar. The lying words shall not be spoken. I would
rather shoot him--or her--than that she should perjure herself, swear
to love another while she loves only me!"
"Geoffrey, how do you know? How can you be sure----"
"Our hands have touched; our eyes have met. That is enough."
He walked out of the window to the garden, and from the garden to the
stables, where he ordered his dog-cart. His servant kept a portmanteau
always ready packed. He left Discombe within an hour of that
conversation with his mother, and he was on his way to London before
noon. The first intimation of his departure which Mrs. Wornock received
was a note which she found on the luncheon-table.
"I am off to the Hartz for a fortnight's tramp. Remember, something
must be done to prevent this marriage. I shall return before the
middle of August, and shall expect to find all settled.
"Address Poste Restante, Hartzburg."
CHAPTER XI.
"WHO KNOWS WHY LOVE BEGINS?"
The time was drawing near. The corn was cut and carried on many a broad
sweep of hot chalky soil, and "summer's branding sun" had burnt up the
thin grass on the wide bare down, where never shadow of tree or bush
made a cool spot in the expanse of light and heat and dryness. The
mysterious immemorial stones yonder on Salisbury Plain stood up against
a background of cloudless blue; and the windows of the cathedral in the
valley glittered and flashed in the sunshine. Only in the sober old
close, and the venerable gardens of a bygone generation, within hedges
that dead hands had planted, trees whose growth dead eyes had watched,
was there coolness or shelter, or the gentle slumberous feeling of
summer afternoon in its restful perfection.
Here, in an antique drawing-room, Mrs. Mornington and her niece were
taking tea, after a morning with tailor and dressmaker.
"There never was such a girl for not-caringness as this girl of mine,"
said Mrs. Mornington, with a vexed air. "If it had not been for me, I
don't think she would have had a new frock in her trousseau, and as she
is a very prim personage about _lingerie_, and has a large stock of
Parisian prettiness in that line, there would really have been nothing
to buy."
"Rather a relief, I should think," laughed Mrs. Canon, who was giving
them tea.
"A most delightful state of things," asserted Mrs. Sub-Dean, proud
mother of half a dozen daughters, in which opinion agreed a county
lady, also rich in daughters.
"Ah, you are all against me!" said Mrs. Mornington; "but there is
a great pleasure in buying things, especially when one is spending
somebody else's money."
"Poor papa!" sighed Suzette. "My aunt forgets that he is not Crœsus."
"Look at that girl's wretched pale face!" cried Mrs. Mornington. "Would
any one think that she was going to be married to a most estimable
young man, and the best match in the neighbourhood--except one?"
At those two last words, Suzette's cheeks flamed crimson, and the
feminine conclave looking at her felt she was being cruelly used by
this strong-minded aunt of hers.
"I don't think the nicest girls are ever very keen about their
trousseau," said the county lady, with a furtive glance at a buxom
freckled daughter, who had lately become engaged, and who had already
begun to discuss house-linen and frocks, with a largeness of ideas that
alarmed her parents.
"Yes; but there is a difference between caring too much and not caring
at all. Suzette would be married in that white gingham she is wearing
to-day, if I would let her."
"Pray don't teaze people about my frocks, auntie. If you can't find
something more interesting to talk about, we had better go away," said
Suzette, with a pettishness which was quite unlike her; but it must
be owned that to be made the object of a public attack in feminine
convocation was somewhat exasperating.
Mrs. Mornington was not to be put down. She went on talking of frocks,
though one of the daughters of the house carried Suzette off to the
garden--an act of real Christian charity, if she had not spoilt her
good work by beginning to talk of Suzette's lover.
"I can quite fancy your aunt must be rather boring sometimes," she
said. "But _do_ tell me about Mr. Carew. I thought him so nice the
other day at the flower-show, when you introduced him to me."
"What can I tell you about him? You have seen him--and I am glad you
thought him nice."
"Yes; but one wants to know more. One wants to know what he is
like--from your point of view."
"But how could you see him from my point of view? That's impossible."
"True! A casual acquaintance could never see him as he appears to
you--to whom he is all the world," said the Canon's daughter, who
was young and romantic, having lived upon church music and Coventry
Patmore's poetry.
"There's my aunt showing them patterns of my frocks!" exclaimed
Suzette, irritably, glancing in at the drawing-room, where Mrs.
Mornington sat, the centre of a little group, handing scraps of stuff
out of her reticule.
The scraps were being passed round and peered at and pulled about by
everybody, with a meditative and admiring air. An African savage,
seeing the group, would have supposed that some act of sortilege was
being performed.
"It is rather an ordeal being married," said the Canon's daughter,
thinking sadly of a certain undergraduate who was down-hearted about
his divinity exam., and upon whose achieving deacon's orders within a
reasonable time depended the young lady's matrimonial prospects.
She sighed as she thought of the difference in worldly wealth between
that well-meaning youth and Allan Carew; and yet here was the future
Mrs. Carew pale and worried, and obviously dissatisfied with her lot.
* * * * *
When those gowns had been ordered, Suzette felt as if it were another
link forged in the iron chain which seemed to weigh heavier upon her
every day of her life.
She had promised, and she must keep her promise. That was what she was
continually saying to herself. Those words were woven into all her
thoughts. Allan was so good, so true-hearted! Could she disappoint and
grieve him? Could she be heartless, unkind, selfish--think of herself
first and of him after--snatch at the happiness Fate offered her,
and leave him out in the cold? No, better that she should bear her
lot--become his wife, live out her slow, melancholy days, his faithful
servant and friend, honouring him and obeying him, doing all that woman
can do for man, except loving him.
Those meteoric appearances of Geoffrey's had made life much harder
for Suzette. She might have fought against her love for him more
successfully perhaps had he been always near; had she seen him almost
daily, and become accustomed to his presence as a common incident in
the daily routine; but to be told that he was in the far north of
Scotland, yachting with a friend; and then to be startled by his voice
at her shoulder, murmuring her name in Discombe Wood; and to turn round
with nervous quickness to see him looking at her with his pale smile,
like a ghost--or to be assured that he was salmon-fishing in Connemara,
and to see him suddenly sauntering across the lawn in the July dusk,
more ghostlike even than in the woods, as if face and form were a
materialization which her own sad thoughts had conjured out of the
twilight.
He would take very little trouble to explain his unlooked-for
return. Scotland was too hot; the North Sea suggested a vast sheet of
red-hot iron, blown over by a south wind that was like the breath of
a blast-furnace. Ireland was a place of bad inns and inexorable rain;
and there were no fish, or none that he could catch. He had come home
because life was weariness away from home. He feared that life meant
weariness everywhere.
The days were hurrying by, and now Mrs. Mornington talked everlastingly
of the wedding, or so it seemed to Suzette, who in these latter days
tried to avoid her aunt as much as was consistent with civility, and
fled from the Grove to Discombe as to a haven of peace. Mrs. Mornington
loved to expatiate upon the coming event, to bewail her niece's
indifferentism, to regret that there was to be no festivity worth
speaking of, and to enlarge upon the advantages of Allan's position and
surroundings, and Suzette's good fortune in having come to Matcham.
"Your father might have spent a thousand pounds on a London season,
and not have done half so well for you," she said conclusively.
The General nodded assent.
Certainly, between them they had done wonderfully well for Suzette.
From this worldly wisdom the harassed girl fled to the quiet of
Discombe, where the peaceful silence was only broken by the deep broad
stream of sound from the organ, touched with ever-growing power by Mrs.
Wornock. Suzette would steal softly into the music-room unannounced,
and take her accustomed seat in the recess by the organ, and sit
silently listening as long as Mrs. Wornock cared to play. Only when the
last chord had died away did the two women touch hands and look at each
other.
It was about a week after that wearying day in Salisbury when Suzette
seated herself by the player in this silent way, and sat listening to
a funeral march by Beethoven, with her head leaning on her hand, and
not so much as a murmur of praise for music or performer stirring the
thoughtful quiet of her lips. When the last pianissimo notes, dropping
to deepest bass, had melted into silence, Mrs. Wornock looked up and
saw Suzette's face bathed in tears--tears that streamed over the pallid
cheeks unchecked.
Geoffrey's mother started up from the organ, and clasped the weeping
girl to her breast.
"Poor child! poor child! He was right, then? You are not happy."
"Happy! I am miserable! I don't know what to do. I don't know what
would be worst or wickedest. To disappoint him, or to marry him, not
loving him!"
"No, no, no! you must not marry, not if you cannot love him. But you
are sure of that, Susie? Are you sure you don't love him? He is so
good, so worthy to be loved, as his father was--years ago. Why should
you not love him?"
"Ah, who can tell?" sighed Suzette. "Who knows why love begins, or
how love gets the mastery? I let myself be talked into thinking I
loved him. I always liked him--liked his company--was grateful for
his attentions, respected him for his fine nature, and then I let him
persuade me that this was love; but it wasn't--it never was love.
Friendship and liking are not love; and now that the fatal day draws
near I know how wide a difference there is between love and liking."
"You must not marry him, Suzette. You know I would not willingly
say one word that would tell against Allan Carew's happiness. I
love him almost as dearly as I love my own son; but when I see you
miserable--when I see Geoffrey utterly wretched, I can no longer keep
silence. This marriage must be broken off."
"Allan will hate me; he will despise me. What can he think me?--false,
fickle, unworthy of a good man's love."
"You must tell him the truth. It will be cruel, but not so cruel as to
let him go on believing in you, thinking himself happy, living in a
fool's paradise. Will you let me speak for you, Suzette?--let me do
what your mother might have done had she been here to help you in your
need?"
Suzette was speechless with tears, her face hidden on Mrs. Wornock's
shoulder. The door was opened at this moment, and the butler announced
Mr. Carew.
Allan had approached the group by the organ before either Mrs. Wornock
or Suzette could hide her agitation. Their tears, the way in which they
clung to each other, told of some over-mastering grief.
"Good God! what is the matter? What has happened?" he exclaimed.
"Nothing has happened, Allan; yet there is sorrow for all of us--sorrow
that has been coming upon us, though some of us did not know it.
Suzette, may I tell him--now, this moment?"
"May you tell me? Tell me what?" questioned Allan. "Suzette, speak to
me--you--you--no one else!"
Fear, indignation, despair were in his tone. He caught hold of
Suzette's arm, and drew her towards him, looking searchingly at the
pale, tear-stained face; but she shrank from his grasp, and sank on her
knees at his feet.
"It is my miserable secret--that must be told at last. I have tried--I
have hoped--I honour--I respect you--Allan. But our hearts are not our
own; we cannot guide or govern their impulses. My heart is weighed down
with shame and misery, but it is empty of love. I cannot love you as
your wife should. If I keep my word, I shall be a miserable woman."
"You shall not be that," he said sternly--"not to make me the happiest
man in creation. But don't you think," with chilling deliberation,
"this tragedy might have been acted a little earlier? It seems to me
that you have kept your secret over carefully."
"I have been weak, Allan, hopelessly, miserably weak-minded. I tried to
do what was best. I did not want to disappoint you----"
"Disappoint me? Why, you have fooled me from the first! Disappoint
me? Why, I have built the whole fabric of my future life upon this
rotten foundation! I was to be happy because of your love; my days and
years were to flow sweetly by in a paradise of domestic peace, blest
by your love. And all the time there was no such thing. You did not
love me; you had never loved me; you were only trying to love me; and
the hopelessness of the endeavour is brought home to you now--at this
eleventh hour--three weeks before our wedding-day. Suzette, Suzette,
never was woman's cruelty crueller than this of yours!"
She was in floods of tears at his feet, her head drooping till her brow
almost touched the ground. He left her kneeling there, and rushed away
to the garden to hide his own tears--the tears of which his manhood was
ashamed, the passionate sobs, the wild hysterical weeping of the sex
that seldom weeps. He found a shelter and a hiding-place in an angle
of the garden, where there was a side walk shut in by close-cropped
cypress walls, and here Mrs. Wornock found him presently, sitting on
a marble bench, with his elbows on his knees, his face hidden in his
hands.
She seated herself at his side, and laid her hand gently on his.
"Allan, dear Allan, I am so sorry for you," she said softly.
"I am very sorry for myself. I don't seem to need anybody's pity. I
think I can do all the grieving."
"Ah, that is the worst of it. Nobody's sympathy can help you."
"Not yours," he answered almost savagely; "for, at heart, you must
be glad. My dismissal makes room for some one else--some one whose
interests are dearer to you than mine could ever be."
"There is no one nearer or dearer to me than you, Allan--no one--not
even my own son. You have been to me as a son--the son of the man I
fondly loved, whose face I was to look upon only once--once after those
long years in which we were parted. I have loved you as a part of my
youth, the living memory of my lost love. Ah, my dear, I had to learn
the lesson of self-surrender when I was younger than you. I loved him
with all my heart and mind, and I gave him up."
"You did wrong to give him up. He himself said so. But there is no
parallel between the two cases. This girl has let me believe in her.
I have lived for a year in this sweet delusion--a bliss no more real
than the happiness of a dream. She would have loved me; she would have
married me; all would have been well for us but for your son. When he
came, my chance was blighted. He has charms of mind and manner which
I have not--like me, they say, but ten times handsomer. He can speak
to her with a language that I have not. Oh, those singing notes on the
violin; that long-drawn lingering sweep of the bow, like the cry of a
spirit in paradise--an angelic voice telling of love ethereal--love
released from clay; those tears which seemed to tremble on the strings;
that loud, sudden sob of passionate pain, which came like a short,
sharp amen to the prayer of love! I could understand that language
better than he thought. He stole her love from me--set himself
deliberately to rob me of my life's happiness."
"It is cruel to say that, Allan. He is incapable of treachery, of
deliberate wrong-doing. He is a creature of impulse."
"Meaning a creature with whom self is the only god. And in one of
his impulses he told Suzette of his love, even in plainer words than
his Stradivarius could tell the story; and from that hour her heart
was false to me. I saw the change in her when I came back--after my
father's death."
"You are unjust to him, Allan, in your grief and anger. Whatever his
feelings may have been, he has fought against them. He has made himself
almost an exile from this house."
"He has been biding his time, no doubt; and now that I have had the
_coup de grace_ he will come back."
CHAPTER XII.
"THAT WAY MADNESS LIES."
It would have taken a very respectable earthquake to have made as
much sensation in a rural neighbourhood as was made in the village
and neighbourhood of Matcham by the cancelment of Allan Carew's
engagement to General Vincent's daughter. The fact that no visitors had
been bidden to the wedding seemed to make no difference in the rapid
dissemination of the news. People from twenty miles round had been
interested; people from twenty miles round had come up to be taxed, and
had sent pepper-pots and hair-brushes, paper-knives and scent-bottles,
fans and candlesticks--all of which were now returned to the givers in
the very tissue paper and cardboard boxes in which they had been sent
from shops or stores, accompanied by a formal little note of apology.
The marriage had been deferred indefinitely; and, at his daughter's
request, General Vincent begged to return the gifts, with best thanks
for the kindly feeling which had prompted, etc.
"It will do for some one else!"
That was the almost inevitable exclamation when the tissue paper was
unfolded and the gift appeared, untarnished and undamaged by the double
transit. Then followed speculations as to the meaning of those words,
"deferred indefinitely."
"Indefinitely means never," pronounced Mrs. Roebuck; "there's no doubt
upon that point. He has jilted her. I thought he would begin to look
about him after his father's death. I dare say he will have a house in
town next season--a _pied à terre_ near Park Lane--and go into society,
instead of vegetating among those Bœotians. He must feel himself thrown
away in such a hole."
"I thought he was devoted to Miss Vincent."
"Nonsense! How could any man be devoted to an insignificant Frenchified
chit without style or _savoir farie_?"
"She has a pretty, piquant little face," murmured Mr. Roebuck meekly,
not liking to be enthusiastic about beauty which was the very opposite
of his wife's Roman-nosed and flaxen-haired style.
* * * * *
Upon Mrs. Mornington the blow fell far more heavily than on Suzette's
father, who was very glad to keep his daughter at home, albeit
regretful that she should have treated a faithful lover so scurvily.
"If the poor child did not know her own mind at the beginning, it's
a blessed thing she found out her mistake before it was too late,"
pleaded the General to his irate sister.
"It _is_ too late--too late for respectability--too late for common
humanity. To lead a young man on for over a year, almost to the foot of
the altar, and then to throw him off. It is simply shameful! To make a
fool of him and herself before the whole neighbourhood--to belittle
herself as much as she has belittled him. No doubt all the women will
say that _he_ has jilted _her_."
"Let them. That cannot hurt her."
"But it can hurt me, her aunt. I feel inclined to slap my most intimate
friends when they ask me leading questions, evidently longing to hear
that Allan has acted badly. And when I assure them that my niece is
alone to blame, I can see in their faces that they don't, or won't,
believe me. And why should they believe me? Could any girl, not an
idiot, throw over such a match as Allan has become since his father's
death?"
"I hope you don't mean to say that my girl is an idiot?"
"I say that she has acted like an idiot in this affair."
"And I say that she has acted like an honest woman."
"I shall never be able to look Lady Emily Carew in the face again."
"Don't be alarmed about Lady Emily. She will be no more sorry to keep
her son to herself than I am to keep my daughter."
"She won't have him long. He'll be going off and marrying some horrid
end-of-the-century girl in a fit of pique."
"I don't believe he is such a fool."
Matcham might talk its loudest, and dispute almost to blows, as to
which was the jilter and which the jilted. The principal performers
in the tragedy were well out of ear-shot--Allan at Fendyke with Lady
Emily, Suzette at Bournemouth with an old convent friend and her
invalid mother, people who had no connection with Matcham, and in whose
society the girl could not be reminded of her own wrong-doing. The
invitation to the villa at Branksome had been repeated very often; and
on a renewal of it arriving just after that painful scene at Discombe,
Suzette had written promptly to accept.
"If you don't mind my coming to you out of spirits and altogether
troubled in mind, _chérie_," she wrote; and the girl, who was a
very quiet piece of amiability, and who had worshipped her livelier
school-fellow, replied delightedly, "Your low spirits must be brighter
than other people's gaiety. Come, and let the sea and the downs console
you. Bournemouth is lovely in September. Mother has given me the
charmingest pony, and I have been carefully taught by our old coachman,
who is a whip in a thousand, so you need not be afraid to trust
yourself beside me."
"Except for father's sake, it might be a good thing if she were to
throw me out of her cart and kill me on the spot," mused Suzette, as
she sat listlessly watching her maid packing her trunk.
Among the frocks, there was one of the Salisbury tailor's confections,
a frock which was to have been worn by Mrs. Allan Carew, and Suzette
felt that she would sink with shame when she put it on.
"I ought to be prosecuted for obtaining goods under false pretences,"
she thought.
Geoffrey Wornock found a telegram waiting for him at the little
post-office at Hartzburg, and the mere outward casing of that message
set his heart beating furiously. There must be news of his love in it,
news good or bad.
"I will not live through her wedding-day, if she marries him," he told
himself.
The telegram was from his mother.
"The marriage is broken off with much sorrow on both sides."
"That's nonsense. On her part there can be no sorrow--only relief
of mind, only joy, the prospect of a blissful union, a life without
a cloud. Thank God, thank God, thank God! I never felt there was a
God till now. Now I believe in Him--now I will lift up my heart to
Him, in nightly and daily prayer, as Adam did by the side of Eve. Oh,
thank God, the barrier is removed, and she can be mine! My own dear
love--heart of my heart--life of my life!"
He carried a fiddle among his scanty luggage, not the treasured
inimitable Stradivarius, but a much-cherished little Amati; and
by-and-by, having eaten some hurried scraps by way of dinner, he took
the violin out of its case and went out to a little garden at the back
of the inn, and in a vine-clad berceau gave himself up to impassioned
utterance of the love that overflowed his heart. Music, and music only,
could speak for him--music was the interpreter of all his highest
thoughts. The stolid beer-drinkers came out of their smoke-darkened
parlour to hear him, and sat silent and unseen behind an intervening
screen of greenery, and listened and approved.
"Ach, what for a fiddler! How he can play! Whole heaven-like. Not true,
my friend?"
He played and played, walking about under the vine-curtain--played till
the pale grey evening shadows darkened to purple night, and the stars
looked through the leafy roof of that rustic tunnel. He was playing to
her; to her, his far-away love; to Suzette in England. He was pouring
out his soul's desire to her, a hymn of sweet content; and he almost
fancied that she could hear him. There must be some mystical medium by
which such sounds can travel from being to being, where love attunes
two souls in unison--some process now hidden from the dull mind of
average man, as the electric telegraph was half a century ago.
This is how a lover dreams in the summer gloaming, in a garden on the
slope of a pine-clad hill, with loftier heights beyond, shadowy and
dark against the deep blue of that infinite sky where the stars are
shining aloof and incomprehensible, in remoteness that fills mortality
with despair.
She was free! That was Geoffrey's one thought in every hour and almost
every minute of his breathless journey from Hartzburg to Discombe.
She was free; and for her to be free meant that she was to be his. He
imagined no opposition upon her side when once her engagement to Allan
had been broken. She had been bound by that tie, and that only. His
impetuous, passionate nature, self-loving and concentrative as the
temper of a child, could conceive no restraining influence, nothing
that could prevent her heart answering his, her hand yielding to his,
and a marriage as speedy as law and Church would allow.
They could be married ever so quietly--in London--where no curious
eyes could watch, no gossiping tongues criticise--married--made for
ever one; and then away to mountain and lake, to Pallanza, Lugano,
Bellaggio, to flowery shores betwixt hill and water, to a life lovelier
than his fairest dreams.
No man journeying with a passionate heart ever found rail or boat
quick enough, and Geoffrey, always impatient, chafed at every stage of
the journey, and complained as bitterly as if he had been travelling
at the expensive crawl in which a Horace Walpole or a Beckford was
content to accomplish that restricted round which our ancestors called
the "grand tour." Nothing slower than a balloon driving before a gale
would have satisfied Geoffrey's eager soul. And he would rather have
accepted balloon transit, with all its hazards, and run the risk of
being landed in a Carinthian valley or a Norwegian fjord, than endure
the harassing delay at dusty railway stations, or the slowness of the
channel boat.
He telegraphed to his mother from Brussels, and again from Dover; so
there was a cart waiting for him at the station with one of the fastest
horses in the stable, but, unfortunately, one of the stupidest grooms,
who could furnish him with no information upon any subject.
Was all well at home? His mistress well?
The groom believed so.
"Was Miss Vincent well?"
The groom had heard nothing to the contrary; but he had not seen Miss
Vincent lately.
No particular inference was to be drawn from this statement of the
groom's, since Suzette's visits were not made to the stableyard.
There was no one at Discombe to do stable-parade and to insist upon
horses being stripped and trotted up and down for the edification of a
visitor whose utmost knowledge of a horse might be that it is a beast
with four legs--mane and tail understood, though not always existent.
Geoffrey rattled his old hunter along at a pace that made the cart sway
like an outrigger in the wake of a steamer, and he alighted at the
Manor House at least a quarter of an hour before a reasonable being
would have got himself there.
It was late in the evening, and his mother was sitting alone in the
dimly lighted music-room. The piano was shut--a bad sign; for when
Suzette was there the piano was hardly ever idle.
"Well, mother dear, so glad to be home again," said Geoffrey, with an
affectionate hug, but with eyes that were looking over his mother's
head into space for another presence, even while he gave her that
filial embrace.
"And I am so glad to have you, Geoffrey; and I hope now this restless
spirit will be content to stay."
"_C'est selon._ Where's Suzette?"
"At Bournemouth, with an old school-fellow."
"Why didn't you wire her address, and then I could have gone straight
to her?"
"My dear Geoffrey, what are you thinking of?"
"Of Suzette--of my dear love--of my wife that is to be!"
"My dear boy, you cannot go to her. You must not ask her to marry you
while this cancelled engagement is a new thing. I should think her a
horrid girl if she would listen to you--for ever so long."
"Do you mean for a week--or a fortnight?"
"For a long, long time, Geoffrey--long enough for Allan's wounded heart
to recover."
"Upon my soul, mother, that is too good a joke! Is my mother, the most
romantic and unconventional of women, preaching the eighteenpenny
gospel of middle-class etiquette?"
"It is no question of conventionality. My affection for Allan is only
second to my love for you, and I cannot bear to think of his being
wounded and humiliated, as he must be if Suzette were to accept you
directly after having jilted him."
"And you would have Suzette sit beside the tomb of Allan's hopes for a
year or so while I eat my heart out--banquet on joys deferred--sicken
and die, perhaps, with that slow torture of waiting. Mother, you don't
know what love is--love in the heart of a man. If she had married
Allan, I should have shot myself on her wedding-day. That was written
in my book of fate. If she won't marry me; if she play fast and loose,
blow hot, blow cold; if she won't look in my eyes and say honestly,
'I love you,' and 'I am yours,' I can't answer for myself--I fear
there will be a tragedy. You know there is something here"--touching
his forehead--"which loses itself in a whirl of fiery confusion when
this"--touching his heart--"is too sorely tried."
"Geoffrey, my dearest! oh, Geoffrey, you agonize me when you talk
like that! I think--yes, I believe that Suzette loves you; but she is
sensitive, tender-hearted--all that is womanly and good. You must give
her time to recover from the shock of parting with Allan, whom she
sincerely esteems, and whose sorrow is her sorrow."
"I will see her to-morrow. I cannot live without seeing her. Why, every
mile of pine-forest through which I came seemed three, every mile of
dusty Belgian flatness seemed seven, to my hot impatience. I must see
her, hear her, hold her hand in mine; and she shall do what she likes
with the poor rag of life which will be left when I have lived an hour
with her."
END OF VOL. II.
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.]
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