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From Eroshka's hut Lukashka went home. As he returned, the dewy mists were rising from the ground and enveloped the village. In various places the cattle, though out of sight, could be heard beginning to stir. The cocks called to one another with increasing frequency and insistence. The air was becoming more transparent, and the villagers were getting up. Not till he was close to it could Lukishka discern the fence of his yard, all wet with dew, the porch of the hut, and the open shed. From the misty yard he heard the sound of an axe chopping wood. Lukashka entered the hut. His mother was up, and stood at the oven throwing wood into it. His little sister was still lying in bed asleep.
'Well, Lukashka, had enough holiday-making?' asked his mother softly. 'Where did you spend the night?'
'I was in the village,' replied her son reluctantly, reaching for his musket, which he drew from its cover and examined carefully.
His mother swayed her head.
Lukashka poured a little gunpowder onto the pan, took out a little bag from which he drew some empty cartridge cases which he began filling, carefully plugging each one with a ball wrapped in a rag. Then, having tested the loaded cartridges with his teeth and examined them, he put down the bag.
'I say, Mother, I told you the bags wanted mending; have they been done?' he asked.
'Oh yes, our dumb girl was mending something last night. Why, is it time for you to be going back to the cordon? I haven't seen anything of you!'
'Yes, as soon as I have got ready I shall have to go,' answered Lukashka, tying up the gunpowder. 'And where is our dumb one? Outside?'
'Chopping wood, I expect. She kept fretting for you. "I shall not see him at all!" she said. She puts her hand to her face like this, and clicks her tongue and presses her hands to her heart as much as to say--"sorry." Shall I call her in? She understood all about the abrek.'
'Call her,' said Lukashka. 'And I had some tallow there; bring it: I must grease my sword.'
The old woman went out, and a few minutes later Lukashka's dumb sister came up the creaking steps and entered the hut. She was six years older than her brother and would have been extremely like him had it not been for the dull and coarsely changeable expression (common to all deaf and dumb people) of her face. She wore a coarse smock all patched; her feet were bare and muddy, and on her head she had an old blue kerchief. Her neck, arms, and face were sinewy like a peasant's. Her clothing and her whole appearance indicated that she always did the hard work of a man. She brought in a heap of logs which she threw down by the oven. Then she went up to her brother, and with a joyful smile which made her whole face pucker up, touched him on the shoulder and began making rapid signs to him with her hands, her face, and whole body.
'That's right, that's right, Stepka is a trump!' answered the brother, nodding. 'She's fetched everything and mended everything, she's a trump! Here, take this for it!' He brought out two pieces of gingerbread from his pocket and gave them to her.
The dumb woman's face flushed with pleasure, and she began making a weird noise for joy. Having seized the gingerbread she began to gesticulate still more rapidly, frequently pointing in one direction and passing her thick finger over her eyebrows and her face. Lukashka understood her and kept nodding, while he smiled slightly. She was telling him to give the girls dainties, and that the girls liked him, and that one girl, Maryanka--the best of them all--loved him. She indicated Maryanka by rapidly pointing in the direction of Maryanka's home and to her own eyebrows and face, and by smacking her lips and swaying her head. 'Loves' she expressed by pressing her hands to her breast, kissing her hand, and pretending to embrace someone. Their mother returned to the hut, and seeing what her dumb daughter was saying, smiled and shook her head. Her daughter showed her the gingerbread and again made the noise which expressed joy.
'I told Ulitka the other day that I'd send a matchmaker to them,' said the mother. 'She took my words well.'
Lukashka looked silently at his mother.
'But how about selling the wine, mother? I need a horse.'
'I'll cart it when I have time. I must get the barrels ready,' said the mother, evidently not wishing her son to meddle in domestic matters. 'When you go out you'll find a bag in the passage. I borrowed from the neighbours and got something for you to take back to the cordon; or shall I put it in your saddle-bag?'
'All right,' answered Lukashka. 'And if Girey Khan should come across the river send him to me at the cordon, for I shan't get leave again for a long time now; I have some business with him.'
He began to get ready to start.
'I will send him on,' said the old woman. 'It seems you have been spreeing at Yamka's all the time. I went out in the night to see the cattle, and I think it was your voice I heard singing songs.'
Lukashka did not reply, but went out into the passage, threw the bags over his shoulder, tucked up the skirts of his coat, took his musket, and then stopped for a moment on the threshold.
'Good-bye, mother!' he said as he closed the gate behind him. 'Send me a small barrel with Nazarka. I promised it to the lads, and he'll call for it.'
'May Christ keep you, Lukashka. God be with you! I'll send you some, some from the new barrel,' said the old woman, going to the fence: 'But listen,' she added, leaning over the fence.
The Cossack stopped.
'You've been making merry here; well, that's all right. Why should not a young man amuse himself? God has sent you luck and that's good. But now look out and mind, my son. Don't you go and get into mischief. Above all, satisfy your superiors: one has to! And I will sell the wine and find money for a horse and will arrange a match with the girl for you.'
'All right, all right!' answered her son, frowning.
His deaf sister shouted to attract his attention. She pointed to her head and the palm of her hand, to indicate the shaved head of a Chechen. Then she frowned, and pretending to aim with a gun, she shrieked and began rapidly humming and shaking her head. This meant that Lukashka should kill another Chechen.
Lukashka understood. He smiled, and shifting the gun at his back under his cloak stepped lightly and rapidly, and soon disappeared in the thick mist.
The old woman, having stood a little while at the gate, returned silently to the hut and immediately began working.
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Lukasha returned to the cordon and at the same time Daddy Eroshka whistled to his dogs and, climbing over his wattle fence, went to Olenin's lodging, passing by the back of the houses (he disliked meeting women before going out hunting or shooting). He found Olenin still asleep, and even Vanyusha, though awake, was still in bed and looking round the room considering whether it was not time to get up, when Daddy Eroshka, gun on shoulder and in full hunter's trappings, opened the door.
'A cudgel!' he shouted in his deep voice. 'An alarm! The Chechens are upon us! Ivan! get the samovar ready for your master, and get up yourself--quick,' cried the old man. 'That's our way, my good man! Why even the girls are already up! Look out of the window. See, she's going for water and you're still sleeping!'
Olenin awoke and jumped up, feeling fresh and lighthearted at the sight of the old man and at the sound of his voice.
'Quick, Vanyusha, quick!' he cried.
'Is that the way you go hunting?' said the old man. 'Others are having their breakfast and you are asleep! Lyam! Here!' he called to his dog. 'Is your gun ready?' he shouted, as loud as if a whole crowd were in the hut.
'Well, it's true I'm guilty, but it can't be helped! The powder, Vanyusha, and the wads!' said Olenin.
'A fine!' shouted the old man.
'Du tay voulay vou?' asked Vanyusha, grinning.
'You're not one of us--your gabble is not like our speech, you devil!' the old man shouted at Vanyusha, showing the stumps of his teeth.
'A first offence must be forgiven,' said Olenin playfully, drawing on his high boots.
'The first offence shall be forgiven,' answered Eroshka, 'but if you oversleep another time you'll be fined a pail of chikhir. When it gets warmer you won't find the deer.'
'And even if we do find him he is wiser than we are,' said Olenin, repeating the words spoken by the old man the evening before, 'and you can't deceive him!'
'Yes, laugh away! You kill one first, and then you may talk. Now then, hurry up! Look, there's the master himself coming to see you,' added Eroshka, looking out of the window. 'Just see how he's got himself up. He's put on a new coat so that you should see that he's an officer. Ah, these people, these people!'
Sure enough Vanyusha came in and announced that the master of the house wished to see Olenin.
'L'arjan!' he remarked profoundly, to forewarn his master of the meaning of this visitation. Following him, the master of the house in a new Circassian coat with an officer's stripes on the shoulders and with polished boots (quite exceptional among Cossacks) entered the room, swaying from side to side, and congratulated his lodger on his safe arrival.
The cornet, Elias Vasilich, was an educated Cossack. He had been to Russia proper, was a regimental schoolteacher, and above all he was noble. He wished to appear noble, but one could not help feeling beneath his grotesque pretence of polish, his affectation, his self-confidence, and his absurd way of speaking, he was just the same as Daddy Eroshka. This could also be clearly seen by his sunburnt face and his hands and his red nose. Olenin asked him to sit down.
'Good morning. Father Elias Vasilich,' said Eroshka, rising with (or so it seemed to Olenin) an ironically low bow.
'Good morning. Daddy. So you're here already,' said the cornet, with a careless nod.
The cornet was a man of about forty, with a grey pointed beard, skinny and lean, but handsome and very fresh-looking for his age. Having come to see Olenin he was evidently afraid of being taken for an ordinary Cossack, and wanted to let Olenin feel his importance from the first.
'That's our Egyptian Nimrod,' he remarked, addressing Olenin and pointing to the old man with a self-satisfied smile. 'A mighty hunter before the Lord! He's our foremost man on every hand. You've already been pleased to get acquainted with him.'
Daddy Eroshka gazed at his feet in their shoes of wet raw hide and shook his head thoughtfully at the cornet's ability and learning, and muttered to himself: 'Gyptian Nimvrod! What things he invents!'
'Yes, you see we mean to go hunting,' answered Olenin.
'Yes, sir, exactly,' said the cornet, 'but I have a small business with you.'
'What do you want?'
'Seeing that you are a gentleman,' began the cornet, 'and as I may understand myself to be in the rank of an officer too, and therefore we may always progressively negotiate, as gentlemen do.' (He stopped and looked with a smile at Olenin and at the old man.) 'But if you have the desire with my consent, then, as my wife is a foolish woman of our class, she could not quite comprehend your words of yesterday's date. Therefore my quarters might be let for six rubles to the Regimental Adjutant, without the stables; but I can always avert that from myself free of charge. But, as you desire, therefore I, being myself of an officer's rank, can come to an agreement with you in everything personally, as an inhabitant of this district, not according to our customs, but can maintain the conditions in every way....' 'Speaks clearly!' muttered the old man.
The cornet continued in the same strain for a long time. At last, not without difficulty, Olenin gathered that the cornet wished to let his rooms to him, Olenin, for six rubles a month. The latter gladly agreed to this, and offered his visitor a glass of tea. The cornet declined it.
'According to our silly custom we consider it a sort of sin to drink out of a "worldly" tumbler,' he said. 'Though, of course, with my education I may understand, but my wife from her human weakness...' 'Well then, will you have some tea?'
'If you will permit me, I will bring my own particular glass,' answered the cornet, and stepped out into the porch.
'Bring me my glass!' he cried.
In a few minutes the door opened and a young sunburnt arm in a print sleeve thrust itself in, holding a tumbler in the hand. The cornet went up, took it, and whispered something to his daughter. Olenin poured tea for the cornet into the latter's own 'particular' glass, and for Eroshka into a 'worldly' glass.
'However, I do not desire to detain you,' said the cornet, scalding his lips and emptying his tumbler. 'I too have a great liking for fishing, and I am here, so to say, only on leave of absence for recreation from my duties. I too have the desire to tempt fortune and see whether some Gifts of the Terek may not fall to my share. I hope you too will come and see us and have a drink of our wine, according to the custom of our village,' he added.
The cornet bowed, shook hands with Olenin, and went out. While Olenin was getting ready, he heard the cornet giving orders to his family in an authoritative and sensible tone, and a few minutes later he saw him pass by the window in a tattered coat with his trousers rolled up to his knees and a fishing net over his shoulder.
'A rascal!' said Daddy Eroshka, emptying his 'worldly' tumbler. 'And will you really pay him six rubles? Was such a thing ever heard of? They would let you the best hut in the village for two rubles. What a beast! Why, I'd let you have mine for three!'
'No, I'll remain here,' said Olenin.
'Six rubles! ... Clearly it's a fool's money. Eh, eh, eh! answered the old man. 'Let's have some chikhir, Ivan!'
Having had a snack and a drink of vodka to prepare themselves for the road, Olenin and the old man went out together before eight o'clock.
At the gate they came up against a wagon to which a pair of oxen were harnessed. With a white kerchief tied round her head down to her eyes, a coat over her smock, and wearing high boots, Maryanka with a long switch in her hand was dragging the oxen by a cord tied to their horns.
'Mammy,' said the old man, pretending that he was going to seize her.
Maryanka flourished her switch at him and glanced merrily at them both with her beautiful eyes.
Olenin felt still more light-hearted.
'Now then, come on, come on,' he said, throwing his gun on his shoulder and conscious of the girl's eyes upon him.
'Gee up!' sounded Maryanka's voice behind them, followed by the creak of the moving wagon.
As long as their road lay through the pastures at the back of the village Eroshka went on talking. He could not forget the cornet and kept on abusing him.
'Why are you so angry with him?' asked Olenin.
'He's stingy. I don't like it,' answered the old man. 'He'll leave it all behind when he dies! Then who's he saving up for? He's built two houses, and he's got a second garden from his brother by a law-suit. And in the matter of papers what a dog he is! They come to him from other villages to fill up documents. As he writes it out, exactly so it happens. He gets it quite exact. But who is he saving for? He's only got one boy and the girl; when she's married who'll be left?'
'Well then, he's saving up for her dowry,' said Olenin.
'What dowry? The girl is sought after, she's a fine girl. But he's such a devil that he must yet marry her to a rich fellow. He wants to get a big price for her. There's Luke, a Cossack, a neighbour and a nephew of mine, a fine lad. It's he who killed the Chechen--he has been wooing her for a long time, but he hasn't let him have her. He's given one excuse, and another, and a third. "The girl's too young," he says. But I know what he is thinking. He wants to keep them bowing to him. He's been acting shamefully about that girl. Still, they will get her for Lukashka, because he is the best Cossack in the village, a brave, who has killed an abrek and will be rewarded with a cross.'
'But how about this? When I was walking up and down the yard last night, I saw my landlord's daughter and some Cossack kissing,' said Olenin.
'You're pretending!' cried the old man, stopping.
'On my word,' said Olenin.
'Women are the devil,' said Eroshka pondering. 'But what Cossack was it?'
'I couldn't see.'
'Well, what sort of a cap had he, a white one?'
'Yes.'
'And a red coat? About your height?'
'No, a bit taller.'
'It's he!' and Eroshka burst out laughing. 'It's himself, it's Mark. He is Luke, but I call him Mark for a joke. His very self! I love him. I was just such a one myself. What's the good of minding them? My sweetheart used to sleep with her mother and her sister-in-law, but I managed to get in. She used to sleep upstairs; that witch her mother was a regular demon; it's awful how she hated me. Well, I used to come with a chum, Girchik his name was. We'd come under her window and I'd climb on his shoulders, push up the window and begin groping about. She used to sleep just there on a bench. Once I woke her up and she nearly called out. She hadn't recognized me. "Who is there?" she said, and I could not answer. Her mother was even beginning to stir, but I took off my cap and shoved it over her mouth; and she at once knew it by a seam in it, and ran out to me. I used not to want anything then. She'd bring along clotted cream and grapes and everything,' added Eroshka (who always explained things practically), 'and she wasn't the only one. It was a life!'
'And what now?'
'Now we'll follow the dog, get a pheasant to settle on a tree, and then you may fire.'
'Would you have made up to Maryanka?'
'Attend to the dogs. I'll tell you tonight,' said the old man, pointing to his favourite dog, Lyam.
After a pause they continued talking, while they went about a hundred paces. Then the old man stopped again and pointed to a twig that lay across the path.
'What do you think of that?' he said. 'You think it's nothing? It's bad that this stick is lying so.'
'Why is it bad?'
He smiled.
'Ah, you don't know anything. Just listen to me. When a stick lies like that don't you step across it, but go round it or throw it off the path this way, and say "Father and Son and Holy Ghost," and then go on with God's blessing. Nothing will happen to you. That's what the old men used to teach me.'
'Come, what rubbish!' said Olenin. 'You'd better tell me more about Maryanka. Does she carry on with Lukashka?'
'Hush ... be quiet now!' the old man again interrupted in a whisper: 'just listen, we'll go round through the forest.'
And the old man, stepping quietly in his soft shoes, led the way by a narrow path leading into the dense, wild, overgrown forest. Now and again with a frown he turned to look at Olenin, who rustled and clattered with his heavy boots and, carrying his gun carelessly, several times caught the twigs of trees that grew across the path.
'Don't make a noise. Step softly, soldier!' the old man whispered angrily.
There was a feeling in the air that the sun had risen. The mist was dissolving but it still enveloped the tops of the trees. The forest looked terribly high. At every step the aspect changed: what had appeared like a tree proved to be a bush, and a reed looked like a tree.
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The mist had partly lifted, showing the wet reed thatches, and was now turning into dew that moistened the road and the grass beside the fence. Smoke rose everywhere in clouds from the chimneys. The people were going out of the village, some to their work, some to the river, and some to the cordon. The hunters walked together along the damp, grass-grown path. The dogs, wagging their tails and looking at their masters, ran on both sides of them. Myriads of gnats hovered in the air and pursued the hunters, covering their backs, eyes, and hands. The air was fragrant with the grass and with the dampness of the forest. Olenin continually looked round at the ox-cart in which Maryanka sat urging on the oxen with a long switch.
It was calm. The sounds from the village, audible at first, now no longer reached the sportsmen. Only the brambles cracked as the dogs ran under them, and now and then birds called to one another. Olenin knew that danger lurked in the forest, that abreks always hid in such places. But he knew too that in the forest, for a man on foot, a gun is a great protection. Not that he was afraid, but he felt that another in his place might be; and looking into the damp misty forest and listening to the rare and faint sounds with strained attention, he changed his hold on his gun and experienced a pleasant feeling that was new to him. Daddy Eroshka went in front, stopping and carefully scanning every puddle where an animal had left a double track, and pointing it out to Olenin. He hardly spoke at all and only occasionally made remarks in a whisper. The track they were following had once been made by wagons, but the grass had long overgrown it. The elm and plane-tree forest on both sides of them was so dense and overgrown with creepers that it was impossible to see anything through it. Nearly every tree was enveloped from top to bottom with wild grape vines, and dark bramble bushes covered the ground thickly. Every little glade was overgrown with blackberry bushes and grey feathery reeds. In places, large hoof-prints and small funnel-shaped pheasant-trails led from the path into the thicket. The vigour of the growth of this forest, untrampled by cattle, struck Olenin at every turn, for he had never seen anything like it. This forest, the danger, the old man and his mysterious whispering, Maryanka with her virile upright bearing, and the mountains--all this seemed to him like a dream.
'A pheasant has settled,' whispered the old man, looking round and pulling his cap over his face--'Cover your mug! A pheasant!' he waved his arm angrily at Olenin and pushed forward almost on all fours. 'He don't like a man's mug.'
Olenin was still behind him when the old man stopped and began examining a tree. A cock-pheasant on the tree clucked at the dog that was barking at it, and Olenin saw the pheasant; but at that moment a report, as of a cannon, came from Eroshka's enormous gun, the bird fluttered up and, losing some feathers, fell to the ground. Coming up to the old man Olenin disturbed another, and raising his gun he aimed and fired. The pheasant flew swiftly up and then, catching at the branches as he fell, dropped like a stone to the ground.
'Good man!' the old man (who could not hit a flying bird) shouted, laughing.
Having picked up the pheasants they went on. Olenin, excited by the exercise and the praise, kept addressing remarks to the old man.
'Stop! Come this way,' the old man interrupted. 'I noticed the track of deer here yesterday.'
After they had turned into the thicket and gone some three hundred paces they scrambled through into a glade overgrown with reeds and partly under water. Olenin failed to keep up with the old huntsman and presently Daddy Eroshka, some twenty paces in front, stooped down, nodding and beckoning with his arm. On coming up with him Olenin saw a man's footprint to which the old man was pointing.
'D'you see?'
'Yes, well?' said Olenin, trying to speak as calmly as he could. 'A man's footstep!'
Involuntarily a thought of Cooper's Pathfinder and of abreks flashed through Olenin's mind, but noticing the mysterious manner with which the old man moved on, he hesitated to question him and remained in doubt whether this mysteriousness was caused by fear of danger or by the sport.
'No, it's my own footprint,' the old man said quietly, and pointed to some grass under which the track of an animal was just perceptible.
The old man went on; and Olenin kept up with him.
Descending to lower ground some twenty paces farther on they came upon a spreading pear-tree, under which, on the black earth, lay the fresh dung of some animal.
The spot, all covered over with wild vines, was like a cosy arbour, dark and cool.
'He's been here this morning,' said the old man with a sigh; 'the lair is still damp, quite fresh.'
Suddenly they heard a terrible crash in the forest some ten paces from where they stood. They both started and seized their guns, but they could see nothing and only heard the branches breaking. The rhythmical rapid thud of galloping was heard for a moment and then changed into a hollow rumble which resounded farther and farther off, re-echoing in wider and wider circles through the forest. Olenin felt as though something had snapped in his heart. He peered carefully but vainly into the green thicket and then turned to the old man. Daddy Eroshka with his gun pressed to his breast stood motionless; his cap was thrust backwards, his eyes gleamed with an unwonted glow, and his open mouth, with its worn yellow teeth, seemed to have stiffened in that position.
'A homed stag!' he muttered, and throwing down his gun in despair he began pulling at his grey beard, 'Here it stood. We should have come round by the path.... Fool! fool!' and he gave his beard an angry tug. Fool! Pig!' he repeated, pulling painfully at his own beard. Through the forest something seemed to fly away in the mist, and ever farther and farther off was heard the sound of the flight of the stag.
It was already dusk when, hungry, tired, but full of vigour, Olenin returned with the old man. Dinner was ready. He ate and drank with the old man till he felt warm and merry. Olenin then went out into the porch. Again, to the west, the mountains rose before his eyes. Again the old man told his endless stories of hunting, of abreks, of sweethearts, and of all that free and reckless life. Again the fair Maryanka went in and out and across the yard, her beautiful powerful form outlined by her smock.
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The next day Olenin went alone to the spot where he and the old man startled the stag. Instead of passing round through the gate he climbed over the prickly hedge, as everybody else did, and before he had had time to pull out the thorns that had caught in his coat, his dog, which had run on in front, started two pheasants. He had hardly stepped among the briers when the pheasants began to rise at every step (the old man had not shown him that place the day before as he meant to keep it for shooting from behind the screen). Olenin fired twelve times and killed five pheasants, but clambering after them through the briers he got so fatigued that he was drenched with perspiration. He called off his dog, uncocked his gun, put in a bullet above the small shot, and brushing away the mosquitoes with the wide sleeve of his Circassian coat he went slowly to the spot where they had been the day before. It was however impossible to keep back the dog, who found trails on the very path, and Olenin killed two more pheasants, so that after being detained by this it was getting towards noon before he began to find the place he was looking for.
The day was perfectly clear, calm, and hot. The morning moisture had dried up even in the forest, and myriads of mosquitoes literally covered his face, his back, and his arms. His dog had turned from black to grey, its back being covered with mosquitoes, and so had Olenin's coat through which the insects thrust their stings. Olenin was ready to run away from them and it seemed to him that it was impossible to live in this country in the summer. He was about to go home, but remembering that other people managed to endure such pain he resolved to bear it and gave himself up to be devoured. And strange to say, by noontime the feeling became actually pleasant. He even felt that without this mosquito-filled atmosphere around him, and that mosquito-paste mingled with perspiration which his hand smeared over his face, and that unceasing irritation all over his body, the forest would lose for him some of its character and charm. These myriads of insects were so well suited to that monstrously lavish wild vegetation, these multitudes of birds and beasts which filled the forest, this dark foliage, this hot scented air, these runlets filled with turbid water which everywhere soaked through from the Terek and gurgled here and there under the overhanging leaves, that the very thing which had at first seemed to him dreadful and intolerable now seemed pleasant. After going round the place where yesterday they had found the animal and not finding anything, he felt inclined to rest. The sun stood right above the forest and poured its perpendicular rays down on his back and head whenever he came out into a glade or onto the road. The seven heavy pheasants dragged painfully at his waist. Having found the traces of yesterday's stag he crept under a bush into the thicket just where the stag had lain, and lay down in its lair. He examined the dark foliage around him, the place marked by the stag's perspiration and yesterday's dung, the imprint of the stag's knees, the bit of black earth it had kicked up, and his own footprints of the day before. He felt cool and comfortable and did not think of or wish for anything. And suddenly he was overcome by such a strange feeling of causeless joy and of love for everything, that from an old habit of his childhood he began crossing himself and thanking someone. Suddenly, with extraordinary clearness, he thought: 'Here am I, Dmitri Olenin, a being quite distinct from every other being, now lying all alone Heaven only knows where--where a stag used to live--an old stag, a beautiful stag who perhaps had never seen a man, and in a place where no human being has ever sat or thought these thoughts. Here I sit, and around me stand old and young trees, one of them festooned with wild grape vines, and pheasants are fluttering, driving one another about and perhaps scenting their murdered brothers.' He felt his pheasants, examined them, and wiped the warm blood off his hand onto his coat. 'Perhaps the jackals scent them and with dissatisfied faces go off in another direction: above me, flying in among the leaves which to them seem enormous islands, mosquitoes hang in the air and buzz: one, two, three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million mosquitoes, and all of them buzz something or other and each one of them is separate from all else and is just such a separate Dmitri Olenin as I am myself.' He vividly imagined what the mosquitoes buzzed: 'This way, this way, lads! Here's some one we can eat!' They buzzed and stuck to him. And it was clear to him that he was not a Russian nobleman, a member of Moscow society, the friend and relation of so-and-so and so-and-so, but just such a mosquito, or pheasant, or deer, as those that were now living all around him. 'Just as they, just as Daddy Eroshka, I shall live awhile and die, and as he says truly: "grass will grow and nothing more".
'But what though the grass does grow?' he continued thinking. 'Still I must live and be happy, because happiness is all I desire. Never mind what I am--an animal like all the rest, above whom the grass will grow and nothing more; or a frame in which a bit of the one God has been set,--still I must live in the very best way. How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not happy before?' And he began to recall his former life and he felt disgusted with himself. He appeared to himself to have been terribly exacting and selfish, though he now saw that all the while he really needed nothing for himself. And he looked round at the foliage with the light shining through it, at the setting sun and the clear sky, and he felt just as happy as before. 'Why am I happy, and what used I to live for?' thought he. 'How much I exacted for myself; how I schemed and did not manage to gain anything but shame and sorrow! and, there now, I require nothing to be happy;' and suddenly a new light seemed to reveal itself to him. 'Happiness is this!' he said to himself. 'Happiness lies in living for others. That is evident. The desire for happiness is innate in every man; therefore it is legitimate. When trying to satisfy it selfishly--that is, by seeking for oneself riches, fame, comforts, or love--it may happen that circumstances arise which make it impossible to satisfy these desires. It follows that it is these desires that are illegitimate, but not the need for happiness. But what desires can always be satisfied despite external circumstances? What are they? Love, self-sacrifice.' He was so glad and excited when he had discovered this, as it seemed to him, new truth, that he jumped up and began impatiently seeking some one to sacrifice himself for, to do good to and to love. 'Since one wants nothing for oneself,' he kept thinking, 'why not live for others?' He took up his gun with the intention of returning home quickly to think this out and to find an opportunity of doing good. He made his way out of the thicket. When he had come out into the glade he looked around him; the sun was no longer visible above the tree-tops. It had grown cooler and the place seemed to him quite strange and not like the country round the village. Everything seemed changed--the weather and the character of the forest; the sky was wrapped in clouds, the wind was rustling in the tree-tops, and all around nothing was visible but reeds and dying broken-down trees. He called to his dog who had run away to follow some animal, and his voice came back as in a desert. And suddenly he was seized with a terrible sense of weirdness. He grew frightened. He remembered the abreks and the murders he had been told about, and he expected every moment that an abrek would spring from behind every bush and he would have to defend his life and die, or be a coward. He thought of God and of the future life as for long he had not thought about them. And all around was that same gloomy stern wild nature. 'And is it worth while living for oneself,' thought he, 'when at any moment you may die, and die without having done any good, and so that no one will know of it?' He went in the direction where he fancied the village lay. Of his shooting he had no further thought; but he felt tired to death and peered round at every bush and tree with particular attention and almost with terror, expecting every moment to be called to account for his life. After having wandered about for a considerable time he came upon a ditch down which was flowing cold sandy water from the Terek, and, not to go astray any longer, he decided to follow it. He went on without knowing where the ditch would lead him. Suddenly the reeds behind him crackled. He shuddered and seized his gun, and then felt ashamed of himself: the over-excited dog, panting hard, had thrown itself into the cold water of the ditch and was lapping it!
He too had a drink, and then followed the dog in the direction it wished to go, thinking it would lead him to the village. But despite the dog's company everything around him seemed still more dreary. The forest grew darker and the wind grew stronger and stronger in the tops of the broken old trees. Some large birds circled screeching round their nests in those trees. The vegetation grew poorer and he came oftener and oftener upon rustling reeds and bare sandy spaces covered with animal footprints. To the howling of the wind was added another kind of cheerless monotonous roar. Altogether his spirits became gloomy. Putting his hand behind him he felt his pheasants, and found one missing. It had broken off and was lost, and only the bleeding head and beak remained sticking in his belt. He felt more frightened than he had ever done before. He began to pray to God, and feared above all that he might die without having done anything good or kind; and he so wanted to live, and to live so as to perform a feat of self-sacrifice.
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{
"id": "4761"
}
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21
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None
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Suddenly it was as though the sun had shone into his soul. He heard Russian being spoken, and also heard the rapid smooth flow of the Terek, and a few steps farther in front of him saw the brown moving surface of the river, with the dim-coloured wet sand of its banks and shallows, the distant steppe, the cordon watch-tower outlined above the water, a saddled and hobbled horse among the brambles, and then the mountains opening out before him. The red sun appeared for an instant from under a cloud and its last rays glittered brightly along the river over the reeds, on the watch-tower, and on a group of Cossacks, among whom Lukashka's vigorous figure attracted Olenin's involuntary attention.
Olenin felt that he was again, without any apparent cause, perfectly happy. He had come upon the Nizhni-Prototsk post on the Terek, opposite a pro-Russian Tartar village on the other side of the river. He accosted the Cossacks, but not finding as yet any excuse for doing anyone a kindness, he entered the hut; nor in the hut did he find any such opportunity. The Cossacks received him coldly. On entering the mud hut he lit a cigarette. The Cossacks paid little attention to him, first because he was smoking a cigarette, and secondly because they had something else to divert them that evening. Some hostile Chechens, relatives of the abrek who had been killed, had come from the hills with a scout to ransom the body; and the Cossacks were waiting for their Commanding Officer's arrival from the village. The dead man's brother, tall and well shaped with a short cropped beard which was dyed red, despite his very tattered coat and cap was calm and majestic as a king. His face was very like that of the dead abrek. He did not deign to look at anyone, and never once glanced at the dead body, but sitting on his heels in the shade he spat as he smoked his short pipe, and occasionally uttered some few guttural sounds of command, which were respectfully listened to by his companion. He was evidently a brave who had met Russians more than once before in quite other circumstances, and nothing about them could astonish or even interest him. Olenin was about to approach the dead body and had begun to look at it when the brother, looking up at him from under his brows with calm contempt, said something sharply and angrily. The scout hastened to cover the dead man's face with his coat. Olenin was struck by the dignified and stem expression of the brave's face. He began to speak to him, asking from what village he came, but the Chechen, scarcely giving him a glance, spat contemptuously and turned away. Olenin was so surprised at the Chechen not being interested in him that he could only put it down to the man's stupidity or ignorance of Russian; so he turned to the scout, who also acted as interpreter. The scout was as ragged as the other, but instead of being red-haired he was black-haired, restless, with extremely white gleaming teeth and sparkling black eyes. The scout willingly entered into conversation and asked for a cigarette.
'There were five brothers,' began the scout in his broken Russian. 'This is the third brother the Russians have killed, only two are left. He is a brave, a great brave!' he said, pointing to the Chechen. 'When they killed Ahmet Khan (the dead brave) this one was sitting on the opposite bank among the reeds. He saw it all. Saw him laid in the skiff and brought to the bank. He sat there till the night and wished to kill the old man, but the others would not let him.'
Lukashka went up to the speaker, and sat down. 'Of what village?' asked he.
'From there in the hills,' replied the scout, pointing to the misty bluish gorge beyond the Terek. 'Do you know Suuk-su? It is about eight miles beyond that.'
'Do you know Girey Khan in Suuk-su?' asked Lukashka, evidently proud of the acquaintance. 'He is my kunak.'
'He is my neighbour,' answered the scout.
'He's a trump!' and Lukashka, evidently much interested, began talking to the scout in Tartar.
Presently a Cossack captain, with the head of the village, arrived on horseback with a suite of two Cossacks. The captain--one of the new type of Cossack officers--wished the Cossacks 'Good health,' but no one shouted in reply, 'Hail! Good health to your honour,' as is customary in the Russian Army, and only a few replied with a bow. Some, and among them Lukashka, rose and stood erect. The corporal replied that all was well at the outposts. All this seemed ridiculous: it was as if these Cossacks were playing at being soldiers. But these formalities soon gave place to ordinary ways of behaviour, and the captain, who was a smart Cossack just like the others, began speaking fluently in Tartar to the interpreter. They filled in some document, gave it to the scout, and received from him some money. Then they approached the body.
'Which of you is Luke Gavrilov?' asked the captain.
Lukishka took off his cap and came forward.
'I have reported your exploit to the Commander. I don't know what will come of it. I have recommended you for a cross; you're too young to be made a sergeant. Can you read?'
'I can't.'
'But what a fine fellow to look at!' said the captain, again playing the commander. 'Put on your cap. Which of the Gavrilovs does he come of? ... the Broad, eh?'
'His nephew,' replied the corporal.
'I know, I know. Well, lend a hand, help them,' he said, turning to the Cossacks.
Lukashka's face shone with joy and seemed handsomer than usual. He moved away from the corporal, and having put on his cap sat down beside Olenin.
When the body had been carried to the skiff the brother Chechen descended to the bank. The Cossacks involuntarily stepped aside to let him pass. He jumped into the boat and pushed off from the bank with his powerful leg, and now, as Olenin noticed, for the first time threw a rapid glance at all the Cossacks and then abruptly asked his companion a question. The latter answered something and pointed to Lukashka. The Chechen looked at him and, turning slowly away, gazed at the opposite bank. That look expressed not hatred but cold contempt. He again made some remark.
'What is he saying?' Olenin asked of the fidgety scout.
'Yours kill ours, ours slay yours. It's always the same,' replied the scout, evidently inventing, and he smiled, showing his white teeth, as he jumped into the skiff.
The dead man's brother sat motionless, gazing at the opposite bank. He was so full of hatred and contempt that there was nothing on this side of the river that moved his curiosity. The scout, standing up at one end of the skiff and dipping his paddle now on one side now on the other, steered skilfully while talking incessantly. The skiff became smaller and smaller as it moved obliquely across the stream, the voices became scarcely audible, and at last, still within sight, they landed on the opposite bank where their horses stood waiting. There they lifted out the corpse and (though the horse shied) laid it across one of the saddles, mounted, and rode at a foot-pace along the road past a Tartar village from which a crowd came out to look at them. The Cossacks on the Russian side of the river were highly satisfied and jovial. Laughter and jokes were heard on all sides. The captain and the head of the village entered the mud hut to regale themselves. Lukashka, vainly striving to impart a sedate expression to his merry face, sat down with his elbows on his knees beside Olenin and whittled away at a stick.
'Why do you smoke?' he said with assumed curiosity. 'Is it good?'
He evidently spoke because he noticed Olenin felt ill at ease and isolated among the Cossacks.
'It's just a habit,' answered Olenin. 'Why?'
'H'm, if one of us were to smoke there would be a row! Look there now, the mountains are not far off,' continued Lukashka, 'yet you can't get there! How will you get back alone? It's getting dark. I'll take you, if you like. You ask the corporal to give me leave.'
'What a fine fellow!' thought Olenin, looking at the Cossack's bright face. He remembered Maryanka and the kiss he had heard by the gate, and he was sorry for Lukashka and his want of culture. 'What confusion it is,' he thought. 'A man kills another and is happy and satisfied with himself as if he had done something excellent. Can it be that nothing tells him that it is not a reason for any rejoicing, and that happiness lies not in killing, but in sacrificing oneself?'
'Well, you had better not meet him again now, mate!' said one of the Cossacks who had seen the skiff off, addressing Lukashka. 'Did you hear him asking about you?'
Lukashka raised his head.
'My godson?' said Lukashka, meaning by that word the dead Chechen.
'Your godson won't rise, but the red one is the godson's brother!'
'Let him thank God that he got off whole himself,' replied Lukashka.
'What are you glad about?' asked Olenin. 'Supposing your brother had been killed; would you be glad?'
The Cossack looked at Olenin with laughing eyes. He seemed to have understood all that Olenin wished to say to him, but to be above such considerations.
'Well, that happens too! Don't our fellows get killed sometimes?'
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{
"id": "4761"
}
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1
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THE EPISODE OF THE PATIENT WHO DISAPPOINTED HER DOCTOR
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Hilda Wade's gift was so unique, so extraordinary, that I must illustrate it, I think, before I attempt to describe it. But first let me say a word of explanation about the Master.
I have never met anyone who impressed me so much with a sense of GREATNESS as Professor Sebastian. And this was not due to his scientific eminence alone: the man's strength and keenness struck me quite as forcibly as his vast attainments. When he first came to St. Nathaniel's Hospital, an eager, fiery-eyed physiologist, well past the prime of life, and began to preach with all the electric force of his vivid personality that the one thing on earth worth a young man's doing was to work in his laboratory, attend his lectures, study disease, and be a scientific doctor, dozens of us were infected by his contagious enthusiasm. He proclaimed the gospel of germs; and the germ of his own zeal flew abroad in the hospital: it ran through the wards as if it were typhoid fever. Within a few months, half the students were converted from lukewarm observers of medical routine into flaming apostles of the new methods.
The greatest authority in Europe on comparative anatomy, now that Huxley was taken from us, he had devoted his later days to the pursuit of medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall, thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning's, he represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for life. His long white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, just curled in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping shoulders. His pale face was clean-shaven, save for a thin and wiry grizzled moustache, which cast into stronger relief the deep-set, hawk-like eyes and the acute, intense, intellectual features. In some respects, his countenance reminded me often of Dr. Martineau's: in others it recalled the knife-like edge, unturnable, of his great predecessor, Professor Owen. Wherever he went, men turned to stare at him. In Paris, they took him for the head of the English Socialists; in Russia, they declared he was a Nihilist emissary. And they were not far wrong--in essence; for Sebastian's stern, sharp face was above all things the face of a man absorbed and engrossed by one overpowering pursuit in life--the sacred thirst of knowledge, which had swallowed up his entire nature.
He WAS what he looked--the most single-minded person I have ever come across. And when I say single-minded, I mean just that, and no more. He had an End to attain--the advancement of science, and he went straight towards the End, looking neither to the right nor to the left for anyone. An American millionaire once remarked to him of some ingenious appliance he was describing: “Why, if you were to perfect that apparatus, Professor, and take out a patent for it, I reckon you'd make as much money as I have made.” Sebastian withered him with a glance. “I have no time to waste,” he replied, “on making money!”
So, when Hilda Wade told me, on the first day I met her, that she wished to become a nurse at Nathaniel's, “to be near Sebastian,” I was not at all astonished. I took her at her word. Everybody who meant business in any branch of the medical art, however humble, desired to be close to our rare teacher--to drink in his large thought, to profit by his clear insight, his wide experience. The man of Nathaniel's was revolutionising practice; and those who wished to feel themselves abreast of the modern movement were naturally anxious to cast in their lot with him. I did not wonder, therefore, that Hilda Wade, who herself possessed in so large a measure the deepest feminine gift--intuition--should seek a place under the famous professor who represented the other side of the same endowment in its masculine embodiment--instinct of diagnosis.
Hilda Wade herself I will not formally introduce to you: you will learn to know her as I proceed with my story.
I was Sebastian's assistant, and my recommendation soon procured Hilda Wade the post she so strangely coveted. Before she had been long at Nathaniel's, however, it began to dawn upon me that her reasons for desiring to attend upon our revered Master were not wholly and solely scientific. Sebastian, it is true, recognised her value as a nurse from the first; he not only allowed that she was a good assistant, but he also admitted that her subtle knowledge of temperament sometimes enabled her closely to approach his own reasoned scientific analysis of a case and its probable development. “Most women,” he said to me once, “are quick at reading THE PASSING EMOTION. They can judge with astounding correctness from a shadow on one's face, a catch in one's breath, a movement of one's hands, how their words or deeds are affecting us. We cannot conceal our feelings from them. But underlying character they do not judge so well as fleeting expression. Not what Mrs. Jones IS in herself, but what Mrs. Jones is now thinking and feeling--there lies their great success as psychologists. Most men, on the contrary, guide their life by definite FACTS--by signs, by symptoms, by observed data. Medicine itself is built upon a collection of such reasoned facts. But this woman, Nurse Wade, to a certain extent, stands intermediate mentally between the two sexes. She recognises TEMPERAMENT--the fixed form of character, and what it is likely to do--in a degree which I have never seen equalled elsewhere. To that extent, and within proper limits of supervision, I acknowledge her faculty as a valuable adjunct to a scientific practitioner.”
Still, though Sebastian started with a predisposition in favour of Hilda Wade--a pretty girl appeals to most of us--I could see from the beginning that Hilda Wade was by no means enthusiastic for Sebastian, like the rest of the hospital: “He is extraordinarily able,” she would say, when I gushed to her about our Master; but that was the most I could ever extort from her in the way of praise. Though she admitted intellectually Sebastian's gigantic mind, she would never commit herself to anything that sounded like personal admiration. To call him “the prince of physiologists” did not satisfy me on that head. I wanted her to exclaim, “I adore him! I worship him! He is glorious, wonderful!”
I was also aware from an early date that, in an unobtrusive way, Hilda Wade was watching Sebastian, watching him quietly, with those wistful, earnest eyes, as a cat watches a mouse-hole; watching him with mute inquiry, as if she expected each moment to see him do something different from what the rest of us expected of him. Slowly I gathered that Hilda Wade, in the most literal sense, had come to Nathaniel's, as she herself expressed it, “to be near Sebastian.”
Gentle and lovable as she was in every other aspect, towards Sebastian she seemed like a lynx-eyed detective. She had some object in view, I thought, almost as abstract as his own--some object to which, as I judged, she was devoting her life quite as single-mindedly as Sebastian himself had devoted his to the advancement of science.
“Why did she become a nurse at all?” I asked once of her friend, Mrs. Mallet. “She has plenty of money, and seems well enough off to live without working.”
“Oh, dear, yes,” Mrs. Mallet answered. “She is independent, quite; has a tidy little income of her own--six or seven hundred a year--and she could choose her own society. But she went in for this mission fad early; she didn't intend to marry, she said; so she would like to have some work to do in life. Girls suffer like that, nowadays. In her case, the malady took the form of nursing.”
“As a rule,” I ventured to interpose, “when a pretty girl says she doesn't intend to marry, her remark is premature. It only means--” “Oh, yes, I know. Every girl says it; 'tis a stock property in the popular masque of Maiden Modesty. But with Hilda it is different. And the difference is--that Hilda means it!”
“You are right,” I answered. “I believe she means it. Yet I know one man at least--” for I admired her immensely.
Mrs. Mallet shook her head and smiled. “It is no use, Dr. Cumberledge,” she answered. “Hilda will never marry. Never, that is to say, till she has attained some mysterious object she seems to have in view, about which she never speaks to anyone--not even to me. But I have somehow guessed it!”
“And it is?”
“Oh, I have not guessed what it IS: I am no Oedipus. I have merely guessed that it exists. But whatever it may be, Hilda's life is bounded by it. She became a nurse to carry it out, I feel confident. From the very beginning, I gather, a part of her scheme was to go to St. Nathaniel's. She was always bothering us to give her introductions to Dr. Sebastian; and when she met you at my brother Hugo's, it was a preconcerted arrangement; she asked to sit next you, and meant to induce you to use your influence on her behalf with the Professor. She was dying to get there.”
“It is very odd,” I mused. “But there! --women are inexplicable!”
“And Hilda is in that matter the very quintessence of woman. Even I, who have known her for years, don't pretend to understand her.”
A few months later, Sebastian began his great researches on his new anaesthetic. It was a wonderful set of researches. It promised so well. All Nat's (as we familiarly and affectionately styled St. Nathaniel's) was in a fever of excitement over the drug for a twelvemonth.
The Professor obtained his first hint of the new body by a mere accident. His friend, the Deputy Prosector of the Zoological Society, had mixed a draught for a sick raccoon at the Gardens, and, by some mistake in a bottle, had mixed it wrongly. (I purposely refrain from mentioning the ingredients, as they are drugs which can be easily obtained in isolation at any chemist's, though when compounded they form one of the most dangerous and difficult to detect of organic poisons. I do not desire to play into the hands of would-be criminals.) The compound on which the Deputy Prosector had thus accidentally lighted sent the raccoon to sleep in the most extraordinary manner. Indeed, the raccoon slept for thirty-six hours on end, all attempts to awake him, by pulling his tail or tweaking his hair being quite unavailing. This was a novelty in narcotics; so Sebastian was asked to come and look at the slumbering brute. He suggested the attempt to perform an operation on the somnolent raccoon by removing, under the influence of the drug, an internal growth, which was considered the probable cause of his illness. A surgeon was called in, the growth was found and removed, and the raccoon, to everybody's surprise, continued to slumber peacefully on his straw for five hours afterwards. At the end of that time he awoke, and stretched himself as if nothing had happened; and though he was, of course, very weak from loss of blood, he immediately displayed a most royal hunger. He ate up all the maize that was offered him for breakfast, and proceeded to manifest a desire for more by most unequivocal symptoms.
Sebastian was overjoyed. He now felt sure he had discovered a drug which would supersede chloroform--a drug more lasting in its immediate effects, and yet far less harmful in its ultimate results on the balance of the system. A name being wanted for it, he christened it “lethodyne.” It was the best pain-luller yet invented.
For the next few weeks, at Nat's, we heard of nothing but lethodyne. Patients recovered and patients died; but their deaths or recoveries were as dross to lethodyne, an anaesthetic that might revolutionise surgery, and even medicine! A royal road through disease, with no trouble to the doctor and no pain to the patient! Lethodyne held the field. We were all of us, for the moment, intoxicated with lethodyne.
Sebastian's observations on the new agent occupied several months. He had begun with the raccoon; he went on, of course, with those poor scapegoats of physiology, domestic rabbits. Not that in this particular case any painful experiments were in contemplation. The Professor tried the drug on a dozen or more quite healthy young animals--with the strange result that they dozed off quietly, and never woke up again. This nonplussed Sebastian. He experimented once more on another raccoon, with a smaller dose; the raccoon fell asleep, and slept like a top for fifteen hours, at the end of which time he woke up as if nothing out of the common had happened. Sebastian fell back upon rabbits again, with smaller and smaller doses. It was no good; the rabbits all died with great unanimity, until the dose was so diminished that it did not send them off to sleep at all. There was no middle course, apparently, to the rabbit kind, lethodyne was either fatal or else inoperative. So it proved to sheep. The new drug killed, or did nothing.
I will not trouble you with all the details of Sebastian's further researches; the curious will find them discussed at length in Volume 237 of the Philosophical Transactions. (See also Comptes Rendus de l'Academie de Medecine: tome 49, pp. 72 and sequel.) I will restrict myself here to that part of the inquiry which immediately refers to Hilda Wade's history.
“If I were you,” she said to the Professor one morning, when he was most astonished at his contradictory results, “I would test it on a hawk. If I dare venture on a suggestion, I believe you will find that hawks recover.”
“The deuce they do!” Sebastian cried. However, he had such confidence in Nurse Wade's judgment that he bought a couple of hawks and tried the treatment on them. Both birds took considerable doses, and, after a period of insensibility extending to several hours, woke up in the end quite bright and lively.
“I see your principle,” the Professor broke out. “It depends upon diet. Carnivores and birds of prey can take lethodyne with impunity; herbivores and fruit-eaters cannot recover, and die of it. Man, therefore, being partly carnivorous, will doubtless be able more or less to stand it.”
Hilda Wade smiled her sphinx-like smile. “Not quite that, I fancy,” she answered. “It will kill cats, I feel sure; at least, most domesticated ones. But it will NOT kill weasels. Yet both are carnivores.”
“That young woman knows too much!” Sebastian muttered to me, looking after her as she glided noiselessly with her gentle tread down the long white corridor. “We shall have to suppress her, Cumberledge.... But I'll wager my life she's right, for all that. I wonder, now, how the dickens she guessed it!”
“Intuition,” I answered.
He pouted his under lip above the upper one, with a dubious acquiescence. “Inference, I call it,” he retorted. “All woman's so-called intuition is, in fact, just rapid and half-unconscious inference.”
He was so full of the subject, however, and so utterly carried away by his scientific ardour, that I regret to say he gave a strong dose of lethodyne at once to each of the matron's petted and pampered Persian cats, which lounged about her room and were the delight of the convalescents. They were two peculiarly lazy sultanas of cats--mere jewels of the harem--Oriental beauties that loved to bask in the sun or curl themselves up on the rug before the fire and dawdle away their lives in congenial idleness. Strange to say, Hilda's prophecy came true. Zuleika settled herself down comfortably in the Professor's easy chair and fell into a sound sleep from which there was no awaking; while Roxana met fate on the tiger-skin she loved, coiled up in a circle, and passed from this life of dreams, without knowing it, into one where dreaming is not. Sebastian noted the facts with a quiet gleam of satisfaction in his watchful eye, and explained afterwards, with curt glibness to the angry matron, that her favourites had been “canonised in the roll of science, as painless martyrs to the advancement of physiology.”
The weasels, on the other hand, with an equal dose, woke up after six hours as lively as crickets. It was clear that carnivorous tastes were not the whole solution, for Roxana was famed as a notable mouser.
“Your principle?” Sebastian asked our sibyl, in his brief, quick way.
Hilda's cheek wore a glow of pardonable triumph. The great teacher had deigned to ask her assistance. “I judged by the analogy of Indian hemp,” she answered. “This is clearly a similar, but much stronger, narcotic. Now, whenever I have given Indian hemp by your direction to people of sluggish, or even of merely bustling temperament, I have noticed that small doses produce serious effects, and that the after-results are most undesirable. But when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous, overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk with excitement--drive them into homicidal mania.”
Sebastian nodded his head. He needed no more explanation. “You have hit it,” he said. “I see it at a glance. The old antithesis! All men and all animals fall, roughly speaking, into two great divisions of type: the impassioned and the unimpassioned; the vivid and the phlegmatic. I catch your drift now. Lethodyne is poison to phlegmatic patients, who have not active power enough to wake up from it unhurt; it is relatively harmless to the vivid and impassioned, who can be put asleep by it, indeed, for a few hours more or less, but are alive enough to live on through the coma and reassert their vitality after it.”
I recognised as he spoke that this explanation was correct. The dull rabbits, the sleepy Persian cats, and the silly sheep had died outright of lethodyne; the cunning, inquisitive raccoon, the quick hawk, and the active, intense-natured weasels, all most eager, wary, and alert animals, full of keenness and passion, had recovered quickly.
“Dare we try it on a human subject?” I asked, tentatively.
Hilda Wade answered at once, with that unerring rapidity of hers: “Yes, certainly; on a few--the right persons. _I_, for one, am not afraid to try it.”
“You?” I cried, feeling suddenly aware how much I thought of her. “Oh, not YOU, please, Nurse Wade. Some other life, less valuable!”
Sebastian stared at me coldly. “Nurse Wade volunteers,” he said. “It is in the cause of science. Who dares dissuade her? That tooth of yours? Ah, yes. Quite sufficient excuse. You wanted it out, Nurse Wade. Wells-Dinton shall operate.”
Without a moment's hesitation, Hilda Wade sat down in an easy chair and took a measured dose of the new anaesthetic, proportioned to the average difference in weight between raccoons and humanity. My face displayed my anxiety, I suppose, for she turned to me, smiling with quiet confidence. “I know my own constitution,” she said, with a reassuring glance that went straight to my heart. “I do not in the least fear.”
As for Sebastian, he administered the drug to her as unconcernedly as if she were a rabbit. Sebastian's scientific coolness and calmness have long been the admiration of younger practitioners.
Wells-Dinton gave one wrench. The tooth came out as though the patient were a block of marble. There was not a cry or a movement, such as one notes when nitrous oxide is administered. Hilda Wade was to all appearance a mass of lifeless flesh. We stood round and watched. I was trembling with terror. Even on Sebastian's pale face, usually so unmoved, save by the watchful eagerness of scientific curiosity, I saw signs of anxiety.
After four hours of profound slumber--breath hovering, as it seemed, between life and death--she began to come to again. In half an hour more she was wide awake; she opened her eyes and asked for a glass of hock, with beef essence or oysters.
That evening, by six o'clock, she was quite well and able to go about her duties as usual.
“Sebastian is a wonderful man,” I said to her, as I entered her ward on my rounds at night. “His coolness astonishes me. Do you know, he watched you all the time you were lying asleep there as if nothing were the matter.”
“Coolness?” she inquired, in a quiet voice. “Or cruelty?”
“Cruelty?” I echoed, aghast. “Sebastian cruel! Oh, Nurse Wade, what an idea! Why, he has spent his whole life in striving against all odds to alleviate pain. He is the apostle of philanthropy!”
“Of philanthropy, or of science? To alleviate pain, or to learn the whole truth about the human body?”
“Come, come, now,” I cried. “You analyse too far. I will not let even YOU put me out of conceit with Sebastian.” (Her face flushed at that “even you”; I almost fancied she began to like me.) “He is the enthusiasm of my life; just consider how much he has done for humanity!”
She looked me through searchingly. “I will not destroy your illusion,” she answered, after a pause. “It is a noble and generous one. But is it not largely based on an ascetic face, long white hair, and a moustache that hides the cruel corners of the mouth? For the corners ARE cruel. Some day, I will show you them. Cut off the long hair, shave the grizzled moustache--and what then will remain?” She drew a profile hastily. “Just that,” and she showed it me. 'Twas a face like Robespierre's, grown harder and older and lined with observation. I recognised that it was in fact the essence of Sebastian.
Next day, as it turned out, the Professor himself insisted upon testing lethodyne in his own person. All Nat's strove to dissuade him. “Your life is so precious, sir--the advancement of science!” But the Professor was adamantine.
“Science can only be advanced if men of science will take their lives in their hands,” he answered, sternly. “Besides, Nurse Wade has tried. Am I to lag behind a woman in my devotion to the cause of physiological knowledge?”
“Let him try,” Hilda Wade murmured to me. “He is quite right. It will not hurt him. I have told him already he has just the proper temperament to stand the drug. Such people are rare: HE is one of them.”
We administered the dose, trembling. Sebastian took it like a man, and dropped off instantly, for lethodyne is at least as instantaneous in its operation as nitrous oxide.
He lay long asleep. Hilda and I watched him.
After he had lain for some minutes senseless, like a log, on the couch where we had placed him, Hilda stooped over him quietly and lifted up the ends of the grizzled moustache. Then she pointed one accusing finger at his lips. “I told you so,” she murmured, with a note of demonstration.
“There is certainly something rather stern, or even ruthless, about the set of the face and the firm ending of the lips,” I admitted, reluctantly.
“That is why God gave men moustaches,” she mused, in a low voice; “to hide the cruel corners of their mouths.”
“Not ALWAYS cruel,” I cried.
“Sometimes cruel, sometimes cunning, sometimes sensuous; but nine times out of ten best masked by moustaches.”
“You have a bad opinion of our sex!” I exclaimed.
“Providence knew best,” she answered. “IT gave you moustaches. That was in order that we women might be spared from always seeing you as you are. Besides, I said 'Nine times out of ten.' There are exceptions--SUCH exceptions!”
On second thought, I did not feel sure that I could quarrel with her estimate.
The experiment was that time once more successful. Sebastian woke up from the comatose state after eight hours, not quite as fresh as Hilda Wade, perhaps, but still tolerably alive; less alert, however, and complaining of dull headache. He was not hungry. Hilda Wade shook her head at that. “It will be of use only in a very few cases,” she said to me, regretfully; “and those few will need to be carefully picked by an acute observer. I see resistance to the coma is, even more than I thought, a matter of temperament. Why, so impassioned a man as the Professor himself cannot entirely recover. With more sluggish temperaments, we shall have deeper difficulty.”
“Would you call him impassioned?” I asked. “Most people think him so cold and stern.”
She shook her head. “He is a snow-capped volcano!” she answered. “The fires of his life burn bright below. The exterior alone is cold and placid.”
However, starting from that time, Sebastian began a course of experiments on patients, giving infinitesimal doses at first, and venturing slowly on somewhat larger quantities. But only in his own case and Hilda's could the result be called quite satisfactory. One dull and heavy, drink-sodden navvy, to whom he administered no more than one-tenth of a grain, was drowsy for a week, and listless long after; while a fat washerwoman from West Ham, who took only two-tenths, fell so fast asleep, and snored so stertorously, that we feared she was going to doze off into eternity, after the fashion of the rabbits. Mothers of large families, we noted, stood the drug very ill; on pale young girls of the consumptive tendency its effect was not marked; but only a patient here and there, of exceptionally imaginative and vivid temperament, seemed able to endure it. Sebastian was discouraged. He saw the anaesthetic was not destined to fulfil his first enthusiastic humanitarian expectations. One day, while the investigation was just at this stage, a case was admitted into the observation-cots in which Hilda Wade took a particular interest. The patient was a young girl named Isabel Huntley--tall, dark, and slender, a markedly quick and imaginative type, with large black eyes which clearly bespoke a passionate nature. Though distinctly hysterical, she was pretty and pleasing. Her rich dark hair was as copious as it was beautiful. She held herself erect and had a finely poised head. From the first moment she arrived, I could see nurse Wade was strongly drawn towards her. Their souls sympathised. Number Fourteen--that is our impersonal way of describing CASES--was constantly on Hilda's lips. “I like the girl,” she said once. “She is a lady in fibre.”
“And a tobacco-trimmer by trade,” Sebastian added, sarcastically.
As usual, Hilda's was the truer description. It went deeper.
Number Fourteen's ailment was a rare and peculiar one, into which I need not enter here with professional precision. (I have described the case fully for my brother practitioners in my paper in the fourth volume of Sebastian's Medical Miscellanies.) It will be enough for my present purpose to say, in brief, that the lesion consisted of an internal growth which is always dangerous and most often fatal, but which nevertheless is of such a character that, if it be once happily eradicated by supremely good surgery, it never tends to recur, and leaves the patient as strong and well as ever. Sebastian was, of course, delighted with the splendid opportunity thus afforded him. “It is a beautiful case!” he cried, with professional enthusiasm. “Beautiful! Beautiful! I never saw one so deadly or so malignant before. We are indeed in luck's way. Only a miracle can save her life. Cumberledge, we must proceed to perform the miracle.”
Sebastian loved such cases. They formed his ideal. He did not greatly admire the artificial prolongation of diseased and unwholesome lives, which could never be of much use to their owners or anyone else; but when a chance occurred for restoring to perfect health a valuable existence which might otherwise be extinguished before its time, he positively revelled in his beneficent calling. “What nobler object can a man propose to himself,” he used to say, “than to raise good men and true from the dead, as it were, and return them whole and sound to the family that depends upon them? Why, I had fifty times rather cure an honest coal-heaver of a wound in his leg than give ten years more lease of life to a gouty lord, diseased from top to toe, who expects to find a month of Carlsbad or Homburg once every year make up for eleven months of over-eating, over-drinking, vulgar debauchery, and under-thinking.” He had no sympathy with men who lived the lives of swine: his heart was with the workers.
Of course, Hilda Wade soon suggested that, as an operation was absolutely necessary, Number Fourteen would be a splendid subject on whom to test once more the effects of lethodyne. Sebastian, with his head on one side, surveying the patient, promptly coincided. “Nervous diathesis,” he observed. “Very vivid fancy. Twitches her hands the right way. Quick pulse, rapid perceptions, no meaningless unrest, but deep vitality. I don't doubt she'll stand it.”
We explained to Number Fourteen the gravity of the case, and also the tentative character of the operation under lethodyne. At first, she shrank from taking it. “No, no!” she said; “let me die quietly.” But Hilda, like the Angel of Mercy that she was, whispered in the girl's ear: “IF it succeeds, you will get quite well, and--you can marry Arthur.”
The patient's dark face flushed crimson.
“Ah! Arthur,” she cried. “Dear Arthur! I can bear anything you choose to do to me--for Arthur!”
“How soon you find these things out!” I cried to Hilda, a few minutes later. “A mere man would never have thought of that. And who is Arthur?”
“A sailor--on a ship that trades with the South Seas. I hope he is worthy of her. Fretting over Arthur's absence has aggravated the case. He is homeward-bound now. She is worrying herself to death for fear she should not live to say good-bye to him.”
“She WILL live to marry him,” I answered, with confidence like her own, “if YOU say she can stand it.”
“The lethodyne--oh, yes; THAT'S all right. But the operation itself is so extremely dangerous; though Dr. Sebastian says he has called in the best surgeon in London for all such cases. They are rare, he tells me--and Nielsen has performed on six, three of them successfully.”
We gave the girl the drug. She took it, trembling, and went off at once, holding Hilda's hand, with a pale smile on her face, which persisted there somewhat weirdly all through the operation. The work of removing the growth was long and ghastly, even for us who were well seasoned to such sights; but at the end Nielsen expressed himself as perfectly satisfied. “A very neat piece of work!” Sebastian exclaimed, looking on. “I congratulate you, Nielsen. I never saw anything done cleaner or better.”
“A successful operation, certainly!” the great surgeon admitted, with just pride in the Master's commendation.
“AND the patient?” Hilda asked, wavering.
“Oh, the patient? The patient will die,” Nielsen replied, in an unconcerned voice, wiping his spotless instruments.
“That is not MY idea of the medical art,” I cried, shocked at his callousness. “An operation is only successful if--” He regarded me with lofty scorn. “A certain percentage of losses,” he interrupted, calmly, “is inevitable, of course, in all surgical operations. We are obliged to average it. How could I preserve my precision and accuracy of hand if I were always bothered by sentimental considerations of the patient's safety?”
Hilda Wade looked up at me with a sympathetic glance. “We will pull her through yet,” she murmured, in her soft voice, “if care and skill can do it,--MY care and YOUR skill. This is now OUR patient, Dr. Cumberledge.”
It needed care and skill. We watched her for hours, and she showed no sign or gleam of recovery. Her sleep was deeper than either Sebastian's or Hilda's had been. She had taken a big dose, so as to secure immobility. The question now was, would she recover at all from it? Hour after hour we waited and watched; and not a sign of movement! Only the same deep, slow, hampered breathing, the same feeble, jerky pulse, the same deathly pallor on the dark cheeks, the same corpse-like rigidity of limb and muscle.
At last our patient stirred faintly, as in a dream; her breath faltered. We bent over her. Was it death, or was she beginning to recover?
Very slowly, a faint trace of colour came back to her cheeks. Her heavy eyes half opened. They stared first with a white stare. Her arms dropped by her side. Her mouth relaxed its ghastly smile.... We held our breath.... She was coming to again!
But her coming to was slow--very, very slow. Her pulse was still weak. Her heart pumped feebly. We feared she might sink from inanition at any moment. Hilda Wade knelt on the floor by the girl's side and held a spoonful of beef essence coaxingly to her lips. Number Fourteen gasped, drew a long, slow breath, then gulped and swallowed it. After that she lay back with her mouth open, looking like a corpse. Hilda pressed another spoonful of the soft jelly upon her; but the girl waved it away with one trembling hand. “Let me die,” she cried. “Let me die! I feel dead already.”
Hilda held her face close. “Isabel,” she whispered--and I recognised in her tone the vast moral difference between “Isabel” and “Number Fourteen,”--“Is-a-bel, you must take it. For Arthur's sake, I say, you MUST take it.”
The girl's hand quivered as it lay on the white coverlet. “For Arthur's sake!” she murmured, lifting her eyelids dreamily. “For Arthur's sake! Yes, nurse, dear!”
“Call me Hilda, please! Hilda!”
The girl's face lighted up again. “Yes, Hilda, dear,” she answered, in an unearthly voice, like one raised from the dead. “I will call you what you will. Angel of light, you have been so good to me.”
She opened her lips with an effort and slowly swallowed another spoonful. Then she fell back, exhausted. But her pulse improved within twenty minutes. I mentioned the matter, with enthusiasm, to Sebastian later. “It is very nice in its way,” he answered; “but... it is not nursing.”
I thought to myself that that was just what it WAS; but I did not say so. Sebastian was a man who thought meanly of women. “A doctor, like a priest,” he used to declare, “should keep himself unmarried. His bride is medicine.” And he disliked to see what he called PHILANDERING going on in his hospital. It may have been on that account that I avoided speaking much of Hilda Wade thenceforth before him.
He looked in casually next day to see the patient. “She will die,” he said, with perfect assurance, as we passed down the ward together. “Operation has taken too much out of her.”
“Still, she has great recuperative powers,” Hilda answered. “They all have in her family, Professor. You may, perhaps, remember Joseph Huntley, who occupied Number Sixty-seven in the Accident Ward, some nine months since--compound fracture of the arm--a dark, nervous engineer's assistant--very hard to restrain--well, HE was her brother; he caught typhoid fever in the hospital, and you commented at the time on his strange vitality. Then there was her cousin, again, Ellen Stubbs. We had HER for stubborn chronic laryngitis--a very bad case--anyone else would have died--yielded at once to your treatment; and made, I recollect, a splendid convalescence.”
“What a memory you have!” Sebastian cried, admiring against his will. “It is simply marvellous! I never saw anyone like you in my life... except once. HE was a man, a doctor, a colleague of mine--dead long ago.... Why--” he mused, and gazed hard at her. Hilda shrank before his gaze. “This is curious,” he went on slowly, at last; “very curious. You--why, you resemble him!”
“Do I?” Hilda replied, with forced calm, raising her eyes to his. Their glances met. That moment, I saw each had recognised something; and from that day forth I was instinctively aware that a duel was being waged between Sebastian and Hilda,--a duel between the two ablest and most singular personalities I had ever met; a duel of life and death--though I did not fully understand its purport till much, much later.
Every day after that, the poor, wasted girl in Number Fourteen grew feebler and fainter. Her temperature rose; her heart throbbed weakly. She seemed to be fading away. Sebastian shook his head. “Lethodyne is a failure,” he said, with a mournful regret. “One cannot trust it. The case might have recovered from the operation, or recovered from the drug; but she could not recover from both together. Yet the operation would have been impossible without the drug, and the drug is useless except for the operation.”
It was a great disappointment to him. He hid himself in his room, as was his wont when disappointed, and went on with his old work at his beloved microbes.
“I have one hope still,” Hilda murmured to me by the bedside, when our patient was at her worst. “If one contingency occurs, I believe we may save her.”
“What is that?” I asked.
She shook her head waywardly. “You must wait and see,” she answered. “If it comes off, I will tell you. If not, let it swell the limbo of lost inspirations.”
Next morning early, however, she came up to me with a radiant face, holding a newspaper in her hand. “Well, it HAS happened!” she cried, rejoicing. “We shall save poor Isabel Number Fourteen, I mean; our way is clear, Dr. Cumberledge.”
I followed her blindly to the bedside, little guessing what she could mean. She knelt down at the head of the cot. The girl's eyes were closed. I touched her cheek; she was in a high fever. “Temperature?” I asked.
“A hundred and three.”
I shook my head. Every symptom of fatal relapse. I could not imagine what card Hilda held in reserve. But I stood there, waiting.
She whispered in the girl's ear: “Arthur's ship is sighted off the Lizard.”
The patient opened her eyes slowly, and rolled them for a moment as if she did not understand.
“Too late!” I cried. “Too late! She is delirious--insensible!”
Hilda repeated the words slowly, but very distinctly. “Do you hear, dear? Arthur's ship... it is sighted.... Arthur's ship... at the Lizard.”
The girl's lips moved. “Arthur! Arthur! ... Arthur's ship!” A deep sigh. She clenched her hands. “He is coming?” Hilda nodded and smiled, holding her breath with suspense.
“Up the Channel now. He will be at Southampton tonight. Arthur... at Southampton. It is here, in the papers; I have telegraphed to him to hurry on at once to see you.”
She struggled up for a second. A smile flitted across the worn face. Then she fell back wearily.
I thought all was over. Her eyes stared white. But ten minutes later she opened her lids again. “Arthur is coming,” she murmured. “Arthur... coming.”
“Yes, dear. Now sleep. He is coming.”
All through that day and the next night she was restless and agitated; but still her pulse improved a little. Next morning she was again a trifle better. Temperature falling--a hundred and one, point three. At ten o'clock Hilda came in to her, radiant.
“Well, Isabel, dear,” she cried, bending down and touching her cheek (kissing is forbidden by the rules of the house), “Arthur has come. He is here... down below... I have seen him.”
“Seen him!” the girl gasped.
“Yes, seen him. Talked with him. Such a nice, manly fellow; and such an honest, good face! He is longing for you to get well. He says he has come home this time to marry you.”
The wan lips quivered. “He will NEVER marry me!”
“Yes, yes, he WILL--if you will take this jelly. Look here--he wrote these words to you before my very eyes: 'Dear love to my Isa!' ... If you are good, and will sleep, he may see you--to-morrow.”
The girl opened her lips and ate the jelly greedily. She ate as much as she was desired. In three minutes more her head had fallen like a child's upon her pillow and she was sleeping peacefully.
I went up to Sebastian's room, quite excited with the news. He was busy among his bacilli. They were his hobby, his pets. “Well, what do you think, Professor?” I cried. “That patient of Nurse Wade's--” He gazed up at me abstractedly, his brow contracting. “Yes, yes; I know,” he interrupted. “The girl in Fourteen. I have discounted her case long ago. She has ceased to interest me.... Dead, of course! Nothing else was possible.”
I laughed a quick little laugh of triumph. “No, sir; NOT dead. Recovering! She has fallen just now into a normal sleep; her breathing is natural.”
He wheeled his revolving chair away from the germs and fixed me with his keen eyes. “Recovering?” he echoed. “Impossible! Rallying, you mean. A mere flicker. I know my trade. She MUST die this evening.”
“Forgive my persistence,” I replied; “but--her temperature has gone down to ninety-nine and a trifle.”
He pushed away the bacilli in the nearest watch-glass quite angrily. “To ninety-nine!” he exclaimed, knitting his brows. “Cumberledge, this is disgraceful! A most disappointing case! A most provoking patient!”
“But surely, sir--” I cried.
“Don't talk to ME, boy! Don't attempt to apologise for her. Such conduct is unpardonable. She OUGHT to have died. It was her clear duty. I SAID she would die, and she should have known better than to fly in the face of the faculty. Her recovery is an insult to medical science. What is the staff about? Nurse Wade should have prevented it.”
“Still, sir,” I exclaimed, trying to touch him on a tender spot, “the anaesthetic, you know! Such a triumph for lethodyne! This case shows clearly that on certain constitutions it may be used with advantage under certain conditions.”
He snapped his fingers. “Lethodyne! pooh! I have lost interest in it. Impracticable! It is not fitted for the human species.”
“Why so? Number Fourteen proves--” He interrupted me with an impatient wave of his hand; then he rose and paced up and down the room testily. After a pause, he spoke again. “The weak point of lethodyne is this: nobody can be trusted to say WHEN it may be used--except Nurse Wade,--which is NOT science.”
For the first time in my life, I had a glimmering idea that I distrusted Sebastian. Hilda Wade was right--the man was cruel. But I had never observed his cruelty before--because his devotion to science had blinded me to it.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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2
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THE EPISODE OF THE GENTLEMAN WHO HAD FAILED FOR EVERYTHING
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One day, about those times, I went round to call on my aunt, Lady Tepping. And lest you accuse me of the vulgar desire to flaunt my fine relations in your face, I hasten to add that my poor dear old aunt is a very ordinary specimen of the common Army widow. Her husband, Sir Malcolm, a crusty old gentleman of the ancient school, was knighted in Burma, or thereabouts, for a successful raid upon naked natives, on something that is called the Shan frontier. When he had grown grey in the service of his Queen and country, besides earning himself incidentally a very decent pension, he acquired gout and went to his long rest in Kensal Green Cemetery. He left his wife with one daughter, and the only pretence to a title in our otherwise blameless family.
My cousin Daphne is a very pretty girl, with those quiet, sedate manners which often develop later in life into genuine self-respect and real depth of character. Fools do not admire her; they accuse her of being “heavy.” But she can do without fools; she has a fine, strongly built figure, an upright carriage, a large and broad forehead, a firm chin, and features which, though well-marked and well-moulded, are yet delicate in outline and sensitive in expression. Very young men seldom take to Daphne: she lacks the desired inanity. But she has mind, repose, and womanly tenderness. Indeed, if she had not been my cousin, I almost think I might once have been tempted to fall in love with her.
When I reached Gloucester Terrace, on this particular afternoon, I found Hilda Wade there before me. She had lunched at my aunt's, in fact. It was her “day out” at St. Nathaniel's, and she had come round to spend it with Daphne Tepping. I had introduced her to the house some time before, and she and my cousin had struck up a close acquaintance immediately. Their temperaments were sympathetic; Daphne admired Hilda's depth and reserve, while Hilda admired Daphne's grave grace and self-control, her perfect freedom from current affectations. She neither giggled nor aped Ibsenism.
A third person stood back in the room when I entered--a tall and somewhat jerry-built young man, with a rather long and solemn face, like an early stage in the evolution of a Don Quixote. I took a good look at him. There was something about his air that impressed me as both lugubrious and humorous; and in this I was right, for I learned later that he was one of those rare people who can sing a comic song with immense success while preserving a sour countenance, like a Puritan preacher's. His eyes were a little sunken, his fingers long and nervous; but I fancied he looked a good fellow at heart, for all that, though foolishly impulsive. He was a punctilious gentleman, I felt sure; his face and manner grew upon one rapidly.
Daphne rose as I entered, and waved the stranger forward with an imperious little wave. I imagined, indeed, that I detected in the gesture a faint touch of half-unconscious proprietorship. “Good-morning, Hubert,” she said, taking my hand, but turning towards the tall young man. “I don't think you know Mr. Cecil Holsworthy.”
“I have heard you speak of him,” I answered, drinking him in with my glance. I added internally, “Not half good enough for you.”
Hilda's eyes met mine and read my thought. They flashed back word, in the language of eyes, “I do not agree with you.”
Daphne, meanwhile, was watching me closely. I could see she was anxious to discover what impression her friend Mr. Holsworthy was making on me. Till then, I had no idea she was fond of anyone in particular; but the way her glance wandered from him to me and from me to Hilda showed clearly that she thought much of this gawky visitor.
We sat and talked together, we four, for some time. I found the young man with the lugubrious countenance improved immensely on closer acquaintance. His talk was clever. He turned out to be the son of a politician high in office in the Canadian Government, and he had been educated at Oxford. The father, I gathered, was rich, but he himself was making an income of nothing a year just then as a briefless barrister, and he was hesitating whether to accept a post of secretary that had been offered him in the colony, or to continue his negative career at the Inner Temple, for the honour and glory of it.
“Now, which would YOU advise me, Miss Tepping?” he inquired, after we had discussed the matter some minutes.
Daphne's face flushed up. “It is so hard to decide,” she answered. “To decide to YOUR best advantage, I mean, of course. For naturally all your English friends would wish to keep you as long as possible in England.”
“No, do you think so?” the gawky young man jerked out with evident pleasure. “Now, that's awfully kind of you. Do you know, if YOU tell me I ought to stay in England, I've half a mind... I'll cable over this very day and refuse the appointment.”
Daphne flushed once more. “Oh, please don't!” she exclaimed, looking frightened. “I shall be quite distressed if a stray word of mine should debar you from accepting a good offer of a secretaryship.”
“Why, your least wish--” the young man began--then checked himself hastily--“must be always important,” he went on, in a different voice, “to everyone of your acquaintance.”
Daphne rose hurriedly. “Look here, Hilda,” she said, a little tremulously, biting her lip, “I have to go out into Westbourne Grove to get those gloves for to-night, and a spray for my hair; will you excuse me for half an hour?”
Holsworthy rose too. “Mayn't I go with you?” he asked, eagerly.
“Oh, if you like. How very kind of you!” Daphne answered, her cheek a blush rose. “Hubert, will you come too? and you, Hilda?”
It was one of those invitations which are given to be refused. I did not need Hilda's warning glance to tell me that my company would be quite superfluous. I felt those two were best left together.
“It's no use, though, Dr. Cumberledge!” Hilda put in, as soon as they were gone. “He WON'T propose, though he has had every encouragement. I don't know what's the matter; but I've been watching them both for weeks, and somehow things seem never to get any forwarder.”
“You think he's in love with her?” I asked.
“In love with her! Well, you have eyes in your head, I know; where could they have been looking? He's madly in love--a very good kind of love, too. He genuinely admires and respects and appreciates all Daphne's sweet and charming qualities.”
“Then what do you suppose is the matter?”
“I have an inkling of the truth: I imagine Mr. Cecil must have let himself in for a prior attachment.”
“If so, why does he hang about Daphne?”
“Because--he can't help himself. He's a good fellow and a chivalrous fellow. He admires your cousin; but he must have got himself into some foolish entanglement elsewhere which he is too honourable to break off; while at the same time he's far too much impressed by Daphne's fine qualities to be able to keep away from her. It's the ordinary case of love versus duty.”
“Is he well off? Could he afford to marry Daphne?”
“Oh, his father's very rich: he has plenty of money; a Canadian millionaire, they say. That makes it all the likelier that some undesirable young woman somewhere may have managed to get hold of him. Just the sort of romantic, impressionable hobbledehoy such women angle for.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. Presently Hilda spoke again. “Why don't you try to get to know him, and find out precisely what's the matter?”
“I KNOW what's the matter--now you've told me,” I answered. “It's as clear as day. Daphne is very much smitten with him, too. I'm sorry for Daphne! Well, I'll take your advice; I'll try to have some talk with him.”
“Do, please; I feel sure I have hit upon it. He has got himself engaged in a hurry to some girl he doesn't really care about, and he is far too much of a gentleman to break it off, though he's in love quite another way with Daphne.”
Just at that moment the door opened and my aunt entered.
“Why, where's Daphne?” she cried, looking about her and arranging her black lace shawl.
“She has just run out into Westbourne Grove to get some gloves and a flower for the fete this evening,” Hilda answered. Then she added, significantly, “Mr. Holsworthy has gone with her.”
“What? That boy's been here again?”
“Yes, Lady Tepping. He called to see Daphne.”
My aunt turned to me with an aggrieved tone. It is a peculiarity of my aunt's--I have met it elsewhere--that if she is angry with Jones, and Jones is not present, she assumes a tone of injured asperity on his account towards Brown or Smith, or any other innocent person whom she happens to be addressing. “Now, this is really too bad, Hubert,” she burst out, as if _I_ were the culprit. “Disgraceful! Abominable! I'm sure I can't make out what the young fellow means by it. Here he comes dangling after Daphne every day and all day long--and never once says whether he means anything by it or not. In MY young days, such conduct as that would not have been considered respectable.”
I nodded and beamed benignly.
“Well, why don't you answer me?” my aunt went on, warming up. “DO you mean to tell me you think his behaviour respectful to a nice girl in Daphne's position?”
“My dear aunt,” I answered, “you confound the persons. I am not Mr. Holsworthy. I decline responsibility for him. I meet him here, in YOUR house, for the first time this morning.”
“Then that shows how often you come to see your relations, Hubert!” my aunt burst out, obliquely. “The man's been here, to my certain knowledge, every day this six weeks.”
“Really, Aunt Fanny,” I said; “you must recollect that a professional man--” “Oh, yes. THAT'S the way! Lay it all down to your profession, do, Hubert! Though I KNOW you were at the Thorntons' on Saturday--saw it in the papers--the Morning Post--'among the guests were Sir Edward and Lady Burnes, Professor Sebastian, Dr. Hubert Cumberledge,' and so forth, and so forth. YOU think you can conceal these things; but you can't. I get to know them!”
“Conceal them! My dearest aunt! Why, I danced twice with Daphne.”
“Daphne! Yes, Daphne. They all run after Daphne,” my aunt exclaimed, altering the venue once more. “But there's no respect for age left. _I_ expect to be neglected. However, that's neither here nor there. The point is this: you're the one man now living in the family. You ought to behave like a brother to Daphne. Why don't you board this Holsworthy person and ask him his intentions?”
“Goodness gracious!” I cried; “most excellent of aunts, that epoch has gone past. The late lamented Queen Anne is now dead. It's no use asking the young man of to-day to explain his intentions. He will refer you to the works of the Scandinavian dramatists.”
My aunt was speechless. She could only gurgle out the words: “Well, I can safely say that of all the monstrous behaviour--” then language failed her and she relapsed into silence.
However, when Daphne and young Holsworthy returned, I had as much talk with him as I could, and when he left the house I left also.
“Which way are you walking?” I asked, as we turned out into the street.
“Towards my rooms in the Temple.”
“Oh! I'm going back to St. Nathaniel's,” I continued. “If you'll allow me, I'll walk part way with you.”
“How very kind of you!”
We strode side by side a little distance in silence. Then a thought seemed to strike the lugubrious young man. “What a charming girl your cousin is!” he exclaimed, abruptly.
“You seem to think so,” I answered, smiling.
He flushed a little; the lantern jaw grew longer. “I admire her, of course,” he answered. “Who doesn't? She is so extraordinarily handsome.”
“Well, not exactly handsome,” I replied, with more critical and kinsman-like deliberation. “Pretty, if you will; and decidedly pleasing and attractive in manner.”
He looked me up and down, as if he found me a person singularly deficient in taste and appreciation. “Ah, but then, you are her cousin,” he said at last, with a compassionate tone. “That makes a difference.”
“I quite see all Daphne's strong points,” I answered, still smiling, for I could perceive he was very far gone. “She is good-looking, and she is clever.”
“Clever!” he echoed. “Profound! She has a most unusual intellect. She stands alone.”
“Like her mother's silk dresses,” I murmured, half under my breath.
He took no notice of my flippant remark, but went on with his rhapsody. “Such depth; such penetration! And then, how sympathetic! Why, even to a mere casual acquaintance like myself, she is so kind, so discerning!”
“ARE you such a casual acquaintance?” I inquired, with a smile. (It might have shocked Aunt Fanny to hear me; but THAT is the way we ask a young man his intentions nowadays.)
He stopped short and hesitated. “Oh, quite casual,” he replied, almost stammering. “Most casual, I assure you.... I have never ventured to do myself the honour of supposing that... that Miss Tepping could possibly care for me.”
“There is such a thing as being TOO modest and unassuming,” I answered. “It sometimes leads to unintentional cruelty.”
“No, do you think so?” he cried, his face falling all at once. “I should blame myself bitterly if that were so. Dr. Cumberledge, you are her cousin. DO you gather that I have acted in such a way as to--to lead Miss Tepping to suppose I felt any affection for her?”
I laughed in his face. “My dear boy,” I answered, laying one hand on his shoulder, “may I say the plain truth? A blind bat could see you are madly in love with her.”
His mouth twitched. “That's very serious!” he answered, gravely; “very serious.”
“It is,” I responded, with my best paternal manner, gazing blankly in front of me.
He stopped short again. “Look here,” he said, facing me. “Are you busy? No? Then come back with me to my rooms; and--I'll make a clean breast of it.”
“By all means,” I assented. “When one is young--and foolish--I have often noticed, as a medical man, that a drachm of clean breast is a magnificent prescription.”
He walked back by my side, talking all the way of Daphne's many adorable qualities. He exhausted the dictionary for laudatory adjectives. By the time I reached his door it was not HIS fault if I had not learned that the angelic hierarchy were not in the running with my pretty cousin for graces and virtues. I felt that Faith, Hope, and Charity ought to resign at once in favour of Miss Daphne Tepping, promoted.
He took me into his comfortably furnished rooms--the luxurious rooms of a rich young bachelor, with taste as well as money--and offered me a partaga. Now, I have long observed, in the course of my practice, that a choice cigar assists a man in taking a philosophic outlook on the question under discussion; so I accepted the partaga. He sat down opposite me and pointed to a photograph in the centre of his mantlepiece. “I am engaged to that lady,” he put in, shortly.
“So I anticipated,” I answered, lighting up.
He started and looked surprised. “Why, what made you guess it?” he inquired.
I smiled the calm smile of superior age--I was some eight years or so his senior. “My dear fellow,” I murmured, “what else could prevent you from proposing to Daphne--when you are so undeniably in love with her?”
“A great deal,” he answered. “For example, the sense of my own utter unworthiness.”
“One's own unworthiness,” I replied, “though doubtless real--p'f, p'f--is a barrier that most of us can readily get over when our admiration for a particular lady waxes strong enough. So THIS is the prior attachment!” I took the portrait down and scanned it.
“Unfortunately, yes. What do you think of her?”
I scrutinised the features. “Seems a nice enough little thing,” I answered. It was an innocent face, I admit; very frank and girlish.
He leaned forward eagerly. “That's just it. A nice enough little thing! Nothing in the world to be said against her. While Daphne--Miss Tepping, I mean--” His silence was ecstatic.
I examined the photograph still more closely. It displayed a lady of twenty or thereabouts, with a weak face, small, vacant features, a feeble chin, a good-humoured, simple mouth, and a wealth of golden hair that seemed to strike a keynote.
“In the theatrical profession?” I inquired at last, looking up.
He hesitated. “Well, not exactly,” he answered.
I pursed my lips and blew a ring. “Music-hall stage?” I went on, dubiously.
He nodded. “But a girl is not necessarily any the less a lady because she sings at a music-hall,” he added, with warmth, displaying an evident desire to be just to his betrothed, however much he admired Daphne.
“Certainly not,” I admitted. “A lady is a lady; no occupation can in itself unladify her.... But on the music-hall stage, the odds, one must admit, are on the whole against her.”
“Now, THERE you show prejudice!”
“One may be quite unprejudiced,” I answered, “and yet allow that connection with the music-halls does not, as such, afford clear proof that a girl is a compound of all the virtues.”
“I think she's a good girl,” he retorted, slowly.
“Then why do you want to throw her over?” I inquired.
“I don't. That's just it. On the contrary, I mean to keep my word and marry her.”
“IN ORDER to keep your word?” I suggested.
He nodded. “Precisely. It is a point of honour.”
“That's a poor ground of marriage,” I went on. “Mind, I don't want for a moment to influence you, as Daphne's cousin. I want to get at the truth of the situation. I don't even know what Daphne thinks of you. But you promised me a clean breast. Be a man and bare it.”
He bared it instantly. “I thought I was in love with this girl, you see,” he went on, “till I saw Miss Tepping.”
“That makes a difference,” I admitted.
“And I couldn't bear to break her heart.”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried. “It is the one unpardonable sin. Better anything than that.” Then I grew practical. “Father's consent?”
“MY father's? IS it likely? He expects me to marry into some distinguished English family.”
I hummed a moment. “Well, out with it!” I exclaimed, pointing my cigar at him.
He leaned back in his chair and told me the whole story. A pretty girl; golden hair; introduced to her by a friend; nice, simple little thing; mind and heart above the irregular stage on to which she had been driven by poverty alone; father dead; mother in reduced circumstances. “To keep the home together, poor Sissie decided--” “Precisely so,” I murmured, knocking off my ash. “The usual self-sacrifice! Case quite normal! Everything en regle!”
“You don't mean to say you doubt it?” he cried, flushing up, and evidently regarding me as a hopeless cynic. “I do assure you, Dr. Cumberledge, the poor child--though miles, of course, below Miss Tepping's level--is as innocent, and as good--” “As a flower in May. Oh, yes; I don't doubt it. How did you come to propose to her, though?”
He reddened a little. “Well, it was almost accidental,” he said, sheepishly. “I called there one evening, and her mother had a headache and went up to bed. And when we two were left alone, Sissie talked a great deal about her future and how hard her life was. And after a while she broke down and began to cry. And then--” I cut him short with a wave of my hand. “You need say no more,” I put in, with a sympathetic face. “We have all been there.”
We paused a moment, while I puffed smoke at the photograph again. “Well,” I said at last, “her face looks to me really simple and nice. It is a good face. Do you see her often?”
“Oh, no; she's on tour.”
“In the provinces?”
“M'yes; just at present, at Scarborough.”
“But she writes to you?”
“Every day.”
“Would you think it an unpardonable impertinence if I made bold to ask whether it would be possible for you to show me a specimen of her letters?”
He unlocked a drawer and took out three or four. Then he read one through, carefully. “I don't think,” he said, in a deliberative voice, “it would be a serious breach of confidence in me to let you look through this one. There's really nothing in it, you know--just the ordinary average every-day love-letter.”
I glanced through the little note. He was right. The conventional hearts and darts epistle. It sounded nice enough: “Longing to see you again; so lonely in this place; your dear sweet letter; looking forward to the time; your ever-devoted Sissie.”
“That seems straight,” I answered. “However, I am not quite sure. Will you allow me to take it away, with the photograph? I know I am asking much. I want to show it to a lady in whose tact and discrimination I have the greatest confidence.”
“What, Daphne?”
I smiled. “No, not Daphne,” I answered. “Our friend, Miss Wade. She has extraordinary insight.”
“I could trust anything to Miss Wade. She is true as steel.”
“You are right,” I answered. “That shows that you, too, are a judge of character.”
He hesitated. “I feel a brute,” he cried, “to go on writing every day to Sissie Montague--and yet calling every day to see Miss Tepping. But still--I do it.”
I grasped his hand. “My dear fellow,” I said, “nearly ninety per cent. of men, after all--are human!”
I took both letter and photograph back with me to Nathaniel's. When I had gone my rounds that night, I carried them into Hilda Wade's room and told her the story. Her face grew grave. “We must be just,” she said at last. “Daphne is deeply in love with him; but even for Daphne's sake, we must not take anything for granted against the other lady.”
I produced the photograph. “What do you make of that?” I asked. “_I_ think it an honest face, myself, I may tell you.”
She scrutinised it long and closely with a magnifier. Then she put her head on one side and mused very deliberately. “Madeline Shaw gave me her photograph the other day, and said to me, as she gave it, 'I do so like these modern portraits; they show one WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.'”
“You mean they are so much touched up!”
“Exactly. That, as it stands, is a sweet, innocent face--an honest girl's face--almost babyish in its transparency but... the innocence has all been put into it by the photographer.”
“You think so?”
“I know it. Look here at those lines just visible on the cheek. They disappear, nowhere, at impossible angles. AND the corners of that mouth. They couldn't go so, with that nose and those puckers. The thing is not real. It has been atrociously edited. Part is nature's; part, the photographer's; part, even possibly paint and powder.”
“But the underlying face?”
“Is a minx's.”
I handed her the letter. “This next?” I asked, fixing my eyes on her as she looked.
She read it through. For a minute or two she examined it. “The letter is right enough,” she answered, after a second reading, “though its guileless simplicity is, perhaps, under the circumstances, just a leetle overdone; but the handwriting--the handwriting is duplicity itself: a cunning, serpentine hand, no openness or honesty in it. Depend upon it, that girl is playing a double game.”
“You believe, then, there is character in handwriting?”
“Undoubtedly; when we know the character, we can see it in the writing. The difficulty is, to see it and read it BEFORE we know it; and I have practised a little at that. There is character in all we do, of course--our walk, our cough, the very wave of our hands; the only secret is, not all of us have always skill to see it. Here, however, I feel pretty sure. The curls of the g's and the tails of the y's--how full they are of wile, of low, underhand trickery!”
I looked at them as she pointed. “That is true!” I exclaimed. “I see it when you show it. Lines meant for effect. No straightness or directness in them!”
Hilda reflected a moment. “Poor Daphne!” she murmured. “I would do anything to help her.... I'll tell what might be a good plan.” Her face brightened. “My holiday comes next week. I'll run down to Scarborough--it's as nice a place for a holiday as any--and I'll observe this young lady. It can do no harm--and good may come of it.”
“How kind of you!” I cried. “But you are always all kindness.”
Hilda went to Scarborough, and came back again for a week before going on to Bruges, where she proposed to spend the greater part of her holidays. She stopped a night or two in town to report progress, and, finding another nurse ill, promised to fill her place till a substitute was forthcoming.
“Well, Dr. Cumberledge,” she said, when she saw me alone, “I was right! I have found out a fact or two about Daphne's rival!”
“You have seen her?” I asked.
“Seen her? I have stopped for a week in the same house. A very nice lodging-house on the Spa front, too. The girl's well enough off. The poverty plea fails. She goes about in good rooms and carries a mother with her.”
“That's well,” I answered. “That looks all right.”
“Oh, yes, she's quite presentable: has the manners of a lady whenever she chooses. But the chief point is this: she laid her letters every day on the table in the passage outside her door for post--laid them all in a row, so that when one claimed one's own one couldn't help seeing them.”
“Well, that was open and aboveboard,” I continued, beginning to fear we had hastily misjudged Miss Sissie Montague.
“Very open--too much so, in fact; for I was obliged to note the fact that she wrote two letters regularly every day of her life--'to my two mashes,' she explained one afternoon to a young man who was with her as she laid them on the table. One of them was always addressed to Cecil Holsworthy, Esq.” “And the other?”
“Wasn't.”
“Did you note the name?” I asked, interested.
“Yes; here it is.” She handed me a slip of paper.
I read it: “Reginald Nettlecraft, Esq., 427, Staples Inn, London.”
“What, Reggie Nettlecraft!” I cried, amused. “Why, he was a very little boy at Charterhouse when I was a big one; he afterwards went to Oxford, and got sent down from Christ Church for the part he took in burning a Greek bust in Tom Quad--an antique Greek bust--after a bump supper.”
“Just the sort of man I should have expected,” Hilda answered, with a suppressed smile. “I have a sort of inkling that Miss Montague likes HIM best; he is nearer her type; but she thinks Cecil Holsworthy the better match. Has Mr. Nettlecraft money?”
“Not a penny, I should say. An allowance from his father, perhaps, who is a Lincolnshire parson; but otherwise, nothing.”
“Then, in my opinion, the young lady is playing for Mr. Holsworthy's money; failing which, she will decline upon Mr. Nettlecraft's heart.”
We talked it all over. In the end I said abruptly: “Nurse Wade, you have seen Miss Montague, or whatever she calls herself. I have not. I won't condemn her unheard. I have half a mind to run down one day next week to Scarborough and have a look at her.”
“Do. That will suffice. You can judge then for yourself whether or not I am mistaken.”
I went; and what is more, I heard Miss Sissie sing at her hall--a pretty domestic song, most childish and charming. She impressed me not unfavourably, in spite of what Hilda said. Her peach-blossom cheek might have been art, but looked like nature. She had an open face, a baby smile and there was a frank girlishness about her dress and manner that took my fancy. “After all,” I thought to myself, “even Hilda Wade is fallible.”
So that evening, when her “turn” was over, I made up my mind to go round and call upon her. I had told Cecil Holsworthy my intentions beforehand, and it rather shocked him. He was too much of a gentleman to wish to spy upon the girl he had promised to marry. However, in my case, there need be no such scruples. I found the house and asked for Miss Montague. As I mounted the stairs to the drawing-room floor, I heard a sound of voices--the murmur of laughter; idiotic guffaws, suppressed giggles, the masculine and feminine varieties of tomfoolery.
“YOU'D make a splendid woman of business, YOU would!” a young man was saying. I gathered from his drawl that he belonged to that sub-species of the human race which is known as the Chappie.
“Wouldn't I just?” a girl's voice answered, tittering. I recognised it as Sissie's. “You ought to see me at it! Why, my brother set up a place once for mending bicycles; and I used to stand about at the door, as if I had just returned from a ride; and when fellows came in, with a nut loose or something, I'd begin talking with them while Bertie tightened it. Then, when THEY weren't looking, I'd dab the business end of a darning-needle, so, just plump into their tires; and of course, as soon as they went off, they were back again in a minute to get a puncture mended! I call THAT business.”
A roar of laughter greeted the recital of this brilliant incident in a commercial career. As it subsided, I entered. There were two men in the room, besides Miss Montague and her mother, and a second young lady.
“Excuse this late call,” I said, quietly, bowing. “But I have only one night in Scarborough, Miss Montague, and I wanted to see you. I'm a friend of Mr. Holsworthy's. I told him I'd look you up, and this is my sole opportunity.”
I FELT rather than saw that Miss Montague darted a quick glance of hidden meaning at her friends the chappies; their faces, in response, ceased to snigger and grew instantly sober.
She took my card; then, in her alternative manner as the perfect lady, she presented me to her mother. “Dr. Cumberledge, mamma,” she said, in a faintly warning voice. “A friend of Mr. Holsworthy's.”
The old lady half rose. “Let me see,” she said, staring at me. “WHICH is Mr. Holsworthy, Siss? --is it Cecil or Reggie?”
One of the chappies burst into a fatuous laugh once more at this remark. “Now, you're giving away the whole show, Mrs. Montague!” he exclaimed, with a chuckle. A look from Miss Sissie immediately checked him.
I am bound to admit, however, that after these untoward incidents of the first minute, Miss Montague and her friends behaved throughout with distinguished propriety. Her manners were perfect--I may even say demure. She asked about “Cecil” with charming naivete. She was frank and girlish. Lots of innocent fun in her, no doubt--she sang us a comic song in excellent taste, which is a severe test--but not a suspicion of double-dealing. If I had not overheard those few words as I came up the stairs, I think I should have gone away believing the poor girl an injured child of nature.
As it was, I went back to London the very next day, determined to renew my slight acquaintance with Reggie Nettlecraft.
Fortunately, I had a good excuse for going to visit him. I had been asked to collect among old Carthusians for one of those endless “testimonials” which pursue one through life, and are, perhaps, the worst Nemesis which follows the crime of having wasted one's youth at a public school: a testimonial for a retiring master, or professional cricketer, or washerwoman, or something; and in the course of my duties as collector it was quite natural that I should call upon all my fellow-victims. So I went to his rooms in Staples Inn and reintroduced myself.
Reggie Nettlecraft had grown up into an unwholesome, spotty, indeterminate young man, with a speckled necktie, and cuffs of which he was inordinately proud, and which he insisted on “flashing” every second minute. He was also evidently self-satisfied; which was odd, for I have seldom seen anyone who afforded less cause for rational satisfaction. “Hullo,” he said, when I told him my name. “So it's you, is it, Cumberledge?” He glanced at my card. “St. Nathaniel's Hospital! What rot! Why, blow me tight if you haven't turned sawbones!”
“That is my profession,” I answered, unashamed. “And you?”
“Oh, I don't have any luck, you know, old man. They turned me out of Oxford because I had too much sense of humour for the authorities there--beastly set of old fogeys! Objected to my 'chucking' oyster shells at the tutors' windows--good old English custom, fast becoming obsolete. Then I crammed for the Army. But, bless your heart, a GENTLEMAN has no chance for the Army nowadays; a pack of blooming cads, with what they call 'intellect,' read up for the exams, and don't give US a look-in; I call it sheer piffle. Then the Guv'nor set me on electrical engineering--electrical engineering's played out. I put no stock in it; besides, it's such beastly fag; and then, you get your hands dirty. So now I'm reading for the Bar; and if only my coach can put me up to tips enough to dodge the examiners, I expect to be called some time next summer.”
“And when you have failed for everything?” I inquired, just to test his sense of humour.
He swallowed it like a roach. “Oh, when I've failed for everything, I shall stick up to the Guv'nor. Hang it all, a GENTLEMAN can't be expected to earn his own livelihood. England's going to the dogs, that's where it is; no snug little sinecures left for chaps like you and me; all this beastly competition. And no respect for the feelings of gentlemen, either! Why, would you believe it, Cumberground--we used to call you Cumberground at Charterhouse, I remember, or was it Fig Tree? --I happened to get a bit lively in the Haymarket last week, after a rattling good supper, and the chap at the police court--old cove with a squint--positively proposed to send me to prison, WITHOUT THE OPTION OF A FINE! --I'll trouble you for that--send ME to prison just--for knocking down a common brute of a bobby. There's no mistake about it; England's NOT a country now for a gentleman to live in.”
“Then why not mark your sense of the fact by leaving it?” I inquired, with a smile.
He shook his head. “What? Emigrate? No, thank you! I'm not taking any. None of your colonies for ME, IF you please. I shall stick to the old ship. I'm too much attached to the Empire.”
“And yet imperialists,” I said, “generally gush over the colonies--the Empire on which the sun never sets.”
“The Empire in Leicester Squire!” he responded, gazing at me with unspoken contempt. “Have a whisky-and-soda, old chap? What, no? 'Never drink between meals?' Well, you DO surprise me! I suppose that comes of being a sawbones, don't it?”
“Possibly,” I answered. “We respect our livers.” Then I went on to the ostensible reason of my visit--the Charterhouse testimonial. He slapped his thighs metaphorically, by way of suggesting the depleted condition of his pockets. “Stony broke, Cumberledge,” he murmured; “stony broke! Honour bright! Unless Bluebird pulls off the Prince of Wales's Stakes, I really don't know how I'm to pay the Benchers.”
“It's quite unimportant,” I answered. “I was asked to ask you, and I HAVE asked you.”
“So I twig, my dear fellow. Sorry to have to say NO. But I'll tell you what I can do for you; I can put you upon a straight thing--” I glanced at the mantelpiece. “I see you have a photograph of Miss Sissie Montague,” I broke in casually, taking it down and examining it. “WITH an autograph, too. 'Reggie, from Sissie.' You are a friend of hers?”
“A friend of hers? I'll trouble you. She IS a clinker, Sissie is! You should see that girl smoke. I give you my word of honour, Cumberledge, she can consume cigarettes against any fellow I know in London. Hang it all, a girl like that, you know--well, one can't help admiring her! Ever seen her?”
“Oh, yes; I know her. I called on her, in fact, night before last, at Scarborough.”
He whistled a moment, then broke into an imbecile laugh. “My gum,” he cried; “this IS a start, this is! You don't mean to tell me YOU are the other Johnnie.”
“What other Johnnie?” I asked, feeling we were getting near it.
He leaned back and laughed again. “Well, you know that girl Sissie, she's a clever one, she is,” he went on after a minute, staring at me. “She's a regular clinker! Got two strings to her bow; that's where the trouble comes in. Me and another fellow. She likes me for love and the other fellow for money. Now, don't you come and tell me that YOU are the other fellow.”
“I have certainly never aspired to the young lady's hand,” I answered, cautiously. “But don't you know your rival's name, then?”
“That's Sissie's blooming cleverness. She's a caulker, Sissie is; you don't take a rise out of Sissie in a hurry. She knows that if I knew who the other bloke was, I'd blow upon her little game to him and put him off her. And I WOULD, s'ep me taters; for I'm nuts on that girl. I tell you, Cumberledge, she IS a clinker!”
“You seem to me admirably adapted for one another,” I answered, truthfully. I had not the slightest compunction in handing Reggie Nettlecraft over to Sissie, nor in handing Sissie over to Reggie Nettlecraft.
“Adapted for one another? That's just it. There, you hit the right nail plump on the cocoanut, Cumberground! But Sissie's an artful one, she is. She's playing for the other Johnnie. He's got the dibs, you know; and Sissie wants the dibs even more than she wants yours truly.”
“Got what?” I inquired, not quite catching the phrase.
“The dibs, old man; the chink; the oof; the ready rhino. He rolls in it, she says. I can't find out the chap's name, but I know his Guv'nor's something or other in the millionaire trade somewhere across in America.”
“She writes to you, I think?”
“That's so; every blooming day; but how the dummy did you come to know it?”
“She lays letters addressed to you on the hall table at her lodgings in Scarborough.”
“The dickens she does! Careless little beggar! Yes, she writes to me--pages. She's awfully gone on me, really. She'd marry me if it wasn't for the Johnnie with the dibs. She doesn't care for HIM: she wants his money. He dresses badly, don't you see; and, after all, the clothes make the man! I'D like to get at him. I'D spoil his pretty face for him.” And he assumed a playfully pugilistic attitude.
“You really want to get rid of this other fellow?” I asked, seeing my chance.
“Get rid of him? Why, of course! Chuck him into the river some nice dark night if I could once get a look at him!”
“As a preliminary step, would you mind letting me see one of Miss Montague's letters?” I inquired.
He drew a long breath. “They're a bit affectionate, you know,” he murmured, stroking his beardless chin in hesitation. “She's a hot 'un, Sissie is. She pitches it pretty warm on the affection-stop, I can tell you. But if you really think you can give the other Johnnie a cut on the head with her letters--well, in the interests of true love, which never DOES run smooth, I don't mind letting you have a squint, as my friend, at one of her charming billy-doos.”
He took a bundle from a drawer, ran his eye over one or two with a maudlin air, and then selected a specimen not wholly unsuitable for publication. “THERE'S one in the eye for C.,” he said, chuckling. “What would C. say to that, I wonder? She always calls him C., you know; it's so jolly non-committing. She says, 'I only wish that beastly old bore C. were at Halifax--which is where he comes from and then I would fly at once to my own dear Reggie! But, hang it all, Reggie boy, what's the good of true love if you haven't got the dibs? I MUST have my comforts. Love in a cottage is all very well in its way; but who's to pay for the fizz, Reggie?' That's her refinement, don't you see? Sissie's awfully refined. She was brought up with the tastes and habits of a lady.”
“Clearly so,” I answered. “Both her literary style and her liking for champagne abundantly demonstrate it!” His acute sense of humour did not enable him to detect the irony of my observation. I doubt if it extended much beyond oyster shells. He handed me the letter. I read it through with equal amusement and gratification. If Miss Sissie had written it on purpose in order to open Cecil Holsworthy's eyes, she couldn't have managed the matter better or more effectually. It breathed ardent love, tempered by a determination to sell her charms in the best and highest matrimonial market.
“Now, I know this man, C.,” I said when I had finished. “And I want to ask whether you will let me show him Miss Montague's letter. It would set him against the girl, who, as a matter of fact, is wholly unwor--I mean totally unfitted for him.”
“Let you show it to him? Like a bird! Why, Sissie promised me herself that if she couldn't bring 'that solemn ass, C.,' up to the scratch by Christmas, she'd chuck him and marry me. It's here, in writing.” And he handed me another gem of epistolary literature.
“You have no compunctions?” I asked again, after reading it.
“Not a blessed compunction to my name.”
“Then neither have I,” I answered.
I felt they both deserved it. Sissie was a minx, as Hilda rightly judged; while as for Nettlecraft--well, if a public school and an English university leave a man a cad, a cad he will be, and there is nothing more to be said about it.
I went straight off with the letters to Cecil Holsworthy. He read them through, half incredulously at first; he was too honest-natured himself to believe in the possibility of such double-dealing--that one could have innocent eyes and golden hair and yet be a trickster. He read them twice; then he compared them word for word with the simple affection and childlike tone of his own last letter received from the same lady. Her versatility of style would have done honour to a practised literary craftsman. At last he handed them back to me. “Do you think,” he said, “on the evidence of these, I should be doing wrong in breaking with her?”
“Wrong in breaking with her!” I exclaimed. “You would be doing wrong if you didn't,--wrong to yourself; wrong to your family; wrong, if I may venture to say so, to Daphne; wrong even in the long run to the girl herself; for she is not fitted for you, and she IS fitted for Reggie Nettlecraft. Now, do as I bid you. Sit down at once and write her a letter from my dictation.”
He sat down and wrote, much relieved that I took the responsibility off his shoulders.
“DEAR MISS MONTAGUE,” I began, “the inclosed letters have come into my hands without my seeking it. After reading them, I feel that I have absolutely no right to stand between you and the man of your real choice. It would not be kind or wise of me to do so. I release you at once, and consider myself released. You may therefore regard our engagement as irrevocably cancelled.
“Faithfully yours, “CECIL HOLSWORTHY.”
“Nothing more than that?” he asked, looking up and biting his pen. “Not a word of regret or apology?”
“Not a word,” I answered. “You are really too lenient.”
I made him take it out and post it before he could invent conscientious scruples. Then he turned to me irresolutely. “What shall I do next?” he asked, with a comical air of doubt.
I smiled. “My dear fellow, that is a matter for your own consideration.”
“But--do you think she will laugh at me?”
“Miss Montague?”
“No! Daphne.”
“I am not in not in Daphne's confidence,” I answered. “I don't know how she feels. But, on the face of it, I think I can venture to assure you that at least she won't laugh at you.”
He grasped my hand hard. “You don't mean to say so!” he cried. “Well, that's really very, kind of her! A girl of Daphne's high type! And I, who feel myself so utterly unworthy of her!”
“We are all unworthy of a good woman's love,” I answered. “But, thank Heaven, the good women don't seem to realise it.”
That evening, about ten, my new friend came back in a hurry to my rooms at St. Nathaniel's. Nurse Wade was standing there, giving her report for the night when he entered. His face looked some inches shorter and broader than usual. His eyes beamed. His mouth was radiant.
“Well, you won't believe it, Dr. Cumberledge,” he began; “but--” “Yes, I DO believe it,” I answered. “I know it. I have read it already.”
“Read it!” he cried. “Where?”
I waved my hand towards his face. “In a special edition of the evening papers,” I answered, smiling. “Daphne has accepted you!”
He sank into an easy chair, beside himself with rapture. “Yes, yes; that angel! Thanks to YOU, she has accepted me!”
“Thanks to Miss Wade,” I said, correcting him. “It is really all HER doing. If SHE had not seen through the photograph to the face, and through the face to the woman and the base little heart of her, we might never have found her out.”
He turned to Hilda with eyes all gratitude. “You have given me the dearest and best girl on earth,” he cried, seizing both her hands.
“And I have given Daphne a husband who will love and appreciate her,” Hilda answered, flushing.
“You see,” I said, maliciously; “I told you they never find us out, Holsworthy!”
As for Reggie Nettlecraft and his wife, I should like to add that they are getting on quite as well as could be expected. Reggie has joined his Sissie on the music-hall stage; and all those who have witnessed his immensely popular performance of the Drunken Gentleman before the Bow Street Police Court acknowledge without reserve that, after “failing for everything,” he has dropped at last into his true vocation. His impersonation of the part is said to be “nature itself.” I see no reason to doubt it.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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3
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THE EPISODE OF THE WIFE WHO DID HER DUTY
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To make you understand my next yarn, I must go back to the date of my introduction to Hilda.
“It is witchcraft!” I said the first time I saw her, at Le Geyt's luncheon-party.
She smiled a smile which was bewitching, indeed, but by no means witch-like,--a frank, open smile with just a touch of natural feminine triumph in it. “No, not witchcraft,” she answered, helping herself with her dainty fingers to a burnt almond from the Venetian glass dish,--“not witchcraft,--memory; aided, perhaps, by some native quickness of perception. Though I say it myself, I never met anyone, I think, whose memory goes quite as far as mine does.”
“You don't mean quite as far BACK,” I cried, jesting; for she looked about twenty-four, and had cheeks like a ripe nectarine, just as pink and just as softly downy.
She smiled again, showing a row of semi-transparent teeth, with a gleam in the depths of them. She was certainly most attractive. She had that indefinable, incommunicable, unanalysable personal quality which we know as CHARM. “No, not as far BACK,” she repeated. “Though, indeed, I often seem to remember things that happened before I was born (like Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth): I recollect so vividly all that I have heard or read about them. But as far IN EXTENT, I mean. I never let anything drop out of my memory. As this case shows you, I can recall even quite unimportant and casual bits of knowledge when any chance clue happens to bring them back to me.”
She had certainly astonished me. The occasion for my astonishment was the fact that when I handed her my card, “Dr. Hubert Ford Cumberledge, St. Nathaniel's Hospital,” she had glanced at it for a second and exclaimed, without sensible pause or break, “Oh, then, of course, you're half Welsh, as I am.”
The instantaneous and apparent inconsecutiveness of her inference took me aback. “Well, m'yes: I AM half Welsh,” I replied. “My mother came from Carnarvonshire. But, why THEN, and OF COURSE? I fail to perceive your train of reasoning.”
She laughed a sunny little laugh, like one well accustomed to receive such inquiries. “Fancy asking A WOMAN to give you 'the train of reasoning' for her intuitions!” she cried, merrily. “That shows, Dr. Cumberledge, that you are a mere man--a man of science, perhaps, but NOT a psychologist. It also suggests that you are a confirmed bachelor. A married man accepts intuitions, without expecting them to be based on reasoning.... Well, just this once, I will stretch a point to enlighten you. If I recollect right, your mother died about three years ago?”
“You are quite correct. Then you knew my mother?”
“Oh, dear me, no! I never even met her. Why THEN?”
Her look was mischievous. “But, unless I mistake, I think she came from Hendre Coed, near Bangor.”
“Wales is a village!” I exclaimed, catching my breath. “Every Welsh person seems to know all about every other.”
My new acquaintance smiled again. When she smiled she was irresistible: a laughing face protruding from a cloud of diaphanous drapery. “Now, shall I tell you how I came to know that?” she asked, poising a glace cherry on her dessert fork in front of her. “Shall I explain my trick, like the conjurers?”
“Conjurers never explain anything,” I answered. “They say: 'So, you see, THAT'S how it's done!' --with a swift whisk of the hand--and leave you as much in the dark as ever. Don't explain like the conjurers, but tell me how you guessed it.”
She shut her eyes and seemed to turn her glance inward.
“About three years ago,” she began slowly, like one who reconstructs with an effort a half-forgotten scene, “I saw a notice in the Times--Births, Deaths, and Marriages--'On the 27th of October'--was it the 27th?” The keen brown eyes opened again for a second and flashed inquiry into mine.
“Quite right,” I answered, nodding.
“I thought so. 'On the 27th of October, at Brynmor, Bournemouth, Emily Olwen Josephine, widow of the late Thomas Cumberledge, sometime colonel of the 7th Bengal Regiment of Foot, and daughter of Iolo Gwyn Ford, Esq., J.P., of Hendre Coed, near Bangor. Am I correct?” She lifted her dark eyelashes once more and flooded me.
“You are quite correct,” I answered, surprised. “And that is really all that you knew of my mother?”
“Absolutely all. The moment I saw your card, I thought to myself, in a breath: 'Ford, Cumberledge; what do I know of those two names? I have some link between them. Ah, yes; found Mrs. Cumberledge, wife of Colonel Thomas Cumberledge, of the 7th Bengals, was a Miss Ford, daughter of a Mr. Ford, of Bangor.' That came to me like a lightning-gleam. Then I said to myself again, 'Dr. Hubert Ford Cumberledge must be their son.' So there you have 'the train of reasoning.' Women CAN reason--sometimes. I had to think twice, though, before I could recall the exact words of the Times notice.”
“And can you do the same with everyone?”
“Everyone! Oh, come, now: that is expecting too much! I have not read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested everyone's family announcements. I don't pretend to be the Peerage, the Clergy List, and the London Directory rolled into one. I remembered YOUR family all the more vividly, no doubt, because of the pretty and unusual old Welsh names, 'Olwen' and 'Iolo Gwyn Ford,' which fixed themselves on my memory by their mere beauty. Everything about Wales always attracts me; my Welsh side is uppermost. But I have hundreds--oh, thousands--of such facts stored and pigeon-holed in my memory. If anybody else cares to try me,” she glanced round the table, “perhaps we may be able to test my power that way.”
Two or three of the company accepted her challenge, giving the full names of their sisters or brothers; and, in three cases out of five, my witch was able to supply either the notice of their marriage or some other like published circumstance. In the instance of Charlie Vere, it is true, she went wrong, just at first, though only in a single small particular; it was not Charlie himself who was gazetted to a sub-lieutenancy in the Warwickshire Regiment, but his brother Walter. However, the moment she was told of this slip, she corrected herself at once, and added, like lightning, “Ah, yes: how stupid of me! I have mixed up the names. Charles Cassilis Vere got an appointment on the same day in the Rhodesian Mounted Police, didn't he?” Which was in point of fact quite accurate.
But I am forgetting that all this time I have not even now introduced my witch to you.
Hilda Wade, when I first saw her, was one of the prettiest, cheeriest, and most graceful girls I have ever met--a dusky blonde, brown-eyed, brown-haired, with a creamy, waxen whiteness of skin that was yet warm and peach-downy. And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain fact that there was nothing uncanny about her. In spite of her singular faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough. But she was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and sparkling--a gleam of sunshine. She laid no claim to supernatural powers; she held no dealings with familiar spirits; she was simply a girl of strong personal charm, endowed with an astounding memory and a rare measure of feminine intuition. Her memory, she told me, she shared with her father and all her father's family; they were famous for their prodigious faculty in that respect. Her impulsive temperament and quick instincts, on the other hand, descended to her, she thought, from her mother and her Welsh ancestry.
Externally, she seemed thus at first sight little more than the ordinary pretty, light-hearted English girl, with a taste for field sports (especially riding), and a native love of the country. But at times one caught in the brightened colour of her lustrous brown eyes certain curious undercurrents of depth, of reserve, and of a questioning wistfulness which made you suspect the presence of profounder elements in her nature. From the earliest moment of our acquaintance, indeed, I can say with truth that Hilda Wade interested me immensely. I felt drawn. Her face had that strange quality of compelling attention for which we have as yet no English name, but which everybody recognises. You could not ignore her. She stood out. She was the sort of girl one was constrained to notice.
It was Le Geyts first luncheon-party since his second marriage. Big-bearded, genial, he beamed round on us jubilant. He was proud of his wife and proud of his recent Q.C.-ship. The new Mrs. Le Geyt sat at the head of the table, handsome, capable, self-possessed; a vivid, vigorous woman and a model hostess. Though still quite young, she was large and commanding. Everybody was impressed by her. “Such a good mother to those poor motherless children!” all the ladies declared in a chorus of applause. And, indeed, she had the face of a splendid manager.
I said as much in an undertone over the ices to Miss Wade, who sat beside me--though I ought not to have discussed them at their own table. “Hugo Le Geyt seems to have made an excellent choice,” I murmured. “Maisie and Ettie will be lucky, indeed, to be taken care of by such a competent stepmother. Don't you think so?”
My witch glanced up at her hostess with a piercing dart of the keen brown eyes, held her wine-glass half raised, and then electrified me by uttering, in the same low voice, audible to me alone, but quite clearly and unhesitatingly, these astounding words: “I think, before twelve mouths are out, MR. LE GEYT WILL HAVE MURDERED HER!”
For a minute I could not answer, so startling was the effect of this confident prediction. One does not expect to be told such things at lunch, over the port and peaches, about one's dearest friends, beside their own mahogany. And the assured air of unfaltering conviction with which Hilda Wade said it to a complete stranger took my breath away. WHY did she think so at all? And IF she thought so why choose ME as the recipient of her singular confidences?
I gasped and wondered.
“What makes you fancy anything so unlikely?” I asked aside at last, behind the babel of voices. “You quite alarm me.”
She rolled a mouthful of apricot ice reflectively on her tongue, and then murmured, in a similar aside, “Don't ask me now. Some other time will do. But I mean what I say. Believe me; I do not speak at random.”
She was quite right, of course. To continue would have been equally rude and foolish. I had perforce to bottle up my curiosity for the moment and wait till my sibyl was in the mood for interpreting.
After lunch we adjourned to the drawing-room. Almost at once, Hilda Wade flitted up with her brisk step to the corner where I was sitting. “Oh, Dr. Cumberledge,” she began, as if nothing odd had occurred before, “I WAS so glad to meet you and have a chance of talking to you, because I DO so want to get a nurse's place at St. Nathaniel's.”
“A nurse's place!” I exclaimed, a little surprised, surveying her dress of palest and softest Indian muslin; for she looked to me far too much of a butterfly for such serious work. “Do you really mean it; or are you one of the ten thousand modern young ladies who are in quest of a Mission, without understanding that Missions are unpleasant? Nursing, I can tell you, is not all crimped cap and becoming uniform.”
“I know that,” she answered, growing grave. “I ought to know it. I am a nurse already at St. George's Hospital.”
“You are a nurse! And at St. George's! Yet you want to change to Nathaniel's? Why? St. George's is in a much nicer part of London, and the patients there come on an average from a much better class than ours in Smithfield.”
“I know that too; but... Sebastian is at St. Nathaniel's--and I want to be near Sebastian.”
“Professor Sebastian!” I cried, my face lighting up with a gleam of enthusiasm at our great teacher's name. “Ah, if it is to be under Sebastian that you desire, I can see you mean business. I know now you are in earnest.”
“In earnest?” she echoed, that strange deeper shade coming over her face as she spoke, while her tone altered. “Yes, I think I am in earnest! It is my object in life to be near Sebastian--to watch him and observe him. I mean to succeed.... But I have given you my confidence, perhaps too hastily, and I must implore you not to mention my wish to him.”
“You may trust me implicitly,” I answered.
“Oh, yes; I saw that,” she put in, with a quick gesture. “Of course, I saw by your face you were a man of honour--a man one could trust or I would not have spoken to you. But--you promise me?”
“I promise you,” I replied, naturally flattered. She was delicately pretty, and her quaint, oracular air, so incongruous with the dainty face and the fluffy brown hair, piqued me not a little. That special mysterious commodity of CHARM seemed to pervade all she did and said. So I added: “And I will mention to Sebastian that you wish for a nurse's place at Nathaniel's. As you have had experience, and can be recommended, I suppose, by Le Geyt's sister,” with whom she had come, “no doubt you can secure an early vacancy.”
“Thanks so much,” she answered, with that delicious smile. It had an infantile simplicity about it which contrasted most piquantly with her prophetic manner.
“Only,” I went on, assuming a confidential tone, “you really MUST tell me why you said that just now about Hugo Le Geyt. Recollect, your Delphian utterances have gravely astonished and disquieted me. Hugo is one of my oldest and dearest friends; and I want to know why you have formed this sudden bad opinion of him.”
“Not of HIM, but of HER,” she answered, to my surprise, taking a small Norwegian dagger from the what-not and playing with it to distract attention.
“Come, come, now,” I cried, drawing back. “You are trying to mystify me. This is deliberate seer-mongery. You are presuming on your powers. But I am not the sort of man to be caught by horoscopes. I decline to believe it.”
She turned on me with a meaning glance. Those truthful eyes fixed me. “I am going from here straight to my hospital,” she murmured, with a quiet air of knowledge--talking, I mean to say, like one who really knows. “This room is not the place to discuss this matter, is it? If you will walk back to St. George's with me, I think I can make you see and feel that I am speaking, not at haphazard, but from observation and experience.”
Her confidence roused my most vivid curiosity. When she left I left with her. The Le Geyts lived in one of those new streets of large houses on Campden Hill, so that our way eastward lay naturally through Kensington Gardens.
It was a sunny June day, when light pierced even through the smoke of London, and the shrubberies breathed the breath of white lilacs. “Now, what did you mean by that enigmatical saying?” I asked my new Cassandra, as we strolled down the scent-laden path. “Woman's intuition is all very well in its way; but a mere man may be excused if he asks for evidence.”
She stopped short as I spoke, and gazed full into my eyes. Her hand fingered her parasol handle. “I meant what I said,” she answered, with emphasis. “Within one year, Mr. Le Geyt will have murdered his wife. You may take my word, for it.”
“Le Geyt!” I cried. “Never! I know the man so well! A big, good-natured, kindly schoolboy! He is the gentlest and best of mortals. Le Geyt a murderer! Im--possible!”
Her eyes were far away. “Has it never occurred to you,” she asked, slowly, with her pythoness air, “that there are murders and murders? --murders which depend in the main upon the murderer... and also murders which depend in the main upon the victim?”
“The victim? What do you mean?”
“Well, there are brutal men who commit murder out of sheer brutality--the ruffians of the slums; and there are sordid men who commit murder for sordid money--the insurers who want to forestall their policies, the poisoners who want to inherit property; but have you ever realised that there are also murderers who become so by accident, through their victims' idiosyncrasy? I thought all the time while I was watching Mrs. Le Geyt, 'That woman is of the sort predestined to be murdered.' ... And when you asked me, I told you so. I may have been imprudent; still, I saw it, and I said it.”
“But this is second sight!” I cried, drawing away. “Do you pretend to prevision?”
“No, not second sight; nothing uncanny, nothing supernatural. But prevision, yes; prevision based, not on omens or auguries, but on solid fact--on what I have seen and noticed.”
“Explain yourself, oh, prophetess!”
She let the point of her parasol make a curved trail on the gravel, and followed its serpentine wavings with her eyes. “You know our house surgeon?” she asked at last, looking up of a sudden.
“What, Travers? Oh, intimately.”
“Then come to my ward and see. After you have seen, you will perhaps believe me.”
Nothing that I could say would get any further explanation out of her just then. “You would laugh at me if I told you,” she persisted; “you won't laugh when you have seen it.”
We walked on in silence as far as Hyde Park Corner. There my Sphinx tripped lightly up the steps of St. George's Hospital. “Get Mr. Travers's leave,” she said, with a nod, and a bright smile, “to visit Nurse Wade's ward. Then come up to me there in five minutes.”
I explained to my friend the house surgeon that I wished to see certain cases in the accident ward of which I had heard; he smiled a restrained smile--“Nurse Wade, no doubt!” but, of course, gave me permission to go up and look at them. “Stop a minute,” he added, “and I'll come with you.” When we got there, my witch had already changed her dress, and was waiting for us demurely in the neat dove-coloured gown and smooth white apron of the hospital nurses. She looked even prettier and more meaningful so than in her ethereal outside summer-cloud muslin.
“Come over to this bed,” she said at once to Travers and myself, without the least air of mystery. “I will show you what I mean by it.”
“Nurse Wade has remarkable insight,” Travers whispered to me as we went.
“I can believe it,” I answered.
“Look at this woman,” she went on, aside, in a low voice--“no, NOT the first bed; the one beyond it; Number 60. I don't want the patient to know you are watching her. Do you observe anything odd about her appearance?”
“She is somewhat the same type,” I began, “as Mrs.--” Before I could get out the words “Le Geyt,” her warning eye and puckering forehead had stopped me. “As the lady we were discussing,” she interposed, with a quiet wave of one hand. “Yes, in some points very much so. You notice in particular her scanty hair--so thin and poor--though she is young and good-looking?”
“It is certainly rather a feeble crop for a woman of her age,” I admitted. “And pale at that, and washy.”
“Precisely. It's done up behind about as big as a nutmeg.... Now, observe the contour of her back as she sits up there; it is curiously curved, isn't it?”
“Very,” I replied. “Not exactly a stoop, nor yet quite a hunch, but certainly an odd spinal configuration.”
“Like our friend's, once more?”
“Like our friend's, exactly!”
Hilda Wade looked away, lest she should attract the patient's attention. “Well, that woman was brought in here, half-dead, assaulted by her husband,” she went on, with a note of unobtrusive demonstration.
“We get a great many such cases,” Travers put in, with true medical unconcern, “very interesting cases; and Nurse Wade has pointed out to me the singular fact that in almost all instances the patients resemble one another physically.”
“Incredible!” I cried. “I can understand that there might well be a type of men who assault their wives, but not, surely, a type of women who get assaulted.”
“That is because you know less about it than Nurse Wade,” Travers answered, with an annoying smile of superior knowledge.
Our instructress moved on to another bed, laying one gentle hand as she passed on a patient's forehead. The patient glanced gratitude. “That one again,” she said once more, half indicating a cot at a little distance: “Number 74. She has much the same thin hair--sparse, weak, and colourless. She has much the same curved back, and much the same aggressive, self-assertive features. Looks capable, doesn't she? A born housewife! ... Well, she, too, was knocked down and kicked half-dead the other night by her husband.”
“It is certainly odd,” I answered, “how very much they both recall--” “Our friend at lunch! Yes, extraordinary. See here”; she pulled out a pencil and drew the quick outline of a face in her note-book. “THAT is what is central and essential to the type. They have THIS sort of profile. Women with faces like that ALWAYS get assaulted.”
Travers glanced over her shoulder. “Quite true,” he assented, with his bourgeois nod. “Nurse Wade in her time has shown me dozens of them. Round dozens: bakers' dozens! They all belong to that species. In fact, when a woman of this type is brought in to us wounded now, I ask at once, 'Husband?' and the invariable answer comes pat: 'Well, yes, sir; we had some words together.' The effect of words, my dear fellow, is something truly surprising.”
“They can pierce like a dagger,” I mused.
“And leave an open wound behind that requires dressing,” Travers added, unsuspecting. Practical man, Travers!
“But WHY do they get assaulted--the women of this type?” I asked, still bewildered.
“Number 87 has her mother just come to see her,” my sorceress interposed. “SHE'S an assault case; brought in last night; badly kicked and bruised about the head and shoulders. Speak to the mother. She'll explain it all to you.”
Travers and I moved over to the cot her hand scarcely indicated. “Well, your daughter looks pretty comfortable this afternoon, in spite of the little fuss,” Travers began, tentatively.
“Yus, she's a bit tidy, thanky,” the mother answered, smoothing her soiled black gown, grown green with long service. “She'll git on naow, please Gord. But Joe most did for 'er.”
“How did it all happen?” Travers asked, in a jaunty tone, to draw her out.
“Well, it was like this, sir, yer see. My daughter, she's a lidy as keeps 'erself TO 'erself, as the sayin' is, an' 'olds 'er 'ead up. She keeps up a proper pride, an' minds 'er 'ouse an' 'er little uns. She ain't no gadabaht. But she 'AVE a tongue, she 'ave”; the mother lowered her voice cautiously, lest the “lidy” should hear. “I don't deny it that she 'AVE a tongue, at times, through myself 'avin' suffered from it. And when she DO go on, Lord bless you, why, there ain't no stoppin' of 'er.”
“Oh, she has a tongue, has she?” Travers replied, surveying the “case” critically. “Well, you know, she looks like it.”
“So she do, sir; so she do. An' Joe, 'e's a man as wouldn't 'urt a biby--not when 'e's sober, Joe wouldn't. But 'e'd bin aht; that's where it is; an' 'e cum 'ome lite, a bit fresh, through 'avin' bin at the friendly lead; an' my daughter, yer see, she up an' give it to 'im. My word, she DID give it to 'im! An' Joe, 'e's a peaceable man when 'e ain't a bit fresh; 'e's more like a friend to 'er than an 'usband, Joe is; but 'e lost 'is temper that time, as yer may say, by reason o' bein' fresh, an' 'e knocked 'er abaht a little, an' knocked 'er teeth aht. So we brought 'er to the orspital.”
The injured woman raised herself up in bed with a vindictive scowl, displaying as she did so the same whale-like curved back as in the other “cases.” “But we've sent 'im to the lockup,” she continued, the scowl giving way fast to a radiant joy of victory as she contemplated her triumph “an' wot's more, I 'ad the last word of 'im. 'An 'e'll git six month for this, the neighbours says; an' when he comes aht again, my Gord, won't 'e ketch it!”
“You look capable of punishing him for it,” I answered, and as I spoke, I shuddered; for I saw her expression was precisely the expression Mrs. Le Geyt's face had worn for a passing second when her husband accidentally trod on her dress as we left the dining-room.
My witch moved away. We followed. “Well, what do you say to it now?” she asked, gliding among the beds with noiseless feet and ministering fingers.
“Say to it?” I answered. “That it is wonderful, wonderful. You have quite convinced me.”
“You would think so,” Travers put in, “if you had been in this ward as often as I have, and observed their faces. It's a dead certainty. Sooner or later, that type of woman is cock-sure to be assaulted.”
“In a certain rank of life, perhaps,” I answered, still loth to believe it; “but not surely in ours. Gentlemen do not knock down their wives and kick their teeth out.”
My Sibyl smiled. “No; there class tells,” she admitted. “They take longer about it, and suffer more provocation. They curb their tempers. But in the end, one day, they are goaded beyond endurance; and then--a convenient knife--a rusty old sword--a pair of scissors--anything that comes handy, like that dagger this morning. One wild blow--half unpremeditated--and... the thing is done! Twelve good men and true will find it wilful murder.”
I felt really perturbed. “But can we do nothing,” I cried, “to warn poor Hugo?”
“Nothing, I fear,” she answered. “After all, character must work itself out in its interactions with character. He has married that woman, and he must take the consequences. Does not each of us in life suffer perforce the Nemesis of his own temperament?”
“Then is there not also a type of men who assault their wives?”
“That is the odd part of it--no. All kinds, good and bad, quick and slow, can be driven to it at last. The quick-tempered stab or kick; the slow devise some deliberate means of ridding themselves of their burden.”
“But surely we might caution Le Geyt of his danger!”
“It is useless. He would not believe us. We cannot be at his elbow to hold back his hand when the bad moment comes. Nobody will be there, as a matter of fact; for women of this temperament--born naggers, in short, since that's what it comes to--when they are also ladies, graceful and gracious as she is; never nag at all before outsiders. To the world, they are bland; everybody says, 'What charming talkers!' They are 'angels abroad, devils at home,' as the proverb puts it. Some night she will provoke him when they are alone, till she has reached his utmost limit of endurance--and then,” she drew one hand across her dove-like throat, “it will be all finished.”
“You think so?”
“I am sure of it. We human beings go straight like sheep to our natural destiny.”
“But--that is fatalism.”
“No, not fatalism: insight into temperament. Fatalists believe that your life is arranged for you beforehand from without; willy-nilly, you MUST act so. I only believe that in this jostling world your life is mostly determined by your own character, in its interaction with the characters of those who surround you. Temperament works itself out. It is your own acts and deeds that make up Fate for you.”
For some months after this meeting neither Hilda Wade nor I saw anything more of the Le Geyts. They left town for Scotland at the end of the season; and when all the grouse had been duly slaughtered and all the salmon duly hooked, they went on to Leicestershire for the opening of fox-hunting; so it was not till after Christmas that they returned to Campden Hill. Meanwhile, I had spoken to Dr. Sebastian about Miss Wade, and on my recommendation he had found her a vacancy at our hospital. “A most intelligent girl, Cumberledge,” he remarked to me with a rare burst of approval--for the Professor was always critical--after she had been at work for some weeks at St. Nathaniel's. “I am glad you introduced her here. A nurse with brains is such a valuable accessory--unless, of course, she takes to THINKING. But Nurse Wade never THINKS; she is a useful instrument--does what she's told, and carries out one's orders implicitly.”
“She knows enough to know when she doesn't know,” I answered, “which is really the rarest kind of knowledge.”
“Unrecorded among young doctors!” the Professor retorted, with his sardonic smile. “They think they understand the human body from top to toe, when, in reality--well, they might do the measles!”
Early in January, I was invited again to lunch with the Le Geyts. Hilda Wade was invited, too. The moment we entered the house, we were both of us aware that some grim change had come over it. Le Geyt met us in the hall, in his old genial style, it is true; but still with a certain reserve, a curious veiled timidity which we had not known in him. Big and good-humoured as he was, with kindly eyes beneath the shaggy eyebrows, he seemed strangely subdued now; the boyish buoyancy had gone out of him. He spoke rather lower than was his natural key, and welcomed us warmly, though less effusively than of old. An irreproachable housemaid, in a spotless cap, ushered us into the transfigured drawing-room. Mrs. Le Geyt, in a pretty cloth dress, neatly tailor-made, rose to meet us, beaming the vapid smile of the perfect hostess--that impartial smile which falls, like the rain from Heaven, on good and bad indifferently. “SO charmed to see you again, Dr. Cumberledge!” she bubbled out, with a cheerful air--she was always cheerful, mechanically cheerful, from a sense of duty. “It IS such a pleasure to meet dear Hugo's old friends! AND Miss Wade, too; how delightful! You look so well, Miss Wade! Oh, you're both at St. Nathaniel's now, aren't you? So you can come together. What a privilege for you, Dr. Cumberledge, to have such a clever assistant--or, rather, fellow-worker. It must be a great life, yours, Miss Wade; such a sphere of usefulness! If we can only feel we are DOING GOOD--that is the main matter. For my own part, I like to be mixed up with every good work that's going on in my neighbourhood. I'm the soup-kitchen, you know, and I'm visitor at the workhouse; and I'm the Dorcas Society, and the Mutual Improvement Class; and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to Children, and I'm sure I don't know how much else; so that, what with all that, and what with dear Hugo and the darling children”--she glanced affectionately at Maisie and Ettie, who sat bolt upright, very mute and still, in their best and stiffest frocks, on two stools in the corner--“I can hardly find time for my social duties.”
“Oh, dear Mrs. Le Geyt,” one of her visitors said with effusion, from beneath a nodding bonnet--she was the wife of a rural dean from Staffordshire--“EVERYBODY is agreed that YOUR social duties are performed to a marvel. They are the envy of Kensington. We all of us wonder, indeed, how one woman can find time for all of it!”
Our hostess looked pleased. “Well, yes,” she answered, gazing down at her fawn-coloured dress with a half-suppressed smile of self-satisfaction, “I flatter myself I CAN get through about as much work in a day as anybody!” Her eye wandered round her rooms with a modest air of placid self-approval which was almost comic. Everything in them was as well-kept and as well-polished as good servants, thoroughly drilled, could make it. Not a stain or a speck anywhere. A miracle of neatness. Indeed, when I carelessly drew the Norwegian dagger from its scabbard, as we waited for lunch, and found that it stuck in the sheath, I almost started to discover that rust could intrude into that orderly household.
I recollected then how Hilda Wade had pointed out to me during those six months at St. Nathaniel's that the women whose husbands assaulted them were almost always “notable housewives,” as they say in America--good souls who prided themselves not a little on their skill in management. They were capable, practical mothers of families, with a boundless belief in themselves, a sincere desire to do their duty, as far as they understood it, and a habit of impressing their virtues upon others which was quite beyond all human endurance. Placidity was their note; provoking placidity. I felt sure it must have been of a woman of this type that the famous phrase was coined--“Elle a toutes les vertus--et elle est insupportable.”
“Clara, dear,” the husband said, “shall we go in to lunch?”
“You dear, stupid boy! Are we not all waiting for YOU to give your arm to Lady Maitland?”
The lunch was perfect, and it was perfectly served. The silver glowed; the linen was marked with H. C. Le G. in a most artistic monogram. I noticed that the table decorations were extremely pretty. Somebody complimented our hostess upon them. Mrs. Le Geyt nodded and smiled--“_I_ arranged them. Dear Hugo, in his blundering way--the big darling--forgot to get me the orchids I had ordered. So I had to make shift with what few things our own wee conservatory afforded. Still, with a little taste and a little ingenuity--” She surveyed her handiwork with just pride, and left the rest to our imaginations.
“Only you ought to explain, Clara--” Le Geyt began, in a deprecatory tone.
“Now, you darling old bear, we won't harp on that twice-told tale again,” Clara interrupted, with a knowing smile. “Point da rechauffes! Let us leave one another's misdeeds and one another's explanations for their proper sphere--the family circle. The orchids did NOT turn up, that is the point; and I managed to make shift with the plumbago and the geraniums. Maisie, my sweet, NOT that pudding, IF you please; too rich for you, darling. I know your digestive capacities better than you do. I have told you fifty times it doesn't agree with you. A small slice of the other one!”
“Yes, mamma,” Maisie answered, with a cowed and cowering air. I felt sure she would have murmured, “Yes, mamma,” in the selfsame tone if the second Mrs. Le Geyt had ordered her to hang herself.
“I saw you out in the park, yesterday, on your bicycle, Ettie,” Le Geyt's sister, Mrs. Mallet, put in. “But do you know, dear, I didn't think your jacket was half warm enough.”
“Mamma doesn't like me to wear a warmer one,” the child answered, with a visible shudder of recollection, “though I should love to, Aunt Lina.”
“My precious Ettie, what nonsense--for a violent exercise like bicycling! Where one gets so hot! So unbecomingly hot! You'd be simply stifled, darling.” I caught a darted glance which accompanied the words and which made Ettie recoil into the recesses of her pudding.
“But yesterday was so cold, Clara,” Mrs. Mallet went on, actually venturing to oppose the infallible authority. “A nipping morning. And such a flimsy coat! Might not the dear child be allowed to judge for herself in a matter purely of her own feelings?”
Mrs. Le Geyt, with just the shadow of a shrug, was all sweet reasonableness. She smiled more suavely than ever. “Surely, Lina,” she remonstrated, in her frankest and most convincing tone, “_I_ must know best what is good for dear Ettie, when I have been watching her daily for more than six months past, and taking the greatest pains to understand both her constitution and her disposition. She needs hardening, Ettie does. Hardening. Don't you agree with me, Hugo?”
Le Geyt shuffled uneasily in his chair. Big man as he was, with his great black beard and manly bearing, I could see he was afraid to differ from her overtly. “Well,--m--perhaps, Clara,” he began, peering from under the shaggy eyebrows, “it would be best for a delicate child like Ettie--” Mrs. Le Geyt smiled a compassionate smile. “Ah, I forgot,” she cooed, sweetly. “Dear Hugo never CAN understand the upbringing of children. It is a sense denied him. We women know”--with a sage nod. “They were wild little savages when I took them in hand first--weren't you, Maisie? Do you remember, dear, how you broke the looking-glass in the boudoir, like an untamed young monkey? Talking of monkeys, Mr. Cotswould, HAVE you seen those delightful, clever, amusing French pictures at that place in Suffolk Street? There's a man there--a Parisian--I forget his honoured name--Leblanc, or Lenoir, or Lebrun, or something--but he's a most humorous artist, and he paints monkeys and storks and all sorts of queer beasties ALMOST as quaintly and expressively as you do. Mind, I say ALMOST, for I never will allow that any Frenchman could do anything QUITE so good, quite so funnily mock-human, as your marabouts and professors.”
“What a charming hostess Mrs. Le Geyt makes,” the painter observed to me, after lunch. “Such tact! Such discrimination! ... AND, what a devoted stepmother!”
“She is one of the local secretaries of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,” I said, drily.
“And charity begins at home,” Hilda Wade added, in a significant aside.
We walked home together as far as Stanhope Gate. Our sense of doom oppressed us. “And yet,” I said, turning to her, as we left the doorstep, “I don't doubt Mrs. Le Geyt really believes she IS a model stepmother!”
“Of course she believes it,” my witch answered. “She has no more doubt about that than about anything else. Doubts are not in her line. She does everything exactly as it ought to be done--who should know, if not she? --and therefore she is never afraid of criticism. Hardening, indeed! that poor slender, tender, shrinking little Ettie! A frail exotic. She would harden her into a skeleton if she had her way. Nothing's much harder than a skeleton, I suppose, except Mrs. Le Geyt's manner of training one.”
“I should be sorry to think,” I broke in, “that that sweet little floating thistle-down of a child I once knew was to be done to death by her.”
“Oh, as for that, she will NOT be done to death,” Hilda answered, in her confident way. “Mrs. Le Geyt won't live long enough.”
I started. “You think not?”
“I don't think, I am sure of it. We are at the fifth act now. I watched Mr. Le Geyt closely all through lunch, and I'm more confident than ever that the end is coming. He is temporarily crushed; but he is like steam in a boiler, seething, seething, seething. One day she will sit on the safety-valve, and the explosion will come. When it comes”--she raised aloft one quick hand in the air as if striking a dagger home--“good-bye to her!”
For the next few months I saw much of Le Geyt; and the more I saw of him, the more I saw that my witch's prognosis was essentially correct. They never quarrelled; but Mrs. Le Geyt, in her unobtrusive way, held a quiet hand over her husband which became increasingly apparent. In the midst of her fancy-work (those busy fingers were never idle) she kept her eyes well fixed on him. Now and again I saw him glance at his motherless girls with what looked like a tender, protecting regret; especially when “Clara” had been most openly drilling them; but he dared not interfere. She was crushing their spirit, as she was crushing their father's--and all, bear in mind, for the best of motives! She had their interest at heart; she wanted to do what was right for them. Her manner to him and to them was always honey-sweet--in all externals; yet one could somehow feel it was the velvet glove that masked the iron hand; not cruel, not harsh even, but severely, irresistibly, unflinchingly crushing. “Ettie, my dear, get your brown hat at once. What's that? Going to rain? I did not ask you, my child, for YOUR opinion on the weather. My own suffices. A headache? Oh, nonsense! Headaches are caused by want of exercise. Nothing so good for a touch of headache as a nice brisk walk in Kensington Gardens. Maisie, don't hold your sister's hand like that; it is imitation sympathy! You are aiding and abetting her in setting my wishes at naught. Now, no long faces! What _I_ require is CHEERFUL obedience.”
A bland, autocratic martinet: smiling, inexorable! Poor, pale Ettie grew thinner and wanner under her law daily, while Maisie's temper, naturally docile, was being spoiled before one's eyes by persistent, needless thwarting.
As spring came on, however, I began to hope that things were really mending. Le Geyt looked brighter; some of his own careless, happy-go-lucky self came back again at intervals. He told me once, with a wistful sigh, that he thought of sending the children to school in the country--it would be better for them, he said, and would take a little work off dear Clara's shoulders; for never even to me was he disloyal to Clara. I encouraged him in the idea. He went on to say that the great difficulty in the way was... Clara. She was SO conscientious; she thought it her duty to look after the children herself, and couldn't bear to delegate any part of that duty to others. Besides, she had such an excellent opinion of the Kensington High School!
When I told Hilda Wade of this, she set her teeth together and answered at once: “That settles it! The end is very near. HE will insist upon their going, to save them from that woman's ruthless kindness; and SHE will refuse to give up any part of what she calls her duty. HE will reason with her; he will plead for his children; SHE will be adamant. Not angry--it is never the way of that temperament to get angry--just calmly, sedately, and insupportably provoking. When she goes too far, he will flare up at last; some taunt will rouse him; the explosion will come; and... the children will go to their Aunt Lina, whom they dote upon. When all is said and done, it is the poor man I pity!”
“You said within twelve months.”
“That was a bow drawn at a venture. It may be a little sooner; it may be a little later. But--next week or next month--it is coming: it is coming!”
June smiled upon us once more; and on the afternoon of the 13th, the anniversary of our first lunch together at the Le Geyts, I was up at my work in the accident ward at St. Nathaniel's. “Well, the ides of June have come, Sister Wade!” I said, when I met her, parodying Caesar.
“But not yet gone,” she answered; and a profound sense of foreboding spread over her speaking face as she uttered the words.
Her oracle disquieted me. “Why, I dined there last night,” I cried; “and all seemed exceptionally well.”
“The calm before the storm, perhaps,” she murmured.
Just at that moment I heard a boy crying in the street: “Pall mall Gazette; 'ere y'are; speshul edishun! Shocking tragedy at the West-end! Orful murder! 'Ere y'are! Spechul Globe! Pall Mall, extry speshul!”
A weird tremor broke over me. I walked down into the street and bought a paper. There it stared me in the face on the middle page: “Tragedy at Campden Hill: Well-known Barrister Murders his Wife. Sensational Details.”
I looked closer and read. It was as I feared. The Le Geyts! After I left their house, the night before, husband and wife must have quarrelled, no doubt over the question of the children's schooling; and at some provoking word, as it seemed, Hugo must have snatched up a knife--“a little ornamental Norwegian dagger,” the report said, “which happened to lie close by on the cabinet in the drawing-room,” and plunged it into his wife's heart. “The unhappy lady died instantaneously, by all appearances, and the dastardly crime was not discovered by the servants till eight o'clock this morning. Mr. Le Geyt is missing.”
I rushed up with the news to Nurse Wade, who was at work in the accident ward. She turned pale, but bent over her patient and said nothing.
“It is fearful to think!” I groaned out at last; “for us who know all--that poor Le Geyt will be hanged for it! Hanged for attempting to protect his children!”
“He will NOT be hanged,” my witch answered, with the same unquestioning confidence as ever.
“Why not?” I asked, astonished once more at this bold prediction.
She went on bandaging the arm of the patient whom she was attending. “Because... he will commit suicide,” she replied, without moving a muscle.
“How do you know that?”
She stuck a steel safety-pin with deft fingers into the roll of lint. “When I have finished my day's work,” she answered slowly, still continuing the bandage, “I may perhaps find time to tell you.”
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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4
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THE EPISODE OF THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT COMMIT SUICIDE
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After my poor friend Le Geyt had murdered his wife, in a sudden access of uncontrollable anger, under the deepest provocation, the police naturally began to inquire for him. It is a way they have; the police are no respecters of persons; neither do they pry into the question of motives. They are but poor casuists. A murder is for them a murder, and a murderer a murderer; it is not their habit to divide and distinguish between case and case with Hilda Wade's analytical accuracy.
As soon as my duties at St. Nathaniel's permitted me, on the evening of the discovery, I rushed round to Mrs. Mallet's, Le Geyt's sister. I had been detained at the hospital for some hours, however, watching a critical case; and by the time I reached Great Stanhope Street I found Hilda Wade, in her nurse's dress, there before me. Sebastian, it seemed, had given her leave out for the evening. She was a supernumerary nurse, attached to his own observation-cots as special attendant for scientific purposes, and she could generally get an hour or so whenever she required it.
Mrs. Mallet had been in the breakfast-room with Hilda before I arrived; but as I reached the house she rushed upstairs to wash her red eyes and compose herself a little before the strain of meeting me; so I had the opportunity for a few words alone first with my prophetic companion.
“You said just now at Nathaniel's,” I burst out, “that Le Geyt would not be hanged: he would commit suicide. What did you mean by that? What reason had you for thinking so?”
Hilda sank into a chair by the open window, pulled a flower abstractedly from the vase at her side, and began picking it to pieces, floret after floret, with twitching fingers. She was deeply moved. “Well, consider his family history,” she burst out at last, looking up at me with her large brown eyes as she reached the last petal. “Heredity counts.... And after such a disaster!”
She said “disaster,” not “crime”; I noted mentally the reservation implied in the word.
“Heredity counts,” I answered. “Oh, yes. It counts much. But what about Le Geyt's family history?” I could not recall any instance of suicide among his forbears.
“Well--his mother's father was General Faskally, you know,” she replied, after a pause, in her strange, oblique manner. “Mr. Le Geyt is General Faskally's eldest grandson.”
“Exactly,” I broke in, with a man's desire for solid fact in place of vague intuition. “But I fail to see quite what that has to do with it.”
“The General was killed in India during the Mutiny.”
“I remember, of course--killed, bravely fighting.”
“Yes; but it was on a forlorn hope, for which he volunteered, and in the course of which he is said to have walked straight into an almost obvious ambuscade of the enemy's.”
“Now, my dear Miss Wade”--I always dropped the title of “Nurse,” by request, when once we were well clear of Nathaniel's,--“I have every confidence, you are aware, in your memory and your insight; but I do confess I fail to see what bearing this incident can have on poor Hugo's chances of being hanged or committing suicide.”
She picked a second flower, and once more pulled out petal after petal. As she reached the last again, she answered, slowly: “You must have forgotten the circumstances. It was no mere accident. General Faskally had made a serious strategical blunder at Jhansi. He had sacrificed the lives of his subordinates needlessly. He could not bear to face the survivors. In the course of the retreat, he volunteered to go on this forlorn hope, which might equally well have been led by an officer of lower rank; and he was permitted to do so by Sir Colin in command, as a means of retrieving his lost military character. He carried his point, but he carried it recklessly, taking care to be shot through the heart himself in the first onslaught. That was virtual suicide--honourable suicide to avoid disgrace, at a moment of supreme remorse and horror.”
“You are right,” I admitted, after a minute's consideration. “I see it now--though I should never have thought of it.”
“That is the use of being a woman,” she answered.
I waited a second once more, and mused. “Still, that is only one doubtful case,” I objected.
“There was another, you must remember: his uncle Alfred.”
“Alfred Le Geyt?”
“No; HE died in his bed, quietly. Alfred Faskally.”
“What a memory you have!” I cried, astonished. “Why, that was before our time--in the days of the Chartist riots!”
She smiled a certain curious sibylline smile of hers. Her earnest face looked prettier than ever. “I told you I could remember many things that happened before I was born,” she answered. “THIS is one of them.”
“You remember it directly?”
“How impossible! Have I not often explained to you that I am no diviner? I read no book of fate; I call no spirits from the vasty deep. I simply remember with exceptional clearness what I read and hear. And I have many times heard the story about Alfred Faskally.”
“So have I--but I forget it.”
“Unfortunately, I CAN'T forget. That is a sort of disease with me.... He was a special constable in the Chartist riots; and being a very strong and powerful man, like his nephew Hugo, he used his truncheon--his special constable's baton, or whatever you call it--with excessive force upon a starveling London tailor in the mob near Charing Cross. The man was hit on the forehead--badly hit, so that he died almost immediately of concussion of the brain. A woman rushed out of the crowd at once, seized the dying man, laid his head on her lap, and shrieked out in a wildly despairing voice that he was her husband, and the father of thirteen children. Alfred Faskally, who never meant to kill the man, or even to hurt him, but who was laying about him roundly, without realising the terrific force of his blows, was so horrified at what he had done when he heard the woman's cry, that he rushed off straight to Waterloo Bridge in an agony of remorse and--flung himself over. He was drowned instantly.”
“I recall the story now,” I answered; “but, do you know, as it was told me, I think they said the mob THREW Faskally over in their desire for vengeance.”
“That is the official account, as told by the Le Geyts and the Faskallys; they like to have it believed their kinsman was murdered, not that he committed suicide. But my grandfather”--I started; during the twelve months that I had been brought into daily relations with Hilda Wade, that was the first time I had heard her mention any member of her own family, except once her mother--“my grandfather, who knew him well, and who was present in the crowd at the time, assured me many times that Alfred Faskally really jumped over of his own accord, NOT pursued by the mob, and that his last horrified words as he leaped were, 'I never meant it! I never meant it!' However, the family have always had luck in their suicides. The jury believed the throwing-over story, and found a verdict of 'wilful murder' against some person or persons unknown.”
“Luck in their suicides! What a curious phrase! And you say, ALWAYS. Were there other cases, then?”
“Constructively, yes; one of the Le Geyts, you must recollect, went down with his ship (just like his uncle, the General, in India) when he might have quitted her. It is believed he had given a mistaken order. You remember, of course, he was navigating lieutenant. Another, Marcus, was SAID to have shot himself by accident while cleaning his gun--after a quarrel with his wife. But you have heard all about it. 'The wrong was on my side,' he moaned, you know, when they picked him up, dying, in the gun-room. And one of the Faskally girls, his cousin, of whom his wife was jealous--that beautiful Linda--became a Catholic, and went into a convent at once on Marcus's death; which, after all, in such cases, is merely a religious and moral way of committing suicide--I mean, for a woman who takes the veil just to cut herself off from the world, and who has no vocation, as I hear she had not.”
She filled me with amazement. “That is true,” I exclaimed, “when one comes to think of it. It shows the same temperament in fibre.... But I should never have thought of it.”
“No? Well, I believe it is true, for all that. In every case, one sees they choose much the same way of meeting a reverse, a blunder, an unpremeditated crime. The brave way is to go through with it, and face the music, letting what will come; the cowardly way is to hide one's head incontinently in a river, a noose, or a convent cell.”
“Le Geyt is not a coward,” I interposed, with warmth.
“No, not, a coward--a manly spirited, great-hearted gentleman--but still, not quite of the bravest type. He lacks one element. The Le Geyts have physical courage--enough and to spare--but their moral courage fails them at a pinch. They rush into suicide or its equivalent at critical moments, out of pure boyish impulsiveness.”
A few minutes later, Mrs. Mallet came in. She was not broken down--on the contrary, she was calm--stoically, tragically, pitiably calm; with that ghastly calmness which is more terrible by far than the most demonstrative grief. Her face, though deadly white, did not move a muscle. Not a tear was in her eyes. Even her bloodless hands hardly twitched at the folds of her hastily assumed black gown. She clenched them after a minute when she had grasped mine silently; I could see that the nails dug deep into the palms in her painful resolve to keep herself from collapsing.
Hilda Wade, with infinite sisterly tenderness, led her over to a chair by the window in the summer twilight, and took one quivering hand in hers. “I have been telling Dr. Cumberledge, Lina, about what I most fear for your dear brother, darling; and... I think... he agrees with me.”
Mrs. Mallet turned to me, with hollow eyes, still preserving her tragic calm. “I am afraid of it, too,” she said, her drawn lips tremulous. “Dr. Cumberledge, we must get him back! We must induce him to face it!”
“And yet,” I answered, slowly, turning it over in my own mind; “he has run away at first. Why should he do that if he means--to commit suicide?” I hated to utter the words before that broken soul; but there was no way out of it.
Hilda interrupted me with a quiet suggestion. “How do you know he has run away?” she asked. “Are you not taking it for granted that, if he meant suicide, he would blow his brains out in his own house? But surely that would not be the Le Geyt way. They are gentle-natured folk; they would never blow their brains out or cut their throats. For all we know, he may have made straight for Waterloo Bridge,”--she framed her lips to the unspoken words, unseen by Mrs. Mallet,--“like his uncle Alfred.”
“That is true,” I answered, lip-reading. “I never thought of that either.”
“Still, I do not attach importance to this idea,” she went on. “I have some reason for thinking he has run away... elsewhere; and if so, our first task must be to entice him back again.”
“What are your reasons?” I asked, humbly. Whatever they might be, I knew enough of Hilda Wade by this time to know that she had probably good grounds for accepting them.
“Oh, they may wait for the present,” she answered. “Other things are more pressing. First, let Lina tell us what she thinks of most moment.”
Mrs. Mallet braced herself up visibly to a distressing effort. “You have seen the body, Dr. Cumberledge?” she faltered.
“No, dear Mrs. Mallet, I have not. I came straight from Nathaniel's. I have had no time to see it.”
“Dr. Sebastian has viewed it by my wish--he has been so kind--and he will be present as representing the family at the post-mortem. He notes that the wound was inflicted with a dagger--a small ornamental Norwegian dagger, which always lay, as I know, on the little what-not by the blue sofa.”
I nodded assent. “Exactly; I have seen it there.”
“It was blunt and rusty--a mere toy knife--not at all the sort of weapon a man would make use of who designed to commit a deliberate murder. The crime, if there WAS a crime (which we do not admit), must therefore have been wholly unpremeditated.”
I bowed my head. “For us who knew Hugo that goes without saying.”
She leaned forward eagerly. “Dr. Sebastian has pointed out to me a line of defence which would probably succeed--if we could only induce poor Hugo to adopt it. He has examined the blade and scabbard, and finds that the dagger fits its sheath very tight, so that it can only be withdrawn with considerable violence. The blade sticks.” (I nodded again.) “It needs a hard pull to wrench it out.... He has also inspected the wound, and assures me its character is such that it MIGHT have been self-inflicted.” She paused now and again, and brought out her words with difficulty. “Self-inflicted, he suggests; therefore, that THIS may have happened. It is admitted--WILL be admitted--the servants overheard it--we can make no reservation there--a difference of opinion, an altercation, even, took place between Hugo and Clara that evening”--she started suddenly--“why, it was only last night--it seems like ages--an altercation about the children's schooling. Clara held strong views on the subject of the children”--her eyes blinked hard--“which Hugo did not share. We throw out the hint, then, that Clara, during the course of the dispute--we must call it a dispute--accidentally took up this dagger and toyed with it. You know her habit of toying, when she had no knitting or needlework. In the course of playing with it (we suggest) she tried to pull the knife out of its sheath; failed; held it up, so, point upward; pulled again; pulled harder--with a jerk, at last the sheath came off; the dagger sprang up; it wounded Clara fatally. Hugo, knowing that they had disagreed, knowing that the servants had heard, and seeing her fall suddenly dead before him, was seized with horror--the Le Geyt impulsiveness! --lost his head; rushed out; fancied the accident would be mistaken for murder. But why? A Q.C., don't you know! Recently married! Most attached to his wife. It is plausible, isn't it?”
“So plausible,” I answered, looking it straight in the face, “that... it has but one weak point. We might make a coroner's jury or even a common jury accept it, on Sebastian's expert evidence. Sebastian can work wonders; but we could never make--” Hilda Wade finished the sentence for me as I paused: “Hugo Le Geyt consent to advance it.”
I lowered my head. “You have said it,” I answered.
“Not for the children's sake?” Mrs. Mallet cried, with clasped hands.
“Not for the children's sake, even,” I answered. “Consider for a moment, Mrs. Mallet: IS it true? Do you yourself BELIEVE it?”
She threw herself back in her chair with a dejected face. “Oh, as for that,” she cried, wearily, crossing her hands, “before you and Hilda, who know all, what need to prevaricate? How CAN I believe it? We understand how it came about. That woman! That woman!”
“The real wonder is,” Hilda murmured, soothing her white hand, “that he contained himself so long!”
“Well, we all know Hugo,” I went on, as quietly as I was able; “and, knowing Hugo, we know that he might be urged to commit this wild act in a fierce moment of indignation--righteous indignation on behalf of his motherless girls, under tremendous provocation. But we also know that, having once committed it, he would never stoop to disown it by a subterfuge.”
The heart-broken sister let her head drop faintly. “So Hilda told me,” she murmured; “and what Hilda says in these matters is almost always final.”
We debated the question for some minutes more. Then Mrs. Mallet cried at last: “At any rate, he has fled for the moment, and his flight alone brings the worst suspicion upon him. That is our chief point. We must find out where he is; and if he has gone right away, we must bring him back to London.”
“Where do you think he has taken refuge?”
“The police, Dr. Sebastian has ascertained, are watching the railway stations, and the ports for the Continent.”
“Very like the police!” Hilda exclaimed, with more than a touch of contempt in her voice. “As if a clever man-of-the-world like Hugo Le Geyt would run away by rail, or start off to the Continent! Every Englishman is noticeable on the Continent. It would be sheer madness!”
“You think he has not gone there, then?” I cried, deeply interested.
“Of course not. That is the point I hinted at just now. He has defended many persons accused of murder, and he often spoke to me of their incredible folly, when trying to escape, in going by rail, or in setting out from England for Paris. An Englishman, he used to say, is least observed in his own country. In this case, I think I KNOW where he has gone, how he went there.”
“Where, then?”
“WHERE comes last; HOW first. It is a question of inference.”
“Explain. We know your powers.”
“Well, I take it for granted that he killed her--we must not mince matters--about twelve o'clock; for after that hour, the servants told Lina, there was quiet in the drawing-room. Next, I conjecture, he went upstairs to change his clothes: he could not go forth on the world in an evening suit; and the housemaid says his black coat and trousers were lying as usual on a chair in his dressing-room--which shows at least that he was not unduly flurried. After that, he put on another suit, no doubt--WHAT suit I hope the police will not discover too soon; for I suppose you must just accept the situation that we are conspiring to defeat the ends of justice.”
“No, no!” Mrs. Mallet cried. “To bring him back voluntarily, that he may face his trial like a man!”
“Yes, dear. That is quite right. However, the next thing, of course, would be that he would shave in whole or in part. His big black beard was so very conspicuous; he would certainly get rid of that before attempting to escape. The servants being in bed, he was not pressed for time; he had the whole night before him. So, of course, he shaved. On the other hand, the police, you may be sure, will circulate his photograph--we must not shirk these points”--for Mrs. Mallet winced again--“will circulate his photograph, BEARD AND ALL; and that will really be one of our great safeguards; for the bushy beard so masks the face that, without it, Hugo would be scarcely recognisable. I conclude, therefore, that he must have shorn himself BEFORE leaving home; though naturally I did not make the police a present of the hint by getting Lina to ask any questions in that direction of the housemaid.”
“You are probably right,” I answered. “But would he have a razor?”
“I was coming to that. No; certainly he would not. He had not shaved for years. And they kept no men-servants; which makes it difficult for him to borrow one from a sleeping man. So what he would do would doubtless be to cut off his beard, or part of it, quite close, with a pair of scissors, and then get himself properly shaved next morning in the first country town he came to.”
“The first country town?”
“Certainly. That leads up to the next point. We must try to be cool and collected.” She was quivering with suppressed emotion herself, as she said it, but her soothing hand still lay on Mrs. Mallet's. “The next thing is--he would leave London.”
“But not by rail, you say?”
“He is an intelligent man, and in the course of defending others has thought about this matter. Why expose himself to the needless risk and observation of a railway station? No; I saw at once what he would do. Beyond doubt, he would cycle. He always wondered it was not done oftener, under similar circumstances.”
“But has his bicycle gone?”
“Lina looked. It has not. I should have expected as much. I told her to note that point very unobtrusively, so as to avoid giving the police the clue. She saw the machine in the outer hall as usual.”
“He is too good a criminal lawyer to have dreamt of taking his own,” Mrs. Mallet interposed, with another effort.
“But where could he have hired or bought one at that time of night?” I exclaimed.
“Nowhere--without exciting the gravest suspicion. Therefore, I conclude, he stopped in London for the night, sleeping at an hotel, without luggage, and paying for his room in advance. It is frequently done, and if he arrived late, very little notice would be taken of him. Big hotels about the Strand, I am told, have always a dozen such casual bachelor guests every evening.”
“And then?”
“And then, this morning, he would buy a new bicycle--a different make from his own, at the nearest shop; would rig himself out, at some ready-made tailor's, with a fresh tourist suit--probably an ostentatiously tweedy bicycling suit; and, with that in his luggage-carrier, would make straight on his machine for the country. He could change in some copse, and bury his own clothes, avoiding the blunders he has seen in others. Perhaps he might ride for the first twenty or thirty miles out of London to some minor side-station, and then go on by train towards his destination, quitting the rail again at some unimportant point where the main west road crosses the Great Western or the South-Western line.”
“Great Western or South-Western? Why those two in particular? Then, you have settled in your own mind which direction he has taken?”
“Pretty well. I judge by analogy. Lina, your brother was brought up in the West Country, was he not?”
Mrs. Mallet gave a weary nod. “In North Devon,” she answered; “on the wild stretch of moor about Hartland and Clovelly.”
Hilda Wade seemed to collect herself. “Now, Mr. Le Geyt is essentially a Celt--a Celt in temperament,” she went on; “he comes by origin and ancestry from a rough, heather-clad country; he belongs to the moorland. In other words, his type is the mountaineer's. But a mountaineer's instinct in similar circumstances is--what? Why, to fly straight to his native mountains. In an agony of terror, in an access of despair, when all else fails, he strikes a bee-line for the hills he loves; rationally or irrationally, he seems to think he can hide there. Hugo Le Geyt, with his frank boyish nature, his great Devonian frame, is sure to have done so. I know his mood. He has made for the West Country!”
“You are, right, Hilda,” Mrs. Mallet exclaimed, with conviction. “I'm quite sure, from what I know of Hugo, that to go to the West would be his first impulse.”
“And the Le Geyts are always governed by first impulses,” my character-reader added.
She was quite correct. From the time we two were at Oxford together--I as an undergraduate, he as a don--I had always noticed that marked trait in my dear old friend's temperament.
After a short pause, Hilda broke the silence again. “The sea again; the sea! The Le Geyts love the water. Was there any place on the sea where he went much as a boy--any lonely place, I mean, in that North Devon district?”
Mrs. Mallet reflected a moment. “Yes, there was a little bay--a mere gap in high cliffs, with some fishermen's huts and a few yards of beach--where he used to spend much of his holidays. It was a weird-looking break in a grim sea-wall of dark-red rocks, where the tide rose high, rolling in from the Atlantic.”
“The very thing! Has he visited it since he grew up?”
“To my knowledge, never.”
Hilda's voice had a ring of certainty. “Then THAT is where we shall find him, dear! We must look there first. He is sure to revisit just such a solitary spot by the sea when trouble overtakes him.”
Later in the evening, as we were walking home towards Nathaniel's together, I asked Hilda why she had spoken throughout with such unwavering confidence. “Oh, it was simple enough,” she answered. “There were two things that helped me through, which I didn't like to mention in detail before Lina. One was this: the Le Geyts have all of them an instinctive horror of the sight of blood; therefore, they almost never commit suicide by shooting themselves or cutting their throats. Marcus, who shot himself in the gun-room, was an exception to both rules; he never minded blood; he could cut up a deer. But Hugo refused to be a doctor, because he could not stand the sight of an operation; and even as a sportsman he never liked to pick up or handle the game he had shot himself; he said it sickened him. He rushed from that room last night, I feel sure, in a physical horror at the deed he had done; and by now he is as far as he can get from London. The sight of his act drove him away; not craven fear of an arrest. If the Le Geyts kill themselves--a seafaring race on the whole--their impulse is to trust to water.”
“And the other thing?”
“Well, that was about the mountaineer's homing instinct. I have often noticed it. I could give you fifty instances, only I didn't like to speak of them before Lina. There was Williams, for example, the Dolgelly man who killed a game-keeper at Petworth in a poaching affray; he was taken on Cader Idris, skulking among rocks, a week later. Then there was that unhappy young fellow, Mackinnon, who shot his sweetheart at Leicester; he made, straight as the crow flies, for his home in the Isle of Skye, and there drowned himself in familiar waters. Lindner, the Tyrolese, again, who stabbed the American swindler at Monte Carlo, was tracked after a few days to his native place, St. Valentin, in the Zillerthal. It is always so. Mountaineers in distress fly to their mountains. It is a part of their nostalgia. I know it from within, too: if _I_ were in poor Hugo LeGeyt's place, what do you think I would do? Why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains.”
“What an extraordinary insight into character you have!” I cried. “You seem to divine what everybody's action will be under given circumstances.”
She paused, and held her parasol half poised in her hand. “Character determines action,” she said, slowly, at last. “That is the secret of the great novelists. They put themselves behind and within their characters, and so make us feel that every act of their personages is not only natural but even--given the conditions--inevitable. We recognise that their story is the sole logical outcome of the interaction of their dramatis personae. Now, _I_ am not a great novelist; I cannot create and imagine characters and situations. But I have something of the novelist's gift; I apply the same method to the real life of the people around me. I try to throw myself into the person of others, and to feel how their character will compel them to act in each set of circumstances to which they may expose themselves.”
“In one word,” I said, “you are a psychologist.”
“A psychologist,” she assented; “I suppose so; and the police--well, the police are not; they are at best but bungling materialists. They require a CLUE. What need of a CLUE if you can interpret character?”
So certain was Hilda Wade of her conclusions, indeed, that Mrs. Mallet begged me next day to take my holiday at once--which I could easily do--and go down to the little bay in the Hartland district of which she had spoken, in search of Hugo. I consented. She herself proposed to set out quietly for Bideford, where she could be within easy reach of me, in order to hear of my success or failure; while Hilda Wade, whose summer vacation was to have begun in two days' time, offered to ask for an extra day's leave so as to accompany her. The broken-hearted sister accepted the offer; and, secrecy being above all things necessary, we set off by different routes: the two women by Waterloo, myself by Paddington.
We stopped that night at different hotels in Bideford; but next morning, Hilda rode out on her bicycle, and accompanied me on mine for a mile or two along the tortuous way towards Hartland. “Take nothing for granted,” she said, as we parted; “and be prepared to find poor Hugo Le Geyt's appearance greatly changed. He has eluded the police and their 'clues' so far; therefore, I imagine he must have largely altered his dress and exterior.”
“I will find him,” I answered, “if he is anywhere within twenty miles of Hartland.”
She waved her hand to me in farewell. I rode on after she left me towards the high promontory in front, the wildest and least-visited part of North Devon. Torrents of rain had fallen during the night; the slimy cart-ruts and cattle-tracks on the moor were brimming with water. It was a lowering day. The clouds drifted low. Black peat-bogs filled the hollows; grey stone homesteads, lonely and forbidding, stood out here and there against the curved sky-line. Even the high road was uneven and in places flooded. For an hour I passed hardly a soul. At last, near a crossroad with a defaced finger-post, I descended from my machine, and consulted my ordnance map, on which Mrs. Mallet had marked ominously, with a cross of red rink, the exact position of the little fishing hamlet where Hugo used to spend his holidays. I took the turning which seemed to me most likely to lead to it; but the tracks were so confused, and the run of the lanes so uncertain--let alone the map being some years out of date--that I soon felt I had lost my bearings. By a little wayside inn, half hidden in a deep combe, with bog on every side, I descended and asked for a bottle of ginger-beer; for the day was hot and close, in spite of the packed clouds. As they were opening the bottle, I inquired casually the way to the Red Gap bathing-place.
The landlord gave me directions which confused me worse than ever, ending at last with the concise remark: “An' then, zur, two or dree more turns to the right an' to the left 'ull bring 'ee right up alongzide o' ut.”
I despaired of finding the way by these unintelligible sailing-orders; but just at that moment, as luck would have it, another cyclist flew past--the first soul I had seen on the road that morning. He was a man with the loose-knit air of a shop assistant, badly got up in a rather loud and obtrusive tourist suit of brown homespun, with baggy knickerbockers and thin thread stockings. I judged him a gentleman on the cheap at sight. “Very Stylish; this Suit Complete, only thirty-seven and sixpence!” The landlady glanced out at him with a friendly nod. He turned and smiled at her, but did not see me; for I stood in the shade behind the half-open door. He had a short black moustache and a not unpleasing, careless face. His features, I thought, were better than his garments.
However, the stranger did not interest me just then I was far too full of more important matters. “Why don't 'ee taake an' vollow thik ther gen'leman, zur?” the landlady said, pointing one large red hand after him. “Ur do go down to Urd Gap to zwim every marnin'. Mr. Jan Smith, o' Oxford, they do call un. 'Ee can't go wrong if 'ee do vollow un to the Gap. Ur's lodgin' up to wold Varmer Moore's, an' ur's that vond o' the zay, the vishermen do tell me, as wasn't never any gen'leman like un.”
I tossed off my ginger-beer, jumped on to my machine, and followed the retreating brown back of Mr. John Smith, of Oxford--surely a most non-committing name--round sharp corners and over rutty lanes, tire-deep in mud, across the rusty-red moor, till, all at once, at a turn, a gap of stormy sea appeared wedge-shape between two shelving rock-walls.
It was a lonely spot. Rocks hemmed it in; big breakers walled it. The sou'-wester roared through the gap. I rode down among loose stones and water-worn channels in the solid grit very carefully. But the man in brown had torn over the wild path with reckless haste, zigzagging madly, and was now on the little three-cornered patch of beach, undressing himself with a sort of careless glee, and flinging his clothes down anyhow on the shingle beside him. Something about the action caught my eye. That movement of the arm! It was not--it could not be--no, no, not Hugo!
A very ordinary person; and Le Geyt bore the stamp of a born gentleman.
He stood up bare at last. He flung out his arms, as if to welcome the boisterous wind to his naked bosom. Then, with a sudden burst of recognition, the man stood revealed. We had bathed together a hundred times in London and elsewhere. The face, the clad figure, the dress, all were different. But the body--the actual frame and make of the man--the well-knit limbs, the splendid trunk--no disguise could alter. It was Le Geyt himself--big, powerful, vigorous.
That ill-made suit, those baggy knickerbockers, the slouched cap, the thin thread stockings, had only distorted and hidden his figure. Now that I saw him as he was, he came out the same bold and manly form as ever.
He did not notice me. He rushed down with a certain wild joy into the turbulent water, and, plunging in with a loud cry, buffeted the huge waves with those strong curving arms of his. The sou'-wester was rising. Each breaker as it reared caught him on its crest and tumbled him over like a cork, but like a cork he rose again. He was swimming now, arm over arm, straight out seaward. I saw the lifted hands between the crest and the trough. For a moment I hesitated whether I ought to strip and follow him. Was he doing as so many others of his house had done--courting death from the water?
But some strange hand restrained me. Who was I that I should stand between Hugo Le Geyt and the ways of Providence?
The Le Geyts loved ever the ordeal by water.
Presently, he turned again. Before he turned, I had taken the opportunity to look hastily at his clothes. Hilda Wade had surmised aright once more. The outer suit was a cheap affair from a big ready-made tailor's in St. Martin's Lane--turned out by the thousand; the underclothing, on the other hand, was new and unmarked, but fine in quality--bought, no doubt, at Bideford. An eerie sense of doom stole over me. I felt the end was near. I withdrew behind a big rock, and waited there unseen till Hugo had landed. He began to dress again, without troubling to dry himself. I drew a deep breath of relief. Then this was not suicide!
By the time he had pulled on his vest and drawers, I came out suddenly from my ambush and faced him. A fresh shock awaited me. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was NOT Le Geyt--no, nor anything like him!
Nevertheless, the man rose with a little cry and advanced, half crouching, towards me. “YOU are not hunting me down--with the police?” he exclaimed, his neck held low and his forehead wrinkling.
The voice--the voice was Le Geyt's. It was an unspeakable mystery. “Hugo,” I cried, “dear Hugo--hunting you down? --COULD you imagine it?”
He raised his head, strode forward, and grasped my hand. “Forgive me, Cumberledge,” he cried. “But a proscribed and hounded man! If you knew what a relief it is to me to get out on the water!”
“You forget all there?”
“I forget IT--the red horror!”
“You meant just now to drown yourself?”
“No! If I had meant it I would have done it.... Hubert, for my children's sake, I WILL not commit suicide!”
“Then listen!” I cried. I told him in a few words of his sister's scheme--Sebastian's defence--the plausibility of the explanation--the whole long story. He gazed at me moodily. Yet it was not Hugo!
“No, no,” he said, shortly; and as he spoke it was HE. “I have done it; I have killed her; I will not owe my life to a falsehood.”
“Not for the children's sake?”
He dashed his hand down impatiently. “I have a better way for the children. I will save them still.... Hubert, you are not afraid to speak to a murderer?”
“Dear Hugo--I know all; and to know all is to forgive all.”
He grasped my hand once more. “Know ALL!” he cried, with a despairing gesture. “Oh, no; no one knows ALL but myself; not even the children. But the children know much; THEY will forgive me. Lina knows something; SHE will forgive me. You know a little; YOU forgive me. The world can never know. It will brand my darlings as a murderer's children.”
“It was the act of a minute,” I interposed. “And--though she is dead, poor lady, and one must speak no ill of her--we can at least gather dimly, for your children's sake, how deep was the provocation.”
He gazed at me fixedly. His voice was like lead. “For the children's sake--yes,” he answered, as in a dream. “It was all for the children! I have killed her--murdered her--she has paid her penalty; and, poor dead soul, I will utter no word against her--the woman I have murdered! But one thing I will say: If omniscient justice sends me for this to eternal punishment, I can endure it gladly, like a man, knowing that so I have redeemed my Marian's motherless girls from a deadly tyranny.”
It was the only sentence in which he ever alluded to her.
I sat down by his side and watched him closely. Mechanically, methodically, he went on with his dressing. The more he dressed, the less could I believe it was Hugo. I had expected to find him close-shaven; so did the police, by their printed notices. Instead of that, he had shaved his beard and whiskers, but only trimmed his moustache; trimmed it quite short, so as to reveal the boyish corners of the mouth--a trick which entirely altered his rugged expression. But that was not all; what puzzled me most was the eyes--they were not Hugo's. At first I could not imagine why. By degrees the truth dawned upon me. His eyebrows were naturally thick and shaggy--great overhanging growth, interspersed with many of those stiff long hairs to which Darwin called attention in certain men as surviving traits from a monkey-like ancestor. In order to disguise himself, Hugo had pulled out all these coarser hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal, commercial gentleman. Hugo was scarcely six feet high, indeed, though by his broad shoulders and bushy beard he had always impressed one with such a sense of size; and now that the hirsuteness had been got rid of, and the dress altered, he hardly struck one as taller or bigger than the average of his fellows.
We sat for some minutes and talked. Le Geyt would not speak of Clara; and when I asked him his intentions, he shook his head moodily. “I shall act for the best,” he said--“what of best is left--to guard the dear children. It was a terrible price to pay for their redemption; but it was the only one possible, and, in a moment of wrath, I paid it. Now, I have to pay, in turn, myself. I do not shirk it.”
“You will come back to London, then, and stand your trial?” I asked, eagerly.
“Come back TO LONDON?” he cried, with a face of white panic. Hitherto he had seemed to me rather relieved in expression than otherwise; his countenance had lost its worn and anxious look; he was no longer watching each moment over his children's safety. “Come back... TO LONDON... and face my trial! Why, did you think, Hubert, 'twas the court or the hanging I was shirking? No, no; not that; but IT--the red horror! I must get away from IT to the sea--to the water--to wash away the stain--as far from IT--that red pool--as possible!”
I answered nothing. I left him to face his own remorse in silence.
At last he rose to go, and held one foot undecided on his bicycle.
“I leave myself in Heaven's hands,” he said, as he lingered. “IT will requite.... The ordeal is by water.”
“So I judged,” I answered.
“Tell Lina this from me,” he went on, still loitering: “that if she will trust me, I will strive to do the best that remains for my darlings. I will do it, Heaven helping. She will know WHAT, to-morrow.”
He mounted his machine and sailed off. My eyes followed him up the path with sad forebodings.
All day long I loitered about the Gap. It consisted of two bays--the one I had already seen, and another, divided from it by a saw-edge of rock. In the further cove crouched a few low stone cottages. A broad-bottomed sailing boat lay there, pulled up high on the beach. About three o'clock, as I sat and watched, two men began to launch it. The sea ran high; tide coming in; the sou'-wester still increasing in force to a gale; at the signal-staff on the cliff, the danger-cone was hoisted. White spray danced in air. Big black clouds rolled up seething from windward; low thunder rumbling; a storm threatened.
One of the men was Le Geyt, the other a fisherman.
He jumped in, and put off through the surf with an air of triumph. He was a splendid sailor. His boat leapt through the breakers and flew before the wind with a mere rag of canvas. “Dangerous weather to be out!” I exclaimed to the fisherman, who stood with hands buried in his pockets, watching him.
“Ay that ur be, zur!” the man answered. “Doan't like the look o' ut. But thik there gen'leman, 'ee's one o' Oxford, 'ee do tell me; and they'm a main venturesome lot, they college volk. 'Ee's off by 'isself droo the starm, all so var as Lundy!”
“Will he reach it?” I asked, anxiously, having my own idea on the subject.
“Doan't seem like ut, zur, do ut? Ur must, an' ur mustn't, an' yit again ur must. Powerful 'ard place ur be to maake in a starm, to be zure, Lundy. Zaid the Lord 'ould dezide. But ur 'ouldn't be warned, ur 'ouldn't; an' voolhardy volk, as the zayin' is, must go their own voolhardy waay to perdition!”
It was the last I saw of Le Geyt alive. Next morning the lifeless body of “the man who was wanted for the Campden Hill mystery” was cast up by the waves on the shore of Lundy. The Lord had decided.
Hugo had not miscalculated. “Luck in their suicides,” Hilda Wade said; and, strange to say, the luck of the Le Geyts stood him in good stead still. By a miracle of fate, his children were not branded as a murderer's daughters. Sebastian gave evidence at the inquest on the wife's body: “Self-inflicted--a recoil--accidental--I am SURE of it.” His specialist knowledge--his assertive certainty, combined with that arrogant, masterful manner of his, and his keen, eagle eye, overbore the jury. Awed by the great man's look, they brought in a submissive verdict of “Death by misadventure.” The coroner thought it a most proper finding. Mrs. Mallet had made the most of the innate Le Geyt horror of blood. The newspapers charitably surmised that the unhappy husband, crazed by the instantaneous unexpectedness of his loss, had wandered away like a madman to the scenes of his childhood, and had there been drowned by accident while trying to cross a stormy sea to Lundy, under some wild impression that he would find his dead wife alive on the island. Nobody whispered MURDER. Everybody dwelt on the utter absence of motive--a model husband! --such a charming young wife, and such a devoted stepmother. We three alone knew--we three, and the children.
On the day when the jury brought in their verdict at the adjourned inquest on Mrs. Le Geyt, Hilda Wade stood in the room, trembling and white-faced, awaiting their decision. When the foreman uttered the words, “Death by misadventure,” she burst into tears of relief. “He did well!” she cried to me, passionately. “He did well, that poor father! He placed his life in the hands of his Maker, asking only for mercy to his innocent children. And mercy has been shown to him and to them. He was taken gently in the way he wished. It would have broken my heart for those two poor girls if the verdict had gone otherwise. He knew how terrible a lot it is to be called a murderer's daughter.”
I did not realise at the time with what profound depth of personal feeling she said it.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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5
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THE EPISODE OF THE NEEDLE THAT DID NOT MATCH
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“Sebastian is a great man,” I said to Hilda Wade, as I sat one afternoon over a cup of tea she had brewed for me in her own little sitting-room. It is one of the alleviations of an hospital doctor's lot that he may drink tea now and again with the Sister of his ward. “Whatever else you choose to think of him, you must admit he is a very great man.”
I admired our famous Professor, and I admired Hilda Wade: 'twas a matter of regret to me that my two admirations did not seem in return sufficiently to admire one another. “Oh, yes,” Hilda answered, pouring out my second cup; “he is a very great man. I never denied that. The greatest man, on the whole, I think, that I have ever come across.”
“And he has done splendid work for humanity,” I went on, growing enthusiastic.
“Splendid work! Yes, splendid! (Two lumps, I believe?) He has done more, I admit, for medical science than any other man I ever met.”
I gazed at her with a curious glance. “Then why, dear lady, do you keep telling me he is cruel?” I inquired, toasting my feet on the fender. “It seems contradictory.”
She passed me the muffins, and smiled her restrained smile.
“Does the desire to do good to humanity in itself imply a benevolent disposition?” she answered, obliquely.
“Now you are talking in paradox. Surely, if a man works all his life long for the good of mankind, that shows he is devoured by sympathy for his species.”
“And when your friend Mr. Bates works all his life long at observing, and classifying lady-birds, I suppose that shows he is devoured by sympathy for the race of beetles!”
I laughed at her comical face, she looked at me so quizzically. “But then,” I objected, “the cases are not parallel. Bates kills and collects his lady-birds; Sebastian cures and benefits humanity.”
Hilda smiled her wise smile once more, and fingered her apron. “Are the cases so different as you suppose?” she went on, with her quick glance. “Is it not partly accident? A man of science, you see, early in life, takes up, half by chance, this, that, or the other particular form of study. But what the study is in itself, I fancy, does not greatly matter; do not mere circumstances as often as not determine it? Surely it is the temperament, on the whole, that tells: the temperament that is or is not scientific.”
“How do you mean? You ARE so enigmatic!”
“Well, in a family of the scientific temperament, it seems to me, one brother may happen to go in for butterflies--may he not? --and another for geology, or for submarine telegraphs. Now, the man who happens to take up butterflies does not make a fortune out of his hobby--there is no money in butterflies; so we say, accordingly, he is an unpractical person, who cares nothing for business, and who is only happy when he is out in the fields with a net, chasing emperors and tortoise-shells. But the man who happens to fancy submarine telegraphy most likely invents a lot of new improvements, takes out dozens of patents, finds money flow in upon him as he sits in his study, and becomes at last a peer and a millionaire; so then we say, What a splendid business head he has got, to be sure, and how immensely he differs from his poor wool-gathering brother, the entomologist, who can only invent new ways of hatching out wire-worms! Yet all may really depend on the first chance direction which led one brother as a boy to buy a butterfly net, and sent the other into the school laboratory to dabble with an electric wheel and a cheap battery.”
“Then you mean to say it is chance that has made Sebastian?”
Hilda shook her pretty head. “By no means. Don't be so stupid. We both know Sebastian has a wonderful brain. Whatever was the work he undertook with that brain in science, he would carry it out consummately. He is a born thinker. It is like this, don't you know.” She tried to arrange her thoughts. “The particular branch of science to which Mr. Hiram Maxim's mind happens to have been directed was the making of machine-guns--and he slays his thousands. The particular branch to which Sebastian's mind happens to have been directed was medicine--and he cures as many as Mr. Maxim kills. It is a turn of the hand that makes all the difference.”
“I see,” I said. “The aim of medicine happens to be a benevolent one.”
“Quite so; that's just what I mean. The aim is benevolent; and Sebastian pursues that aim with the single-minded energy of a lofty, gifted, and devoted nature--but not a good one!'
“Not good?”
“Oh, no. To be quite frank, he seems to me to pursue it ruthlessly, cruelly, unscrupulously. He is a man of high ideals, but without principle. In that respect he reminds one of the great spirits of the Italian Renaissance--Benvenuto Cellini and so forth--men who could pore for hours with conscientious artistic care over the detail of a hem in a sculptured robe, yet could steal out in the midst of their disinterested toil to plunge a knife in the back of a rival.”
“Sebastian would not do that,” I cried. “He is wholly free from the mean spirit of jealousy.”
“No, Sebastian would not do that. You are quite right there; there is no tinge of meanness in the man's nature. He likes to be first in the field; but he would acclaim with delight another man's scientific triumph--if another anticipated him; for would it not mean a triumph for universal science? --and is not the advancement of science Sebastian's religion? But... he would do almost as much, or more. He would stab a man without remorse, if he thought that by stabbing him he could advance knowledge.”
I recognised at once the truth of her diagnosis. “Nurse Wade,” I cried, “you are a wonderful woman! I believe you are right; but--how did you come to think of it?”
A cloud passed over her brow. “I have reason to know it,” she answered, slowly. Then her voice changed. “Take another muffin.”
I helped myself and paused. I laid down my cup, and gazed at her. What a beautiful, tender, sympathetic face! And yet, how able! She stirred the fire uneasily. I looked and hesitated. I had often wondered why I never dared ask Hilda Wade one question that was nearest my heart. I think it must have been because I respected her so profoundly. The deeper your admiration and respect for a woman, the harder you find it in the end to ask her. At last I ALMOST made up my mind. “I cannot think,” I began, “what can have induced a girl like you, with means and friends, with brains and”--I drew back, then I plumped it out--“beauty, to take to such a life as this--a life which seems, in many ways, so unworthy of you!”
She stirred the fire more pensively than ever, and rearranged the muffin-dish on the little wrought-iron stand in font of the grate. “And yet,” she murmured, looking down, “what life can be better than the service of one's kind? You think it a great life for Sebastian!”
“Sebastian! He is a man. That is different; quite different. But a woman! Especially YOU, dear lady, for whom one feels that nothing is quite high enough, quite pure enough, quite good enough. I cannot imagine how--” She checked me with one wave of her gracious hand. Her movements were always slow and dignified. “I have a Plan in my life,” she answered earnestly, her eyes meeting mine with a sincere, frank gaze; “a Plan to which I have resolved to sacrifice everything. It absorbs my being. Till that Plan is fulfilled--” I saw the tears were gathering fast on her lashes. She suppressed them with an effort. “Say no more,” she added, faltering. “Infirm of purpose! I WILL not listen.”
I leant forward eagerly, pressing my advantage. The air was electric. Waves of emotion passed to and fro. “But surely,” I cried, “you do not mean to say--” She waved me aside once more. “I will not put my hand to the plough, and then look back,” she answered, firmly. “Dr. Cumberledge, spare me. I came to Nathaniel's for a purpose. I told you at the time what that purpose was--in part: to be near Sebastian. I want to be near him... for an object I have at heart. Do not ask me to reveal it; do not ask me to forego it. I am a woman, therefore weak. But I need your aid. Help me, instead of hindering me.”
“Hilda,” I cried, leaning forward, with quiverings of my heart, “I will help you in whatever way you will allow me. But let me at any rate help you with the feeling that I am helping one who means in time--” At that moment, as unkindly fate would have it, the door opened, and Sebastian entered.
“Nurse Wade,” he began, in his iron voice, glancing about him with stern eyes, “where are those needles I ordered for that operation? We must be ready in time before Nielsen comes.... Cumberledge, I shall want you.”
The golden opportunity had come and gone. It was long before I found a similar occasion for speaking to Hilda.
Every day after that the feeling deepened upon me that Hilda was there to watch Sebastian. WHY, I did not know; but it was growing certain that a life-long duel was in progress between these two--a duel of some strange and mysterious import.
The first approach to a solution of the problem which I obtained came a week or two later. Sebastian was engaged in observing a case where certain unusual symptoms had suddenly supervened. It was a case of some obscure affection of the heart. I will not trouble you here with the particular details. We all suspected a tendency to aneurism. Hilda Wade was in attendance, as she always was on Sebastian's observation cases. We crowded round, watching. The Professor himself leaned over the cot with some medicine for external application in a basin. He gave it to Hilda to hold. I noticed that as she held it her fingers trembled, and that her eyes were fixed harder than ever upon Sebastian. He turned round to his students. “Now this,” he began, in a very unconcerned voice, as if the patient were a toad, “is a most unwonted turn for the disease to take. It occurs very seldom. In point of fact, I have only observed the symptom once before; and then it was fatal. The patient in that instance”--he paused dramatically--“was the notorious poisoner, Dr. Yorke-Bannerman.”
As he uttered the words, Hilda Wade's hands trembled more than ever, and with a little scream she let the basin fall, breaking it into fragments.
Sebastian's keen eyes had transfixed her in a second. “How did you manage to do that?” he asked, with quiet sarcasm, but in a tone full of meaning.
“The basin was heavy,” Hilda faltered. “My hands were trembling--and it somehow slipped through them. I am not... quite myself... not quite well this afternoon. I ought not to have attempted it.”
The Professor's deep-set eyes peered out like gleaming lights from beneath their overhanging brows. “No; you ought not to have attempted it,” he answered, withering her with a glance. “You might have let the thing fall on the patient and killed him. As it is, can't you see you have agitated him with the flurry? Don't stand there holding your breath, woman: repair your mischief. Get a cloth and wipe it up, and give ME the bottle.”
With skilful haste he administered a little sal volatile and nux vomica to the swooning patient; while Hilda set about remedying the damage. “That's better,” Sebastian said, in a mollified tone, when she had brought another basin. There was a singular note of cloaked triumph in his voice. “Now, we'll begin again.... I was just saying, gentlemen, before this accident, that I had seen only ONE case of this peculiar form of the tendency before; and that case was the notorious”--he kept his glittering eyes fixed harder on Hilda than ever--“the notorious Dr. Yorke-Bannerman.”
_I_ was watching Hilda, too. At the words, she trembled violently all over once more, but with an effort restrained herself. Their looks met in a searching glance. Hilda's air was proud and fearless: in Sebastian's, I fancied I detected, after a second, just a tinge of wavering.
“You remember Yorke-Bannerman's case,” he went on. “He committed a murder--” “Let ME take the basin!” I cried, for I saw Hilda's hands giving way a second time, and I was anxious to spare her.
“No, thank you,” she answered low, but in a voice that was full of suppressed defiance. “I will wait and hear this out. I PREFER to stop here.”
As for Sebastian, he seemed now not to notice her, though I was aware all the time of a sidelong glance of his eye, parrot-wise, in her direction. “He committed a murder,” he went on, “by means of aconitine--then an almost unknown poison; and, after committing it, his heart being already weak, he was taken himself with symptoms of aneurism in a curious form, essentially similar to these; so that he died before the trial--a lucky escape for him.”
He paused rhetorically once more; then he added in the same tone: “Mental agitation and the terror of detection no doubt accelerated the fatal result in that instance. He died at once from the shock of the arrest. It was a natural conclusion. Here we may hope for a more successful issue.”
He spoke to the students, of course, but I could see for all that that he was keeping his falcon eye fixed hard on Hilda's face. I glanced aside at her. She never flinched for a second. Neither said anything directly to the other; still, by their eyes and mouths, I knew some strange passage of arms had taken place between them. Sebastian's tone was one of provocation, of defiance, I might almost say of challenge. Hilda's air I took rather for the air of calm and resolute, but assured, resistance. He expected her to answer; she said nothing. Instead of that, she went on holding the basin now with fingers that WOULD not tremble. Every muscle was strained. Every tendon was strung. I could see she held herself in with a will of iron.
The rest of the episode passed off quietly. Sebastian, having delivered his bolt, began to think less of Hilda and more of the patient. He went on with his demonstration. As for Hilda, she gradually relaxed her muscles, and, with a deep-drawn breath, resumed her natural attitude. The tension was over. They had had their little skirmish, whatever it might mean, and had it out; now, they called a truce over the patient's body.
When the case had been disposed of, and the students dismissed, I went straight into the laboratory to get a few surgical instruments I had chanced to leave there. For a minute or two, I mislaid my clinical thermometer, and began hunting for it behind a wooden partition in the corner of the room by the place for washing test-tubes. As I stooped down, turning over the various objects about the tap in my search, Sebastian's voice came to me. He had paused outside the door, and was speaking in his calm, clear tone, very low, to Hilda. “So NOW we understand one another, Nurse Wade,” he said, with a significant sneer. “I know whom I have to deal with!”
“And _I_ know, too,” Hilda answered, in a voice of placid confidence.
“Yet you are not afraid?”
“It is not _I_ who have cause for fear. The accused may tremble, not the prosecutor.”
“What! You threaten?”
“No; I do not threaten. Not in words, I mean. My presence here is in itself a threat, but I make no other. You know now, unfortunately, WHY I have come. That makes my task harder. But I will NOT give it up. I will wait and conquer.”
Sebastian answered nothing. He strode into the laboratory alone, tall, grim, unbending, and let himself sink into his easy chair, looking up with a singular and somewhat sinister smile at his bottles of microbes. After a minute he stirred the fire, and bent his head forward, brooding. He held it between his hands, with his elbows on his knees, and gazed moodily straight before him into the glowing caves of white-hot coal in the fireplace. That sinister smile still played lambent around the corners of his grizzled moustaches.
I moved noiselessly towards the door, trying to pass behind him unnoticed. But, alert as ever, his quick ears detected me. With a sudden start, he raised his head and glanced round. “What! you here?” he cried, taken aback. For a second he appeared almost to lose his self-possession.
“I came for my clinical,” I answered, with an unconcerned air. “I have somehow managed to mislay it in the laboratory.”
My carefully casual tone seemed to reassure him. He peered about him with knit brows. “Cumberledge,” he asked at last, in a suspicious voice, “did you hear that woman?”
“The woman in 93? Delirious?”
“No, no. Nurse Wade?”
“Hear her?” I echoed, I must candidly admit with intent to deceive. “When she broke the basin?”
His forehead relaxed. “Oh! it is nothing,” he muttered, hastily. “A mere point of discipline. She spoke to me just now, and I thought her tone unbecoming in a subordinate.... Like Korah and his crew, she takes too much upon her.... We must get rid of her, Cumberledge; we must get rid of her. She is a dangerous woman!”
“She is the most intelligent nurse we have ever had in the place, sir,” I objected, stoutly.
He nodded his head twice. “Intelligent--je vous l'accorde; but dangerous--dangerous!”
Then he turned to his papers, sorting them out one by one with a preoccupied face and twitching fingers. I recognised that he desired to be left alone, so I quitted the laboratory.
I cannot quite say WHY, but ever since Hilda Wade first came to Nathaniel's my enthusiasm for Sebastian had been cooling continuously. Admiring his greatness still, I had doubts as to his goodness. That day I felt I positively mistrusted him. I wondered what his passage of arms with Hilda might mean. Yet, somehow, I was shy of alluding to it before her.
One thing, however, was clear to me now--this great campaign that was being waged between the nurse and the Professor had reference to the case of Dr. Yorke-Bannerman.
For a time, nothing came of it; the routine of the hospital went on as usual. The patient with the suspected predisposition to aneurism kept fairly well for a week or two, and then took a sudden turn for the worse, presenting at times most unwonted symptoms. He died unexpectedly. Sebastian, who had watched him every hour, regarded the matter as of prime importance. “I'm glad it happened here,” he said, rubbing his hands. “A grand opportunity. I wanted to catch an instance like this before that fellow in Paris had time to anticipate me. They're all on the lookout. Von Strahlendorff, of Vienna, has been waiting for just such a patient for years. So have I. Now fortune has favoured me. Lucky for us he died! We shall find out everything.”
We held a post-mortem, of course, the condition of the blood being what we most wished to observe; and the autopsy revealed some unexpected details. One remarkable feature consisted in a certain undescribed and impoverished state of the contained bodies which Sebastian, with his eager zeal for science, desired his students to see and identify. He said it was likely to throw much light on other ill-understood conditions of the brain and nervous system, as well as on the peculiar faint odour of the insane, now so well recognised in all large asylums. In order to compare this abnormal state with the aspect of the healthy circulating medium, he proposed to examine a little good living blood side by side with the morbid specimen under the microscope. Nurse Wade was in attendance in the laboratory, as usual. The Professor, standing by the instrument, with one hand on the brass screw, had got the diseased drop ready arranged for our inspection beforehand, and was gloating over it himself with scientific enthusiasm. “Grey corpuscles, you will observe,” he said, “almost entirely deficient. Red, poor in number, and irregular in outline. Plasma, thin. Nuclei, feeble. A state of body which tells severely against the due rebuilding of the wasted tissues. Now compare with typical normal specimen.” He removed his eye from the microscope, and wiped a glass slide with a clean cloth as he spoke. “Nurse Wade, we know of old the purity and vigour of your circulating fluid. You shall have the honour of advancing science once more. Hold up your finger.”
Hilda held up her forefinger unhesitatingly. She was used to such requests; and, indeed, Sebastian had acquired by long experience the faculty of pinching the finger-tip so hard, and pressing the point of a needle so dexterously into a minor vessel, that he could draw at once a small drop of blood without the subject even feeling it.
The Professor nipped the last joint between his finger and thumb for a moment till it was black at the end; then he turned to the saucer at his side, which Hilda herself had placed there, and chose from it, cat-like, with great deliberation and selective care, a particular needle. Hilda's eyes followed his every movement as closely and as fearlessly as ever. Sebastian's hand was raised, and he was just about to pierce the delicate white skin, when, with a sudden, quick scream of terror, she snatched her hand away hastily.
The Professor let the needle drop in his astonishment. “What did you do that for?” he cried, with an angry dart of the keen eyes. “This is not the first time I have drawn your blood. You KNEW I would not hurt you.”
Hilda's face had grown strangely pale. But that was not all. I believe I was the only person present who noticed one unobtrusive piece of sleight-of-hand which she hurriedly and skilfully executed. When the needle slipped from Sebastian's hand, she leant forward even as she screamed, and caught it, unobserved, in the folds of her apron. Then her nimble fingers closed over it as if by magic, and conveyed it with a rapid movement at once to her pocket. I do not think even Sebastian himself noticed the quick forward jerk of her eager hands, which would have done honour to a conjurer. He was too much taken aback by her unexpected behaviour to observe the needle.
Just as she caught it, Hilda answered his question in a somewhat flurried voice. “I--I was afraid,” she broke out, gasping. “One gets these little accesses of terror now and again. I--I feel rather weak. I don't think I will volunteer to supply any more normal blood this morning.”
Sebastian's acute eyes read her through, as so often. With a trenchant dart he glanced from her to me. I could see he began to suspect a confederacy. “That will do,” he went on, with slow deliberateness. “Better so. Nurse Wade, I don't know what's beginning to come over you. You are losing your nerve--which is fatal in a nurse. Only the other day you let fall and broke a basin at a most critical moment; and now, you scream aloud on a trifling apprehension.” He paused and glanced around him. “Mr. Callaghan,” he said, turning to our tall, red-haired Irish student, “YOUR blood is good normal, and YOU are not hysterical.” He selected another needle with studious care. “Give me your finger.”
As he picked out the needle, I saw Hilda lean forward again, alert and watchful, eyeing him with a piercing glance; but, after a second's consideration, she seemed to satisfy herself, and fell back without a word. I gathered that she was ready to interfere, had occasion demanded. But occasion did not demand; and she held her peace quietly.
The rest of the examination proceeded without a hitch. For a minute or two, it is true, I fancied that Sebastian betrayed a certain suppressed agitation--a trifling lack of his accustomed perspicuity and his luminous exposition. But, after meandering for a while through a few vague sentences, he soon recovered his wonted calm; and as he went on with his demonstration, throwing himself eagerly into the case, his usual scientific enthusiasm came back to him undiminished. He waxed eloquent (after his fashion) over the “beautiful” contrast between Callaghan's wholesome blood, “rich in the vivifying architectonic grey corpuscles which rebuild worn tissues,” and the effete, impoverished, unvitalised fluid which stagnated in the sluggish veins of the dead patient. The carriers of oxygen had neglected their proper task; the granules whose duty it was to bring elaborated food-stuffs to supply the waste of brain and nerve and muscle had forgotten their cunning. The bricklayers of the bodily fabric had gone out on strike; the weary scavengers had declined to remove the useless by-products. His vivid tongue, his picturesque fancy, ran away with him. I had never heard him talk better or more incisively before; one could feel sure, as he spoke, that the arteries of his own acute and teeming brain at that moment of exaltation were by no means deficient in those energetic and highly vital globules on whose reparative worth he so eloquently descanted. “Sure, the Professor makes annywan see right inside wan's own vascular system,” Callaghan whispered aside to me, in unfeigned admiration.
The demonstration ended in impressive silence. As we streamed out of the laboratory, aglow with his electric fire, Sebastian held me back with a bent motion of his shrivelled forefinger. I stayed behind unwillingly. “Yes, sir?” I said, in an interrogative voice.
The Professor's eyes were fixed intently on the ceiling. His look was one of rapt inspiration. I stood and waited. “Cumberledge,” he said at last, coming back to earth with a start, “I see it more plainly each day that goes. We must get rid of that woman.”
“Of Nurse Wade?” I asked, catching my breath.
He roped the grizzled moustache, and blinked the sunken eyes. “She has lost nerve,” he went on, “lost nerve entirely. I shall suggest that she be dismissed. Her sudden failures of stamina are most embarrassing at critical junctures.”
“Very well, sir,” I answered, swallowing a lump in my throat. To say the truth, I was beginning to be afraid on Hilda's account. That morning's events had thoroughly disquieted me.
He seemed relieved at my unquestioning acquiescence. “She is a dangerous edged-tool; that's the truth of it,” he went on, still twirling his moustache with a preoccupied air, and turning over his stock of needles. “When she's clothed and in her right mind, she is a valuable accessory--sharp and trenchant like a clean, bright lancet; but when she allows one of these causeless hysterical fits to override her tone, she plays one false at once--like a lancet that slips, or grows dull and rusty.” He polished one of the needles on a soft square of new chamois-leather while he spoke, as if to give point and illustration to his simile.
I went out from him, much perturbed. The Sebastian I had once admired and worshipped was beginning to pass from me; in his place I found a very complex and inferior creation. My idol had feet of clay. I was loth to acknowledge it.
I stalked along the corridor moodily towards my own room. As I passed Hilda Wade's door, I saw it half ajar. She stood a little within, and beckoned me to enter.
I passed in and closed the door behind me. Hilda looked at me with trustful eyes. Resolute still, her face was yet that of a hunted creature. “Thank Heaven, I have ONE friend here, at least!” she said, slowly seating herself. “You saw me catch and conceal the needle?”
“Yes, I saw you.”
She drew it forth from her purse, carefully but loosely wrapped up in a small tag of tissue-paper. “Here it is!” she said, displaying it. “Now, I want you to test it.”
“In a culture?” I asked; for I guessed her meaning.
She nodded. “Yes, to see what that man has done to it.”
“What do you suspect?”
She shrugged her graceful shoulders half imperceptibly.
“How should I know? Anything!”
I gazed at the needle closely. “What made you distrust it?” I inquired at last, still eyeing it.
She opened a drawer, and took out several others. “See here,” she said, handing me one; “THESE are the needles I keep in antiseptic wool--the needles with which I always supply the Professor. You observe their shape--the common surgical patterns. Now, look at THIS needle, with which the Professor was just going to prick my finger! You can see for yourself at once it is of bluer steel and of a different manufacture.”
“That is quite true,” I answered, examining it with my pocket lens, which I always carry. “I see the difference. But how did you detect it?”
“From his face, partly; but partly, too, from the needle itself. I had my suspicions, and I was watching him closely. Just as he raised the thing in his hand, half concealing it, so, and showing only the point, I caught the blue gleam of the steel as the light glanced off it. It was not the kind I knew. Then I withdrew my hand at once, feeling sure he meant mischief.”
“That was wonderfully quick of you!”
“Quick? Well, yes. Thank Heaven, my mind works fast; my perceptions are rapid. Otherwise--” she looked grave. “One second more, and it would have been too late. The man might have killed me.”
“You think it is poisoned, then?”
Hilda shook her head with confident dissent. “Poisoned? Oh, no. He is wiser now. Fifteen years ago, he used poison. But science has made gigantic strides since then. He would not needlessly expose himself to-day to the risks of the poisoner.”
“Fifteen years ago he used poison?”
She nodded, with the air of one who knows. “I am not speaking at random,” she answered. “I say what I know. Some day I will explain. For the present, it is enough to tell you I know it.”
“And what do you suspect now?” I asked, the weird sense of her strange power deepening on me every second.
She held up the incriminated needle again.
“Do you see this groove?” she asked, pointing to it with the tip of another.
I examined it once more at the light with the lens. A longitudinal groove, apparently ground into one side of the needle, lengthwise, by means of a small grinding-stone and emery powder, ran for a quarter of an inch above the point. This groove seemed to me to have been produced by an amateur, though he must have been one accustomed to delicate microscopic manipulation; for the edges under the lens showed slightly rough, like the surface of a file on a small scale: not smooth and polished, as a needle-maker would have left them. I said so to Hilda.
“You are quite right,” she answered. “That is just what it shows. I feel sure Sebastian made that groove himself. He could have bought grooved needles, it is true, such as they sometimes use for retaining small quantities of lymphs and medicines; but we had none in stock, and to buy them would be to manufacture evidence against himself, in case of detection. Besides, the rough, jagged edge would hold the material he wished to inject all the better, while its saw-like points would tear the flesh, imperceptibly, but minutely, and so serve his purpose.”
“Which was?”
“Try the needle, and judge for yourself. I prefer you should find out. You can tell me to-morrow.”
“It was quick of you to detect it!” I cried, still turning the suspicious object over. “The difference is so slight.”
“Yes; but you tell me my eyes are as sharp as the needle. Besides, I had reason to doubt; and Sebastian himself gave me the clue by selecting his instrument with too great deliberation. He had put it there with the rest, but it lay a little apart; and as he picked it up gingerly, I began to doubt. When I saw the blue gleam, my doubt was at once converted into certainty. Then his eyes, too, had the look which I know means victory. Benign or baleful, it goes with his triumphs. I have seen that look before, and when once it lurks scintillating in the luminous depths of his gleaming eyeballs, I recognise at once that, whatever his aim, he has succeeded in it.”
“Still, Hilda, I am loth--” She waved her hand impatiently. “Waste no time,” she cried, in an authoritative voice. “If you happen to let that needle rub carelessly against the sleeve of your coat you may destroy the evidence. Take it at once to your room, plunge it into a culture, and lock it up safe at a proper temperature--where Sebastian cannot get at it--till the consequences develop.”
I did as she bid me. By this time, I was not wholly unprepared for the result she anticipated. My belief in Sebastian had sunk to zero, and was rapidly reaching a negative quantity.
At nine the next morning, I tested one drop of the culture under the microscope. Clear and limpid to the naked eye, it was alive with small objects of a most suspicious nature, when properly magnified. I knew those hungry forms. Still, I would not decide offhand on my own authority in a matter of such moment. Sebastian's character was at stake--the character of the man who led the profession. I called in Callaghan, who happened to be in the ward, and asked him to put his eye to the instrument for a moment. He was a splendid fellow for the use of high powers, and I had magnified the culture 300 diameters. “What do you call those?” I asked, breathless.
He scanned them carefully with his experienced eye. “Is it the microbes ye mean?” he answered. “An' what 'ud they be, then, if it wasn't the bacillus of pyaemia?”
“Blood-poisoning!” I ejaculated, horror-struck.
“Aye; blood-poisoning: that's the English of it.”
I assumed an air of indifference. “I made them that myself,” I rejoined, as if they were mere ordinary experimental germs; “but I wanted confirmation of my own opinion. You're sure of the bacillus?”
“An' haven't I been keeping swarms of those very same bacteria under close observation for Sebastian for seven weeks past? Why, I know them as well as I know me own mother.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That will do.” And I carried off the microscope, bacilli and all, into Hilda Wade's sitting-room. “Look yourself!” I cried to her.
She stared at them through the instrument with an unmoved face. “I thought so,” she answered shortly. “The bacillus of pyaemia. A most virulent type. Exactly what I expected.”
“You anticipated that result?”
“Absolutely. You see, blood-poisoning matures quickly, and kills almost to a certainty. Delirium supervenes so soon that the patient has no chance of explaining suspicions. Besides, it would all seem so very natural! Everybody would say: 'She got some slight wound, which microbes from some case she was attending contaminated.' You may be sure Sebastian thought out all that. He plans with consummate skill. He had designed everything.”
I gazed at her, uncertain. “And what will you DO?” I asked. “Expose him?”
She opened both her palms with a blank gesture of helplessness. “It is useless!” she answered. “Nobody would believe me. Consider the situation. YOU know the needle I gave you was the one Sebastian meant to use--the one he dropped and I caught--BECAUSE you are a friend of mine, and because you have learned to trust me. But who else would credit it? I have only my word against his--an unknown nurse's against the great Professor's. Everybody would say I was malicious or hysterical. Hysteria is always an easy stone to fling at an injured woman who asks for justice. They would declare I had trumped up the case to forestall my dismissal. They would set it down to spite. We can do nothing against him. Remember, on his part, the utter absence of overt motive.”
“And you mean to stop on here, in close attendance on a man who has attempted your life?” I cried, really alarmed for her safety.
“I am not sure about that,” she answered. “I must take time to think. My presence at Nathaniel's was necessary to my Plan. The Plan fails for the present. I have now to look round and reconsider my position.”
“But you are not safe here now,” I urged, growing warm. “If Sebastian really wishes to get rid of you, and is as unscrupulous as you suppose, with his gigantic brain he can soon compass his end. What he plans he executes. You ought not to remain within the Professor's reach one hour longer.”
“I have thought of that, too,” she replied, with an almost unearthly calm. “But there are difficulties either way. At any rate, I am glad he did not succeed this time. For, to have killed me now, would have frustrated my Plan”--she clasped her hands--“my Plan is ten thousand times dearer than life to me!”
“Dear lady!” I cried, drawing a deep breath, “I implore you in this strait, listen to what I urge. Why fight your battle alone? Why refuse assistance? I have admired you so long--I am so eager to help you. If only you will allow me to call you--” Her eyes brightened and softened. Her whole bosom heaved. I felt in a flash she was not wholly indifferent to me. Strange tremors in the air seemed to play about us. But she waved me aside once more. “Don't press me,” she said, in a very low voice. “Let me go my own way. It is hard enough already, this task I have undertaken, without YOUR making it harder.... Dear friend, dear friend, you don't quite understand. There are TWO men at Nathaniel's whom I desire to escape--because they both alike stand in the way of my Purpose.” She took my hands in hers. “Each in a different way,” she murmured once more. “But each I must avoid. One is Sebastian. The other--” she let my hand drop again, and broke off suddenly. “Dear Hubert,” she cried, with a catch, “I cannot help it: forgive me!”
It was the first time she had ever called me by my Christian name. The mere sound of the word made me unspeakably happy.
Yet she waved me away. “Must I go?” I asked, quivering.
“Yes, yes: you must go. I cannot stand it. I must think this thing out, undisturbed. It is a very great crisis.”
That afternoon and evening, by some unhappy chance, I was fully engaged in work at the hospital. Late at night a letter arrived for me. I glanced at it in dismay. It bore the Basingstoke postmark. But, to my alarm and surprise, it was in Hilda's hand. What could this change portend? I opened it, all tremulous.
“DEAR HUBERT,--” I gave a sigh of relief. It was no longer “Dear Dr. Cumberledge” now, but “Hubert.” That was something gained, at any rate. I read on with a beating heart. What had Hilda to say to me?
“DEAR HUBERT,--By the time this reaches you, I shall be far away, irrevocably far, from London. With deep regret, with fierce searchings of spirit, I have come to the conclusion that, for the Purpose I have in view, it would be better for me at once to leave Nathaniel's. Where I go, or what I mean to do, I do not wish to tell you. Of your charity, I pray, refrain from asking me. I am aware that your kindness and generosity deserve better recognition. But, like Sebastian himself, I am the slave of my Purpose. I have lived for it all these years, and it is still very dear to me. To tell you my plans would interfere with that end. Do not, therefore, suppose I am insensible to your goodness.... Dear Hubert, spare me--I dare not say more, lest I say too much. I dare not trust myself. But one thing I MUST say. I am flying from YOU quite as much as from Sebastian. Flying from my own heart, quite as much as from my enemy. Some day, perhaps, if I accomplish my object, I may tell you all. Meanwhile, I can only beg of you of your kindness to trust me. We shall not meet again, I fear, for years. But I shall never forget you--you, the kind counsellor, who have half turned me aside from my life's Purpose. One word more, and I should falter. --In very great haste, and amid much disturbance, yours ever affectionately and gratefully, “HILDA.”
It was a hurried scrawl in pencil, as if written in a train. I felt utterly dejected. Was Hilda, then, leaving England?
Rousing myself after some minutes, I went straight to Sebastian's rooms, and told him in brief terms that Nurse Wade had disappeared at a moment's notice, and had sent a note to tell me so.
He looked up from his work, and scanned me hard, as was his wont. “That is well,” he said at last, his eyes glowing deep; “she was getting too great a hold on you, that young woman!”
“She retains that hold upon me, sir,” I answered curtly.
“You are making a grave mistake in life, my dear Cumberledge,” he went on, in his old genial tone, which I had almost forgotten. “Before you go further, and entangle yourself more deeply, I think it is only right that I should undeceive you as to this girl's true position. She is passing under a false name, and she comes of a tainted stock.... Nurse Wade, as she chooses to call herself, is a daughter of the notorious murderer, Yorke-Bannerman.”
My mind leapt back to the incident of the broken basin. Yorke-Bannerman's name had profoundly moved her. Then I thought of Hilda's face. Murderers, I said to myself, do not beget such daughters as that. Not even accidental murderers, like my poor friend Le Geyt. I saw at once the prima facie evidence was strongly against her. But I had faith in her still. I drew myself up firmly, and stared him back full in the face. “I do not believe it,” I answered, shortly.
“You do not believe it? I tell you it is so. The girl herself as good as acknowledged it to me.”
I spoke slowly and distinctly. “Dr. Sebastian,” I said, confronting him, “let us be quite clear with one another. I have found you out. I know how you tried to poison that lady. To poison her with bacilli which _I_ detected. I cannot trust your word; I cannot trust your inferences. Either she is not Yorke-Bannerman's daughter at all, or else... Yorke-Bannerman was NOT a murderer....” I watched his face closely. Conviction leaped upon me. “And someone else was,” I went on. “I might put a name to him.”
With a stern white face, he rose and opened the door. He pointed to it slowly. “This hospital is not big enough for you and me abreast,” he said, with cold politeness. “One or other of us must go. Which, I leave to your good sense to determine.”
Even at that moment of detection and disgrace, in one man's eyes, at least, Sebastian retained his full measure of dignity.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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6
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THE EPISODE OF THE LETTER WITH THE BASINGSTOKE POSTMARK
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I have a vast respect for my grandfather. He was a man of forethought. He left me a modest little income of seven hundred a-year, well invested. Now, seven hundred a-year is not exactly wealth; but it is an unobtrusive competence; it permits a bachelor to move about the world and choose at will his own profession. _I_ chose medicine; but I was not wholly dependent upon it. So I honoured my grandfather's wise disposition of his worldly goods; though, oddly enough, my cousin Tom (to whom he left his watch and five hundred pounds) speaks MOST disrespectfully of his character and intellect.
Thanks to my grandfather's silken-sailed barque, therefore, when I found myself practically dismissed from Nathaniel's I was not thrown on my beam-ends, as most young men in my position would have been; I had time and opportunity for the favourite pastime of looking about me. Of course, had I chosen, I might have fought the case to the bitter end against Sebastian; he could not dismiss me--that lay with the committee. But I hardly cared to fight. In the first place, though I had found him out as a man, I still respected him as a great teacher; and in the second place (which is always more important), I wanted to find and follow Hilda.
To be sure, Hilda, in that enigmatic letter of hers, had implored me not to seek her out; but I think you will admit there is one request which no man can grant to the girl he loves--and that is the request to keep away from her. If Hilda did not want ME, I wanted Hilda; and, being a man, I meant to find her.
My chances of discovering her whereabouts, however, I had to confess to myself (when it came to the point) were extremely slender. She had vanished from my horizon, melted into space. My sole hint of a clue consisted in the fact that the letter she sent me had been posted at Basingstoke. Here, then, was my problem: given an envelope with the Basingstoke postmark, to find in what part of Europe, Asia, Africa, or America the writer of it might be discovered. It opened up a fine field for speculation.
When I set out to face this broad puzzle, my first idea was: “I must ask Hilda.” In all circumstances of difficulty, I had grown accustomed to submitting my doubts and surmises to her acute intelligence; and her instinct almost always supplied the right solution. But now Hilda was gone; it was Hilda herself I wished to track through the labyrinth of the world. I could expect no assistance in tracking her from Hilda.
“Let me think,” I said to myself, over a reflective pipe, with feet poised on the fender. “How would Hilda herself have approached this problem? Imagine I'm Hilda. I must try to strike a trail by applying her own methods to her own character. She would have attacked the question, no doubt,”--here I eyed my pipe wisely,--“from the psychological side. She would have asked herself”--I stroked my chin--“what such a temperament as hers was likely to do under such-and-such circumstances. And she would have answered it aright. But then”--I puffed away once or twice--“SHE is Hilda.”
When I came to reconnoitre the matter in this light, I became at once aware how great a gulf separated the clumsy male intelligence from the immediate and almost unerring intuitions of a clever woman. I am considered no fool; in my own profession, I may venture to say, I was Sebastian's favourite pupil. Yet, though I asked myself over and over again where Hilda would be likely to go--Canada, China, Australia--as the outcome of her character, in these given conditions, I got no answer. I stared at the fire and reflected. I smoked two successive pipes, and shook out the ashes. “Let me consider how Hilda's temperament would work,” I said, looking sagacious. I said it several times--but there I stuck. I went no further. The solution would not come. I felt that in order to play Hilda's part, it was necessary first to have Hilda's head-piece. Not every man can bend the bow of Ulysses.
As I turned the problem over in my mind, however, one phrase at last came back to me--a phrase which Hilda herself had let fall when we were debating a very similar point about poor Hugo Le Geyt: “If I were in his place, what do you think I would do? --why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains.”
She must have gone to Wales, then. I had her own authority for saying so.... And yet--Wales? Wales? I pulled myself up with a jerk. In that case, how did she come to be passing by Basingstoke?
Was the postmark a blind? Had she hired someone to take the letter somewhere for her, on purpose to put me off on a false track? I could hardly think so. Besides, the time was against it. I saw Hilda at Nathaniel's in the morning; the very same evening I received the envelope with the Basingstoke postmark.
“If I were in his place.” Yes, true; but, now I come to think on it, WERE the positions really parallel? Hilda was not flying for her life from justice; she was only endeavouring to escape Sebastian--and myself. The instances she had quoted of the mountaineer's curious homing instinct--the wild yearning he feels at moments of great straits to bury himself among the nooks of his native hills--were they not all instances of murderers pursued by the police? It was abject terror that drove these men to their burrows. But Hilda was not a murderer; she was not dogged by remorse, despair, or the myrmidons of the law; it was murder she was avoiding, not the punishment of murder. That made, of course, an obvious difference. “Irrevocably far from London,” she said. Wales is a suburb. I gave up the idea that it was likely to prove her place of refuge from the two men she was bent on escaping. Hong-Kong, after all, seemed more probable than Llanberis.
That first failure gave me a clue, however, as to the best way of applying Hilda's own methods. “What would such a person do under the circumstances?” that was her way of putting the question. Clearly, then, I must first decide what WERE the circumstances. Was Sebastian speaking the truth? Was Hilda Wade, or was she not, the daughter of the supposed murderer, Dr. Yorke-Bannerman?
I looked up as much of the case as I could, in unobtrusive ways, among the old law-reports, and found that the barrister who had had charge of the defence was my father's old friend, Mr. Horace Mayfield, a man of elegant tastes, and the means to gratify them.
I went to call on him on Sunday evening at his artistically luxurious house in Onslow Gardens. A sedate footman answered the bell. Fortunately, Mr. Mayfield was at home, and, what is rarer, disengaged. You do not always find a successful Q.C. at his ease among his books, beneath the electric light, ready to give up a vacant hour to friendly colloquy.
“Remember Yorke-Bannerman's case?” he said, a huge smile breaking slowly like a wave over his genial fat face--Horace Mayfield resembles a great good-humoured toad, with bland manners and a capacious double chin--“I should just say I DID! Bless my soul--why, yes,” he beamed, “I was Yorke-Bannerman's counsel. Excellent fellow, Yorke-Bannerman--most unfortunate end, though--precious clever chap, too! Had an astounding memory. Recollected every symptom of every patient he ever attended. And SUCH an eye! Diagnosis? It was clairvoyance! A gift--no less. Knew what was the matter with you the moment he looked at you.”
That sounded like Hilda. The same surprising power of recalling facts; the same keen faculty for interpreting character or the signs of feeling. “He poisoned somebody, I believe,” I murmured, casually. “An uncle of his, or something.”
Mayfield's great squat face wrinkled; the double chin, folding down on the neck, became more ostentatiously double than ever. “Well, I can't admit that,” he said, in his suave voice, twirling the string of his eye-glass. “I was Yorke-Bannerman's advocate, you see; and therefore I was paid not to admit it. Besides, he was a friend of mine, and I always liked him. But I WILL allow that the case DID look a trifle black against him.”
“Ha? Looked black, did it?” I faltered.
The judicious barrister shrugged his shoulders. A genial smile spread oilily once more over his smooth face. “None of my business to say so,” he answered, puckering the corners of his eyes. “Still, it was a long time ago; and the circumstances certainly WERE suspicious. Perhaps, on the whole, Hubert, it was just as well the poor fellow died before the trial came off; otherwise”--he pouted his lips--“I might have had my work cut out to save him.” And he eyed the blue china gods on the mantelpiece affectionately.
“I believe the Crown urged money as the motive?” I suggested.
Mayfield glanced inquiry at me. “Now, why do you want to know all this?” he asked, in a suspicious voice, coming back from his dragons. “It is irregular, very, to worm information out of an innocent barrister in his hours of ease about a former client. We are a guileless race, we lawyers; don't abuse our confidence.”
He seemed an honest man, I thought, in spite of his mocking tone. I trusted him, and made a clean breast of it. “I believe,” I answered, with an impressive little pause, “I want to marry Yorke-Bannerman's daughter.”
He gave a quick start. “What, Maisie?” he exclaimed.
I shook my head. “No, no; that is not the name,” I replied.
He hesitated a moment. “But there IS no other,” he hazarded cautiously at last. “I knew the family.”
“I am not sure of it,” I went on. “I have merely my suspicions. I am in love with a girl, and something about her makes me think she is probably a Yorke-Bannerman.”
“But, my dear Hubert, if that is so,” the great lawyer went on, waving me off with one fat hand, “it must be at once apparent to you that _I_ am the last person on earth to whom you ought to apply for information. Remember my oath. The practice of our clan: the seal of secrecy!”
I was frank once more. “I do not know whether the lady I mean is or is not Yorke-Bannerman's daughter,” I persisted. “She may be, and she may not. She gives another name--that's certain. But whether she is or isn't, one thing I know--I mean to marry her. I believe in her; I trust her. I only seek to gain this information now because I don't know where she is--and I want to track her.”
He crossed his big hands with an air of Christian resignation, and looked up at the panels of the coffered ceiling. “In that,” he answered, “I may honestly say, I can't help you. Humbug apart, I have not known Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman's address--or Maisie's either--ever since my poor friend's death. Prudent woman, Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman! She went away, I believe, to somewhere in North Wales, and afterwards to Brittany. But she probably changed her name; and--she did not confide in me.”
I went on to ask him a few questions about the case, premising that I did so in the most friendly spirit. “Oh, I can only tell you what is publicly known,” he answered, beaming, with the usual professional pretence of the most sphinx-like reticence. “But the plain facts, as universally admitted, were these. I break no confidence. Yorke-Bannerman had a rich uncle from whom he had expectations--a certain Admiral Scott Prideaux. This uncle had lately made a will in Yorke-Bannerman's favour; but he was a cantankerous old chap--naval, you know autocratic--crusty--given to changing his mind with each change of the wind, and easily offended by his relations--the sort of cheerful old party who makes a new will once every month, disinheriting the nephew he last dined with. Well, one day the Admiral was taken ill, at his own house, and Yorke-Bannerman attended him. OUR contention was--I speak now as my old friend's counsel--that Scott Prideaux, getting as tired of life as we were all tired of him, and weary of this recurrent worry of will-making, determined at last to clear out for good from a world where he was so little appreciated, and, therefore, tried to poison himself.”
“With aconitine?” I suggested, eagerly.
“Unfortunately, yes; he made use of aconitine for that otherwise laudable purpose. Now, as ill luck would have it”--Mayfield's wrinkles deepened--“Yorke-Bannerman and Sebastian, then two rising doctors engaged in physiological researches together, had just been occupied in experimenting upon this very drug--testing the use of aconitine. Indeed, you will no doubt remember”--he crossed his fat hands again comfortably--“it was these precise researches on a then little-known poison that first brought Sebastian prominently before the public. What was the consequence?” His smooth, persuasive voice flowed on as if I were a concentrated jury. “The Admiral grew rapidly worse, and insisted upon calling in a second opinion. No doubt he didn't like the aconitine when it came to the pinch--for it DOES pinch, I can tell you--and repented him of his evil. Yorke-Bannerman suggested Sebastian as the second opinion; the uncle acquiesced; Sebastian was called in, and, of course, being fresh from his researches, immediately recognised the symptoms of aconitine poisoning.”
“What! Sebastian found it out?” I cried, starting.
“Oh, yes! Sebastian. He watched the case from that point to the end; and the oddest part of it all was this--that though he communicated with the police, and himself prepared every morsel of food that the poor old Admiral took from that moment forth, the symptoms continually increased in severity. The police contention was that Yorke-Bannerman somehow managed to put the stuff into the milk beforehand; my own theory was--as counsel for the accused”--he blinked his fat eyes--“that old Prideaux had concealed a large quantity of aconitine in the bed, before his illness, and went on taking it from time to time--just to spite his nephew.”
“And you BELIEVE that, Mr. Mayfield?”
The broad smile broke concentrically in ripples over the great lawyer's face. His smile was Mayfield's main feature. He shrugged his shoulders and expanded his big hands wide open before him. “My dear Hubert,” he said, with a most humorous expression of countenance, “you are a professional man yourself; therefore you know that every profession has its own little courtesies--its own small fictions. I was Yorke-Bannerman's counsel, as well as his friend. 'Tis a point of honour with us that no barrister will ever admit a doubt as to a client's innocence--is he not paid to maintain it? --and to my dying day I will constantly maintain that old Prideaux poisoned himself. Maintain it with that dogged and meaningless obstinacy with which we always cling to whatever is least provable.... Oh, yes! He poisoned himself; and Yorke-Bannerman was innocent.... But still, you know, it WAS the sort of case where an acute lawyer, with a reputation to make, would prefer to be for the Crown rather than for the prisoner.”
“But it was never tried,” I ejaculated.
“No, happily for us, it was never tried. Fortune favoured us. Yorke-Bannerman had a weak heart, a conveniently weak heart, which the inquest sorely affected; and besides, he was deeply angry at what he persisted in calling Sebastian's defection. He evidently thought Sebastian ought to have stood by him. His colleague preferred the claims of public duty--as he understood them, I mean--to those of private friendship. It was a very sad case--for Yorke-Bannerman was really a charming fellow. But I confess I WAS relieved when he died unexpectedly on the morning of his arrest. It took off my shoulders a most serious burden.”
“You think, then, the case would have gone against him?”
“My dear Hubert,” his whole face puckered with an indulgent smile, “of course the case must have gone against us. Juries are fools; but they are not such fools as to swallow everything--like ostriches: to let me throw dust in their eyes about so plain an issue. Consider the facts, consider them impartially. Yorke-Bannerman had easy access to aconitine; had whole ounces of it in his possession; he treated the uncle from whom he was to inherit; he was in temporary embarrassments--that came out at the inquest; it was known that the Admiral had just made a twenty-third will in his favour, and that the Admiral's wills were liable to alteration every time a nephew ventured upon an opinion in politics, religion, science, navigation, or the right card at whist, differing by a shade from that of the uncle. The Admiral died of aconitine poisoning; and Sebastian observed and detailed the symptoms. Could anything be plainer--I mean, could any combination of fortuitous circumstances”--he blinked pleasantly again--“be more adverse to an advocate sincerely convinced of his client's innocence--as a professional duty?” And he gazed at me comically.
The more he piled up the case against the man who I now felt sure was Hilda's father, the less did I believe him. A dark conspiracy seemed to loom up in the background. “Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked, at last, in a very tentative tone, “that perhaps--I throw out the hint as the merest suggestion--perhaps it may have been Sebastian who--” He smiled this time till I thought his smile would swallow him.
“If Yorke-Bannerman had NOT been my client,” he mused aloud, “I might have been inclined to suspect rather that Sebastian aided him to avoid justice by giving him something violent to take, if he wished it: something which might accelerate the inevitable action of the heart-disease from which he was suffering. Isn't THAT more likely?”
I saw there was nothing further to be got out of Mayfield. His opinion was fixed; he was a placid ruminant. But he had given me already much food for thought. I thanked him for his assistance, and returned on foot to my rooms at the hospital.
I was now, however, in a somewhat different position for tracking Hilda from that which I occupied before my interview with the famous counsel. I felt certain by this time that Hilda Wade and Maisie Yorke-Bannerman were one and the same person. To be sure, it gave me a twinge to think that Hilda should be masquerading under an assumed name; but I waived that question for the moment, and awaited her explanations. The great point now was to find Hilda. She was flying from Sebastian to mature a new plan. But whither? I proceeded to argue it out on her own principles; oh, how lamely! The world is still so big! Mauritius, the Argentine, British Columbia, New Zealand!
The letter I had received bore the Basingstoke postmark. Now a person may be passing Basingstoke on his way either to Southampton or Plymouth, both of which are ports of embarcation for various foreign countries. I attached importance to that clue. Something about the tone of Hilda's letter made me realise that she intended to put the sea between us. In concluding so much, I felt sure I was not mistaken. Hilda had too big and too cosmopolitan a mind to speak of being “irrevocably far from London,” if she were only going to some town in England, or even to Normandy, or the Channel Islands. “Irrevocably far” pointed rather to a destination outside Europe altogether--to India, Africa, America: not to Jersey, Dieppe, or Saint-Malo.
Was it Southampton or Plymouth to which she was first bound? --that was the next question. I inclined to Southampton. For the sprawling lines (so different from her usual neat hand) were written hurriedly in a train, I could see; and, on consulting Bradshaw, I found that the Plymouth expresses stop longest at Salisbury, where Hilda would, therefore, have been likely to post her note if she were going to the far west; while some of the Southampton trains stop at Basingstoke, which is, indeed, the most convenient point on that route for sending off a letter. This was mere blind guesswork, to be sure, compared with Hilda's immediate and unerring intuition; but it had some probability in its favour, at any rate. Try both: of the two, she was likelier to be going to Southampton.
My next move was to consult the list of outgoing steamers. Hilda had left London on a Saturday morning. Now, on alternate Saturdays, the steamers of the Castle line sail from Southampton, where they call to take up passengers and mails. Was this one of those alternate Saturdays? I looked at the list of dates: it was. That told further in favour of Southampton. But did any steamer of any passenger line sail from Plymouth on the same day? None, that I could find. Or from Southampton elsewhere? I looked them all up. The Royal Mail Company's boats start on Wednesdays; the North German Lloyd's on Wednesdays and Sundays. Those were the only likely vessels I could discover. Either, then, I concluded, Hilda meant to sail on Saturday by the Castle line for South Africa, or else on Sunday by North German Lloyd for some part of America.
How I longed for one hour of Hilda to help me out with her almost infallible instinct. I realised how feeble and fallacious was my own groping in the dark. Her knowledge of temperament would have revealed to her at once what I was trying to discover, like the police she despised, by the clumsy “clues” which so roused her sarcasm.
However, I went to bed and slept on it. Next morning I determined to set out for Southampton on a tour of inquiry to all the steamboat agencies. If that failed, I could go on to Plymouth.
But, as chance would have it, the morning post brought me an unexpected letter, which helped me not a little in unravelling the problem. It was a crumpled letter, written on rather soiled paper, in an uneducated hand, and it bore, like Hilda's, the Basingstoke postmark.
“Charlotte Churtwood sends her duty to Dr. Cumberledge,” it said, with somewhat uncertain spelling, “and I am very sorry that I was not able to Post the letter to you in London, as the lady ast me, but after her train ad left has I was stepping into mine the Ingine started and I was knocked down and badly hurt and the lady gave me a half-sovering to Post it in London has soon as I got there but bein unable to do so I now return it dear sir not knowing the lady's name and adress she having trusted me through seeing me on the platform, and perhaps you can send it back to her, and was very sorry I could not Post it were she ast me, but time bein an objeck put it in the box in Basingstoke station and now inclose post office order for ten Shillings whitch dear sir kindly let the young lady have from your obedient servant, “CHARLOTTE CHURTWOOD.”
In the corner was the address: “11, Chubb's Cottages, Basingstoke.”
The happy accident of this letter advanced things for me greatly--though it also made me feel how dependent I was upon happy accidents, where Hilda would have guessed right at once by mere knowledge of character. Still, the letter explained many things which had hitherto puzzled me. I had felt not a little surprise that Hilda, wishing to withdraw from me and leave no traces, should have sent off her farewell letter from Basingstoke--so as to let me see at once in what direction she was travelling. Nay, I even wondered at times whether she had really posted it herself at Basingstoke, or given it to somebody who chanced to be going there to post for her as a blind. But I did not think she would deliberately deceive me; and, in my opinion, to get a letter posted at Basingstoke would be deliberate deception, while to get it posted in London was mere vague precaution. I understood now that she had written it in the train, and then picked out a likely person as she passed to take it to Waterloo for her.
Of course, I went straight down to Basingstoke, and called at once at Chubb's Cottages. It was a squalid little row on the outskirts of the town. I found Charlotte Churtwood herself exactly such a girl as Hilda, with her quick judgment of character, might have hit upon for such a purpose. She was a conspicuously honest and transparent country servant, of the lumpy type, on her way to London to take a place as housemaid. Her injuries were severe, but not dangerous. “The lady saw me on the platform,” she said, “and beckoned to me to come to her. She ast me where I was going, and I says, 'To London, miss.' Says she, smiling kind-like, 'Could you post a letter for me, certain sure?' Says I, 'You can depend upon me.' An' then she give me the arf-sovering, an' says, says she, 'Mind, it's VERY par-tickler; if the gentleman don't get it, 'e'll fret 'is 'eart out.' An' through 'aving a young man o' my own, as is a groom at Andover, o' course I understood 'er, sir. An' then, feeling all full of it, as yu may say, what with the arf-sovering, and what with one thing and what with another, an' all of a fluster with not being used to travelling, I run up, when the train for London come in, an' tried to scramble into it, afore it 'ad quite stopped moving. An' a guard, 'e rushes up, an' 'Stand back!' says 'e; 'wait till the train stops,' says 'e, an' waves his red flag at me. But afore I could stand back, with one foot on the step, the train sort of jumped away from me, and knocked me down like this; and they say it'll be a week now afore I'm well enough to go on to London. But I posted the letter all the same, at Basingstoke station, as they was carrying me off; an' I took down the address, so as to return the arf-sovering.” Hilda was right, as always. She had chosen instinctively the trustworthy person,--chosen her at first sight, and hit the bull's-eye.
“Do you know what train the lady was in?” I asked, as she paused. “Where was it going, did you notice?”
“It was the Southampton train, sir. I saw the board on the carriage.”
That settled the question. “You are a good and an honest girl,” I said, pulling out my purse; “and you came to this misfortune through trying--too eagerly--to help the young lady. A ten-pound note is not overmuch as compensation for your accident. Take it, and get well. I should be sorry to think you lost a good place through your anxiety to help us.”
The rest of my way was plain sailing now. I hurried on straight to Southampton. There my first visit was to the office of the Castle line. I went to the point at once. Was there a Miss Wade among the passengers by the Dunottar Castle?
No; nobody of that name on the list.
Had any lady taken a passage at the last moment?
The clerk perpended. Yes; a lady had come by the mail train from London, with no heavy baggage, and had gone on board direct, taking what cabin she could get. A young lady in grey. Quite unprepared. Gave no name. Called away in a hurry.
What sort of lady?
Youngish; good-looking; brown hair and eyes, the clerk thought; a sort of creamy skin; and a--well, a mesmeric kind of glance that seemed to go right through you.
“That will do,” I answered, sure now of my quarry. “To which port did she book?”
“To Cape Town.”
“Very well,” I said, promptly. “You may reserve me a good berth in the next outgoing steamer.”
It was just like Hilda's impulsive character to rush off in this way at a moment's notice; and just like mine to follow her. But it piqued me a little to think that, but for the accident of an accident, I might never have tracked her down. If the letter had been posted in London as she intended, and not at Basingstoke, I might have sought in vain for her from then till Doomsday.
Ten days later, I was afloat on the Channel, bound for South Africa.
I always admired Hilda's astonishing insight into character and motive; but I never admired it quite so profoundly as on the glorious day when we arrived at Cape Town. I was standing on deck, looking out for the first time in my life on that tremendous view--the steep and massive bulk of Table Mountain,--a mere lump of rock, dropped loose from the sky, with the long white town spread gleaming at its base, and the silver-tree plantations that cling to its lower slopes and merge by degrees into gardens and vineyards--when a messenger from the shore came up to me tentatively.
“Dr. Cumberledge?” he said, in an inquiring tone.
I nodded. “That is my name.”
“I have a letter for you, sir.”
I took it, in great surprise. Who on earth in Cape Town could have known I was coming? I had not a friend to my knowledge in the colony. I glanced at the envelope. My wonder deepened. That prescient brain! It was Hilda's handwriting.
I tore it open and read: “MY DEAR HUBERT,--I KNOW you will come; I KNOW you will follow me. So I am leaving this letter at Donald Currie & Co.'s office, giving their agent instructions to hand it to you as soon as you reach Cape Town. I am quite sure you will track me so far at least; I understand your temperament. But I beg you, I implore you, to go no further. You will ruin my plan if you do. And I still adhere to it. It is good of you to come so far; I cannot blame you for that. I know your motives. But do not try to find me out. I warn you, beforehand, it will be quite useless. I have made up my mind. I have an object in life, and, dear as you are to me--THAT I will not pretend to deny--I can never allow even YOU to interfere with it. So be warned in time. Go back quietly by the next steamer.
“Your ever attached and grateful, “HILDA.”
I read it twice through with a little thrill of joy. Did any man ever court so strange a love? Her very strangeness drew me. But go back by the next steamer! I felt sure of one thing: Hilda was far too good a judge of character to believe that I was likely to obey that mandate.
I will not trouble you with the remaining stages of my quest. Except for the slowness of South African mail coaches, they were comparatively easy. It is not so hard to track strangers in Cape Town as strangers in London. I followed Hilda to her hotel, and from her hotel up country, stage after stage--jolted by rail, worse jolted by mule-waggon--inquiring, inquiring, inquiring--till I learned at last she was somewhere in Rhodesia.
That is a big address; but it does not cover as many names as it covers square miles. In time I found her. Still, it took time; and before we met, Hilda had had leisure to settle down quietly to her new existence. People in Rhodesia had noted her coming, as a new portent, because of one strange peculiarity. She was the only woman of means who had ever gone up of her own free will to Rhodesia. Other women had gone there to accompany their husbands, or to earn their livings; but that a lady should freely select that half-baked land as a place of residence--a lady of position, with all the world before her where to choose--that puzzled the Rhodesians. So she was a marked person. Most people solved the vexed problem, indeed, by suggesting that she had designs against the stern celibacy of a leading South African politician. “Depend upon it,” they said, “it's Rhodes she's after.” The moment I arrived at Salisbury, and stated my object in coming, all the world in the new town was ready to assist me. The lady was to be found (vaguely speaking) on a young farm to the north--a budding farm, whose general direction was expansively indicated to me by a wave of the arm, with South African uncertainty.
I bought a pony at Salisbury--a pretty little seasoned sorrel mare--and set out to find Hilda. My way lay over a brand-new road, or what passes for a road in South Africa--very soft and lumpy, like an English cart-track. I am a fair cross-country rider in our own Midlands, but I never rode a more tedious journey than that one. I had crawled several miles under a blazing sun along the shadeless new track, on my African pony, when, to my surprise I saw, of all sights in the world, a bicycle coming towards me.
I could hardly believe my eyes. Civilisation indeed! A bicycle in these remotest wilds of Africa!
I had been picking my way for some hours through a desolate plateau--the high veldt--about five thousand feet above the sea level, and entirely treeless. In places, to be sure, a few low bushes of prickly aspect rose in tangled clumps; but for the most part the arid table-land was covered by a thick growth of short brown grass, about nine inches high, burnt up in the sun, and most wearisome to look at. The distressing nakedness of a new country confronted me. Here and there a bald farm or two had been literally pegged out--the pegs were almost all one saw of them as yet; the fields were in the future. Here and there, again, a scattered range of low granite hills, known locally as kopjes--red, rocky prominences, flaunting in the sunshine--diversified the distance. But the road itself, such as it was, lay all on the high plain, looking down now and again into gorges or kloofs, wooded on their slopes with scrubby trees, and comparatively well-watered. In the midst of all this crude, unfinished land, the mere sight of a bicycle, bumping over the rubbly road, was a sufficient surprise; but my astonishment reached a climax when I saw, as it drew near, that it was ridden by a woman!
One moment later I had burst into a wild cry, and rode forward to her hurriedly. “Hilda!” I shouted aloud, in my excitement: “Hilda!”
She stepped lightly from her pedals, as if it had been in the park: head erect and proud; eyes liquid, lustrous. I dismounted, trembling, and stood beside her. In the wild joy of the moment, for the first time in my life, I kissed her fervently. Hilda took the kiss, unreproving. She did not attempt to refuse me.
“So you have come at last!” she murmured, with a glow on her face, half nestling towards me, half withdrawing, as if two wills tore her in different directions. “I have been expecting you for some days; and, somehow, to-day, I was almost certain you were coming!”
“Then you are not angry with me?” I cried. “You remember, you forbade me!”
“Angry with you? Dear Hubert, could I ever be angry with you, especially for thus showing me your devotion and your trust? I am never angry with you. When one knows, one understands. I have thought of you so often; sometimes, alone here in this raw new land, I have longed for you to come. It is inconsistent of me, of course; but I am so solitary, so lonely!”
“And yet you begged me not to follow you!”
She looked up at me shyly--I was not accustomed to see Hilda shy. Her eyes gazed deep into mine beneath the long, soft lashes. “I begged you not to follow me,” she repeated, a strange gladness in her tone. “Yes, dear Hubert, I begged you--and I meant it. Cannot you understand that sometimes one hopes a thing may never happen--and is supremely happy because it happens, in spite of one? I have a purpose in life for which I live: I live for it still. For its sake I told you you must not come to me. Yet you HAVE come, against my orders; and--” she paused, and drew a deep sigh--“oh, Hubert, I thank you for daring to disobey me!”
I clasped her to my bosom. She allowed me, half resisting. “I am too weak,” she murmured. “Only this morning, I made up my mind that when I saw you I would implore you to return at once. And now that you are here--” she laid her little hand confidingly in mine--“see how foolish I am! --I cannot dismiss you.”
“Which means to say, Hilda, that, after all, you are still a woman!”
“A woman; oh, yes; very much a woman! Hubert, I love you; I half wish I did not.”
“Why, darling?” I drew her to me.
“Because--if I did not, I could send you away--so easily! As it is--I cannot let you stop--and... I cannot dismiss you.”
“Then divide it,” I cried gaily; “do neither; come away with me!”
“No, no; nor that, either. I will not stultify my whole past life. I will not dishonour my dear father's memory.”
I looked around for something to which to tether my horse. A bridle is in one's way--when one has to discuss important business. There was really nothing about that seemed fit for the purpose. Hilda saw what I sought, and pointed mutely to a stunted bush beside a big granite boulder which rose abruptly from the dead level of the grass, affording a little shade from that sweltering sunlight. I tied my mare to the gnarled root--it was the only part big enough--and sat down by Hilda's side, under the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. I realised at that moment the force and appropriateness of the Psalmist's simile. The sun beat fiercely on the seeding grasses. Away on the southern horizon we could faintly perceive the floating yellow haze of the prairie fires lit by the Mashonas.
“Then you knew I would come?” I began, as she seated herself on the burnt-up herbage, while my hand stole into hers, to nestle there naturally.
She pressed it in return. “Oh, yes; I knew you would come,” she answered, with that strange ring of confidence in her voice. “Of course you got my letter at Cape Town?”
“I did, Hilda--and I wondered at you more than ever as I read it. But if you KNEW I would come, why write to prevent me?”
Her eyes had their mysterious far-away air. She looked out upon infinity. “Well, I wanted to do my best to turn you aside,” she said, slowly. “One must always do one's best, even when one feels and believes it is useless. That surely is the first clause in a doctor's or a nurse's rubric.”
“But WHY didn't you want me to come?” I persisted. “Why fight against your own heart? Hilda, I am sure--I KNOW you love me.”
Her bosom rose and fell. Her eyes dilated. “Love you?” she cried, looking away over the bushy ridges, as if afraid to trust herself. “Oh, yes, Hubert, I love you! It is not for that that I wish to avoid you. Or, rather, it is just because of that. I cannot endure to spoil your life--by a fruitless affection.”
“Why fruitless?” I asked, leaning forward.
She crossed her hands resignedly. “You know all by this time,” she answered. “Sebastian would tell you, of course, when you went to announce that you were leaving Nathaniel's. He could not do otherwise; it is the outcome of his temperament--an integral part of his nature.”
“Hilda,” I cried, “you are a witch! How COULD you know that? I can't imagine.”
She smiled her restrained, Chaldean smile. “Because I KNOW Sebastian,” she answered, quietly. “I can read that man to the core. He is simple as a book. His composition is plain, straightforward, quite natural, uniform. There are no twists and turns in him. Once learn the key, and it discloses everything, like an open sesame. He has a gigantic intellect, a burning thirst for knowledge; one love, one hobby--science; and no moral instincts. He goes straight for his ends; and whatever comes in his way,” she dug her little heel in the brown soil, “he tramples on it as ruthlessly as a child will trample on a worm or a beetle.”
“And yet,” I said, “he is so great.”
“Yes, great, I grant you; but the easiest character to unravel that I have ever met. It is calm, austere, unbending, yet not in the least degree complex. He has the impassioned temperament, pushed to its highest pitch; the temperament that runs deep, with irresistible force; but the passion that inspires him, that carries him away headlong, as love carries some men, is a rare and abstract one--the passion of science.”
I gazed at her as she spoke, with a feeling akin to awe. “It must destroy the plot-interest of life for you, Hilda,” I cried--out there in the vast void of that wild African plateau--“to foresee so well what each person will do--how each will act under such given circumstances.”
She pulled a bent of grass and plucked off its dry spikelets one by one. “Perhaps so,” she answered, after a meditative pause; “though, of course, all natures are not equally simple. Only with great souls can you be sure beforehand like that, for good or for evil. It is essential to anything worth calling character that one should be able to predict in what way it will act under given circumstances--to feel certain, 'This man will do nothing small or mean,' 'That one could never act dishonestly, or speak deceitfully.' But smaller natures are more complex. They defy analysis, because their motives are not consistent.”
“Most people think to be complex is to be great,” I objected.
She shook her head. “That is quite a mistake,” she answered. “Great natures are simple, and relatively predictable, since their motives balance one another justly. Small natures are complex, and hard to predict, because small passions, small jealousies, small discords and perturbations come in at all moments, and override for a time the permanent underlying factors of character. Great natures, good or bad, are equably poised; small natures let petty motives intervene to upset their balance.”
“Then you knew I would come,” I exclaimed, half pleased to find I belonged inferentially to her higher category.
Her eyes beamed on me with a beautiful light. “Knew you would come? Oh, yes. I begged you not to come; but I felt sure you were too deeply in earnest to obey me. I asked a friend in Cape Town to telegraph your arrival; and almost ever since the telegram reached me I have been expecting you and awaiting you.”
“So you believed in me?”
“Implicitly--as you in me. That is the worst of it, Hubert. If you did NOT believe in me, I could have told you all--and then, you would have left me. But, as it is, you KNOW all--and yet, you want to cling to me.”
“You know I know all--because Sebastian told me?”
“Yes; and I think I even know how you answered him.”
“How?”
She paused. The calm smile lighted up her face once more. Then she drew out a pencil. “You think life must lack plot-interest for me,” she began, slowly, “because, with certain natures, I can partially guess beforehand what is coming. But have you not observed that, in reading a novel, part of the pleasure you feel arises from your conscious anticipation of the end, and your satisfaction in seeing that you anticipated correctly? Or part, sometimes, from the occasional unexpectedness of the real denouement? Well, life is like that. I enjoy observing my successes, and, in a way, my failures. Let me show you what I mean. I think I know what you said to Sebastian--not the words, of course, but the purport; and I will write it down now for you. Set down YOUR version, too. And then we will compare them.”
It was a crucial test. We both wrote for a minute or two. Somehow, in Hilda's presence, I forgot at once the strangeness of the scene, the weird oddity of the moment. That sombre plain disappeared for me. I was only aware that I was with Hilda once more--and therefore in Paradise. Pison and Gihon watered the desolate land. Whatever she did seemed to me supremely right. If she had proposed to me to begin a ponderous work on Medical Jurisprudence, under the shadow of the big rock, I should have begun it incontinently.
She handed me her slip of paper; I took it and read: “Sebastian told you I was Dr. Yorke-Bannerman's daughter. And you answered, 'If so, Yorke-Bannerman was innocent, and YOU are the poisoner.' Is not that correct?”
I handed her in answer my own paper. She read it with a faint flush. When she came to the words: “Either she is not Yorke-Bannerman's daughter; or else, Yorke-Bannerman was not a poisoner, and someone else was--I might put a name to him,” she rose to her feet with a great rush of long-suppressed feeling, and clasped me passionately. “My Hubert!” she cried, “I read you aright. I knew it! I was sure of you!”
I folded her in my arms, there, on the rusty-red South African desert. “Then, Hilda dear,” I murmured, “you will consent to marry me?”
The words brought her back to herself. She unfolded my arms with slow reluctance. “No, dearest,” she said, earnestly, with a face where pride fought hard against love. “That is WHY, above all things, I did not want you to follow me. I love you; I trust you: you love me; you trust me. But I never will marry anyone till I have succeeded in clearing my father's memory. I KNOW he did not do it; I KNOW Sebastian did. But that is not enough. I must prove it, I must prove it!”
“I believe it already,” I answered. “What need, then, to prove it?”
“To you, Hubert? Oh, no; not to you. There I am safe. But to the world that condemned him--condemned him untried. I must vindicate him; I must clear him!”
I bent my face close to hers. “But may I not marry you first?” I asked--“and after that, I can help you to clear him.”
She gazed at me fearlessly. “No, no!” she cried, clasping her hands; “much as I love you, dear Hubert, I cannot consent to it. I am too proud! --too proud! I will not allow the world to say--not even to say falsely”--her face flushed crimson; her voice dropped low--“I will not allow them to say those hateful words, 'He married a murderer's daughter.'”
I bowed my head. “As you will, my darling,” I answered. “I am content to wait. I trust you in this, too. Some day, we will prove it.”
And all this time, preoccupied as I was with these deeper concerns, I had not even asked where Hilda lived, or what she was doing!
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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7
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THE EPISODE OF THE STONE THAT LOOKED ABOUT IT
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Hilda took me back with her to the embryo farm where she had pitched her tent for the moment; a rough, wild place. It lay close to the main road from Salisbury to Chimoio.
Setting aside the inevitable rawness and newness of all things Rhodesian, however, the situation itself was not wholly unpicturesque. A ramping rock or tor of granite, which I should judge at a rough guess to extend to an acre in size, sprang abruptly from the brown grass of the upland plain. It rose like a huge boulder. Its summit was crowned by the covered grave of some old Kaffir chief--a rude cairn of big stones under a thatched awning. At the foot of this jagged and cleft rock the farmhouse nestled--four square walls of wattle-and-daub, sheltered by its mass from the sweeping winds of the South African plateau. A stream brought water from a spring close by: in front of the house--rare sight in that thirsty land--spread a garden of flowers. It was an oasis in the desert. But the desert itself stretched grimly all round. I could never quite decide how far the oasis was caused by the water from the spring, and how far by Hilda's presence.
“Then you live here?” I cried, gazing round--my voice, I suppose, betraying my latent sense of the unworthiness of the position.
“For the present,” Hilda answered, smiling. “You know, Hubert, I have no abiding city anywhere, till my Purpose is fulfilled. I came here because Rhodesia seemed the farthest spot on earth where a white woman just now could safely penetrate--in order to get away from you and Sebastian.”
“That is an unkind conjunction!” I exclaimed, reddening.
“But I mean it,” she answered, with a wayward little nod. “I wanted breathing-space to form fresh plans. I wanted to get clear away for a time from all who knew me. And this promised best.... But nowadays, really, one is never safe from intrusion anywhere.”
“You are cruel, Hilda!”
“Oh, no. You deserve it. I asked you not to come--and you came in spite of me. I have treated you very nicely under the circumstances, I think. I have behaved like an angel. The question is now, what ought I to do next? You have upset my plans so.”
“Upset your plans? How?”
“Dear Hubert,”--she turned to me with an indulgent smile,--“for a clever man, you are really TOO foolish! Can't you see that you have betrayed my whereabouts to Sebastian? _I_ crept away secretly, like a thief in the night, giving no name or place; and, having the world to ransack, he might have found it hard to track me; for HE had not YOUR clue of the Basingstoke letter--nor your reason for seeking me. But now that YOU have followed me openly, with your name blazoned forth in the company's passenger-lists, and your traces left plain in hotels and stages across the map of South Africa--why, the spoor is easy. If Sebastian cares to find us, he can follow the scent all through without trouble.”
“I never thought of that!” I cried, aghast.
She was forbearance itself. “No, I knew you would never think of it. You are a man, you see. I counted that in. I was afraid from the first you would wreck all by following me.”
I was mutely penitent. “And yet, you forgive me, Hilda?”
Her eyes beamed tenderness. “To know all, is to forgive all,” she answered. “I have to remind you of that so often! How can I help forgiving, when I know WHY you came--what spur it was that drove you? But it is the future we have to think of now, not the past. And I must wait and reflect. I have NO plan just at present.”
“What are you doing at this farm?” I gazed round at it, dissatisfied.
“I board here,” Hilda answered, amused at my crestfallen face. “But, of course, I cannot be idle; so I have found work to do. I ride out on my bicycle to two or three isolated houses about, and give lessons to children in this desolate place, who would otherwise grow up ignorant. It fills my time, and supplies me with something besides myself to think about.”
“And what am _I_ to do?” I cried, oppressed with a sudden sense of helplessness.
She laughed at me outright. “And is this the first moment that that difficulty has occurred to you?” she asked, gaily. “You have hurried all the way from London to Rhodesia without the slightest idea of what you mean to do now you have got here?”
I laughed at myself in turn. “Upon my word, Hilda,” I cried, “I set out to find you. Beyond the desire to find you, I had no plan in my head. That was an end in itself. My thoughts went no farther.”
She gazed at me half saucily. “Then don't you think, sir, the best thing you can do, now you HAVE found me, is--to turn back and go home again?”
“I am a man,” I said, promptly, taking a firm stand. “And you are a judge of character. If you really mean to tell me you think THAT likely--well, I shall have a lower opinion of your insight into men than I have been accustomed to harbour.”
Her smile was not wholly without a touch of triumph.
“In that case,” she went on, “I suppose the only alternative is for you to remain here.”
“That would appear to be logic,” I replied. “But what can I do? Set up in practice?”
“I don't see much opening,” she answered. “If you ask my advice, I should say there is only one thing to be done in Rhodesia just now--turn farmer.”
“It IS done,” I answered, with my usual impetuosity. “Since YOU say the word, I am a farmer already. I feel an interest in oats that is simply absorbing. What steps ought I to take first in my present condition?”
She looked at me, all brown with the dust of my long ride. “I would suggest,” she said slowly, “a good wash, and some dinner.”
“Hilda,” I cried, surveying my boots, or what was visible of them, “that is REALLY clever of you. A wash and some dinner! So practical, so timely! The very thing! I will see to it.”
Before night fell, I had arranged everything. I was to buy the next farm from the owner of the one where Hilda lodged; I was also to learn the rudiments of South African agriculture from him for a valuable consideration; and I was to lodge in his house while my own was building. He gave me his views on the cultivation of oats. He gave them at some length--more length than perspicuity. I knew nothing about oats, save that they were employed in the manufacture of porridge--which I detest; but I was to be near Hilda once more, and I was prepared to undertake the superintendence of the oat from its birth to its reaping if only I might be allowed to live so close to Hilda.
The farmer and his wife were Boers, but they spoke English. Mr. Jan Willem Klaas himself was a fine specimen of the breed--tall, erect, broad-shouldered, and genial. Mrs. Klaas, his wife, was mainly suggestive, in mind and person, of suet-pudding. There was one prattling little girl of three years old, by name Sannie, a most engaging child; and also a chubby baby.
“You are betrothed, of course?” Mrs. Klaas said to Hilda before me, with the curious tactlessness of her race, when we made our first arrangement.
Hilda's face flushed. “No; we are nothing to one another,” she answered--which was only true formally. “Dr. Cumberledge had a post at the same hospital in London where I was a nurse; and he thought he would like to try Rhodesia. That is all.”
Mrs. Klaas gazed from one to other of us suspiciously. “You English are strange!” she answered, with a complacent little shrug. “But there--from Europe! Your ways, we know, are different.”
Hilda did not attempt to explain. It would have been impossible to make the good soul understand. Her horizon was so simple. She was a harmless housewife, given mostly to dyspepsia and the care of her little ones. Hilda had won her heart by unfeigned admiration for the chubby baby. To a mother, that covers a multitude of eccentricities, such as one expects to find in incomprehensible English. Mrs. Klaas put up with me because she liked Hilda.
We spent some months together on Klaas's farm. It was a dreary place, save for Hilda. The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof of the bald stable for the waggon oxen--all was as crude and ugly as a new country can make things. It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda should live in such an unfinished land--Hilda, whom I imagined as moving by nature through broad English parks, with Elizabethan cottages and immemorial oaks--Hilda, whose proper atmosphere seemed to be one of coffee-coloured laces, ivy-clad abbeys, lichen-incrusted walls--all that is beautiful and gracious in time-honoured civilisations.
Nevertheless, we lived on there in a meaningless sort of way--I hardly knew why. To me it was a puzzle. When I asked Hilda, she shook her head with her sibylline air and answered, confidently: “You do not understand Sebastian as well as I do. We have to wait for HIM. The next move is his. Till he plays his piece, I cannot tell how I may have to checkmate him.”
So we waited for Sebastian to advance a pawn. Meanwhile, I toyed with South African farming--not very successfully, I must admit. Nature did not design me for growing oats. I am no judge of oxen, and my views on the feeding of Kaffir sheep raised broad smiles on the black faces of my Mashona labourers.
I still lodged at Tant Mettie's, as everybody called Mrs. Klaas; she was courtesy aunt to the community at large, while Oom Jan Willem was its courtesy uncle. They were simple, homely folk, who lived up to their religious principles on an unvaried diet of stewed ox-beef and bread; they suffered much from chronic dyspepsia, due in part, at least, no doubt, to the monotony of their food, their life, their interests. One could hardly believe one was still in the nineteenth century; these people had the calm, the local seclusion of the prehistoric epoch. For them, Europe did not exist; they knew it merely as a place where settlers came from. What the Czar intended, what the Kaiser designed, never disturbed their rest. A sick ox, a rattling tile on the roof, meant more to their lives than war in Europe. The one break in the sameness of their daily routine was family prayers; the one weekly event, going to church at Salisbury. Still, they had a single enthusiasm. Like everybody else for fifty miles around, they believed profoundly in the “future of Rhodesia.” When I gazed about me at the raw new land--the weary flat of red soil and brown grasses--I felt at least that, with a present like that, it had need of a future.
I am not by disposition a pioneer; I belong instinctively to the old civilisations. In the midst of rudimentary towns and incipient fields, I yearn for grey houses, a Norman church, an English thatched cottage.
However, for Hilda's sake, I braved it out, and continued to learn the A B C of agriculture on an unmade farm with great assiduity from Oom Jan Willem.
We had been stopping some months at Klaas's together when business compelled me one day to ride in to Salisbury. I had ordered some goods for my farm from England which had at last arrived. I had now to arrange for their conveyance from the town to my plot of land--a portentous matter. Just as I was on the point of leaving Klaas's, and was tightening the saddle-girth on my sturdy little pony, Oom Jan Willem himself sidled up to me with a mysterious air, his broad face all wrinkled with anticipatory pleasure. He placed a sixpence in my palm, glancing about him on every side as he did so, like a conspirator.
“What am I to buy with it?” I asked, much puzzled, and suspecting tobacco. Tant Mettie declared he smoked too much for a church elder.
He put his finger to his lips, nodded, and peered round. “Lollipops for Sannie,” he whispered low, at last, with a guilty smile. “But”--he glanced about him again--“give them to me, please, when Tant Mettie isn't looking.” His nod was all mystery.
“You may rely on my discretion,” I replied, throwing the time-honoured prejudices of the profession to the winds, and well pleased to aid and abet the simple-minded soul in his nefarious designs against little Sannie's digestive apparatus. He patted me on the back. “PEPPERMINT lollipops, mind!” he went on, in the same solemn undertone. “Sannie likes them best--peppermint.”
I put my foot in the stirrup, and vaulted into my saddle. “They shall not be forgotten,” I answered, with a quiet smile at this pretty little evidence of fatherly feeling. I rode off. It was early morning, before the heat of the day began. Hilda accompanied me part of the way on her bicycle. She was going to the other young farm, some eight miles off, across the red-brown plateau, where she gave lessons daily to the ten-year old daughter of an English settler. It was a labour of love; for settlers in Rhodesia cannot afford to pay for what are beautifully described as “finishing governesses”; but Hilda was of the sort who cannot eat the bread of idleness. She had to justify herself to her kind by finding some work to do which should vindicate her existence.
I parted from her at a point on the monotonous plain where one rubbly road branched off from another. Then I jogged on in the full morning sun over that scorching plain of loose red sand all the way to Salisbury. Not a green leaf or a fresh flower anywhere. The eye ached at the hot glare of the reflected sunlight from the sandy level.
My business detained me several hours in the half-built town, with its flaunting stores and its rough new offices; it was not till towards afternoon that I could get away again on my sorrel, across the blazing plain once more to Klaas's.
I moved on over the plateau at an easy trot, full of thoughts of Hilda. What could be the step she expected Sebastian to take next? She did not know, herself, she had told me; there, her faculty failed her. But SOME step he WOULD take; and till he took it she must rest and be watchful.
I passed the great tree that stands up like an obelisk in the midst of the plain beyond the deserted Matabele village. I passed the low clumps of dry karroo-bushes by the rocky kopje. I passed the fork of the rubbly roads where I had parted from Hilda. At last, I reached the long, rolling ridge which looks down upon Klaas's, and could see in the slant sunlight the mud farmhouse and the corrugated iron roof where the oxen were stabled.
The place looked more deserted, more dead-alive than ever. Not a black boy moved in it. Even the cattle and Kaffir sheep were nowhere to be seen.... But then it was always quiet; and perhaps I noticed the obtrusive air of solitude and sleepiness even more than usual, because I had just returned from Salisbury. All things are comparative. After the lost loneliness of Klaas's farm, even brand-new Salisbury seemed busy and bustling.
I hurried on, ill at ease. But Tant Mettie would, doubtless, have a cup of tea ready for me as soon as I arrived, and Hilda would be waiting at the gate to welcome me.
I reached the stone enclosure, and passed up through the flower-garden. To my great surprise, Hilda was not there. As a rule, she came to meet me, with her sunny smile. But perhaps she was tired, or the sun on the road might have given her a headache. I dismounted from my mare, and called one of the Kaffir boys to take her to the stable. Nobody answered.... I called again. Still silence.... I tied her up to the post, and strode over to the door, astonished at the solitude. I began to feel there was something weird and uncanny about this home-coming. Never before had I known Klaas's so entirely deserted.
I lifted the latch and opened the door. It gave access at once to the single plain living-room. There, all was huddled. For a moment my eyes hardly took in the truth. There are sights so sickening that the brain at the first shock wholly fails to realise them.
On the stone slab floor of the low living-room Tant Mettie lay dead. Her body was pierced through by innumerable thrusts, which I somehow instinctively recognised as assegai wounds. By her side lay Sannie, the little prattling girl of three, my constant playmate, whom I had instructed in cat's-cradle, and taught the tales of Cinderella and Red Riding Hood. My hand grasped the lollipops in my pocket convulsively. She would never need them. Nobody else was about. What had become of Oom Jan Willem--and the baby?
I wandered out into the yard, sick with the sight I had already seen. There Oom Jan Willem himself lay stretched at full length; a bullet had pierced his left temple; his body was also riddled through with assegai thrusts.
I saw at once what this meant. A rising of the Matabele!
I had come back from Salisbury, unknowing it, into the midst of a revolt of bloodthirsty savages.
Yet, even if I had known, I must still have hurried home with all speed to Klaas's--to protect Hilda.
Hilda? Where was Hilda? A breathless sinking crept over me.
I staggered out into the open. It was impossible to say what horror might not have happened. The Matabele might even now be lurking about the kraal--for the bodies were hardly cold. But Hilda? Hilda? Whatever came, I must find Hilda.
Fortunately, I had my loaded revolver in my belt. Though we had not in the least anticipated this sudden revolt--it broke like a thunder-clap from a clear sky--the unsettled state of the country made even women go armed about their daily avocations.
I strode on, half maddened. Beside the great block of granite which sheltered the farm there rose one of those rocky little hillocks of loose boulders which are locally known in South Africa by the Dutch name of kopjes. I looked out upon it drearily. Its round brown ironstones lay piled irregularly together, almost as if placed there in some earlier age by the mighty hands of prehistoric giants. My gaze on it was blank. I was thinking, not of it, but of Hilda, Hilda.
I called the name aloud: “Hilda! Hilda! Hilda!”
As I called, to my immense surprise, one of the smooth round boulders on the hillside seemed slowly to uncurl, and to peer about it cautiously. Then it raised itself in the slant sunlight, put a hand to its eyes, and gazed out upon me with a human face for a moment. After that it descended, step by step, among the other stones, with a white object in its arms. As the boulder uncurled and came to life, I was aware, by degrees... yes, yes, it was Hilda, with Tant Mettie's baby!
In the fierce joy of that discovery I rushed forward to her, trembling, and clasped her in my arms. I could find no words but “Hilda! Hilda!”
“Are they gone?” she asked, staring about her with a terrified air, though still strangely preserving her wonted composure of manner.
“Who gone? The Matabele?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Did you see them, Hilda?”
“For a moment--with black shields and assegais, all shouting madly. You have been to the house, Hubert? You know what has happened?”
“Yes, yes, I know--a rising. They have massacred the Klaases.”
She nodded. “I came back on my bicycle, and, when I opened the door, found Tant Mettie and little Sannie dead. Poor, sweet little Sannie! Oom Jan was lying shot in the yard outside. I saw the cradle overturned, and looked under it for the baby. They did not kill her--perhaps did not notice her. I caught her up in my arms, and rushed out to my machine, thinking to make for Salisbury, and give the alarm to the men there. One must try to save others--and YOU were coming, Hubert! Then I heard horses' hoofs--the Matabele returning. They dashed back, mounted,--stolen horses from other farms,--they have taken poor Oom Jan's,--and they have gone on, shouting, to murder elsewhere! I flung down my machine among the bushes as they came,--I hope they have not seen it,--and I crouched here between the boulders, with the baby in my arms, trusting for protection to the colour of my dress, which is just like the ironstone.”
“It is a perfect deception,” I answered, admiring her instinctive cleverness even then. “I never so much as noticed you.”
“No, nor the Matabele either, for all their sharp eyes. They passed by without stopping. I clasped the baby hard, and tried to keep it from crying--if it had cried, all would have been lost; but they passed just below, and swept on toward Rozenboom's. I lay still for a while, not daring to look out. Then I raised myself warily, and tried to listen. Just at that moment, I heard a horse's hoofs ring out once more. I couldn't tell, of course, whether it was YOU returning, or one of the Matabele, left behind by the others. So I crouched again.... Thank God, you are safe, Hubert!”
All this took a moment to say, or was less said than hinted. “Now, what must we do?” I cried. “Bolt back again to Salisbury?”
“It is the only thing possible--if my machine is unhurt. They may have taken it... or ridden over and broken it.”
We went down to the spot, and picked it up where it lay, half-concealed among the brittle, dry scrub of milk-bushes. I examined the bearings carefully; though there were hoof-marks close by, it had received no hurt. I blew up the tire, which was somewhat flabby, and went on to untie my sturdy pony. The moment I looked at her I saw the poor little brute was wearied out with her two long rides in the sweltering sun. Her flanks quivered. “It is no use,” I cried, patting her, as she turned to me with appealing eyes that asked for water. “She CAN'T go back as far as Salisbury; at least, till she has had a feed of corn and a drink. Even then, it will be rough on her.”
“Give her bread,” Hilda suggested. “That will hearten her more than corn. There is plenty in the house; Tant Mettie baked this morning.”
I crept in reluctantly to fetch it. I also brought out from the dresser a few raw eggs, to break into a tumbler and swallow whole; for Hilda and I needed food almost as sorely as the poor beast herself. There was something gruesome in thus rummaging about for bread and meat in the dead woman's cupboard, while she herself lay there on the floor; but one never realises how one will act in these great emergencies until they come upon one. Hilda, still calm with unearthly calmness, took a couple of loaves from my hand, and began feeding the pony with them. “Go and draw water for her,” she said, simply, “while I give her the bread; that will save time. Every minute is precious.”
I did as I was bid, not knowing each moment but that the insurgents would return. When I came back from the spring with the bucket, the mare had demolished the whole two loaves, and was going on upon some grass which Hilda had plucked for her.
“She hasn't had enough, poor dear,” Hilda said, patting her neck. “A couple of loaves are penny buns to her appetite. Let her drink the water, while I go in and fetch out the rest of the baking.”
I hesitated. “You CAN'T go in there again, Hilda!” I cried. “Wait, and let me do it.”
Her white face was resolute. “Yes, I CAN,” she answered. “It is a work of necessity; and in works of necessity a woman, I think, should flinch at nothing. Have I not seen already every varied aspect of death at Nathaniel's?” And in she went, undaunted, to that chamber of horrors, still clasping the baby.
The pony made short work of the remaining loaves, which she devoured with great zest. As Hilda had predicted, they seemed to hearten her. The food and drink, with a bucket of water dashed on her hoofs, gave her new vigour like wine. We gulped down our eggs in silence. Then I held Hilda's bicycle. She vaulted lightly on to the seat, white and tired as she was, with the baby in her left arm, and her right hand on the handle-bar.
“I must take the baby,” I said.
She shook her head.
“Oh, no. I will not trust her to you.”
“Hilda, I insist.”
“And I insist, too. It is my place to take her.”
“But can you ride so?” I asked, anxiously.
She began to pedal. “Oh, dear, yes. It is quite, quite easy. I shall get there all right--if the Matabele don't burst upon us.”
Tired as I was with my long day's work, I jumped into my saddle. I saw I should only lose time if I disputed about the baby. My little horse seemed to understand that something grave had occurred; for, weary as she must have been, she set out with a will once more over that great red level. Hilda pedalled bravely by my side. The road was bumpy, but she was well accustomed to it. I could have ridden faster than she went, for the baby weighted her. Still, we rode for dear life. It was a grim experience.
All round, by this time, the horizon was dim with clouds of black smoke which went up from burning farms and plundered homesteads. The smoke did not rise high; it hung sullenly over the hot plain in long smouldering masses, like the smoke of steamers on foggy days in England. The sun was nearing the horizon; his slant red rays lighted up the red plain, the red sand, the brown-red grasses, with a murky, spectral glow of crimson. After those red pools of blood, this universal burst of redness appalled one. It seemed as though all nature had conspired in one unholy league with the Matabele. We rode on without a word. The red sky grew redder.
“They may have sacked Salisbury!” I exclaimed at last, looking out towards the brand-new town.
“I doubt it,” Hilda answered. Her very doubt reassured me.
We began to mount a long slope. Hilda pedalled with difficulty. Not a sound was heard save the light fall of my pony's feet on the soft new road, and the shrill cry of the cicalas. Then, suddenly, we started. What was that noise in our rear? Once, twice, it rang out. The loud ping of a rifle!
Looking behind us, we saw eight or ten mounted Matabele! Stalwart warriors they were--half naked, and riding stolen horses. They were coming our way! They had seen us! They were pursuing us!
“Put on all speed!” I cried, in my agony. “Hilda, can you manage it?” She pedalled with a will. But, as we mounted the slope, I saw they were gaining upon us. A few hundred yards were all our start. They had the descent of the opposite hill as yet in their favour.
One man, astride on a better horse than the rest, galloped on in front and came within range of us. He had a rifle in his hand, he pointed it twice, and covered us. But he did not shoot. Hilda gave a cry of relief. “Don't you see?” she exclaimed. “It is Oom Jan Willem's rifle! That was their last cartridge. They have no more ammunition.”
I saw she was probably right; for Klaas was out of cartridges, and was waiting for my new stock to arrive from England. If that were correct, they must get near enough to attack us with assegais. They are more dangerous so. I remembered what an old Boer had said to me at Buluwayo: “The Zulu with his assegai is an enemy to be feared; with a gun, he is a bungler.”
We pounded on up the hill. It was deadly work, with those brutes at our heels. The child on Hilda's arm was visibly wearying her. It kept on whining. “Hilda,” I cried, “that baby will lose your life! You CANNOT go on carrying it.”
She turned to me with a flash of her eyes. “What! You are a man,” she broke out, “and you ask a woman to save her life by abandoning a baby! Hubert, you shame me!”
I felt she was right. If she had been capable of giving it up, she would not have been Hilda. There was but one other way left.
“Then YOU must take the pony,” I called out, “and let me have the bicycle!”
“You couldn't ride it,” she called back. “It is a woman's machine, remember.”
“Yes, I could,” I replied, without slowing. “It is not much too short; and I can bend my knees a bit. Quick, quick! No words! Do as I tell you!”
She hesitated a second. The child's weight distressed her. “We should lose time in changing,” she answered, at last, doubtful but still pedalling, though my hand was on the rein, ready to pull up the pony.
“Not if we manage it right. Obey orders! The moment I say 'Halt,' I shall slacken my mare's pace. When you see me leave the saddle, jump off instantly, you, and mount her! I will catch the machine before it falls. Are you ready? Halt, then!”
She obeyed the word without one second's delay. I slipped off, held the bridle, caught the bicycle, and led it instantaneously. Then I ran beside the pony--bridle in one hand, machine in the other--till Hilda had sprung with a light bound into the stirrup. At that, a little leap, and I mounted the bicycle. It was all done nimbly, in less time than the telling takes, for we are both of us naturally quick in our movements. Hilda rode like a man, astride--her short, bicycling skirt, unobtrusively divided in front and at the back, made this easily possible. Looking behind me with a hasty glance, I could see that the savages, taken aback, had reined in to deliberate at our unwonted evolution. I feel sure that the novelty of the iron horse, with a woman riding it, played not a little on their superstitious fears; they suspected, no doubt, this was some ingenious new engine of war devised against them by the unaccountable white man; it might go off unexpectedly in their faces at any moment. Most of them, I observed, as they halted, carried on their backs black ox-hide shields, interlaced with white thongs; they were armed with two or three assegais apiece and a knobkerry.
Instead of losing time by the change, as it turned out, we had actually gained it. Hilda was able to put on my sorrel to her full pace, which I had not dared to do, for fear of outrunning my companion; the wise little beast, for her part, seemed to rise to the occasion, and to understand that we were pursued; for she stepped out bravely. On the other hand, in spite of the low seat and the short crank of a woman's machine, I could pedal up the slope with more force than Hilda, for I am a practised hill-climber; so that in both ways we gained, besides having momentarily disconcerted and checked the enemy. Their ponies were tired, and they rode them full tilt with savage recklessness, making them canter up-hill, and so needlessly fatiguing them. The Matabele, indeed, are unused to horses, and manage them but ill. It is as foot soldiers, creeping stealthily through bush or long grass, that they are really formidable. Only one of their mounts was tolerably fresh, the one which had once already almost overtaken us. As we neared the top of the slope, Hilda, glancing behind her, exclaimed, with a sudden thrill, “He is spurting again, Hubert!”
I drew my revolver and held it in my right hand, using my left for steering. I did not look back; time was far too precious. I set my teeth hard. “Tell me when he draws near enough for a shot,” I said, quietly.
Hilda only nodded. Being mounted on the mare, she could see behind her more steadily now than I could from the machine; and her eye was trustworthy. As for the baby, rocked by the heave and fall of the pony's withers, it had fallen asleep placidly in the very midst of this terror!
After a second, I asked once more, with bated breath, “Is he gaining?”
She looked back. “Yes; gaining.”
A pause. “And now?”
“Still gaining. He is poising an assegai.”
Ten seconds more passed in breathless suspense. The thud of their horses' hoofs alone told me their nearness. My finger was on the trigger. I awaited the word. “Fire!” she said at last, in a calm, unflinching voice. “He is well within distance.”
I turned half round and levelled as true as I could at the advancing black man. He rode, nearly naked, showing all his teeth and brandishing his assegai; the long white feathers stuck upright in his hair gave him a wild and terrifying barbaric aspect. It was difficult to preserve one's balance, keep the way on, and shoot, all at the same time; but, spurred by necessity, I somehow did it. I fired three shots in quick succession. My first bullet missed; my second knocked the man over; my third grazed the horse. With a ringing shriek, the Matabele fell in the road, a black writhing mass; his horse, terrified, dashed back with maddened snorts into the midst of the others. Its plunging disconcerted the whole party for a minute.
We did not wait to see the rest. Taking advantage of this momentary diversion in our favour, we rode on at full speed to the top of the slope--I never knew before how hard I could pedal--and began to descend at a dash into the opposite hollow.
The sun had set by this time. There is no twilight in those latitudes. It grew dark at once. We could see now, in the plain all round, where black clouds of smoke had rolled before, one lurid red glare of burning houses, mixed with a sullen haze of tawny light from the columns of prairie fire kindled by the insurgents.
We made our way still onward across the open plain without one word towards Salisbury. The mare was giving out. She strode with a will; but her flanks were white with froth; her breath came short; foam flew from her nostrils.
As we mounted the next ridge, still distancing our pursuers, I saw suddenly, on its crest, defined against the livid red sky like a silhouette, two more mounted black men!
“It's all up, Hilda!” I cried, losing heart at last. “They are on both sides of us now! The mare is spent; we are surrounded!”
She drew rein and gazed at them. For a moment suspense spoke in all her attitude. Then she burst into a sudden deep sigh of relief. “No, no,” she cried; “these are friendlies!”
“How do you know?” I gasped. But I believed her.
“They are looking out this way, with hands shading their eyes against the red glare. They are looking away from Salisbury, in the direction of the attack. They are expecting the enemy. They MUST be friendlies! See, see! they have caught sight of us!”
As she spoke, one of the men lifted his rifle and half pointed it. “Don't shoot! don't shoot!” I shrieked aloud. “We are English! English!”
The men let their rifles drop, and rode down towards us. “Who are you?” I cried.
They saluted us, military fashion. “Matabele police, sah,” the leader answered, recognising me. “You are flying from Klaas's?”
“Yes,” I answered. “They have murdered Klaas, with his wife and child. Some of them are now following us.”
The spokesman was a well-educated Cape Town negro. “All right sah,” he answered. “I have forty men here right behind de kopje. Let dem come! We can give a good account of dem. Ride on straight wit de lady to Salisbury!”
“The Salisbury people know of this rising, then?” I asked.
“Yes, sah. Dem know since five o'clock. Kaffir boys from Klaas's brought in de news; and a white man escaped from Rozenboom's confirm it. We have pickets all round. You is safe now; you can ride on into Salisbury witout fear of de Matabele.”
I rode on, relieved. Mechanically, my feet worked to and fro on the pedals. It was a gentle down-gradient now towards the town. I had no further need for special exertion.
Suddenly, Hilda's voice came wafted to me, as through a mist. “What are you doing, Hubert? You'll be off in a minute!”
I started and recovered my balance with difficulty. Then I was aware at once that one second before I had all but dropped asleep, dog tired, on the bicycle. Worn out with my long day and with the nervous strain, I began to doze off, with my feet still moving round and round automatically, the moment the anxiety of the chase was relieved, and an easy down-grade gave me a little respite.
I kept myself awake even then with difficulty. Riding on through the lurid gloom, we reached Salisbury at last, and found the town already crowded with refugees from the plateau. However, we succeeded in securing two rooms at a house in the long street, and were soon sitting down to a much-needed supper.
As we rested, an hour or two later, in the ill-furnished back room, discussing this sudden turn of affairs with our host and some neighbours--for, of course, all Salisbury was eager for news from the scene of the massacres--I happened to raise my head, and saw, to my great surprise... a haggard white face peering in at us through the window.
It peered round a corner, stealthily. It was an ascetic face, very sharp and clear-cut. It had a stately profile. The long and wiry grizzled moustache, the deep-set, hawk-like eyes, the acute, intense, intellectual features, all were very familiar. So was the outer setting of long, white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, and just curled in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping shoulders. But the expression on the face was even stranger than the sudden apparition. It was an expression of keen and poignant disappointment--as of a man whom fate has baulked of some well-planned end, his due by right, which mere chance has evaded.
“They say there's a white man at the bottom of all this trouble,” our host had been remarking, one second earlier. “The niggers know too much; and where did they get their rifles? People at Rozenboom's believe some black-livered traitor has been stirring up the Matabele for weeks and weeks. An enemy of Rhodes's, of course, jealous of our advance; a French agent, perhaps; but more likely one of these confounded Transvaal Dutchmen. Depend upon it, it's Kruger's doing.”
As the words fell from his lips, I saw the face. I gave a quick little start, then recovered my composure.
But Hilda noted it. She looked up at me hastily. She was sitting with her back to the window, and therefore, of course, could not see the face itself, which indeed was withdrawn with a hurried movement, yet with a certain strange dignity, almost before I could feel sure of having seen it. Still, she caught my startled expression, and the gleam of surprise and recognition in my eye. She laid one hand upon my arm. “You have seen him?” she asked quietly, almost below her breath.
“Seen whom?”
“Sebastian.”
It was useless denying it to HER. “Yes, I have seen him,” I answered, in a confidential aside.
“Just now--this moment--at the back of the house--looking in at the window upon us?”
“You are right--as always.”
She drew a deep breath. “He has played his game,” she said low to me, in an awed undertone. “I felt sure it was he. I expected him to play; though what piece, I knew not; and when I saw those poor dead souls, I was certain he had done it--indirectly done it. The Matabele are his pawns. He wanted to aim a blow at ME; and THIS was the way he chose to aim it.”
“Do you think he is capable of that?” I cried. For, in spite of all, I had still a sort of lingering respect for Sebastian. “It seems so reckless--like the worst of anarchists--when he strikes at one head, to involve so many irrelevant lives in one common destruction.”
Hilda's face was like a drowned man's.
“To Sebastian,” she answered, shuddering, “the End is all; the Means are unessential. Who wills the End, wills the Means; that is the sum and substance of his philosophy of life. From first to last, he has always acted up to it. Did I not tell you once he was a snow-clad volcano?”
“Still, I am loth to believe--” I cried.
She interrupted me calmly. “I knew it,” she said. “I expected it. Beneath that cold exterior, the fires of his life burn fiercely still. I told you we must wait for Sebastian's next move; though I confess, even from HIM, I hardly dreamt of this one. But, from the moment when I opened the door on poor Tant Mettie's body, lying there in its red horror, I felt it must be he. And when you started just now, I said to myself in a flash of intuition--'Sebastian has come! He has come to see how his devil's work has prospered.' He sees it has gone wrong. So now he will try to devise some other.”
I thought of the malign expression on that cruel white face as it stared in at the window from the outer gloom, and I felt convinced she was right. She had read her man once more. For it was the desperate, contorted face of one appalled to discover that a great crime attempted and successfully carried out has failed, by mere accident, of its central intention.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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8
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THE EPISODE OF THE EUROPEAN WITH THE KAFFIR HEART
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Unfashionable as it is to say so, I am a man of peace. I belong to a profession whose province is to heal, not to destroy. Still there ARE times which turn even the most peaceful of us perforce into fighters--times when those we love, those we are bound to protect, stand in danger of their lives; and at moments like that, no man can doubt what is his plain duty. The Matabele revolt was one such moment. In a conflict of race we MUST back our own colour. I do not know whether the natives were justified in rising or not; most likely, yes; for we had stolen their country; but when once they rose, when the security of white women depended upon repelling them, I felt I had no alternative. For Hilda's sake, for the sake of every woman and child in Salisbury, and in all Rhodesia, I was bound to bear my part in restoring order.
For the immediate future, it is true, we were safe enough in the little town; but we did not know how far the revolt might have spread; we could not tell what had happened at Charter, at Buluwayo, at the outlying stations. The Matabele, perhaps, had risen in force over the whole vast area which was once Lo-Bengula's country; if so, their first object would certainly be to cut us off from communication with the main body of English settlers at Buluwayo.
“I trust to you, Hilda,” I said, on the day after the massacre at Klaas's, “to divine for us where these savages are next likely to attack us.”
She cooed at the motherless baby, raising one bent finger, and then turned to me with a white smile. “Then you ask too much of me,” she answered. “Just think what a correct answer would imply! First, a knowledge of these savages' character; next, a knowledge of their mode of fighting. Can't you see that only a person who possessed my trick of intuition, and who had also spent years in warfare among the Matabele, would be really able to answer your question?”
“And yet such questions have been answered before now by people far less intuitive than you,” I went on. “Why, I've read somewhere how, when the war between Napoleon the First and the Prussians broke out, in 1806, Jomini predicted that the decisive battle of the campaign would be fought near Jena; and near Jena it was fought. Are not YOU better than many Jominis?”
Hilda tickled the baby's cheek. “Smile, then, baby, smile!” she said, pouncing one soft finger on a gathering dimple. “And who WAS your friend Jomini?”
“The greatest military critic and tactician of his age,” I answered. “One of Napoleon's generals. I fancy he wrote a book, don't you know--a book on war--Des Grandes Operations Militaires, or something of that sort.”
“Well, there you are, then! That's just it! Your Jomini, or Hominy, or whatever you call him, not only understood Napoleon's temperament, but understood war and understood tactics. It was all a question of the lie of the land, and strategy, and so forth. If _I_ had been asked, I could never have answered a quarter as well as Jomini Piccolomini--could I, baby? Jomini would have been worth a good many me's. There, there, a dear, motherless darling! Why, she crows just as if she hadn't lost all her family!”
“But, Hilda, we must be serious. I count upon you to help us in this matter. We are still in danger. Even now these Matabele may attack and destroy us.”
She laid the child on her lap, and looked grave. “I know it, Hubert; but I must leave it now to you men. I am no tactician. Don't take ME for one of Napoleon's generals.”
“Still,” I said, “we have not only the Matabele to reckon with, recollect. There is Sebastian as well. And, whether you know your Matabele or not, you at least know your Sebastian.”
She shuddered. “I know him; yes, I know him.... But this case is so difficult. We have Sebastian--complicated by a rabble of savages, whose habits and manners I do not understand. It is THAT that makes the difficulty.”
“But Sebastian himself?” I urged. “Take him first, in isolation.”
She paused for a full minute, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on the table. Her brow gathered. “Sebastian?” she repeated. “Sebastian? --ah, there I might guess something. Well, of course, having once begun this attempt, and being definitely committed, as it were, to a policy of killing us, he will go through to the bitter end, no matter how many other lives it may cost. That is Sebastian's method.”
“You don't think, having once found out that I saw and recognised him, he would consider the game lost, and slink away to the coast again?”
“Sebastian? Oh, no; that is the absolute antipodes of his type and temperament.”
“He will never give up because of a temporary check, you think?”
“No, never. The man has a will of sheer steel--it may break, but it will not bend. Besides, consider: he is too deeply involved. You have seen him; you know; and he knows you know. You may bring this thing home to him. Then what is his plain policy? Why, to egg on the natives whose confidence he has somehow gained into making a further attack, and cutting off all Salisbury. If he had succeeded in getting you and me massacred at Klaas's, as he hoped, he would no doubt have slunk off to the coast at once, leaving his black dupes to be shot down at leisure by Rhodes's soldiers.”
“I see; but having failed in that?”
“Then he is bound to go through with it, and kill us if he can, even if he has to kill all Salisbury with us. That, I feel sure, is Sebastian's plan. Whether he can get the Matabele to back him up in it or not is a different matter.”
“But taking Sebastian himself; alone?”
“Oh, Sebastian himself alone would naturally say: 'Never mind Buluwayo! Concentrate round Salisbury, and kill off all there first; when that is done, then you can move on at your ease and cut them to pieces in Charter and Buluwayo.' You see, he would have no interest in the movement, himself, once he had fairly got rid of us here. The Matabele are only the pieces in his game. It is ME he wants, not Salisbury. He would clear out of Rhodesia as soon as he had carried his point. But he would have to give some reasonable ground to the Matabele for his first advice; and it seems a reasonable ground to say, 'Don't leave Salisbury in your rear, so as to put yourselves between two fires. Capture the outpost first; that down, march on undistracted to the principal stronghold.'”
“Who is no tactician?” I murmured, half aloud.
She laughed. “That's not tactics, Hubert; that's plain common sense--and knowledge of Sebastian. Still, it comes to nothing. The question is not, 'What would Sebastian wish?' it is, 'Could Sebastian persuade these angry black men to accept his guidance?'”
“Sebastian!” I cried; “Sebastian could persuade the very devil! I know the man's fiery enthusiasm, his contagious eloquence. He thrilled me through, myself, with his electric personality, so that it took me six years--and your aid--to find him out at last. His very abstractness tells. Why, even in this war, you may be sure, he will be making notes all the time on the healing of wounds in tropical climates, contrasting the African with the European constitution.”
“Oh, yes; of course. Whatever he does, he will never forget the interests of science. He is true to his lady-love, to whomever else he plays false. That is his saving virtue.”
“And he will talk down the Matabele,” I went on, “even if he doesn't know their language. But I suspect he does; for, you must remember, he was three years in South Africa as a young man, on a scientific expedition, collecting specimens. He can ride like a trooper; and he knows the country. His masterful ways, his austere face, will cow the natives. Then, again, he has the air of a prophet; and prophets always stir the negro. I can imagine with what air he will bid them drive out the intrusive white men who have usurped their land, and draw them flattering pictures of a new Matabele empire about to arise under a new chief, too strong for these gold-grubbing, diamond-hunting mobs from over sea to meddle with.”
She reflected once more. “Do you mean to say anything of our suspicions in Salisbury, Hubert?” she asked at last.
“It is useless,” I answered. “The Salisbury folk believe there is a white man at the bottom of this trouble already. They will try to catch him; that's all that is necessary. If we said it was Sebastian, people would only laugh at us. They must understand Sebastian, as you and I understand him, before they would think such a move credible. As a rule in life, if you know anything which other people do not know, better keep it to yourself; you will only get laughed at as a fool for telling it.”
“I think so, too. That is why I never say what I suspect or infer from my knowledge of types--except to a few who can understand and appreciate. Hubert, if they all arm for the defence of the town, you will stop here, I suppose, to tend the wounded?”
Her lips trembled as she spoke, and she gazed at me with a strange wistfulness. “No, dearest,” I answered at once, taking her face in my hands. “I shall fight with the rest. Salisbury has more need to-day of fighters than of healers.”
“I thought you would,” she answered, slowly. “And I think you do right.” Her face was set white; she played nervously with the baby. “I would not urge you; but I am glad you say so. I want you to stop; yet I could not love you so much if I did not see you ready to play the man at such a crisis.”
“I shall give in my name with the rest,” I answered.
“Hubert, it is hard to spare you--hard to send you to such danger. But for one other thing, I am glad you are going.... They must take Sebastian alive; they must NOT kill him.”
“They will shoot him red-handed if they catch him,” I answered confidently. “A white man who sides with the blacks in an insurrection!”
“Then YOU must see that they do not do it. They must bring him in alive, and try him legally. For me--and therefore for you--that is of the first importance.”
“Why so, Hilda?”
“Hubert, you want to marry me.” I nodded vehemently. “Well, you know I can only marry you on one condition--that I have succeeded first in clearing my father's memory. Now, the only man living who can clear it is Sebastian. If Sebastian were to be shot, it could NEVER be cleared--and then, law of Medes and Persians, I could never marry you.”
“But how can you expect Sebastian, of all men, to clear it, Hilda?” I cried. “He is ready to kill us both, merely to prevent your attempting a revision; is it likely you can force him to confess his crime, still less induce him to admit it voluntarily?”
She placed her hands over her eyes and pressed them hard with a strange, prophetic air she often had about her when she gazed into the future. “I know my man,” she answered, slowly, without uncovering her eyes. “I know how I can do it--if the chance ever comes to me. But the chance must come first. It is hard to find. I lost it once at Nathaniel's. I must not lose it again. If Sebastian is killed skulking here in Rhodesia, my life's purpose will have failed; I shall not have vindicated my father's good name; and then, we can never marry.”
“So I understand, Hilda, my orders are these: I am to go out and fight for the women and children, if possible; that Sebastian shall be made prisoner alive, and on no account to let him be killed in the open!”
“I give you no orders, Hubert. I tell you how it seems best to me. But if Sebastian is shot dead--then you understand it must be all over between us. I NEVER can marry you until, or unless, I have cleared my father.”
“Sebastian shall not be shot dead,” I cried, with my youthful impetuosity. “He shall be brought in alive, though all Salisbury as one man try its best to lynch him.”
I went out to report myself as a volunteer for service. Within the next few hours the whole town had been put in a state of siege, and all available men armed to oppose the insurgent Matabele. Hasty preparations were made for defence. The ox-waggons of settlers were drawn up outside in little circles here and there, so as to form laagers, which acted practically as temporary forts for the protection of the outskirts. In one of these I was posted. With our company were two American scouts, named Colebrook and Doolittle, irregular fighters whose value in South African campaigns had already been tested in the old Matabele war against Lo-Bengula. Colebrook, in particular, was an odd-looking creature--a tall, spare man, bodied like a weasel. He was red-haired, ferret-eyed, and an excellent scout, but scrappier and more inarticulate in his manner of speech than any human being I had ever encountered. His conversation was a series of rapid interjections, jerked out at intervals, and made comprehensible by a running play of gesture and attitude.
“Well, yes,” he said, when I tried to draw him out on the Matabele mode of fighting. “Not on the open. Never! Grass, if you like. Or bushes. The eyes of them! The eyes! ...” He leaned eagerly forward, as if looking for something. “See here, Doctor; I'm telling you. Spots. Gleaming. Among the grass. Long grass. And armed, too. A pair of 'em each. One to throw”--he raised his hand as if lancing something--“the other for close fighting. Assegais, you know. That's the name of it. Only the eyes. Creeping, creeping, creeping. No noise. One raised. Waggons drawn up in laager. Oxen out-spanned in the middle. Trekking all day. Tired out; dog tired. Crawl, crawl, crawl! Hands and knees. Might be snakes. A wriggle. Men sitting about the camp fire. Smoking. Gleam of their eyes! Under the waggons. Nearer, nearer, nearer! Then, the throwing ones in your midst. Shower of 'em. Right and left. 'Halloa! stand by, boys!' Look up; see 'em swarming, black like ants, over the waggons. Inside the laager. Snatch up rifles! All up! Oxen stampeding, men running, blacks sticking 'em like pigs in the back with their assegais. Bad job, the whole thing. Don't care for it, myself. Very tough 'uns to fight. If they once break laager.”
“Then you should never let them get to close quarters,” I suggested, catching the general drift of his inarticulate swift pictures.
“You're a square man, you are, Doctor! There you touch the spot. Never let 'em get at close quarters. Sentries? --creep past 'em. Outposts? --crawl between. Had Forbes and Wilson like that. Cut 'em off. Perdition! ... But Maxims will do it! Maxims! Never let em get near. Sweep the ground all round. Durned hard, though, to know just WHEN they're coming. A night; two nights; all clear; only waste ammunition. Third, they swarm like bees; break laager; all over!”
This was not exactly an agreeable picture of what we had to expect--the more so as our particular laager happened to have no Maxims. However, we kept a sharp lookout for those gleaming eyes in the long grass of which Colebrook warned us; their flashing light was the one thing to be seen, at night above all, when the black bodies could crawl unperceived through the tall dry herbage. On our first night out we had no adventures. We watched by turns outside, relieving sentry from time to time, while those of us who slept within the laager slept on the bare ground with our arms beside us. Nobody spoke much. The tension was too great. Every moment we expected an attack of the enemy.
Next day news reached us by scouts from all the other laagers. None of them had been attacked; but in all there was a deep, half-instinctive belief that the Matabele in force were drawing step by step closer and closer around us. Lo-Bengula's old impis, or native regiments, had gathered together once more under their own indunas--men trained and drilled in all the arts and ruses of savage warfare. On their own ground, and among their native scrub, those rude strategists are formidable. They know the country, and how to fight in it. We had nothing to oppose to them but a handful of the new Matabeleland police, an old regular soldier or two, and a raw crowd of volunteers, most of whom, like myself, had never before really handled a rifle.
That afternoon, the Major in command decided to send out the two American scouts to scour the grass and discover, if possible, how near our lines the Matabele had penetrated. I begged hard to be permitted to accompany them. I wanted, if I could, to get evidence against Sebastian; or, at least, to learn whether he was still directing and assisting the enemy. At first, the scouts laughed at my request; but when I told them privately that I believed I had a clue against the white traitor who had caused the revolt, and that I wished to identify him, they changed their tone, and began to think there might be something in it.
“Experience?” Colebrook asked in his brief shorthand of speech, running his ferret eyes over me.
“None,” I answered; “but a noiseless tread and a capacity for crawling through holes in hedges which may perhaps be useful.”
He glanced inquiry at Doolittle, who was a shorter and stouter man, with a knack of getting over obstacles by sheer forcefulness.
“Hands and knees!” he said, abruptly, in the imperative mood, pointing to a clump of dry grass with thorny bushes ringed about it.
I went down on my hands and knees, and threaded my way through the long grasses and matted boughs as noiselessly as I could. The two old hands watched me. When I emerged several yards off, much to their surprise, Colebrook turned to Doolittle. “Might answer,” he said curtly. “Major says, 'Choose your own men.' Anyhow, if they catch him, nobody's fault but his. Wants to go. Will do it.”
We set out through the long grass together, walking erect at first, till we had got some distance from the laager, and then, creeping as the Matabele themselves creep, without displacing the grass-flowers, for a mere wave on top would have betrayed us at once to the quick eyes of those observant savages. We crept on for a mile or so. At last, Colebrook turned to me, one finger on his lips. His ferret eyes gleamed. We were approaching a wooded hill, all interspersed with boulders. “Kaffirs here!” he whispered low, as if he knew by instinct. HOW he knew, I cannot tell; he seemed almost to scent them.
We stole on farther, going more furtively than ever now. I could notice by this time that there were waggons in front, and could hear men speaking in them. I wanted to proceed, but Colebrook held up one warning hand. “Won't do,” he said, shortly, in a low tone. “Only myself. Danger ahead! Stop here and wait for me.”
Doolittle and myself waited. Colebrook kept on cautiously, squirming his long body in sinuous waves like a lizard's through the grass, and was soon lost to us. No snake could have been lither. We waited, with ears intent. One minute, two minutes, many minutes passed. We could catch the voices of the Kaffirs in the bush all round. They were speaking freely, but what they said I did not know, as I had picked up only a very few words of the Matabele language.
It seemed hours while we waited, still as mice in our ambush, and alert. I began to think Colebrook must have been lost or killed--so long was he gone--and that we must return without him. At last--we leaned forward--a muffled movement in the grass ahead! A slight wave at the base! Then it divided below, bit by bit, while the tops remained stationary. A weasel-like body slank noiselessly through. Finger on lips once more, Colebrook glided beside us. We turned and crawled back, stifling our very pulses. For many minutes none of us spoke. But we heard in our rear a loud cry and a shaking of assegais; the Kaffirs behind us were yelling frightfully. They must have suspected something--seen some movement in the tufted heads of grass, for they spread abroad, shouting. We halted, holding our breath. After a time, however; the noise died down. They were moving another way. We crept on again, stealthily.
When, at last, after many minutes, we found ourselves beyond a sheltering belt of brushwood, we ventured to rise and speak. “Well?” I asked of Colebrook. “Did you discover anything?”
He nodded assent. “Couldn't see him,” he said shortly. “But he's there, right enough. White man. Heard 'em talk of him.”
“What did they say?” I asked, eagerly.
“Said he had a white skin, but his heart was a Kaffir's. Great induna; leader of many impis. Prophet, wise weather doctor! Friend of old Moselekatse's. Destroy the white men from over the big water; restore the land to the Matabele. Kill all in Salisbury, especially the white women. Witches--all witches. They give charms to the men; cook lions' hearts for them; make them brave with love-drinks.”
“They said that?” I exclaimed, taken aback. “Kill all the white women!”
“Yes. Kill all. White witches, every one. The young ones worst. Word of the great induna.”
“And you could not see him?”
“Crept near waggons, close. Fellow himself inside. Heard his voice; spoke English, with a little Matabele. Kaffir boy who was servant at the mission interpreted.”
“What sort of voice? Like this?” And I imitated Sebastian's cold, clear-cut tone as well as I was able.
“The man! That's him, Doctor. You've got him down to the ground. The very voice. Heard him giving orders.”
That settled the question. I was certain of it now. Sebastian was with the insurgents.
We made our way back to our laager, flung ourselves down, and slept a little on the ground before taking our turn in the fatigues of the night watch. Our horses were loosely tied, ready for any sudden alarm. About midnight, we three were sitting with others about the fire, talking low to one another. All at once Doolittle sprang up, alert and eager. “Look out, boys!” he cried, pointing his hands under the waggons. “What's wriggling in the grass there?”
I looked, and saw nothing. Our sentries were posted outside, about a hundred yards apart, walking up and down till they met, and exchanging “All's well” aloud at each meeting.
“They should have been stationary!” one of our scouts exclaimed, looking out at them. “It's easier for the Matabele to see them so, when they walk up and down, moving against the sky. The Major ought to have posted them where it wouldn't have been so simple for a Kaffir to see them and creep in between them!”
“Too late now, boys!” Colebrook burst out, with a rare effort of articulateness. “Call back the sentries, Major! The blacks have broken line! Hold there! They're in upon us!”
Even as he spoke, I followed his eager pointing hand with my eyes, and just descried among the grass two gleaming objects, seen under the hollow of one of the waggons. Two: then two; then two again; and behind, whole pairs of them. They looked like twin stars; but they were eyes, black eyes, reflecting the starlight and the red glare of the camp-fire. They crept on tortuously in serpentine curves through the long, dry grasses. I could feel, rather than see, that they were Matabele, crawling prone on their bellies, and trailing their snake-like way between the dark jungle. Quick as thought, I raised my rifle and blazed away at the foremost. So did several others. But the Major shouted, angrily: “Who fired? Don't shoot, boys, till you hear the word of command! Back, sentries, to laager! Not a shot till they're safe inside! You'll hit your own people!”
Almost before he said it, the sentries darted back. The Matabele, crouching on hands and knees in the long grass, had passed between them unseen. A wild moment followed. I can hardly describe it; the whole thing was so new to me, and took place so quickly. Hordes of black human ants seemed to surge up all at once over and under the waggons. Assegais whizzed through the air, or gleamed brandished around one. Our men fell back to the centre of the laager, and formed themselves hastily under the Major's orders. Then a pause; a deadly fire. Once, twice, thrice we volleyed. The Matabele fell by dozens--but they came on by hundreds. As fast as we fired and mowed down one swarm, fresh swarms seemed to spring from the earth and stream over the waggons. Others appeared to grow up almost beneath our feet as they wormed their way on their faces along the ground between the wheels, squirmed into the circle, and then rose suddenly, erect and naked, in front of us. Meanwhile, they yelled and shouted, clashing their spears and shields. The oxen bellowed. The rifles volleyed. It was a pandemonium of sound in an orgy of gloom. Darkness, lurid flame, blood, wounds, death, horror!
Yet, in the midst of all this hubbub, I could not help admiring the cool military calm and self-control of our Major. His voice rose clear above the confused tumult. “Steady, boys, steady! Don't fire at random. Pick each your likeliest man, and aim at him deliberately. That's right; easy--easy! Shoot at leisure, and don't waste ammunition!”
He stood as if he were on parade, in the midst of this palpitating turmoil of savages. Some of us, encouraged by his example, mounted the waggons, and shot from the tops at our approaching assailants.
How long the hurly-burly went on, I cannot say. We fired, fired, fired, and Kaffirs fell like sheep; yet more Kaffirs rose fresh from the long grass to replace them. They swarmed with greater ease now over the covered waggons, across the mangled and writhing bodies of their fellows; for the dead outside made an inclined plane for the living to mount by. But the enemy were getting less numerous, I thought, and less anxious to fight. The steady fire told on them. By-and-by, with a little halt, for the first time they wavered. All our men now mounted the waggons, and began to fire on them in regular volleys as they came up. The evil effects of the surprise were gone by this time; we were acting with coolness and obeying orders. But several of our people dropped close beside me, pierced through with assegais.
All at once, as if a panic had burst over them, the Matabele, with one mind, stopped dead short in their advance and ceased fighting. Till that moment, no number of deaths seemed to make any difference to them. Men fell, disabled; others sprang up from the ground by magic. But now, of a sudden, their courage flagged--they faltered, gave way, broke, and shambled in a body. At last, as one man, they turned and fled. Many of them leapt up with a loud cry from the long grass where they were skulking, flung away their big shields with the white thongs interlaced, and ran for dear life, black, crouching figures, through the dense, dry jungle. They held their assegais still, but did not dare to use them. It was a flight, pell-mell--and the devil take the hindmost.
Not until then had I leisure to THINK, and to realise my position. This was the first and only time I had ever seen a battle. I am a bit of a coward, I believe--like most other men--though I have courage enough to confess it; and I expected to find myself terribly afraid when it came to fighting. Instead of that, to my immense surprise, once the Matabele had swarmed over the laager, and were upon us in their thousands, I had no time to be frightened. The absolute necessity for keeping cool, for loading and reloading, for aiming and firing, for beating them off at close quarters--all this so occupied one's mind, and still more one's hands, that one couldn't find room for any personal terrors. “They are breaking over there!” “They will overpower us yonder!” “They are faltering now!” Those thoughts were so uppermost in one's head, and one's arms were so alert, that only after the enemy gave way, and began to run at full pelt, could a man find breathing-space to think of his own safety. Then the thought occurred to me, “I have been through my first fight, and come out of it alive; after all, I was a deal less afraid than I expected!”
That took but a second, however. Next instant, awaking to the altered circumstances, we were after them at full speed; accompanying them on their way back to their kraals in the uplands with a running fire as a farewell attention.
As we broke laager in pursuit of them, by the uncertain starlight we saw a sight which made us boil with indignation. A mounted man turned and fled before them. He seemed their leader, unseen till then. He was dressed like a European--tall, thin, unbending, in a greyish-white suit. He rode a good horse, and sat it well; his air was commanding, even as he turned and fled in the general rout from that lost battle.
I seized Colebrook's arm, almost speechless with anger. “The white man!” I cried. “The traitor!”
He did not answer a word, but with a set face of white rage loosed his horse from where it was tethered among the waggons. At the same moment, I loosed mine. So did Doolittle. Quick as thought, but silently, we led them out all three where the laager was broken. I clutched my mare's mane, and sprang to the stirrup to pursue our enemy. My sorrel bounded off like a bird. The fugitive had a good two minutes start of us; but our horses were fresh, while his had probably been ridden all day. I patted my pony's neck; she responded with a ringing neigh of joy. We tore after the outlaw, all three of us abreast. I felt a sort of fierce delight in the reaction after the fighting. Our ponies galloped wildly over the plain; we burst out into the night, never heeding the Matabele whom we passed on the open in panic-stricken retreat. I noticed that many of them in their terror had even flung away their shields and their assegais.
It was a mad chase across the dark veldt--we three, neck to neck, against that one desperate runaway. We rode all we knew. I dug my heels into my sorrel's flanks, and she responded bravely. The tables were turned now on our traitor since the afternoon of the massacre. HE was the pursued, and WE were the pursuers. We felt we must run him down, and punish him for his treachery.
At a breakneck pace, we stumbled over low bushes; we grazed big boulders; we rolled down the sides of steep ravines; but we kept him in sight all the time, dim and black against the starry sky; slowly, slowly--yes, yes! --we gained upon him. My pony led now. The mysterious white man rode and rode--head bent, neck forward--but never looked behind him. Bit by bit we lessened the distance between us. As we drew near him at last, Doolittle called out to me, in a warning voice: “Take care, Doctor! Have your revolvers ready! He's driven to bay now! As we approach, he'll fire at us!”
Then it came home to me in a flash. I felt the truth of it. “He DARE not fire!” I cried. “He dare not turn towards us. He cannot show his face! If he did, we might recognise him!”
On we rode, still gaining. “Now, now,” I cried, “we shall catch him!”
Even as I leaned forward to seize his rein, the fugitive, without checking his horse, without turning his head, drew his revolver from his belt, and, raising his hand, fired behind him at random. He fired towards us, on the chance. The bullet whizzed past my ear, not hitting anyone. We scattered, right and left, still galloping free and strong. We did not return his fire, as I had told the others of my desire to take him alive. We might have shot his horse; but the risk of hitting the rider, coupled with the confidence we felt of eventually hunting him to earth, restrained us. It was the great mistake we made.
He had gained a little by his shots, but we soon caught it up. Once more I said, “We are on him!”
A minute later, we were pulled up short before an impenetrable thicket of prickly shrubs, through which I saw at once it would have been quite impossible to urge our staggering horses.
The other man, of course, reached it before us, with his mare's last breath. He must have been making for it, indeed, of set purpose; for the second he arrived at the edge of the thicket he slipped off his tired pony, and seemed to dive into the bush as a swimmer dives off a rock into the water.
“We have him now!” I cried, in a voice of triumph. And Colebrook echoed, “We have him!”
We sprang down quickly. “Take him alive, if you can!” I exclaimed, remembering Hilda's advice. “Let us find out who he is, and have him properly tried and hanged at Buluwayo! Don't give him a soldier's death! All he deserves is a murderer's!”
“You stop here,” Colebrook said, briefly, flinging his bridle to Doolittle to hold. “Doctor and I follow him. Thick bush. Knows the ways of it. Revolvers ready!”
I handed my sorrel to Doolittle. He stopped behind, holding the three foam-bespattered and panting horses, while Colebrook and I dived after our fugitive into the matted bushes.
The thicket, as I have said, was impenetrable above; but it was burrowed at its base by over-ground runs of some wild animal--not, I think, a very large one; they were just like the runs which rabbits make among gorse and heather, only on a bigger scale--bigger, even, than a fox's or badger's. By crouching and bending our backs, we could crawl through them with difficulty into the scrubby tangle. It was hard work creeping. The runs divided soon. Colebrook felt with his hands on the ground: “I can make out the spoor!” he muttered, after a minute. “He has gone on this way!”
We tracked him a little distance in, crawling at times, and rising now and again where the runs opened out on to the air for a moment. The spoor was doubtful and the tunnels tortuous. I felt the ground from time to time, but could not be sure of the tracks with my fingers; I was not a trained scout, like Colebrook or Doolittle. We wriggled deeper into the tangle. Something stirred once or twice. It was not far from me. I was uncertain whether it was HIM--Sebastian--or a Kaffir earth-hog, the animal which seemed likeliest to have made the burrows. Was he going to elude us, even now? Would he turn upon us with a knife? If so, could we hold him?
At last, when we had pushed our way some distance in, we heard a wild cry from outside. It was Doolittle's voice. “Quick! quick! out again! The man will escape! He has come back on his tracks, and rounded!”
I saw our mistake at once. We had left our companion out there alone, rendered helpless by the care of all three horses.
Colebrook said never a word. He was a man of action. He turned with instinctive haste, and followed our own spoor back again with his hands and knees to the opening in the thicket by which we had first entered.
Before we could reach it, however, two shots rang out clear in the direction where we had left poor Doolittle and the horses. Then a sharp cry broke the stillness--the cry of a wounded man. We redoubled our pace. We knew we were outwitted.
When we reached the open, we saw at once by the uncertain light what had happened. The fugitive was riding away on my own little sorrel,--riding for dear life; not back the way we came from Salisbury, but sideways across the veldt towards Chimoio and the Portuguese seaports. The other two horses, riderless and terrified, were scampering with loose heels over the dark plain. Doolittle was not to be seen; he lay, a black lump, among the black bushes about him.
We looked around for him, and found him. He was severely, I may even say dangerously, wounded. The bullet had lodged in his right side. We had to catch our two horses, and ride them back with our wounded man, leading the fugitive's mare in tow, all blown and breathless. I stuck to the fugitive's mare; it was the one clue we had now against him. But Sebastian, if it WAS Sebastian, had ridden off scot-free. I understood his game at a glance. He had got the better of us once more. He would make for the coast by the nearest road, give himself out as a settler escaped from the massacre, and catch the next ship for England or the Cape, now this coup had failed him.
Doolittle had not seen the traitor's face. The man rose from the bush, he said, shot him, seized the pony, and rode off in a second with ruthless haste. He was tall and thin, but erect--that was all the wounded scout could tell us about his assailant. And THAT was not enough to identify Sebastian.
All danger was over. We rode back to Salisbury. The first words Hilda said when she saw me were: “Well, he has got away from you!”
“Yes; how did you know?”
“I read it in your step. But I guessed as much before. He is so very keen; and you started too confident.”
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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9
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THE EPISODE OF THE LADY WHO WAS VERY EXCLUSIVE
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The Matabele revolt gave Hilda a prejudice against Rhodesia. I will confess that I shared it. I may be hard to please; but it somehow sets one against a country when one comes home from a ride to find all the other occupants of the house one lives in massacred. So Hilda decided to leave South Africa. By an odd coincidence, I also decided on the same day to change my residence. Hilda's movements and mine, indeed, coincided curiously. The moment I learned she was going anywhere, I discovered in a flash that I happened to be going there too. I commend this strange case of parallel thought and action to the consideration of the Society for Psychical Research.
So I sold my farm, and had done with Rhodesia. A country with a future is very well in its way; but I am quite Ibsenish in my preference for a country with a past. Oddly enough, I had no difficulty in getting rid of my white elephant of a farm. People seemed to believe in Rhodesia none the less firmly because of this slight disturbance. They treated massacres as necessary incidents in the early history of a colony with a future. And I do not deny that native risings add picturesqueness. But I prefer to take them in a literary form.
“You will go home, of course?” I said to Hilda, when we came to talk it all over.
She shook her head. “To England? Oh, no. I must pursue my Plan. Sebastian will have gone home; he expects me to follow.”
“And why don't you?”
“Because--he expects it. You see, he is a good judge of character; he will naturally infer, from what he knows of my temperament, that after this experience I shall want to get back to England and safety. So I should--if it were not that I know he will expect it. As it is, I must go elsewhere; I must draw him after me.”
“Where?”
“Why do you ask, Hubert?”
“Because--I want to know where I am going myself. Wherever you go, I have reason to believe, I shall find that I happen to be going also.”
She rested her little chin on her hand and reflected a minute. “Does it occur to you,” she asked at last, “that people have tongues? If you go on following me like this, they will really begin to talk about us.”
“Now, upon my word, Hilda,” I cried, “that is the very first time I have ever known you show a woman's want of logic! I do not propose to follow you; I propose to happen to be travelling by the same steamer. I ask you to marry me; you won't; you admit you are fond of me; yet you tell me not to come with you. It is _I_ who suggest a course which would prevent people from chattering--by the simple device of a wedding. It is YOU who refuse. And then you turn upon me like this! Admit that you are unreasonable.”
“My dear Hubert, have I ever denied that I was a woman?”
“Besides,” I went on, ignoring her delicious smile, “I don't intend to FOLLOW you. I expect, on the contrary, to find myself beside you. When I know where you are going, I shall accidentally turn up on the same steamer. Accidents WILL happen. Nobody can prevent coincidences from occurring. You may marry me, or you may not; but if you don't marry me, you can't expect to curtail my liberty of action, can you? You had better know the worst at once; if you won't take me, you must count upon finding me at your elbow all the world over--till the moment comes when you choose to accept me.”
“Dear Hubert, I am ruining your life!”
“An excellent reason, then, for taking my advice, and marrying me instantly! But you wander from the question. Where are you going? That is the issue now before the house. You persist in evading it.”
She smiled, and came back to earth. “Oh, if you MUST know, to India, by the east coast, changing steamers at Aden.”
“Extraordinary!” I cried. “Do you know, Hilda, as luck will have it, _I_ also shall be on my way to Bombay by the very same steamer!”
“But you don't know what steamer it is?”
“No matter. That only makes the coincidence all the odder. Whatever the name of the ship may be, when you get on board, I have a presentiment that you will be surprised to find me there.”
She looked up at me with a gathering film in her eyes. “Hubert, you are irrepressible!”
“I am, my dear child; so you may as well spare yourself the needless trouble of trying to repress me.”
If you rub a piece of iron on a loadstone, it becomes magnetic. So, I think, I must have begun to acquire some part of Hilda's own prophetic strain; for, sure enough, a few weeks later, we both of us found ourselves on the German East African steamer Kaiser Wilhelm, on our way to Aden--exactly as I had predicted. Which goes to prove that there is really something after all in presentiments!
“Since you persist in accompanying me,” Hilda said to me, as we sat in our chairs on deck the first evening out, “I see what I must do. I must invent some plausible and ostensible reason for our travelling together.”
“We are not travelling together,” I answered. “We are travelling by the same steamer; that is all--exactly like the rest of our fellow-passengers. I decline to be dragged into this imaginary partnership.”
“Now do be serious, Hubert! I am going to invent an object in life for us.”
“What object?”
“How can I tell yet? I must wait and see what turns up. When we tranship at Aden, and find out what people are going on to Bombay with us, I shall probably discover some nice married lady to whom I can attach myself.”
“And am I to attach myself to her, too?”
“My dear boy, I never asked you to come. You came unbidden. You must manage for yourself as best you may. But I leave much to the chapter of accidents. We never know what will turn up, till it turns up in the end. Everything comes at last, you know, to him that waits.”
“And yet,” I put in, with a meditative air, “I have never observed that waiters are so much better off than the rest of the community. They seem to me--” “Don't talk nonsense. It is YOU who are wandering from the question now. Please return to it.”
I returned at once. “So I am to depend on what turns up?”
“Yes. Leave that to me. When we see our fellow-passengers on the Bombay steamer, I shall soon discover some ostensible reason why we two should be travelling through India with one of them.”
“Well, you are a witch, Hilda,” I answered. “I found that out long ago; but if you succeed between here and Bombay in inventing a Mission, I shall begin to believe you are even more of a witch than I ever thought you.”
At Aden we changed into a P. and O. steamer. Our first evening out on our second cruise was a beautiful one; the bland Indian Ocean wore its sweetest smile for us. We sat on deck after dinner. A lady with a husband came up from the cabin while we sat and gazed at the placid sea. I was smoking a quiet digestive cigar. Hilda was seated in her deck chair next to me.
The lady with the husband looked about her for a vacant space on which to place the chair a steward was carrying for her. There was plenty of room on the quarter-deck. I could not imagine why she gazed about her with such obtrusive caution. She inspected the occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny through a long-handled tortoise-shell optical abomination. None of them seemed to satisfy her. After a minute's effort, during which she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group on the other side of us. In other words, she sat as far away from everybody present as the necessarily restricted area of the quarter-deck permitted.
Hilda glanced at me and smiled. I snatched a quick look at the lady again. She was dressed with an amount of care and a smartness of detail that seemed somewhat uncalled for on the Indian Ocean. A cruise on a P. and O. steamer is not a garden party. Her chair was most luxurious, and had her name painted on it, back and front, in very large letters, with undue obtrusiveness. I read it from where I sat, “Lady Meadowcroft.”
The owner of the chair was tolerably young, not bad looking, and most expensively attired. Her face had a certain vacant, languid, half ennuyee air which I have learned to associate with women of the nouveau-riche type--women with small brains and restless minds, habitually plunged in a vortex of gaiety, and miserable when left for a passing moment to their own resources.
Hilda rose from her chair, and walked quietly forward towards the bow of the steamer. I rose, too, and accompanied her. “Well?” she said, with a faint touch of triumph in her voice when we had got out of earshot.
“Well, what?” I answered, unsuspecting.
“I told you everything turned up at the end!” she said, confidently. “Look at the lady's nose!”
“It does turn up at the end--certainly,” I answered, glancing back at her. “But I hardly see--” “Hubert, you are growing dull! You were not so at Nathaniel's.... It is the lady herself who has turned up, not her nose--though I grant you THAT turns up too--the lady I require for our tour in India; the not impossible chaperon.”
“Her nose tells you that?”
“Her nose, in part; but her face as a whole, too, her dress, her chair, her mental attitude to things in general.”
“My dear Hilda, you can't mean to tell me you have divined her whole nature at a glance, by magic!”
“Not wholly at a glance. I saw her come on board, you know--she transhipped from some other line at Aden as we did, and I have been watching her ever since. Yes, I think I have unravelled her.”
“You have been astonishingly quick!” I cried.
“Perhaps--but then, you see, there is so little to unravel! Some books, we all know, you must 'chew and digest'; they can only be read slowly; but some you can glance at, skim, and skip; the mere turning of the pages tells you what little worth knowing there is in them.”
“She doesn't LOOK profound,” I admitted, casting an eye at her meaningless small features as we paced up and down. “I incline to agree you might easily skim her.”
“Skim her--and learn all. The table of contents is SO short.... You see, in the first place, she is extremely 'exclusive'; she prides herself on her 'exclusiveness': it, and her shoddy title, are probably all she has to pride herself upon, and she works them both hard. She is a sham great lady.”
As Hilda spoke, Lady Meadowcroft raised a feebly querulous voice. “Steward! this won't do! I can smell the engine here. Move my chair. I must go on further.”
“If you go on further that way, my lady,” the steward answered, good-humouredly, but with a man-servant's deference for any sort of title, “you'll smell the galley, where they're cooking the dinner. I don't know which your ladyship would like best--the engine or the galley.”
The languid figure leaned back in the chair with an air of resignation. “I'm sure I don't know why they cook the dinners up so high,” she murmured, pettishly, to her husband. “Why can't they stick the kitchens underground--in the hold, I mean--instead of bothering us up here on deck with them?”
The husband was a big, burly, rough-and-ready Yorkshireman--stout, somewhat pompous, about forty, with hair wearing bald on the forehead: the personification of the successful business man. “My dear Emmie,” he said, in a loud voice, with a North Country accent, “the cooks have got to live. They've got to live like the rest of us. I can never persuade you that the hands must always be humoured. If you don't humour 'em, they won't work for you. It's a poor tale when the hands won't work. Even with galleys on deck, the life of a sea-cook is not generally thowt an enviable position. Is not a happy one--not a happy one, as the fellah says in the opera. You must humour your cooks. If you stuck 'em in the hold, you'd get no dinner at all--that's the long and the short of it.”
The languid lady turned away with a sickly, disappointed air. “Then they ought to have a conscription, or something,” she said, pouting her lips. “The Government ought to take it in hand and manage it somehow. It's bad enough having to go by these beastly steamers to India at all, without having one's breath poisoned by--” the rest of the sentence died away inaudibly in a general murmur of ineffective grumbling.
“Why do you think she is EXCLUSIVE?” I asked Hilda as we strolled on towards the stern, out of the spoilt child's hearing.
“Why, didn't you notice? --she looked about her when she came on deck to see whether there was anybody who WAS anybody sitting there, whom she might put her chair near. But the Governor of Madras hadn't come up from his cabin yet; and the wife of the chief Commissioner of Oude had three civilians hanging about her seat; and the daughters of the Commander-in-Chief drew their skirts away as she passed. So she did the next best thing--sat as far apart as she could from the common herd: meaning all the rest of us. If you can't mingle at once with the Best People, you can at least assert your exclusiveness negatively, by declining to associate with the mere multitude.”
“Now, Hilda, that is the first time I have ever known you to show any feminine ill-nature!”
“Ill-nature! Not at all. I am merely trying to arrive at the lady's character for my own guidance. I rather like her, poor little thing. Don't I tell you she will do? So far from objecting to her, I mean to go the round of India with her.”
“You have decided quickly.”
“Well, you see, if you insist upon accompanying me, I MUST have a chaperon; and Lady Meadowcroft will do as well as anybody else. In fact, being be-ladied, she will do a little better, from the point of view of Society, though THAT is a detail. The great matter is to fix upon a possible chaperon at once, and get her well in hand before we arrive at Bombay.”
“But she seems so complaining!” I interposed. “I'm afraid, if you take her on, you'll get terribly bored with her.”
“If SHE takes ME on, you mean. She's not a lady's-maid, though I intend to go with her; and she may as well give in first as last, for I'm going. Now see how nice I am to you, sir! I've provided you, too, with a post in her suite, as you WILL come with me. No, never mind asking me what it is just yet; all things come to him who waits; and if you will only accept the post of waiter, I mean all things to come to you.”
“All things, Hilda?” I asked, meaningly, with a little tremor of delight.
She looked at me with a sudden passing tenderness in her eyes. “Yes, all things, Hubert. All things. But we mustn't talk of that--though I begin to see my way clearer now. You shall be rewarded for your constancy at last, dear knight-errant. As to my chaperon, I'm not afraid of her boring me; she bores herself, poor lady; one can see that, just to look at her; but she will be much less bored if she has us two to travel with. What she needs is constant companionship, bright talk, excitement. She has come away from London, where she swims with the crowd; she has no resources of her own, no work, no head, no interests. Accustomed to a whirl of foolish gaieties, she wearies her small brain; thrown back upon herself, she bores herself at once, because she has nothing interesting to tell herself. She absolutely requires somebody else to interest her. She can't even amuse herself with a book for three minutes together. See, she has a yellow-backed French novel now, and she is only able to read five lines at a time; then she gets tired and glances about her listlessly. What she wants is someone gay, laid on, to divert her all the time from her own inanity.”
“Hilda, how wonderfully quick you are at reading these things! I see you are right; but I could never have guessed so much myself from such small premises.”
“Well, what can you expect, my dear boy? A girl like this, brought up in a country rectory, a girl of no intellect, busy at home with the fowls, and the pastry, and the mothers' meetings--suddenly married offhand to a wealthy man, and deprived of the occupations which were her salvation in life, to be plunged into the whirl of a London season, and stranded at its end for want of the diversions which, by dint of use, have become necessaries of life to her!”
“Now, Hilda, you are practising upon my credulity. You can't possibly tell from her look that she was brought up in a country rectory.”
“Of course not. You forget. There my memory comes in. I simply remember it.”
“You remember it? How?”
“Why, just in the same way as I remembered your name and your mother's when I was first introduced to you. I saw a notice once in the births, deaths, and marriages--'At St. Alphege's, Millington, by the Rev. Hugh Clitheroe, M.A., father of the bride, Peter Gubbins, Esq., of The Laurels, Middleston, to Emilia Frances, third daughter of the Rev. Hugh Clitheroe, rector of Millington.'”
“Clitheroe--Gubbins; what on earth has that to do with it? That would be Mrs. Gubbins: this is Lady Meadowcroft.”
“The same article, as the shopmen say--only under a different name. A year or two later I read a notice in the Times that 'I, Ivor de Courcy Meadowcroft, of The Laurels, Middleston, Mayor-elect of the Borough of Middleston, hereby give notice, that I have this day discontinued the use of the name Peter Gubbins, by which I was formerly known, and have assumed in lieu thereof the style and title of Ivor de Courcy Meadowcroft, by which I desire in future to be known.'
“A month or two later, again I happened to light upon a notice in the Telegraph that the Prince of Wales had opened a new hospital for incurables at Middleston, and that the Mayor, Mr. Ivor Meadowcroft, had received an intimation of Her Majesty's intention of conferring upon him the honour of knighthood. Now what do you make of it?”
“Putting two and two together,” I answered, with my eye on our subject, “and taking into consideration the lady's face and manner, I should incline to suspect that she was the daughter of a poor parson, with the usual large family in inverse proportion to his means. That she unexpectedly made a good match with a very wealthy manufacturer who had raised himself; and that she was puffed up accordingly with a sense of self-importance.”
“Exactly. He is a millionaire, or something very like it; and, being an ambitious girl, as she understands ambition, she got him to stand for the mayoralty, I don't doubt, in the year when the Prince of Wales was going to open the Royal Incurables, on purpose to secure him the chance of a knighthood. Then she said, very reasonably, 'I WON'T be Lady Gubbins--Sir Peter Gubbins!' There's an aristocratic name for you! --and, by a stroke of his pen, he straightway dis-Gubbinised himself, and emerged as Sir Ivor de Courcy Meadowcroft.”
“Really, Hilda, you know everything about everybody! And what do you suppose they're going to India for?”
“Now, you've asked me a hard one. I haven't the faintest notion.... And yet... let me think. How is this for a conjecture? Sir Ivor is interested in steel rails, I believe, and in railway plant generally. I'm almost sure I've seen his name in connection with steel rails in reports of public meetings. There's a new Government railway now being built on the Nepaul frontier--one of these strategic railways, I think they call them--it's mentioned in the papers we got at Aden. He MIGHT be going out for that. We can watch his conversation, and see what part of India he talks about.”
“They don't seem inclined to give us much chance of talking,” I objected.
“No; they are VERY exclusive. But I'm very exclusive, too. And I mean to give them a touch of my exclusiveness. I venture to predict that, before we reach Bombay, they'll be going down on their knees and imploring us to travel with them.”
At table, as it happened, from next morning's breakfast the Meadowcrofts sat next to us. Hilda was on one side of me; Lady Meadowcroft on the other; and beyond her again, bluff Yorkshire Sir Ivor, with his cold, hard, honest blue North Country eyes, and his dignified, pompous English, breaking down at times into a North Country colloquialism. They talked chiefly to each other. Acting on Hilda's instructions, I took care not to engage in conversation with our “exclusive” neighbour, except so far as the absolute necessities of the table compelled me. I “troubled her for the salt” in the most frigid voice. “May I pass you the potato salad?” became on my lips a barrier of separation. Lady Meadowcroft marked and wondered. People of her sort are so anxious to ingratiate themselves with “all the Best People” that if they find you are wholly unconcerned about the privilege of conversation with a “titled person,” they instantly judge you to be a distinguished character. As the days rolled on, Lady Meadowcroft's voice began to melt by degrees. Once, she asked me, quite civilly, to send round the ice; she even saluted me on the third day out with a polite “Good-morning, doctor.”
Still, I maintained (by Hilda's advice) my dignified reserve, and took my seat severely with a cold “Good-morning.” I behaved like a high-class consultant, who expects to be made Physician in Ordinary to Her Majesty.
At lunch that day, Hilda played her first card with delicious unconsciousness--apparent unconsciousness; for, when she chose, she was a consummate actress. She played it at a moment when Lady Meadowcroft, who by this time was burning with curiosity on our account, had paused from her talk with her husband to listen to us. I happened to say something about some Oriental curios belonging to an aunt of mine in London. Hilda seized the opportunity. “What did you say was her name?” she asked, blandly.
“Why, Lady Tepping,” I answered, in perfect innocence. “She has a fancy for these things, you know. She brought a lot of them home with her from Burma.”
As a matter of fact, as I have already explained, my poor dear aunt is an extremely commonplace old Army widow, whose husband happened to get knighted among the New Year's honours for some brush with the natives on the Shan frontier. But Lady Meadowcroft was at the stage where a title is a title; and the discovery that I was the nephew of a “titled person” evidently interested her. I could feel rather than see that she glanced significantly aside at Sir Ivor, and that Sir Ivor in return made a little movement of his shoulders equivalent to “I told you so.”
Now Hilda knew perfectly well that the aunt of whom I spoke WAS Lady Tepping; so I felt sure that she had played this card of malice prepense, to pique Lady Meadowcroft.
But Lady Meadowcroft herself seized the occasion with inartistic avidity. She had hardly addressed us as yet. At the sound of the magic passport, she pricked up her ears, and turned to me suddenly. “Burma?” she said, as if to conceal the true reason for her change of front. “Burma? I had a cousin there once. He was in the Gloucestershire Regiment.”
“Indeed?” I answered. My tone was one of utter unconcern in her cousin's history. “Miss Wade, will you take Bombay ducks with your curry?” In public, I thought it wise under the circumstances to abstain from calling her Hilda. It might lead to misconceptions; people might suppose we were more than fellow-travellers.
“You have had relations in Burma?” Lady Meadowcroft persisted.
I manifested a desire to discontinue the conversation. “Yes,” I answered, coldly, “my uncle commanded there.”
“Commanded there! Really! Ivor, do you hear? Dr. Cumberledge's uncle commanded in Burma.” A faint intonation on the word commanded drew unobtrusive attention to its social importance. “May I ask what was his name? --my cousin was there, you see.” An insipid smile. “We may have friends in common.”
“He was a certain Sir Malcolm Tepping,” I blurted out, staring hard at my plate.
“Tepping! I think I have heard Dick speak of him, Ivor.”
“Your cousin,” Sir Ivor answered, with emphatic dignity, “is certain to have mixed with nobbut the highest officials in Burma.”
“Yes, I'm sure Dick used to speak of a certain Sir Malcolm. My cousin's name, Dr. Cumberledge, was Maltby--Captain Richard Maltby.”
“Indeed,” I answered, with an icy stare. “I cannot pretend to the pleasure of having met him.”
Be exclusive to the exclusive, and they burn to know you. From that moment forth Lady Meadowcroft pestered us with her endeavours to scrape acquaintance. Instead of trying how far she could place her chair from us, she set it down as near us as politeness permitted. She entered into conversation whenever an opening afforded itself, and we two stood off haughtily. She even ventured to question me about our relation to one another: “Miss Wade is your cousin, I suppose?” she suggested.
“Oh, dear, no,” I answered, with a glassy smile. “We are not connected in any way.”
“But you are travelling together!”
“Merely as you and I are travelling together--fellow-passengers on the same steamer.”
“Still, you have met before.”
“Yes, certainly. Miss Wade was a nurse at St. Nathaniel's, in London, where I was one of the house doctors. When I came on board at Cape Town, after some months in South Africa, I found she was going by the same steamer to India.” Which was literally true. To have explained the rest would have been impossible, at least to anyone who did not know the whole of Hilda's history.
“And what are you both going to do when you get to India?”
“Really, Lady Meadowcroft,” I said, severely, “I have not asked Miss Wade what she is going to do. If you inquire of her point-blank, as you have inquired of me, I dare say she will tell you. For myself, I am just a globe-trotter, amusing myself. I only want to have a look round at India.”
“Then you are not going out to take an appointment?”
“By George, Emmie,” the burly Yorkshireman put in, with an air of annoyance, “you are cross-questioning Dr. Cumberledge; nowt less than cross-questioning him!”
I waited a second. “No,” I answered, slowly. “I have not been practising of late. I am looking about me. I travel for enjoyment.”
That made her think better of me. She was of the kind, indeed, who think better of a man if they believe him to be idle.
She dawdled about all day on deck chairs, herself, seldom even reading; and she was eager now to drag Hilda into conversation. Hilda resisted; she had found a volume in the library which immensely interested her.
“What ARE you reading, Miss Wade?” Lady Meadowcroft cried at last, quite savagely. It made her angry to see anybody else pleased and occupied when she herself was listless.
“A delightful book!” Hilda answered. “The Buddhist Praying Wheel, by William Simpson.”
Lady Meadowcroft took it from her and turned the pages over with a languid air. “Looks awfully dull!” she observed, with a faint smile, at last, returning it.
“It's charming,” Hilda retorted, glancing at one of the illustrations. “It explains so much. It shows one why one turns round one's chair at cards for luck; and why, when a church is consecrated, the bishop walks three times about it sunwise.”
“Our Bishop is a dreadfully prosy old gentleman,” Lady Meadowcroft answered, gliding off at a tangent on a personality, as is the wont of her kind; “he had, oh, such a dreadful quarrel with my father over the rules of the St. Alphege Schools at Millington.”
“Indeed,” Hilda answered, turning once more to her book. Lady Meadowcroft looked annoyed. It would never have occurred to her that within a few weeks she was to owe her life to that very abstruse work, and what Hilda had read in it.
That afternoon, as we watched the flying fish from the ship's side, Hilda said to me abruptly, “My chaperon is an extremely nervous woman.”
“Nervous about what?”
“About disease, chiefly. She has the temperament that dreads infection--and therefore catches it.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Haven't you noticed that she often doubles her thumb under her fingers--folds her fist across it--so--especially when anybody talks about anything alarming? If the conversation happens to turn on jungle fever, or any subject like that, down goes her thumb instantly, and she clasps her fist over it with a convulsive squeeze. At the same time, too, her face twitches. I know what that trick means. She's horribly afraid of tropical diseases, though she never says so.”
“And you attach importance to her fear?”
“Of course. I count upon it as probably our chief means of catching and fixing her.”
“As how?”
She shook her head and quizzed me. “Wait and see. You are a doctor; I, a trained nurse. Before twenty-four hours, I foresee she will ask us. She is sure to ask us, now she has learned that you are Lady Tepping's nephew, and that I am acquainted with several of the Best People.”
That evening, about ten o'clock, Sir Ivor strolled up to me in the smoking-room with affected unconcern. He laid his hand on my arm and drew me aside mysteriously. The ship's doctor was there, playing a quiet game of poker with a few of the passengers. “I beg your pardon, Dr. Cumberledge,” he began, in an undertone, “could you come outside with me a minute? Lady Meadowcroft has sent me up to you with a message.”
I followed him on to the open deck. “It is quite impossible, my dear sir,” I said, shaking my head austerely, for I divined his errand. “I can't go and see Lady Meadowcroft. Medical etiquette, you know; the constant and salutary rule of the profession!”
“Why not?” he asked, astonished.
“The ship carries a surgeon,” I replied, in my most precise tone. “He is a duly qualified gentleman, very able in his profession, and he ought to inspire your wife with confidence. I regard this vessel as Dr. Boyell's practice, and all on board it as virtually his patients.”
Sir Ivor's face fell. “But Lady Meadowcroft is not at all well,” he answered, looking piteous; “and--she can't endure the ship's doctor. Such a common man, you know! His loud voice disturbs her. You MUST have noticed that my wife is a lady of exceptionally delicate nervous organisation.” He hesitated, beamed on me, and played his trump card. “She dislikes being attended by owt but a GENTLEMAN.”
“If a gentleman is also a medical man,” I answered, “his sense of duty towards his brother practitioners would, of course, prevent him from interfering in their proper sphere, or putting upon them the unmerited slight of letting them see him preferred before them.”
“Then you positively refuse?” he asked, wistfully, drawing back. I could see he stood in a certain dread of that imperious little woman.
I conceded a point. “I will go down in twenty minutes,” I admitted, looking grave,--“not just now, lest I annoy my colleague,--and I will glance at Lady Meadowcroft in an unprofessional way. If I think her case demands treatment, I will tell Dr. Boyell.” And I returned to the smoking-room and took up a novel.
Twenty minutes later I knocked at the door of the lady's private cabin, with my best bedside manner in full play. As I suspected, she was nervous--nothing more--my mere smile reassured her. I observed that she held her thumb fast, doubled under in her fist, all the time I was questioning her, as Hilda had said; and I also noticed that the fingers closed about it convulsively at first, but gradually relaxed as my voice restored confidence. She thanked me profusely, and was really grateful.
On deck next day she was very communicative. They were going to make the regular tour first, she said, but were to go on to the Tibetan frontier at the end, where Sir Ivor had a contract to construct a railway, in a very wild region. Tigers? Natives? Oh, she didn't mind either of THEM; but she was told that that district--what did they call it? the Terai, or something--was terribly unwholesome. Fever was what-you-may-call-it there--yes, “endemic”--that was the word; “oh, thank you, Dr. Cumberledge.” She hated the very name of fever. “Now you, Miss Wade, I suppose,” with an awestruck smile, “are not in the least afraid of it?”
Hilda looked up at her calmly. “Not in the least,” she answered. “I have nursed hundreds of cases.”
“Oh, my, how dreadful! And never caught it?”
“Never. I am not afraid, you see.”
“I wish _I_ wasn't! Hundreds of cases! It makes one ill to think of it! ... And all successfully?”
“Almost all of them.”
“You don't tell your patients stories when they're ill about your other cases who died, do you?” Lady Meadowcroft went on, with a quick little shudder.
Hilda's face by this time was genuinely sympathetic. “Oh, never!” she answered, with truth. “That would be very bad nursing! One's object in treating a case is to make one's patient well; so one naturally avoids any sort of subject that might be distressing or alarming.”
“You really mean it?” Her face was pleading.
“Why, of course. I try to make my patients my friends; I talk to them cheerfully; I amuse them and distract them; I get them away, as far as I can, from themselves and their symptoms.”
“Oh, what a lovely person to have about one when one's ill!” the languid lady exclaimed, ecstatically. “I SHOULD like to send for you if I wanted nursing! But there--it's always so, of course, with a real lady; common nurses frighten one so. I wish I could always have a lady to nurse me!”
“A person who sympathises--that is the really important thing,” Hilda answered, in her quiet voice. “One must find out first one's patient's temperament. YOU are nervous, I can see.” She laid one hand on her new friend's arm. “You need to be kept amused and engaged when you are ill; what YOU require most is--insight--and sympathy.”
The little fist doubled up again; the vacant face grew positively sweet. “That's just it! You have hit it! How clever you are! I want all that. I suppose, Miss Wade, YOU never go out for private nursing?”
“Never,” Hilda answered. “You see, Lady Meadowcroft, I don't nurse for a livelihood. I have means of my own; I took up this work as an occupation and a sphere in life. I haven't done anything yet but hospital nursing.”
Lady Meadowcroft drew a slight sigh. “What a pity!” she murmured, slowly. “It does seem hard that your sympathies should all be thrown away, so to speak, on a horrid lot of wretched poor people, instead of being spent on your own equals--who would so greatly appreciate them.”
“I think I can venture to say the poor appreciate them, too,” Hilda answered, bridling up a little--for there was nothing she hated so much as class-prejudices. “Besides, they need sympathy more; they have fewer comforts. I should not care to give up attending my poor people for the sake of the idle rich.”
The set phraseology of the country rectory recurred to Lady Meadowcroft--“our poorer brethren,” and so forth. “Oh, of course,” she answered, with the mechanical acquiescence such women always give to moral platitudes. “One must do one's best for the poor, I know--for conscience' sake and all that; it's our duty, and we all try hard to do it. But they're so terribly ungrateful! Don't you think so? Do you know, Miss Wade, in my father's parish--” Hilda cut her short with a sunny smile--half contemptuous toleration, half genuine pity. “We are all ungrateful,” she said; “but the poor, I think, the least so. I'm sure the gratitude I've often had from my poor women at St. Nathaniel's has made me sometimes feel really ashamed of myself. I had done so little--and they thanked me so much for it.”
“Which only shows,” Lady Meadowcroft broke in, “that one ought always to have a LADY to nurse one.”
“Ca marche!” Hilda said to me, with a quiet smile, a few minutes after, when her ladyship had disappeared in her fluffy robe down the companion-ladder.
“Yes, ca marche,” I answered. “In an hour or two you will have succeeded in landing your chaperon. And what is most amusing, landed her, too, Hilda, just by being yourself--letting her see frankly the actual truth of what you think and feel about her and about everyone!”
“I could not do otherwise,” Hilda answered, growing grave. “I must be myself, or die for it. My method of angling consists in showing myself just as I am. You call me an actress, but I am not really one; I am only a woman who can use her personality for her own purposes. If I go with Lady Meadowcroft, it will be a mutual advantage. I shall really sympathise with her for I can see the poor thing is devoured with nervousness.”
“But do you think you will be able to stand her?” I asked.
“Oh, dear, yes. She's not a bad little thing, au fond, when you get to know her. It is society that has spoilt her. She would have made a nice, helpful, motherly body if she'd married the curate.”
As we neared Bombay, conversation grew gradually more and more Indian; it always does under similar circumstances. A sea voyage is half retrospect, half prospect; it has no personal identity. You leave Liverpool for New York at the English standpoint, and are full of what you did in London or Manchester; half-way over, you begin to discuss American custom-houses and New York hotels; by the time you reach Sandy Hook, the talk is all of quick trains west and the shortest route from Philadelphia to New Orleans. You grow by slow stages into the new attitude; at Malta you are still regretting Europe; after Aden, your mind dwells most on the hire of punkah-wallahs and the proverbial toughness of the dak-bungalow chicken.
“How's the plague at Bombay now?” an inquisitive passenger inquired of the Captain at dinner our last night out. “Getting any better?”
Lady Meadowcroft's thumb dived between her fingers again. “What! is there plague in Bombay?” she asked, innocently, in her nervous fashion.
“Plague in Bombay!” the Captain burst out, his burly voice resounding down the saloon. “Why, bless your soul, ma'am, where else would you expect it? Plague in Bombay! It's been there these five years. Better? Not quite. Going ahead like mad. They're dying by thousands.”
“A microbe, I believe, Dr. Boyell,” the inquisitive passenger observed deferentially, with due respect for medical science.
“Yes,” the ship's doctor answered, helping himself to an olive. “Forty million microbes to each square inch of the Bombay atmosphere.”
“And we are going to Bombay!” Lady Meadowcroft exclaimed, aghast.
“You must have known there was plague there, my dear,” Sir Ivor put in, soothingly, with a deprecating glance. “It's been in all the papers. But only the natives get it.”
The thumb uncovered itself a little. “Oh, only the natives!” Lady Meadowcroft echoed, relieved; as if a few thousand Hindus more or less would hardly be missed among the blessings of British rule in India. “You know, Ivor, I never read those DREADFUL things in the papers. _I_ read the Society news, and Our Social Diary, and columns that are headed 'Mainly About People.' I don't care for anything but the Morning Post and the World and Truth. I hate horrors.... But it's a blessing to think it's only the natives.”
“Plenty of Europeans, too, bless your heart,” the Captain thundered out unfeelingly. “Why, last time I was in port, a nurse died at the hospital.”
“Oh, only a nurse--” Lady Meadowcroft began, and then coloured up deeply, with a side glance at Hilda.
“And lots besides nurses,” the Captain continued, positively delighted at the terror he was inspiring. “Pucka Englishmen and Englishwomen. Bad business this plague, Dr. Cumberledge! Catches particularly those who are most afraid of it.”
“But it's only in Bombay?” Lady Meadowcroft cried, clutching at the last straw. I could see she was registering a mental determination to go straight up-country the moment she landed.
“Not a bit of it!” the Captain answered, with provoking cheerfulness. “Rampaging about like a roaring lion all over India!”
Lady Meadowcroft's thumb must have suffered severely. The nails dug into it as if it were someone else's.
Half an hour later, as we were on deck in the cool of the evening, the thing was settled. “My wife,” Sir Ivor said, coming up to us with a serious face, “has delivered her ultimatum. Positively her ultimatum. I've had a mort o' trouble with her, and now she's settled. EITHER, she goes back from Bombay by the return steamer; OR ELSE--you and Miss Wade must name your own terms to accompany us on our tour, in case of emergencies.” He glanced wistfully at Hilda. “DO you think you can help us?”
Hilda made no hypocritical pretence of hanging back. Her nature was transparent. “If you wish it, yes,” she answered, shaking hands upon the bargain. “I only want to go about and see India; I can see it quite as well with Lady Meadowcroft as without her--and even better. It is unpleasant for a woman to travel unattached. I require a chaperon, and am glad to find one. I will join your party, paying my own hotel and travelling expenses, and considering myself as engaged in case your wife should need my services. For that, you can pay me, if you like, some nominal retaining fee--five pounds or anything. The money is immaterial to me. I like to be useful, and I sympathise with nerves; but it may make your wife feel she is really keeping a hold over me if we put the arrangement on a business basis. As a matter of fact, whatever sum she chooses to pay, I shall hand it over at once to the Bombay Plague Hospital.”
Sir Ivor looked relieved. “Thank you ever so much!” he said, wringing her hand warmly. “I thowt you were a brick, and now I know it. My wife says your face inspires confidence, and your voice sympathy. She MUST have you with her. And you, Dr. Cumberledge?”
“I follow Miss Wade's lead,” I answered, in my most solemn tone, with an impressive bow. “I, too, am travelling for instruction and amusement only; and if it would give Lady Meadowcroft a greater sense of security to have a duly qualified practitioner in her suite, I shall be glad on the same terms to swell your party. I will pay my own way; and I will allow you to name any nominal sum you please for your claim on my medical attendance, if necessary. I hope and believe, however, that our presence will so far reassure our prospective patient as to make our post in both cases a sinecure.”
Three minutes later Lady Meadowcroft rushed on deck and flung her arms impulsively round Hilda. “You dear, good girl!” she cried; “how sweet and kind of you! I really COULDN'T have landed if you hadn't promised to come with us. And Dr. Cumberledge, too! So nice and friendly of you both. But there, it IS so much pleasanter to deal with ladies and gentlemen!”
So Hilda won her point; and what was best, won it fairly.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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10
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THE EPISODE OF THE GUIDE WHO KNEW THE COUNTRY
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We toured all round India with the Meadowcrofts; and really the lady who was “so very exclusive” turned out not a bad little thing, when once one had succeeded in breaking through the ring-fence with which she surrounded herself. She had an endless, quenchless restlessness, it is true; her eyes wandered aimlessly; she never was happy for two minutes together, unless she was surrounded by friends, and was seeing something. What she saw did not interest her much; certainly her tastes were on the level with those of a very young child. An odd-looking house, a queerly dressed man, a tree cut into shape to look like a peacock, delighted her far more than the most glorious view of the quaintest old temple. Still, she must be seeing. She could no more sit still than a fidgety child or a monkey at the Zoo. To be up and doing was her nature--doing nothing, to be sure; but still, doing it strenuously.
So we went the regulation round of Delhi and Agra, the Taj Mahal, and the Ghats at Benares, at railroad speed, fulfilling the whole duty of the modern globe-trotter. Lady Meadowcroft looked at everything--for ten minutes at a stretch; then she wanted to be off, to visit the next thing set down for her in her guide-book. As we left each town she murmured mechanically: “Well, we've seen THAT, thank Heaven!” and straightway went on, with equal eagerness, and equal boredom, to see the one after it.
The only thing that did NOT bore her, indeed, was Hilda's bright talk.
“Oh, Miss Wade,” she would say, clasping her hands, and looking up into Hilda's eyes with her own empty blue ones, “you ARE so funny! So original, don't you know! You never talk or think of anything like other people. I can't imagine how such ideas come up in your mind. If _I_ were to try all day, I'm sure I should never hit upon them!” Which was so perfectly true as to be a trifle obvious.
Sir Ivor, not being interested in temples, but in steel rails, had gone on at once to his concession, or contract, or whatever else it was, on the north-east frontier, leaving his wife to follow and rejoin him in the Himalayas as soon as she had exhausted the sights of India. So, after a few dusty weeks of wear and tear on the Indian railways, we met him once more in the recesses of Nepaul, where he was busy constructing a light local line for the reigning Maharajah.
If Lady Meadowcroft had been bored at Allahabad and Ajmere, she was immensely more bored in a rough bungalow among the trackless depths of the Himalayan valleys. To anybody with eyes in his head, indeed, Toloo, where Sir Ivor had pitched his headquarters, was lovely enough to keep one interested for a twelvemonth. Snow-clad needles of rock hemmed it in on either side; great deodars rose like huge tapers on the hillsides; the plants and flowers were a joy to look at. But Lady Meadowcroft did not care for flowers which one could not wear in one's hair; and what was the good of dressing here, with no one but Ivor and Dr. Cumberledge to see one? She yawned till she was tired; then she began to grow peevish.
“Why Ivor should want to build a railway at all in this stupid, silly place,” she said, as we sat in the veranda in the cool of evening, “I'm sure _I_ can't imagine. We MUST go somewhere. This is maddening, maddening! Miss Wade--Dr. Cumberledge--I count upon you to discover SOMETHING for me to do. If I vegetate like this, seeing nothing all day long but those eternal hills”--she clenched her little fist--“I shall go MAD with ennui.”
Hilda had a happy thought. “I have a fancy to see some of these Buddhist monasteries,” she said, smiling as one smiles at a tiresome child whom one likes in spite of everything. “You remember, I was reading that book of Mr. Simpson's on the steamer--coming out--a curious book about the Buddhist Praying Wheels; and it made me want to see one of their temples immensely. What do you say to camping out? A few weeks in the hills? It would be an adventure, at any rate.”
“Camping out?” Lady Meadowcroft exclaimed, half roused from her languor by the idea of a change. “Oh, do you think that would be fun? Should we sleep on the ground? But, wouldn't it be dreadfully, horribly uncomfortable?”
“Not half so uncomfortable as you'll find yourself here at Toloo in a few days, Emmie,” her husband put in, grimly. “The rains will soon be on, lass; and when the rains are on, by all accounts, they're precious heavy hereabouts--rare fine rains, so that a man's half-flooded out of his bed o' nights--which won't suit YOU, my lady.”
The poor little woman clasped her twitching hands in feeble agony. “Oh, Ivor, how dreadful! Is it what they call the mongoose, or monsoon, or something? But if they're so bad here, surely they'll be worse in the hills--and camping out, too--won't they?”
“Not if you go the right way to work. Ah'm told it never rains t'other side o' the hills. The mountains stop the clouds, and once you're over, you're safe enough. Only, you must take care to keep well in the Maharajah's territory. Cross the frontier t'other side into Tibet, an' they'll skin thee alive as soon as look at thee. They don't like strangers in Tibet; prejudiced against them, somehow; they pretty well skinned that young chap Landor who tried to go there a year ago.”
“But, Ivor, I don't want to be skinned alive! I'm not an eel, please!”
“That's all right, lass. Leave that to me. I can get thee a guide, a man that's very well acquainted with the mountains. I was talking to a scientific explorer here t'other day, and he knows of a good guide who can take you anywhere. He'll get you the chance of seeing the inside of a Buddhist monastery, if you like, Miss Wade. He's hand in glove with all the religion they've got in this part o' the country. They've got noan much, but at what there is, he's a rare devout one.”
We discussed the matter fully for two or three days before we made up our minds. Lady Meadowcroft was undecided between her hatred of dulness and her haunting fear that scorpions and snakes would intrude upon our tents and beds while we were camping. In the end, however, the desire for change carried the day. She decided to dodge the rainy season by getting behind the Himalayan-passes, in the dry region to the north of the great range, where rain seldom falls, the country being watered only by the melting of the snows on the high summits.
This decision delighted Hilda, who, since she came to India, had fallen a prey to the fashionable vice of amateur photography. She took to it enthusiastically. She had bought herself a first-rate camera of the latest scientific pattern at Bombay, and ever since had spent all her time and spoiled her pretty hands in “developing.” She was also seized with a craze for Buddhism. The objects that everywhere particularly attracted her were the old Buddhist temples and tombs and sculptures with which India is studded. Of these she had taken some hundreds of views, all printed by herself with the greatest care and precision. But in India, after all, Buddhism is a dead creed. Its monuments alone remain; she was anxious to see the Buddhist religion in its living state; and that she could only do in these remote outlying Himalayan valleys.
Our outfit, therefore, included a dark tent for Hilda's photographic apparatus; a couple of roomy tents to live and sleep in; a small cooking-stove; a cook to look after it; half-a-dozen bearers; and the highly recommended guide who knew his way about the country. In three days we were ready, to Sir Ivor's great delight. He was fond of his pretty wife, and proud of her, I believe; but when once she was away from the whirl and bustle of the London that she loved, it was a relief to him, I fancy, to pursue his work alone, unhampered by her restless and querulous childishness.
On the morning when we were to make our start, the guide who was “well acquainted with the mountains” turned up--as villainous-looking a person as I have ever set eyes on. He was sullen and furtive. I judged him at sight to be half Hindu, half Tibetan. He had a dark complexion, between brown and tawny; narrow slant eyes, very small and beady-black, with a cunning leer in their oblique corners; a flat nose much broadened at the wings; a cruel, thick, sensuous mouth, and high cheek-bones; the whole surmounted by a comprehensive scowl and an abundant crop of lank black hair, tied up in a knot at the nape of the neck with a yellow ribbon. His face was shifty; his short, stout form looked well adapted to mountain climbing, and also to wriggling. A deep scar on his left cheek did not help to inspire confidence. But he was polite and civil-spoken. Altogether a clever, unscrupulous, wide-awake soul, who would serve you well if he thought he could make by it, and would betray you at a pinch to the highest bidder.
We set out, in merry mood, prepared to solve all the abstruse problems of the Buddhist religion. Our spoilt child stood the camping out better than I expected. She was fretful, of course, and worried about trifles; she missed her maid and her accustomed comforts; but she minded the roughing it less, on the whole, than she had minded the boredom of inaction in the bungalow; and, being cast on Hilda and myself for resources, she suddenly evolved an unexpected taste for producing, developing, and printing photographs. We took dozens, as we went along, of little villages on our route, wood-built villages with quaint houses and turrets; and as Hilda had brought her collection of prints with her, for comparison of the Indian and Nepaulese monuments, we spent the evenings after our short day's march each day in arranging and collating them. We had planned to be away six weeks, at least. In that time the monsoon would have burst and passed. Our guide thought we might see all that was worth seeing of the Buddhist monasteries, and Sir Ivor thought we should have fairly escaped the dreaded wet season.
“What do you make of our guide?” I asked of Hilda on our fourth day out. I began somehow to distrust him.
“Oh, he seems all right,” Hilda answered, carelessly--and her voice reassured me. “He's a rogue, of course; all guides and interpreters, and dragomans and the like, in out-of-the-way places, always ARE rogues. If they were honest men, they would share the ordinary prejudices of their countrymen, and would have nothing to do with the hated stranger. But in this case our friend, Ram Das, has no end to gain by getting us into mischief. If he had, he wouldn't scruple for a second to cut our throats; but then, there are too many of us. He will probably try to cheat us by making preposterous charges when he gets us back to Toloo; but that's Lady Meadowcroft's business. I don't doubt Sir Ivor will be more than a match for him there. I'll back one shrewd Yorkshireman against any three Tibetan half-castes, any day.”
“You're right that he would cut our throats if it served his purpose,” I answered. “He's servile, and servility goes hand in hand with treachery. The more I watch him, the more I see 'scoundrel' written in large type on every bend of the fellow's oily shoulders.”
“Oh, yes, he's a bad lot, I know. The cook, who can speak a little English and a little Tibetan, as well as Hindustani, tells me Ram Das has the worst reputation of any man in the mountains. But he says he's a very good guide to the passes, for all that, and if he's well paid will do what he's paid for.”
Next day but one we approached at last, after several short marches, the neighbourhood of what our guide assured us was a Buddhist monastery. I was glad when he told us of it, giving the place the name of a well-known Nepaulese village; for, to say the truth, I was beginning to get frightened. Judging by the sun, for I had brought no compass, it struck me that we seemed to have been marching almost due north ever since we left Toloo; and I fancied such a line of march must have brought us by this time suspiciously near the Tibetan frontier. Now, I had no desire to be “skinned alive,” as Sir Ivor put it. I did not wish to emulate St. Bartholomew and others of the early Christian martyrs; so I was pleased to learn that we were really drawing near to Kulak, the first of the Nepaulese Buddhist monasteries to which our well-informed guide, himself a Buddhist, had promised to introduce us.
We were tramping up a beautiful high mountain valley, closed round on every side by snowy peaks. A brawling river ran over a rocky bed in cataracts down its midst. Crags rose abruptly a little in front of us. Half-way up the slope to the left, on a ledge of rock, rose a long, low building with curious, pyramid-like roofs, crowned at either end by a sort of minaret, which resembled more than anything else a huge earthenware oil-jar. This was the monastery or lamasery we had come so far to see. Honestly, at first sight, I did not feel sure it was worth the trouble.
Our guide called a halt, and turned to us with a sudden peremptory air. His servility had vanished. “You stoppee here,” he said, slowly, in broken English, “while me-a go on to see whether Lama-sahibs ready to take you. Must ask leave from Lama-sahibs to visit village; if no ask leave”--he drew his hand across his throat with a significant gesture--“Lama-sahibs cuttee head off Eulopean.”
“Goodness gracious!” Lady Meadowcroft cried, clinging tight to Hilda. “Miss Wade, this is dreadful! Where on earth have you brought us to?”
“Oh, that's all right,” Hilda answered, trying to soothe her, though she herself began to look a trifle anxious. “That's only Ram Das's graphic way of putting things.”
We sat down on a bank of trailing club-moss by the side of the rough track, for it was nothing more, and let our guide go on to negotiate with the Lamas. “Well, to-night, anyhow,” I exclaimed, looking up, “we shall sleep on our own mattresses with a roof over our heads. These monks will find us quarters. That's always something.”
We got out our basket and made tea. In all moments of doubt, your Englishwoman makes tea. As Hilda said, she will boil her Etna on Vesuvius. We waited and drank our tea; we drank our tea and waited. A full hour passed away. Ram Das never came back. I began to get frightened.
At last something stirred. A group of excited men in yellow robes issued forth from the monastery, wound their way down the hill, and approached us, shouting. They gesticulated as they came. I could see they looked angry. All at once Hilda clutched my arm: “Hubert,” she cried, in an undertone, “we are betrayed! I see it all now. These are Tibetans, not Nepaulese.” She paused a second, then went on: “I see it all--all, all. Our guide--Ram Das--he HAD a reason, after all, for getting us into mischief. Sebastian must have tracked us; he was bribed by Sebastian! It was HE who recommended Ram Das to Sir Ivor!”
“Why do you think so?” I asked, low.
“Because--look for yourself; these men who come are dressed in yellow. That means Tibetans. Red is the colour of the Lamas in Nepaul; yellow in Tibet and all other Buddhist countries. I read it in the book--The Buddhist Praying Wheel, you know. These are Tibetan fanatics, and, as Ram Das said, they will probably cut our throats for us.”
I was thankful that Hilda's marvellous memory gave us even that moment for preparation and facing the difficulty. I saw in a flash that she was quite right: we had been inveigled across the frontier. These moutis were Tibetans--Buddhist inquisitors--enemies. Tibet is the most jealous country on earth; it allows no stranger to intrude upon its borders. I had to meet the worst. I stood there, a single white man, armed only with one revolver, answerable for the lives of two English ladies, and accompanied by a cringing out-caste Ghoorka cook and half-a-dozen doubtful Nepaulese bearers. To fly was impossible. We were fairly trapped. There was nothing for it but to wait and put a bold face on our utter helplessness.
I turned to our spoilt child. “Lady Meadowcroft,” I said, very seriously, “this is danger; real danger. Now, listen to me. You must do as you are bid. No crying; no cowardice. Your life and ours depend upon it. We must none of us give way. We must pretend to be brave. Show one sign of fear, and these people will probably cut our throats on the spot here.”
To my immense surprise, Lady Meadowcroft rose to the height of the situation. “Oh, as long as it isn't disease,” she answered, resignedly; “I'm not much afraid of anything. I should mind the plague a great deal more than I mind a set of howling savages.”
By that time the men in yellow robes had almost come up to us. It was clear they were boiling over with indignation; but they still did everything decently and in order. One, who was dressed in finer vestments than the rest--a portly person, with the fat, greasy cheeks and drooping flesh of a celibate church dignitary, whom I therefore judged to be the abbot, or chief Lama of the monastery--gave orders to his subordinates in a language which we did not understand. His men obeyed him. In a second they had closed us round, as in a ring or cordon.
Then the chief Lama stepped forward, with an authoritative air, like Pooh-Bah in the play, and said something in the same tongue to the cook, who spoke a little Tibetan. It was obvious from his manner that Ram Das had told them all about us; for the Lama selected the cook as interpreter at once, without taking any notice of myself, the ostensible head of the petty expedition.
“What does he, say?” I asked, as soon as he had finished speaking.
The cook, who had been salaaming all the time, at the risk of a broken back, in his most utterly abject and grovelling attitude, made answer tremulously in his broken English: “This is priest-sahib of the temple. He very angry, because why? Eulopean-sahib and mem-sahibs come into Tibet-land. No Eulopean, no Hindu, must come into Tibet-land. Priest-sahib say, cut all Eulopean throats. Let Nepaul man go back like him come, to him own country.”
I looked as if the message were purely indifferent to me. “Tell him,” I said, smiling--though at some little effort--“we were not trying to enter Tibet. Our rascally guide misled us. We were going to Kulak, in the Maharajah's territory. We will turn back quietly to the Maharajah's land if the priest-sahib will allow us to camp out for the night here.”
I glanced at Hilda and Lady Meadowcroft. I must say their bearing under these trying circumstances was thoroughly worthy of two English ladies. They stood erect, looking as though all Tibet might come, and they would smile at it scornfully.
The cook interpreted my remarks as well as he was able--his Tibetan being probably about equal in quality to his English. But the chief Lama made a reply which I could see for myself was by no means friendly.
“What is his answer?” I asked the cook, in my haughtiest voice. I am haughty with difficulty.
Our interpreter salaamed once more, shaking in his shoes, if he wore any. “Priest-sahib say, that all lies. That all dam-lies. You is Eulopean missionary, very bad man; you want to go to Lhasa. But no white sahib must go to Lhasa. Holy city, Lhasa; for Buddhists only. This is not the way to Kulak; this not Maharajah's land. This place belong-a Dalai-Lama, head of all Lamas; have house at Lhasa. But priest-sahib know you Eulopean missionary, want to go Lhasa, convert Buddhists, because... Ram Das tell him so.”
“Ram Das!” I exclaimed, thoroughly angry by this time. “The rogue! The scoundrel! He has not only deserted us, but betrayed us as well. He has told this lie on purpose to set the Tibetans against us. We must face the worst now. Our one chance is, to cajole these people.”
The fat priest spoke again. “What does he say this time?” I asked.
“He say, Ram Das tell him all this because Ram Das good man--very good man: Ram Das converted Buddhist. You pay Ram Das to guidee you to Lhasa. But Ram Das good man, not want to let Eulopean see holy city; bring you here instead; then tell priest-sahib about it.” And he chuckled inwardly.
“What will they do to us?” Lady Meadowcroft asked, her face very white, though her manner was more courageous than I could easily have believed of her.
“I don't know,” I answered, biting my lip. “But we must not give way. We must put a bold face upon it. Their bark, after all, may be worse than their bite. We may still persuade them to let us go back again.”
The men in yellow robes motioned us to move on towards the village and monastery. We were their prisoners, and it was useless to resist. So I ordered the bearers to take up the tents and baggage. Lady Meadowcroft resigned herself to the inevitable. We mounted the path in a long line, the Lamas in yellow closely guarding our draggled little procession. I tried my best to preserve my composure, and above all else not to look dejected.
As we approached the village, with its squalid and fetid huts, we caught the sound of bells, innumerable bells, tinkling at regular intervals. Many people trooped out from their houses to look at us, all flat-faced, all with oblique eyes, all stolidly, sullenly, stupidly passive. They seemed curious as to our dress and appearance, but not apparently hostile. We walked on to the low line of the monastery with its pyramidal roof and its queer, flower-vase minarets. After a moment's discussion they ushered us into the temple or chapel, which was evidently also their communal council-room and place of deliberation. We entered, trembling. We had no great certainty that we would ever get out of it alive again.
The temple was a large, oblong hall, with a great figure of Buddha, cross-legged, imperturbable, enthroned in a niche at its further end, like the apse or recess in a church in Italy. Before it stood an altar. The Buddha sat and smiled on us with his eternal smile. A complacent deity, carved out of white stone, and gaudily painted; a yellow robe, like the Lamas', dangled across his shoulders. The air seemed close with incense and also with bad ventilation. The centre of the nave, if I may so call it, was occupied by a huge wooden cylinder, a sort of overgrown drum, painted in bright colours, with ornamental designs and Tibetan letters. It was much taller than a man, some nine feet high, I should say, and it revolved above and below on an iron spindle. Looking closer, I saw it had a crank attached to it, with a string tied to the crank. A solitary monk, absorbed in his devotions, was pulling this string as we entered, and making the cylinder revolve with a jerk as he pulled it. At each revolution, a bell above rang once. The monk seemed as if his whole soul was bound up in the huge revolving drum and the bell worked by it.
We took this all in at a glance, somewhat vaguely at first, for our lives were at stake, and we were scarcely in a mood for ethnological observations. But the moment Hilda saw the cylinder her eye lighted up. I could see at once an idea had struck her. “This is a praying-wheel!” she cried, in quite a delighted voice. “I know where I am now, Hubert--Lady Meadowcroft--I see a way out of this! Do exactly as you see me do, and all may yet go well. Don't show surprise at anything. I think we can work upon these people's religious feelings.”
Without a moment's hesitation she prostrated herself thrice on the ground before the figure of Buddha, knocking her head ostentatiously in the dust as she did so. We followed suit instantly. Then Hilda rose and began walking slowly round the big drum in the nave, saying aloud at each step, in a sort of monotonous chant, like a priest intoning, the four mystic words, “Aum, mani, padme, hum,” “Aum, mani, padme, hum,” many times over. We repeated the sacred formula after her, as if we had always been brought up to it. I noticed that Hilda walked the way of the sun. It is an important point in all these mysterious, half-magical ceremonies.
At last, after about ten or twelve such rounds, she paused, with an absorbed air of devotion, and knocked her head three times on the ground once more, doing poojah, before the ever-smiling Buddha.
By this time, however, the lessons of St. Alphege's rectory began to recur to Lady Meadowcroft's mind. “Oh, Miss Wade,” she murmured in an awestruck voice, “OUGHT we to do like this? Isn't it clear idolatry?”
Hilda's common sense waved her aside at once. “Idolatry or not, it is the only way to save our lives,” she answered, in her firmest voice.
“But--OUGHT we to save our lives? Oughtn't we to be... well, Christian martyrs?”
Hilda was patience itself. “I think not, dear,” she replied, gently but decisively. “You are not called upon to be a martyr. The danger of idolatry is scarcely so great among Europeans of our time that we need feel it a duty to protest with our lives against it. I have better uses to which to put my life myself. I don't mind being a martyr--where a sufficient cause demands it. But I don't think such a sacrifice is required of us now in a Tibetan monastery. Life was not given us to waste on gratuitous martyrdoms.”
“But... really... I'm afraid...” “Don't be afraid of anything, dear, or you will risk all. Follow my lead; _I_ will answer for your conduct. Surely, if Naaman, in the midst of idolaters, was permitted to bow down in the house of Rimmon, to save his place at court, you may blamelessly bow down to save your life in a Buddhist temple. Now, no more casuistry, but do as I tell you! 'Aum, mani, padme, hum,' again! Once more round the drum there!”
We followed her a second time, Lady Meadowcroft giving in after a feeble protest. The priests in yellow looked on, profoundly impressed by our circumnavigation. It was clear they began to reconsider the question of our nefarious designs on their holy city.
After we had finished our second tour round the drum, with the utmost solemnity, one of the monks approached Hilda, whom he seemed to take now for an important priestess. He said something to her in Tibetan, which, of course, we did not understand; but, as he pointed at the same time to the brother on the floor who was turning the wheel, Hilda nodded acquiescence. “If you wish it,” she said in English--and he appeared to comprehend. “He wants to know whether I would like to take a turn at the cylinder.”
She knelt down in front of it, before the little stool where the brother in yellow had been kneeling till that moment, and took the string in her hand, as if she were well accustomed to it. I could see that the abbot gave the cylinder a surreptitious push with his left hand, before she began, so as to make it revolve in the opposite direction from that in which the monk had just been moving it. This was obviously to try her. But Hilda let the string drop, with a little cry of horror. That was the wrong way round--the unlucky, uncanonical direction; the evil way, widdershins, the opposite of sunwise. With an awed air she stopped short, repeated once more the four mystic words, or mantra, and bowed thrice with well-assumed reverence to the Buddha. Then she set the cylinder turning of her own accord, with her right hand, in the propitious direction, and sent it round seven times with the utmost gravity.
At this point, encouraged by Hilda's example, I too became possessed of a brilliant inspiration. I opened my purse and took out of it four brand-new silver rupees of the Indian coinage. They were very handsome and shiny coins, each impressed with an excellent design of the head of the Queen as Empress of India. Holding them up before me, I approached the Buddha, and laid the four in a row submissively at his feet, uttering at the same time an appropriate formula. But as I did not know the proper mantra for use upon such an occasion, I supplied one from memory, saying, in a hushed voice, “Hokey--pokey--winky--wum,” as I laid each one before the benignly-smiling statue. I have no doubt from their faces the priests imagined I was uttering a most powerful spell or prayer in my own language.
As soon as I retreated, with my face towards the image, the chief Lama glided up and examined the coins carefully. It was clear he had never seen anything of the sort before, for he gazed at them for some minutes, and then showed them round to his monks with an air of deep reverence. I do not doubt he took the image of her gracious Majesty for a very mighty and potent goddess. As soon as all had inspected them, with many cries of admiration, he opened a little secret drawer or relic-holder in the pedestal of the statue, and deposited them in it with a muttered prayer, as precious offerings from a European Buddhist.
By this time, we could easily see we were beginning to produce a most favourable impression. Hilda's study of Buddhism had stood us in good stead. The chief Lama or abbot motioned to us to be seated, in a much politer mood; after which he and his principal monks held a long and animated conversation together. I gathered from their looks and gestures that the head Lama inclined to regard us as orthodox Buddhists, but that some of his followers had grave doubts of their own as to the depth and reality of our religious convictions.
While they debated and hesitated, Hilda had another splendid idea. She undid her portfolio, and took out of it the photographs of ancient Buddhist topes and temples which she had taken in India. These she produced triumphantly. At once the priests and monks crowded round us to look at them. In a moment, when they recognised the meaning of the pictures, their excitement grew quite intense. The photographs were passed round from hand to hand, amid loud exclamations of joy and surprise. One brother would point out with astonishment to another some familiar symbol or some ancient text; two or three of them, in their devout enthusiasm, fell down on their knees and kissed the pictures.
We had played a trump card! The monks could see for themselves by this time that we were deeply interested in Buddhism. Now, minds of that calibre never understand a disinterested interest; the moment they saw we were collectors of Buddhist pictures, they jumped at once to the conclusion that we must also, of course, be devout believers. So far did they carry their sense of fraternity, indeed, that they insisted upon embracing us. That was a hard trial to Lady Meadowcroft, for the brethren were not conspicuous for personal cleanliness. She suspected germs, and she dreaded typhoid far more than she dreaded the Tibetan cutthroat.
The brethren asked, through the medium of our interpreter, the cook, where these pictures had been made. We explained as well as we could by means of the same mouthpiece, a very earthen vessel, that they came from ancient Buddhist buildings in India. This delighted them still more, though I know not in what form our Ghoorka retainer may have conveyed the information. At any rate, they insisted on embracing us again; after which the chief Lama said something very solemnly to our amateur interpreter.
The cook interpreted. “Priest-sahib say, he too got very sacred thing, come from India. Sacred Buddhist poojah-thing. Go to show it to you.”
We waited, breathless. The chief Lama approached the altar before the recess, in front of the great cross-legged, vapidly smiling Buddha. He bowed himself to the ground three times over, as well as his portly frame would permit him, knocking his forehead against the floor, just as Hilda had done; then he proceeded, almost awestruck, to take from the altar an object wrapped round with gold brocade, and very carefully guarded. Two acolytes accompanied him. In the most reverent way, he slowly unwound the folds of gold cloth, and released from its hiding-place the highly sacred deposit. He held it up before our eyes with an air of triumph. It was an English bottle!
The label on it shone with gold and bright colours. I could see it was figured. The figure represented a cat, squatting on its haunches. The sacred inscription ran, in our own tongue, “Old Tom Gin, Unsweetened.”
The monks bowed their heads in profound silence as the sacred thing was produced. I caught Hilda's eye. “For Heaven's sake,” I murmured low, “don't either of you laugh! If you do, it's all up with us.”
They kept their countenances with admirable decorum.
Another idea struck me. “Tell them,” I said to the cook, “that we, too, have a similar and very powerful god, but much more lively.” He interpreted my words to them.
Then I opened our stores, and drew out with a flourish--our last remaining bottle of Simla soda-water.
Very solemnly and seriously I unwired the cork, as if performing an almost sacrosanct ceremony. The monks crowded round, with the deepest curiosity. I held the cork down for a second with my thumb, while I uttered once more, in my most awesome tone, the mystic words: “Hokey--pokey--winky--wum!” then I let it fly suddenly. The soda-water was well up. The cork bounded to the ceiling; the contents of the bottle spurted out over the place in the most impressive fashion.
For a minute the Lamas drew back alarmed. The thing seemed almost devilish. Then slowly, reassured by our composure, they crept back and looked. With a glance of inquiry at the abbot, I took out my pocket corkscrew, and drew the cork of the gin-bottle, which had never been opened. I signed for a cup. They brought me one, reverently. I poured out a little gin, to which I added some soda-water, and drank first of it myself, to show them it was not poison. After that, I handed it to the chief Lama, who sipped at it, sipped again, and emptied the cup at the third trial. Evidently the sacred drink was very much to his taste, for he smacked his lips after it, and turned with exclamations of surprised delight to his inquisitive companions.
The rest of the soda-water, duly mixed with gin, soon went the round of the expectant monks. It was greatly approved of. Unhappily, there was not quite enough soda water to supply a drink for all of them; but those who tasted it were deeply impressed. I could see that they took the bite of carbonic-acid gas for evidence of a most powerful and present deity.
That settled our position. We were instantly regarded, not only as Buddhists, but as mighty magicians from a far country. The monks made haste to show us rooms destined for our use in the monastery. They were not unbearably filthy, and we had our own bedding. We had to spend the night there, that was certain. We had, at least, escaped the worst and most pressing danger. I may add that I believe our cook to have been a most arrant liar--which was a lucky circumstance. Once the wretched creature saw the tide turn, I have reason to infer that he supported our cause by telling the chief Lama the most incredible stories about our holiness and power. At any rate, it is certain that we were regarded with the utmost respect, and treated thenceforth with the affectionate deference due to acknowledged and certified sainthood.
It began to strike us now, however, that we had almost overshot the mark in this matter of sanctity. We had made ourselves quite too holy. The monks, who were eager at first to cut our throats, thought so much of us now that we grew a little anxious as to whether they would not wish to keep such devout souls in their midst for ever. As a matter of fact, we spent a whole week against our wills in the monastery, being very well fed and treated meanwhile, yet virtually captives. It was the camera that did it. The Lamas had never seen any photographs before. They asked how these miraculous pictures were produced; and Hilda, to keep up the good impression, showed them how she operated. When a full-length portrait of the chief Lama, in his sacrificial robes, was actually printed off and exhibited before their eyes, their delight knew no bounds. The picture was handed about among the astonished brethren, and received with loud shouts of joy and wonder. Nothing would satisfy them then but that we must photograph every individual monk in the place. Even the Buddha himself, cross-legged and imperturbable, had to sit for his portrait. As he was used to sitting--never, indeed, having done anything else--he came out admirably.
Day after day passed; suns rose and suns set; and it was clear that the monks did not mean to let us leave their precincts in a hurry. Lady Meadowcroft, having recovered by this time from her first fright, began to grow bored. The Buddhists' ritual ceased to interest her. To vary the monotony, I hit upon an expedient for killing time till our too pressing hosts saw fit to let us depart. They were fond of religious processions of the most protracted sort--dances before the altar, with animal masks or heads, and other weird ceremonial orgies. Hilda, who had read herself up in Buddhist ideas, assured me that all these things were done in order to heap up Karma.
“What is Karma?” I asked, listlessly.
“Karma is good works, or merit. The more praying-wheels you turn, the more bells you ring, the greater the merit. One of the monks is always at work turning the big wheel that moves the bell, so as to heap up merit night and day for the monastery.”
This set me thinking. I soon discovered that, no matter how the wheel is turned, the Karma or merit is equal. It is the turning it that counts, not the personal exertion. There were wheels and bells in convenient situations all over the village, and whoever passed one gave it a twist as he went by, thus piling up Karma for all the inhabitants. Reflecting upon these facts, I was seized with an idea. I got Hilda to take instantaneous photographs of all the monks during a sacred procession, at rapid intervals. In that sunny climate we had no difficulty at all in printing off from the plates as soon as developed. Then I took a small wheel, about the size of an oyster-barrel--the monks had dozens of them--and pasted the photographs inside in successive order, like what is called a zoetrope, or wheel of life. By cutting holes in the side, and arranging a mirror from Lady Meadowcroft's dressing-bag, I completed my machine, so that, when it was turned round rapidly, one saw the procession actually taking place as if the figures were moving. The thing, in short, made a living picture like a cinematograph. A mountain stream ran past the monastery, and supplied it with water. I had a second inspiration. I was always mechanical. I fixed a water-wheel in the stream, where it made a petty cataract, and connected it by means of a small crank with the barrel of photographs. My zoetrope thus worked off itself, and piled up Karma for all the village whether anyone happened to be looking at it or not.
The monks, who were really excellent fellows when not engaged in cutting throats in the interest of the faith, regarded this device as a great and glorious religious invention. They went down on their knees to it, and were profoundly respectful. They also bowed to me so deeply, when I first exhibited it, that I began to be puffed up with spiritual pride. Lady Meadowcroft recalled me to my better self by murmuring, with a sigh: “I suppose we really can't draw a line now; but it DOES seem to me like encouraging idolatry!”
“Purely mechanical encouragement,” I answered, gazing at my handicraft with an inventor's pardonable pride. “You see, it is the turning itself that does good, not any prayers attached to it. I divert the idolatry from human worshippers to an unconscious stream--which must surely be meritorious.” Then I thought of the mystic sentence, “Aum, mani, padme, hum.” “What a pity it is,” I cried, “I couldn't make them a phonograph to repeat their mantra! If I could, they might fulfil all their religious duties together by machinery!”
Hilda reflected a second. “There is a great future,” she said at last, “for the man who first introduces smoke-jacks into Tibet! Every household will buy one, as an automatic means of acquiring Karma.”
“Don't publish that idea in England!” I exclaimed, hastily--“if ever we get there. As sure as you do, somebody will see in it an opening for British trade; and we shall spend twenty millions on conquering Tibet, in the interests of civilisation and a smoke-jack syndicate.”
How long we might have stopped at the monastery I cannot say, had it not been for the intervention of an unexpected episode which occurred just a week after our first arrival. We were comfortable enough in a rough way, with our Ghoorka cook to prepare our food for us, and our bearers to wait; but to the end I never felt quite sure of our hosts, who, after all, were entertaining us under false pretences. We had told them, truly enough, that Buddhist missionaries had now penetrated to England; and though they had not the slightest conception where England might be, and knew not the name of Madame Blavatsky, this news interested them. Regarding us as promising neophytes, they were anxious now that we should go on to Lhasa, in order to receive full instruction in the faith from the chief fountainhead, the Grand Lama in person. To this we demurred. Mr. Landor's experiences did not encourage us to follow his lead. The monks, for their part, could not understand our reluctance. They thought that every well-intentioned convert must wish to make the pilgrimage to Lhasa, the Mecca of their creed. Our hesitation threw some doubt on the reality of our conversion. A proselyte, above all men, should never be lukewarm. They expected us to embrace the opportunity with fervour. We might be massacred on the way, to be sure; but what did that matter? We should be dying for the faith, and ought to be charmed at so splendid a prospect.
On the day-week after our arrival time chief Lama came to me at nightfall. His face was serious. He spoke to me through our accredited interpreter, the cook. “Priest-sahib say, very important; the sahib and mem-sahibs must go away from here before sun get up to-morrow morning.”
“Why so?” I asked, as astonished as I was pleased.
“Priest-sahib say, he like you very much; oh, very, very much; no want to see village people kill you.”
“Kill us! But I thought they believed we were saints!”
“Priest say, that just it; too much saint altogether. People hereabout all telling that the sahib and the mem-sahibs very great saints; much holy, like Buddha. Make picture; work miracles. People think, if them kill you, and have your tomb here, very holy place; very great Karma; very good for trade; plenty Tibetan man hear you holy men, come here on pilgrimage. Pilgrimage make fair, make market, very good for village. So people want to kill you, build shrine over your body.”
This was a view of the advantages of sanctity which had never before struck me. Now, I had not been eager even for the distinction of being a Christian martyr; as to being a Buddhist martyr, that was quite out of the question. “Then what does the Lama advise us to do?” I asked.
“Priest-sahib say he love you; no want to see village people kill you. He give you guide--very good guide--know mountains well; take you back straight to Maharajah's country.”
“Not Ram Das?” I asked, suspiciously.
“No, not Ram Das. Very good man--Tibetan.”
I saw at once this was a genuine crisis. All was hastily arranged. I went in and told Hilda and Lady Meadowcroft. Our spoilt child cried a little, of course, at the idea of being enshrined; but on the whole behaved admirably. At early dawn next morning, before the village was awake, we crept with stealthy steps out of the monastery, whose inmates were friendly. Our new guide accompanied us. We avoided the village, on whose outskirts the lamasery lay, and made straight for the valley. By six o'clock, we were well out of sight of the clustered houses and the pyramidal spires. But I did not breathe freely till late in the afternoon, when we found ourselves once more under British protection in the first hamlet of the Maharajah's territory.
As for that scoundrel, Ram Das, we heard nothing more of him. He disappeared into space from the moment he deserted us at the door of the trap into which he had led us. The chief Lama told me he had gone back at once by another route to his own country.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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11
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THE EPISODE OF THE OFFICER WHO UNDERSTOOD PERFECTLY
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After our fortunate escape from the clutches of our too-admiring Tibetan hosts, we wound our way slowly back through the Maharajah's territory towards Sir Ivor's headquarters. On the third day out from the lamasery we camped in a romantic Himalayan valley--a narrow, green glen, with a brawling stream running in white cataracts and rapids down its midst. We were able to breathe freely now; we could enjoy the great tapering deodars that rose in ranks on the hillsides, the snow-clad needles of ramping rock that bounded the view to north and south, the feathery bamboo-jungle that fringed and half-obscured the mountain torrent, whose cool music--alas, fallaciously cool--was borne to us through the dense screen of waving foliage. Lady Meadowcroft was so delighted at having got clear away from those murderous and saintly Tibetans that for a while she almost forgot to grumble. She even condescended to admire the deep-cleft ravine in which we bivouacked for the night, and to admit that the orchids which hung from the tall trees were as fine as any at her florist's in Piccadilly. “Though how they can have got them out here already, in this outlandish place--the most fashionable kinds--when we in England have to grow them with such care in expensive hot-houses,” she said, “really passes my comprehension.”
She seemed to think that orchids originated in Covent Garden.
Early next morning I was engaged with one of my native men in lighting the fire to boil our kettle--for in spite of all misfortunes we still made tea with creditable punctuality--when a tall and good-looking Nepaulese approached us from the hills, with cat-like tread, and stood before me in an attitude of profound supplication. He was a well-dressed young man, like a superior native servant; his face was broad and flat, but kindly and good-humoured. He salaamed many times, but still said nothing.
“Ask him what he wants,” I cried, turning to our fair-weather friend, the cook.
The deferential Nepaulese did not wait to be asked. “Salaam, sahib,” he said, bowing again very low till his forehead almost touched the ground. “You are Eulopean doctor, sahib?”
“I am,” I answered, taken aback at being thus recognised in the forests of Nepaul. “But how in wonder did you come to know it?”
“You camp near here when you pass dis way before, and you doctor little native girl, who got sore eyes. All de country here tell you is very great physician. So I come and to see if you will turn aside to my village to help us.”
“Where did you learn English?” I exclaimed, more and more astonished.
“I is servant one time at British Lesident's at de Maharajah's city. Pick up English dere. Also pick up plenty lupee. Velly good business at British Lesident's. Now gone back home to my own village, letired gentleman.” And he drew himself up with conscious dignity.
I surveyed the retired gentleman from head to foot. He had an air of distinction, which not even his bare toes could altogether mar. He was evidently a person of local importance. “And what did you want me to visit your village for?” I inquired, dubiously.
“White traveller sahib ill dere, sir. Vely ill; got plague. Great first-class sahib, all same like Governor. Ill, fit to die; send me out all times to try find Eulopean doctor.”
“Plague?” I repeated, startled. He nodded.
“Yes, plague; all same like dem hab him so bad down Bombay way.”
“Do you know his name?” I asked; for though one does not like to desert a fellow-creature in distress, I did not care to turn aside from my road on such an errand, with Hilda and Lady Meadowcroft, unless for some amply sufficient reason.
The retired gentleman shook his head in the most emphatic fashion. “How me know?” he answered, opening the palms of his hands as if to show he had nothing concealed in them. “Forget Eulopean name all times so easily. And traveller sahib name very hard to lemember. Not got English name. Him Eulopean foleigner.”
“A European foreigner!” I repeated. “And you say he is seriously ill? Plague is no trifle. Well, wait a minute; I'll see what the ladies say about it. How far off is your village?”
He pointed with his hand, somewhat vaguely, to the hillside. “Two hours' walk,” he answered, with the mountaineer's habit of reckoning distance by time, which extends, under the like circumstances, the whole world over.
I went back to the tents, and consulted Hilda and Lady Meadowcroft. Our spoilt child pouted, and was utterly averse to any detour of any sort. “Let's get back straight to Ivor,” she said, petulantly. “I've had enough of camping out. It's all very well in its way for a week but when they begin to talk about cutting your throat and all that, it ceases to be a joke and becomes a wee bit uncomfortable. I want my feather bed. I object to their villages.”
“But consider, dear,” Hilda said, gently. “This traveller is ill, all alone in a strange land. How can Hubert desert him? It is a doctor's duty to do what he can to alleviate pain and to cure the sick. What would we have thought ourselves, when we were at the lamasery, if a body of European travellers had known we were there, imprisoned and in danger of our lives, and had passed by on the other side without attempting to rescue us?”
Lady Meadowcroft knit her forehead. “That was us,” she said, with an impatient nod, after a pause--“and this is another person. You can't turn aside for everybody who's ill in all Nepaul. And plague, too! --so horrid! Besides, how do we know this isn't another plan of these hateful people to lead us into danger?”
“Lady Meadowcroft is quite right,” I said, hastily. “I never thought about that. There may be no plague, no patient at all. I will go up with this man alone, Hilda, and find out the truth. It will only take me five hours at most. By noon I shall be back with you.”
“What? And leave us here unprotected among the wild beasts and the savages?” Lady Meadowcroft cried, horrified. “In the midst of the forest! Dr. Cumberledge, how can you?”
“You are NOT unprotected,” I answered, soothing her. “You have Hilda with you. She is worth ten men. And besides, our Nepaulese are fairly trustworthy.”
Hilda bore me out in my resolve. She was too much of a nurse, and had imbibed too much of the true medical sentiment, to let me desert a man in peril of his life in a tropical jungle. So, in spite of Lady Meadowcroft, I was soon winding my way up a steep mountain track, overgrown with creeping Indian weeds, on my road to the still problematical village graced by the residence of the retired gentleman.
After two hours' hard climbing we reached it at last. The retired gentleman led the way to a house in a street of the little wooden hamlet. The door was low; I had to stoop to enter it. I saw in a moment this was indeed no trick. On a native bed, in a corner of the one room, a man lay desperately ill; a European, with white hair and with a skin well bronzed by exposure to the tropics. Ominous dark spots beneath the epidermis showed the nature of the disease. He tossed restlessly as he lay, but did not raise his fevered head or look at my conductor. “Well, any news of Ram Das?” he asked at last, in a parched and feeble voice. Parched and feeble as it was, I recognised it instantly. The man on the bed was Sebastian--no other!
“No news of Lam Das,” the retired gentleman replied, with an unexpected display of womanly tenderness. “Lam Das clean gone; not come any more. But I bling you back Eulopean doctor, sahib.”
Sebastian did not look up from his bed even then. I could see he was more anxious about a message from his scout than about his own condition. “The rascal!” he moaned, with his eyes closed tight. “The rascal! he has betrayed me.” And he tossed uneasily.
I looked at him and said nothing. Then I seated myself on a low stool by the bedside and took his hand in mine to feel his pulse. The wrist was thin and wasted. The face, too, I noticed, had fallen away greatly. It was clear that the malignant fever which accompanies the disease had wreaked its worst on him. So weak and ill was he, indeed, that he let me hold his hand, with my fingers on his pulse, for half a minute or more without ever opening his eyes or displaying the slightest curiosity at my presence. One might have thought that European doctors abounded in Nepaul, and that I had been attending him for a week, with “the mixture as before” at every visit.
“Your pulse is weak and very rapid,” I said slowly, in a professional tone. “You seem to me to have fallen into a perilous condition.”
At the sound of my voice, he gave a sudden start. Yet even so, for a second, he did not open his eyes. The revelation of my presence seemed to come upon him as in a dream. “Like Cumberledge's,” he muttered to himself, gasping. “Exactly like Cumberledge's.... But Cumberledge is dead... I must be delirious.... If I didn't KNOW to the contrary, I could have sworn it was Cumberledge's!”
I spoke again, bending over him. “How long have the glandular swellings been present, Professor?” I asked, with quiet deliberativeness.
This time he opened his eyes sharply, and looked up in my face. He swallowed a great gulp of surprise. His breath came and went. He raised himself on his elbows and stared at me with a fixed stare. “Cumberledge!” he cried; “Cumberledge! Come back to life, then! They told me you were dead! And here you are, Cumberledge!”
“WHO told you I was dead?” I asked, sternly.
He stared at me, still in a dazed way. He was more than half comatose. “Your guide, Ram Das,” he answered at last, half incoherently. “He came back by himself. Came back without you. He swore to me he had seen all your throats cut in Tibet. He alone had escaped. The Buddhists had massacred you.”
“He told you a lie,” I said, shortly.
“I thought so. I thought so. And I sent him back for confirmatory evidence. But the rogue has never brought it.” He let his head drop on his rude pillow heavily. “Never, never brought it!”
I gazed at him, full of horror. The man was too ill to hear me, too ill to reason, too ill to recognise the meaning of his own words, almost. Otherwise, perhaps, he would hardly have expressed himself quite so frankly. Though to be sure he had said nothing to criminate himself in any way; his action might have been due to anxiety for our safety.
I fixed my glance on him long and dubiously. What ought I to do next? As for Sebastian, he lay with his eyes closed, half oblivious of my presence. The fever had gripped him hard. He shivered, and looked helpless as a child. In such circumstances, the instincts of my profession rose imperative within me. I could not nurse a case properly in this wretched hut. The one thing to be done was to carry the patient down to our camp in the valley. There, at least, we had air and pure running water.
I asked a few questions from the retired gentleman as to the possibility of obtaining sufficient bearers in the village. As I supposed, any number were forthcoming immediately. Your Nepaulese is by nature a beast of burden; he can carry anything up and down the mountains, and spends his life in the act of carrying.
I pulled out my pencil, tore a leaf from my note-book, and scribbled a hasty note to Hilda: “The invalid is--whom do you think? --Sebastian! He is dangerously ill with some malignant fever. I am bringing him down into camp to nurse. Get everything ready for him.” Then I handed it over to a messenger, found for me by the retired gentleman, to carry to Hilda. My host himself I could not spare, as he was my only interpreter.
In a couple of hours we had improvised a rough, woven-grass hammock as an ambulance couch, had engaged our bearers, and had got Sebastian under way for the camp by the river.
When I arrived at our tents, I found Hilda had prepared everything for our patient with her usual cleverness. Not only had she got a bed ready for Sebastian, who was now almost insensible, but she had even cooked some arrowroot from our stores beforehand, so that he might have a little food, with a dash of brandy in it, to recover him after the fatigue of the journey down the mountain. By the time we had laid him out on a mattress in a cool tent, with the fresh air blowing about him, and had made him eat the meal prepared for him, he really began to look comparatively comfortable.
Lady Meadowcroft was now our chief trouble. We did not dare to tell her it was really plague; but she had got near enough back to civilisation to have recovered her faculty for profuse grumbling; and the idea of the delay that Sebastian would cause us drove her wild with annoyance. “Only two days off from Ivor,” she cried, “and that comfortable bungalow! And now to think we must stop here in the woods a week or ten days for this horrid old Professor! Why can't he get worse at once and die like a gentleman? But, there! with YOU to nurse him, Hilda, he'll never get worse. He couldn't die if he tried. He'll linger on and on for weeks and weeks through a beastly convalescence!”
“Hubert,” Hilda said to me, when we were alone once more; “we mustn't keep her here. She will be a hindrance, not a help. One way or another we must manage to get rid of her.”
“How can we?” I asked. “We can't turn her loose upon the mountain roads with a Nepaulese escort. She isn't fit for it. She would be frantic with terror.”
“I've thought of that, and I see only one thing possible. I must go on with her myself as fast as we can push to Sir Ivor's place, and then return to help you nurse the Professor.”
I saw she was right. It was the sole plan open to us. And I had no fear of letting Hilda go off alone with Lady Meadowcroft and the bearers. She was a host in herself, and could manage a party of native servants at least as well as I could.
So Hilda went, and came back again. Meanwhile, I took charge of the nursing of Sebastian. Fortunately, I had brought with me a good stock of jungle-medicines in my little travelling-case, including plenty of quinine; and under my careful treatment the Professor passed the crisis and began to mend slowly. The first question he asked me when he felt himself able to talk once more was, “Nurse Wade--what has become of her?” --for he had not yet seen her. I feared the shock for him.
“She is here with me,” I answered, in a very measured voice. “She is waiting to be allowed to come and help me in taking care of you.”
He shuddered and turned away. His face buried itself in the pillow. I could see some twinge of remorse had seized upon him. At last he spoke. “Cumberledge,” he said, in a very low and almost frightened tone, “don't let her come near me! I can't bear it. I can't bear it.”
Ill as he was, I did not mean to let him think I was ignorant of his motive. “You can't bear a woman whose life you have attempted,” I said, in my coldest and most deliberate way, “to have a hand in nursing you! You can't bear to let her heap coals of fire on your head! In that you are right. But, remember, you have attempted MY life too; you have twice done your best to get me murdered.”
He did not pretend to deny it. He was too weak for subterfuges. He only writhed as he lay. “You are a man,” he said, shortly, “and she is a woman. That is all the difference.” Then he paused for a minute or two. “Don't let her come near me,” he moaned once more, in a piteous voice. “Don't let her come near me!”
“I will not,” I answered. “She shall not come near you. I spare you that. But you will have to eat the food she prepares; and you know SHE will not poison you. You will have to be tended by the servants she chooses; and you know THEY will not murder you. She can heap coals of fire on your head without coming into your tent. Consider that you sought to take her life--and she seeks to save yours! She is as anxious to keep you alive as you are anxious to kill her.”
He lay as in a reverie. His long white hair made his clear-cut, thin face look more unearthly than ever, with the hectic flush of fever upon it. At last he turned to me. “We each work for our own ends,” he said, in a weary way. “We pursue our own objects. It suits ME to get rid of HER: it suits HER to keep ME alive. I am no good to her dead; living, she expects to wring a confession out of me. But she shall not have it. Tenacity of purpose is the one thing I admire in life. She has the tenacity of purpose--and so have I. Cumberledge, don't you see it is a mere duel of endurance between us?”
“And may the just side win,” I answered, solemnly.
It was several days later before he spoke to me of it again. Hilda had brought some food to the door of the tent and passed it in to me for our patient. “How is he now?” she whispered.
Sebastian overheard her voice, and, cowering within himself, still managed to answer: “Better, getting better. I shall soon be well now. You have carried your point. You have cured your enemy.”
“Thank God for that!” Hilda said, and glided away silently.
Sebastian ate his cup of arrowroot in silence; then he looked at me with wistful, musing eyes. “Cumberledge,” he murmured at last; “after all, I can't help admiring that woman. She is the only person who has ever checkmated me. She checkmates me every time. Steadfastness is what I love. Her steadfastness of purpose and her determination move me.”
“I wish they would move you to tell the truth,” I answered.
He mused again. “To tell the truth!” he muttered, moving his head up and down. “I have lived for science. Shall I wreck all now? There are truths which it is better to hide than to proclaim. Uncomfortable truths--truths that never should have been--truths which help to make greater truths incredible. But, all the same, I cannot help admiring that woman. She has Yorke-Bannerman's intellect, with a great deal more than Yorke-Bannerman's force of will. Such firmness! such energy! such resolute patience! She is a wonderful creature. I can't help admiring her!”
I said no more to him just then. I thought it better to let nascent remorse and nascent admiration work out their own natural effects unimpeded. For I could see our enemy was beginning to feel some sting of remorse. Some men are below it. Sebastian thought himself above it. I felt sure he was mistaken.
Yet even in the midst of these personal preoccupations, I saw that our great teacher was still, as ever, the pure man of science. He noted every symptom and every change of the disease with professional accuracy. He observed his own case, whenever his mind was clear enough, as impartially as he would have observed any outside patient's. “This is a rare chance, Cumberledge,” he whispered to me once, in an interval of delirium. “So few Europeans have ever had the complaint, and probably none who were competent to describe the specific subjective and psychological symptoms. The delusions one gets as one sinks into the coma, for example, are of quite a peculiar type--delusions of wealth and of absolute power, most exhilarating and magnificent. I think myself a millionaire or a Prime Minister. Be sure you make a note of that--in case I die. If I recover, of course I can write an exhaustive monograph on the whole history of the disease in the British Medical Journal. But if I die, the task of chronicling these interesting observations will devolve upon you. A most exceptional chance! You are much to be congratulated.”
“You MUST not die, Professor,” I cried, thinking more, I will confess, of Hilda Wade than of himself. “You must live... to report this case for science.” I used what I thought the strongest lever I knew for him.
He closed his eyes dreamily. “For science! Yes, for science! There you strike the right chord! What have I not dared and done for science? But, in case I die, Cumberledge, be sure you collect the notes I took as I was sickening--they are most important for the history and etiology of the disease. I made them hourly. And don't forget the main points to be observed as I am dying. You know what they are. This is a rare, rare chance! I congratulate you on being the man who has the first opportunity ever afforded us of questioning an intelligent European case, a case where the patient is fully capable of describing with accuracy his symptoms and his sensations in medical phraseology.”
He did not die, however. In about another week he was well enough to move. We carried him down to Mozufferpoor, the first large town in the plains thereabouts, and handed him over for the stage of convalescence to the care of the able and efficient station doctor, to whom my thanks are due for much courteous assistance.
“And now, what do you mean to do?” I asked Hilda, when our patient was placed in other hands, and all was over.
She answered me without one second's hesitation: “Go straight to Bombay, and wait there till Sebastian takes passage for England.”
“He will go home, you think, as soon as he is well enough?”
“Undoubtedly. He has now nothing more to stop in India for.”
“Why not as much as ever?”
She looked at me curiously. “It is so hard to explain,” she replied, after a moment's pause, during which she had been drumming her little forefinger on the table. “I feel it rather than reason it. But don't you see that a certain change has lately come over Sebastian's attitude? He no longer desires to follow me; he wants to avoid me. That is why I wish more than ever to dog his steps. I feel the beginning of the end has come. I am gaining my point. Sebastian is wavering.”
“Then when he engages a berth, you propose to go by the same steamer?”
“Yes. It makes all the difference. When he tries to follow me, he is dangerous; when he tries to avoid me, it becomes my work in life to follow him. I must keep him in sight every minute now. I must quicken his conscience. I must make him FEEL his own desperate wickedness. He is afraid to face me: that means remorse. The more I compel him to face me, the more the remorse is sure to deepen.”
I saw she was right. We took the train to Bombay. I found rooms at the hospitable club, by a member's invitation, while Hilda went to stop with some friends of Lady Meadowcroft's on the Malabar Hill. We waited for Sebastian to come down from the interior and take his passage. Hilda, with her intuitive certainty, felt sure he would come.
A steamer, two steamers, three steamers, sailed, and still no Sebastian. I began to think he must have made up his mind to go back some other way. But Hilda was confident, so I waited patiently. At last one morning I dropped in, as I had often done before, at the office of one of the chief steamship companies. It was the very morning when a packet was to sail. “Can I see the list of passengers on the Vindhya?” I asked of the clerk, a sandy-haired Englishman, tall, thin, and sallow.
The clerk produced it.
I scanned it in haste. To my surprise and delight, a pencilled entry half-way down the list gave the name, “Professor Sebastian.”
“Oh, Sebastian is going by this steamer?” I murmured, looking up.
The sandy-haired clerk hummed and hesitated. “Well, I believe he's going, sir,” he answered at last; “but it's a bit uncertain. He's a fidgety man, the Professor. He came down here this morning and asked to see the list, the same as you have done. Then he engaged a berth provisionally--'mind, provisionally,' he said--that's why his name is only put in on the list in pencil. I take it he's waiting to know whether a party of friends he wishes to meet are going also.”
“Or wishes to avoid,” I thought to myself, inwardly; but I did not say so. I asked instead, “Is he coming again?”
“Yes, I think so: at 5.30.”
“And she sails at seven?”
“At seven, punctually. Passengers must be aboard by half-past six at latest.”
“Very good,” I answered, making up my mind promptly. “I only called to know the Professor's movements. Don't mention to him that I came. I may look in again myself an hour or two later.”
“You don't want a passage, sir? You may be the friend he's expecting.”
“No, I don't want a passage--not at present certainly.” Then I ventured on a bold stroke. “Look here,” I said, leaning across towards him, and assuming a confidential tone: “I am a private detective”--which was perfectly true in essence--“and I'm dogging the Professor, who, for all his eminence, is gravely suspected of a great crime. If you will help me, I will make it worth your while. Let us understand one another. I offer you a five-pound note to say nothing of all this to him.”
The sallow clerk's fishy eye glistened. “You can depend upon me,” he answered, with an acquiescent nod. I judged that he did not often get the chance of earning some eighty rupees so easily.
I scribbled a hasty note and sent it round to Hilda: “Pack your boxes at once, and hold yourself in readiness to embark on the Vindhya at six o'clock precisely.” Then I put my own things straight; and waited at the club till a quarter to six. At that time I strolled on unconcernedly into the office. A cab outside held Hilda and our luggage. I had arranged it all meanwhile by letter.
“Professor Sebastian been here again?” I asked.
“Yes, sir; he's been here; and he looked over the list again; and he's taken his passage. But he muttered something about eavesdroppers, and said that if he wasn't satisfied when he got on board, he would return at once and ask for a cabin in exchange by the next steamer.”
“That will do,” I answered, slipping the promised five-pound note into the clerk's open palm, which closed over it convulsively. “Talked about eavesdroppers, did he? Then he knows he's been shadowed. It may console you to learn that you are instrumental in furthering the aims of justice and unmasking a cruel and wicked conspiracy. Now, the next thing is this: I want two berths at once by this very steamer--one for myself--name of Cumberledge; one for a lady--name of Wade; and look sharp about it.”
The sandy-haired man did look sharp; and within three minutes we were driving off with our tickets to Prince's Dock landing-stage.
We slipped on board unobtrusively, and instantly took refuge in our respective staterooms till the steamer was well under way, and fairly out of sight of Kolaba Island. Only after all chance of Sebastian's avoiding us was gone for ever did we venture up on deck, on purpose to confront him.
It was one of those delicious balmy evenings which one gets only at sea and in the warmer latitudes. The sky was alive with myriads of twinkling and palpitating stars, which seemed to come and go, like sparks on a fire-back, as one gazed upward into the vast depths and tried to place them. They played hide-and-seek with one another and with the innumerable meteors which shot recklessly every now and again across the field of the firmament, leaving momentary furrows of light behind them. Beneath, the sea sparkled almost like the sky, for every turn of the screw churned up the scintillating phosphorescence in the water, so that countless little jets of living fire seemed to flash and die away at the summit of every wavelet. A tall, spare man in a picturesque cloak, and with long, lank, white hair, leant over the taffrail, gazing at the numberless flashing lights of the surface. As he gazed, he talked on in his clear, rapt voice to a stranger by his side. The voice and the ring of enthusiasm were unmistakable. “Oh, no,” he was saying, as we stole up behind him, “that hypothesis, I venture to assert, is no longer tenable by the light of recent researches. Death and decay have nothing to do directly with the phosphorescence of the sea, though they have a little indirectly. The light is due in the main to numerous minute living organisms, most of them bacilli, on which I once made several close observations and crucial experiments. They possess organs which may be regarded as miniature bull's-eye lanterns. And these organs--” “What a lovely evening, Hubert!” Hilda said to me, in an apparently unconcerned voice, as the Professor reached this point in his exposition.
Sebastian's voice quavered and stammered for a moment. He tried just at first to continue and complete his sentence: “And these organs,” he went on, aimlessly, “these bull's-eyes that I spoke about, are so arranged--so arranged--I was speaking on the subject of crustaceans, I think--crustaceans so arranged--” then he broke down utterly and turned sharply round to me. He did not look at Hilda--I think he did not dare; but he faced me with his head down and his long, thin neck protruded, eyeing me from under those overhanging, penthouse brows of his. “You sneak!” he cried, passionately. “You sneak! You have dogged me by false pretences. You have lied to bring this about! You have come aboard under a false name--you and your accomplice!”
I faced him in turn, erect and unflinching. “Professor Sebastian,” I answered, in my coldest and calmest tone, “you say what is not true. If you consult the list of passengers by the Vindhya, now posted near the companion-ladder, you will find the names of Hilda Wade and Hubert Cumberledge duly entered. We took our passage AFTER you inspected the list at the office to see whether our names were there--in order to avoid us. But you cannot avoid us. We do not mean that you shall avoid us. We will dog you now through life--not by lies or subterfuges, as you say, but openly and honestly. It is YOU who need to slink and cower, not we. The prosecutor need not descend to the sordid shifts of the criminal.”
The other passenger had sidled away quietly the moment he saw our conversation was likely to be private; and I spoke in a low voice, though clearly and impressively, because I did not wish for a scene. I was only endeavouring to keep alive the slow, smouldering fire of remorse in the man's bosom. And I saw I had touched him on a spot that hurt. Sebastian drew himself up and answered nothing. For a minute or two he stood erect, with folded arms, gazing moodily before him. Then he said, as if to himself: “I owe the man my life. He nursed me through the plague. If it had not been for that--if he had not tended me so carefully in that valley in Nepaul--I would throw him overboard now--catch him in my arms and throw him overboard! I would--and be hanged for it!”
He walked past us as if he saw us not, silent, erect, moody. Hilda stepped aside and let him pass. He never even looked at her. I knew why; he dared not. Every day now, remorse for the evil part he had played in her life, respect for the woman who had unmasked and outwitted him, made it more and more impossible for Sebastian to face her. During the whole of that voyage, though he dined in the same saloon and paced the same deck, he never spoke to her, he never so much as looked at her. Once or twice their eyes met by accident, and Hilda stared him down; Sebastian's eyelids dropped, and he stole away uneasily. In public, we gave no overt sign of our differences; but it was understood on board that relations were strained: that Professor Sebastian and Dr. Cumberledge had been working at the same hospital in London together; and that owing to some disagreement between them Dr. Cumberledge had resigned--which made it most awkward for them to be travelling together by the same steamer.
We passed through the Suez Canal and down the Mediterranean. All the time, Sebastian never again spoke to us. The passengers, indeed, held aloof from the solitary, gloomy old man, who strode along the quarter-deck with his long, slow stride, absorbed in his own thoughts, and intent only on avoiding Hilda and myself. His mood was unsociable. As for Hilda, her helpful, winning ways made her a favourite with all the women, as her pretty face did with all the men. For the first time in his life, Sebastian seemed to be aware that he was shunned. He retired more and more within himself for company; his keen eye began to lose in some degree its extraordinary fire, his expression to forget its magnetic attractiveness. Indeed, it was only young men of scientific tastes that Sebastian could ever attract. Among them, his eager zeal, his single-minded devotion to the cause of science, awoke always a responsive chord which vibrated powerfully.
Day after day passed, and we steamed through the Straits and neared the Channel. Our thoughts began to assume a home complexion. Everybody was full of schemes as to what he would do when he reached England. Old Bradshaws were overhauled and trains looked out, on the supposition that we would get in by such an hour on Tuesday. We were steaming along the French coast, off the western promontory of Brittany. The evening was fine, and though, of course, less warm than we had experienced of late, yet pleasant and summer-like. We watched the distant cliffs of the Finistere mainland and the numerous little islands that lie off the shore, all basking in the unreal glow of a deep red sunset. The first officer was in charge, a very cock-sure and careless young man, handsome and dark-haired; the sort of young man who thought more of creating an impression upon the minds of the lady passengers than of the duties of his position.
“Aren't you going down to your berth?” I asked of Hilda, about half-past ten that night; “the air is so much colder here than you have been feeling it of late, that I'm afraid of your chilling yourself.”
She looked up at me with a smile, and drew her little fluffy, white woollen wrap closer about her shoulders. “Am I so very valuable to you, then?” she asked--for I suppose my glance had been a trifle too tender for a mere acquaintance's. “No, thank you, Hubert; I don't think I'll go down, and, if you're wise, you won't go down either. I distrust this first officer. He's a careless navigator, and to-night his head's too full of that pretty Mrs. Ogilvy. He has been flirting with her desperately ever since we left Bombay, and to-morrow he knows he will lose her for ever. His mind isn't occupied with the navigation at all; what HE is thinking of is how soon his watch will be over, so that he may come down off the bridge on to the quarter-deck to talk to her. Don't you see she's lurking over yonder, looking up at the stars and waiting for him by the compass? Poor child! she has a bad husband, and now she has let herself get too much entangled with this empty young fellow. I shall be glad for her sake to see her safely landed and out of the man's clutches.”
As she spoke, the first officer glanced down towards Mrs. Ogilvy, and held out his chronometer with an encouraging smile which seemed to say, “Only an hour and a half more now! At twelve, I shall be with you!”
“Perhaps you're right, Hilda,” I answered, taking a seat beside her and throwing away my cigar. “This is one of the worst bits on the French coast that we're approaching. We're not far off Ushant. I wish the captain were on the bridge instead of this helter-skelter, self-conceited young fellow. He's too cock-sure. He knows so much about seamanship that he could take a ship through any rocks on his course, blindfold--in his own opinion. I always doubt a man who is so much at home in his subject that he never has to think about it. Most things in this world are done by thinking.”
“We can't see the Ushant light,” Hilda remarked, looking ahead.
“No; there's a little haze about on the horizon, I fancy. See, the stars are fading away. It begins to feel damp. Sea mist in the Channel.”
Hilda sat uneasily in her deck-chair. “That's bad,” she answered; “for the first officer is taking no more heed of Ushant than of his latter end. He has forgotten the existence of the Breton coast. His head is just stuffed with Mrs. Ogilvy's eyelashes. Very pretty, long eyelashes, too; I don't deny it; but they won't help him to get through the narrow channel. They say it's dangerous.”
“Dangerous!” I answered. “Not a bit of it--with reasonable care. Nothing at sea is dangerous--except the inexplicable recklessness of navigators. There's always plenty of sea-room--if they care to take it. Collisions and icebergs, to be sure, are dangers that can't be avoided at times, especially if there's fog about. But I've been enough at sea in my time to know this much at least--that no coast in the world is dangerous except by dint of reckless corner-cutting. Captains of great ships behave exactly like two hansom-drivers in the streets of London; they think they can just shave past without grazing; and they DO shave past nine times out of ten. The tenth time they run on the rocks through sheer recklessness, and lose their vessel; and then, the newspapers always ask the same solemn question--in childish good faith--how did so experienced and able a navigator come to make such a mistake in his reckoning? He made NO mistake; he simply tried to cut it fine, and cut it too fine for once, with the result that he usually loses his own life and his passengers. That's all. We who have been at sea understand that perfectly.”
Just at that moment another passenger strolled up and joined us--a Bengal Civil servant. He drew his chair over by Hilda's, and began discussing Mrs. Ogilvy's eyes and the first officer's flirtations. Hilda hated gossip, and took refuge in generalities. In three minutes the talk had wandered off to Ibsen's influence on the English drama, and we had forgotten the very existence of the Isle of Ushant.
“The English public will never understand Ibsen,” the newcomer said, reflectively, with the omniscient air of the Indian civilian. “He is too purely Scandinavian. He represents that part of the Continental mind which is farthest removed from the English temperament. To him, respectability--our god--is not only no fetish, it is the unspeakable thing, the Moabitish abomination. He will not bow down to the golden image which our British Nebuchadnezzar, King Demos, has made, and which he asks us to worship. And the British Nebuchadnezzar will never get beyond the worship of his Vishnu, respectability, the deity of the pure and blameless ratepayer. So Ibsen must always remain a sealed book to the vast majority of the English people.”
“That is true,” Hilda answered, “as to his direct influence; but don't you think, indirectly, he is leavening England? A man so wholly out of tune with the prevailing note of English life could only affect it, of course, by means of disciples and popularisers--often even popularisers who but dimly and distantly apprehend his meaning. He must be interpreted to the English by English intermediaries, half Philistine themselves, who speak his language ill, and who miss the greater part of his message. Yet only by such half-hints--Why, what was that? I think I saw something!”
Even as she uttered the words, a terrible jar ran fiercely through the ship from stem to stern--a jar that made one clench one's teeth and hold one's jaws tight--the jar of a prow that shattered against a rock. I took it all in at a glance. We had forgotten Ushant, but Ushant had not forgotten us. It had revenged itself upon us by revealing its existence.
In a moment all was turmoil and confusion on deck. I cannot describe the scene that followed. Sailors rushed to and fro, unfastening ropes and lowering boats, with admirable discipline. Women shrieked and cried aloud in helpless terror. The voice of the first officer could be heard above the din, endeavouring to atone by courage and coolness in the actual disaster for his recklessness in causing it. Passengers rushed on deck half clad, and waited for their turn to take places in the boats. It was a time of terror, turmoil, and hubbub. But, in the midst of it all, Hilda turned to me with infinite calm in her voice. “Where is Sebastian?” she asked, in a perfectly collected tone. “Whatever happens, we must not lose sight of him.”
“I am here,” another voice, equally calm, responded beside her. “You are a brave woman. Whether I sink or swim, I admire your courage, your steadfastness of purpose.” It was the only time he had addressed a word to her during the entire voyage.
They put the women and children into the first boats lowered. Mothers and little ones went first; single women and widows after. “Now, Miss Wade,” the first officer said, taking her gently by the shoulders when her turn arrived. “Make haste; don't keep us waiting!”
But Hilda held back. “No, no,” she said, firmly. “I won't go yet. I am waiting for the men's boat. I must not leave Professor Sebastian.”
The first officer shrugged his shoulders. There was no time for protest. “Next, then,” he said, quickly. “Miss Martin--Miss Weatherly!”
Sebastian took her hand and tried to force her in. “You MUST go,” he said, in a low, persuasive tone. “You must not wait for me!”
He hated to see her, I knew. But I imagined in his voice--for I noted it even then--there rang some undertone of genuine desire to save her.
Hilda loosened his grasp resolutely. “No, no,” she answered, “I cannot fly. I shall never leave you.”
“Not even if I promise--” She shook her head and closed her lips hard. “Certainly not,” she said again, after a pause. “I cannot trust you. Besides, I must stop by your side and do my best to save you. Your life is all in all to me. I dare not risk it.”
His gaze was now pure admiration. “As you will,” he answered. “For he that loseth his life shall gain it.”
“If ever we land alive,” Hilda answered, glowing red in spite of the danger, “I shall remind you of that word. I shall call upon you to fulfil it.”
The boat was lowered, and still Hilda stood by my side. One second later, another shock shook us. The Vindhya parted amidships, and we found ourselves struggling and choking in the cold sea water.
It was a miracle that every soul of us was not drowned that moment, as many of us were. The swirling eddy which followed as the Vindhya sank swamped two of the boats, and carried down not a few of those who were standing on the deck with us. The last I saw of the first officer was a writhing form whirled about in the water; before he sank, he shouted aloud, with a seaman's frank courage, “Say it was all my fault; I accept the responsibility. I ran her too close. I am the only one to blame for it.” Then he disappeared in the whirlpool caused by the sinking ship, and we were left still struggling.
One of the life-rafts, hastily rigged by the sailors, floated our way. Hilda struck out a stroke or two and caught it. She dragged herself on to it, and beckoned me to follow. I could see she was holding on to something tightly. I struck out in turn and reached the raft, which was composed of two seats, fastened together in haste at the first note of danger. I hauled myself up by Hilda's side. “Help me to pull him aboard!” she cried, in an agonised voice. “I am afraid he has lost consciousness!” Then I looked at the object she was clutching in her hands. It was Sebastian's white head, apparently quite lifeless.
I pulled him up with her and laid him out on the raft. A very faint breeze from the south-west had sprung up; that and a strong seaward current that sets round the rocks were carrying us straight out from the Breton coast and all chance of rescue, towards the open channel.
But Hilda thought nothing of such physical danger. “We have saved him, Hubert!” she cried, clasping her hands. “We have saved him! But do you think he is alive? For unless he is, MY chance, OUR chance, is gone forever!”
I bent over and felt his pulse. As far as I could make out, it still beat feebly.
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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12
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THE EPISODE OF THE DEAD MAN WHO SPOKE
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I will not trouble you with details of those three terrible days and nights when we drifted helplessly about at the mercy of the currents on our improvised life-raft up and down the English Channel. The first night was the worst. Slowly after that we grew used to the danger, the cold, the hunger, and the thirst. Our senses were numbed; we passed whole hours together in a sort of torpor, just vaguely wondering whether a ship would come in sight to save us, obeying the merciful law that those who are utterly exhausted are incapable of acute fear, and acquiescing in the probability of our own extinction. But however slender the chance--and as the hours stole on it seemed slender enough--Hilda still kept her hopes fixed mainly on Sebastian. No daughter could have watched the father she loved more eagerly and closely than Hilda watched her life-long enemy--the man who had wrought such evil upon her and hers. To save our own lives without him would be useless. At all hazards, she must keep him alive, on the bare chance of a rescue. If he died, there died with him the last hope of justice and redress.
As for Sebastian, after the first half-hour, during which he lay white and unconscious, he opened his eyes faintly, as we could see by the moonlight, and gazed around him with a strange, puzzled state of inquiry. Then his senses returned to him by degrees. “What! you, Cumberledge?” he murmured, measuring me with his eye; “and you, Nurse Wade? Well, I thought you would manage it.” There was a tone almost of amusement in his voice, a half-ironical tone which had been familiar to us in the old hospital days. He raised himself on one arm and gazed at the water all round. Then he was silent for some minutes. At last he spoke again. “Do you know what I ought to do if I were consistent?” he asked, with a tinge of pathos in his words. “Jump off this raft, and deprive you of your last chance of triumph--the triumph which you have worked for so hard. You want to save my life for your own ends, not for mine. Why should I help you to my own undoing?”
Hilda's voice was tenderer and softer than usual as she answered: “No, not for my own ends alone, and not for your undoing, but to give you one last chance of unburdening your conscience. Some men are too small to be capable of remorse; their little souls have no room for such a feeling. You are great enough to feel it and to try to crush it down. But you CANNOT crush it down; it crops up in spite of you. You have tried to bury it in your soul, and you have failed. It is your remorse that has driven you to make so many attempts against the only living souls who knew and understood. If ever we get safely to land once more--and God knows it is not likely--I give you still the chance of repairing the mischief you have done, and of clearing my father's memory from the cruel stain which you and only you can wipe away.”
Sebastian lay long, silent once more, gazing up at her fixedly, with the foggy, white moonlight shining upon his bright, inscrutable eyes. “You are a brave woman, Maisie Yorke-Bannerman,” he said, at last, slowly; “a very brave woman. I will try to live--I too--for a purpose of my own. I say it again: he that loseth his life shall gain it.”
Incredible as it may sound, in half an hour more he was lying fast asleep on that wave-tossed raft, and Hilda and I were watching him tenderly. And it seemed to us as we watched him that a change had come over those stern and impassive features. They had softened and melted until his face was that of a gentler and better type. It was as if some inward change of soul was moulding the fierce old Professor into a nobler and more venerable man.
Day after day we drifted on, without food or water. The agony was terrible; I will not attempt to describe it, for to do so is to bring it back too clearly to my memory. Hilda and I, being younger and stronger, bore up against it well; but Sebastian, old and worn, and still weak from the plague, grew daily weaker. His pulse just beat, and sometimes I could hardly feel it thrill under my finger. He became delirious, and murmured much about Yorke-Bannerman's daughter. Sometimes he forgot all, and spoke to me in the friendly terms of our old acquaintance at Nathaniel's, giving me directions and advice about imaginary operations. Hour after hour we watched for a sail, and no sail appeared. One could hardly believe we could toss about so long in the main highway of traffic without seeing a ship or spying more than the smoke-trail of some passing steamer.
As far as I could judge, during those days and nights, the wind veered from south-west to south-east, and carried us steadily and surely towards the open Atlantic. On the third evening out, about five o'clock, I saw a dark object on the horizon. Was it moving towards us? We strained our eyes in breathless suspense. A minute passed, and then another. Yes, there could be no doubt. It grew larger and larger. It was a ship--a steamer. We made all the signs of distress we could manage. I stood up and waved Hilda's white shawl frantically in the air. There was half an hour of suspense, and our hearts sank as we thought that they were about to pass us. Then the steamer hove to a little and seemed to notice us. Next instant we dropped upon our knees, for we saw they were lowering a boat. They were coming to our aid. They would be in time to save us.
Hilda watched our rescuers with parted lips and agonised eyes. Then she felt Sebastian's pulse. “Thank Heaven,” she cried, “he still lives! They will be here before he is quite past confession.”
Sebastian opened his eyes dreamily. “A boat?” he asked.
“Yes, a boat!”
“Then you have gained your point, child. I am able to collect myself. Give me a few hours' more life, and what I can do to make amends to you shall be done.”
I don't know why, but it seemed longer between the time when the boat was lowered and the moment when it reached us than it had seemed during the three days and nights we lay tossing about helplessly on the open Atlantic. There were times when we could hardly believe it was really moving. At last, however, it reached us, and we saw the kindly faces and outstretched hands of our rescuers. Hilda clung to Sebastian with a wild clasp as the men reached out for her.
“No, take HIM first!” she cried, when the sailors, after the custom of men, tried to help her into the gig before attempting to save us; “his life is worth more to me than my own. Take him--and for God's sake lift him gently, for he is nearly gone!”
They took him aboard and laid him down in the stern. Then, and then only, Hilda stepped into the boat, and I staggered after her. The officer in charge, a kind young Irishman, had had the foresight to bring brandy and a little beef essence. We ate and drank what we dared as they rowed us back to the steamer. Sebastian lay back, with his white eyelashes closed over the lids, and the livid hue of death upon his emaciated cheeks; but he drank a teaspoonful or two of brandy, and swallowed the beef essence with which Hilda fed him.
“Your father is the most exhausted of the party,” the officer said, in a low undertone. “Poor fellow, he is too old for such adventures. He seems to have hardly a spark of life left in him.”
Hilda shuddered with evident horror. “He is not my father--thank Heaven!” she cried, leaning over him and supporting his drooping head, in spite of her own fatigue and the cold that chilled our very bones. “But I think he will live. I mean him to live. He is my best friend now--and my bitterest enemy!”
The officer looked at her in surprise, and then touched his forehead, inquiringly, with a quick glance at me. He evidently thought cold and hunger had affected her reason. I shook my head. “It is a peculiar case,” I whispered. “What the lady says is right. Everything depends for us upon our keeping him alive till we reach England.”
They rowed us to the boat, and we were handed tenderly up the side. There, the ship's surgeon and everybody else on board did their best to restore us after our terrible experience. The ship was the Don, of the Royal Mail Steamship Company's West Indian line; and nothing could exceed the kindness with which we were treated by every soul on board, from the captain to the stewardess and the junior cabin-boy. Sebastian's great name carried weight even here. As soon as it was generally understood on board that we had brought with us the famous physiologist and pathologist, the man whose name was famous throughout Europe, we might have asked for anything that the ship contained without fear of a refusal. But, indeed, Hilda's sweet face was enough in itself to win the interest and sympathy of all who saw it.
By eleven next morning we were off Plymouth Sound; and by midday we had landed at the Mill Bay Docks, and were on our way to a comfortable hotel in the neighbourhood.
Hilda was too good a nurse to bother Sebastian at once about his implied promise. She had him put to bed, and kept him there carefully.
“What do you think of his condition?” she asked me, after the second day was over. I could see by her own grave face that she had already formed her own conclusions.
“He cannot recover,” I answered. “His constitution, shattered by the plague and by his incessant exertions, has received too severe a shock in this shipwreck. He is doomed.”
“So I think. The change is but temporary. He will not last out three days more, I fancy.”
“He has rallied wonderfully to-day,” I said; “but 'tis a passing rally; a flicker--no more. If you wish to do anything, now is the moment. If you delay, you will be too late.”
“I will go in and see him,” Hilda answered. “I have said nothing more to him, but I think he is moved. I think he means to keep his promise. He has shown a strange tenderness to me these last few days. I almost believe he is at last remorseful, and ready to undo the evil which he has done.”
She stole softly into the sick room. I followed her on tip-toe, and stood near the door behind the screen which shut off the draught from the patient. Sebastian stretched his arms out to her. “Ah, Maisie, my child,” he cried, addressing her by the name she had borne in her childhood--both were her own--“don't leave me any more! Stay with me always, Maisie! I can't get on without you.”
“But you hated once to see me!”
“Because I have so wronged you.”
“And now? Will you do nothing to repair the wrong?”
“My child, I can never undo that wrong. It is irreparable, for the past can never be recalled; but I will try my best to minimise it. Call Cumberledge in. I am quite sensible now, quite conscious. You will be my witness, Cumberledge, that my pulse is normal and that my brain is clear. I will confess it all. Maisie, your constancy and your firmness have conquered me. And your devotion to your father. If only I had had a daughter like you, my girl, one whom I could have loved and trusted, I might have been a better man. I might even have done better work for science--though on that side, at least, I have little with which to reproach myself.”
Hilda bent over him. “Hubert and I are here,” she said, slowly, in a strangely calm voice; “but that is not enough. I want a public, an attested, confession. It must be given before witnesses, and signed and sworn to. Somebody might throw doubt upon my word and Hubert's.”
Sebastian shrank back. “Given before witnesses, and signed and sworn to! Maisie, is this humiliation necessary; do you exact it?”
Hilda was inexorable. “You know yourself how you are situated. You have only a day or two to live,” she said, in an impressive voice. “You must do it at once, or never. You have postponed it all your life. Now, at this last moment, you must make up for it. Will you die with an act of injustice unconfessed on your conscience?”
He paused and struggled. “I could--if it were not for you,” he answered.
“Then do it for me,” Hilda cried. “Do it for me! I ask it of you not as a favour, but as a right. I DEMAND it!” She stood, white, stern, inexorable, by his couch, and laid her hand upon his shoulder.
He paused once more. Then he murmured feebly, in a querulous tone, “What witnesses? Whom do you wish to be present?”
Hilda spoke clearly and distinctly. She had thought it all out with herself beforehand. “Such witnesses as will carry absolute conviction to the mind of all the world; irreproachable, disinterested witnesses; official witnesses. In the first place, a commissioner of oaths. Then a Plymouth doctor, to show that you are in a fit state of mind to make a confession. Next, Mr. Horace Mayfield, who defended my father. Lastly, Dr. Blake Crawford, who watched the case on your behalf at the trial.”
“But, Hilda,” I interposed, “we may possibly find that they cannot come away from London just now. They are busy men, and likely to be engaged.”
“They will come if I pay their fees. I do not mind how much this costs me. What is money compared to this one great object of my life?”
“And then--the delay! Suppose that we are too late?”
“He will live some days yet. I can telegraph up at once. I want no hole-and-corner confession, which may afterwards be useless, but an open avowal before the most approved witnesses. If he will make it, well and good; if not, my life-work will have failed. But I had rather it failed than draw back one inch from the course which I have laid down for myself.”
I looked at the worn face of Sebastian. He nodded his head slowly. “She has conquered,” he answered, turning upon the pillow. “Let her have her own way. I hid it for years, for science' sake. That was my motive, Cumberledge, and I am too near death to lie. Science has now nothing more to gain or lose by me. I have served her well, but I am worn out in her service. Maisie may do as she will. I accept her ultimatum.”
We telegraphed up, at once. Fortunately, both men were disengaged, and both keenly interested in the case. By that evening, Horace Mayfield was talking it all over with me in the hotel at Southampton. “Well, Hubert, my boy,” he said, “a woman, we know, can do a great deal”; he smiled his familiar smile, like a genial fat toad; “but if your Yorke-Bannerman succeeds in getting a confession out of Sebastian, she'll extort my admiration.” He paused a moment, then he added, in an afterthought: “I say that she'll extort my admiration; but, mind you, I don't know that I shall feel inclined to believe it. The facts have always appeared to me--strictly between ourselves, you know--to admit of only one explanation.”
“Wait and see,” I answered. “You think it more likely that Miss Wade will have persuaded Sebastian to confess to things that never happened than that he will convince you of Yorke-Bannerman's innocence?”
The great Q.C. fingered his cigarette-holder affectionately.
“You hit it first time,” he answered. “That is precisely my attitude. The evidence against our poor friend was so peculiarly black. It would take a great deal to make me disbelieve it.”
“But surely a confession--” “Ah, well, let me hear the confession, and then I shall be better able to judge.”
Even as he spoke Hilda had entered the room.
“There will be no difficulty about that, Mr. Mayfield. You shall hear it, and I trust that it will make you repent for taking so black a view of the case of your own client.”
“Without prejudice, Miss Bannerman, without prejudice,” said the lawyer, with some confusion. “Our conversation is entirely between ourselves, and to the world I have always upheld that your father was an innocent man.”
But such distinctions are too subtle for a loving woman.
“He WAS an innocent man,” said she, angrily. “It was your business not only to believe it, but to prove it. You have neither believed it nor proved it; but if you will come upstairs with me, I will show you that I have done both.”
Mayfield glanced at me and shrugged his fat shoulders. Hilda had led the way, and we both followed her. In the room of the sick man our other witnesses were waiting: a tall, dark, austere man who was introduced to me as Dr. Blake Crawford, whose name I had heard as having watched the case for Sebastian at the time of the investigation. There were present also a commissioner of oaths, and Dr. Mayby, a small local practitioner, whose attitude towards the great scientist was almost absurdly reverential. The three men were grouped at the foot of the bed, and Mayfield and I joined them. Hilda stood beside the dying man, and rearranged the pillow against which he was propped. Then she held some brandy to his lips. “Now!” said she.
The stimulant brought a shade of colour into his ghastly cheeks, and the old quick, intelligent gleam came back into his deep sunk eyes.
“A remarkable woman, gentlemen,” said he, “a very noteworthy woman. I had prided myself that my willpower was the most powerful in the country--I had never met any to match it--but I do not mind admitting that, for firmness and tenacity, this lady is my equal. She was anxious that I should adopt one course of action. I was determined to adopt another. Your presence here is a proof that she has prevailed.”
He paused for breath, and she gave him another small sip of the brandy.
“I execute her will ungrudgingly and with the conviction that it is the right and proper course for me to take,” he continued. “You will forgive me some of the ill which I have done you, Maisie, when I tell you that I really died this morning--all unknown to Cumberledge and you--and that nothing but my will force has sufficed to keep spirit and body together until I should carry out your will in the manner which you suggested. I shall be glad when I have finished, for the effort is a painful one, and I long for the peace of dissolution. It is now a quarter to seven. I have every hope that I may be able to leave before eight.”
It was strange to hear the perfect coolness with which he discussed his own approaching dissolution. Calm, pale, and impassive, his manner was that of a professor addressing his class. I had seen him speak so to a ring of dressers in the old days at Nathaniel's.
“The circumstances which led up to the death of Admiral Scott Prideaux, and the suspicions which caused the arrest of Doctor Yorke-Bannerman, have never yet been fully explained, although they were by no means so profound that they might not have been unravelled at the time had a man of intellect concentrated his attention upon them. The police, however, were incompetent and the legal advisers of Dr. Bannerman hardly less so, and a woman only has had the wit to see that a gross injustice has been done. The true facts I will now lay before you.”
Mayfield's broad face had reddened with indignation; but now his curiosity drove out every other emotion, and he leaned forward with the rest of us to hear the old man's story.
“In the first place, I must tell you that both Dr. Bannerman and myself were engaged at the time in an investigation upon the nature and properties of the vegetable alkaloids, and especially of aconitine. We hoped for the very greatest results from this drug, and we were both equally enthusiastic in our research. Especially, we had reason to believe that it might have a most successful action in the case of a certain rare but deadly disease, into the nature of which I need not enter. Reasoning by analogy, we were convinced that we had a certain cure for this particular ailment.
“Our investigation, however, was somewhat hampered by the fact that the condition in question is rare out of tropical countries, and that in our hospital wards we had not, at that time, any example of it. So serious was this obstacle, that it seemed that we must leave other men more favourably situated to reap the benefit of our work and enjoy the credit of our discovery, but a curious chance gave us exactly what we were in search of, at the instant when we were about to despair. It was Yorke-Bannerman who came to me in my laboratory one day to tell me that he had in his private practice the very condition of which we were in search.
“'The patient,' said he, 'is my uncle, Admiral Scott Prideaux.'
“'Your uncle!' I cried, in amazement. 'But how came he to develop such a condition?'
“'His last commission in the Navy was spent upon the Malabar Coast, where the disease is endemic. There can be do doubt that it has been latent in his system ever since, and that the irritability of temper and indecision of character, of which his family have so often had to complain, were really among the symptoms of his complaint.'
“I examined the Admiral in consultation with my colleague, and I confirmed his diagnosis. But, to my surprise, Yorke-Bannerman showed the most invincible and reprehensible objection to experiment upon his relative. In vain I assured him that he must place his duty to science high above all other considerations. It was only after great pressure that I could persuade him to add an infinitesimal portion of aconitine to his prescriptions. The drug was a deadly one, he said, and the toxic dose was still to be determined. He could not push it in the case of a relative who trusted himself to his care. I tried to shake him in what I regarded as his absurd squeamishness--but in vain.
“But I had another resource. Bannerman's prescriptions were made up by a fellow named Barclay, who had been dispenser at Nathaniel's and afterwards set up as a chemist in Sackville Street. This man was absolutely in my power. I had discovered him at Nathaniel's in dishonest practices, and I held evidence which would have sent him to gaol. I held this over him now, and I made him, unknown to Bannerman, increase the doses of aconitine in the medicine until they were sufficient for my experimental purposes. I will not enter into figures, but suffice it that Bannerman was giving more than ten times what he imagined.
“You know the sequel. I was called in, and suddenly found that I had Bannerman in my power. There had been a very keen rivalry between us in science. He was the only man in England whose career might impinge upon mine. I had this supreme chance of putting him out of my way. He could not deny that he had been giving his uncle aconitine. I could prove that his uncle had died of aconitine. He could not himself account for the facts--he was absolutely in my power. I did not wish him to be condemned, Maisie. I only hoped that he would leave the court discredited and ruined. I give you my word that my evidence would have saved him from the scaffold.”
Hilda was listening, with a set, white face.
“Proceed!” said she, and held out the brandy once more.
“I did not give the Admiral any more aconitine after I had taken over the case. But what was already in his system was enough. It was evident that we had seriously under-estimated the lethal dose. As to your father, Maisie, you have done me an injustice. You have always thought that I killed him.”
“Proceed!” said she.
“I speak now from the brink of the grave, and I tell you that I did not. His heart was always weak, and it broke down under the strain. Indirectly I was the cause--I do not seek to excuse anything; but it was the sorrow and the shame that killed him. As to Barclay, the chemist, that is another matter. I will not deny that I was concerned in that mysterious disappearance, which was a seven days' wonder in the Press. I could not permit my scientific calm to be interrupted by the blackmailing visits of so insignificant a person. And then after many years you came, Maisie. You also got between me and that work which was life to me. You also showed that you would rake up this old matter and bring dishonour upon a name which has stood for something in science. You also--but you will forgive me. I have held on to life for your sake as an atonement for my sins. Now, I go! Cumberledge--your notebook. Subjective sensations, swimming in the head, light flashes before the eyes, soothing torpor, some touch of coldness, constriction of the temples, humming in the ears, a sense of sinking--sinking--sinking!”
It was an hour later, and Hilda and I were alone in the chamber of death. As Sebastian lay there, a marble figure, with his keen eyes closed and his pinched, thin face whiter and serener than ever, I could not help gazing at him with some pangs of recollection. I could not avoid recalling the time when his very name was to me a word of power, and when the thought of him roused on my cheek a red flush of enthusiasm. As I looked I murmured two lines from Browning's Grammarian's Funeral: This is our Master, famous, calm, and dead, Borne on our shoulders.
Hilda Wade, standing beside me, with an awestruck air, added a stanza from the same great poem: Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying.
I gazed at her with admiration. “And it is YOU, Hilda, who pay him this generous tribute!” I cried, “YOU, of all women!”
“Yes, it is I,” she answered. “He was a great man, after all, Hubert. Not good, but great. And greatness by itself extorts our unwilling homage.”
“Hilda,” I cried, “you are a great woman; and a good woman, too. It makes me proud to think you will soon be my wife. For there is now no longer any just cause or impediment.”
Beside the dead master, she laid her hand solemnly and calmly in mine. “No impediment,” she answered. “I have vindicated and cleared my father's memory. And now, I can live. 'Actual life comes next.' We have much to do, Hubert.”
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{
"id": "4903"
}
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The night passed away without further event on board the schooner, yet in all the anxiety that might be supposed incident to men so perilously situated. Habits of long-since acquired superstition, too powerful to be easily shaken off, moreover contributed to the dejection of the mariners, among whom there were not wanting those who believed the silent steersman was in reality what their comrade had represented,--an immaterial being, sent from the world of spirits to warn them of some impending evil. What principally gave weight to this impression were the repeated asseverations of Fuller, during the sleepless night passed by all on deck, that what he had seen was no other, could be no other, than a ghost! exhibiting in its hueless, fleshless cheek, the well-known lineaments of one who was supposed to be no more: and, if the story of their comrade had needed confirmation among men in whom faith in, rather than love for, the marvellous was a constitutional ingredient, the terrible effect that seemed to have been produced on Captain de Haldimar by the same mysterious visitation would have been more than conclusive. The very appearance of the night, too, favoured the delusion. The heavens, comparatively clear at the moment when the canoe approached the vessel, became suddenly enveloped in the deepest gloom at its departure, as if to enshroud the course of those who, having so mysteriously approached, had also so unaccountably disappeared. Nor had this threatening state of the atmosphere the counterbalancing advantage of storm and tempest to drive them onward through the narrow waters of the Sinclair, and enable them, by anticipating the pursuit of their enemies, to shun the Scylla and Charybdis that awaited their more leisure advance. The wind increased not; and the disappointed seamen remarked, with dismay, that their craft scarcely made more progress than at the moment when she first quitted her anchorage.
It was now near the first hours of day; and although, perhaps, none slept, there were few who were not apparently at rest, and plunged in the most painful reflections. Still occupying her humble couch, and shielded from the night air merely by the cloak that covered her own blood-stained garments, lay the unhappy Clara, her deep groans and stifled sobs bursting occasionally from her pent-up heart, and falling on the ears of the mariners like sounds of fearful import, produced by the mysterious agency that already bore such undivided power over their thoughts. On the bare deck, at her side, lay her brother, his face turned upon the planks, as if to shut out all objects from eyes he had not the power to close; and, with one arm supporting his heavy brow, while the other, cast around the restless form of his beloved sister, seemed to offer protection and to impart confidence, even while his lips denied the accents of consolation. Seated on an empty hen-coop at their head, was Sir Everard Valletort, his back reposing against the bulwarks of the vessel, his arms folded across his chest, and his eyes bent mechanically on the man at the helm, who stood within a few paces of him,--an attitude of absorption, which he, ever and anon, changed to one of anxious and enquiring interest, whenever the agitation of Clara was manifested in the manner already shown.
The main deck and forecastle of the vessel presented a similar picture of mingled unquietness and repose. Many of the seamen might be seen seated on the gun-carriages, with their cheeks pressing the rude metal that served them for a pillow. Others lay along the decks, with their heads resting on the elevated hatches; while not a few, squatted on their haunches with their knees doubled up to their very chins, supported in that position the aching head that rested between their rough and horny palms. A first glance might have induced the belief that all were buried in the most profound slumber; but the quick jerking of a limb,--the fitful, sudden shifting of a position,--the utter absence of that deep breathing which indicates the unconsciousness of repose, and the occasional spirting of tobacco juice upon the deck,--all these symptoms only required to be noticed, to prove the living silence that reigned throughout was not born either of apathy or sleep.
At the gangway at which the canoe had approached now stood the individual already introduced to our readers as Jack Fuller. The same superstitious terror that caused his flight had once more attracted him to the spot where the subject of his alarm first appeared to him; and, without seeming to reflect that the vessel, in her slow but certain progress, had left all vestige of the mysterious visitant behind, he continued gazing over the bulwarks on the dark waters, as if he expected at each moment to find his sight stricken by the same appalling vision. It was at the moment when he had worked up his naturally dull imagination to its highest perception of the supernatural, that he was joined by the rugged boatswain, who had passed the greater part of the night in pacing up and down the decks, watching the aspect of the heavens, and occasionally tauting a rope or squaring a light yard, unassisted, as the fluttering of the canvass in the wind rendered the alteration necessary.
"Well, Jack!" bluntly observed the latter in a gruff whisper that resembled the suppressed growling of a mastiff, "what the hell are ye thinking of now? --Not got over your flumbustification yet, that ye stand here, looking as sanctified as an old parson!"
"I'll tell ye what it is, Mr. Mullins," returned the sailor, in the same key; "you may make as much game on me as you like; but these here strange sort of doings are somehow quizzical; and, though I fears nothing in the shape of flesh and blood, still, when it comes to having to do with those as is gone to Davy Jones's locker like, it gives a fellow an all-overishness as isn't quite the thing. You understand me?"
"I'm damned if I do!" was the brief but energetic rejoinder.
"Well, then," continued Fuller, "if I must out with it, I must. I think that 'ere Ingian must have been the devil, or how could he come so sudden and unbeknownst upon me, with the head of a 'possum: and then, agin, how could he get away from the craft without our seeing him? and how came the ghost on board of the canoe?"
"Avast there, old fellow; you means not the head of a 'possum, but a beaver: but that 'ere's all nat'r'l enough, and easily 'counted for; but you hav'n't told us whose ghost it was, after all."
"No; the captain made such a spring to the gunwale, as frighted it all out of my head: but come closer, Mr. Mullins, and I'll whisper it in your ear. --Hark! what was that?"
"I hears nothing," said the boatswain, after a pause.
"It's very odd," continued Fuller; "but I thought as how I heard it several times afore you came."
"There's something wrong, I take it, in your upper story, Jack Fuller," coolly observed his companion; "that 'ere ghost has quite capsized you."
"Hark, again!" repeated the sailor. "Didn't you hear it then? A sort of a groan like."
"Where, in what part?" calmly demanded the boatswain, though in the same suppressed tone in which the dialogue had been, carried on.
"Why, from the canoe that lies alongside there. I heard it several times afore."
"Well, damn my eyes, if you a'rn't turned a real coward at last," politely remarked Mr. Mullins. "Can't the poor fat devil of a Canadian snooze a bit in his hammock, without putting you so completely out of your reckoning?"
"The Canadian--the Canadian!" hurriedly returned Fuller: "why, don't you see him there, leaning with his back to the main-mast, and as fast asleep as if the devil himself couldn't wake him?"
"Then it was the devil, you heard, if you like," quaintly retorted Mullins: "but bear a hand, and tell us all about this here ghost."
"Hark, again! what was that?" once more enquired the excited sailor.
"Only a gust of wind passing through the dried boughs of the canoe," said the boatswain: "but since we can get nothing out of that crazed noddle of yours, see if you can't do something with your hands. That 'ere canoe running alongside, takes half a knot off the ship's way. Bear a hand then, and cast off the painter, and let her drop astarn, that she may follow in our wake. Hilloa! what the hell's the matter with the man now?"
And well might he ask. With his eyeballs staring, his teeth chattering, his body half bent, and his arms thrown forward, yet pendent as if suddenly arrested in that position while in the act of reaching the rope, the terrified sailor stood gazing on the stern of the canoe; in which, by the faint light of the dawning day, was to be seen an object well calculated to fill the least superstitious heart with terror and dismay. Through an opening in the foliage peered the pale and spectral face of a human being, with its dull eyes bent fixedly and mechanically upon the vessel. In the centre of the wan forehead was a dark incrustation, as of blood covering the superficies of a newly closed wound. The pallid mouth was partially unclosed, so as to display a row of white and apparently lipless teeth; and the features were otherwise set and drawn, as those of one who is no longer of earth. Around the head was bound a covering so close, as to conceal every part save the face; and once or twice a hand was slowly raised, and pressed upon the blood spot that dimmed the passing fairness of the brow. Every other portion of the form was invisible.
"Lord have mercy upon us!" exclaimed the boatswain, in a voice that, now elevated to more than its natural tone, sounded startlingly on the stillness of the scene; "sure enough it is, indeed, a ghost!"
"Ha! do you believe me now?" returned Fuller, gaining confidence from the admission of his companion, and in the same elevated key. "It is, as I hope to be saved, the ghost I see'd afore."
The commotion on deck was now every where universal. The sailors started to their feet, and, with horror and alarm visibly imprinted on their countenances, rushed tumultuously towards the dreaded gangway.
"Make way--room, fellows!" exclaimed a hurried voice; and presently Captain de Haldimar, who had bounded like lightning from the deck, appeared with eager eye and excited cheek among them. To leap into the bows of the canoe, and disappear under the foliage, was the work of a single instant. All listened breathlessly for the slightest sound; and then every heart throbbed with the most undefinable emotions, as his lips were heard giving utterance to the deep emotion of his own spirit,-- "Madeline, oh, my own lost Madeline!" he exclaimed with almost frantic energy of passion: "do I then press you once more in madness to my doting heart? Speak, speak to me--for God's sake speak, or I shall go mad! Air, air,--she wants air only--she cannot be dead."
These last words were succeeded by the furious rending asunder of the fastenings that secured the boughs, and presently the whole went overboard, leaving revealed the tall and picturesque figure of the officer; whose left arm encircled while it supported the reclining and powerless form of one who well resembled, indeed, the spectre for which she had been mistaken, while his right hand was busied in detaching the string that secured a portion of the covering round her throat. At length it fell from her shoulders; and the well known form of Madeline de Haldimar, clad even in the vestments in which they had been wont to see her, met the astonished gaze of the excited seamen. Still there were some who doubted it was the corporeal woman whom they beheld; and several of the crew who were catholics even made the sign of the cross as the supposed spirit was now borne up the gangway in the arms of the pained yet gratified De Haldimar: nor was it until her feet were seen finally resting on the deck, that Jack Fuller could persuade himself it was indeed Miss de Haldimar, and not her ghost, that lay clasped to the heart of the officer.
With the keen rush of the morning air upon her brow returned the suspended consciousness of the bewildered Madeline. The blood came slowly and imperceptibly to her cheek; and her eyes, hitherto glazed, fixed, and inexpressive, looked enquiringly, yet with stupid wonderment, around. She started from the embrace of her lover, gazed alternately at his disguise, at himself, and at Clara; and then passing her hand several times rapidly across her brow, uttered an hysteric scream, and threw herself impetuously forward on the bosom of the sobbing girl; who, with extended arms, parted lips, and heaving bosom, sat breathlessly awaiting the first dawn of the returning reason of her more than sister.
We should vainly attempt to paint all the heart-rending misery of the scene exhibited in the gradual restoration of Miss de Haldimar to her senses. From a state of torpor, produced by the freezing of every faculty into almost idiocy, she was suddenly awakened to all the terrors of the past and the deep intonations of her rich voice were heard only in expressions of agony, that entered into the most iron-hearted of the assembled seamen; while they drew from the bosom of her gentle and sympathising cousin fresh bursts of desolating grief. Imagination itself would find difficulty in supplying the harrowing effect upon all, when, with upraised hands, and on her bended knees, her large eyes turned wildly up to heaven, she invoked in deep and startling accents the terrible retribution of a just God on the inhuman murderers of her father, with whose life-blood her garments were profusely saturated; and then, with hysteric laughter, demanded why she alone had been singled out to survive the bloody tragedy. Love and affection, hitherto the first principles of her existence, then found no entrance into her mind. Stricken, broken-hearted, stultified to all feeling save that of her immediate wretchedness, she thought only of the horrible scenes through which she had passed; and even he, whom at another moment she could have clasped in an agony of fond tenderness to her beating bosom,--he to whom she had pledged her virgin faith, and was bound by the dearest of human ties,--he whom she had so often longed to behold once more, and had thought of, the preceding day, with all the tenderness of her impassioned and devoted soul,--even he did not, in the first hours of her terrible consciousness, so much as command a single passing regard. All the affections were for a period blighted in her bosom. She seemed as one devoted, without the power of resistance, to a grief which calcined and preyed upon all other feelings of the mind. One stunning and annihilating reflection seemed to engross every principle of her being; nor was it for hours after she had been restored to life and recollection that a deluge of burning tears, giving relief to her heart and a new direction to her feelings, enabled her at length to separate the past from, and in some degree devote herself to, the present. Then, indeed, for the first time did she perceive and take pleasure in the presence of her lover; and clasping her beloved and weeping Clara to her heart, thank her God, in all the fervour of true piety, that she at least had been spared to shed a ray of comfort on her distracted spirit. But we will not pain the reader by dwelling on a scene that drew tears even from the rugged and flint-nerved boatswain himself; for, although we should linger on it with minute anatomical detail, no powers of language we possess could convey the transcript as it should be. Pass we on, therefore, to the more immediate incidents of our narrative.
The day now rapidly developing, full opportunity was afforded the mariners to survey the strict nature of their position. To all appearance they were yet in the middle of the lake, for around them lay the belting sweep of forest that bounded the perspective of the equidistant circle, of which their bark was the focus or immediate centre. The wind was dying gradually away, and when at length the sun rose, in all his splendour, there was scarce air enough in the heavens to keep the sails from flapping against the masts, or to enable the vessel to obey her helm. In vain was the low and peculiar whistle of the seamen heard, ever and anon, in invocation of the departing breeze. Another day, calm and breathless as the preceding, had been chartered from the world of light; and their hearts failed them, as they foresaw the difficulty of their position, and the almost certainty of their retreat being cut off. It was while labouring under the disheartening consciousness of danger, peculiar to all, that the anxious boatswain summoned Captain de Haldimar and Sir Everard Valletort, by a significant beck of the finger, to the side of the deck opposite to that on which still lay the suffering and nearly broken-hearted girls.
"Well, Mullins, what now?" enquired the former, as he narrowly scanned the expression of the old man's features: "that clouded brow of yours, I fear me, bodes no agreeable information."
"Why, your honour, I scarcely knows what to say about it; but seeing as I'm the only officer in the ship, now our poor captain is killed, God bless him! I thought I might take the liberty to consult with your honours as to the best way of getting out of the jaws of them sharks of Ingians; and two heads, as the saying is, is always better than one."
"And now you have the advantage of three," observed the officer, with a sickly smile; "but I fear, Mullins, that if your own be not sufficient for the purpose, ours will be of little service. You must take counsel from your own experience and knowledge of nautical matters."
"Why, to be sure, your honour," and the sailor rolled his quid from one cheek to the other, "I think I may say as how I'll venture to steer the craft with any man on the Canada lakes, and bring her safe into port too; but seeing as how I'm only a petty officer, and not yet recommended by his worship the governor for the full command, I thought it but right to consult with my superiors, not as to the management of the craft, but the best as is to be done. What does your honour think of making for the high land over the larboard bow yonder, and waiting for the chance of the night-breeze to take us through the Sinclair?"
"Do whatever you think best," returned the officer. "For my part, I scarcely can give an opinion. Yet how are we to get there? There does not appear to be a breath of wind."
"Oh, that's easily managed; we have only to brail and furl up a little, to hide our cloth from the Ingians, and then send the boats a-head to tow the craft, while some of us lend a hand at her own sweeps. We shall get close under the lee of the land afore night, and then we must pull up agin along shore, until we get within a mile or so of the head of the river."
"But shall we not be seen by our enemies?" asked Sir Everard; "and will they not be on the watch for our movements, and intercept our retreat?"
"Now that's just the thing, your honour, as they're not likely to do, if so be as we bears away for yon headlands. I knows every nook and sounding round the lake; and odd enough if I didn't, seeing as how the craft circumnavigated it, at least, a dozen times since we have been cooped up here. Poor Captain Danvers! (may the devil damn his murderers, I say, though it does make a commander of me for once;) he used always to make for that 'ere point, whenever he wished to lie quiet; for never once did we see so much as a single Ingian on the headland. No, your honour, they keeps all at t'other side of the lake, seeing as how that is the main road from Mackina' to Detroit."
"Then, by all means, do so," eagerly returned Captain de Haldimar. "Oh, Mullins! take us but safely through, and if the interest of my father can procure you a king's commission, you shall not want it, believe me."
"And if half my fortune can give additional stimulus to exertion, it shall be shared, with pleasure, between yourself and crew," observed Sir Everard.
"Thank your honours,--thank your honours," said the boatswain, somewhat electrified by these brilliant offers. "The lads may take the money, if they like; all I cares about is the king's commission. Give me but a swab on my shoulder, and the money will come fast enough of itself. But, still, shiver my topsails, if I wants any bribery to make me do my duty; besides, if 'twas only for them poor girls alone, I would go through fire and water to sarve them. I'm not very chicken-hearted in my old age, your honours, but I don't recollect the time when I blubbered so much as I did when Miss Madeline come aboard. But I can't bear to think of it; and now let us see and get all ready for towing."
Every thing now became bustle and activity on board the schooner. The matches, no longer required for the moment, were extinguished, and the heavy cutlasses and pistols unbuckled from the loins of the men, and deposited near their respective guns. Light forms flew aloft, and, standing out upon the yards, loosely furled the sails that had previously been hauled and clewed up; but, as this was an operation requiring little time in so small a vessel, those who were engaged in it speedily glided to the deck again, ready for a more arduous service. The boats had, meanwhile, been got forward, and into these the sailors sprang, with an alacrity that could scarcely have been expected from men who had passed not only the preceding night, but many before it, in utter sleeplessness and despair. But the imminence of the danger, and the evident necessity existing for exertion, aroused them to new energy; and the hitherto motionless vessel was now made to obey the impulse given by the tow ropes of the boats, in a manner that proved their crews to have entered on their toil with the determination of men, resolved to devote themselves in earnest to their task. Nor was the spirit of action confined to these. The long sweeps of the schooner had been shipped, and such of the crew as remained on board laboured effectually at them,--a service, in which they were essentially aided, not only by mine host of the Fleur de lis, but by the young officers themselves.
At mid-day the headlands were seen looming largely in the distance, while the immediate shores of the ill-fated fortress were momentarily, and in the same proportion, disappearing under the dim line of horizon in the rear. More than half their course, from the spot whence they commenced towing, had been completed, when the harassed men were made to quit their oars, in order to partake of the scanty fare of the vessel, consisting chiefly of dried bear's meat and venison. Spirit of any description they had none; but, unlike their brethren of the Atlantic, when driven to extremities in food, they knew not what it was to poison the nutritious properties of the latter by sipping the putrid dregs of the water-cask, in quantities scarce sufficient to quench the fire of their parched palates. Unslaked thirst was a misery unknown to the mariners of these lakes: it was but to cast their buckets deep into the tempting element, and water, pure, sweet, and grateful as any that ever bubbled from the moss-clad fountain of sylvan deity, came cool and refreshing to their lips, neutralising, in a measure, the crudities of the coarsest food. It was to this inestimable advantage the crew of the schooner had been principally indebted for their health, during the long series of privation, as far as related to fresh provisions and rest, to which they had been subjected. All appeared as vigorous in frame, and robust in health, as at the moment when they had last quitted the waters of the Detroit; and but for the inward sinking of the spirit, reflected in many a bronzed and furrowed brow, there was little to show they had been exposed to any very extraordinary trials.
Their meal having been hastily dispatched, and sweetened by a draught from the depths of the Huron, the seamen once more sprang into their boats, and devoted themselves, heart and soul, to the completion of their task, pulling with a vigour that operated on each and all with a tendency to encouragement and hope. At length the vessel, still impelled by her own sweeps, gradually approached the land; and at rather more than an hour before sunset was so near that the moment was deemed arrived when, without danger of being perceived, she might be run up along the shore to the point alluded to by the boatswain. Little more than another hour was occupied in bringing her to her station; and the red tints of departing day were still visible in the direction of the ill-fated fortress of Michilimackinac, when the sullen rumbling of the cable, following the heavy splash of the anchor, announced the place of momentary concealment had been gained.
The anchorage lay between two projecting headlands; to the outermost extremities of which were to be seen, overhanging the lake, the stately birch and pine, connected at their base by an impenetrable brushwood, extending to the very shore, and affording the amplest concealment, except from the lake side and the banks under which the schooner was moored. From the first quarter, however, little danger was incurred, as any canoes the savages might send in discovery of their course, must unavoidably be seen the moment they appeared over the line of the horizon, while, on the contrary, their own vessel, although much larger, resting on and identified with the land, must be invisible, except on a very near approach. In the opposite direction they were equally safe; for, as Mullins had truly remarked, none, save a few wandering hunters, whom chance occasionally led to the spot, were to be met with in a part of the country that lay so completely out of the track of communication between the fortresses. It was, however, but to double the second headland in their front, and they came within view of the Sinclair, the head of which was situated little more than a league beyond the spot where they now lay. Thus secure for the present, and waiting only for the rising of the breeze, of which the setting sun had given promise, the sailors once more snatched their hasty refreshment, while two of their number were sent aloft to keep a vigilant look-out along the circuit embraced by the enshrouding headlands.
During the whole of the day the cousins had continued on deck clasped in each other's arms, and shedding tears of bitterness, and heaving the most heart-rending sobs at intervals, yet but rarely conversing. The feelings of both were too much oppressed to admit of the utterance of their grief. The vampire of despair had banqueted on their hearts. Their vitality had been sucked, as it were, by its cold and bloodless lips; and little more than the withered rind, that had contained the seeds of so many affections, had been left. Often had Sir Everard and De Haldimar paused momentarily from the labour of their oars, to cast an eye of anxious solicitude on the scarcely conscious girls, wishing, rather than expecting, to find the violence of their desolation abated, and that, in the full expansion of unreserved communication, they were relieving their sick hearts from the terrible and crushing weight of woe that bore them down. Captain de Haldimar had even once or twice essayed to introduce the subject himself, in the hope that some fresh paroxysm, following their disclosures, would remove the horrible stupefaction of their senses; but the wild look and excited manner of Madeline, whenever he touched on the chord of her affliction, had as often caused him to desist.
Towards the evening, however, her natural strength of character came in aid of his quiescent efforts to soothe her; and she appeared not only more composed, but more sensible of the impression produced by surrounding objects. As the last rays of the sun were tinging the horizon, she drew up her form in a sitting position against the bulwarks, and, raising her clasped hands to heaven, while her eyes were bent long and fixedly on the distant west, appeared for some minutes wholly lost in that attitude of absorption. Then she closed her eyes; and through the swollen lids came coursing, one by one, over her quivering cheek, large tears, that seemed to scald a furrow where they passed. After this she became more calm--her respiration more free; and she even consented to taste the humble meal which the young man now offered for the third time. Neither Clara nor herself had eaten food since the preceding morning; and the weakness of their frames contributed not a little to the increasing despondency of their spirits; but, notwithstanding several attempts previously made, they had rejected what was offered them, with insurmountable loathing. When they had now swallowed a few morsels of the sliced venison ham, prepared with all the delicacy the nearly exhausted resources of the vessel could supply, accompanied by a small portion of the cornbread of the Canadian, Captain de Haldimar prevailed on them to swallow a few drops of the spirit that still remained in the canteen given them by Erskine on their departure from Detroit. The genial liquid sent a kindling glow to their chilled hearts, and for a moment deadened the pungency of their anguish; and then it was that Miss de Haldimar entered briefly on the horrors she had witnessed, while Clara, with her arm encircling her waist, fixed her dim and swollen eyes, from which a tear ever and anon rolled heavily to her lap, on those of her beloved cousin.
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Without borrowing the affecting language of the unhappy girl--a language rendered even more touching by the peculiar pathos of her tones, and the searching agony of spirit that burst at intervals through her narrative--we will merely present our readers with a brief summary of what was gleaned from her melancholy disclosure. On bearing her cousin to the bedroom, after the terrifying yell first heard from without the fort, she had flown down the front stairs of the blockhouse, in the hope of reaching the guardroom in time to acquaint Captain Baynton with what she and Clara had witnessed from their window. Scarcely, however, had she gained the exterior of the building, when she saw that officer descending from a point of the rampart immediately on her left, and almost in a line with the block-house. He was running to overtake and return the ball of the Indian players, which had, at that moment, fallen into the centre of the fort, and was now rolling rapidly away from the spot on which Miss de Haldimar stood. The course of the ball led the pursuing officer out of the reach of her voice; and it was not until he had overtaken and thrown it again over the rampart, she could succeed in claiming his attention. No sooner, however, had he heard her hurried statement, than, without waiting to take the orders of his commanding officer, he prepared to join his guard, and give directions for the immediate closing of the gates. But the opportunity was now lost. The delay occasioned by the chase and recovery of the ball had given the Indians time to approach the gates in a body, while the unsuspicious soldiery looked on without so much as dreaming to prevent them; and Captain Baynton had scarcely moved forward in execution of his purpose, when the yelling fiends were seen already possessing themselves of the drawbridge, and exhibiting every appearance of fierce hostility. Wild, maddened at the sight, the almost frantic Madeline, alive only to her father's danger, rushed back towards the council-room, whence the startling yell from without had already been echoed, and where the tramp of feet, and the clashing of weapons, were distinguishable.
Cut off from his guard, by the rapid inundation of warriors, Captain Baynton had at once seen the futility of all attempts to join the men, and his first impression evidently had been to devote himself to the preservation of the cousins. With this view he turned hastily to Miss de Haldimar, and hurriedly naming the back staircase of the block-house, urged her to direct her flight to that quarter. But the excited girl had neither consideration nor fear for herself; she thought only of her father: and, even while the fierceness of contest was at its height within, she suddenly burst into the council-room. The confusion and horror of the scene that met her eyes no language can render: blood was flowing in every direction, and dying and dead officers, already stripped of their scalps, were lying strewed about the room. Still the survivors fought with all the obstinacy of despair, and many of the Indians had shared the fate of their victims. Miss de Haldimar attempted to reach her father, then vigorously combating with one of the most desperate of the chiefs; but, before she could dart through the intervening crowd, a savage seized her by the hair, and brandished a tomahawk rapidly over her neck. At that moment Captain Baynton sent his glittering blade deep into the heart of the Indian, who, relinquishing his grasp, fell dead at the feet of his intended victim. The devoted officer then threw his left arm round her waist, and, parrying with his sword-arm the blows of those who sought to intercept his flight, dragged his reluctant burden towards the door. Hotly pressed by the remaining officers, nearly equal in number, the Indians were now compelled to turn and defend themselves in front, when Captain Baynton took that opportunity of getting once more into the corridor, not, however, without having received a severe wound immediately behind the right ear, and leaving a skirt and lappel of his uniform in the hands of two savages who had successively essayed to detain him. At that moment the band without had succeeded in forcing open the door of the guard-room; and the officer saw, at a glance, there was little time left for decision. In hurried and imploring accents he besought Miss de Haldimar to forget every thing but her own danger, and to summon resolution to tear herself from the scene: but prayer and entreaty, and even force, were alike employed in vain. Clinging firmly to the rude balustrades, she refused to be led up the staircase, and wildly resisting all his efforts to detach her hands, declared she would again return to the scene of death, in which her beloved parent was so conspicuous an actor. While he was yet engaged in this fruitless attempt to force her from the spot, the door of the council-room was suddenly burst open, and a group of bleeding officers, among whom was Major de Haldimar, followed by their yelling enemies, rushed wildly into the passage, and, at the very foot of the stairs where they yet stood, the combat was renewed. From that moment Miss de Haldimar lost sight of her generous protector. Meanwhile the tumult of execrations, and groans, and yells, was at its height; and one by one she saw the unhappy officers sink beneath weapons yet reeking with the blood of their comrades, until not more than three or four, including her father and the commander of the schooner, were left. At length Major de Haldimar, overcome by exertion, and faint from wounds, while his wild eye darted despairingly on his daughter, had his sword-arm desperately wounded, when the blade dropped to the earth, and a dozen weapons glittered above his head. The wild shriek that had startled Clara then burst from the agonised heart of her maddened cousin, and she darted forward to cover her father's head with her arms. But her senses failed her in the attempt; and the last thing she recollected was falling over the weltering form of Middleton, who pressed her, as she lay there, in the convulsive energy of death, to his almost pulseless heart.
A vague consciousness of being raised from the earth, and borne rapidly through the air, came over her even in the midst of her insensibility, but without any definite perception of the present, or recollection of the past, until she suddenly, when about midway between the fort and the point of wood that led to Chabouiga, opened her eyes, and found herself in the firm grasp of an Indian, whose features, even in the hasty and fearful glance she cast at the countenance, she fancied were not unfamiliar to her. Not another human being was to be seen in the clearing at that moment; for all the savages, including even the women assembled outside, were now within the fort assisting in the complex horrors of murder, fire, and spoliation. In the wild energy of returning reason and despair, the wretched girl struggled violently to free herself; and so far with success, that the Indian, whose strength was evidently fast failing him, was compelled to quit his hold, and suffer her to walk. No sooner did Miss de Haldimar feel her feet touching the ground, when she again renewed her exertions to free herself, and return to the fort; but the Indian held her firmly secured by a leathern thong he now attached to her waist, and every attempt proved abortive. He was evidently much disconcerted at her resistance; and more than once she expected, and almost hoped, the tomahawk at his side would be made to revenge him for the test to which his patience was subjected; but Miss de Haldimar looked in vain for the expression of ferocity and impatience that might have been expected from him at such a moment. There was an air of mournfulness, and even kindness, mingled with severity, on his smooth brow that harmonised ill with the horrible atrocities in which he had, to all appearance, covered as he was with blood, been so recent and prominent an actor. The Indian remarked her surprise; and then looking hurriedly, yet keenly, around, and finding no living being near them, suddenly tore the shirt from his chest, and emphatically pronouncing the names "Oucanasta," "De Haldimar," disclosed to the still struggling captive the bosom of a woman. After which, pointing in the direction of the wood, and finally towards Detroit, she gave Miss de Haldimar to understand that was the course intended to be pursued.
In a moment the resistance of the latter ceased. She at once recognised the young Indian woman whom her cousin had rescued from death: and aware, as she was, of the strong attachment that had subsequently bound her to her preserver, she was at no loss to understand how she might have been led to devote herself to the rescue of one whom, it was probable, she knew to be his affianced wife. Once, indeed, a suspicion of a different nature crossed her mind; for the thought occurred to her she had only been saved from the general doom to be made the victim of private revenge--that it was only to glut the jealous vengeance of the woman at a more deliberative hour, she had been made a temporary captive. The apprehension, however, was no sooner formed than extinguished. Bitterly, deeply as she had reason to abhor the treachery and cunning of the dark race to which her captor belonged, there was an expression of openness and sincerity, and even imploringness, in the countenance of Oucanasta, which, added to her former knowledge of the woman, at once set this fear at rest, inducing her to look upon her rather in the character of a disinterested saviour, than in that of a cruel and vindictive enemy, goaded on to the indulgence of malignant hate by a spirit of rivalry and revenge. Besides, even were her cruellest fears to be realised, what could await her worse than the past? If she could even succeed in getting away, it would only be to return upon certain death; and death only could await her, however refined the tortures accompanying its infliction, in the event of her quietly following and yielding herself up to the guidance of one who offered this slight consolation, at least, that she was of her own sex. But Miss de Haldimar was willing to attribute more generous motives to the Indian; and fortified in her first impression, she signified by signs, that seemed to be perfectly intelligible to her companion, she appreciated her friendly intentions, and confided wholly in her.
No longer checked in her efforts, Oucanasta now directed her course towards the wood, still holding the thong that remained attached to Miss de Haldimar's waist, probably with a view to deceive any individuals from the villages on whom they might chance to fall, into a belief that the English girl was in reality her prisoner. No sooner, however, had they entered the depths of the forest, when, instead of following the path that led to Chabouiga, Oucanasta took a direction to the left, and then moving nearly on a parallel line with the course of the lake, continued her flight as rapidly as the rude nature of the underwood, and the unpractised feet of her companion, would permit. They had travelled in this manner for upwards of four hours, without meeting a breathing thing, or even so much as exchanging a sound between themselves, when, at length, the Indian stopped at the edge of a deep cavern-like excavation in the earth, produced by the tearing up, by the wild tempest, of an enormous pine. Into this she descended, and presently reappeared with several blankets, and two light painted paddles. Then unloosing the thong from the waist of the exhausted girl, she proceeded to disguise her in one of the blankets in the manner already shown, securing it over the head, throat, and shoulders with the badge of captivity, now no longer necessary for her purpose. She then struck off at right angles from the course they had previously pursued; and in less than twenty minutes both stood on the lake shore, apparently at a great distance from the point whence they had originally set out. The Indian gazed for a moment anxiously before her; and then, with an exclamation, evidently meant to convey a sense of pleasure and satisfaction, pointed forward upon the lake. Miss de Haldimar followed, with eager and aching eyes, the direction of her finger, and beheld the well-known schooner evidently urging her flight towards the entrance of the Sinclair. Oh, how her sick heart seemed ready to burst at that moment! When she had last gazed upon it was from the window of her favourite apartment; and even while she held her beloved Clara clasped fondly in her almost maternal embrace, she had dared to indulge the fairest images that ever sprung into being at the creative call of woman's fancy. How bitter had been the reverse! and what incidents to fill up the sad volume of the longest life of sorrow and bereavement had not Heaven awarded her in lieu! In one short hour the weight of a thousand worlds had fallen on and crushed her heart; and when and how was the panacea to be obtained to restore one moment's cessation from suffering to her agonised spirit? Alas! she felt at that moment, that, although she should live a thousand years, the bitterness and desolation of her grief must remain. From the vessel she turned her eyes away upon the distant shore, which it was fast quitting, and beheld a column of mingled flame and smoke towering far above the horizon, and attesting the universal wreck of what had so long been endeared to her as her home. And she had witnessed all this, and yet had strength to survive it!
The courage of the unhappy girl had hitherto been sustained by no effort of volition of her own. From the moment when, discovering a friend in Oucanasta, she had yielded herself unresistingly to the guidance of that generous creature, her feelings had been characterised by an obtuseness strongly in contrast with the high excitement that had distinguished her previous manner. A dreamy recollection of some past horror, it is true, pursued her during her rapid and speechless flight; but any analysis of the causes conducing to that horror, her subjugated faculties were unable to enter upon. Even as one who, under the influence of incipient slumber, rejects the fantastic images that rise successively and indistinctly to the slothful brain, until, at length, they weaken, fade, and gradually die away, leaving nothing but a formless and confused picture of the whole; so was it with Miss de Haldimar. Had she been throughout alive to the keen recollections associated with her flight, she could not have stirred a foot in furtherance of her own safety, even if she would. The mere instinct of self-preservation would never have won one so truly devoted to the generous purpose of her deliverer, had not the temporary stupefaction of her mind prevented all desire of opposition. It is true, in the moment of her discovery of the sex of Oucanasta, she had been able to exercise her reflecting powers; but they were only in connection with the present, and wholly abstract and separate from the past. She had followed her conductor almost without consciousness, and with such deep absorption of spirit, that she neither once conjectured whither they were going, nor what was to be the final issue of their flight. But now, when she stood on the lake shore, suddenly awakened, as if by some startling spell, to every harrowing recollection, and with her attention assisted by objects long endeared, and rendered familiar to her gaze--when she beheld the vessel that had last borne her across the still bosom of the Huron, fleeing for ever from the fortress where her arrival had been so joyously hailed--when she saw that fortress itself presenting the hideous spectacle of a blackened mass of ruins fast crumbling into nothingness--when, in short, she saw nothing but what reminded her of the terrific past, the madness of reason returned, and the desolation of her heart was complete. And then, again, when she thought of her generous, her brave, her beloved, and too unfortunate father, whom she had seen perish at her feet--when she thought of her own gentle Clara, and the sufferings and brutalities to which, if she yet lived, she must inevitably be exposed, and of the dreadful fate of the garrison altogether, the most menial of whom was familiar to her memory, brought up, as she had been, among them from her childhood--when she dwelt on all these things, a faintness, as of death, came over her, and she sank without life on the beach. Of what passed afterwards she had no recollection. She neither knew how she had got into the canoe, nor what means the Indian had taken to secure her approach to the schooner. She had no consciousness of having been removed to the bark of the Canadian, nor did she even remember having risen and gazed through the foliage on the vessel at her side; but she presumed, the chill air of morning having partially restored pulsation, she had moved instinctively from her recumbent position to the spot in which her spectre-like countenance had been perceived by Fuller. The first moment of her returning reason was that when, standing on the deck of the schooner, she found herself so unexpectedly clasped to the heart of her lover.
Twilight had entirely passed away when Miss de Haldimar completed her sad narrative; and already the crew, roused to exertion by the swelling breeze, were once more engaged in weighing the anchor, and setting and trimming the sails of the schooner, which latter soon began to shoot round the concealing headland into the opening of the Sinclair. A deathlike silence prevailed throughout the decks of the little bark, as her bows, dividing the waters of the basin that formed its source, gradually immerged into the current of that deep but narrow river; so narrow, indeed, that from its centre the least active of the mariners might have leaped without difficulty to either shore. This was the most critical part of the dangerous navigation. With a wide sea-board, and full command of their helm, they had nothing to fear; but so limited was the passage of this river, it was with difficulty the yards and masts of the schooner could be kept disengaged from the projecting boughs of the dense forest that lined the adjacent shores to their very junction with the water. The darkness of the night, moreover, while it promised to shield them from the observation of the savages, contributed greatly to perplex their movements; for such was the abruptness with which the river wound itself round in various directions, that it required a man constantly on the alert at the bows to apprise the helmsman of the course he should steer, to avoid collision with the shores. Canopies of weaving branches met in various directions far above their heads, and through these the schooner glided with a silence that might have called up the idea of a Stygian freight. Meanwhile, the men stood anxiously to their guns, concealing the matches in their water-buckets as before; and, while they strained both ear and eye through the surrounding; gloom to discover the slightest evidence of danger, grasped the handles of their cutlasses with a firm hand, ready to unsheathe them at the first intimation of alarm.
At the suggestion of the boatswain, who hinted at the necessity of having cleared decks, Captain de Haldimar had prevailed on his unfortunate relatives to retire to the small cabin arranged for their reception; and here they were attended by an aged female, who had long followed the fortunes of the crew, and acted in the twofold character of laundress and sempstress. He himself, with Sir Everard, continued on deck watching the progress of the vessel with an anxiety that became more intense at each succeeding hour. Hitherto their course had been unimpeded, save by the obstacles already enumerated; and they had now, at about an hour before dawn, gained a point that promised a speedy termination to their dangers and perplexities. Before them lay a reach in the river, enveloped in more than ordinary gloom, produced by the continuous weaving of the tops of the overhanging trees; and in the perspective, a gleam of relieving light, denoting the near vicinity of the lake that lay at the opposite extremity of the Sinclair, whose name it also bore. This was the narrowest part of the river; and so approximate were its shores, that the vessel in her course could not fail to come in contact both with the obtruding foliage of the forest and the dense bullrushes skirting the edge of either bank.
"If we get safe through this here place," said the boatswain, in a rough whisper to his anxious and attentive auditors, "I think as how I'll venture to answer for the craft. I can see daylight dancing upon the lake already. Ten minutes more and she will be there." Then turning to the man at the helm,--"Keep her in the centre of the stream, Jim. Don't you see you're hugging the weather shore?"
"It would take the devil himself to tell which is the centre," growled the sailor, in the same suppressed tone. "One might steer with one's eyes shut in such a queer place as this and never be no worser off than with them open."
"Steady her helm, steady," rejoined Mullins, "it's as dark as pitch, to be sure, but the passage is straight as an arrow, and with a steady helm you can't miss it. Make for the light ahead."
"Abaft there!" hurriedly and loudly shouted the man on the look-out at the bows, "there's a tree lying across the river, and we're just upon it."
While he yet spoke, and before the boatswain could give such instructions as the emergency required, the vessel suddenly struck against the obstacle in question; but the concussion was not of the violent nature that might have been anticipated. The course of the schooner, at no one period particularly rapid, had been considerably checked since her entrance into the gloomy arch, in the centre of which her present accident had occurred; so that it was without immediate injury to her hull and spars she had been thus suddenly brought to. But this was not the most alarming part of the affair. Captain de Haldimar and Sir Everard both recollected, that, in making the same passage, not forty-eight hours previously, they had encountered no obstacle of the kind, and a misgiving of danger rose simultaneously to the hearts of each. It was, however, a thing of too common occurrence in these countries, where storm and tempest were so prevalent and partial, to create more than a mere temporary alarm; for it was quite as probable the barrier had been interposed by some fitful outburst of Nature, as that it arose from design on the part of their enemies: and when the vessel had continued stationary for some minutes, without the prepared and expectant crew discovering the slightest indication of attack, the former impression was preserved by the officers--at least avowedly to those around.
"Bear a hand, my lads, and cut away," at length ordered the boatswain, in a low but clear tone; "half a dozen at each end of the stick, and we shall soon clear a passage for the craft."
A dozen sailors grasped their axes, and hastened forward to execute the command. They sprang lightly from the entangled bows of the schooner, and diverging in equal numbers moved to either extremity of the fallen tree.
"This is sailing through the heart of the American forest with a vengeance," muttered Mullins, whose annoyance at their detention was strongly manifested as he paced up and down the deck. "Shiver my topsails, if it isn't bad enough to clear the Sinclair at any time, much more so when one's running for one's life, and not a whisper's length from one's enemies. Do you know, Captain," abruptly checking his movement, and familiarly placing his hand on the shoulder of De Haldimar, "the last time we sailed through this very reach I couldn't help telling poor Captain Danvers, God rest his soul, what a nice spot it was for an Ingian ambuscade, if they had only gumption enough to think of it."
"Hark!" said the officer, whose heart, eye, and ear were painfully on the alert, "what rustling is that we hear overhead?"
"It's Jack Fuller, no doubt, your honour; I sent him up to clear away the branches from the main topmast rigging." Then raising his head, and elevating his voice, "Hilloa! aloft there!"
The only answer was a groan, followed by a deeper commotion among the rustling foliage.
"Why, what the devil's the matter with you now, Jack?" pursued the boatswain, in a voice of angry vehemence. "Are ye scared at another ghost, and be damned to you, that ye keep groaning there after that fashion?"
At that moment a heavy dull mass was heard tumbling through the upper rigging of the schooner towards the deck, and presently a human form fell at the very feet of the small group, composed of the two officers and the individual who had last spoken.
"A light, a light!" shouted the boatswain; "the foolish chap has lost his hold through fear, and ten to one if he hasn't cracked his skull-piece for his pains. Quick there with a light, and let's see what we can do for him."
The attention of all had been arrested by the sound of the falling weight, and as one of the sailors now advanced, bearing a dark lantern from below, the whole of the crew, with the exception of those employed on the fallen tree, gathered themselves in a knot round the motionless form of the prostrate man. But no sooner had their eyes encountered the object of their interest, when each individual started suddenly and involuntarily back, baring his cutlass, and drawing forth his pistol, the whole presenting a group of countenances strongly marked by various shades of consternation and alarm, even while their attitudes were those of men prepared for some fierce and desperate danger. It was indeed Fuller whom they had beheld, but not labouring, as the boatswain had imagined, under the mere influence of superstitious fear. He was dead, and the blood flowing from a deep wound, inflicted by a sharp instrument in his chest, and the scalped head, too plainly told the manner of his death, and the danger that awaited them all.
A pause ensued, but it was short. Before any one could find words to remark on the horrible circumstance, the appalling war-cry of the savages burst loudly from every quarter upon the ears of the devoted crew. In the desperation of the moment, several of the men clutched their cutlasses between their teeth, and seizing the concealed matches, rushed to their respective stations at the guns. It was in vain the boatswain called out to them, in a voice of stern authority, to desist, intimating that their only protection lay in the reservation of the fire of their batteries. Goaded and excited, beyond the power of resistance, to an impulse that set all subordination at defiance, they applied the matches, and almost at the same instant the terrific discharge of both broadsides took place, rocking the vessel to the water's edge, and reverberating, throughout, the confined space in which she lay, like the deadly explosion of some deeply excavated mine.
Scarcely had the guns been fired, when the seamen became sensible of their imprudence. The echoes were yet struggling to force a passage through the dense forest, when a second yell of the Indians announced the fiercest joy and triumph, unmixed by disaster, at the result; and then the quick leaping of many forms could be heard, as they divided the crashing underwood, and rushed forward to close with their prey. It was evident, from the difference of sound, their first cry had been pealed forth while lying prostrate on the ground, and secure from the bullets, whose harmless discharge that cry was intended to provoke; for now the voices seemed to rise progressively from the earth, until they reached the level of each individual height, and were already almost hotly breathing in the ears of those they were destined to fill with illimitable dismay.
"Shiver my topsails, but this comes of disobeying orders," roared the boatswain, in a voice of mingled anger and vexation. "The Ingians are quite as cunning as ourselves, and arn't to be frighted that way. Quick, every cutlass and pistol to his gangway, and let's do our best. Pass the word forward for the axemen to return to quarters."
Recovered from their first paroxysm of alarm, the men at length became sensible of the presence of a directing power, which, humble as it was, their long habits of discipline had taught them to respect, and, headed on the one side by Captain de Haldimar, and on the other by Sir Everard Valletort, neither of whom, however, entertained the most remote chance of success, flew, as commanded, to their respective gangways. The yell of the Indians had again ceased, and all was hushed into stillness; but as the anxious and quicksighted officers gazed over the bulwarks, they fancied they could perceive, even through the deep gloom that every where prevailed, the forms of men,--resting in cautious and eager attitudes, on the very verge of the banks, and at a distance of little more than half pistol shot. Every heart beat with expectancy,--every eye was riveted intently in front, to watch and meet the first movements of their foes, but not a sound of approach was audible to the equally attentive ear. In this state of aching suspense they might have continued about five minutes, when suddenly their hearts were made to quail by a third cry, that came, not as previously, from the banks of the river, but from the very centre of their own decks, and from the top-mast and riggings of the schooner. So sudden and unexpected too was this fresh danger, that before the two parties had time to turn, and assume a new posture of defence, several of them had already fallen under the butchering blades of their enemies. Then commenced a desperate but short conflict, mingled with yellings, that again were answered from every point; and rapidly gliding down the pendant ropes, were to be seen the active and dusky forms of men, swelling the number of the assailants, who had gained the deck in the same noiseless manner, until resistance became almost hopeless.
"Ha! I hear the footsteps of our lads at last," exclaimed Mullins exultingly to his comrades, as he finished despatching a third savage with his sturdy weapon. "Quick, men, quick, up with hatchet and cutlass, and take them in the rear. If we are to die, let's die--" game, he would perhaps have added, but death arrested the word upon his lips; and his corpse rolled along the deck, until its further progress was stopped by the stiffened body of the unhappy Fuller.
Notwithstanding the fall of their brave leader, and the whoopings of their enemies, the flagging spirits of the men were for a moment excited by the announcement of the return even of the small force of the axemen, and they defended themselves with a courage and determination worthy of a better result; but when, by the lurid light of the torches, now lying burning about the decks, they turned and beheld not their companions, but a fresh band of Indians, at whose pouch-belts dangled the reeking scalps of their murdered friends, they at once relinquished the combat as hopeless, and gave themselves unresistingly up to be bound by their captors.
Meanwhile the cousins experienced a renewal of all those horrors from which their distracted minds had been temporarily relieved; and, petrified with alarm, as they lay in the solitary berth that contained them both, endured sufferings infinitely more terrible than death itself. The early part of the tumult they had noticed almost without comprehending its cause, and but for the terrific cry of the Indians that had preceded them, would have mistaken the deafening broadsides for the blowing up of the vessel, so tremendous and violent bad been the concussion. Nay, there was a moment when Miss de Haldimar felt a pang of deep disappointment and regret at the misconception; for, with the fearful recollection of past events, so strongly impressed on her bleeding heart, she could not but acknowledge, that to be engulfed in one general and disastrous explosion, was mercy compared with the alternative of falling into the hands of those to whom her loathing spirit bad been too fatally taught to deny even the commonest attributes of humanity. As for Clara, she had not the power to think, or to form a conjecture on the subject:--she was merely sensible of a repetition of the horrible scenes from which she had so recently been snatched, and with a pale cheek, a fixed eye, and an almost pulseless heart, lay without motion in the inner side of the berth. The piteous spectacle of her cousin's alarm lent a forced activity to the despair of Miss de Haldimar, in whom apprehension produced that strong energy of excitement that sometimes gives to helplessness the character of true courage. With the increasing clamour of appalling conflict on deck, this excitement grew at every moment stronger, until it finally became irrepressible, so that at length, when through the cabin windows there suddenly streamed a flood of yellow light, extinguishing that of the lamp that threw its flickering beams around the cabin, she flung herself impetuously from the berth, and, despite of the aged and trembling female who attempted to detain her, burst open the narrow entrance to the cabin, and rushed up the steps communicating with the deck.
The picture that here met her eyes was at once graphic and fearful in the extreme. On either side of the river lines of streaming torches were waved by dusky warriors high above their heads, reflecting the grim countenances, not only of those who bore them, but of dense groups in their rear, whose numbers were alone concealed by the foliage of the forest in which they stood. From the branches that wove themselves across the centre of the river, and the topmast and rigging of the vessel, the same strong yellow light, produced by the bark of the birch tree steeped in gum, streamed down upon the decks below, rendering each line and block of the schooner as distinctly visible as if it had been noon on the sunniest of those far distant lakes. The deck itself was covered with the bodies of slain men--sailors, and savages mixed together; and amid these were to be seen fierce warriors, reclining triumphantly and indolently on their rifles, while others were occupied in securing the arms of their captives with leathern thongs behind their backs. The silence that now prevailed was strongly in contrast with, and even more fearful than, the horrid shouts by which it had been preceded; and, but for the ghastly countenances of the captives, and the quick rolling eyes of the savages, Miss de Haldimar might have imagined herself the sport of some extraordinary and exciting illusion. Her glance over these prominent features in the tragedy had been cursory, yet accurate. It now rested on one that had more immediate and terrifying interest for herself. At a few paces in front of the companion ladder, and with their backs turned towards her, stood two individuals, whose attitudes denoted the purpose of men resolved to sell with their lives alone a passage to a tall fierce-looking savage, whose countenance betrayed every mark of triumphant and deadly passion, while he apparently hesitated whether his uplifted arm should stay the weapon it wielded. These individuals were Captain de Haldimar and Sir Everard Valletort; and to the former of these the attention of the savage was more immediately and exultingly directed; so much so, indeed, that Miss de Haldimar thought she could read in the ferocious expression of his features the death-warrant of her cousin. In the wild terror of the moment she gave a piercing scream that was answered by a hundred yelling voices, and rushing between her lover and his enemy, threw herself wildly and supplicatingly at the feet of the latter. Uttering a savage laugh, the monster spurned her from him with his foot, when, quick as thought, a pistol was discharged within a few inches of his face; but with a rapidity equal to that of his assailant, he bent aside his head, and the ball passed harmlessly on. The yell that followed was terrific; and while it was yet swelling into fulness, Captain de Haldimar felt an iron hand furiously grappling his throat, and, ere the grasp was relinquished, he again stood the bound and passive victim of the warrior of the Fleur de lis.
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{
"id": "4911"
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3
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The interval that succeeded to the last council-scene of the Indians was passed by the officers of Detroit in a state of inexpressible anxiety and doubt. The fears entertained for the fate of their companions, who had set out in the perilous and almost forlorn hope of reaching Michilimackinac, in time to prevent the consummation of the threatened treachery, had, in some degree, if not wholly, been allayed by the story narrated by the Ottawa chief. It was evident, from his statement, the party had again met, and been engaged in fearful struggle with the gigantic warrior they had all so much reason to recollect; and it was equally apparent, that in that struggle they had been successful. But still, so many obstacles were likely to be opposed to their navigation of the several lakes and rivers over which lay their course, it was almost feared, even if they eventually escaped unharmed themselves, they could not possibly reach the fort in time to communicate the danger that awaited their friends. It is true, the time gained by Governor de Haldimar on the first occasion had afforded a considerable interval, of which advantage might be taken; but it was also, on the other hand, uncertain whether Ponteac had commanded the same delay in the council of the chiefs investing Michilimackinac, to which he had himself assented. Three days were sufficient to enable an Indian warrior to perform the journey by land; and it was chiefly on this vague and uncertain ground they based whatever little of hope was entertained on the subject.
It had been settled at the departure of the adventurers, that the instant they effected a communication with the schooner on Lake Huron, Francois should be immediately sent back, with instructions so to contrive the period of his return, that his canoe should make its appearance soon after daybreak at the nearest extremity of Hog Island, the position of which has been described in our introductory chapter. From this point a certain signal, that could be easily distinguished with the aid of a telescope, was to be made from the canoe, which, without being of a nature to attract the attention of the savages, was yet to be such as could not well be mistaken by the garrison. This was a precaution adopted, not only with the view of giving the earliest intimation of the result of the enterprise, but lest the Canadian should be prevented, by any closer investment on the part of the Indians, from communicating personally with the fort in the way he had been accustomed.
It will easily be comprehended therefore, that, as the period approached when they might reasonably look for the return of Francois, if he should return at all, the nervous anxiety of the officers became more and more developed. Upwards of a week had elapsed since the departure of their friends; and already, for the last day or two, their impatience had led them, at early dawn, and with beating hearts, to that quarter of the rampart which overlooked the eastern extremity of Hog Island. Hitherto, however, their eager watching had been in vain. As far as our recollection of the Canadian tradition of this story serves us, it must have been on the fourth night after the final discomfiture of the plans of Ponteac, and the tenth from the departure of the adventurers, that the officers were assembled in the mess-room, partaking of the scanty and frugal supper to which their long confinement had reduced them. The subject of their conversation, as it was ever of their thoughts, was the probable fate of their companions; and many and various, although all equally melancholy, were the conjectures offered as to the result. There was on the countenance of each, that deep and fixed expression of gloom, which, if it did not indicate any unmanliness of despair, told at least that hope was nearly extinct: but more especially was this remarkable in the young but sadly altered Charles de Haldimar, who, with a vacant eye and a pre-occupied manner, seemed wholly abstracted from the scene before him.
All was silence in the body of the fort. The men off duty had long since retired to rest in their clothes, and only the "All's well!" of the sentinels was heard at intervals of a quarter of an hour, as the cry echoed from mouth to mouth in the line of circuit. Suddenly, however, between two of those intervals, and during a pause in the languid conversation of the officers, the sharp challenge of a sentinel was heard, and then quick steps on the rampart, as of men hastening to the point whence the challenge had been given. The officers, whom this new excitement seemed to arouse into fresh activity, hurriedly quitted the room; and, with as little noise as possible, gained the spot where the voice had been heard. Several men were bending eagerly over the rampart, and, with their muskets at the recover, riveting their gaze on a dark and motionless object that lay on the verge of the ditch immediately beneath them.
"What have you here, Mitchell?" asked Captain Blessington, who was in command of the guard, and who had recognised the gruff voice of the veteran in the challenge just given.
"An American burnt log, your honour," muttered the soldier, "if one was to judge from its stillness; but if it is, it must have rolled there within the last minute; for I'll take my affidavy it wasn't here when I passed last in my beat."
"An American burnt log, indeed! it's some damned rascal of a spy, rather," remarked Captain Erskine. "Who knows but it may be our big friend, come to pay us a visit again? And yet he is not half long enough for him, either. Can't you try and tickle him with the bayonet, any of you fellows, and see whether he is made of flesh and blood?"
Although this observation was made almost without object, it being totally impossible for any musket, even with the addition of its bayonet, to reach more than half way across the ditch, the several sentinels threw themselves on their chests, and, stretching over the rampart as far as possible, made the attempt to reach the suspicious looking object that lay beyond. No sooner, however, had their arms been extended in such a manner as to be utterly powerless, when the dark mass was seen to roll away in an opposite direction, and with such rapidity that, before the men could regain their feet and level their muskets, it had entirely disappeared from their view.
"Cleverly managed, to give the red skin his due," half laughingly observed Captain Erskine, while his brother officers continued to fix their eyes in astonishment on the spot so recently occupied by the strange object; "but what the devil could be his motive for lying there so long? Not playing the eaves-dropper, surely; and yet, if he meant to have picked off a sentinel, what was to have prevented him from doing it sooner?"
"He had evidently no arms," said Ensign Delme.
"No, nor legs either, it would appear," resumed the literal Erskine. "Curse me if I ever saw any thing in the shape of a human form bundled together in that manner."
"I mean he had no fire-arms--no rifle," pursued Delme.
"And if he had, he certainly would have rifled one of us of a life," continued the captain, laughing at his own conceit. "But come, the bird is flown, and we have only to thank ourselves for having been so egregiously duped. Had Valletort been here, he would have given a different account of him."
"Hist! listen!" exclaimed Lieutenant Johnstone, calling the attention of the party to a peculiar and low sound in the direction in which the supposed Indian had departed.
It was repeated, and in a plaintive tone, indicating a desire to propitiate. Soon afterwards a human form was seen advancing slowly, but without show either of concealment or hostility in its movements. It finally remained stationary on the spot where the dark and shapeless mass had been first perceived.
"Another Oucanasta for De Haldimar, no doubt," observed Captain Erskine, after a moment's pause. "These grenadiers carry every thing before them as well in love as in war."
The error of the good-natured officer was, however, obvious to all but himself. The figure, which was now distinctly traced in outline for that of a warrior, stood boldly and fearlessly on the brink of the ditch, holding up its left arm, in the hand of which dangled something that was visible in the starlight, and pointing energetically to this pendant object with the other.
A voice from one of the party now addressed the Indian in two several dialects, but without eliciting a reply. He either understood not, or would not answer the question proposed, but continued pointing significantly to the indistinct object which he still held forth in an elevated position.
"The governor must be apprised of this," observed Captain Blessington to De Haldimar, who was his subaltern of the guard. "Hasten, Charles, to acquaint your father, and receive his orders."
The young officer willingly obeyed the injunction of his superior. A secret and indefinable hope rushed through his mind, that as the Indian came not in hostility, he might be the bearer of some communication from their friends; and he moved rapidly towards that part of the building occupied by his father.
The light of a lamp suspended over the piazza leading to the governor's rooms reflecting strongly on his regimentals, he passed unchallenged by the sentinels posted there, and uninterruptedly gained a door that opened on a narrow passage, at the further extremity of which was the sitting-room usually occupied by his parent. This again was entered from the same passage by a second door, the upper part of which was of common glass, enabling any one on the outside to trace with facility every object within when the place was lighted up.
A glance was sufficient to satisfy the youth his father was not in the room; although there was strong evidence he had not retired for the night. In the middle of the floor stood an oaken table, and on this lay an open writing desk, with a candle on each side, the wicks of which had burnt so long as to throw a partial gloom over the surrounding wainscotting. Scattered about the table and desk were a number of letters that had apparently been just looked at or read; and in the midst of these an open case of red morocco, containing a miniature. The appearance of these letters, thus left scattered about by one who was scrupulously exact in the arrangement of his papers, added to the circumstance of the neglected and burning candles, confirmed the young officer in an impression that his father, overcome by fatigue, had retired into his bed-room, and fallen unconsciously asleep. Imagining, therefore, he could not, without difficulty, succeed in making himself heard, and deeming the urgency of the case required it, he determined to wave the usual ceremony of knocking, and penetrate to his father's bedroom unannounced. The glass door being without fastening within, easily yielded to his pressure of the latch; but as he passed by the table, a strong and natural feeling of curiosity induced him to cast his eye upon the miniature. To his infinite surprise, nay, almost terror, he discovered it was that of his mother--the identical portrait which his sister Clara had worn in her bosom from infancy, and which he had seen clasped round her neck on the very deck of the schooner in which she sailed for Michilimackinac. He felt there could be no mistake, for only one miniature of the sort had ever been in possession of the family, and that the one just accounted for. Almost stupified at what he saw, and scarcely crediting the evidence of his senses, the young officer glanced his eye hurriedly along one of the open letters that lay around. It was in the well remembered hand-writing of his mother, and commenced, "Dear, dearest Reginald." After this followed expressions of endearment no woman might address except to an affianced lover, or the husband of her choice; and his heart sickened while he read. Scarcely, however, had he scanned half a dozen lines, when it occurred to him he was violating some secret of his parents; and, discontinuing the perusal with an effort, he prepared to acquit himself of his mission.
On raising his eyes from the paper he was startled by the appearance of his father, who, with a stern brow and a quivering lip, stood a few paces from the table, apparently too much overcome by his indignation to be able to utter a sentence.
Charles de Haldimar felt all the awkwardness of his position. Some explanation of his conduct, however, was necessary; and he stammered forth the fact of the portrait having riveted his attention, from its striking resemblance to that in his sister's possession.
"And to what do these letters bear resemblance?" demanded the governor, in a voice that trembled in its attempt to be calm, while he fixed his penetrating eye on that of his son. "THEY, it appears, were equally objects of attraction with you."
"The letters were in the hand-writing of my mother; and I was irresistibly led to glance at one of them," replied the youth, with the humility of conscious wrong. "The action was involuntary, and no sooner committed than repented of. I am here, my father, on a mission of importance, which must account for my presence."
"A mission of importance!" repeated the governor, with more of sorrow than of anger in the tone in which he now spoke. "On what mission are you here, if it be not to intrude unwarrantably on a parent's privacy?"
The young officer's cheek flushed high, as he proudly answered:--"I was sent by Captain Blessington, sir, to take your orders in regard to an Indian who is now without the fort under somewhat extraordinary circumstances, yet evidently without intention of hostility. It is supposed he bears some message from my brother."
The tone of candour and offended pride in which this formal announcement of duty was made seemed to banish all suspicion from the mind of the governor; and he remarked, in a voice that had more of the kindness that had latterly distinguished his address to his son, "Was this, then, Charles, the only motive for your abrupt intrusion at this hour? Are you sure no inducement of private curiosity was mixed up with the discharge of your duty, that you entered thus unannounced? You must admit, at least, I found you employed in a manner different from what the urgency of your mission would seem to justify."
There was lurking irony in this speech; yet the softened accents of his father, in some measure, disarmed the youth of the bitterness he would have flung into his observation,--"That no man on earth, his parent excepted, should have dared to insinuate such a doubt with impunity."
For a moment Colonel de Haldimar seemed to regard his son with a surprised but satisfied air, as if he had not expected the manifestation of so much spirit, in one whom he had been accustomed greatly to undervalue.
"I believe you, Charles," he at length observed; "forgive the justifiable doubt, and think no more of the subject. Yet, one word," as the youth was preparing to depart; "you have read that letter" (and he pointed to that which had principally arrested the attention of the officer): "what impression has it given you of your mother? Answer me sincerely. MY name," and his faint smile wore something of the character of triumph, "is not REGINALD, you know."
The pallid cheek of the young man flushed at this question. His own undisguised impression was, that his mother had cherished a guilty love for another than her husband. He felt the almost impiety of such a belief, but he could not resist the conviction that forced itself on his mind; the letter in her handwriting spoke for itself; and though the idea was full of wretchedness, he was unable to conquer it. Whatever his own inference might be, however, he could not endure the thought of imparting it to his father; he, therefore, answered evasively.
"Doubtless my mother had some dear relative of the name, and to him was this letter addressed; perhaps a brother, or an uncle. But I never knew," he pursued, with a look of appeal to his father, "that a second portrait of my mother existed. This is the very counterpart of Clara's."
"It may be the same," remarked the governor, but in a tone of indecision, that dented his faith in what he uttered.
"Impossible, my father. I accompanied Clara, if you recollect, as far as Lake Sinclair; and when I quitted the deck of the schooner to return, I particularly remarked my sister wore her mother's portrait, as usual, round her neck."
"Well, no matter about the portrait," hurriedly rejoined the governor; "yet, whatever your impression, Charles," and he spoke with a warmth that was far from habitual to him, "dare not to sully the memory of your mother by a doubt of her purity. An accident has given this letter to your inspection, but breathe not its contents to a human creature; above all, respect the being who gave you birth. Go, tell Captain Blessington to detain the Indian; I will join you immediately."
Strongly, yet confusedly, impressed with the singularity of the scene altogether, and more particularly with his father's strange admonition, the young officer quitted the room, and hastened to rejoin his companions. On reaching the rampart he found that the Indian, during his long absence, had departed; yet not without depositing, on the outer edge of the ditch, the substance to which he had previously directed their attention. At the moment of De Haldimar's approach, the officers were bending over the rampart, and, with straining eyes, endeavouring to make out what it was, but in vain; something was just perceptible in the withered turf, but what that something was no one could succeed in discovering.
"Whatever this be, we must possess ourselves of it," said Captain Blessington: "it is evident, from the energetic manner of him who left it, it is of importance. I think I know who is the best swimmer and climber of our party."
Several voices unanimously pronounced the name of "Johnstone."
"Any thing for a dash of enterprise," said that officer, whose slight wound had been perfectly healed. "But what do you propose that the swimmer and climber should do, Blessington?"
"Secure yon parcel, without lowering the drawbridge."
"What! and be scalped in the act? Who knows if it be not a trick after all, and that the rascal who placed it there is not lying within a few feet, ready to pounce upon me the instant I reach the bank."
"Never mind," said Erskine, laughingly, "we will revenge your death, my boy."
"Besides, consider the nunquam non paratus, Johnstone," slily remarked Lieutenant Leslie.
"What, again, Leslie?" energetically responded the young Scotsman. "Yet think not I hesitate, for I did but jest: make fast a rope round my loins, and I think I will answer for the result."
Colonel de Haldimar now made his appearance. Having heard a brief statement of the facts, and approving of the suggestion of Captain Blessington, a rope was procured, and made fast under the shoulders of the young officer, who had previously stripped himself of his uniform and shoes. He then suffered himself to drop gently over the edge of the rampart, his companions gradually lowering the rope, until a deep and gasping aspiration, such as is usually wrung from one coming suddenly in contact with cold water, announced he had gained the surface of the ditch. The rope was then slackened, to give him the unrestrained command of his limbs; and in the next instant he was seen clambering up the opposite elevation.
Although the officers, indulging in a forced levity, in a great degree meant to encourage their companion, had treated his enterprise with indifference, they were far from being without serious anxiety for the result. They had laughed at the idea, suggested by him, of being scalped; whereas, in truth, they entertained the apprehension far more powerfully than he did himself. The artifices resorted to by the savages, to secure an isolated victim, were so many and so various, that suspicion could not but attach to the mysterious occurrence they had just witnessed. Willing even as they were to believe their present visitor, whoever he was, came not in a spirit of enmity, they could not altogether divest themselves of a fear that it was only a subtle artifice to decoy one of them within the reach of their traitorous weapons. They, therefore, watched the movements of their companion with quickening pulses; and it was with a lively satisfaction they saw him, at length, after a momentary search, descend once more into the ditch, and, with a single powerful impulsion of his limbs, urge himself back to the foot of the rampart. Neither feet nor hands were of much service, in enabling him to scale the smooth and slanting logs that composed the exterior surface of the works; but a slight jerk of the well secured rope, serving as a signal to his friends, he was soon dragged once more to the summit of the rampart, without other injury than a couple of slight bruises.
"Well, what success?" eagerly asked Leslie and Captain Erskine in the same breath, as the dripping Johnstone buried himself in the folds of a capacious cloak procured during his absence.
"You shall hear," was the reply; "but first, gentlemen, allow me, if you please, to enjoy, with yourselves, the luxury of dry clothes. I have no particular ambition to contract an American ague fit just now; yet, unless you take pity on me, and reserve my examination for a future moment, there is every probability I shall not have a tooth left by to-morrow morning."
No one could deny the justice of the remark, for the teeth of the young man were chattering as he spoke. It was not, therefore, until after he had changed his dress, and swallowed a couple of glasses of Captain Erskine's never failing spirit, that they all repaired once more to the mess-room, when Johnstone anticipated all questions, by the production of the mysterious packet.
After removing several wrappers of bark, each of which was secured by a thong of deerskin, Colonel de Haldimar, to whom the successful officer had handed his prize, at length came to a small oval case of red morocco, precisely similar, in size and form, to that which had so recently attracted the notice of his son. For a moment he hesitated, and his cheek was observed to turn pale, and his hand to tremble; but quickly subduing his indecision, he hurriedly unfastened the clasp, and disclosed to the astonished view of the officers the portrait of a young and lovely woman, habited in the Highland garb.
Exclamations of various kinds burst from the lips of the group of officers. Several knew it to be the portrait of Mrs. de Haldimar; others recognised it from the striking likeness it bore to Clara and to Charles; all knew it had never been absent from the possession of the former since her mother's death; and feeling satisfied as they did that its extraordinary appearance among them, at the present moment, was an announcement of some dreadful disaster, their countenances wore an impress of dismay little inferior to that of the wretched Charles, who, agonized beyond all attempt at description, had thrown himself into a seat in the rear of the group, and sat like one bewildered, with his head buried in his hands.
"Gentlemen," at length observed Colonel de Haldimar, in a voice that proved how vainly his natural emotion was sought to be subdued by his pride, "this, I fear me, is an unwelcome token. It comes to announce to a father the murder of his child; to us all, the destruction of our last remaining friends and comrades."
"God forbid!" solemnly aspirated Captain Blessington. After a pause of a moment or two he pursued: "I know not why, sir; but my impression is, the appearance of this portrait, which we all recognise for that worn by Miss de Haldimar, bears another interpretation."
Colonel de Haldimar shook his head. --"I have but too much reason to believe," he observed, smiling in mournful bitterness, "it has been conveyed to us not in mercy but in revenge."
No one ventured to question why; for notwithstanding all were aware that in the mysterious ravisher of the wife of Halloway Colonel de Haldimar had a fierce and inexorable private enemy, no allusion had ever been made by that officer himself to the subject.
"Will you permit me to examine the portrait and envelopes, Colonel?" resumed Captain Blessington: "I feel almost confident, although I confess I have no other motive for it than what springs from a recollection of the manner of the Indian, that the result will bear me out in my belief the bearer came not in hostility but in friendship."
"By my faith, I quite agree with Blessington," said Captain Erskine; "for, in addition to the manner of the Indian, there is another evidence in favour of his position. Was it merely intended in the light in which you consider it, Colonel, the case or the miniature itself might have been returned, but certainly not the metal in which it is set. The savages are fully aware of the value of gold, and would not so easily let it slip through their fingers."
"And wherefore thus carefully wrapped up?" remarked Lieutenant Johnstone, "unless it had been intended it should meet with no injury on the way. I certainly think the portrait never would have been conveyed, in its present perfect state, by an enemy."
"The fellow seemed to feel, too, that he came in the character of one whose intentions claimed all immunity from harm," remarked Captain Wentworth. "He surely never would have stood so fearlessly on the brink of the ditch, and within pistol shot, had he not been conscious of rendering some service to those connected with us."
To these several observations of his officers, Colonel de Haldimar listened attentively; and although he made no reply, it was evident he felt gratified at the eagerness with which each sought to remove the horrible impression he had stated to have existed in his own mind. Meanwhile, Captain Blessington had turned and examined the miniature in fifty different ways, but without succeeding in discovering any thing that could confirm him in his original impression. Vexed and disappointed, he at length flung it from him on the table, and sinking into a seat at the side of the unfortunate Charles, pressed the hand of the youth in significant silence.
Finding his worst fears now confirmed. Colonel de Haldimar, for the first time, cast a glance towards his son, whose drooping head, and sorrowing attitude, spoke volumes to his heart. For a moment his own cheek blanched, and his eye was seen to glisten with the first tear ever witnessed there by those around him. Subduing his emotion, however, he drew up his person to its lordly height, as if that act reminded him the commander was not to be lost in the father, and quitting the room with a heavy brow and step, recommended to his officers the repose of which they appeared to stand so much in need. But not one was there who felt inclined to court the solitude of his pillow. No sooner were the footsteps of the governor heard dying away in the distance, when fresh lights were ordered, and several logs of wood heaped on the slackening fire. Around this the officers now grouped, and throwing themselves back in their chairs, assumed the attitudes of men seeking to indulge rather in private reflection than in personal converse.
The grief of the wretched Charles de Haldimar, hitherto restrained by the presence of his father, and encouraged by the touching evidences of interest afforded him by the ever-considerate Blessington, now burst forth audibly. No attempt was made by the latter officer to check the emotion of his young friend. Knowing his passionate fondness for his sister, he was not without fear that the sudden shock produced by the appearance of her miniature might destroy his reason, even if it affected not his life; and as the moment was now come when tears might be shed without exciting invidious remark in the only individual who was likely to make it, he sought to promote them as much as possible. Too much occupied in their own mournful reflections to bestow more than a passing notice on the weakness of their friend, the group round the fireplace scarcely seemed to have regarded his emotion.
This violent paroxysm past, De Haldimar breathed more freely; and, after listening to several earnest observations of Captain Blessington, who still held out the possibility of something favourable turning up, on a re-examination of the portrait by daylight, he was so far composed as to be able to attend to the summons of the sergeant of the guard, who came to say the relief were ready, and waiting to be inspected before they were finally marched off. Clasping the extended hand of his captain between his own, with a pressure indicative of his deep gratitude, De Haldimar now proceeded to the discharge of his duty; and having caught up the portrait, which still lay on the table, and thrust it into the breast of his uniform, he repaired hurriedly to rejoin his guard, from which circumstances alone had induced his unusually long absence.
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The remainder of that night was passed by the unhappy De Haldimar in a state of indescribable wretchedness. After inspecting the relief, he had thrown himself on his rude guard-bed; and, drawing his cloak over his eyes, given full rein to the wanderings of his excited imagination. It was in vain the faithful old Morrison, who never suffered his master to mount a guard without finding some one with whom to exchange his tour of duty, when he happened not to be in orders himself, repeatedly essayed, as he sat stirring the embers of the fire, to enter into conversation with him. The soul of the young officer was sick, past the endurance even of that kind voice; and, more than once, he impetuously bade him be silent, if he wished to continue where he was; or, if not, to join his comrades in the next guard-room. A sigh was the only respectful but pained answer to these sharp remonstrances; and De Haldimar, all absorbed even as he was in his own grief, felt it deeply; for he knew the old man loved him, and he could not bear the idea of appearing to repay with slight the well-intentioned efforts of one whom he had always looked upon more as a dependant on his family than as the mere rude soldier. Still he could not summon courage to disclose the true nature of his grief, which the other merely ascribed to general causes and vague apprehensions of a yet unaccomplished evil. Morrison had ever loved his sister with an affection in no way inferior to that which he bore towards himself. He had also nursed her in childhood; and his memory was ever faithful to trace, as his tongue was to dwell on, those gentle and amiable qualities, which, strongly marked at an earlier period of her existence, had only undergone change, inasmuch as they had become matured and more forcibly developed in womanhood. Often, latterly, had the grey-haired veteran been in the habit of alluding to her; for he saw the subject was one that imparted a mournful satisfaction to the youth; and, with a tact that years, more than deep reading of the human heart, had given him, he ever made a point of adverting to their re-union as an event admitting not of doubt.
Hitherto the affectionate De Haldimar had loved to listen to these sounds of comfort; for, although they carried no conviction to his mind, impressed as he was with the terrible curse of Ellen Halloway, and the consequent belief that his family were devoted to some fearful doom, still they came soothingly and unctuously to his sick soul; and, all deceptive even as he felt them to be, he found they created a hope which, while certain to be dispelled by calm after-reflection, carried a momentary solace to his afflicted spirit. But, now that he had every evidence his adored sister was no more, and that the illusion of hope was past for ever, to have heard her name even mentioned by one who, ignorant of the fearful truth the events of that night had elucidated, was still ready to renew a strain every chord of which had lost its power of harmony, was repugnant beyond bearing to his heart. At one moment he resolved briefly to acquaint the old man with the dreadful fact, but unwillingness to give pain prevented him; and, moreover, he felt the grief the communication would draw from the faithful servitor of his family must be of so unchecked a nature as to render his own sufferings even more poignant than they were. Neither had he (independently of all other considerations) resolution enough to forego the existence of hope in another, even although it had passed entirely away from himself. It was for these reasons he had so harshly and (for him) unkindly checked, the attempt of the old man at a conversation which he, at every moment, felt would be made to turn on the ill-fated Clara.
Miserable as he felt his position to be, it was not without satisfaction he again heard the voice of his sergeant summoning him to the inspection of another relief. This duty performed, and anxious to avoid the paining presence of his servant, he determined, instead of returning to his guard-room, to consume the hour that remained before day in pacing the ramparts. Leaving word with his subordinate, that, in the event of his being required, he might be found without difficulty, he ascended to that quarter of the works where the Indian had been first seen who had so mysteriously conveyed the sad token he still retained in his breast. It was on the same side with that particular point whence we have already stated a full view of the bridge with its surrounding scenery, together with the waters of the Detroit, where they were intersected by Hog Island, were distinctly commanded. At either of those points was stationed a sentinel, whose duty it was to extend his beat between the boxes used now rather as lines of demarcation than as places of temporary shelter, until each gained that of his next comrade, when they again returned to their own, crossing each other about half way: a system of precaution pursued by the whole of the sentinels in the circuit of the rampart.
The ostensible motive of the officer in ascending the works, was to visit his several posts; but no sooner had he found himself between the points alluded to, which happened to be the first in his course, than he seemed to be riveted there by a species of fascination. Not that there was any external influence to produce this effect, for the utmost stillness reigned both within and around the fort; and, but for the howling of some Indian wolf-dog in the distance, or the low and monotonous beat of their drums in the death-dance, there was nought that gave evidence of the existence of the dreadful enemy by whom they were beset. But the whole being of the acutely suffering De Haldimar was absorbed in recollections connected with the spot on which he stood. At one extremity was the point whence he had witnessed the dreadful tragedy of Halloway's death; at the other, that on which had been deposited the but too unerring record of the partial realisation of the horrors threatened at the termination of that tragedy; and whenever he attempted to pass each of these boundaries, he felt as if his limbs repugned the effort.
In the sentinels, his appearance among them excited but little surprise; for it was no uncommon thing for the officers of the guard to spend the greatest part of the night in visiting, in turn, the several more exposed points of the ramparts; and that it was now confined to one particular part, seemed not even to attract their notice. It was, therefore, almost wholly unremarked by his men, that the heart-stricken De Haldimar paced his quick and uncertain walk with an imagination filled with the most fearful forebodings, and with a heart throbbing with the most painful excitement. Hitherto, since the discovery of the contents of the packet, his mind had been so exclusively absorbed in stupifying grief for his sister, that his perception seemed utterly incapable of outstepping the limited sphere drawn around it; but now, other remembrances, connected with the localities, forced themselves upon his attention; and although, in all these, there was nothing that was not equally calculated to carry dismay and sorrow to his heart, still, in dividing his thoughts with the one supreme agony that bowed him down, they were rather welcomed than discarded. His mind was as a wheel, embracing grief within grief, multiplied to infinitude; and the wider and more diffusive the circle, the less powerful was the concentration of sickening heart and brain on that which was the more immediate axis of the whole.
Reminded, for the first time, as he pursued his measured but aimless walk, by the fatal portrait which he more than once pressed with feverish energy to his lips, of the singular discovery he had made that night in the apartments of his father, he was naturally led, by a chain of consecutive thought, into a review of the whole of the extraordinary scene. The fact of the existence of a second likeness of his mother was one that did not now fail to reawaken all the unqualified surprise he had experienced at the first discovery. So far from having ever heard his father make the slightest allusion to this memorial of his departed mother, he perfectly recollected his repeatedly recommending to Clara the safe custody of a treasure, which, if lost, could never be replaced. What could be the motive for this mystery? --and why had he sought to impress him with the belief it was the identical portrait worn by his sister which had so unintentionally been exposed to his view? Why, too, had he evinced so much anxiety to remove from his mind all unfavourable impressions in regard to his mother? Why have been so energetic in his caution not to suffer a taint of impurity to attach to her memory? Why should he have supposed the possibility of such impression, unless there had been sufficient cause for it? In what, moreover, originated his triumphant expression of feature, when, on that occasion, he reminded him that HIS name was not Reginald? Who, then, was this Reginald? Then came the recollection of what had been repeated to him of the parting scene between Halloway and his wife. In addressing her ill-fated husband, she had named him Reginald. Could it be possible this was the same being alluded to by his father? But no; his youth forbade the supposition, being but two years older than his brother Frederick; yet might he not, in some way or other, be connected with the Reginald of the letter? Why, too, had his father shown such unrelenting severity in the case of this unfortunate victim? --a severity which had induced more than one remark from his officers, that it looked as if he entertained some personal feeling of enmity towards a man who had done so much for his family, and stood so high in the esteem of all who knew him.
Then came another thought. At the moment of his execution, Halloway had deposited a packet in the hands of Captain Blessington;--could these letters--could that portrait be the same? Certain it was, by whatever means obtained, his father could not have had them long in his possession; for it was improbable letters of so old a date should have occupied his attention NOW, when many years had rolled over the memory of his mother. And then, again, what was the meaning of the language used by the implacable enemy of his father, that uncouth and ferocious warrior of the Fleur de lis, not only on the occasion of the execution of Halloway, but afterwards to his brother, during his short captivity; and, subsequently, when, disguised as a black, he penetrated, with the band of Ponteac, into the fort, and aimed his murderous weapon at his father's head. What had made him the enemy of his family? and where and how had originated his father's connection with so extraordinary and so savage a being? Could he, in any way, be implicated with his mother? But no; there was something revolting, monstrous, in the thought: besides, had not his father stood forward the champion of her innocence? --had he not declared, with an energy carrying conviction with every word, that she was untainted by guilt? And would he have done this, had he had reason to believe in the existence of a criminal love for him who evidently was his mortal foe? Impossible.
Such were the questions and solutions that crowded on and distracted the mind of the unhappy De Haldimar, who, after all, could arrive at no satisfactory conclusion. It was evident there was a secret,--yet, whatever its nature, it was one likely to go down with his father to the grave; for, however humiliating the reflection to a haughty parent, compelled to vindicate the honour of a mother to her son, and in direct opposition to evidence that scarcely bore a shadow of misinterpretation, it was clear he had motives for consigning the circumstance to oblivion, which far outweighed any necessity he felt of adducing other proofs of her innocence than those which rested on his own simple yet impressive assertion.
In the midst of these bewildering doubts, De Haldimar heard some one approaching in his rear, whose footsteps he distinguished from the heavy pace of the sentinels. He turned, stopped, and was presently joined by Captain Blessington.
"Why, dearest Charles," almost querulously asked the kind officer, as he passed his arm through that of his subaltern,--"why will you persist in feeding this love of solitude? What possible result can it produce, but an utter prostration of every moral and physical energy? Come, come, summon a little fortitude; all may not yet be so hopeless as you apprehend. For my own part, I feel convinced the day will dawn upon some satisfactory solution of the mystery of that packet."
"Blessington, my dear Blessington!" --and De Haldimar spoke with mournful energy,--"you have known me from my boyhood, and, I believe, have ever loved me; seek not, therefore, to draw me from the present temper of my mind; deprive me not of an indulgence which, melancholy as it is, now constitutes the sole satisfaction I take in existence."
"By Heaven! Charles, I will not listen to such language. You absolutely put my patience to the rack."
"Nay, then, I will urge no more," pursued the young officer. "To revert, therefore, to a different subject. Answer me one question with sincerity. What were the contents of the packet you received from poor Halloway previous to his execution? and in whose possession are they now?"
Pleased to find the attention of his young friend diverted for the moment from his sister, Captain Blessington quickly rejoiced, he believed the packet contained letters which Halloway had stated to him were of a nature to throw some light on his family connections. He had, however, transferred it, with the seal unbroken, as desired by the unhappy man, to Colonel de Haldimar.
An exclamation of surprise burst involuntarily from the lips of the youth. "Has my father ever made any allusion to that packet since?" he asked.
"Never," returned Captain Blessington; "and, I confess, his failing to do so has often excited my astonishment. But why do you ask?"
De Haldimar energetically pressed the arm of his captain, while a heavy sigh burst from his oppressed heart "This very night, Blessington, on entering my father's apartment to apprise him of what was going on here, I saw,--I can scarcely tell you what, but certainly enough to convince me, from what you have now stated, Halloway was, in some degree or other, connected with our family. Tell me," he anxiously pursued, "was there a portrait enclosed with the letters?"
"I cannot state with confidence, Charles," replied his friend; "but if I might judge from the peculiar form and weight of the packet, I should be inclined to say not. Have you seen the letters, then?"
"I have seen certain letters which, I have reason to believe, are the same," returned De Haldimar. "They were addressed to 'Reginald;' and Halloway, I think you have told me, was so called by his unhappy wife."
"There can be little doubt they are the same," said Captain Blessington; "but what were their contents, and by whom written, that you deem they prove a connection between the unhappy soldier and your family?"
De Haldimar felt the blood rise into his cheek, at this natural but unexpected demand. "I am sure, Blessington," he replied, after a pause, "you will not think me capable of unworthy mystery towards yourself but the contents of these letters are sacred, inasmuch as they relate only to circumstances connected with my father's family."
"This is singular indeed," exclaimed Captain Blessington, in a tone that marked his utter and unqualified astonishment at what had now been disclosed to him; "but surely, Charles," he pursued, "if the packet handed me by Halloway were the same you allude to, he would have caused the transfer to have been made before the period chosen by him for that purpose."
"But the name," pursued De Haldimar; "how are we to separate the identity of the packets, when we recur to that name of 'Reginald?'"
"True," rejoined the musing Blessington; "there is a mystery in this that baffles all my powers of penetration. Were I in possession of the contents of the letters, I might find some clue to solve the enigma: but--" "You surely do not mean this as a reproach, Blessington?" fervently interrupted the youth. "More I dare not, cannot say, for the secret is not my own; and feelings, which it would be dishonour to outrage, alone bind me to silence. What little I have revealed to you even now, has been uttered in confidence. I hope you have so understood it."
"Perfectly, Charles. What you have stated, goes no further; but we have been too long absent from our guard, and I confess I have no particular fancy for remaining in this chill night-air. Let us return."
De Haldimar made no opposition, and they both prepared to quit the rampart. As they passed the sentinel stationed at that point where the Indian had been first seen, their attention was directed by him to a fire that now suddenly rose, apparently at a great distance, and rapidly increased in volume. The singularity of this occurrence riveted the officers for a moment in silent observation; until Captain Blessington at length ventured a remark, that, judging from the direction, and the deceptive nature of the element at night, he should incline to think it was the hut of the Canadian burning.
"Which is another additional proof, were any such wanting, that every thing is lost," mournfully urged the ever apprehensive De Haldimar. "Francois has been detected in rendering aid to our friends; and the Indians, in all probability, after having immolated their victim, are sacrificing his property to their rage."
During this exchange of opinions, the officers had again moved to the opposite point of the limited walk of the younger. Scarcely had they reached it, and before Captain Blessington could find time to reply to the fears of his friend, when a loud and distant booming like that of a cannon was heard in the direction of the fire. The alarm was given hastily by the sentinels, and sounds of preparation and arming were audible in the course of a minute or two every where throughout the fort. Startled by the report, which they had half inclined to imagine produced by the discharge of one of their own guns, the half slumbering officers had quitted the chairs in which they had passed the night in the mess-room, and were soon at the side of their more watchful companions, then anxiously listening for a repetition of the sound.
The day was just beginning to dawn, and as the atmosphere cleared gradually away, it was perceived the fire rose not from the hut of the Canadian, but at a point considerably beyond it. Unusual as it was to see a large fire of this description, its appearance became an object of minor consideration, since it might be attributed to some caprice or desire on the part of the Indians to excite apprehension in their enemies. But how was the report which had reached their ears to be accounted for? It evidently could only have been produced by the discharge of a cannon; and if so, where could the Indians have procured it? No such arm had recently been in their possession; and if it were, they were totally unacquainted with the manner of serving it.
As the day became more developed, the mystery was resolved. Every telescope in the fort had been called into requisition; and as they were now levelled in the direction of the fire, sweeping the line of horizon around, exclamations of surprise escaped the lips of several.
"The fire is at the near extremity of the wood on Hog Island," exclaimed Lieutenant Johnstone. "I can distinctly see the forms of a multitude of savages dancing round it with hideous gestures and menacing attitudes."
"They are dancing their infernal war dance," said Captain Wentworth. "How I should like to be able to discharge a twenty-four pound battery, loaded with grape, into the very heart of the devilish throng."
"Do you see any prisoners? --Are any of our friends among them?" eagerly and tremblingly enquired De Haldimar of the officer who had last spoken.
Captain Wentworth made a sweep of his glass along the shores of the island; but apparently without success. He announced that he could discover nothing but a vast number of bark canoes lying dry and upturned on the beach.
"It is an unusual hour for their war dance," observed Captain Blessington. "My experience furnishes me with no one instance in which it has not been danced previous to their retiring to rest."
"Unless," said Lieutenant Boyce, "they should have been thus engaged all night; in which case the singularity may be explained."
"Look, look," eagerly remarked Lieutenant Johnstone--"see how they are flying to their canoes, bounding and leaping like so many devils broke loose from their chains. The fire is nearly deserted already."
"The schooner--the schooner!" shouted Captain Erskine. "By Heaven, our own gallant schooner! see how beautifully she drives past the island. It was her gun we heard, intended as a signal to prepare us for her appearance."
A thrill of wild and indescribable emotion passed through every heart. Every eye was turned upon the point to which attention was now directed. The graceful vessel, with every stitch of canvass set, was shooting rapidly past the low bushes skirting the sands that still concealed her hull; and in a moment or two she loomed largely and proudly on the bosom of the Detroit, the surface of which was slightly curled with a north-western breeze.
"Safe, by Jupiter!" exclaimed the delighted Erskine, dropping the glass upon the rampart, and rubbing his hands together with every manifestation of joy.
"The Indians are in chase," said Lieutenant Boyce; "upwards of fifty canoes are following in the schooner's wake. But Danvers will soon give us an account of their Lilliputian fleet."
"Let the troops be held in readiness for a sortie, Mr. Lawson," said the governor, who had joined his officers just as the schooner cleared the island; "we must cover their landing, or, with this host of savages in pursuit, they will never effect it alive."
During the whole of this brief but exciting scene, the heart of Charles de Haldimar beat audibly. A thousand hopes and fears rushed confusedly on his mind, and he was as one bewildered by, and scarcely crediting what he saw. Could Clara,--could his cousin--could his brother--could his friend be on board? He scarcely dared to ask himself these questions; still it was with a fluttering heart, in which hope, however, predominated, that he hastened to execute an order of his captain, that bore immediate reference to his duty as subaltern of the guard.
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Meanwhile the schooner dashed rapidly along, her hull occasionally hid from the view of those assembled on the ramparts by some intervening orchard or cluster of houses, but her tall spars glittering in their covering of white canvass, and marking the direction of her course. At length she came to a point in the river that offered no other interruption to the eye than what arose from the presence of almost all the inhabitants of the village, who, urged by curiosity and surprise, were to be seen crowding the intervening bank. Here the schooner was suddenly put about, and the English colours, hitherto concealed by the folds of the canvass, were at length discovered proudly floating in the breeze.
Immediately over the gateway of the fort there was an elevated platform, approached by the rampart, of which it formed a part, by some half dozen rude steps on either side; and on this platform was placed a long eighteen pounder, that commanded the whole extent of road leading from the drawbridge to the river. Hither the officers had all repaired, while the schooner was in the act of passing the town; and now that, suddenly brought up in the wind's eye, she rode leisurely in the offing, every movement on her decks was plainly discernible with the telescope.
"Where the devil can Danvers have hid all his crew?" first spoke Captain Erskine; "I count but half a dozen hands altogether on deck, and these are barely sufficient to work her."
"Lying concealed, and ready, no doubt, to give the canoes a warm reception," observed Lieutenant Johnstone; "but where can our friends be? Surely, if there, they would show themselves to us."
There was truth in this remark; and each felt discouraged and disappointed that they did not appear.
"There come the whooping hell fiends," said Major Blackwater. "By Heaven! the very water is darkened with the shadows of their canoes."
Scarcely had he spoken, when the vessel was suddenly surrounded by a multitude of savages, whose fierce shouts rent the air, while their dripping paddles, gleaming like silver in the rays of the rising sun, were alternately waved aloft in triumph, and then plunged into the troubled element, which they spurned in fury from their blades.
"What can Danvers be about? Why does he not either open his fire, or crowd sail and away from them?" exclaimed several voices.
"The detachment is in readiness, sir," said Mr. Lawson, ascending the platform, and addressing Major Blackwater.
"The deck, the deck!" shouted Erskine.
Already the eyes of several were bent in the direction alluded to by the last speaker, while those whose attention had been diverted by the approaching canoes glanced rapidly to the same point. To the surprise and consternation of all, the tall and well-remembered form of the warrior of the Fleur de lis was seen towering far above the bulwarks of the schooner; and with an expression in the attitude he had assumed, which no one could mistake for other than that of triumphant defiance. Presently he drew from the bosom of his hunting coat a dark parcel, and springing into the rigging of the main-mast, ascended with incredible activity to the point where the English ensign was faintly floating in the breeze. This he tore furiously away, and rending it into many pieces, cast the fragments into the silver element beneath him, on whose bosom they were seen to float among the canoes of the savages, many of whom possessed themselves, with eagerness, of the gaudy coloured trophies. The dark parcel was now unfolded by the active warrior, who, after having waved it several times round his head, commenced attaching it to the lines whence the English ensign had so recently been torn. It was a large black flag, the purport of which was too readily comprehended by the excited officers.
"D--n the ruffian! can we not manage to make that, flag serve as his own winding sheet?" exclaimed Captain Erskine. "Come, Wentworth, give us a second edition of the sortie firing; I know no man who understands pointing a gun better than yourself, and this eighteen pounder might do some mischief."
The idea was instantly caught at by the officer of artillery, who read his consent in the eye of Colonel de Haldimar. His companions made way on either side; and several gunners, who were already at their stations, having advanced to work the piece at the command of their captain, it was speedily brought to bear upon the schooner.
"This will do, I think," said Wentworth, as, glancing his experienced eye carefully along the gun, he found it pointed immediately on the gigantic frame of the warrior. "If this chain-shot miss him, it will be through no fault of mine."
Every eye was now riveted on the main-mast of the schooner, where the warrior was still engaged in attaching the portentous flag. The gunner, who held the match, obeyed the silent signal of his captain; and the massive iron was heard rushing past the officers, bound on its murderous mission. A moment or two of intense anxiety elapsed; and when at length the rolling volumes of smoke gradually floated away, to the dismay and disappointment of all, the fierce warrior was seen standing apparently unharmed on the same spot in the rigging. The shot had, however, been well aimed, for a large rent in the outstretched canvass, close at his side, and about mid-height of his person, marked the direction it had taken. Again he tore away, and triumphantly waved the black flag around his head, while from his capacious lungs there burst yells of defiance and scorn, that could be distinguished for his own even at that distance. This done, he again secured the death symbol to its place; and gliding to the deck by a single rope, appeared to give orders to the few men of the crew who were to be seen; for every stitch of canvass was again made to fill, and the vessel, bounding forward before the breeze then blowing upon her quarter, shot rapidly behind the town, and was finally seen to cast anchor in the navigable channel that divides Hog Island from the shores of Canada.
At the discharge of the eighteen pounder, the river had been suddenly cleared, as if by magic, of every canoe; while, warned by the same danger, the groups of inhabitants, assembled on the bank, had rushed for shelter to their respective homes; so that, when the schooner disappeared, not a vestige of human life was to be seen along that vista so recently peopled with human forms. An order from Colonel de Haldimar to the adjutant, countermanding the sortie, was the first interruption to the silence that had continued to pervade the little band of officers; and two or three of these having hastened to the western front of the rampart, in order to obtain a more distinct view of the movements of the schooner, their example was speedily followed by the remainder, all of whom now quitted the platform, and repaired to the same point.
Here, with the aid of their telescopes, they again distinctly commanded a view of the vessel, which lay motionless close under the sandy beach of the island, and exhibiting all the technicalities of skill in the disposition of sails and yards peculiar to the profession. In vain, however, was every eye strained to discover, among the multitude of savages that kept momentarily leaping to her deck, the forms of those in whom they were most interested. A group of some half dozen men, apparently common sailors, and those, in all probability, whose services had been compelled in the working of the vessel, were the only evidences that civilised man formed a portion of that grotesque assemblage. These, with their arms evidently bound behind their backs, and placed on one of the gangways, were only visible at intervals, as the band of savages that surrounded them, brandishing their tomahawks around their heads, occasionally left an opening in their circle. The formidable warrior of the Fleur de lis was no longer to be seen, although the flag which he had hoisted still fluttered in the breeze.
"All is lost, then," ejaculated the governor, with a mournfulness of voice and manner that caused many of his officers to turn and regard him with surprise. "That black flag announces the triumph of my foe in the too certain destruction of my children. Now, indeed," he concluded in a lower tone, "for the first time, does the curse of Ellen Halloway sit heavily on my soul."
A deep sigh burst from one immediately behind him. The governor turned suddenly round, and beheld his son. Never did human countenance wear a character of more poignant misery than that of the unhappy Charles at the moment. Attracted by the report of the cannon, he had flown to the rampart to ascertain the cause, and had reached his companions only to learn the strong hope so recently kindled in his breast was fled for ever. His cheek, over which hung his neglected hair, was now pale as marble, and his lips bloodless and parted; yet, notwithstanding this intensity of personal sorrow, a tear had started to his eye, apparently wrung from him by this unusual expression of dismay in his father.
"Charles--my son--my only now remaining child," murmured the governor with emotion, as he remarked, and started at the death-like image of the youth; "look not thus, or you will utterly unman me."
A sudden and involuntary impulse caused him to extend his arms. The young officer sprang forward into the proffered embrace, and sank his head upon the cheek of his father. It was the first time he had enjoyed that privilege since his childhood; and even overwhelmed as he was by his affliction, he felt it deeply.
This short but touching scene was witnessed by their companions, without levity in any, and with emotion by several. None felt more gratified at this demonstration of parental affection for the sensitive boy, than Blessington and Erskine.
"I cannot yet persuade myself," observed the former officer, as the colonel again assumed that dignity of demeanour which had been momentarily lost sight of in the ebullition of his feelings,--"I cannot yet persuade myself things are altogether so bad as they appear. It is true the schooner is in the possession of the enemy, but there is nothing to prove our friends are on board."
"If you had reason to know HIM into whose hands she has fallen, as I do, you would think differently, Captain Blessington," returned the governor. "That mysterious being," he pursued, after a short pause, "would never have made this parade of his conquest, had it related merely to a few lives, which to him are of utter insignificance. The very substitution of yon black flag, in his insolent triumph, was the pledge of redemption of a threat breathed in my ear within this very fort: on what occasion I need not state, since the events connected with that unhappy night are still fresh in the recollections of us all. That he is my personal enemy, gentlemen, it would be vain to disguise from you; although who he is, or of what nature his enmity, it imports not now to enter upon Suffice it, I have little doubt my children are in his power; but whether the black flag indicates they are no more, or that the tragedy is only in preparation, I confess I am at a loss to understand."
Deeply affected by the evident despondency that had dictated these unusual admissions on the part of their chief, the officers were forward to combat the inferences he had drawn: several coinciding in the opinion now expressed by Captain Wentworth, that the fact of the schooner having fallen into the hands of the savages by no means implied the capture of the fort whence she came; since it was not at all unlikely she had been chased during a calm by the numerous canoes into the Sinclair, where, owing to the extreme narrowness of the river, she had fallen an easy prey.
"Moreover," observed Captain Blessington, "it is highly improbable the ferocious warrior could have succeeded in capturing any others than the unfortunate crew of the schooner; for had this been the case, he would not have lost the opportunity of crowning his triumph by exhibiting his victims to our view in some conspicuous part of the vessel."
"This, I grant you," rejoined the governor, "to be one solitary circumstance in our favour; but may it not, after all, merely prove that our worst apprehensions are already realised?"
"He is not one, methinks, since vengeance seems his aim, to exercise it in so summary, and therefore merciful, a manner. Depend upon it, colonel, had any of those in whom we are more immediately interested, fallen into his hands, he would not have failed to insult and agonize us by an exhibition of his prisoners."
"You are right, Blessington," exclaimed Charles de Haldimar, in a voice that his choking feelings rendered almost sepulchral; "he is not one to exercise his vengeance in a summary, and merciful manner. The deed is yet unaccomplished, for even now the curse of Ellen Halloway rings again in my ear, and tells me the atoning blood must be spilt on the grave of her husband."
The peculiar tone in which these words were uttered, caused every one present to turn and regard the speaker, for they recalled the prophetic language of the unhappy woman. There was now a wildness of expression in his handsome features, marking the mind utterly dead to hope, yet struggling to work itself up to passive endurance of the worst. Colonel de Haldimar sighed painfully, as he bent his eye half reproachfully on the dull and attenuated features of his son; and although he spoke not, his look betrayed the anguish that allusion had called up to his heart.
"Forgive me, my father," exclaimed the youth, grasping a hand that was reluctantly extended. "I meant it not in unkindness; but indeed I have ever had the conviction strongly impressed on my spirit. I know I appear weak, childish, unsoldierlike; yet can it be wondered at, when I have been so often latterly deceived by false hopes, that now my heart has room for no other tenant than despair. I am very wretched," he pursued, with affecting despondency; "in the presence of my companions do I admit it, but they all know how I loved my sister. Can they then feel surprise, that having lost not only her, but my brother and my friend, I should be the miserable thing I am."
Colonel de Haldimar turned away, much affected; and throwing his back against the sentry box near him, passed his hand over his eyes, and remained for a few moments motionless.
"Charles, Charles, is this your promise to me?" whispered Captain Blessington, as he approached and took the hand of his unhappy friend. "Is this the self-command you pledged yourself to exercise? For Heaven's sake, agitate not your father thus, by the indulgence of a grief that can have no other tendency than to render him equally wretched. Be advised by me, and quit the rampart. Return to your guard, and endeavour to compose yourself."
"Ha! what new movement is that on the part of the savages?" exclaimed Captain Erskine, who had kept his glass to his eye mechanically, and chiefly with a view of hiding the emotion produced in him by the almost infantine despair of the younger De Haldimar: "surely it is--yet, no, it cannot be--yes, see how they are dragging several prisoners from the wood to the beach. I can distinctly see a man in a blanket coat, and two others considerably taller, and apparently sailors. But look, behind them are two females in European dress. Almighty Heaven! there can be no doubt."
A painful pause ensued. Every other glass and eye was levelled in the same direction; and, even as Erskine had described it, a party of Indians were seen, by those who had the telescopes, conducting five prisoners towards a canoe that lay in the channel communicating from the island with the main land on the Detroit shore. Into the bottom of these they were presently huddled, so that only their heads and shoulders were visible above the gunwale of the frail bark. Presently a tall warrior was seen bounding from the wood towards the beach. The crowd of gesticulating Indians made way, and the warrior was seen to stoop and apply his shoulder to the canoe, one half of which was high and dry upon the sands. The heavily laden vessel obeyed the impetus with a rapidity that proved the muscular power of him who gave it. Like some wild animal, instinct with life, it lashed the foaming waters from its bows, and left a deep and gurgling furrow where it passed. As it quitted the shore, the warrior sprang lightly in, taking his station at the stern; and while his tall and remarkable figure bent nimbly to the movement, he dashed his paddle from right to left alternately in the stream, with a quickness that rendered it almost invisible to the eye. Presently the canoe disappeared round an intervening headland, and the officers lost sight of it altogether.
"The portrait, Charles; what have you done with the portrait?" exclaimed Captain Blessington, actuated by a sudden recollection, and with a trepidation in his voice and manner that spoke volumes of despair to the younger De Haldimar. "This is our only hope of solving the mystery. Quick, give me the portrait, if you have it."
The young officer hurriedly tore the miniature from the breast of his uniform, and pitched it through the interval that separated him from his captain, who stood a few feet off; but with so uncertain and trembling an aim, it missed the hand extended to secure it, and fell upon the very stone the youth had formerly pointed out to Blessington, as marking the particular spot on which he stood during the execution of Halloway. The violence of the fall separated the back of the frame from the picture itself, when suddenly a piece of white and crumpled paper, apparently part of the back of a letter, yet cut to the size and shape of the miniature, was exhibited to the view of all.
"Ha!" resumed the gratified Blessington, as he stooped to possess himself of the prize; "I knew the miniature would be found to contain some intelligence from our friends. It is only this moment it occurred to me to take it to pieces, but accident has anticipated my purpose. May the omen prove a good one! But what have we here?"
With some difficulty, the anxious officer now succeeded in making out the characters, which, in default of pen or pencil, had been formed by the pricking of a fine pin on the paper. The broken sentences, on which the whole of the group now hung with greedy ear, ran nearly as follows:--"All is lost. Michilimackinac is taken. We are prisoners, and doomed to die within eight and forty hours. Alas! Clara and Madeline are of our number. Still there is a hope, if my father deem it prudent to incur the risk. A surprise, well managed, may do much; but it must be tomorrow night; forty-eight hours more, and it will be of no avail. He who will deliver this is our friend, and the enemy of my father's enemy. He will be in the same spot at the same hour to-morrow night, and will conduct the detachment to wherever we may chance to be. If you fail in your enterprise, receive our last prayers for a less disastrous fate. God bless you all!"
The blood ran coldly through every vein during the perusal of these important sentences, but not one word of comment was offered by an individual of the group. No explanation was necessary. The captives in the canoe, the tall warrior in its stern, all sufficiently betrayed the horrible truth.
Colonel de Haldimar at length turned an enquiring look at his two captains, and then addressing the adjutant, asked-- "What companies are off duty to-day, Mr. Lawson?"
"Mine," said Blessington, with an energy that denoted how deeply rejoiced he felt at the fact, and without giving the adjutant time to reply.
"And mine," impetuously added Captain Erskine; "and, by G--! I will answer for them; they never embarked on a duty of the sort with greater zeal than they will on this occasion."
"Gentlemen, I thank you," said Colonel de Haldimar, with deep emotion, as he stepped forward and grasped in turn the hands of the generous-hearted officers. "To Heaven, and to your exertions, do I commit my children."
"Any artillery, colonel?" enquired the officer of that corps.
"No, Wentworth, no artillery. Whatever remains to be done, must be achieved by the bayonet alone, and under favour of the darkness. Gentlemen, again I thank you for this generous interest in my children--this forwardness in an enterprise on which depend the lives of so many dear friends. I am not one given to express warm emotion, but I do, indeed, appreciate this conduct deeply." He then moved away, desiring Mr. Lawson, as he quitted the rampart, to cause the men for this service to be got in instant readiness.
Following the example of their colonel, Captains Blessington and Erskine quitted the rampart also, hastening to satisfy themselves by personal inspection of the efficiency in all respects of their several companies; and in a few minutes, the only individual to be seen in that quarter of the works was the sentinel, who had been a silent and pained witness of all that had passed among his officers.
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Doubtless, many of our readers are prepared to expect that the doom of the unfortunate Frank Halloway was, as an officer of his regiment had already hinted, the fruit of some personal pique and concealed motive of vengeance; and that the denouement of our melancholy story will afford evidence of the governor's knowledge of the true character of him, who, under an assumed name, excited such general interest at his trial and death, not only among his military superiors, but those with whom his adverse destiny had more immediately associated him. It has already been urged to us, by one or two of our critical friends to whom we have submitted what has been thus far written in our tale, that, to explain satisfactorily and consistently the extreme severity of the governor, some secret and personally influencing motive must be assigned; but to these we have intimated, what we now repeat,--namely, that we hope to bear out our story, by natural explanation and simple deduction. Who Frank Halloway really was, or what the connection existing between him and the mysterious enemy of the family of De Haldimar, the sequel of our narrative will show; but whatever its nature, and however well founded the apprehension of the governor of the formidable being hitherto known as the warrior of the Fleur de lis, and however strong his conviction that the devoted Halloway and his enemy were in secret correspondence, certain it is, that, to the very hour of the death of the former, he knew him as no other than the simple private soldier.
To have ascribed to Colonel de Haldimar motives that would have induced his eagerly seeking the condemnation of an innocent man, either to gratify a thirst of vengeance, or to secure immunity against personal danger, would have been to have painted him, not only as a villain, but a coward. Colonel de Haldimar was neither; but, on the contrary, what is understood in worldly parlance and the generally received acceptation of the terms, a man of strict integrity and honour, as well as of the most undisputed courage. Still, he was a severe and a haughty man,--one whose military education had been based on the principles of the old school--and to whom the command of a regiment afforded a field for the exercise of an orthodox despotism, that could not be passed over without the immolation of many a victim on its rugged surface. Without ever having possessed any thing like acute feeling, his heart, as nature had formed it, was moulded to receive the ordinary impressions of humanity; and had he been doomed to move in the sphere of private life, if he had not been distinguished by any remarkable sensibilities, he would not, in all probability, have been conspicuous for any extraordinary cruelties. Sent into the army, however, at an early age, and with a blood not remarkable for its mercurial aptitudes, he had calmly and deliberately imbibed all the starched theories and standard prejudices which a mind by no means naturally gifted was but too well predisposed to receive; and he was among the number of those (many of whom are indigenous to our soil even at the present day) who look down from a rank obtained, upon that which has been just quitted, with a contempt, and coldness, and consciousness of elevation, commensurate only with the respect paid to those still above them, and which it belongs only to the little-minded to indulge in.
As a subaltern, M. de Haldimar had ever been considered a pattern of rigid propriety and decorum of conduct. Not the shadow of military crime had ever been laid to his charge. He was punctual at all parades and drills; kept the company to which he was attached in a perfect hot water of discipline; never missed his distance in marching past, or failed in a military manoeuvre; paid his mess-bill regularly to the hour, nay, minute, of the settling day; and was never, on any one occasion, known to enter the paymaster's office, except on the well-remembered 24th of each month; and, to crown all, he had never asked, consequently never obtained, a day's leave from his regiment, although he had served in it so long, that there was now but one man living who had entered it with him. With all these qualities, Ensign de Haldimar promised to make an excellent soldier; and, as such, was encouraged by the field-officers of the corps, who unhesitatingly pronounced him a lad of discernment and talent, who would one day rival them in all the glorious privileges of martinetism. It was even remarked, as an evidence of his worth, that, when promoted to a lieutenancy, he looked down upon the ensigns with that becoming condescension which befitted his new rank; and up to the captains with the deferential respect he felt to be due to that third step in the five-barred gate of regimental promotion, on which his aspiring but chained foot had not yet succeeded in reposing. What, therefore, he became when he had succeeded in clambering to the top, and looked down from the lordly height he had after many years of plodding service obtained, we must leave it to the imaginations of our readers to determine. We reserve it to a future page, to relate more interesting particulars.
Sufficient has been shown, however, from this outline of his character, as well as from the conversations among his officers, elsewhere transcribed, to account for the governor's conduct in the case of Halloway. That the recommendation of his son, Captain de Haldimar, had not been attended to, arose not from any particular ill-will towards the unhappy man, but simply because he had always been in the habit of making his own selections from the ranks, and that the present recommendation had been warmly urged by one who he fancied pretended to a discrimination superior to his own, in pointing out merits that had escaped his observation. It might be, too, that there was a latent pride about the manner of Halloway that displeased and dissatisfied one who looked upon his subordinates as things that were amenable to the haughtiness of his glance,--not enough of deference in his demeanour, or of supplicating obsequiousness in his speech, to entitle him to the promotion prayed for. Whatever the motive, there was nothing of personality to influence him in the rejection of the appeal made in favour of one who had never injured him; but who, on the contrary, as the whole of the regiment could attest, had saved the life of his son.
Rigid disciplinarian as he was, and holding himself responsible for the safety of the garrison it was but natural, when the discovery had been made of the unaccountable unfastening of the gate of the fort, suspicion of no ordinary kind should attach to the sentinel posted there; and that he should steadily refuse all credence to a story wearing so much appearance of improbability. Proud, and inflexible, and bigoted to first impressions, his mind was closed against those palliating circumstances, which, adduced by Halloway in his defence, had so mainly contributed to stamp the conviction of his moral innocence on the minds of his judges and the attentive auditory; and could he even have conquered his pride so far as to have admitted the belief of that innocence, still the military crime of which he had been guilty, in infringing a positive order of the garrison, was in itself sufficient to call forth all the unrelenting severity of his nature. Throughout the whole of the proceedings subsequently instituted, he had acted and spoken from a perfect conviction of the treason of the unfortunate soldier, and with the fullest impression of the falsehood of all that had been offered in his defence. The considerations that influenced the minds of his officers, found no entrance into his proud breast, which was closed against every thing but his own dignified sense of superior judgment. Could he, like them, have given credence to the tale of Halloway, or really have believed that Captain de Haldimar, educated under his own military eye, could have been so wanting in subordination, as not merely to have infringed a positive order of the garrison, but to have made a private soldier of that garrison accessary to his delinquency, it is more than probable his stern habits of military discipline would have caused him to overlook the offence of the soldier, in deeper indignation at the conduct of the infinitely more culpable officer; but not one word did he credit of a statement, which he assumed to have been got up by the prisoner with the mere view of shielding himself from punishment: and when to these suspicions of his fidelity was attached the fact of the introduction of his alarming visitor, it must be confessed his motives for indulging in this belief were not without foundation.
The impatience manifested during the trial of Halloway was not a result of any desire of systematic persecution, but of a sense of wounded dignity. It was a thing unheard of, and unpardonable in his eyes, for a private soldier to assert, in his presence, his honour and his respectability in extenuation, even while admitting the justice of a specific charge; and when he remarked the Court listening with that profound attention, which the peculiar history of the prisoner had excited, he could not repress the manifestation of his anger. In justice to him, however, it must be acknowledged that, in causing the charge, to which the unfortunate man pleaded guilty, to be framed, he had only acted from the conviction that, on the two first, there was not sufficient evidence to condemn one whose crime was as clearly established, to his judgment, as if he had been an eye-witness of the treason. It is true, he availed himself of Halloway's voluntary confession, to effect his condemnation; but estimating him as a traitor, he felt little delicacy was necessary to be observed on that score.
Much of the despotic military character of Colonel de Haldimar had been communicated to his private life; so much, indeed, that his sons,--both of whom, it has been seen, were of natures that belied their origin from so stern a stock,--were kept at nearly as great a distance from him as any other subordinates of his regiment. But although he seldom indulged in manifestations of parental regard towards those whom he looked upon rather as inferiors in military rank, than as beings connected with him by the ties of blood, Colonel de Haldimar was not without that instinctive love for his children, which every animal in the creation feels for its offspring. He, also, valued and took a pride in, because they reflected a certain degree of lustre upon himself, the talents and accomplishments of his eldest son, who, moreover, was a brave, enterprising officer, and, only wanted, in his father's estimation, that severity of carriage and hauteur of deportment, befitting HIS son, to render him perfect. As for Charles,--the gentle, bland, winning, universally conciliating Charles,--he looked upon him as a mere weak boy, who could never hope to arrive at any post of distinction, if only by reason of the extreme delicacy of his physical organisation; and to have shown any thing like respect for his character, or indulged in any expression of tenderness for one so far below his estimate of what a soldier, a child of his, ought to be, would have been a concession of which his proud nature was incapable. In his daughter Clara, however, the gentleness of sex claimed that warmer affection which was denied to him, who resembled her in almost every attribute of mind and person. Colonel de Haldimar doated on his daughter with a tenderness, for which few, who were familiar with his harsh and unbending nature, ever gave him credit. She was the image of one on whom all of love that he had ever known had been centered; and he had continued in Clara an affection, that seemed in itself to form a portion, distinct and apart, of his existence.
We have already seen, as stated by Charles de Haldimar to the unfortunate wife of Halloway, with what little success he had pleaded in the interview he had requested of his father, for the preserver of his gallant brother's life; and we have also seen how equally inefficient was the lowly and supplicating anguish of that wretched being, when, on quitting the apartment of his son, Colonel de Haldimar had so unexpectedly found himself clasped in her despairing embrace. There was little to be expected from an intercession on the part of one claiming so little ascendancy over his father's heart, as the universally esteemed young officer; still less from one who, in her shriek of agony, had exposed the haughty chief to the observation both of men and officers, and under circumstances that caused his position to border on the ludicrous. But however these considerations might have failed in effect, there was another which, as a soldier, he could not wholly overlook. Although he had offered no comment on the extraordinary recommendation to mercy annexed to the sentence of the prisoner, it had had a certain weight with him; and he felt, all absolute even as he was, he could not, without exciting strong dissatisfaction among his troops, refuse attention to a document so powerfully worded, and bearing the signature and approval of so old and valued an officer as Captain Blessington. His determination, therefore, had been formed, even before his visit to his son, to act as circumstances might require; and, in the mean while, he commanded every preparation for the execution to be made.
In causing a strong detachment to be marched to the conspicuous point chosen for his purpose, he had acted from a conviction of the necessity of showing the enemy the treason of the soldier had been detected; reserving to himself the determination of carrying the sentence into full effect, or pardoning the condemned, as the event might warrant. Not one moment, meanwhile, did he doubt the guilt of Halloway, whose description of the person of his enemy was, in itself, to him, confirmatory evidence of his treason. It is doubtful whether he would, in any way, have been influenced by the recommendation of the Court, had the first charges been substantiated; but as there was nothing but conjecture to bear out these, and as the prisoner had been convicted only on the ground of suffering Captain de Haldimar to quit the fort contrary to orders, he felt he might possibly go too far in carrying the capital punishment into effect, in decided opposition to the general feeling of the garrison,--both of officers and men.
When the shot was subsequently fired from the hut of the Canadian, and the daring rifleman recognised as the same fearful individual who had gained access to his apartment the preceding night, conviction of the guilt of Halloway came even deeper home to the mind of the governor. It was through Francois alone that a communication was kept up secretly between the garrison and several of the Canadians without the fort; and the very fact of the mysterious warrior having been there so recently after his daring enterprise, bore evidence that whatever treason was in operation, had been carried on through the instrumentality of mine host of the Fleur de lis. In proof, moreover, there was the hat of Donellan, and the very rope Halloway had stated to be that by which the unfortunate officer had effected his exit. Colonel de Haldimar was not one given to indulge in the mysterious or to believe in the romantic. Every thing was plain matter of fact, as it now appeared before him; and he thought it evident, as though it had been written in words of fire, that if his son and his unfortunate servant had quitted the fort in the manner represented, it was no less certain they had been forced off by a party, at the head of whom was his vindictive enemy, and with the connivance of Halloway. We have seen, that after the discovery of the sex of the supposed drummer-boy when the prisoners were confronted together, Colonel de Haldimar had closely watched the expression of their countenances, but failed in discovering any thing that could be traced into evidence of a guilty recognition. Still he conceived his original impression to have been too forcibly borne out, even by the events of the last half hour, to allow this to have much weight with him; and his determination to carry the thing through all its fearful preliminary stages became more and more confirmed.
In adopting this resolution in the first instance, he was not without a hope that Halloway, standing, as he must feel himself to be, on the verge of the grave, might be induced to make confession of his guilt, and communicate whatever particulars might prove essential not only to the safety of the garrison generally, but to himself individually, as far as his personal enemy was concerned. With this view, he had charged Captain Blessington, in the course of their march from the hut to the fatal bridge, to promise a full pardon, provided he should make such confession of his crime as would lead to a just appreciation of the evils likely to result from the treason that had in part been accomplished. Even in making this provision, however, which was met by the prisoner with solemn yet dignified reiteration of his innocence, Colonel de Haldimar had not made the refusal of pardon altogether conclusive in his own mind: still, in adopting this plan, there was a chance of obtaining a confession; and not until there was no longer a prospect of the unhappy man being led into that confession, did he feel it imperative on him to stay the progress of the tragedy.
What the result would have been, had not Halloway, in the strong excitement of his feelings, sprung to his feet upon the coffin, uttering the exclamation of triumph recorded in the last pages of our first volume, is scarcely doubtful. However much the governor might have contemned and slighted a credulity in which he in no way participated himself, he had too much discrimination not to perceive, that to have persevered in the capital punishment would have been to have rendered himself personally obnoxious to the comrades of the condemned, whose dispirited air and sullen mien, he clearly saw, denounced the punishment as one of unnecessary rigour. The haughty commander was not one to be intimidated by manifestations of discontent; neither was he one to brook a spirit of insubordination, however forcibly supported; but he had too much experience and military judgment, not to determine that this was riot a moment, by foregoing an act of compulsory clemency, to instil divisions in the garrison, when the safety of all so much depended on the cheerfulness and unanimity with which they lent themselves to the arduous duties of defence.
However originating in policy, the lenity he might have been induced to have shown, all idea of the kind was chased from his mind by the unfortunate action of the prisoner. At the moment when the distant heights resounded with the fierce yells of the savages, and leaping forms came bounding down the slope, the remarkable warrior of the Fleur de lis--the fearful enemy who had whispered the most demoniac vengeance in his ears the preceding night--was the only one that met and riveted the gaze of the governor. He paused not to observe or to think who the flying man could be of whom the mysterious warrior was in pursuit,--neither did it, indeed, occur to him that it was a pursuit at all. But one idea suggested itself to his mind, and that was an attempt at rescue of the condemned on the part of his accomplice; and when at length Halloway, who had at once, as if by instinct, recognised his captain in the fugitive, shouted forth his gratitude to Heaven that "he at length approached who alone had the power to save him," every shadow of mercy was banished from the mind of the governor, who, labouring under a natural misconception of the causes of his exulting shout, felt that justice imperatively demanded her victim, and no longer hesitated in awarding the doom that became the supposed traitor. It was under this impression that he sternly gave and repeated the fatal order to fire; and by this misjudged and severe, although not absolutely cruel act, not only destroyed one of the noblest beings that ever wore a soldier's uniform, but entailed upon himself and family that terrific curse of his maniac wife, which rang like a prophetic warning in the ears of all, and was often heard in the fitful starlings of his own ever-after troubled slumbers.
What his feelings were, when subsequently he discovered, in the wretched fugitive, the son whom he already believed to have been numbered with the dead, and heard from his lips a confirmation of all that had been advanced by the unhappy Halloway, we shall leave it to our readers to imagine. Still, even amid his first regret, the rigid disciplinarian was strong within him; and no sooner had the detachment regained the fort, after performing the last offices of interment over their ill-fated comrade, than Captain de Haldimar received an intimation, through the adjutant, to consider himself under close arrest for disobedience of orders. Finally, however, he succeeded in procuring an interview with his father; in the course of which, disclosing the plot of the Indians, and the short period allotted for its being carried into execution, he painted in the most gloomy colours the alarming, dangers which threatened them all, and finished by urgently imploring his father to suffer him to make the attempt to reach their unsuspecting friends at Michilimackinac. Fully impressed with the difficulties attendant on a scheme that offered so few feasible chances of success, Colonel de Haldimar for a period denied his concurrence; but when at length the excited young man dwelt on the horrors that would inevitably await his sister and betrothed cousin, were they to fall into the hands of the savages, these considerations were found to be effective. An after-arrangement included Sir Everard Valletort, who had expressed a strong desire to share his danger in the enterprise; and the services of the Canadian, who had been brought back a prisoner to the fort, and on whom promises and threats were bestowed in an equally lavish manner, were rendered available. In fact, without the assistance of Francois, there was little chance of their effecting in safety the navigation of the waters through which they were to pass to arrive at the fort. He it was, who, when summoned to attend a conference among the officers, bearing on the means to be adopted, suggested the propriety of their disguising themselves as Canadian duck hunters; in which character they might expect to pass unmolested, even if encountered by any outlying parties of the savages. With the doubts that had previously been entertained of the fidelity of Francois, there was an air of forlorn hope given to the enterprise; still, as the man expressed sincere earnestness of desire to repay the clemency accorded him, by a faithful exercise of his services, and as the object sought was one that justified the risk, there was, notwithstanding, a latent hope cherished by all parties, that the event would prove successful. We have already seen to what extent their anticipations were realised.
Whether it was that he secretly acknowledged the too excessive sternness of his justice in regard to Halloway (who still, in the true acceptation of facts, had been guilty of a crime that entailed the penalty he had paid), or that the apprehensions that arose to his heart in regard to her on whom he yearned with all a father's fondness governed his conduct, certain it is, that, from the hour of the disclosure made by his son, Colonel de Haldimar became an altered man. Without losing any thing of that dignity of manner, which had hitherto been confounded with the most repellent haughtiness of bearing, his demeanour towards his officers became more courteous; and although, as heretofore, he kept himself entirely aloof, except when occasions of duty brought them together, still, when they did meet, there was more of conciliation in his manner, and less of austerity in his speech. There was, moreover, a dejection in his eye, strongly in contrast with his former imperious glance; and more than one officer remarked, that, if his days were devoted to the customary practical arrangements for defence, his pallid countenance betokened that his nights were nights rather of vigil than of repose.
However natural and deep the alarm entertained for the fate of the sister fort, there could be no apprehension on the mind of Colonel de Haldimar in regard to his own; since, furnished with the means of foiling his enemies with their own weapons of cunning and deceit, a few extraordinary precautions alone were necessary to secure all immunity from danger. Whatever might be the stern peculiarities of his character,--and these had originated chiefly in an education purely military,--Colonel de Haldimar was an officer well calculated to the important trust reposed in him; for, combining experience with judgment in all matters relating to the diplomacy of war, and being fully conversant with the character and habits of the enemy opposed to him, he possessed singular aptitude to seize whatever advantages might present themselves.
The prudence and caution of his policy have already been made manifest in the two several council scenes with the chiefs recorded in our second volume. It may appear singular, that, with the opportunity thus afforded him of retaining the formidable Ponteac,--the strength and sinew of that long protracted and ferocious war,--in his power, he should have waved his advantage; but here Colonel de Haldimar gave evidence of the tact which so eminently distinguished his public conduct throughout. He well knew the noble, fearless character of the chief; and felt, if any hold was to be secured over him, it was by grappling with his generosity, and not by the exercise of intimidation. Even admitting that Ponteac continued his prisoner, and that the troops, pouring their destructive fire upon the mass of enemies so suddenly arrested on the drawbridge, had swept away the whole, still they were but as a mite among the numerous nations that were leagued against the English; and to these nations, it was evident, they must, sooner or later, succumb.
Colonel de Haldimar knew enough of the proud but generous nature of the Ottawa, to deem that the policy he proposed to pursue in the last council scene would not prove altogether without effect on that warrior. It was well known to him, that much pains had been taken to instil into the minds of the Indians the belief that the English were resolved on their final extirpation; and as certain slights, offered to them at various periods, had given a colouring of truth to this assertion, the formidable league which had already accomplished the downfall of so many of the forts had been the consequence of these artful representations. Although well aware that the French had numerous emissaries distributed among the fierce tribes, it was not until after the disclosure made by the haughty Ponteac, at the close of the first council scene, that he became apprised of the alarming influence exercised over the mind of that warrior himself by his own terrible and vindictive enemy. The necessity of counteracting that influence was obvious; and he felt this was only to be done (if at all) by some marked and extraordinary evidence of the peaceful disposition of the English. Hence his determination to suffer the faithless chiefs and their followers to depart unharmed from the fort, even at the moment when the attitude assumed by the prepared garrison fully proved to the assailants their designs had been penetrated and their schemes rendered abortive.
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With the general position of the encampment of the investing Indians, the reader has been made acquainted through the narrative of Captain de Haldimar. It was, as has been shown, situate in a sort of oasis close within the verge of the forest, and (girt by an intervening underwood which Nature, in her caprice, had fashioned after the manner of a defensive barrier) embraced a space sufficient to contain the tents of the fighting men, together with their women and children. This, however, included only the warriors and inferior chiefs. The tents of the leaders were without the belt of underwood, and principally distributed at long intervals on that side of the forest which skirted the open country towards the river; forming, as it were, a chain of external defences, and sweeping in a semicircular direction round the more dense encampment of their followers. At its highest elevation the forest shot out suddenly into a point, naturally enough rendered an object of attraction from whatever part it was commanded.
Darkness was already beginning to spread her mantle over the intervening space, and the night fires of the Indians were kindling into brightness, glimmering occasionally through the wood with that pale and lambent light peculiar to the fire-fly, of which they offered a not inapt representation, when suddenly a lofty tent, the brilliant whiteness of which was thrown into strong relief by the dark field on which it reposed, was seen to rise at a few paces from the abrupt point in the forest just described, and on the extreme summit of a ridge, beyond which lay only the western horizon in golden perspective.
The opening of this tent looked eastward and towards the fort; and on its extreme summit floated a dark flag, which at intervals spread itself before the slight evening breeze, but oftener hung drooping and heavily over the glittering canvass. One solitary pine, whose trunk exceeded not the ordinary thickness of a man's waist, and standing out as a landmark on the ridge, rose at the distance of a few feet from the spot on which the tent had been erected; and to this was bound the tall and elegant figure of one dressed in the coarse garb of a sailor. The arms and legs of this individual were perfectly free; but a strong rope, rendered doubly secure after the manner of what is termed "whipping" among seamen, after having been tightly drawn several times around his waist, and then firmly knotted behind, was again passed round the tree, to which the back of the prisoner was closely lashed; thus enabling, or rather compelling, him to be a spectator of every object within the tent.
Layers of bark, over which were spread the dressed skins of the bear and the buffalo, formed the floor and carpet of the latter; and on these, in various parts, and in characteristic attitudes, reposed the forms of three human beings;--one, the formidable warrior of the Fleur de lis. Attired in the garb in which we first introduced him to our readers, and with the same weapons reposing at his side, the haughty savage lay at his lazy length; his feet reaching beyond the opening of the tent, and his head reposing on a rude pillow formed of a closely compressed pack of skins of wild animals, over which was spread a sort of mantle or blanket. One hand was introduced between the pillow and his head, the other grasped the pipe tomahawk he was smoking; and while the mechanical play of his right foot indicated pre-occupation of thought, his quick and meaning eye glanced frequently and alternately upon the furthest of his companions, the prisoner without, and the distant fort.
Within a few feet of the warrior lay, extended on a buffalo skin, the delicate figure of a female, whose hair, complexion, and hands, denoted her European extraction. Her dress was entirely Indian, however; consisting of a machecoti with leggings, mocassins, and shirt of printed cotton studded with silver brooches,--all of which were of a quality and texture to mark the wearer as the wife of a chief; and her fair hair, done up in a club behind, reposed on a neck of dazzling whiteness. Her eyes were large, blue, but wild and unmeaning; her countenance vacant; and her movements altogether mechanical. A wooden bowl filled with hominy,--a preparation of Indian corn,--was at her side; and from this she was now in the act of feeding herself with a spoon of the same material, but with a negligence and slovenliness that betrayed her almost utter unconsciousness of the action.
At the further side of the tent there was another woman, even more delicate in appearance than the one last mentioned. She, too, was blue-eyed, and of surpassing fairness of skin. Her attitude denoted a mind too powerfully absorbed in grief to be heedful of appearances; for she sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, and rocking her body to and fro with an undulating motion that seemed to have its origin in no effort of volition of her own. Her long fair hair hung negligently over her shoulders; and a blanket drawn over the top of her head like a veil, and extending partly over the person, disclosed here and there portions of an apparel which was strictly European, although rent, and exhibiting in various places stains of blood. A bowl similar to that of her companion, and filled with the same food, was at her side; but this was untasted.
"Why does the girl refuse to eat?" asked the warrior of her next him, as he fiercely rolled a volume of smoke from his lips. "Make her eat, for I would speak to her afterwards."
"Why does the girl refuse to eat?" responded the woman in the same tone, dropping her spoon as she spoke, and turning to the object of remark with a vacant look. "It is good," she pursued, as she rudely shook the arm of the heedless sufferer. "Come, girl, eat."
A shriek burst from the lips of the unhappy girl, as, apparently roused from her abstraction, she suffered the blanket to fall from her head, and staring wildly at her questioner, faintly demanded,-- "Who, in the name of mercy, are you, who address me in this horrid place in my own tongue? Speak; who are you? Surely I should know that voice for that of Ellen, the wife of Frank Halloway!"
A maniac laugh was uttered by the wretched woman. This continued offensively for a moment; and she observed, in an infuriated tone and with a searching eye,--"No, I am not the wife of Halloway. It is false. I am the wife of Wacousta. This is my husband!" and as she spoke she sprang nimbly to her feet, and was in the next instant lying prostrate on the form of the warrior; her arms thrown wildly around him, and her lips imprinting kisses on his cheek.
But Wacousta was in no mood to suffer her endearments. He for the first time seemed alive to the presence of her who lay beyond, and, to whose whole appearance a character of animation had been imparted by the temporary excitement of her feelings. He gazed at her a moment, with the air of one endeavouring to recall the memory of days long gone by; and as he continued to do so, his eye dilated, his chest heaved, and his countenance alternately flushed and paled. At length he threw the form that reposed upon his own, violently, and even savagely, from him; sprang eagerly to his feet; and clearing the space that divided him from the object of his attention at a single step, bore her from the earth in his arms with as much ease as if she had been an infant, and then returning to his own rude couch, placed his horror-stricken victim at his side.
"Nay, nay," he urged sarcastically, as she vainly struggled to free herself; "let the De Haldimar portion of your blood rise up in anger if it will; but that of Clara Beverley, at least--."
"Gracious Providence! where am I, that I hear the name of my sainted mother thus familiarly pronounced?" interrupted the startled girl; "and who are you,"--turning her eyes wildly on the swarthy countenance of the warrior,--"who are you, I ask, who, with the mien and in the garb of a savage of these forests, appear thus acquainted with her name?"
The warrior passed his hand across his brow for a moment, as if some painful and intolerable reflection had been called up by the question; but he speedily recovered his self-possession, and, with an expression of feature that almost petrified his auditor, vehemently observed,-- "You ask who I am! One who knew your mother long before the accursed name of De Haldimar had even been whispered in her ear; and whom love for the one and hatred for the other has rendered the savage you now behold! But," he continued, while a fierce and hideous smile lighted up every feature, "I overlook my past sufferings in my present happiness. The image of Clara Beverley, even such as my soul loved her in its youth, is once more before me in her child; THAT child shall be my wife!"
"Your wife! monster;--never!" shrieked the unhappy girl, again vainly attempting to disengage herself from the encircling arm of the savage. "But," she pursued, in a tone of supplication, while the tears coursed each other down her cheek, "if you ever loved my mother as you say you have, restore her children to their home; and, if saints may be permitted to look down from heaven in approval of the acts of men, she whom you have loved will bless you for the deed."
A deep groan burst from the vast chest of Wacousta; but, for a moment, he answered not. At length he observed, pointing at the same time with his finger towards the cloudless vault above their heads,--"Do you behold yon blue sky, Clara de Haldimar?"
"I do;--what mean you?" demanded the trembling girl, in whom a momentary hope had been excited by the subdued manner of the savage.
"Nothing," he coolly rejoined; "only that were your mother to appear there at this moment, clad in all the attributes ascribed to angels, her prayer would not alter the destiny that awaits you. Nay, nay; look not thus sorrowfully," he pursued, as, in despite of her efforts to prevent him, he imprinted a burning kiss upon her lips. "Even thus was I once wont to linger on the lips of your mother; but hers ever pouted to be pressed by mine; and not with tears, but with sunniest smiles, did she court them." He paused; bent his head over the face of the shuddering girl; and gazing fixedly for a few minutes on her countenance, while he pressed her struggling form more closely to his own, exultingly pursued, as if to himself,--"Even as her mother was, so is she. Ye powers of hell! who would have ever thought a time would come when both my vengeance and my love would be gratified to the utmost? How strange it never should have occurred to me he had a daughter!"
"What mean you, fierce, unpitying man?" exclaimed the terrified Clara, to whom a full sense of the horror of her position had lent unusual energy of character. "Surely you will not detain a poor defenceless woman in your hands,--the child of her you say you have loved. But it is false! --you never knew her, or you would not now reject my prayer."
"Never knew her!" fiercely repeated Wacousta. Again he paused. "Would I had never known her! and I should not now be the outcast wretch I am," he added, slowly and impressively. Then once more elevating his voice,--"Clara de Haldimar, I have loved your mother as man never loved woman; and I have hated your father" (grinding his teeth with fury as he spoke) "as man never hated man. That love, that hatred are unquenched--unquenchable. Before me I see at once the image of her who, even in death, has lived enshrined in my heart, and the child of him who is my bitterest foe. Clara de Haldimar, do you understand me now?"
"Almighty Providence! is there no one to save me? --can nothing touch your stubborn heart?" exclaimed the affrighted girl; and she turned her swimming eyes on those of the warrior, in appeal; but his glance caused her own to sink in confusion. "Ellen Halloway," she pursued, after a moment's pause, and in the wild accents of despair, "if you are indeed the wife of this man, as you say you are, oh! plead for me with him; and in the name of that kindness, which I once extended to yourself, prevail on him to restore me to my father!"
"Ellen Halloway! --who calls Ellen Halloway?" said the wretched woman, who had again resumed her slovenly meal on the rude couch, apparently without consciousness of the scene enacting at her side. "I am not Ellen Halloway: they said so; but it is not true. My husband was Reginald Morton: but he went for a soldier, and was killed; and I never saw him more."
"Reginald Morton! What mean you, woman? --What know you of Reginald Morton?" demanded Wacousta, with frightful energy, as, leaning over the shrinking form of Clara, he violently grasped and shook the shoulder of the unhappy maniac.
"Stop; do not hurt me, and I will tell you all, sir," she almost screamed. "Oh, sir, Reginald Morton was my husband once; but he was kinder than you are. He did not look so fiercely at me; nor did he pinch me so."
"What of him? --who was he?" furiously repeated Wacousta, as he again impatiently shook the arm of the wretched Ellen. "Where did you know him? --Whence came he?"
"Nay, you must not be jealous of poor Reginald:" and, as she uttered these words in a softening and conciliating tone, her eye was turned upon those of the warrior with a mingled expression of fear and cunning. "But he was very good and very handsome, and generous; and we lived near each other, and we loved each other at first sight. But his family were very proud, and they quarrelled with him because he married me; and then we became very poor, and Reginald went for a soldier, and--; but I forget the rest, it is so long ago." She pressed her hand to her brow, and sank her head upon her chest.
"Ellen, woman, again I ask you where he came from? this Reginald Morton that you have named. To what county did he belong?"
"Oh, we were both Cornish," she answered, with a vivacity singularly in contrast with her recent low and monotonous tone; "but, as I said before, he was of a great family, and I only a poor clergyman's daughter."
"Cornish! --Cornish, did you say?" fiercely repeated the dark Wacousta, while an expression of loathing and disgust seemed for a moment to convulse his features; "then is it as I had feared. One word more. Was the family seat called Morton Castle?"
"It was," unhesitatingly returned the poor woman, yet with the air of one wondering to hear a name repeated, long forgotten even by herself. "It was a beautiful castle too, on a lovely ridge of hills; and it commanded such a nice view of the sea, close to the little port of ----; and the parsonage stood in such a sweet valley, close under the castle; and we were all so happy." She paused, again put her hand to her brow, and pressed it with force, as if endeavouring to pursue the chain of connection in her memory, but evidently without success.
"And your father's name was Clayton?" said the warrior, enquiringly; "Henry Clayton, if I recollect aright?"
"Ha! who names my father?" shrieked the wretched woman. "Yes, sir, it was Clayton--Henry Clayton--the kindest, the noblest of human beings. But the affliction of his child, and the persecutions of the Morton family, broke his heart. He is dead, sir, and Reginald is dead too; and I am a poor lone widow in the world, and have no one to love me." Here the tears coursed each other rapidly down her faded cheek, although her eyes were staring and motionless.
"It is false!" vociferated the warrior, who, now he had gained all that was essential to the elucidation of his doubts, quitted the shoulder he had continued to press with violence in his nervous hand, and once more extended himself at his length; "in me you behold the uncle of your husband. Yes, Ellen Clayton, you have been the wife of two Reginald Mortons. Both," he pursued with unutterable bitterness, while he again started up and shook his tomahawk menacingly in the direction of the fort,--"both have been the victims of yon cold-blooded governor; but the hour of our reckoning is at hand. Ellen," he fiercely added, "do you recollect the curse you pronounced on the family of that haughty man, when he slaughtered your Reginald. By Heaven! it shall be fulfilled; but first shall the love I have so long borne the mother be transferred to the child."
Again he sought to encircle the waist of her whom, in the strong excitement of his rage, he had momentarily quitted; but the unutterable disgust and horror produced in the mind of the unhappy Clara lent an almost supernatural activity to her despair. She dexterously eluded his grasp, gained her feet, and with tottering steps and outstretched arms darted through the opening of the tent, and piteously exclaiming, "Save me! oh, for God's sake, save me!" sank exhausted, and apparently lifeless, on the chest of the prisoner without.
To such of our readers as, deceived by the romantic nature of the attachment stated to have been originally entertained by Sir Everard Valletort for the unseen sister of his friend, have been led to expect a tale abounding in manifestations of its progress when the parties had actually met, we at once announce disappointment. Neither the lover of amorous adventure, nor the admirer of witty dialogue, should dive into these pages. Room for the exercise of the invention might, it is true, be found; but ours is a tale of sad reality, and our heroes and heroines figure under circumstances that would render wit a satire upon the understanding, and love a reflection upon the heart. Within the bounds of probability have we, therefore, confined ourselves.
What the feelings of the young Baronet must have been, from the first moment when he received from the hands of the unfortunate Captain Baynton (who, although an officer of his own corps, was personally a stranger to him,) that cherished sister of his friend, on whose ideal form his excited imagination had so often latterly loved to linger, up to the present hour, we should vainly attempt to paint. There are emotions of the heart, it would be mockery in the pen to trace. From the instant of his first contributing to preserve her life, on that dreadful day of blood, to that when the schooner fell into the hands of the savages, few words had passed between them, and these had reference merely to the position in which they found themselves, and whenever Sir Everard felt he could, without indelicacy or intrusion, render himself in the slightest way serviceable to her. The very circumstances under which they had met, conduced to the suppression, if not utter extinction, of all of passion attached to the sentiment with which he had been inspired. A new feeling had quickened in his breast; and it was with emotions more assimilated to friendship than to love that he now regarded the beautiful but sorrow-stricken sister of his bosom friend. Still there was a softness, a purity, a delicacy and tenderness in this new feeling, in which the influence of sex secretly though unacknowledgedly predominated; and even while sensible it would have been a profanation of every thing most sacred and delicate in nature to have admitted a thought of love within his breast at such a moment, he also felt he could have entertained a voluptuous joy in making any sacrifice, even to the surrender of life itself, provided the tranquillity of that gentle and suffering being could be by it ensured.
Clara, in her turn, had been in no condition to admit so exclusive a power as that of love within her soul. She had, it is true, even amid the desolation of her shattered spirit, recognised in the young officer the original of a portrait so frequently drawn by her brother, and dwelt on by herself. She acknowledged, moreover, the fidelity of the painting: but however she might have felt and acted under different circumstances, absorbed as was her heart, and paralysed her imagination, by the harrowing scenes she had gone through, she, too, had room but for one sentiment in her fainting soul, and that was friendship for the friend of her brother; on whom, moreover, she bestowed that woman's gratitude, which could not fail to be awakened by a recollection of the risks he had encountered, conjointly with Frederick, to save her from destruction. During their passage across lake Huron, Sir Everard had usually taken his seat on the deck, at that respectful distance which he conceived the delicacy of the position of the unfortunate cousins demanded; but in such a manner that, while he seemed wholly abstracted from them, his eye had more than once been detected by Clara fixed on hers, with an affectionateness of interest she could not avoid repaying with a glance of recognition and approval. These, however, were the only indications of regard that had passed between them.
If, however, a momentary and irrepressible flashing of that sentiment, which had, at an earlier period, formed a portion of their imaginings, did occasionally steal over their hearts while there was a prospect of reaching their friends in safety, all manifestation of its power was again finally suppressed when the schooner fell into the hands of the savages. Become the immediate prisoners of Wacousta, they had been surrendered to that ferocious chief to be dealt with as he might think proper; and, on disembarking from the canoe in which their transit to the main land had been descried that morning from the fort, had been separated from their equally unfortunate and suffering companions. Captain de Haldimar, Madeline, and the Canadian, were delivered over to the custody of several choice warriors of the tribe in which Wacousta was adopted; and, bound hand and foot, were, at that moment, in the war tent of the fierce savage, which, as Ponteac had once boasted to the governor, was every where hung around with human scalps, both of men, of women, and of children. The object of this mysterious man, in removing Clara to the spot we have described, was one well worthy of his ferocious nature. His vengeance had already devoted her to destruction; and it was within view of the fort, which contained the father whom he loathed, he had resolved his purpose should be accomplished. A refinement of cruelty, such as could scarcely have been supposed to enter the breast even of such a remorseless savage as himself, had caused him to convey to the same spot, him whom he rather suspected than knew to be the lover of the young girl. It was with the view of harrowing up the soul of one whom he had recognised as the officer who had disabled him on the night of the rencontre on the bridge, that he had bound Sir Everard to the tree, whence, as we have already stated, he was a compelled spectator of every thing that passed within the tent; and yet with that free action of limb which only tended to tantalize him the more amid his unavailable efforts to rid himself of his bonds,--a fact that proved not only the dire extent to which the revenge of Wacousta could be carried, but the actual and gratuitous cruelty of his nature.
One must have been similarly circumstanced, to understand all the agony of the young man during this odious scene, and particularly at the fierce and repeated declaration of the savage that Clara should be his bride. More than once had he essayed to remove the ligatures which confined his waist; but his unsuccessful attempts only drew an occasional smile of derision from his enemy, as he glanced his eye rapidly towards him. Conscious at length of the inutility of efforts, which, without benefiting her for whom they were principally prompted, rendered him in some degree ridiculous even in his own eyes, the wretched Valletort desisted altogether, and with his head sunk upon his chest, and his eyes closed, sought at least to shut out a scene which blasted his sight, and harrowed up his very soul.
But when Clara, uttering her wild cry for protection, and rushing forth from the tent, sank almost unconsciously in his embrace, a thrill of inexplicable joy ran through each awakened fibre of his frame. Bending eagerly forward, he had extended his arms to receive her; and when he felt her light and graceful form pressing upon his own as its last refuge--when he felt her heart beating against his--when he saw her head drooping on his shoulder, in the wild recklessness of despair,--even amid that scene of desolation and grief he could not help enfolding her in tumultuous ecstasy to his breast. Every horrible danger was for an instant forgotten in the soothing consciousness that he at length encircled the form of her, whom in many an hour of solitude he had thus pictured, although under far different circumstances, reposing confidingly on him. There was delight mingled with agony in his sensation of the wild throb of her bosom against his own; and even while his soul fainted within him, as he reflected on the fate that awaited her, he felt as if he could himself now die more happily.
Momentary, however, was the duration of this scene. Furious with anger at the evident disgust of his victim, Wacousta no sooner saw her sink into the arms of her lover, than with that agility for which he was remarkable he was again on his feet, and stood in the next instant at her side. Uniting to the generous strength of his manhood all that was wrung from his mingled love and despair, the officer clasped his hands round the waist of the drooping Clara; and with clenched teeth, and feet firmly set, seemed resolved to defy every effort of the warrior to remove her. Not a word was uttered on either side; but in the fierce smile that curled the lip of the savage, there spoke a language even more terrible than the words that smile implied. Sir Everard could not suppress an involuntary shudder; and when at length Wacousta, after a short but violent struggle, succeeded in again securing and bearing off his prize, the wretchedness of soul of the former was indescribable.
"You see 'tis vain to struggle against your destiny, Clara de Haldimar," sneered the warrior. "Ours is but a rude nuptial couch, it is true; but the wife of an Indian chief must not expect the luxuries of Europe in the heart of an American wilderness."
"Almighty Heaven! where am I?" exclaimed the wretched girl, again unclosing her eyes to all the horror of her position; for again she lay at the side, and within the encircling arm, of her enemy. "Oh, Sir Everard Valletort, I thought I was with you, and that you had saved me from this monster. Where is my brother? --Where are Frederick and Madeline? --Why have they deserted me? --Ah! my heart will break. I cannot endure this longer, and live."
"Clara, Miss de Haldimar," groaned Sir Everard, in a voice of searching agony; "could I lay down my life for you, I would; but you see these bonds. Oh God! oh God! have pity on the innocent; and for once incline the heart of yon fierce monster to the whisperings of mercy." As he uttered the last sentence, he attempted to sink on his knees in supplication to Him he addressed, but the tension of the cord prevented him; yet were his hands clasped, and his eyes upraised to heaven, while his countenance beamed with an expression of fervent enthusiasm.
"Peace, babbler! or, by Heaven! that prayer shall be your last," vociferated Wacousta. "But no," he pursued to himself, dropping at the same time the point of his upraised tomahawk; "these are but the natural writhings of the crushed worm; and the longer protracted they are, the more complete will be my vengeance." Then turning to the terrified girl,--"You ask, Clara de Haldimar, where you are? In the tent of your mother's lover, I reply,--at the side of him who once pressed her to his heart, even as I now press you, and with a fondness that was only equalled by her own. Come, dear Clara," and his voice assumed a tone of tenderness that was even more revolting than his natural ferocity, "let me woo you to the affection she once possessed. It was a heart of fire in which her image stood enshrined,--it is a heart of fire still, and well worthy of her child."
"Never, never!" shrieked the agonised girl. "Kill me, murder me, if you will; but oh! if you have pity, pollute not my ear with the avowal of your detested love. But again I repeat, it is false that my mother ever knew you. She never could have loved so fierce, so vindictive a being as yourself."
"Ha! do you doubt me still?" sternly demanded the savage. Then drawing the shuddering girl still closer to his vast chest,--"Come hither, Clara, while to convince you I unfold the sad history of my life, and tell you more of your parents than you have ever known. When," he pursued solemnly, "you have learnt the extent of my love for the one, and of my hatred for the other, and the wrongs I have endured from both, you will no longer wonder at the spirit of mingled love and vengeance that dictates my conduct towards yourself. Listen, girl," he continued fiercely, "and judge whether mine are injuries to be tamely pardoned, when a whole life has been devoted to the pursuit of the means of avenging them."
Irresistibly led by a desire to know what possible connection could have existed between her parents and this singular and ferocious man, the wretched girl gave her passive assent. She even hoped that, in the course of his narrative, some softening recollections would pass over his mind, the effect of which might be to predispose him to mercy. Wacousta buried his face for a few moments in his large hand, as if endeavouring to collect and concentrate the remembrances of past years. His countenance, meanwhile, had undergone a change; for there was now a shade of melancholy mixed with the fierceness of expression usually observable there. This, however, was dispelled in the course of his narrative, and as various opposite passions were in turn powerfully and severally developed.
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"It is now four and twenty years," commenced Wacousta, "since your father and myself first met as subalterns in the regiment he now commands, when, unnatural to say, an intimacy suddenly sprang up between us which, as it was then to our brother officers, has since been a source of utter astonishment to myself. Unnatural, I repeat, for fire and ice are not more opposite than were the elements of which our natures were composed. He, all coldness, prudence, obsequiousness, and forethought. I, all enthusiasm, carelessness, impetuosity, and independence. Whether this incongruous friendship--friendship! no, I will not so far sully the sacred name as thus to term the unnatural union that subsisted between us;--whether this intimacy, then, sprang from the adventitious circumstance of our being more frequently thrown together as officers of the same company,--for we were both attached to the grenadiers,--or that my wild spirit was soothed by the bland amenity of his manners, I know not. The latter, however, is not improbable; for proud, and haughty, and dignified, as the colonel NOW is, such was not THEN the character of the ensign; who seemed thrown out of one of Nature's supplest moulds, to fawn, and cringe, and worm his way to favour by the wily speciousness of his manners. Oh God!" pursued Wacousta, after a momentary pause, and striking his palm against his forehead, "that I ever should have been the dupe of such a cold-blooded hypocrite!
"I have said our intimacy excited surprise among our brother officers. It did; for all understood and read the character of your father, who was as much disliked and distrusted for the speciousness of his false nature, as I was generally esteemed for the frankness and warmth of mine. No one openly censured the evident preference I gave him in my friendship; but we were often sarcastically termed the Pylades and Orestes of the regiment, until my heart was ready to leap into my throat with impatience at the bitterness in which the taunt was conceived; and frequently in my presence was allusion made to the blind folly of him, who should take a cold and slimy serpent to his bosom only to feel its fangs darted into it at the moment when most fostered by its genial heat. All, however, was in vain. On a nature like mine, innuendo was likely to produce an effect directly opposite to that intended; and the more I found them inclined to be severe on him I called my friend, the more marked became my preference. I even fancied that because I was rich, generous, and heir to a title, their observations were prompted by jealousy of the influence he possessed over me, and a desire to supplant him only for their interests' sake. Bitterly have I been punished for the illiberality of such an opinion. Those to whom I principally allude were the subalterns of the regiment, most of whom were nearly of our own age. One or two of the junior captains were also of this number; but, by the elders (as we termed the seniors of that rank) and field officers, Ensign de Haldimar was always regarded as a most prudent and promising young officer.
"What conduced, in a great degree, to the establishment of our intimacy was the assistance I always received from my brother subaltern in whatever related to my military duties. As the lieutenant of the company, the more immediate responsibility attached to myself; but being naturally of a careless habit, or perhaps considering all duty irksome to my impatient nature that was not duty in the field, I was but too often guilty of neglecting it. On these occasions my absence was ever carefully supplied by your father, who, in all the minutiae of regimental economy, was surpassed by no other officer in the corps; so that credit was given to me, when, at the ordinary inspections, the grenadiers were acknowledged to be the company the most perfect in equipment and skilful in manoeuvre. Deeply, deeply," again mused Wacousta, "have these services been repaid.
"As you have just learnt, Cornwall is the country of my birth. I was the eldest of the only two surviving children of a large family; and, as heir to the baronetcy of the proud Mortons, was looked up to by lord and vassal as the future perpetuator of the family name. My brother had been designed for the army; but as this was a profession to which I had attached my inclinations, the point was waved in my favour, and at the age of eighteen I first joined the ---- regiment, then quartered in the Highlands of Scotland. During my boyhood I had ever accustomed myself to athletic exercises, and loved to excite myself by encountering danger in its most terrific forms. Often had I passed whole days in climbing the steep and precipitous crags which overhang the sea in the neighbourhood of Morton Castle, ostensibly in the pursuit of the heron or the seagull, but self-acknowledgedly for the mere pleasure of grappling with the difficulties they opposed to me. Often, too, in the most terrific tempests, when sea and sky have met in one black and threatening mass, and when the startled fishermen have in vain attempted to dissuade me from my purpose, have I ventured, in sheer bravado, out of sight of land, and unaccompanied by a human soul. Then, when wind and tide have been against me on my return, have I, with my simple sculls alone, caused my faithful bark to leap through the foaming brine as though a press of canvass had impelled her on. Oh, that this spirit of adventure had never grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength!" sorrowfully added the warrior, again apostrophising himself: "then had I never been the wretch I am.
"The wild daring by which my boyhood had been marked was again powerfully awakened by the bold and romantic scenery of the Scottish Highlands; and as the regiment was at that time quartered in a part of these mountainous districts, where, from the disturbed nature of the times, society was difficult of attainment, many of the officers were driven from necessity, as I was from choice, to indulge in the sports of the chase. On one occasion a party of four of us set out early in the morning in pursuit of deer, numbers of which we knew were to be met with in the mountainous tracts of Bute and Argyleshire. The course we happened to take lay through a succession of dark deep glens, and over frowning rocks; the difficulties of access to which only stirred up my dormant spirit of enterprise the more. We had continued in this course for many hours, overcoming one difficulty only to be encountered by another, and yet without meeting a single deer; when, at length, the faint blast of a horn was heard far above our heads in the distance, and presently a noble stag was seen to ascend a ledge of rocks immediately in front of us. To raise my gun to my shoulder and fire was the work of a moment, after which we all followed in pursuit. On reaching the spot where the deer had first been seen, we observed traces of blood, satisfying us he had been wounded; but the course taken in his flight was one that seemed to defy every human effort to follow in. It was a narrow pointed ledge, ascending boldly towards a huge cliff that projected frowningly from the extreme summit, and on either side lay a dark, deep, and apparently fathomless ravine; to look even on which was sufficient to appal the stoutest heart, and unnerve the steadiest brain. For me, however, long accustomed to dangers of the sort, it had no terror. This was a position in which I had often wished once more to find myself placed, and I felt buoyant and free as the deer itself I intended to pursue. In vain did my companions (and your father was one) implore me to abandon a project so wild and hazardous. I bounded forward, and they turned shuddering away, that their eyes might not witness the destruction that awaited me. Meanwhile, balancing my long gun in my upraised hands, I trod the dangerous path with a buoyancy and elasticity of limb, a lightness of heart, and a fearlessness of consequences, that surprised even myself. Perhaps it was to the latter circumstance I owed my safety, for a single doubt of my security might have impelled a movement that would not have failed to have precipitated me into the yawning gulf below. I had proceeded in this manner about five hundred yards, when I came to the termination of the ledge, from the equally narrow transverse extremity of which branched out three others; the whole contributing to form a figure resembling that of a trident. Pausing here for a moment, I applied the hunting horn, with which I was provided, to my lips. This signal, announcing my safety, was speedily returned by my friends below in a cheering and lively strain, that seemed to express at once surprise and satisfaction; and inspirited by the sound, I prepared to follow up my perilous chase. Along the ledge I had quitted I had remarked occasional traces where the stricken deer had passed; and the same blood-spots now directed me at a point where, but for these, I must have been utterly at fault. The centre of these new ridges, and the narrowest, was that taken by the animal, and on that I once more renewed my pursuit. As I continued to advance I found the ascent became more precipitous, and the difficulties opposed to my progress momentarily more multiplied. Still, nothing daunted, I continued my course towards the main body of rock that now rose within a hundred yards. How this was to be gained I knew not; for it shelved out abruptly from the extreme summit, overhanging the abyss, and presenting an appearance which I cannot more properly render than by comparing it to the sounding-boards placed over the pulpits of our English churches. Still I was resolved to persevere to the close, and I but too unhappily succeeded." Again Wacousta paused. A tear started to his eye, but this he impatiently brushed away with his swarthy hand.
"It was evident to me," he again resumed, "that there must be some opening through which the deer had effected his escape to the precipitous height above; and I felt a wild and fearful triumph in following him to his cover, over passes which it was my pleasure to think none of the hardy mountaineers themselves would have dared to venture upon with impunity. I paused not to consider of the difficulty of bearing away my prize, even if I succeeded in overtaking it. At every step my excitement and determination became stronger, and I felt every fibre of my frame to dilate, as when, in my more boyish days, I used to brave, in my gallant skiff, the mingled fury of the warring elements of sea and storm. Suddenly, while my mind was intent only on the dangers I used then to hold in such light estimation, I found my further progress intercepted by a fissure in the crag. It was not the width of this opening that disconcerted me, for it exceeded not ten feet; but I came upon it so unadvisedly, that, in attempting to check my forward motion, I had nearly lost my equipoise, and fallen into the abyss that now yawned before and on either side of me. To pause upon the danger, would, I felt, be to ensure it. Summoning all my dexterity into a single bound, I cleared the chasm; and with one buskined foot (for my hunting costume was strictly Highland) clung firmly to the ledge, while I secured my balance with the other. At this point the rock became gradually broader, so that I now trod the remainder of the rude path in perfect security, until I at length found myself close to the vast mass of which these ledges were merely ramifications or veins: but still I could discover no outlet by which the wounded deer could have escaped. While I lingered, thoughtfully, for a moment, half in disappointment, half in anger, and with my back leaning against the rock, I fancied I heard a rustling, as of the leaves and branches of underwood, on that part which projected like a canopy, far above the abyss. I bent my eye eagerly and fixedly on the spot whence the sound proceeded, and presently could distinguish the blue sky appearing through an aperture, to which was, the instant afterwards, applied what I conceived to be a human face. No sooner, however, was it seen than withdrawn; and then the rustling of leaves was heard again, and all was still as before.
"Why did my evil genius so will it," resumed Wacousta, after another pause, during which he manifested deep emotion, "that I should have heard those sounds and seen that face? But for these I should have returned to my companions, and my life might have been the life--the plodding life--of the multitude; things that are born merely to crawl through existence and die, knowing not at the moment of death why or how they have lived at all. But who may resist the destiny that presides over him from the cradle to the grave? for, although the mass may be, and are, unworthy of the influencing agency of that Unseen Power, who will presume to deny there are those on whom it stamps its iron seal, even from the moment of their birth to that which sees all that is mortal of them consigned to the tomb? What was it but destiny that whispered to me what I had seen was the face of a woman? I had not traced a feature, nor could I distinctly state that it was a human countenance I had beheld; but mine was ever an imagination into which the wildest improbability was scarce admitted that it did not grow into conviction in the instant.
"A new direction was now given to my feelings. I felt a presentiment that my adventure, if prosecuted, would terminate in some extraordinary and characteristic manner; and obeying, as I ever did, the first impulse of my heart, I prepared to grapple once more with the difficulties that yet remained to be surmounted. In order to do this, it was necessary that my feet and hands should be utterly without incumbrance; for it was only by dint of climbing that I could expect to reach that part of the projecting rock to which my attention had been directed. Securing my gun between some twisted roots that grew out of and adhered to the main body of the rock, I commenced the difficult ascent; and, after considerable effort, found myself at length immediately under the aperture. My progress along the lower superficies of this projection was like that of a crawling reptile. My back hung suspended over the chasm, into which one false movement of hand or foot, one yielding of the roots entwined in the rock, must inevitably have precipitated me; and, while my toes wormed themselves into the tortuous fibres of the latter, I passed hand over hand beyond my head, until I had arrived within a foot or two of the point I desired to reach. Here, however, a new difficulty occurred. A slight projection of the rock, close to the aperture, impeded my further progress in the manner hitherto pursued; and, to pass this, I was compelled to drop my whole weight, suspended by one vigorous arm, while, with the other, I separated the bushes that concealed the opening. A violent exertion of every muscle now impelled me upward, until at length I had so far succeeded as to introduce my head and shoulders through the aperture; after which my final success was no longer doubtful. If I have been thus minute in the detail of the dangerous nature of this passage," continued Wacousta, gloomily, "it is not without reason. I would have you to impress the whole of the localities upon your imagination, that you may the better comprehend, from a knowledge of the risks I incurred, how little I have merited the injuries under which I have writhed for years."
Again one of those painful pauses with which his narrative was so often broken, occurred; and, with an energy that terrified her whom he addressed, Wacousta pursued--"Clara de Haldimar, it was here--in this garden--this paradise--this oasis of the rocks in which I now found myself, that I first saw and loved your mother. Ha! you start: you believe me now. --Loved her!" he continued, after another short pause--"oh, what a feeble word is love to express the concentration of mighty feelings that flowed like burning lava through my veins! Who shall pretend to give a name to the emotion that ran thrillingly--madly through my excited frame, when first I gazed on her, who, in every attribute of womanly beauty, realised all my fondest fancy ever painted? --Listen to me, Clara," he pursued, in a fiercer tone, and with a convulsive pressure of the form he still encircled:--"If, in my younger days, my mind was alive to enterprise, and loved to contemplate danger in its most appalling forms, this was far from being the master passion of my soul; nay, it was the strong necessity I felt of pouring into some devoted bosom the overflowing fulness of my heart, that made me court in solitude those positions of danger with which the image of woman was ever associated. How often, while tossed by the raging elements, now into the blue vault of heaven, now into the lowest gulfs of the sea, have I madly wished to press to my bounding bosom the being of my fancy's creation, who, all enamoured and given to her love, should, even amid the danger that environed her, be alive but to one consciousness,--that of being with him on whom her life's hope alone reposed! How often, too, while bending over some dark and threatening precipice, or standing on the utmost verge of some tall projecting cliff, my aching head (aching with the intenseness of its own conceptions) bared to the angry storm, and my eye fixed unshrinkingly on the boiling ocean far beneath my feet, has my whole soul--my every faculty, been bent on that ideal beauty which controlled every sense! Oh, imagination, how tyrannical is thy sway--how exclusive thy power--how insatiable thy thirst! Surrounded by living beauty, I was insensible to its influence; for, with all the perfection that reality can attain on earth, there was ever to be found some deficiency, either physical or moral, that defaced the symmetry and destroyed the loveliness of the whole; but, no sooner didst thou, with magic wand, conjure up one of thy embodiments, than my heart became a sea of flame, and was consumed in the vastness of its own fires.
"It was in vain that my family sought to awaken me to a sense of the acknowledged loveliness of the daughters of more than one ancient house in the county, with one of whom an alliance was, in many respects, considered desirable. Their beauty, or rather their whole, was insufficient to stir up into madness the dormant passions of my nature; and although my breast was like a glowing furnace, in which fancy cast all the more exciting images of her coinage to secure the last impress of the heart's approval, my outward deportment to some of the fairest and loveliest of earth's realities was that of one on whom the influence of woman's beauty could have no power. From my earliest boyhood I had loved to give the rein to these feelings, until they at length rendered me their slave. Woman was the idol that lay enshrined within my inmost heart; but it was woman such as I had not yet met with, yet felt must somewhere exist in the creation. For her I could have resigned title, fortune, family, every thing that is dear to man, save the life, through which alone the reward of such sacrifice could have been tasted, and to this phantom I had already yielded up all the manlier energies of my nature; but, deeply as I felt the necessity of loving something less unreal, up to the moment of my joining the regiment, my heart had never once throbbed for created woman.
"I have already said that, on gaining the summit of the rock, I found myself in a sort of oasis of the mountains. It was so. Belted on every hand by bold and precipitous crags, that seemed to defy the approach even of the wildest animals, and putting utterly at fault the penetration and curiosity of man, was spread a carpet of verdure, a luxuriance of vegetation, that might have put to shame the fertility of the soft breeze-nourished valleys of Italy and Southern France. Time, however, is not given me to dwell on the mingled beauty and wildness of a scene, so consonant with my ideas of the romantic and the picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although my heart be lacerated once more in the recollection) who was the presiding deity of the whole,--the being after whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus, I should have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so largely a debtor, had in aught been cheated of what she had, for a series of years, so rigidly claimed.
"At about twenty yards from the aperture, and on a bank, formed of turf, covered with moss, and interspersed with roses and honeysuckles, sat this divinity of the oasis. She, too, was clad in the Highland dress, which gave an air of wildness and elegance to her figure that was in classic harmony with the surrounding scenery. At the moment of my appearance she was in the act of dressing the wounded shoulder of a stag, that had recently been shot; and from the broad tartan riband I perceived attached to its neck, added to the fact of the tameness of the animal, I presumed that this stag, evidently a favourite of its mistress, was the same I had fired at and wounded. The rustling I made among the bushes had attracted her attention; she raised her eyes from the deer, and, beholding me, started to her feet, uttering a cry of terror and surprise. Fearing to speak, as if the sound of my own voice were sufficient to dispel the illusion that fascinated both eye and heart into delicious tension on her form, yet with my soul kindled into all that wild uncontrollable love which had been the accumulation of years of passionate imagining, I stood for some moments as motionless as the rock out of which I appeared to grow. It seemed as though I had not the power to think or act, so fully was every faculty of my being filled with the consciousness that I at length gazed upon her I was destined to love for ever.
"It was this utter immobility on my own part, that ensured me a continuance of the exquisite happiness I then enjoyed. The first movement of the startled girl had been to fly towards her dwelling, which stood at a short distance, half imbedded in the same clustering roses and honey-suckles that adorned her bank of moss; but when she remarked my utter stillness, and apparent absence of purpose, she checked the impulse that would have directed her departure, and stopped, half in curiosity, half in fear, to examine me once more. At that moment all my energies appeared to be restored; I threw myself into an attitude expressive of deep contrition for the intrusion of which I had been unconsciously guilty, and dropping on one knee, and raising my clasped hands, inclined them towards her in token of mingled deprecation of her anger, and respectful homage to herself. At first she hesitated,--then gradually and timidly retrod her way to the seat she had so abruptly quitted in her alarm. Emboldened by this movement, I made a step or two in advance, but no sooner had I done so than she again took to flight. Once more, however, she turned to behold me, and again I had dropped on my knee, and was conjuring her, with the same signs, to remain and bless me with her presence. Again she returned to her seat, and again I advanced. Scarcely less timid, however, than the deer, which followed her every movement, she fled a third time,--a third time looked back, and was again induced, by my supplicating manner, to return. Frequently was this repeated, before I finally found myself at the feet, and pressing the hand--(oh God! what torture in the recollection!) --yes, pressing the hand of her for whose smile I would, even at that moment, have sacrificed my soul; and every time she fled, the classic disposition of her graceful limbs, and her whole natural attitude of alarm, could only be compared with those of one of the huntresses of Diana, intruded on in her woodland privacy by the unhallowed presence of some daring mortal. Such was your mother, Clara de Haldimar; yes, even such as I have described her was Clara Beverley."
Again Wacousta paused, and his pause was longer than usual, as, with his large hand again covering his face, he seemed endeavouring to master the feelings which these recollections had called up. Clara scarcely breathed. Unmindful of her own desolate position, her soul was intent only on a history that related so immediately to her beloved mother, of whom all that she had hitherto known was, that she was a native of Scotland, and that her father had married her while quartered in that country. The deep emotion of the terrible being before her, so often manifested in the course of what he had already given of his recital, added to her knowledge of the facts just named, scarcely left a doubt of the truth of his statement on her mind. Her ear was now bent achingly towards him, in expectation of a continuance of his history, but he still remained in the same attitude of absorption. An irresistible impulse caused her to extend her hand, and remove his own from his eyes: they were filled with tears; and even while her mind rapidly embraced the hope that this manifestation of tenderness was but the dawning of mercy towards the children of her he had once loved, her kind nature could not avoid sympathizing with him, whose uncouthness of appearance and savageness of nature was, in some measure, lost sight of in the fact of the powerful love he yet apparently acknowledged.
But no sooner did Wacousta feel the soft pressure of her hand, and meet her eyes turned on his with an expression of interest, than the most rapid transition was effected in his feelings. He drew the form of the weakly resisting girl closer to his heart; again imprinted a kiss upon her lips; and then, while every muscle in his iron frame seemed quivering with emotion, exclaimed,--"By Heaven! that touch, that glance, were Clara Beverley's all over! Oh, let me linger on the recollection, even such as they were, when her arms first opened to receive me in that sweet oasis of the Highlands. Yes, Clara," he proceeded more deliberately, as he scanned her form with an eye that made her shudder, "such as your mother was, so are you; the same delicacy of proportion; the same graceful curvature of limb, only less rounded, less womanly. But you must be younger by about two years than she then was. Your age cannot exceed seventeen; and time will supply what your mere girlhood renders you deficient in."
There was a cool licence of speech--a startling freedom of manner--in the latter part of this address, that disappointed not less than it pained and offended the unhappy Clara. It seemed to her as if the illusion she had just created, were already dispelled by his language, even as her own momentary interest in the fierce man had also been destroyed from the same cause. She shuddered; and sighing bitterly, suffered her tears to force themselves through her closed lids upon her pallid cheek. This change in her appearance seemed to act as a check on the temporary excitement of Wacousta. Again obeying one of these rapid transitions of feeling, for which he was remarkable, he once more assumed an expression of seriousness, and thus continued his narrative.
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"It boots not now, Clara, to enter upon all that succeeded to my first introduction to your mother. It would take long to relate, not the gradations of our passion, for that was like the whirlwind of the desert, sudden and devastating from the first; but the burning vow, the plighted faith, the reposing confidence, the unchecked abandonment that flew from the lips, and filled the heart of each, sealed, as they were, with kisses, long, deep, enervating, even such as I had ever pictured that divine pledge of human affection should be. Yes, Clara de Haldimar, your mother was the child of nature THEN. Unspoiled by the forms, unvitiated by the sophistries of a world with which she had never mixed, her intelligent innocence made the most artless avowals to my enraptured ear,--avowals that the more profligate minded woman of society would have blushed to whisper even to herself. And for these I loved her to my own undoing.
"Blind vanity, inconceivable folly!" continued Wacousta, again pressing his forehead with force; "how could I be so infatuated as not to perceive, that although her heart was filled with a new and delicious passion, it was less the individual than the man she loved. And how could it be otherwise, since I was the first, beside her father, she had ever seen or recollected to have seen? Still, Clara de Haldimar," he pursued, with haughty energy, "I was not always the rugged being I now appear. Of surpassing strength I had ever been, and fleet of foot, but not then had I attained to my present gigantic stature; neither was my form endowed with the same Herculean rudeness; nor did my complexion wear the swarthy hue of the savage; nor had my features been rendered repulsive, from the perpetual action of those fierce passions which have since assailed my soul. My physical faculties had not yet been developed to their present grossness of maturity, neither had my moral energies acquired that tone of ferocity which often renders me hideous, even in my own eyes. In a word, the milk of my nature (for, with all my impetuosity of character, I was generous-hearted and kind) had not yet been turned to gall by villainy and deceit. My form had then all that might attract--my manners all that might win--my enthusiasm of speech all that might persuade--and my heart all that might interest a girl fashioned after nature's manner, and tutored in nature's school. In the regiment, I was called the handsome grenadier; but there was another handsomer than I,--a sly, insidious, wheedling, false, remorseless villain. That villain, Clara de Haldimar, was your father.
"But wherefore," continued Wacousta, chafing with the recollection, "wherefore do I, like a vain and puling schoolboy, enter into this abasing contrast of personal advantages? The proud eagle soars not more above the craven kite, than did my soul, in all that was manly and generous, above that of yon false governor; and who should have prized those qualities, if it were not the woman who, bred in solitude, and taught by fancy to love all that was generous and noble in the heart of man, should have considered mere beauty of feature as dust in the scale, when opposed to sentiments which can invest even deformity with loveliness? In all this I may appear vain; I am only just.
"I have said that your mother had been brought up in solitude, and without having seen the face of another man than her father. Such was the case;--Colonel Beverley, of English name, but Scottish connections, was an old gentleman of considerable eccentricity of character. He had taken a part in the rebellion of 1715; but sick and disgusted with an issue by which his fortunes had been affected, and heart-broken by the loss of a beloved wife, whose death had been accelerated by circumstances connected with the disturbed nature of the times, he had resolved to bury himself and child in some wild, where the face of man, whom he loathed, might no more offend his sight. This oasis of the mountains was the spot selected for his purpose; for he had discovered it some years previously, on an occasion, when, closely pursued by some of the English troops, and separated from his followers, he had only effected his escape by venturing on the ledges of rock I have already described. After minute subsequent search, at the opposite extremity of the oblong belt of rocks that shut it in on every hand, he had discovered an opening, through which the transport of such necessaries as were essential to his object might be effected; and, causing one of his dwelling houses to be pulled down, he had the materials carried across the rocks on the shoulders of the men employed to re-erect them in his chosen solitude. A few months served to complete these arrangements, which included a garden abounding in every fruit and flower that could possibly live in so elevated a region; and; this, in time, under his own culture, and that of his daughter, became the Eden it first appeared to me.
"Previous to their entering on this employment, the workmen had been severally sworn to secrecy; and when all was declared ready for his reception, the colonel summoned them a second time to his presence; when, after making a handsome present to each, in addition to his hire, he found no difficulty in prevailing on them to renew their oath that they would preserve the most scrupulous silence in regard to the place of his retreat. He then took advantage of a dark and tempestuous night to execute his project; and, attended only by an old woman and her daughter, faithful dependants of the family, set out in quest of his new abode, leaving all his neighbours to discuss and marvel at the singularity of his disappearance. True to his text, however, not even a boy was admitted into his household: and here they had continued to live, unseeing and unseen by man, except when a solitary and distant mountaineer occasionally flitted among the rocks below in pursuit of his game. Fruits and vegetables composed their principal diet; but once a fortnight the old woman was dispatched through the opening already mentioned, which was at other times so secured by her master, that no hand but his own could remove the intricate fastenings. This expedition had for its object the purchase of bread and animal food at the nearest market; and every time she sallied forth an oath was administered to the crone, the purport of which was, not only that she would return, unless prevented by violence or death, but that she would not answer any questions put to her, as to who she was, whence she came, or for whom the fruits of her marketing were intended.
"Meanwhile, wrapped up in his books, which were chiefly classic authors, or writers on abstruse sciences, the misanthropical colonel paid little or no attention to the cultivation of the intellect of his daughter, whom he had merely instructed in the elementary branches of education; in all which, however, she evinced an aptitude and perfectability that indicated quickness of genius and a capability of far higher attainments. Books he principally withheld from her, because they brought the image of man, whom he hated, and wished she should also hate, too often in flattering colours before her; and had any work treating of love been found to have crept accidentally into his own collection, it would instantly and indignantly have been committed to the flames.
"Thus left to the action of her own heart--the guidance of her own feelings--it was but natural your mother should have suffered her imagination to repose on an ideal happiness, which, although in some degree destitute of shape and character, was still powerfully felt. Nature is too imperious a law-giver to be thwarted in her dictates; and however we may seek to stifle it, her inextinguishable voice will make itself heard, whether it be in the lonely desert or in the crowded capital. Possessed of a glowing heart and warm sensibilities, Clara Beverley felt the energies of her being had not been given to her to be wasted on herself. In her dreams by night, and her thoughts by day, she had pictured a being endowed with those attributes which were the fruit of her own fertility of conception. If she plucked a flower, (and all this she admitted at our first interview," groaned Wacousta,) "she was sensible of the absence of one to whom that flower might be given. If she gazed at the star-studded canopy of heaven, or bent her head over the frowning precipices by which she was every where surrounded, she felt the absence of him with whom she could share the enthusiasm excited by the contemplation of the one, and to whom she could impart the mingled terror and admiration produced by the dizzying depths of the other. What dear acknowledgments (alas! too deceitful,) flowed from her guileless lips, even during that first interview. With a candour and unreservedness that spring alone from unsophisticated manners and an untainted heart, she admitted, that the instant she beheld me, she felt she had found the being her fancy had been so long tutored to linger on, and her heart to love. She was sure I was come to be her husband (for she had understood from her aged attendant that a man who loved a woman wished to be her husband); and she was glad her pet stag had been wounded, since it had been the means of procuring her such happiness. She was not cruel enough to take pleasure in the sufferings of the poor animal; for she would nurse it, and it would soon be well again; but she could not help rejoicing in its disaster, since that circumstance had been the cause of my finding her out, and loving her even as she loved me. And all this was said with her head reclining on my chest, and her beautiful countenance irradiated with a glow that had something divine in the simplicity of purpose it expressed.
"On my demanding to know whether it was not her face I had seen at the opening in the cliff, she replied that it was. Her stag often played the truant, and passed whole hours away from her, rambling beyond the precincts of the solitude that contained its mistress; but no sooner was the small silver bugle, which she wore across her shoulder, applied to her lips, than 'Fidelity' (thus she had named him) was certain to obey the call, and to come bounding up the line of cliff to the main rock, into which it effected its entrance at a point that had escaped my notice. It was her bugle I had heard in the course of my pursuit of the animal; and, from the aperture through which I had effected my entrance, she had looked out to see who was the audacious hunter she had previously observed threading a passage, along which her stag itself never appeared without exciting terror in her bosom. The first glimpse she had caught of my form was at the moment when, after having sounded my own bugle, I cleared the chasm; and this was a leap she had so often trembled to see taken by 'Fidelity,' that she turned away and shuddered when she saw it fearlessly adventured on by a human being. A feeling of curiosity had afterwards induced her to return and see if the bold hunter had cleared the gulf, or perished in his mad attempt; but when she looked outward from the highest pinnacle of her rocky prison, she could discover no traces of him whatever. It then occurred to her, that, if successful in his leap, his progress must have been finally arrested by the impassable rock that terminated the ridge; in which case she might perchance obtain a nearer sight of his person. With this view she had removed the bushes enshrouding the aperture; and, bending low to the earth, thrust her head partially through it. Scarcely had she done so, however, when she beheld me immediately, though far beneath her, with my back reposing against the rock, and my eyes apparently fixed on hers.
"Filled with a variety of opposite sentiments, among which unfeigned alarm was predominant, she had instantaneously removed her head; and, closing the aperture as noiselessly as possible, returned to the moss-covered seat on which I had first surprised her; where, while she applied dressings of herbs to the wound of her favourite, she suffered her mind to ruminate on the singularity of the appearance of a man so immediately in the vicinity of their retreat. The supposed impracticability of the ascent I had accomplished, satisfied, even while (as she admitted) it disappointed her. I must of necessity retrace my way over the dangerous ridge. Great, therefore, was her surprise, when, after having been attracted by the rustling noise of the bushes over the aperture, she presently saw the figure of the same hunter emerge from the abyss it overhung. Terror had winged her flight; but it was terror mingled with a delicious emotion entirely new to her. It was that emotion, momentarily increasing in power, that induced her to pause, look back, hesitate in her course, and finally be won, by my supplicating manner, to return and bless me with her presence.
"Two long and delicious hours," pursued Wacousta, after another painful pause of some moments, "did we pass in this manner; exchanging thought, and speech, and heart, as if the term of our acquaintance had been coeval with the first dawn of our intellectual life; when suddenly a small silver toned bell was heard from the direction of the house, hid from the spot--on which we sat by the luxuriant foliage of an intervening laburnum. This sound seemed to dissipate the dreamy calm that had wrapped the soul of your mother into forgetfulness. She started suddenly up, and bade me, if I loved her, begone; as that bell announced her required attendance on her father, who, now awakened from the mid-day slumber in which he ever indulged, was about to take his accustomed walk around the grounds; which was little else, in fact, than a close inspection of the walls of his natural castle. I rose to obey her; our eyes met, and she threw herself into my extended arms. We whispered anew our vows of eternal love. She called me her husband, and I pronounced the endearing name of wife. A burning kiss sealed the compact; and, on her archly observing that the sleep of her father continued about two hours at noon, and that the old woman and her daughter were always occupied within doors, I promised to repeat my visit every second day until she finally quitted her retreat to be my own for life. Again the bell was rung; and this time with a violence that indicated impatience of delay. I tore myself from her arms, darted to the aperture, and kissing my hand in reply to the graceful waving of her scarf as she half turned in her own flight, sunk finally from her view; and at length, after making the same efforts, and mastering the same obstacles that had marked and opposed my advance, once more found myself at the point whence I had set out in pursuit of the wounded deer.
"Many were the congratulations I received from my companions, whom I found waiting my return. They had endured the three hours of my absence with intolerable anxiety and alarm; until, almost despairing of beholding me again, they had resolved on going back without me. They said they had repeatedly sounded their horns; but meeting with no answer from mine, had been compelled to infer either that I had strayed to a point whence return to them was impracticable, or that I must have perished in the abyss. I readily gave in to the former idea; stating I had been led by the traces of the wounded deer to a considerable distance, and over passes which it had proved a work of time and difficulty to surmount, yet without securing my spoil. All this time there was a glow of animation on my cheek, and a buoyancy of spirit in my speech, that accorded ill, the first, with the fatigue one might have been supposed to experience in so perilous a chase; the second, with the disappointment attending its result. Your father, ever cool and quick of penetration, was the first to observe this; and when he significantly remarked, that, to judge from my satisfied countenance, my time had been devoted to the pursuit of more interesting game, I felt for a moment as if he was actually master of my secret, and was sensible my features underwent a change. I, however, parried the attack, by replying indifferently, that if he should have the hardihood to encounter the same dangers, he would, if successful, require no other prompter than the joy of self-preservation to lend the same glow of satisfaction to his own features. Nothing further was said on the subject; but conversing on indifferent topics, we again threaded the mazes of rock and underwood we had passed at an early hour, and finally gained the town in which we were quartered.
"During dinner, as on our way home, although my voice occasionally mixed with the voices of my companions, my heart was far away, and full of the wild but innocent happiness in which it had luxuriated. At length, the more freely to indulge in the recollection, I stole at an early hour from the mess-room, and repaired to my own apartments. In the course of the morning, I had hastily sketched an outline of your mother's features in pencil, with a view to assist me in the design of a miniature I purposed painting from memory. This was an amusement of which I was extremely and in which I had attained considerable excellence; being enabled, from memory alone, to give a most correct representation of any object that particularly fixed my attention. She had declared utter ignorance of the art herself, her father having studiously avoided instructing her in it from some unexplained motive; yet as she expressed the most unbounded admiration of those who possessed it, it was my intention to surprise her with a highly finished likeness of herself at my next visit. With this view I now set to work; and made such progress, that before I retired to rest I had completed all but the finishing touches, to which I purposed devoting a leisure hour or two by daylight on the morrow.
"While occupied the second day in its completion, it occurred to me I was in orders for duty on the following, which was that of my promised visit to the oasis; and I despatched my servant with my compliments to your father, and a request that he would be so obliging as to take my guard for me on the morrow, and I would perform his duty when next his name appeared on the roster. Some time afterwards I heard the door of the room in which I sat open, and some one enter. Presuming it to be my servant, returned from the execution of the message with which he had just been charged, I paid no attention to the circumstance; but finding, presently, he did not speak, I turned round with a view of demanding what answer he had brought. To my surprise, however, I beheld not my servant, but your father. He was standing looking over my shoulder at the work on which I was engaged; and notwithstanding in the instant he resumed the cold, quiet, smirking look that usually distinguished him, I thought I could trace the evidence of some deep emotion which my action had suddenly dispelled. He apologised for his intrusion, although we were on those terms that rendered apology unnecessary, but said he had just received my message, and preferred coming in person to assure me how happy he should feel to take my duty, or to render me any other service in his power. I thought he laid unusual emphasis on the last sentence; yet I thanked him warmly, stating that the only service I should now exact of him would be to take my guard, as I was compelled to be absent nearly the whole of the following morning. He observed, with a smile, he hoped I was not going to venture my neck on those dangerous precipices a second time, after the narrow escape I had had on the preceding day. As he spoke, I thought his eye met mine with a sly yet scrutinizing glance; and, not wishing to reply immediately to his question, I asked him what he thought of the work with which I was endeavouring to beguile an idle hour. He took it up, and I watched the expression of his handsome countenance with the anxiety of a lover who wishes that all should think his mistress beautiful as he does himself. It betrayed a very indefinite sort of admiration; and yet it struck me there was an eagerness in his dilating eye that contrasted strongly with the calm and unconcern of his other features. At length I asked him, laughingly, what he thought of my Cornish cousin. He replied, cautiously enough, that since it was the likeness of a cousin, and he dwelt emphatically on the word, he could not fail to admire it. Candour, however, compelled him to admit, that had I not declared the original to be one so closely connected with me, he should have said the talent of so perfect an artist might have been better employed. Whatever, however, his opinion of the lady might be, there could be no question that the painting was exquisite; yet, he confessed, he could not but be struck with the singularity of the fact of a Cornish girl appearing in the full costume of a female Highlander. This, I replied, was mere matter of fancy and association, arising from my having been so much latterly in the habit of seeing that dress principally worn. He smiled one of his then damnable soft smiles of assent, and here the conversation terminated, and he left me.
"The next day saw me again at the side of your mother, who received me with the same artless demonstrations of affection. There was a mellowed softness in her countenance, and a tender languor in her eye, I had not remarked the preceding day. Then there was more of the vivacity and playfulness of the young girl; now, more of the deep fervour and the composed serenity of the thoughtful woman. This change was too consonant to my taste--too flattering to my self-love--not to be rejoiced in; and as I pressed her yielding form in silent rapture to my own, I more than ever felt she was indeed the being for whom my glowing heart had so long yearned. After the first full and unreserved interchange of our souls' best feelings, our conversation turned upon lighter topics; and I took an opportunity to produce the fruit of my application since we had parted. Never shall I forget the surprise and delight that animated her beautiful countenance when first she gazed upon the miniature. The likeness was perfect, even to the minutest shading of her costume; and so forcibly and even childishly did this strike her, that it was with difficulty I could persuade her she was not gazing on some peculiar description of mirror that reflected back her living image. She expressed a strong desire to retain it; and to this I readily assented: stipulating only to retain it until my next visit, in order that I might take an exact copy for myself. With a look of the fondest love, accompanied by a pressure on mine of lips that distilled dewy fragrance where they rested, she thanked me for a gift which she said would remind her, in absence, of the fidelity with which her features had been engraven on my heart. She admitted, moreover, with a sweet blush, that she herself had not been idle. Although her pencil could not call up my image in the same manner, her pen had better repaid her exertions; and, in return for the portrait, she would give me a letter she had written to beguile her loneliness on the preceding day. As she spoke she drew a sealed packet from the bosom of her dress, and placing it in my hand, desired me not to read it until I had returned to my home. But there was an expression of sweet confusion in her lovely countenance, and a trepidation in her manner, that, half disclosing the truth, rendered me utterly impatient of the delay imposed; and eagerly breaking the seal, I devoured rather than read its contents.
"Accursed madness of recollection!" pursued Wacousta, again striking his brow violently with his hand,--"why is it that I ever feel thus unmanned while recurring to those letters? Oh! Clara de Haldimar, never did woman pen to man such declarations of tenderness and attachment as that too dear but faithless letter of your mother contained. Words of fire, emanating from the guilelessness of innocence, glowed in every line; and yet every sentence breathed an utter unconsciousness of the effect those words were likely to produce. Mad, wild, intoxicated, I read the letter but half through; and, as it fell from my trembling hand, my eye turned, beaming with the fires of a thousand emotions, upon that of the worshipped writer. That glance was more than her own could meet. A new consciousness seemed to be stirred up in her soul. Her eye dropped beneath its long and silken fringe--her cheek became crimson--her bosom heaved--and, all confidingness, she sank her head upon my chest, which heaved scarcely less wildly than her own.
"Had I been a cold-blooded villain--a selfish and remorseless seducer," continued Wacousta with vehemence--"what was to have prevented my triumph at that moment? But I came not to blight the flower that had long been nurtured, though unseen, with the life-blood of my own being. Whatever I may be NOW, I was THEN the soul of disinterestedness and honour; and had she reposed on the bosom of her own father, that devoted and unresisting girl could not have been pressed there with holier tenderness. But even to this there was too soon a term. The hour of parting at length arrived, announced, as before, by the small bell of her father, and I again tore myself from her arms; not, however, without first securing the treasured letter, and obtaining a promise from your mother that I should receive another at each succeeding visit."
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"Nearly a month passed away in this manner; and at each interview our affection seemed to increase. The days of our meeting were ever days of pure and unalloyed happiness; while the alternate ones of absence were, on my part, occupied chiefly with reading the glowing letters given me at each parting by your mother. Of all these, however, there was not one so impassioned, so natural, so every way devoted, as the first. Not that she who wrote them felt less, but that the emotion excited in her bosom by the manifestation of mine on that occasion, had imparted a diffidence to her style of expression, plainly indicating the source whence it sprung.
"One day, while preparing to set out on my customary excursion, a report suddenly reached me that the route had arrived for the regiment, who were to march from ---- within three days. This intelligence I received with inconceivable delight; for it had been settled between your mother and myself, that this should be the moment chosen for her departure. It was not to be supposed (and I should have been both pained and disappointed had it been otherwise,) that she would consent to abandon her parent without some degree of regret; but, having foreseen this objection from the first, I had gradually prepared her for the sacrifice. This was the less difficult, as he appeared never to have treated her with affection,--seldom with the marked favour that might have been presumed to distinguish the manner of a father towards a lovely and only daughter. Living for himself and the indulgence of his misanthropy alone, he cared little for the immolation of his child's happiness on its unhallowed shrine; and this was an act of injustice I had particularly dwelt upon; upheld in truth, as it was, by the knowledge she herself possessed, that no consideration could induce him to bestow her hand on any one individual of a race he so cordially detested; and this was not without considerable weight in her decision.
"With a glowing cheek, and a countenance radiant with happiness, did your mother receive my proposal to prepare for her departure on the following day. She was sufficiently aware, even through what I had stated myself, that there were certain ceremonies of the Church to be performed, in order to give sanctity to our union, and ensure her own personal respectability in the world; and these, I told her, would be solemnised by the chaplain of the regiment. She implicitly confided in me; and she was right; for I loved her too well to make her my mistress, while no barrier existed to her claim to a dearer title. And had she been the daughter of a peasant, instead of a high-born gentleman, finding her as I had found her, and loving her as I did love her, I should have acted precisely in the same way.
"The only difficulty that now occurred was the manner of her flight. The opening before alluded to as being the point whence the old woman made her weekly sally to the market town, was of so intricate and labyrinthian a character that none but the colonel understood the secret of its fastenings; and the bare thought of my venturing with her on the route by which I had hitherto made my entry into the oasis, was one that curdled my blood with fear. I could absolutely feel my flesh to contract whenever I painted the terrible risk that would be incurred in adopting a plan I had once conceived,--namely, that of lashing your mother to my back, while I again effected my descent to the ledge beneath, in the manner I had hitherto done. I felt that, once on the ridge, I might, without much effort, attain the passage of the fissure already described; for the habit of accomplishing this leap had rendered it so perfectly familiar to me, that I now performed it with the utmost security and ease; but to imagine our united weight suspended over the abyss, as it necessarily must be in the first stage of our flight, when even the dislodgment of a single root or fragment of the rock was sufficient to ensure the horrible destruction of her whom I loved better than my own life, had something too appalling in it to suffer me to dwell on the idea for more than a moment. I had proposed, as the most feasible and rational plan, that the colonel should be compelled to give us egress through the secret passage, when we might command the services of the old woman to guide us through the passes that led to the town; but to this your mother most urgently objected, declaring that she would rather encounter any personal peril that might attend her escape, in a different manner, than appear to be a participator in an act of violence against her parent whose obstinacy of character she moreover knew too well to leave a hope of his being intimidated into the accomplishment of our object, even by a threat of death itself. This plan I was therefore compelled to abandon; and as neither of us were able to discover the passage by which the deer always effected its entrance, I was obliged to fix upon one, which it was agreed should be put in practice on the following day.
"On my return, I occupied myself with preparations for the reception of her who was so speedily to become my wife. Unwilling that she should be seen by any of my companions, until the ceremony was finally performed, I engaged apartments in a small retired cottage, distant about half a mile from the furthest extremity of the town, where I purposed she should remain until the regiment finally quitted the station. This point secured, I hastened to the quarters of the chaplain, to engage his services for the following evening; but he was from home at the time, and I repaired to my own rooms, to prepare the means of escape for your mother. These occupied me until a very late hour; and when at length I retired to rest, it was only to indulge in the fondest imaginings that ever filled the heart of a devoted lover. Alas! (and the dark warrior again sighed heavily) the day-dream of my happiness was already fast drawing to a close.
"At half an hour before noon, I was again in the oasis; your mother was at the wonted spot; and although she received me with her sunniest smiles, there were traces of tears upon her cheek. I kissed them eagerly away, and sought to dissipate the partial gloom that was again clouding her brow. She observed it pained me to see her thus, and she made a greater effort to rally. She implored me to forgive her weakness; but it was the first time she was to be separated from her parent; and conscious as she was that it was to be for ever, she could not repress the feeling that rose, despite of herself, to her heart. She had, however, prepared a letter, at my suggestion, to be left on her favourite moss seat, where it was likely she would first be sought by her father, to assure him of her safety, and of her prospects of future happiness; and the consciousness that he would labour under no harrowing uncertainty in regard to her fate, seemed, at length, to soothe and satisfy her heart.
"I now led her to the aperture, where I had left the apparatus provided for my purpose: this consisted of a close netting, about four feet in depth, with a board for a footstool at the bottom, and furnished at intervals with hoops, so as to keep it full and open. The top of this netting was provided with two handles, to which were attached the ends of a cord many fathoms in length; the whole of such durability, as to have borne weights equal to those of three ordinary sized men, with which I had proved it prior to my setting out. My first care was to bandage the eyes of your mother, (who willingly and fearlessly submitted to all I proposed,) that she might not see, and become faint with seeing, the terrible chasm over which she was about to be suspended. I then placed her within the netting, which, fitting closely to her person, and reaching under her arms, completely secured her; and my next urgent request was, that she would not, on any account, remove the bandage, or make the slightest movement, when she found herself stationary below, until I had joined her. I then dropped her gently through the aperture, lowering fathom after fathom of the rope, the ends of which I had firmly secured round the trunk of a tree, as an additional safeguard, until she finally came on a level with that part of the cliff on which I had reposed when first she beheld me. As she still hung immediately over the abyss, it was necessary to give a gradual impetus to her weight, to enable her to gain the landing-place. I now, therefore, commenced swinging her to and fro, until she at length came so near the point desired, that I clearly saw the principal difficulty was surmounted. The necessary motion having been given to the balance, with one vigorous and final impulsion I dexterously contrived to deposit her several feet from the edge of the lower rock, when, slackening the rope on the instant, I had the inexpressible satisfaction to see that she remained firm and stationary. The waving of her scarf immediately afterwards (a signal previously agreed upon), announced she had sustained no injury in this rather rude collision with the rock, and I in turn commenced my descent.
"Fearing to cast away the ends of the rope, lest their weight should by any chance effect the balance of the footing your mother had obtained, I now secured them around my loins, and accomplishing my descent in the customary manner, speedily found myself once more at the side of my heart's dearest treasure. Here the transport of my joy was too great to be controlled; I felt that NOW my prize was indeed secured to me for ever; and I burst forth into the most passionate exclamations of tenderness, and falling on my knees, raised my hands to Heaven in fervent gratitude for the success with which my enterprise had been crowned. Another would have been discouraged at the difficulties still remaining; but with these I was become too familiar, not to feel the utmost confidence in encountering them, even with the treasure that was equally perilled with myself. For a moment I removed the bandage from the eyes of your mother, that she might behold not only the far distant point whence she had descended, but the frowning precipice I had daily been in the habit of climbing to be blest with her presence. She did so,--and her cheek paled, for the first time, with a sense of the danger I had incurred; then turning her soft and beautiful eyes on mine, she smiled a smile that seemed to express how much her love would repay me. Again our lips met, and we were happy even in that lonely spot, beyond all language to describe. Once more, at length, I prepared to execute the remainder of my task; and I again applied the bandage to her eyes, saying that, although the principal danger was over, still there was another I could not bear she should look upon. Again she smiled, and with a touching sweetness of expression that fired my blood, observing at the same time she feared no danger while she was with me, but that if my object was to prevent her from looking at me, the most efficient way certainly was to apply a bandage to her eyes. Oh! woman, woman!" groaned Wacousta, in fierce anguish of spirit, "who shall expound the complex riddle of thy versatile nature?
"Disengaging the rope from the handles of the netting, I now applied to these a broad leathern belt taken from the pouches of two of my men, and stooping with my back to the cherished burden with which I was about to charge myself, passed the centre of the belt across my chest, much in the manner in which, as you are aware, Indian women carry their infant children. As an additional precaution, I had secured the netting round my waist by a strong lacing of cord, and then raising myself to my full height, and satisfying myself of the perfect freedom of action of my limbs, seized a long balancing pole I had left suspended against the rock at my last visit, and commenced my descent of the sloping ridge. On approaching the horrible chasm, a feeling of faintness came over me, despite of the confidence with which I had previously armed myself. This, however, was but momentary. Sensible that every thing depended on rapidity of movement, I paused not in my course; but, quickening my pace as I gradually drew nearer, gave the necessary impetus to my motion, and cleared the gap with a facility far exceeding what had distinguished my first passage, and which was the fruit of constant practice alone. Here my balance was sustained by the pole; and at length I had the inexpressible satisfaction to find myself at the very extremity of the ridge, and immediately at the point where I had left my companions in my first memorable pursuit. Alas!" continued the warrior, again interrupting himself with one of those fierce exclamations of impatient anguish that so frequently occurred in his narrative, "what subject for rejoicing was there in this? Better far we had been dashed to pieces in the abyss, than I should have lived to curse the hour when first my spirit of adventure led me to traverse it." Again he resumed:-- "In the deep transport of my joy, I once more threw myself on my knees in speechless thanksgiving to Providence for the complete success of my undertaking. Your mother, whom I had previously released from her confinement, did the same; and at that moment the union of our hearts seemed to be cemented by a divine influence, manifested in the fulness of the gratitude of each. I then raised her from the earth, imprinting a kiss upon her fair brow, that was hallowed by the purity of the feeling I had so recently indulged in; and throwing over her shoulders the mantle of a youth, which I had secreted near the spot, enjoined her to follow me closely in the path I was about to pursue. As she had hitherto encountered no fatigue, and was, moreover, well provided with strong buskins I had brought for the purpose, I thought it advisable to discontinue the use of the netting, which must attract notice, and cause us, perhaps, to be followed, in the event of our being met by any of the hunters that usually traversed these parts. To carry her in my arms, as I should have preferred, might have excited the same curiosity, and I was therefore compelled to decide upon her walking; reserving to myself, however, the sweet task of bearing her in my embrace over the more difficult parts of our course.
"I have not hitherto found it necessary to state," continued Wacousta, his brow lowering with fierce and gloomy thought, "that more than once, latterly, on my return from the oasis, which was usually at a stated hour, I had observed a hunter hovering near the end of the ledge, yet quickly retreating as I advanced. There was something in the figure of this man that recalled to my recollection the form of your father; but ever, on my return to quarters, I found him in uniform, and exhibiting any thing but the appearance of one who had recently been threading his weary way among rocks and fastnesses. Besides, the improbability of this fact was so great, that it occupied not my attention beyond the passing moment. On the present occasion, however, I saw the same hunter, and was more forcibly than ever struck by the resemblance to my friend. Prior to my quitting the point where I had liberated your mother from the netting, I had, in addition to the disguise of the cloak, found it necessary to make some alteration in the arrangement of her hair; the redundancy of which, as it floated gracefully over her polished neck, was in itself sufficient to betray her sex. With this view I had removed her plumed bonnet. It was the first time I had seen her without it; and so deeply impressed was I by the angel-like character of the extreme feminine beauty she, more than ever, then exhibited, that I knelt in silent adoration for some moments at her feet, my eyes and countenance alone expressing the fervent and almost holy emotion of my enraptured soul. Had she been a divinity, I could not have worshipped her with a purer feeling. While I yet knelt, I fancied I heard a sound behind me; and, turning quickly, beheld the head of a man peering above a point of rock at some little distance. He immediately, on witnessing my action, sank again beneath it, but not in sufficient time to prevent my almost assuring myself that it was the face of your father I had beheld. My first impulse was to bound forward, and satisfy myself who it really was who seemed thus ever on the watch to intercept my movements; but a second rapid reflection convinced me, that, having been discovered, it was most likely the intruder had already effected his retreat, and that any attempt at pursuit might not only alarm your mother, but compromise her safety. I determined, however, to tax your father with the fact on my return to quarters; and, from the manner in which he met the charge, to form my own conclusion.
"Meanwhile we pursued our course; and after an hour's rather laborious exertion, at length emerged from the succession of glens and rocks that lay in our way; when, skirting the valley in which the town was situated, we finally reached the cottage where I had secured my lodging. Previous to entering it, I had told your mother, that for the few hours that would intervene before the marriage ceremony could be performed, I should, by way of lulling the curiosity of her hostess, introduce her as a near relative of my own. This I did accordingly; and, having seen that every thing was comfortably arranged for her convenience, and recommending her strongly to the care of the old woman, I set off once more in search of the chaplain of the regiment Before I could reach his residence, however, I was met by a sergeant of my company, who came running towards me, evidently with some intelligence of moment. He stated, that my presence was required without delay. The grenadiers, with the senior subaltern, were in orders for detachment for an important service; and considerable displeasure had been manifested by the colonel at my absence, especially as of late I had greatly neglected my military duties. He had been looking for me every where, he said, but without success, when Ensign de Haldimar had pointed out to him in what direction it was likely I might be found.
"At a calmer moment, I should have been startled at the last observation; but my mind was too much engrossed with the principal subject of my regret, to pay any attention to the circumstance. It was said the detachment would be occupied in this duty a week or ten days, at least; and how was I to absent myself from her whom I so fondly loved for this period, without even being permitted first to see and account to her for my absence? There was torture in the very thought; and in the height of my impatience, I told the sergeant he might give my compliments to the colonel, and say I would see the service d--d rather than inconvenience myself by going out on this duty at so short a notice; that I had private business of the highest importance to myself to transact, and could not absent myself. As the man, however, prepared coolly to depart, it suddenly occurred to me, that I might prevail on your father to take my duty now, as on former occasions he had willingly done, and I countermanded my message to the colonel; desiring him, however, to find out Ensign de Haldimar, and say that I requested to see him immediately at my quarters, whither I was now proceeding to change my dress.
"With a beating heart did I assume an uniform that appeared, at that moment, hideous in my eyes; yet I was not without a hope I might yet get off this ill-timed duty. Before I had completed my equipment, your father entered; and when I first glanced my eye full upon his, I thought his countenance exhibited evidences of confusion. This immediately reminded me of the unknown hunter, and I asked him if he was not the person I described. His answer was not a positive denial, but a mixture of raillery and surprise that lulled my doubts, enfeebled as they were by the restored calm of his features. I then told him that I had a particular favour to ask of him, which, in consideration of our friendship, I trusted he would not refuse; and that was, to take my duty in the expedition about to set forth. His manner implied concern; and he asked, with a look that had much deliberate expression in it, 'if I was aware that it was a duty in which blood was expected to be shed? He could not suppose that any consideration would induce me to resign my duty to another officer, when apprised of this fact.' All this was said with the air of one really interested in my honour; but in my increasing impatience, I told him I wanted none of his cant; I simply asked him a favour, which he would grant or decline as he thought proper. This was a harshness of language I had never indulged in; but my mind was sore under the existing causes of my annoyance, and I could not bear to have my motives reflected on at a moment when my heart was torn with all the agonies attendant on the position in which I found myself placed. His cheek paled and flushed more than once, before he replied, 'that in spite of my unkindness his friendship might induce him to do much for me, even as he had hitherto done, but that on the present occasion it rested not with him. In order to justify himself he would no longer disguise the fact from me, that the colonel had declared, in the presence of the whole regiment, I should take my duty regularly in future, and not be suffered to make a convenience of the service any longer. If, however, he could do any thing for me during my absence, I had but to command him.
"While I was yet giving vent, in no very measured terms, to the indignation I felt at being made the subject of public censure by the colonel, the same sergeant came into the room, announcing that the company were only waiting for me to march, and that the colonel desired my instant presence. In the agitation of my feelings, I scarcely knew what I did, putting several portions of my regimental equipment on so completely awry, that your father noticed and rectified the errors I had committed; while again, in the presence of the sergeant, I expressed the deepest regret he could not relieve me from a duty that was hateful to the last degree.
"Torn with agony at the thought of the uncertainty in which I was compelled to leave her, whom I so fondly adored, I had now no other alternative than to make a partial confidant of your father. I told him that in the cottage which I pointed out he would find the original of the portrait he had seen me painting on a former occasion,--the Cornish cousin, whose beauty he professed to hold so cheaply. More he should know of her on my return; but at present I confided her to his honour, and begged he would prove his friendship for me by rendering her whatever attention she might require in her humble abode. With these hurried injunctions he promised to comply; and it has often occurred to me since, although I did not remark it at the time, that while his voice and manner were calm, there was a burning glow upon his handsome cheek, and a suppressed exultation in his eye, that I had never observed on either before. I then quitted the room; and hastening to my company with a gloom on--my brow that indicated the wretchedness of my inward spirit, was soon afterwards on the march from ----."
Again the warrior seemed agitated with the most violent emotion; he buried his face in his hands; and the silence that ensued was longer than any he had previously indulged in. At length he made an effort to arouse himself; and again exhibiting his swarthy features, disclosed a brow, not clouded, as before, by grief, but animated with the fiercest and most appalling passions, while he thus impetuously resumed.
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"If, hitherto, Clara de Haldimar, I have been minute in the detail of all that attended my connection with your mother, it has been with a view to prove to you how deeply I have been injured; but I have now arrived at a part of my history, when to linger on the past would goad me into madness, and render me unfit for the purpose to which I have devoted myself. Brief must be the probing of wounds, that nearly five lustres have been insufficient to heal; brief the tale that reveals the infamy of those who have given you birth, and the utter blighting of the fairest hopes of one whose only fault was that of loving, "not too wisely, but too well."
"Will you credit the monstrous truth," he added, in a fierce but composed whisper, while he bent eagerly over the form of the trembling yet attentive girl, "when I tell you that, on my return from that fatal expedition, during my continuance on which her image had never once been absent from my mind, I found Clara Beverley the wife of De Haldimar? Yes," continued Wacousta, his wounded feeling and mortified pride chafing, by the bitter recollection, into increasing fury, while his countenance paled in its swarthiness, "the wife, the wedded wife of yon false and traitorous governor! Well may you look surprised, Clara de Haldimar: such damnable treachery as this may startle his own blood in the veins of another, nor find its justification even in the devotedness of woman's filial piety. To what satanic arts so calculating a villain could have had recourse to effect his object I know not; but it is not the less true, that she, from whom my previous history must have taught you to expect the purity of intention and conduct of an angel, became his wife,--and I a being accursed among men. Even as our common mother is said to have fallen in the garden of Eden, tempted by the wily beauty of the devil, so did your mother fall, seduced by that of the cold, false, traitorous De Haldimar." Here the agitation of Wacousta became terrific. The labouring of his chest was like that of one convulsed with some racking agony and the swollen veins and arteries of his head seemed to threaten the extinction of life in some fearful paroxysm. At length he burst into a violent fit of tears, more appalling, in one of his iron nature, than the fury which had preceded it,--and it was many minutes before he could so far compose himself as to resume.
"Think not, Clara de Haldimar, I speak without the proof. Her own words confessed, her own lips avowed it, and yet I neither slew her, nor her paramour, nor myself. On my return to the regiment I had flown to the cottage, on the wings of the most impatient and tender love that ever filled the bosom of man for woman. To my enquiries the landlady replied, that my cousin had been married two days previously, by the military chaplain, to a handsome young officer, who had visited her soon after my departure, and was constantly with her from that moment; and that immediately after the ceremony they had left, but she knew not whither. Wild, desperate, almost bereft of reason, and with a heart bounding against my bosom, as if each agonising throb were to be its last, I ran like a maniac back into the town, nor paused till I found myself in the presence of your father. My mind was a volcano, but still I attempted to be calm, even while I charged him, in the most outrageous terms, with his villainy. Deny it he could not; but, far from excusing it, he boldly avowed and justified the step he had taken, intimating, with a smile full of meaning, there was nothing in a connection with the family of De Haldimar to reflect disgrace on the cousin of Sir Reginald Morton; and that; the highest compliment he could pay his friend was to attach himself to one whom that friend had declared to be so near a relative of his own. There was a coldness of taunt in these remarks, that implied his sense of the deception I had practised on him, in regard to the true nature of the relationship; and for a moment, while my hand firmly grasped the hilt of my sword, I hesitated whether I should not cut him down at my feet: I had self-command, however, to abstain from the outrage, and I have often since regretted I had. My own blood could have been but spilt in atonement for my just revenge; and as for the obloquy attached to the memory of the assassin, it could not have been more bitter than that which has followed me through life. But what do I say?" fiercely continued the warrior, an exulting ferocity sparkling in his eye, and animating his countenance; "had he fallen, then my vengeance were but half complete. No; it is now he shall feel the deadly venom in his heart, that has so long banqueted on mine.
"Determined to know from her own lips," he pursued, to the shuddering Clara, whose hopes, hitherto strongly excited, now, began again to fade beneath the new aspect given to the strange history of this terrible man;--"determined to satisfy myself from her own acknowledgment, whether all I had heard was not an imposition, I summoned calmness enough to desire that your mother might confirm in person the alienation of her affection, as nothing short of that could convince me of the truth. He left the room, and presently re-appeared, conducting her in from another: I thought she looked more beautiful than ever, but, alas! I had the inexpressible horror to discover, before a word was uttered, that all the fondness of her nature was indeed transferred to your father. How I endured the humiliation of that scene has often been a source of utter astonishment to myself; but I did endure it. To my wild demand, how she could so soon have forgotten her vows, and falsified her plighted engagements, she replied, timidly and confusedly, she had not yet known her own heart; but if she had pained me by her conduct, she was sorry for it, and hoped I would forgive her. She would always be happy to esteem me as a friend, but she loved her Charles far, far better than she had ever loved me. This damning admission, couched in the same language of simplicity that had first touched and won my affection, was like boiling lead upon my brain. In a transport of madness I sprang towards her, caught her in my arms, and swore she should accompany me back to the oasis--when I had taken her there, to be regained by my detested rival, if he could; but that he should not eat the fruit I had plucked at so much peril to myself. She struggled to disengage herself, calling on your father by the most endearing epithets to free her from my embrace. He attempted it, and I struck him senseless to the floor at a single blow with the flat of my sabre, which in my extreme fury I had unsheathed. Instead, however, of profiting by the opportunity thus afforded to execute my threat, a feeling of disgust and contempt came over me, for the woman, whose inconstancy had been the cause of my committing myself in this ungentlemanly manner; and bestowing deep but silent curses on her head, I rushed from the house in a state of frenzy. How often since have I regretted that I had not pursued my first impulse, and borne her to some wild, where, forgetting one by whose beauty of person her eye alone had been seduced, her heart might have returned to its allegiance to him who had first awakened the sympathies of her soul, and would have loved her with a love blending the fiercest fires of the eagle with the gentlest devotedness of the dove. But destiny had differently ordained.
"Did my injuries end here?" pursued the dark warrior, as his eye kindled with rage. "No: for weeks I was insensible to any thing but the dreadful shock my soul had sustained. A heavy stupor weighed me down, and for a period it was supposed my reason was overthrown: no such mercy was reserved for me. The regiment had quitted the Highlands, and were now stationary in ----, whither I had accompanied it in arrest. The restoration of my faculties was the signal for new persecutions. Scarcely had the medical officers reported me fit to sustain the ordeal, when a court-martial was assembled to try me on a variety of charges. Who was my prosecutor? Listen, Clara," and he shook her violently by the arm. "He who had robbed me of all that gave value to life, and incentive to honour,--he who, under the guise of friendship, had stolen into the Eden of my love, and left it barren of affection. In a word, yon detested governor, to whose inhuman cruelty even the son of my brother has, by some strange fatality of coincidence, so recently fallen a second sacrifice. Curses, curses on him," he pursued, with frightful vehemence, half rising as he spoke, and holding forth his right arm in a menacing attitude; "but the hour of retribution is at hand, and revenge, the exclusive passion of the gods, shall at length be mine. In no other country in the world--under no other circumstances than the present--could I have so secured it.
"What were the charges preferred against me?" he continued, with a violence that almost petrified the unhappy girl. "Hear them, and judge whether I have not cause for the inextinguishable hate that rankles at my heart. Every trifling disobedience of orders--every partial neglect of duty that could be raked up--was tortured into a specific charge; and, as I have already admitted I had latterly transgressed not a little in this respect, these were numerous enough. Yet they were but preparatory to others of greater magnitude. Next succeeded one that referred to the message I had given, and countermanded, to the sergeant of my company, when in the impatience of my disappointment I had desired him to tell the colonel I would see the service d--d rather than inconvenience myself at that moment for it. This was unsupported by other evidence, however, and therefore failed in the proof. But the web was too closely woven around to admit of my escaping. --Will you, can you believe any thing half so atrocious, as that your father should have called on this same man not only to prove the violent and insubordinate language I had used in reference to the commanding officer in my own rooms, but also to substantiate a charge of cowardice, grounded on the unwillingness I had expressed to accompany the expedition, and the extraordinary trepidation I had evinced, while preparing for the duty, manifested, as it was stated to be, by the various errors he had rectified in my equipment with his own hand? Yes, even this pitiful charge was one of the many preferred; but the severest was that which he had the unblushing effrontery to make the subject of public investigation, rather than of private redress--the blow I had struck him in his own apartments. And who was his witness in this monstrous charge? --your mother, Clara. Yea, I stood as a criminal in her presence; and yet she came forward to tender an evidence that was to consign me to a disgraceful sentence. My vile prosecutor had, moreover, the encouragement, the sanction of his colonel throughout, and by him he was upheld in every contemptible charge his ingenuity could devise. Do you not anticipate the result? --I was found guilty, and dismissed the service.
"How acted my brother officers, when, previously to the trial, I alluded to the damnable treachery of your father? Did they condemn his conduct, or sympathise with me in my misfortune? --No; they shrugged their shoulders, and coldly observed, I ought to have known better than to trust one against whom they had so often cautioned me; but that as I had selected him for my friend, I should have bestowed a whole, and not a half confidence upon him. He had had the hypocrisy to pretend to them he had violated no trust, since he had honourably espoused a lady whom I had introduced to him as a cousin, and in whom I appeared to have no other interest than that of relationship. Not, they said, that they believed he actually did entertain that impression; but still the excuse was too plausible, and had been too well studied by my cunning rival, to be openly refuted. As for the mere fact of his supplanting me, they thought it an excellent thing,--a ruse d'amour for which they never would have given him credit; and although they admitted it was provoking enough to be ousted out of one's mistress in that cool sort of way, still I should not so far have forgotten myself as to have struck him while he was unarmed, when it was so easy to have otherwise fastened an insult on him. Such," bitterly pursued Wacousta, "was the consolation I received from men, who, a few short weeks before, had been sedulous to gain and cultivate my friendship,--but even this was only vouchsafed antecedent to my trial. When the sentence was promulgated, announcing my dismissal from the service, every back was turned upon me, as though I had been found guilty of some dishonourable action or some disgraceful crime; and, on the evening of the same day, when I threw from me for ever an uniform that I now loathed from my inmost soul, there was not one among those who had often banqueted at my expense, who had the humanity to come to me and say, 'Sir Reginald Morton, farewell.'
"What agonies of mind I endured,--what burning tears I nightly shed upon a pillow I was destined to press in freezing loneliness,--what hours of solitude I passed, far from the haunts of my fellow-men, and forming plans of vengeance,--it would take much longer time to relate than I have actually bestowed on my unhappy history. To comprehend their extent and force, you must understand the heart of fire in which the deep sense of injury had taken root; but the night wears away, and briefly told must be the remainder of my tale. The rebellion of forty-five saw me in arms in the Scottish ranks; and, in one instance, opposed to the regiment from which I had been so ignominiously expelled. Never did revenge glow like a living fire in the heart of man as it did in mine; for the effect of my long brooding in solitude had been to inspire me with a detestation, not merely for those who had been most rancorous in their enmity, but for every thing that wore the uniform, from the commanding officer down to the meanest private. Every blow that I dealt, every life that I sacrificed, was an insult washed away from my attainted honour; but him whom I most sought in the melee I never could reach. At length the corps to which I had attached myself was repulsed; and I saw, with rage in my heart, that my enemy still lived to triumph in the fruit of his villainy.
"Although I was grown considerably in stature at this period, and was otherwise greatly altered in appearance, I had been recognised in the action by numbers of the regiment; and, indeed, more than once I had, in the intoxication of my rage, accompanied the blow that slew or maimed one of my former associates with a declaration of the name of him who inflicted it. The consequence was, I was denounced as a rebel and an outlaw, and a price was put upon my head. Accustomed, however, as I had ever been, to rocks and fastnesses, I had no difficulty in eluding the vigilance of those who were sent in pursuit of me; and thus compelled to live wholly apart from my species, I at length learned to hate them, and to know that man is the only enemy of man upon earth.
"A change now came ever the spirit of my vengeance; for about this period your mother died. I had never ceased to love, even while I despised her; and notwithstanding, had she, after her flagrant inconstancy, thrown herself into my arms, I should have rejected her with scorn, still I was sensible no other woman could ever supply her place in my affection. She was, in truth, the only being I had ever looked upon with fondness; and deeply even as I had been injured by her, I wept her memory with many a scalding tear. This, however, only increased my hatred for him who had rioted in her beauty, and supplanted me in her devotedness. I had the means of learning, occasionally, all that passed in the regiment; and the same account that brought me the news of your mother's death also gave me the intelligence that three children had been the fruit of her union with De Haldimar. How," pursued Wacousta, with bitter energy, "shall I express the deep loathing I felt for those children? It seemed to me as if their existence had stamped a seal of infamy on my own brow; and I hated them, even in their childhood, as the offspring of an abhorred, and, as it appeared to me, an unnatural union. I heard, moreover (and this gave me pleasure), that their father doated on them; and from that moment I resolved to turn his cup of joy into bitterness, even as he had turned mine. I no longer sought his life; for the jealousy that had half impelled that thirst existed no longer: but, deeming his cold nature at least accessible through his parental affection, I was resolved that in his children he should suffer a portion of the agonies he had inflicted on me. I waited, however, until they should be grown up to an age when the heart of the parent would be more likely to mourn their loss; and then I was determined my vengeance should be complete.
"Circumstances singularly favoured my design. Many years afterwards, the regiment formed one of the expedition against Quebec under General Wolfe. They were commanded by your father, who, in the course of promotion, had obtained the lieutenant-colonelcy; and I observed by the army list, that a subaltern of the same name, whom I presumed to be his eldest son, was in the corps. Here was a field for my vengeance beyond any I could have hoped for. I contrived to pass over into Cornwall, the ban of outlawry being still unrepealed; and having procured from my brother a sum sufficient for my necessities, and bade him an eternal farewell, embarked in a fishing-boat for the coast of France, whence I subsequently took a passage to this country. At Montreal I found the French general, who gladly received my allegiance as a subject of France, and gave me a commission in one of the provincial corps that usually served in concert with our Indian allies. With the general I soon became a favourite; and, as a mark of his confidence at the attack on Quebec, he entrusted me with the command of a detached irregular force, consisting partly of Canadians and partly of Indians, intended to harass the flanks of the British army. This gave me an opportunity of being at whatever point of the field I might think most favourable to my design; and I was too familiar with the detested uniform of the regiment not to be able to distinguish it from afar. In a word, Clara, for I am weary of my own tale, in that engagement I had an opportunity of recognising your brother. He struck me by his martial appearance as he encouraged his grenadiers to the attack of the French columns; and, as I turned my eye upon him in admiration, I was stung to the soul by his resemblance to his father. Vengeance thrilled throughout every fibre of my frame at that moment. The opportunity I had long sought was at length arrived; and already, in anticipation, I enjoyed the conquest his fall would occasion to my enemy. I rushed within a few feet of my victim; but the bullet aimed at his heart was received in the breast of a faithful soldier, who had flown to intercept it. How I cursed the meddler for his officiousness!"
"Oh, that soldier was your nephew," eagerly interrupted Clara, pointing towards her companion, who had fallen into a profound slumber, "the husband of this unfortunate woman. Frank Halloway (for by that name was he alone known in the regiment) loved my brother as though he had been of the same blood. He it was who flew to receive the ball that was destined for another. But I nursed him on his couch of suffering, and with my own hands prepared his food and dressed his wound. Oh, if pity can touch your heart (and I will not believe that a heart that once felt as you say yours has felt can be inaccessible to pity), let the recollection of your nephew's devotedness to my mother's child disarm you of vengeance, and induce you to restore us!"
"Never!" thundered Wacousta,--"never! The very circumstance you have now named is an additional incentive to my vengeance. My nephew saved the life of your brother at the hazard of his own; and how has he been rewarded for the generous deed? By an ignominious death, inflicted, perhaps, for some offence not more dishonouring than those which have thrown me an outcast upon these wilds; and that at the command and in the presence of the father of him whose life he was fool enough to preserve. Yet, what but ingratitude of the grossest nature could a Morton expect at the hands of the false family of De Haldimar! They were destined to be our bane, and well have they fulfilled the end for which they were created."
"Almighty Providence!" aspirated the sinking Clara, as she turned her streaming eyes to heaven; "can it be that the human heart can undergo such change? Can this be the being who once loved my mother with a purity and tenderness of affection that angels themselves might hallow with approval; or is all that I have heard but a bewildering dream?"
"No, Clara," calmly and even solemnly returned the warrior; "it is no dream, but a reality--a sad, dreadful, heart-rending reality; yet, if I am that altered being, to whom is the change to be ascribed? Who turned the generous current of my blood into a river of overflowing gall? Who, when my cup was mantling with the only bliss I coveted upon earth, traitorously emptied it, and substituted a heart-corroding poison in its stead? Who blighted my fair name, and cast me forth an alien in the land of my forefathers? Who, in a word, cut me off from every joy that existence can impart to man? Who did all this? Your father! But these are idle words. What I have been, you know; what I now am, and through what agency I have been rendered what I now am, you know also. Not more fixed is fate than my purpose. Your brother dies even on the spot on which my nephew died; and you, Clara, shall be my bride; and the first thing your children shall be taught to lisp shall be curses on the vile name of De Haldimar!"
"Once more, in the name of my sainted mother, I implore you to have mercy," shrieked the unhappy Clara. "Oh!" she continued, with vehement supplication, "let the days of your early love be brought back to' your memory, that your heart may be softened; and cut yourself not wholly off from your God, by the commission of such dreadful outrages. Again I conjure you, restore us to my father."
"Never!" savagely repeated Wacousta. "I have passed years of torture in the hope of such an hour as this; and now that fruition is within my grasp, may I perish if I forego it! Ha, sir!" turning from the almost fainting Clara to Sir Everard, who had listened with deep attention to the history of this extraordinary man;--"for this," and he thrust aside the breast of his hunting coat, exhibiting the scar of a long but superficial wound,--"for this do you owe me a severe reckoning. I would recommend you, however,"--and he spoke in mockery,--"when next you drive a weapon into the chest of an unresisting enemy, to be more certain of your aim. Had that been as true as the blow from the butt of your rifle, I should not have lived to triumph in this hour. I little deemed," he pursued, still addressing the nearly heart-broken officer in the same insolent strain, "that my intrigue with that dark-eyed daughter of the old Canadian would have been the means of throwing your companion so speedily into my power, after his first narrow escape. Your disguise was well managed, I confess; and but that there is an instinct about me, enabling me to discover a De Haldimar, as a hound does the deer, by scent, you might have succeeded in passing for what you appeared. But" (and his tone suddenly changed its irony for fierceness) "to the point, sir. That you are the lover of this girl I clearly perceive, and death were preferable to a life embittered by the recollection that she whom we love reposes in the arms of another. No such kindness is meant you, however. To-morrow you shall return to the fort; and, when there, you may tell your colonel, that, in exchange for a certain miniature and letters, which, in the hurry of departure, I dropped in his apartment, some ten days since, Sir Reginald Morton, the outlaw, has taken his daughter Clara to wife, but without the solemnisation of those tedious forms that bound himself in accursed union with her mother. Oh! what would I not give," he continued, bitterly, "to witness the pang inflicted on his false heart, when first the damning truth arrests his ear. Never did I know the triumph of my power until now; for what revenge can be half so sweet as that which attains a loathed enemy through the dishonour of his child? But, hark! what mean those sounds?"
A loud yelling was now heard at some distance in rear of the tent. Presently the bounding of many feet on the turf was distinguishable; and then, at intervals, the peculiar cry that announces the escape of a prisoner. Wacousta started to his feet, and fiercely grasping his tomahawk, advanced to the front of the tent, where he seemed to listen for a moment attentively, as if endeavouring to catch the direction of the pursuit.
"Ha! by Heaven!" he exclaimed, "there must be treachery in this, or yon slippery captain would not so soon be at his flight again, bound as I had bound him." Then uttering a deafening yell, and rushing past Sir Everard, near whom he paused an instant, as if undecided whether he should not first dispose of him, as a precautionary measure, he flew with the speed of an antelope in the direction in which he was guided by the gradually receding sounds.
"The knife, Miss de Haldimar," exclaimed Sir Everard, after a few moments of breathless and intense anxiety. "See, there is one in the belt that Ellen Halloway has girt around her loins. Quick, for Heaven's sake, quick; our only chance of safety is in this."
With an activity arising from her despair, the unhappy Clara sprang from the rude couch on which she had been left by Wacousta, and, stooping over the form of the maniac, extended her hand to remove the weapon from her side; but Ellen, who had been awakened from her long slumber by the yells just uttered, seemed resolute to prevent it. A struggle for its possession now ensued between these frail and delicate beings; in which Clara, however, had the advantage, not only from the recumbent position of her opponent, but from the greater security of her grasp. At length, with a violent effort, she contrived to disengage it from the sheath, around which Ellen had closely clasped both her hands; but, with the quickness of thought, the latter were again clenched round the naked blade, and without any other evident motive than what originated in the obstinacy of her madness, the unfortunate woman fiercely attempted to wrest it away. In the act of doing so, her hands were dreadfully cut; and Clara, shocked at the sight of the blood she had been the means of shedding, lost all the energy she had summoned, and sunk senseless at the feet of the maniac, who now began to utter the most piteous cries.
"Oh, God! we are lost," exclaimed Sir Everard; "the voice of that wretched woman has alarmed our enemy, and even now I hear him approaching. Quick, Clara, give me the knife. But no, it is now too late; he is here."
At that instant, the dark form of a warrior rushed noiselessly to the spot on which he stood. The officer turned his eyes in desperation on his enemy, but a single glance was sufficient to assure him it was not Wacousta. The Indian paused not in his course, but passing close round the tree to which the baronet was attached, made a circular movement, that brought him in a line with the direction that had been taken by his enemy; and again they were left alone.
A new fear now oppressed the heart of the unfortunate Valletort, even to agony: Clara still lay senseless, speechless, before him; and his impression was, that, in the struggle, Ellen Halloway had murdered her. The latter yet continued her cries; and, as she held up her hands, he could see by the fire-light they were covered with blood. An instinctive impulse caused him to bound forward to the assistance of the motionless Clara; when, to his infinite surprise and joy, he discovered the cord, which had bound him to the tree, to be severed. The Indian who had just passed had evidently been his deliverer; and a sudden flash of recollection recalled the figure of the young warrior that had escaped from the schooner and was supposed to have leaped into the canoe of Oucanasta at the moment when Madeline de Haldimar was removed into that of the Canadian.
In a transport of conflicting feelings, Sir Everard now raised the insensible Clara from the ground; and, having satisfied himself she had sustained no serious injury, prepared for a flight which he felt to be desperate, if not altogether hopeless. There was not a moment to be lost, for the cries of the wretched Ellen increased in violence, as she seemed sensible she was about to be left utterly alone; and ever and anon, although afar off, yet evidently drawing nearer, was to be heard the fierce denouncing yell of Wacousta. The spot on which the officer stood, was not far from that whence his unfortunate friend had commenced his flight on the first memorable occasion; and as the moon shone brightly in the cloudless heavens, there could be no mistake in the course he was to pursue. Dashing down the steep, therefore, with all the speed his beloved burden would enable him to attain, he made immediately for the bridge, over which his only chance of safety lay.
It unfortunately happened, however, that, induced either by the malice of her insanity, or really terrified at the loneliness of her position, the wretched Ellen Halloway had likewise quitted the tent, and now followed close in the rear of the fugitives, still uttering the same piercing cries of anguish. The voice of Wacousta was also again heard in the distance; and Sir Everard had the inexpressible horror to find that, guided by the shrieks of the maniac woman, he was now shaping his course, not to the tent where he had left his prisoners, but in an oblique direction towards the bridge; where he evidently hoped to intercept them. Aware of the extreme disadvantages under which he laboured in a competition of speed with his active enemy, the unhappy officer would have here terminated the struggle, had he not been partially sustained by the hope that the detachment prayed for by De Haldimar, through the friendly young chief, to whom he owed his own liberation, might be about this time on its way to attempt their rescue. This thought supported his faltering resolution, although nearly exhausted with his efforts--compelled, as he was, to sustain the motionless form of the slowly reviving Clara; and he again braced himself to the unequal flight The moon still shone beautifully bright, and he could now distinctly see the bridge over which he was to pass; but notwithstanding he strained his eyes as he advanced, no vestige of a British uniform was to be seen in the open space that lay beyond. Once he turned to regard his pursuers. Ellen was a few yards only in his rear; and considerably beyond her rose, in tall relief against the heavens, the gigantic form of the warrior. The pursuit of the latter was now conducted with a silence that terrified even more than the yells he had previously uttered; and he gained so rapidly on his victims, that the tread of his large feet was now distinctly audible. Again the officer, with despair in his heart, made the most incredible exertions to reach the bridge, without seeming to reflect that, even when there, no security was offered him against his enemy. Once, as he drew nearer, he fancied he saw the dark heads of human beings peering from under that part of the arch which had afforded cover to De Haldimar and himself oh the memorable occasion of their departure with the Canadian; and, convinced that the warriors of Wacousta had been sent there to lie in ambuscade and intercept his retreat, his hopes were utterly paralysed; and although he stopped not, his flight was rather mechanical than the fruit of any systematic plan of escape.
He had now gained the extremity of the bridge, with Ellen Halloway and Wacousta close in his rear, when suddenly the heads of many men were once more distinguishable, even in the shadow of the arch that overhung the sands of the river. Three individuals detached themselves from the group and leaping upon the further extremity of the bridge, moved rapidly to meet him. Meanwhile the baronet had stopped suddenly, as if in doubt whether to advance or to recede. His suspense was but momentary. Although the persons of these men were disguised as Indian warriors, the broad moonlight that beamed full on their countenances, disclosed the well-remembered features of Blessington, Erskine, and Charles de Haldimar. The latter sprang before his companions, and, uttering a cry of joy, sank in speechless agony on the neck of his still unconscious sister.
"For God's sake, free me, De Haldimar!" exclaimed the excited baronet, disengaging his charge from the embrace of his friend. "This is no moment for congratulation. Erskine, Blessington, see you not who is behind me? Be upon your guard; defend your lives!" And as he spoke, he rushed forward with feint and tottering steps to place his companions between the unhappy girl and the danger that threatened her.
The swords of the officers were drawn; but instead of advancing upon the formidable being, who stood as if paralysed at this unexpected rencontre, the two seniors contented themselves with assuming a defensive attitude,--retiring slowly and gradually towards the other extremity of the bridge.
Overcome by his emotion, Charles de Haldimar had not noticed this action of his companions, and stood apparently riveted to the spot. The voice of Blessington calling on him by name to retire, seemed to arouse the dormant consciousness of the unhappy maniac. She uttered a piercing shriek, and, springing forward, sank on her knees at his feet, exclaiming, as she forcibly detained him by his dress,-- "Almighty Heaven! where am I? surely that was Captain Blessington's kind voice I heard; and you--you are Charles de Haldimar. Oh! save my husband; plead for him with your father! ----but no," she continued wildly,--"he is dead--he is murdered! Behold these hands all covered with his blood! Oh! ----" "Ha! another De Haldimar!" exclaimed Wacousta, recovering his slumbering energies, "this spot seems indeed fated for our meeting. More than thrice have I been balked of my just revenge, but now will I secure it. Thus, Ellen, do I avenge your husband's and my nephew's death. My own wrongs demand another sacrifice. But, ha! where is she? where is Clara? where is my bride?"
Bounding over the ill-fated De Haldimar, who lay, even in death, firmly clasped in the embrace of the wretched Ellen, the fierce man dashed furiously forward to renew his pursuit of the fugitives. But suddenly the extremity of the bridge was filled with a column of armed men, that kept issuing from the arch beneath. Sensible of his danger, he sought to make good his retreat; but when he turned for the purpose, the same formidable array met his view at the opposite extremity; and both parties now rapidly advanced in double quick time, evidently with a view of closing upon and taking him prisoner. In this dilemma, his only hope was in the assistance that might be rendered him by his warriors. A yell, so terrific as to be distinctly heard in the fort itself, burst from his vast chest, and rolled in prolonged echoes through the forest. It was faintly answered from the encampment, and met by deep but noiseless curses from the exasperated soldiery, whom the sight of their murdered officer was momentarily working into frenzy.
"Kill him not, for your lives! --I command you, men, kill him not!" muttered Captain Blessington with suppressed passion, as his troops were preparing to immolate him on their clustering bayonets. "Such a death were, indeed, mercy to such a villain."
"Ha! ha!" laughed Wacousta in bitter scorn; "who is there of all your accursed regiment who will dare to take him alive?" Then brandishing his tomahawk around him, to prevent their finally closing, he dealt his blows with such astonishing velocity, that no unguarded point was left about his person; and more than one soldier was brought to the earth in the course of the unequal struggle.
"By G--d!" said Captain Erskine, "are the two best companies of the regiment to be kept at bay by a single desperado? Shame on ye, fellows! If his hands are too many for you, lay him by the heels."
This ruse was practised with success. In attempting to defend himself from the attack of those who sought to throw him down, the warrior necessarily left his upper person exposed; when advantage was taken to close with him and deprive him of the play of his arms. It was not, however, without considerable difficulty, that they succeeded in disarming and binding his hands; after which a strong cord being fastened round his waist, he was tightly lashed to a gun, which, contrary to the original intention of the governor, had been sent out with the expedition. The retreat of the detachment then commenced rapidly; but it was not without being hotly pursued by the band of warriors the yell of Wacousta had summoned in pursuit, that they finally gained the fort: under what feelings of sorrow for the fate of an officer so beloved, we leave it to our readers to imagine.
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The morning of the next day dawned on few who had pressed their customary couches--on none, whose feverish pulse and bloodshot eye failed to attest the utter sleeplessness in which the night had been passed. Numerous groups of men were to be seep assembling after the reveille, in various parts of the barrack square--those who had borne a part in the recent expedition commingling with those who had not, and recounting to the latter, with mournful look and voice, the circumstances connected with the bereavement of their universally lamented officer. As none, however, had seen the blow struck that deprived him of life, although each had heard the frantic exclamations of a voice that had been recognised for Ellen Halloway's, much of the marvellous was necessarily mixed up with truth in their narrative,--some positively affirming Mr. de Haldimar had not once quitted his party, and declaring that nothing short of a supernatural agency could have transported him unnoticed to the fatal spot, where, in their advance, they had beheld him murdered. The singular appearance of Ellen Halloway also, at that moment, on the very bridge on which she had pronounced her curse on the family of De Haldimar, and in company with the terrible and mysterious being who had borne her off in triumph on that occasion to the forest, and under circumstances calculated to excite the most superstitious impressions, was not without its weight in determining their rude speculations; and all concurred in opinion, that the death of the unfortunate young officer was a judgment on their colonel for the little mercy he had extended to the noble-hearted Halloway.
Then followed allusion to their captive, whose gigantic stature and efforts at escape, tremendous even as the latter were, were duly exaggerated by each, with the very laudable view of claiming a proportionate share of credit for his own individual exertions; and many and various were the opinions expressed as to the manner of death he should be made to suffer. Among the most conspicuous of the orators were those with whom our readers have already made slight acquaintance in our account of the sortie by Captain Erskine's company for the recovery of the supposed body of Frederick de Haldimar. One was for impaling him alive, and setting him up to rot on the platform above the gate. Another for blowing him from the muzzle of a twenty-four pounder, into the centre of the first band of Indians that approached the fort, that thus perceiving they had lost the strength and sinew of their cunning war, they might be the more easily induced to propose terms of peace. A third was of opinion he ought to be chained to the top of the flag-staff, as a target, to be shot at with arrows only, contriving never to touch a mortal part. A fourth would have had him tied naked over the sharp spikes that constituted the chevaux-de-frize garnishing the sides of the drawbridge. Each devised some new death--proposed some new torture; but all were of opinion, that simply to be shot, or even to be hanged, was too merciful a punishment for the wretch who had so wantonly and inhumanly butchered the kind-hearted, gentle-mannered officer, whom they had almost all known and loved from his very boyhood; and they looked forward, with mingled anxiety and vengeance, to the moment when, summoned as it was expected he shortly would be, before the assembled garrison, he would be made to expiate the atrocity with his blood.
While the men thus gave indulgence to their indignation and their grief, their officers were even mere painfully affected. The body of the ill-fated Charles had been borne to his apartment, where, divested of its disguise, it had again been inducted in such apparel as was deemed suited to the purpose. Extended on the very bed on which he lay at the moment when she, whose maniac raving, and forcible detention, had been the immediate cause of his destruction, had preferred her wild but fruitless supplication for mercy, he exhibited, even in death, the same delicate beauty that had characterised him on that occasion; yet, with a mildness and serenity of expression on his still, pale features, strongly in contrast with the agitation and glow of excitement that then distinguished him. Never was human loveliness in death so marked as in Charles de Haldimar; and but for the deep wound that, dividing his clustering locks, had entered from the very crown of the head to the opening of his marble brow, one ignorant of his fate might have believed he but profoundly slept. Several women of the regiment were occupied in those offices about the corpse, which women alone are capable of performing at such moments, and as they did so, suffered their tears to flow silently yet abundantly over him, who was no longer sensible either of human grief or of human joy. Close at the head of the bed stood an old man, with his face buried in his hands; the latter reposing against the wainscoting of the room. He, too, wept, but his weeping was more audible, more painful, and accompanied by suffocating sobs. It was the humble, yet almost paternally attached servant of the defunct--the veteran Morrison.
Around the bed were grouped nearly all the officers, standing in attitudes indicative of anxiety and interest, and gazing mournfully on the placid features of their ill-fated friend. All, on entering, moved noiselessly over the rude floor, as though fearful of disturbing the repose of one who merely slumbered; and the same precaution was extended to the brief but heartfelt expressions of sorrow that passed, from one to the other, as they gazed on all that remained of the gentle De Haldimar. At length the preparations of the women having been completed, they retired from the room, leaving one of their number only, rather out of respect than necessity, to remain by the corpse. When they were departed, this woman, the wife of one of Blessington's sergeants, and the same who had been present at the scene between Ellen Halloway and the deceased, cut off a large lock of his beautiful hair, and separating it into small tresses, handed one to each of the officers. This considerate action, although unsolicited on the part of the latter, deeply touched them, as indicating a sense of the high estimation in which the youth bad been held. It was a tribute to the memory of him they mourned, of the purest kind; and each, as he received his portion, acknowledged with a mournful but approving look, or nod, or word, the motive that bad prompted the offering. Nor was it a source of less satisfaction, melancholy even as that satisfaction was, to perceive that, after having set aside another lock, probably for the sister of the deceased, she selected and consigned to the bosom of her dress a third, evidently intended for herself. The whole scene was in striking contrast with the almost utter absence of all preparation or concern that had preceded the interment of Murphy, on a former occasion. In one, the rude soldier was mourned,--in the other, the gentle friend was lamented; nor the latter alone by the companions to whom intimacy had endeared him, but by those humbler dependants, who knew him only through those amiable attributes of character, which were ever equally extended to all. Gradually the officers now moved away in the same noiseless manner in which they had approached, either in pursuance of their several duties, or to make their toilet of the morning. Two only of their number remained near the couch of death.
"Poor unfortunate De Haldimar!" observed one of these, in a low tone, as if speaking to himself; "too fatally, indeed, have your forebodings been realised; and what I considered as the mere despondency of a mind crashed into feebleness by an accumulation of suffering, was, after all, but the first presentiment of a death no human power might avert. By Heaven! I would give up half my own being to be able to reanimate that form once more,--but the wish is vain."
"Who shall announce the intelligence to his sister?" sighed his companion. "Never will that already nearly heart-broken girl be able to survive the shock of her brother's death. Blessington, you alone are fitted to such a task; and, painful as it is, you must undertake it. Is the colonel apprised of the dreadful truth, do you know?"
"He is. It was told him at the moment of our arrival last night; but from the little outward emotion displayed by him, I should be tempted to infer he had almost anticipated some such catastrophe."
"Poor, poor Charles!" bitterly exclaimed Sir Everard Valletort--for it was he. "What would I not give to recall the rude manner in which I spurned you from me last night. But, alas! what could I do, laden with such a trust, and pursued, without the power of defence, by such an enemy? Little, indeed, did I imagine what was so speedily to be your doom! Blessington," he pursued, with increased emotion, "it grieves me to wretchedness to think that he, whom I loved as though he had been my twin brother, should have perished with his last thoughts, perhaps, lingering on the seeming unkindness with which I had greeted him after so anxious an absence."
"Nay, if there be blame, it must attach to me," sorrowfully observed Captain Blessington. "Had Erskine and myself not retired before the savage, as we did, our unfortunate friend would in all probability have been alive at this very hour. But in our anxiety to draw the former into the ambuscade we had prepared for him, we utterly overlooked that Charles was not retreating with us."
"How happened it," demanded Sir Everard, his attention naturally directed to the subject by the preceding remarks, "that you lay thus in ambuscade, when the object of the expedition, as solicited by Frederick de Haldimar, was an attempt to reach us in the encampment of the Indians?"
"It certainly was under that impression we left the fort; but, on coming to the spot where the friendly Indian lay waiting to conduct us, he proposed the plan we subsequently adopted as the most likely, not only to secure the escape of the prisoners, whom he pledged himself to liberate, but to defend ourselves with advantage against Wacousta and the immediate guard set over them, should they follow in pursuit. Erskine approving, as well as myself, of the plan, we halted at the bridge, and disposed of our men under each extremity; so that, if attacked by the Indians in front, we might be enabled to throw them into confusion by taking them in rear, as they flung themselves upon the bridge. The event seemed to answer our expectations. The alarm raised in the encampment satisfied us the young Indian had contrived to fulfil his promise; and we momentarily looked for the appearance of those whose flight we naturally supposed would be directed towards the bridge. To our great surprise, however, we remarked that the sounds of pursuit, instead of approaching us, seemed to take an opposite direction, apparently towards the point whence we had seen the prisoners disembarked in the morning. At length, when almost tempted to regret we had not pushed boldly on, in conformity with our first intention, we heard the shrill cries of a woman; and, not long afterwards, the sounds of human feet rushing down the slope. What our sensations were, you may imagine; for we all believed it to be either Clara or Madeline de Haldimar fleeing alone, and pursued by our ferocious enemies. To show ourselves would, we were sensible, be to ensure the death of the pursued, before we could possibly come up; and, although it was with difficulty we repressed the desire to rush forward to the rescue, our better judgment prevailed. Finally we saw you approach, followed closely by what appeared to be a mere boy of an Indian, and, at a considerable distance, by the tall warrior of the Fleur de lis. We imagined there was time enough for you to gain the bridge; and finding your more formidable pursuer was only accompanied by the youth already alluded to, conceived at that moment the design of making him our prisoner. Still there were half a dozen muskets ready to be levelled on him should he approach too near to his fugitives, or manifest any other design than that of simply recapturing them. How well our plan succeeded you are aware; but, alas!" and he glanced sorrowfully at the corpse, "why was our success to be embittered by so great a sacrifice?"
"Ah, would to Heaven that he at least had been spared," sighed Sir Everard, as he took the wan white hand of his friend in his own; "and yet I know not: he looks so calm, so happy in death, it is almost selfish to repine he has escaped the horrors that still await us in this dreadful warfare. But what of Frederick and Madeline de Haldimar? From the statement you have given, they must have been liberated by the young Ottawa before he came to me; yet, what could have induced them to have taken a course of flight so opposite to that which promised their only chance of safety?"
"Heaven only knows," returned Captain Blessington. "I fear they have again been recaptured by the savages; in which case their doom is scarcely doubtful; unless, indeed, our prisoner of last night be given up in exchange for them."
"Then will their liberty be purchased at a terrible price," remarked the baronet. "Will you believe, Blessington, that that man, whose enmity to our colonel seems almost devilish, was once an officer in this very regiment?"
"You astonish me, Valletort. --Impossible! and yet it has always been apparent to me they were once associates."
"I heard him relate his history only last night to Clara, whom he had the audacity to sully with proposals to become his bride," pursued the baronet. "His tale was a most extraordinary one. He narrated it, however, only up to the period when the life of De Haldimar was attempted by him at Quebec. But with his subsequent history we are all acquainted, through the fame of his bloody atrocities in all the posts that have fallen into the hands of Ponteac. That man, savage and even fiendish as he now is, was once possessed of the noblest qualities. I am sorry to say it; but Colonel de Haldimar has brought this present affliction upon himself. At some future period I will tell you all."
"Alas!" said Captain Blessington, "poor Charles, then, has been made to pay the penalty of his father's errors; and, certainly, the greatest of these was his dooming the unfortunate Halloway to death in the manner he did."
"What think you of the fact of Halloway being the nephew of this extraordinary man, and both of high family?" demanded Sir Everard.
"Indeed! and was the latter, then, aware of the connection?"
"Not until last night," replied Sir Everard. "Some observations made by the wretched wife of Halloway, in the course of which she named his true name, (which was that of the warrior also,) first indicated the fact to the latter. But, what became of that unfortunate creature? --was she brought in?"
"I understand not," said Captain Blessington. "In the confusion and hurry of securing our prisoner, and the apprehension of immediate attack from his warriors, Ellen was entirely overlooked. Some of my men say they left her lying, insensible, on the spot whence they had raised the body of our unfortunate friend, which they had some difficulty in releasing from her convulsive embrace. But, hark! there is the first drum for parade, and I have not yet exchanged my Indian garb."
Captain Blessington now quitted the room, and Sir Everard, relieved from the restraining presence of his companions, gave free vent to his emotion, throwing himself upon the body of his friend, and giving utterance to the feelings of anguish that oppressed his heart.
He had continued some minutes in this position, when he fancied he felt the warm tears of a human being bedewing a hand that reposed on the neck of his unfortunate friend. He looked up, and, to his infinite surprise, beheld Clara de Haldimar standing before him at the opposite side of the bed. Her likeness to her brother, at that moment, was so striking, that, for a second or two, the irrepressible thought passed through the mind of the officer, it was not a living being he gazed upon, but the immaterial spirit of his friend. The whole attitude and appearance of the wretched girl, independently of the fact of her noiseless entrance, tended to favour the delusion. Her features, of an ashy paleness, seemed fixed, even as those of the corpse beneath him; and, but for the tears that coursed silently down her cheek, there was scarcely an outward evidence of emotion. Her dress was a simple white robe, fastened round her waist with a pale blue riband; and over her shoulders hung her redundant hair, resembling in colour, and disposed much in the manner of that of her brother, which had been drawn negligently down to conceal the wound on his brow. For some moments the baronet gazed at her in speechless agony. Her tranquil exterior was torture to him; for he, feared it betokened some alienation of reason. He would have preferred to witness the most hysteric convulsion of grief, rather than that traitorous calm; and yet he had not the power to seek to remove it.
"You are surprised to see me here, mingling my grief with yours, Sir Everard," she at length observed, with the same calm mien, and in tones of touching sweetness. "I came, with my father's permission, to take a last farewell of him whose death has broken my heart. I expected to be alone; but--Nay, do not go," she added, perceiving that the officer was about to depart. "Had you not been here, I should have sent for you; for we have both a sacred duty to perform. May I not ask your hand?"
More and more dismayed at her collected manner, the young officer gazed at her with the deepest sorrow depicted in every line of his own countenance. He extended his hand, and Clara, to his surprise, grasped and pressed it firmly.
"It was the wish of this poor boy that his Clara should be the wife of his friend, Sir Everard. Did he ever express such to you?"
"It was the fondest desire of his heart," returned the baronet, unable to restrain the emotion of joy that mingled, despite of himself, with his worst apprehensions.
"I need not ask how you received his proposal," continued Clara, with the same calmness of manner. "Last night," she pursued solemnly, "I was the bride of the murderer of my brother, of the lover of my mother,--tomorrow night I may be the bride of death; but to-night I am the bride of my brother's friend. Yes, here am I come to pledge myself to the fulfilment of his wish. If you deem a heart-broken girl not unworthy of you, I am your wife, Sir Everard; and, recollect, it is a solemn pledge, that which a sister gives over the lifeless body of a brother, beloved as this has been."
"Oh, Clara--dearest Clara," passionately exclaimed the excited young man, "if a life devoted to your happiness can repay you for this, count upon it as you would upon your eternal salvation. In you will I love both my friend and the sister he has bequeathed to me. Clara, my betrothed wife, summon all the energies of your nature to sustain this cruel shock; and exert yourself for him who will be to you both a brother and a husband."
As he spoke he drew the unresisting girl towards him, and, locking her in his embrace, pressed, for the first time, the lips, which it had maddened him the preceding night to see polluted by the forcible kisses of Wacousta. But Clara shared not, but merely suffered his momentary happiness. Her cheek wore not the crimson of excitement, neither were her tears discontinued. She seemed as one who mechanically submitted to what she had no power of resistance to oppose; and even in the embrace of her affianced husband, she exhibited the same deathlike calm that had startled him at her first appearance. Religion could not hallow a purer feeling than that which had impelled the action of the young officer. The very consciousness of the sacred pledge having been exchanged over the corpse of his friend, imparted a holiness of fervour to his mind; and even while he pressed her, whom he secretly swore to love with all the affection of a fond brother and a husband united, he felt that if the spirit of him, who slept unconscious of the scene, were suffered to linger near, it would be to hallow it with approval.
"And now," said Clara at length, yet without attempting to disengage herself,--"now that we are united, I would be alone with my brother. My husband, leave me."
Deeply touched at the name of husband, Sir Everard could not refrain from imprinting another kiss on the lips that uttered it. He then gently disengaged himself from his lovely but suffering charge, whom he deposited with her head resting on the bed; and making a significant motion of his hand to the woman, who, as well as old Morrison, had been spectators of the whole scene, stole gently from the apartment, under what mingled emotions of joy and grief it would be difficult to describe.
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It was the eighth hour of morning, and both officers and men, quitting their ill-relished meal, were to be seen issuing to the parade, where the monotonous roll of the assemblee now summoned them. Presently the garrison was formed in the order we have described in our first volume; that is to say, presenting three equal sides of a square. The vacant space fronted the guard-house, near one extremity of which was to be seen a flight of steps communicating with the rampart, where the flag-staff was erected. Several men were employed at this staff, passing strong ropes through iron pulleys that were suspended from the extreme top, while in the basement of the staff itself, to a height of about twenty feet, were stuck at intervals strong wooden pegs, serving as steps to the artillerymen for greater facility in clearing, when foul, the lines to which the colours were attached. The latter had been removed; and, from the substitution of a cord considerably stronger than that which usually appeared there, it seemed as if some far heavier weight was about to be appended to it. Gradually the men, having completed their unusual preparations, quitted the rampart, and the flagstaff, which was of tapering pine, was left totally unguarded.
The "Attention!" of Major Blackwater to the troops, who had been hitherto standing in attitudes of expectancy that rendered the injunction almost superfluous, announced the approach of the governor. Soon afterwards that officer entered the area, wearing his characteristic dignity of manner, yet exhibiting every evidence of one who had suffered deeply. Preparation for a drum-head court-martial, as in the first case of Halloway, had already been made within the square, and the only actor wanting in the drama was he who was to be tried.
Once Colonel de Haldimar made an effort to command his appearance, but the huskiness of his voice choked his utterance, and he was compelled to pause. After the lapse of a few moments, he again ordered, but in a voice that was remarked to falter,-- "Mr. Lawson, let the prisoner be brought forth."
The feeling of suspense that ensued between the delivery and execution of this command was painful throughout the ranks. All were penetrated with curiosity to behold a man who had several times appeared to them under the most appalling circumstances, and against whom the strongest feeling of indignation had been excited for his barbarous murder of Charles de Haldimar. It was with mingled awe and anger they now awaited his approach. At length the captive was seen advancing from the cell in which he had been confined, his gigantic form towering far above those of the guard of grenadiers by whom he was surrounded; and with a haughtiness in his air, and insolence in his manner, that told he came to confront his enemy with a spirit unsubdued by the fate that too probably awaited him.
Many an eye was turned upon the governor at that moment. He was evidently struggling for composure to meet the scene he felt it to be impossible to avoid; and he turned pale and paler as his enemy drew near.
At length the prisoner stood nearly in the same spot where his unfortunate nephew had lingered on a former occasion. He was unchained; but his hands were firmly secured behind his back. He threw himself into an attitude of carelessness, resting on one foot, and tapping the earth with the other; riveting his eye, at the same time, with an expression of the most daring insolence, on the governor, while his swarthy cheek was moreover lighted up with a smile of the deepest scorn.
"You are Reginald Morton the outlaw, I believe," at length observed the governor in an uncertain tone, that, however, acquired greater firmness as he proceeded,--"one whose life has already been forfeited through his treasonable practices in Europe, and who has, moreover, incurred the penalty of an ignominious death, by acting in this country as a spy of the enemies of England. What say you, Reginald Morton, that you should not be convicted in the death that awaits the traitor?"
"Ha! ha! by Heaven, such cold, pompous insolence amuses me," vociferated Wacousta. "It reminds me of Ensign de Haldimar of nearly five and twenty years back, who was then as cunning a dissembler as he is now." Suddenly changing his ribald tone to one of scorn and rage:--"You BELIEVE me, you say, to be Reginald Morton the outlaw. Well do you know it. I am that Sir Reginald Morton, who became an outlaw, not through his own crimes, but through your villainy. Ay, frown as you may, I heed it not. You may award me death, but shall not chain my tongue. To your whole regiment do I proclaim you for a false, remorseless villain." Then turning his flashing eye along the ranks:--"I was once an officer in this corps, and long before any of you wore the accursed uniform. That man, that fiend, affected to be my friend; and under the guise of friendship, stole into the heart I loved better than my own life. Yes," fervently pursued the excited prisoner, stamping violently with his foot upon the earth, "he robbed me of my affianced wife; and for that I resented an outrage that should have banished him to some lone region, where he might never again pollute human nature with his presence--he caused me to be tried by a court-martial, and dismissed the service. Then, indeed, I became the outlaw he has described, but not until then. Now, Colonel de Haldimar, that I have proclaimed your infamy, poor and inefficient as the triumph be, do your worst--I ask no mercy. Yesterday I thought that years of toilsome pursuit of the means of vengeance were about to be crowned with success; but fate has turned the tables on me and I yield."
To all but the baronet and Captain Blessington this declaration was productive of the utmost surprise. Every eye was turned upon the colonel. He grew impatient under the scrutiny, and demanded if the court, who meanwhile had been deliberating, satisfied of the guilt of the prisoner, had come to a decision in regard to his punishment. An affirmative answer was given, and Colonel de Haldimar proceeded.
"Reginald Morton, with the private misfortunes of your former life we have nothing to do. It is the decision of this court, who are merely met out of form, that you suffer immediate death by hanging, as a just recompense for your double treason to your country. There," and he pointed to the flag-staff, "will you be exhibited to the misguided people whom your wicked artifices have stirred up into hostility against us. When they behold your fate, they will take warning from your example; and, finding we have heads and arms not to suffer offence with impunity, be more readily brought to obedience."
"I understand your allusion," coolly rejoined Wacousta, glancing earnestly at, and apparently measuring with his eye, the dimensions of the conspicuous scaffold on which he was to suffer. "You had ever a calculating head, De Haldimar, where any secret villainy, any thing to promote your own selfish ends, was to be gained by it; but your calculation seems now, methinks, at fault."
Colonel de Haldimar looked at him enquiringly.
"You have STILL a son left," pursued the prisoner with the same recklessness of manner, and in a tone denoting allusion to him who was no more, that caused an universal shudder throughout the ranks. "He is in the hands of the Ottawa Indians, and I am the friend of their great chief, inferior only in power among the tribe to himself. Think you that he will see me hanged up like a dog, and fail to avenge my disgraceful death?"
"Ha! presumptuous renegade, is this the deep game you have in view? Hope you then to stipulate for the preservation of a life every way forfeited to the offended justice of your country? Dare you to cherish the belief, that, after the horrible threats so often denounced by you, you will again be let loose upon a career of crime and blood?"
"None of your cant, de Haldimar, as I once observed to you before," coolly retorted Wacousta, with bitter sarcasm. "Consult your own heart, and ask if its catalogue of crime be not far greater than my own: yet I ask not my life. I would but have the manner of my fate altered, and fain would die the death of the soldier I WAS before you rendered me the wretch I AM. Methinks the boon is not so great, if the restoration of your son be the price."
"Do you mean, then," eagerly returned the governor, "that if the mere mode of your death be changed, my son shall be restored?"
"I do," was the calm reply.
"What pledge have we of the fact? What faith can we repose in the word of a fiend, whose brutal vengeance has already sacrificed the gentlest life that ever animated human clay?" Here the emotion of the governor almost choked, his utterance, and considerable agitation and murmuring were manifested in the ranks.
"Gentle, said you?" replied the prisoner, musingly; "then did he resemble his mother, whom I loved, even as his brother resembles you whom I have had so much reason to hate. Had I known the boy to be what you describe, I might have felt some touch of pity even while I delayed not to strike his death blow; but the false moonlight deceived me, and the detested name of De Haldimar, pronounced by the lips of my nephew's wife--that wife whom your cold-blooded severity had widowed and driven mad--was in itself sufficient to ensure his doom."
"Inhuman ruffian!" exclaimed the governor, with increasing indignation; "to the point. What pledge have you to offer that my son will be restored?"
"Nay, the pledge is easily given, and without much risk. You have only to defer my death until your messenger return from his interview with Ponteac. If Captain de Haldimar accompany him back, shoot me as I have requested; if he come not, then it is but to hang me after all."
"Ha! I understand you; this is but a pretext to gain time, a device to enable your subtle brain to plan some mode of escape."
"As you will, Colonel de Haldimar," calmly retorted Wacousta; and again he sank into silence, with the air of one utterly indifferent to results.
"Do you mean," resumed the colonel, "that a request from yourself to the Ottawa chief will obtain the liberation of my son?"
"Unless the Indian be false as yourself, I do."
"And of the lady who is with him?" continued the colonel, colouring with anger.
"Of both."
"How is the message to be conveyed?"
"Ha, sir!" returned the prisoner, drawing himself up to his full height, "now are you arrived at a point that is pertinent. My wampum belt will be the passport, and the safeguard of him you send; then for the communication. There are certain figures, as you are aware, that, traced on bark, answer the same purpose among the Indians with the European language of letters. Let my hands be cast loose," he pursued, but in a tone in which agitation and excitement might be detected, "and if bark be brought me, and a burnt stick or coal, I will give you not only a sample of Indian ingenuity, but a specimen of my own progress in Indian acquirements."
"What, free your hands, and thus afford you a chance of escape?" observed the governor, doubtingly.
Wacousta bent his stedfast gaze on him for a few moments, as if he questioned he had heard aright. Then bursting into a wild and scornful laugh,--"By Heaven!" he exclaimed, "this is, indeed, a high compliment you pay me at the expense of these fine fellows. What, Colonel de Haldimar afraid to liberate an unarmed prisoner, hemmed in by a forest of bayonets? This is good; gentlemen," and he bent himself in sarcastic reverence to the astonished troops, "I beg to offer you my very best congratulations on the high estimation in which you are held by your colonel."
"Peace, sirrah!" exclaimed the governor, enraged beyond measure at the insolence of him who thus held him up to contempt before his men, "or, by Heaven, I will have your tongue cut out! --Mr. Lawson, let what this fellow requires be procured immediately." Then addressing Lieutenant Boyce, who commanded the immediate guard over the prisoner,--"Let his hands be liberated, sir, and enjoin your men to be watchful of the movements of this supple traitor. His activity I know of old to be great, and he seems to have doubled it since he assumed that garb."
The command was executed, and the prisoner stood, once more, free and unfettered in every muscular limb. A deep and unbroken silence ensued; and the return of the adjutant was momentarily expected. Suddenly a loud scream was heard, and the slight figure of a female, clad in white, came rushing from the piazza in which the apartment of the deceased De Haldimar was situated. It was Clara. The guard of Wacousta formed the fourth front of the square; but they were drawn up somewhat in the distance, so as to leave an open space of several feet at the angles. Through one of these the excited girl now passed into the area, with a wildness in her air and appearance that riveted every eye in painful interest upon her. She paused not until she had gained the side of the captive, at whose feet she now sank in an attitude expressive of the most profound despair.
"Tiger! --monster!" she raved, "restore my brother! --give me back the gentle life you have taken, or destroy my own! See, I am a weak defenceless girl: can you not strike? --you who have no pity for the innocent. But come," she pursued, mournfully, regaining her feet and grasping his iron hand,--"come and see the sweet calm face of him you have slain:--come with me, and behold the image of Clara Beverley; and, if you ever loved her as you say you did, let your soul be touched with remorse for your crime."
The excitement and confusion produced by this unexpected interruption was great. Murmurs of compassion for the unhappy Clara, and of indignation against the prisoner, were no longer sought to be repressed by the men; while the officers, quitting their places in the ranks, grouped themselves indiscriminately in the foreground. One, more impatient than his companions, sprang forward, and forcibly drew away the delicate, hand that still grasped that of the captive. It was Sir Everard Valletort.
"Clara, my beloved wife!" he exclaimed, to the astonishment of all who heard him, "pollute not your lips by further communion with such a wretch; his heart is as inaccessible to pity as the rugged rocks on which his spring-life was passed. For Heaven's sake,--for my sake,--linger not within his reach. There is death in his very presence."
"Your wife, sir!" haughtily observed the governor, with irrepressible astonishment and indignation in his voice; "what mean you? --Gentlemen, resume your places in the ranks. --Clara--Miss de Haldimar, I command you to retire instantly to your apartment. --We will discourse of this later, Sir Everard Valletort. I trust you have not dared to offer an indignity to my child."
While he was yet turned to that officer, who had taken his post, as commanded, in the inner angle of the square, and with a countenance that denoted the conflicting emotions of his soul, he was suddenly startled by the confused shout and rushing forward of the whole body, both of officers and men. Before he had time to turn, a loud and well-remembered yell burst upon his ear. The next moment, to his infinite surprise and horror, he beheld the bold warrior rapidly ascending the very staff that had been destined for his scaffold, and with Clara in his arms.
Great was the confusion that ensued. To rush forward and surround the flag-staff, was the immediate action of the troops. Many of the men raised their muskets, and in the excitement of the moment, would have fired, had they not been restrained by their officers, who pointed out the certain destruction it would entail on the unfortunate Clara. With the rapidity of thought, Wacousta had snatched up his victim, while the attention of the troops was directed to the singular conversation passing between the governor and Sir Everard Valletort, and darting through one of the open angles already alluded to, had gained the rampart before they had recovered from the stupor produced by his daring action. Stepping lightly upon the pegs, he had rapidly ascended to the utmost height of these, before any one thought of following him; and then grasping in his teeth the cord which was to have served for his execution, and holding Clara firmly against his chest, while he embraced the smooth staff with knees and feet closely compressed around it, accomplished the difficult ascent with an ease that astonished all who beheld him. Gradually, as he approached the top, the tapering pine waved to and fro; and at each moment it was expected, that, yielding to their united weight, it would snap asunder, and precipitate both Clara and himself, either upon the rampart, or into the ditch beyond.
More than one officer now attempted to follow the fugitive in his adventurous course; but even Lieutenant Johnstone, the most active and experienced in climbing of the party, was unable to rise more than a few yards above the pegs that afforded a footing, add the enterprise was abandoned as an impossibility. At length Wacousta was seen to gain the extreme summit. For a moment he turned his gaze anxiously beyond the town, in the direction of the bridge; and, after pealing forth one of his terrific yells, exclaimed, exultingly, as he turned his eye upon his enemy:-- "Well, colonel, what think you of this sample of Indian ingenuity? Did I not tell you," he continued, in mockery, "that, if my hands were but free, I would give you a specimen of my progress in Indian acquirements?"
"If you would avoid a death even more terrible than that of hanging," shouted the governor, in a voice of mingled rage and terror, "restore my daughter."
"Ha! ha! ha! --excellent!" vociferated the savage. "You threaten largely, my good governor; but your threats are harmless as those of a weak besieging army before an impregnable fortress. It is for the strongest, however, to propose his terms. --If I restore this girl to life, will you pledge yourself to mine?"
"Never!" thundered Colonel de Haldimar, with unusual energy. --"Men, procure axes; cut the flag-staff down, since this is the only means left of securing yon insolent traitor! Quick to your work: and mark, who first seizes him shall have promotion on the spot."
Axes were instantly procured, and two of the men now lent themselves vigorously to the task. Wacousta seemed to watch these preparations with evident anxiety; and to all it appeared as if his courage had been paralysed by this unexpected action. No sooner, however, had the axemen reached the heart of the staff, than, holding Clara forth over the edge of the rampart, he shouted,-- "One stroke more, and she perishes!"
Instantaneously the work was discontinued. A silence of a few moments ensued. Every eye was turned upward,--every heart beat with terror to see the delicate girl, held by a single arm, and apparently about to be precipitated from that dizzying height. Again Wacousta shouted,-- "Life for life, De Haldimar! If I yield her shall I live?"
"No terms shall be dictated to me by a rebel, in the heart of my own fort," returned the governor. "Restore my child, and we will then consider what mercy may be extended to you."
"Well do I know what mercy dwells in such a heart as yours," gloomily remarked the prisoner; "but I come."
"Surround the staff, men," ordered the governor, in a low tone. "The instant he descends, secure him: lash him in every limb, nor suffer even his insolent tongue to be longer at liberty."
"Boyce, for God's sake open the gate, and place men in readiness to lower the drawbridge," implored Sir Everard of the officer of the guard, and in a tone of deep emotion that was not meant to be overheard by the governor. "I fear the boldness of this vengeful man may lead him to some desperate means of escape."
While the officer whom he addressed issued a command, the responsibility of which he fancied he might, under the peculiar circumstances of the moment, take upon himself, Wacousta began his descent, not as before, by adhering to the staff, but by the rope which he held in his left hand, while he still supported the apparently senseless Clara against his right chest with the other.
"Now, Colonel de Haldimar, I hope your heart is at rest," he shouted, as he rapidly glided by the cord; "enjoy your triumph as best may suit your pleasure."
Every eye followed his movement with interest; every heart beat lighter at the certainty of Clara being again restored, and without other injury than the terror she must have experienced in such a scene. Each congratulated himself on the favourable termination of the terrible adventure, yet were all ready to spring upon and secure the desperate author of the wrong. Wacousta had now reached the centre of the flag-staff. Pausing for a moment, he grappled it with his strong and nervous feet, on which he apparently rested, to give a momentary relief to the muscles of his left arm. He then abruptly abandoned his hold, swinging himself out a few yards from the staff, and returning again, dashed his feet against it with a force that caused the weakened mass to vibrate to its very foundation. Impelled by his weight, and the violence of his action, the creaking pine gave way; its lofty top gradually bending over the exterior rampart until it finally snapped asunder, and fell with a loud crash across the ditch.
"Open the gate, down with the drawbridge!" exclaimed the excited governor.
"Down with the drawbridge," repeated Sir Everard to the men already stationed there ready to let loose at the first order. The heavy chains rattled sullenly through the rusty pulleys, and to each the bridge seemed an hour descending. Before it had reached its level, it was covered with the weight of many armed men rushing confusedly to the front; and the foremost of these leaped to the earth before it had sunk into its customary bed. Sir Everard Valletort and Lieutenant Johnstone were in the front, both armed with their rifles, which had been brought them before Wacousta commenced his descent. Without order or combination, Erskine, Blessington, and nearly half of their respective companies, followed as they could; and dispersing as they advanced, sought only which could outstep his fellows in the pursuit.
Meanwhile the fugitive, assisted in his fall by the gradual rending asunder of the staff, had obeyed the impulsion first given to his active form, until, suddenly checking himself by the rope, he dropped with his feet downward into the centre of the ditch. For a moment he disappeared, then came again uninjured to the surface; and in the face of more than fifty men, who, lining the rampart with their muskets levelled to take him at advantage the instant he should reappear, seemed to laugh their efforts to scorn. Holding Clara before him as a shield, through which the bullets of his enemies must pass before they could attain him, he impelled his gigantic form with a backward movement towards the opposite bank, which he rapidly ascended; and, still fronting his enemies, commenced his flight in that manner with a speed which (considering the additional weight of the drenched garments of both) was inconceivable. The course taken by him was not through the town, but circuitously across the common until he arrived on that immediate line whence, as we have before stated, the bridge was distinctly visible from the rampart; on which, nearly the whole of the remaining troops, in defiance of the presence of their austere chief, were now eagerly assembled, watching, with unspeakable interest, the progress of the chase.
Desperate as were the exertions of Wacousta, who evidently continued this mode of flight from a conviction that the instant his person was left exposed the fire-arms of his pursuers would be brought to bear upon him, the two officers in front, animated by the most extraordinary exertions, were rapidly gaining upon him. Already was one within fifty yards of him, when a loud yell was heard from the bridge. This was fiercely answered by the fleeing man, and in a manner that implied his glad sense of coming rescue. In the wild exultation of the moment, he raised Clara high above his head, to show her in triumph to the governor, whose person his keen eye could easily distinguish among those crowded upon the rampart. In the gratified vengeance of that hour, he seemed utterly to overlook the actions of those who were so near him. During this brief scene, Sir Everard had dropped upon one knee, and supporting his elbow on the other, aimed his rifle at the heart of the ravisher of his wife. An exulting shout burst from the pursuing troops. Wacousta bounded a few feet in air, and placing his hand to his side, uttered another yell, more appalling than any that had hitherto escaped him. His flight was now uncertain and wavering. He staggered as one who had received a mortal wound; and discontinuing his unequal mode of retreat, turned his back upon his pursuers, and threw all his remaining energies into a final effort at escape.
Inspirited by the success of his shot, and expecting momentarily to see him fall weakened with the loss of blood, the excited Valletort redoubled his exertions. To his infinite joy, he found that the efforts of the fugitive became feebler at each moment Johnstone was about twenty paces behind him, and the pursuing party at about the same distance from Johnstone. The baronet had now reached his enemy, and already was the butt of his rifle raised with both hands with murderous intent, when suddenly Wacousta, every feature distorted with rage and pain, turned like a wounded lion at bay, and eluding the blow, deposited the unconscious form of his victim upon the sward. Springing upon his infinitely weaker pursuer, he grappled him furiously by the throat, exclaiming through his clenched teeth:-- "Nay then, since you will provoke your fate--be it so. Die like a dog, and be d--d, for having balked me--of my just revenge!"
As he spoke, he hurled the gasping officer to the earth with a violence that betrayed the dreadful excitement of his soul, and again hastened to assure himself of his prize.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Johnstone had come up, and, seeing his companion struggling as he presumed, with advantage, with his severely wounded enemy, made it his first care to secure the unhappy girl; for whose recovery the pursuit had been principally instituted. Quitting his rifle, he now essayed to raise her in his arms. She was without life or consciousness, and the impression on his mind was that she was dead.
While in the act of raising her, the terrible Wacousta stood at his side, his vast chest heaving forth a laugh of mingled rage and contempt. Before the officer could extricate, with a view of defending himself, his arms were pinioned as though in a vice; and ere he could recover from his surprise, he felt himself lifted up and thrown to a considerable distance. When he opened his eyes a moment afterwards, he was lying amid the moving feet of his own men.
From the instant of the closing of the unfortunate Valletort with his enemy, the Indians, hastening to the assistance of their chief, had come up, and a desultory fire had already commenced, diverting, in a great degree, the attention of the troops from the pursued. Emboldened by this new aspect of things Wacousta now deliberately grasped the rifle that had been abandoned by Johnstone; and raising it to his shoulder, fired among the group collected on the ramparts. For a moment he watched the result of his shot, and then, pealing forth another fierce yell, he hurled the now useless weapon into the very heart of his pursuers; and again raising Clara in his arms, once more commenced his retreat, which, under cover of the fire of his party, was easily effected.
"Who has fallen?" demanded the governor of his adjutant, perceiving that some one had been hit at his side, yet without taking his eyes off his terrible enemy.
"Mr. Delme, sir," was the reply. "He has been shot through the heart, and his men are bearing him from the rampart."
"This must not be," resumed the governor with energy. "Private feelings must no longer be studied at the expense of the public good. That pursuit is hopeless; and already too many of my officers have fallen. Desire the retreat to be sounded, Mr. Lawson. Captain Wentworth, let one or two covering guns be brought to bear upon the savages. They are gradually increasing hi numbers; and if we delay, the party will be wholly cut off."
In issuing these orders, Colonel de Haldimar evinced a composedness that astonished all who heard him. But although his voice was calm, despair was upon his brow. Still he continued to gaze fixedly on the retreating form of his enemy, until he finally disappeared behind the orchard of the Canadian of the Fleur de lis.
Obeying the summons from the fort, the troops without now commenced their retreat, bearing off the bodies of their fallen officers and several of their comrades who had fallen by the Indian fire. There was a show of harassing them on their return; but they were too near the fort to apprehend much danger. Two or three well-directed discharges of artillery effectually checked the onward progress of the savages; and, in the course of a minute, they had again wholly disappeared.
In gloomy silence, and with anger and disappointment in their hearts, the detachment now re-entered the fort. Johnstone was only severely bruised; Sir Everard Valletort not dead. Both were conveyed to the same room, where they were instantly attended by the surgeon, who pronounced the situation of the latter hopeless.
Major Blackwater, Captains Blessington and Erskine, Lieutenants Leslie and Boyce, and Ensigns Fortescue and Summers, were now the only regimental officers that remained of thirteen originally comprising the strength of the garrison. The whole of these stood grouped around their colonel, who seemed transfixed to the spot he had first occupied on the rampart, with his arms folded, and his gaze bent in the direction in which he had lost sight of Wacousta and his child.
Hitherto the morning had been cold and cheerless, and objects in the far distance were but indistinctly seen through a humid atmosphere. At about half an hour before mid-day the air became more rarified, and, the murky clouds gradually disappearing, left the blue autumnal sky without spot or blemish. Presently, as the bells of the fort struck twelve, a yell as of a legion of devils rent the air; and, riveting their gaze in that direction, all beheld the bridge, hitherto deserted, suddenly covered with a multitude of savages, among whom were several individuals attired in the European garb, and evidently prisoners. Each officer had a telescope raised to his eye, and each prepared himself, shudderingly, for some horrid consummation. Presently the bridge was cleared of all but a double line of what appeared to be women, armed with war-clubs and tomahawks. Along the line were now seen to pass, in slow succession, the prisoners that had previously been observed. At each step they took (and it was evident they had been compelled to run the gauntlet), a blow was inflicted by some one or other of the line, until the wretched victims were successively despatched. A loud yell from the warriors, who, although hidden from view by the intervening orchards, were evidently merely spectators in the bloody drama, announced each death. These yells were repeated, at intervals, to about the number of thirty, when, suddenly, the bridge was again deserted as before.
After the lapse of a minute, the tall figure of a warrior was seen to advance, holding a female in his arms. No one could mistake, even at that distance, the gigantic proportions of Wacousta,--as he stood in the extreme centre of the bridge, in imposing relief against the flood that glittered like a sea of glass beyond. From his chest there now burst a single yell; but, although audible, it was fainter than any remembered ever to have been heard from him by the garrison. He then advanced to the extreme edge of the bridge; and, raising the form of the female far above his head with his left hand, seemed to wave her in vengeful triumph. A second warrior was seen upon the bridge, and stealing cautiously to the same point. The right hand of the first warrior was now raised and brandished in air; in the next instant it descended upon the breast of the female, who fell from his arms into the ravine beneath. Yells of triumph from the Indians, and shouts of execration from the soldiers, mingled faintly together. At that moment the arm of the second warrior was raised, and a blade was seen to glitter in the sunshine. His arm descended, and Wacousta was observed to stagger forward and fall heavily into the abyss into which his victim had the instant before been precipitated. Another loud yell, but of disappointment and anger, was heard drowning that of exultation pealed by the triumphant warrior, who, darting to the open extremity of the bridge, directed his flight along the margin of the river, where a light canoe was ready to receive him. Into this he sprang, and, seizing the paddle, sent the waters foaming from its sides; and, pursuing his way across the river, had nearly gained the shores of Canada before a bark was to be seen following in pursuit.
How felt--how acted Colonel de Haldimar throughout this brief but terrible scene? He uttered not a word. With his arms still folded across his breast, he gazed upon the murder of his child; but he heaved not a groan, he shed not a tear. A momentary triumph seemed to, irradiate his pallid features, when he saw the blow struck that annihilated his enemy; but it was again instantly shaded by an expression of the most profound despair.
"It is done, gentlemen," he at length remarked. "The tragedy is closed, the curse of Ellen Halloway is fulfilled, and I am--childless! --Blackwater," he pursued, endeavouring to stifle the emotion produced by the last reflection, "pay every attention to the security of the garrison, see that the drawbridge is again properly chained up, and direct that the duties of the troops be prosecuted in every way as heretofore."
Leaving his officers to wonder at and pity that apathy of mind that could mingle the mere forms of duty with the most heart-rending associations, Colonel de Haldimar now quitted the rampart; and, with a head that was remarked for the first time to droop over his chest, paced his way musingly to his apartments.
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Night had long since drawn her circling mantle over the western hemisphere; and deeper, far deeper than the gloom of that night was the despair which filled every bosom of the devoted garrison, whose fortunes it has fallen to our lot to record. A silence, profound as that of death, pervaded the ramparts and exterior defences of the fortress, interrupted only, at long intervals, by the customary "All's well!" of the several sentinels; which, after the awful events of the day, seemed to many who now heard it as if uttered in mockery of their hopelessness of sorrow. The lights within the barracks of the men had been long since extinguished; and, consigned to a mere repose of limb, in which the eye and heart shared not, the inferior soldiery pressed their rude couches with spirits worn out by a succession of painful excitements, and frames debilitated, by much abstinence and watching. It was an hour at which sleep was wont to afford them the blessing of a temporary forgetfulness of endurances that weighed the more heavily as they were believed to be endless and without fruit; but sleep had now apparently been banished from all; for the low and confused murmur that met the ear from the several block-houses was continuous and general, betraying at times, and in a louder key, words that bore reference to the tragic occurrences of the day.
The only lights visible in the fort proceeded from the guard-house and a room adjoining that of the ill-fated Charles de Haldimar. Within the latter were collected, with the exception of the governor, and grouped around a bed on which lay one of their companions in a nearly expiring state, the officers of the garrison, reduced nearly one third in number since we first offered them to the notice of our readers. The dying man was Sir Everard Valletort, who, supported by pillows, was concluding a narrative that had chained the earnest attention of his auditory, even amid the deep and heartfelt sympathy perceptible in each for the forlorn and hopeless condition of the narrator. At the side of the unhappy baronet, and enveloped in a dressing gown, as if recently out of bed, sat, reclining in a rude elbow chair, one whose pallid countenance denoted, that, although far less seriously injured, he, too, had suffered severely:--it was Lieutenant Johnstone.
The narrative was at length closed; and the officer, exhausted by the effort he had made in his anxiety to communicate every particular to his attentive and surprised companions, had sunk back upon his pillow, when, suddenly, the loud and unusual "Who comes there?" of the sentinel stationed on the rampart above the gateway, arrested every ear. A moment of pause succeeded, when again was heard the "Stand, friend!" evidently given in reply to the familiar answer to the original challenge. Then were audible rapid movements in the guard-house, as of men aroused from temporary slumber, and hastening to the point whence the voice proceeded.
Silently yet hurriedly the officers now quitted the bedside of the dying man, leaving only the surgeon and the invalid Johnstone behind them; and, flying to the rampart, stood in the next minute confounded with the guard, who were already grouped round the challenging sentinel, bending their gaze eagerly in the direction of the road.
"What now, man? --whom have you challenged?" asked Major Blackwater.
"It is I--De Haldimar," hoarsely exclaimed one of four dark figures that, hitherto, unnoticed by the officers, stood immediately beyond the ditch, with a burden deposited at their feet. "Quick, Blackwater, let us in for God's sake! Each succeeding minute may bring a scouting party on our track. Lower the drawbridge!"
"Impossible!" exclaimed the major: "after all that has passed, it is more than my commission is worth to lower the bridge without permission. Mr. Lawson, quick to the governor, and report that Captain de Haldimar is here: with whom shall he say?" again addressing the impatient and almost indignant officer.
"With Miss de Haldimar, Francois the Canadian, and one to whom we all owe our lives," hurriedly returned the officer; "and you may add," he continued gloomily, "the corpse of my sister. But while we stand in parley here, we are lost: Lawson, fly to my father, and tell him we wait for entrance."
With nearly the speed enjoined the adjutant departed. Scarcely a minute elapsed when he again stood upon the rampart, and advancing closely to the major, whispered a few words in his ear.
"Good God! can it be possible? When? How came this? but we will enquire later. Open the gate; down with the bridge, Leslie," addressing the officer of the guard.
The command was instantly obeyed. The officers flew to receive the fugitives; and as the latter crossed the drawbridge, the light of a lantern, that had been brought from the guard-room, flashed full upon the harassed countenances of Captain and Miss de Haldimar, Francois the Canadian, and the devoted Oucanasta.
Silent and melancholy was the greeting that took place between the parties: the voice spoke not; the hand alone was eloquent; but it was in the eloquence of sorrow only that it indulged. Pleasure, even in this almost despaired of re-union, could not be expressed; and even the eye shrank from mutual encounter, as if its very glance at such a moment were sacrilege. Recalled to a sense of her situation by the preparation of the men to raise the bridge, the Indian woman was the first to break the silence.
"The Saganaw is safe within his fort, and the girl of the pale faces will lay her head upon his bosom," she remarked solemnly. "Oucanasta will go to her solitary wigwam among the red skins."
The heart of Madeline de Haldimar was oppressed by the weight of many griefs; yet she could not see the generous preserver of her life, and the rescuer of the body of her ill-fated cousin, depart without emotion. Drawing a ring, of some value and great beauty, from her finger, which she had more than once observed the Indian to admire, she placed it on her hand; and then, throwing herself on the bosom of the faithful creature, embraced her with deep manifestations of affection, but without uttering a word.
Oucanasta was sensibly gratified: she raised her large eyes to heaven as if in thankfulness; and by the light of the lantern, which fell upon her dark but expressive countenance, tears were to be seen starting unbidden from their source.
Released from the embrace of her, whose life she had twice preserved at imminent peril to her own, the Indian again prepared to depart; but there was another, who, like Madeline, although stricken by many sorrows, could not forego the testimony of his heart's gratitude. Captain de Haldimar, who, during this short scene, had despatched a messenger to his room for the purpose, now advanced to the poor girl, bearing a short but elegantly mounted dagger, which he begged her to deliver as a token of his friendship to the young chief her brother. He then dropped on one knee at her feet, and raising her hand, pressed it fervently against his heart; an action which, even to the untutored mind of the Indian, bore evidence only of the feeling that prompted it, A heavy sigh escaped her labouring chest; and as the officer now rose and quitted her hand, she turned slowly and with dignity from him, and crossing the drawbridge, was in a few minutes lost in the surrounding gloom.
Our readers have, doubtless, anticipated the communication made to Major Blackwater by the Adjutant Lawson. Bowed down to the dust by the accomplishment of the curse of Ellen Halloway, the inflexibility of Colonel de Haldimar's pride was not proof against the utter annihilation wrought to his hopes as a father by the unrelenting hatred of the enemy his early falsehood and treachery had raised up to him. When the adjutant entered his apartment, the stony coldness of his cheek attested he had been dead some hours.
We pass over the few days of bitter trial that succeeded to the restoration of Captain de Haldimar and his bride to their friends; days, during which were consigned to the same grave the bodies of the governor, his lamented children, and the scarcely less regretted Sir Everard Valletort. The funeral service was attempted by Captain Blessington; but the strong affection of that excellent officer, for three of the defunct parties at least, was not armed against the trial. He had undertaken a task far beyond his strength; and scarcely had commenced, ere he was compelled to relinquish the performance of the ritual to the adjutant. A large grave had been dug close under the rampart, and near the fatal flag-staff, to receive the bodies of their deceased friends; and, as they were lowered successively into their last earthly resting place, tears fell unrestrainedly over the bronzed cheeks of the oldest soldiers, while many a female sob blended with and gave touching solemnity to the scene.
On the morning of the third day from this quadruple interment, notice was given by one of the sentinels that an Indian was approaching the fort, making signs as if in demand for a parley. The officers, headed by Major Blackwater, now become the commandant of the place, immediately ascended the rampart, when the stranger was at once recognised by Captain de Haldimar for the young Ottawa, the preserver of his life, and the avenger of the deaths of those they mourned, in whose girdle was thrust, in seeming pride, the richly mounted dagger that officer had caused to be conveyed to him through his no less generous sister. A long conference ensued, in the language of the Ottawas, between the parties just named, the purport of which was of high moment to the garrison, now nearly reduced to the last extremity. The young chief had come to apprise them, that, won by the noble conduct of the English, on a late occasion, when his warriors were wholly in their power, Ponteac had expressed a generous determination to conclude a peace with the garrison, and henceforth to consider them as his friends. This he had publicly declared in a large council of the chiefs, held the preceding night; and the motive of the Ottawa's coming was, to assure the English, that, on this occasion, their great leader was perfectly sincere in a resolution, at which he had the more readily arrived, now that his terrible coadjutor and vindictive adviser was no more. He prepared them for the coming of Ponteac and the principal chiefs of the league to demand a council on the morrow; and, with this final communication, again withdrew.
The Ottawa was right Within a week from that period the English were to be seen once more issuing from their fort; and, although many months elapsed before the wounds of their suffering hearts were healed, still were they grateful to Providence for their final preservation from a doom that had fallen, without exception, on every fortress on the line of frontier in which they lay.
Time rolled on; and, in the course of years, Oucanasta might be seen associating with and bearing curious presents, the fruits of Indian ingenuity, to the daughters of De Haldimar, now become the colonel of the ---- regiment; while her brother, the chief, instructed his sons in the athletic and active exercises peculiar to his race. As for poor Ellen Halloway, search had been made for her, but she never was heard of afterwards.
THE END
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{
"id": "4911"
}
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1
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THE TRIAL
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During the first two months of the year 1844, the greatest possible excitement existed in Dublin respecting the State Trials, in which Mr O'Connell, [1] his son, the Editors of three different repeal newspapers, Tom Steele, the Rev. Mr Tierney--a priest who had taken a somewhat prominent part in the Repeal Movement--and Mr Ray, the Secretary to the Repeal Association, were indicted for conspiracy. Those who only read of the proceedings in papers, which gave them as a mere portion of the news of the day, or learned what was going on in Dublin by chance conversation, can have no idea of the absorbing interest which the whole affair created in Ireland, but more especially in the metropolis. Every one felt strongly, on one side or on the other. Every one had brought the matter home to his own bosom, and looked to the result of the trial with individual interest and suspense.
[FOOTNOTE 1: The historical events described here form a backdrop to the novel. Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847) came from a wealthy Irish Catholic family. He was educated in the law, which he practiced most successfully, and developed a passion for religious and political liberty. In 1823, together with Lalor Sheil and Thomas Wyse, he organized the Catholic Association, whose major goal was Catholic emancipation. This was achieved by act of parliament the following year. O'Connell served in parliament in the 1830's and was active in the passage of bills emancipating the Jews and outlawing slavery. In 1840 he formed the Repeal Association, whose goal was repeal of the 1800 Act of Union which joined Ireland to Great Britain. In 1842, after serving a year as Lord Mayor of Dublin, O'Connell challenged the British government by announcing that he intended to achieve repeal within a year. Though he openly opposed violence, Prime Minister Peel's government considered him a threat and arrested O'Connell and his associates in 1843 on trumped-up charges of conspiracy, sedition, and unlawfule assembly. They were tried in 1844, and all but one were convicted, although the conviction was later overturned in the House of Lords. O'Connell did serve some time in jail and was considered a martyr to the cause of Irish independence.]
Even at this short interval Irishmen can now see how completely they put judgment aside, and allowed feeling and passion to predominate in the matter. Many of the hottest protestants, of the staunchest foes to O'Connell, now believe that his absolute imprisonment was not to be desired, and that whether he were acquitted or convicted, the Government would have sufficiently shown, by instituting his trial, its determination to put down proceedings of which they did not approve. On the other hand, that class of men who then styled themselves Repealers are now aware that the continued imprisonment of their leader--the persecution, as they believed it to be, of "the Liberator" [2]--would have been the one thing most certain to have sustained his influence, and to have given fresh force to their agitation. Nothing ever so strengthened the love of the Irish for, and the obedience of the Irish to O'Connell, as his imprisonment; nothing ever so weakened his power over them as his unexpected enfranchisement [3]. The country shouted for joy when he was set free, and expended all its enthusiasm in the effort.
[FOOTNOTE 2: The Irish often referred to Daniel O'Connell as "the liberator."]
[FOOTNOTE 3: enfranchisement--being set free. This is a political observation by Trollope.]
At the time, however, to which I am now referring, each party felt the most intense interest in the struggle, and the most eager desire for success. Every Repealer, and every Anti-Repealer in Dublin felt that it was a contest, in which he himself was, to a certain extent, individually engaged. All the tactics of the opposed armies, down to the minutest legal details, were eagerly and passionately canvassed in every circle. Ladies, who had before probably never heard of "panels" in forensic phraseology, now spoke enthusiastically on the subject; and those on one side expressed themselves indignant at the fraudulent omission of certain names from the lists of jurors; while those on the other were capable of proving the legality of choosing the jury from the names which were given, and stated most positively that the omissions were accidental.
"The traversers" [4] were in everybody's mouth--a term heretofore confined to law courts, and lawyers' rooms. The Attorney-General, the Commander-in-Chief of the Government forces, was most virulently assailed; every legal step which he took was scrutinised and abused; every measure which he used was base enough of itself to hand down his name to everlasting infamy. Such were the tenets of the Repealers. And O'Connell and his counsel, their base artifices, falsehoods, delays, and unprofessional proceedings, were declared by the Saxon party to be equally abominable.
[FOOTNOTE 4: traversers--Trollope repeatedly refers to the defendants as "traversers." The term probably comes from the legal term "to traverse," which is to deny the charges against one in a common law proceeding. Thus, the traversers would have been those who pled innocent.]
The whole Irish bar seemed, for the time, to have laid aside the habitual _sang froid_ [5] and indifference of lawyers, and to have employed their hearts as well as their heads on behalf of the different parties by whom they were engaged. The very jurors themselves for a time became famous or infamous, according to the opinions of those by whom their position was discussed. Their names and additions were published and republished; they were declared to be men who would stand by their country and do their duty without fear or favour--so said the Protestants. By the Roman Catholics, they were looked on as perjurors determined to stick to the Government with blind indifference to their oaths. Their names are now, for the most part, forgotten, though so little time has elapsed since they appeared so frequently before the public.
[FOOTNOTE 5: sang froid--(French) coolness in a trying situation, lack of excitability] Every day's proceedings gave rise to new hopes and fears. The evidence rested chiefly on the reports of certain short-hand writers, who had been employed to attend Repeal meetings, and their examinations and cross-examinations were read, re-read, and scanned with the minutest care. Then, the various and long speeches of the different counsel, who, day after day, continued to address the jury; the heat of one, the weary legal technicalities of another, the perspicuity of a third, and the splendid forensic eloquence of a fourth, were criticised, depreciated and admired. It seemed as though the chief lawyers of the day were standing an examination, and were candidates for some high honour, which each was striving to secure.
The Dublin papers were full of the trial; no other subject, could, at the time, either interest or amuse. I doubt whether any affair of the kind was ever, to use the phrase of the trade, so well and perfectly reported. The speeches appeared word for word the same in the columns of newspapers of different politics. For four-fifths of the contents of the paper it would have been the same to you whether you were reading the Evening Mail, or the Freeman. Every word that was uttered in the Court was of importance to every one in Dublin; and half-an-hour's delay in ascertaining, to the minutest shade, what had taken place in Court during any period, was accounted a sad misfortune.
The press round the Four Courts [6], every morning before the doors were open, was very great: and except by the favoured few who were able to obtain seats, it was only with extreme difficulty and perseverance, that an entrance into the body of the Court could be obtained.
[FOOTNOTE 6: The Four Courts was a landmark courthouse in Dublin named for the four divisions of the Irish judicial system: Common Pleas, Chancery, Exchequer, and King's Bench.]
It was on the eleventh morning of the proceedings, on the day on which the defence of the traversers was to be commenced, that two young men, who had been standing for a couple of hours in front of the doors of the Court, were still waiting there, with what patience was left to them, after having been pressed and jostled for so long a time. Richard Lalor Sheil, however, was to address the jury on behalf of Mr John O'Connell--and every one in Dublin knew that that was a treat not to be lost. The two young men, too, were violent Repealers. The elder of them was a three-year-old denizen of Dublin, who knew the names of the contributors to the "Nation", who had constantly listened to the indignation and enthusiasm of O'Connell, Smith O'Brien, and O'Neill Daunt, in their addresses from the rostrum of the Conciliation Hall [7]; who had drank much porter at Jude's, who had eaten many oysters at Burton Bindon's, who had seen and contributed to many rows in the Abbey Street Theatre; who, during his life in Dublin, had done many things which he ought not to have done, and had probably made as many omissions of things which it had behoved him to do. He had that knowledge of the persons of his fellow-citizens, which appears to be so much more general in Dublin than in any other large town; he could tell you the name and trade of every one he met in the streets, and was a judge of the character and talents of all whose employments partook, in any degree, of a public nature. His name was Kelly; and, as his calling was that of an attorney's clerk, his knowledge of character would be peculiarly valuable in the scene at which he and his companion were so anxious to be present.
[FOOTNOTE 7: Conciliation Hall, Dublin, was built in 1843 as a meeting place for O'Connell's Repeal Association.]
The younger of the two brothers, for such they were, was a somewhat different character. Though perhaps a more enthusiastic Repealer than his brother, he was not so well versed in the details of Repeal tactics, or in the strength and weakness of the Repeal ranks. He was a young farmer, of the better class, from the County Mayo, where he held three or four hundred wretchedly bad acres under Lord Ballindine, and one or two other small farms, under different landlords. He was a good-looking young fellow, about twenty-five years of age, with that mixture of cunning and frankness in his bright eye, which is so common among those of his class in Ireland, but more especially so in Connaught.
The mother of these two young men kept an inn in the small town of Dunmore, and though from the appearance of the place, one would be led to suppose that there could not be in Dunmore much of that kind of traffic which innkeepers love, Mrs Kelly was accounted a warm, comfortable woman. Her husband had left her for a better world some ten years since, with six children; and the widow, instead of making continual use, as her chief support, of that common wail of being a poor, lone woman, had put her shoulders to the wheel, and had earned comfortably, by sheer industry, that which so many of her class, when similarly situated, are willing to owe to compassion.
She held on the farm, which her husband rented from Lord Ballindine, till her eldest son was able to take it. He, however, was now a gauger [8] in the north of Ireland. Her second son was the attorney's clerk; and the farm had descended to Martin, the younger, whom we have left jostling and jostled at one of the great doors of the Four Courts, and whom we must still leave there for a short time, while a few more of the circumstances of his family are narrated.
[FOOTNOTE 8: gauger--a British revenue officer often engaged in the collection of duties on distilled spirits.]
Mrs Kelly had, after her husband's death, added a small grocer's establishment to her inn. People wondered where she had found the means of supplying her shop: some said that old Mick Kelly must have had money when he died, though it was odd how a man who drank so much could ever have kept a shilling by him. Others remarked how easy it was to get credit in these days, and expressed a hope that the wholesale dealer in Pill Lane might be none the worse. However this might be, the widow Kelly kept her station firmly and constantly behind her counter, wore her weeds and her warm, black, stuff dress decently and becomingly, and never asked anything of anybody.
At the time of which we are writing, her two elder sons had left her, and gone forth to make their own way, and take the burden of the world on their own shoulders. Martin still lived with his mother, though his farm lay four miles distant, on the road to Ballindine, and in another county--for Dunmore is in County Galway, and the lands of Toneroe, as Martin's farm was called, were in the County Mayo. One of her three daughters had lately been married to a shop-keeper in Tuam, and rumour said that he had got £500 with her; and Pat Daly was not the man to have taken a wife for nothing. The other two girls, Meg and Jane, still remained under their mother's wing, and though it was to be presumed that they would soon fly abroad, with the same comfortable plumage which had enabled their sister to find so warm a nest, they were obliged, while sharing their mother's home, to share also her labours, and were not allowed to be too proud to cut off pennyworths of tobacco, and mix dandies of punch for such of their customers as still preferred the indulgence of their throats to the blessing of Father Mathew.
Mrs. Kelly kept two ordinary in-door servants to assist in the work of the house; one, an antiquated female named Sally, who was more devoted to her tea-pot than ever was any bacchanalian to his glass. Were there four different teas in the inn in one evening, she would have drained the pot after each, though she burst in the effort. Sally was, in all, an honest woman, and certainly a religious one;--she never neglected her devotional duties, confessed with most scrupulous accuracy the various peccadillos of which she might consider herself guilty; and it was thought, with reason, by those who knew her best, that all the extra prayers she said,--and they were very many,--were in atonement for commissions of continual petty larceny with regard to sugar. On this subject did her old mistress quarrel with her, her young mistress ridicule her; of this sin did her fellow-servant accuse her; and, doubtless, for this sin did her Priest continually reprove her; but in vain. Though she would not own it, there was always sugar in her pocket, and though she declared that she usually drank her tea unsweetened, those who had come upon her unawares had seen her extracting the pinches of moist brown saccharine from the huge slit in her petticoat, and could not believe her.
Kate, the other servant, was a red-legged lass, who washed the potatoes, fed the pigs, and ate her food nobody knew when or where. Kates, particularly Irish Kates, are pretty by prescription; but Mrs. Kelly's Kate had been excepted, and was certainly a most positive exception. Poor Kate was very ugly. Her hair had that appearance of having been dressed by the turkey-cock, which is sometimes presented by the heads of young women in her situation; her mouth extended nearly from ear to ear; her neck and throat, which were always nearly bare, presented no feminine charms to view; and her short coarse petticoat showed her red legs nearly to the knee; for, except on Sundays, she knew not the use of shoes and stockings. But though Kate was ungainly and ugly, she was useful, and grateful--very fond of the whole family, and particularly attached to the two young ladies, in whose behalf she doubtless performed many a service, acceptable enough to them, but of which, had she known of them, the widow would have been but little likely to approve.
Such was Mrs. Kelly's household at the time that her son Martin left Connaught to pay a short visit to the metropolis, during the period of O'Connell's trial. But, although Martin was a staunch Repealer, and had gone as far as Galway, and Athlone, to be present at the Monster Repeal Meetings which had been held there, it was not political anxiety alone which led him to Dublin. His landlord; the young Lord Ballindine, was there; and, though Martin could not exactly be said to act as his lordship's agent--for Lord Ballindine had, unfortunately, a legal agent, with whose services his pecuniary embarrassments did not allow him to dispense--he was a kind of confidential tenant, and his attendance had been requested. Martin, moreover, had a somewhat important piece of business of his own in hand, which he expected would tend greatly to his own advantage; and, although he had fully made up his mind to carry it out if possible, he wanted, in conducting it, a little of his brother's legal advice, and, above all, his landlord's sanction.
This business was nothing less than an intended elopement with an heiress belonging to a rank somewhat higher than that in which Martin Kelly might be supposed to look, with propriety, for his bride; but Martin was a handsome fellow, not much burdened with natural modesty, and he had, as he supposed, managed to engage the affections of Anastasia Lynch, a lady resident near Dunmore.
All particulars respecting Martin's intended--the amount of her fortune--her birth and parentage--her age and attractions--shall, in due time, be made known; or rather, perhaps, be suffered to make themselves known. In the mean time we will return to the two brothers, who are still anxiously waiting to effect an entrance into the august presence of the Law.
Martin had already told his brother of his matrimonial speculations, and had received certain hints from that learned youth as to the proper means of getting correct information as to the amount of the lady's wealth,--her power to dispose of it by her own deed,--and certain other particulars always interesting to gentlemen who seek money and love at the same time. John did not quite approve of the plan; there might have been a shade of envy at his brother's good fortune; there might be some doubt as to his brother's power of carrying the affair through successfully; but, though he had not encouraged him, he gave him the information he wanted, and was as willing to talk over the matter as Martin could desire.
As they were standing in the crowd, their conversation ran partly on Repeal and O'Connell, and partly on matrimony and Anty Lynch, as the lady was usually called by those who knew her best.
"Tear and 'ouns Misther Lord Chief Justice!" exclaimed Martin, "and are ye niver going to opin them big doors?"
"And what'd be the good of his opening them yet," answered John, "when a bigger man than himself an't there? Dan and the other boys isn't in it yet, and sure all the twelve judges couldn't get on a peg without them."
"Well, Dan, my darling!" said the other, "you're thought more of here this day than the lot of 'em, though the place in a manner belongs to them, and you're only a prisoner."
"Faix and that's what he's not, Martin; no more than yourself, nor so likely, may-be. He's the traverser, as I told you before, and that's not being a prisoner. If he were a prisoner, how did he manage to tell us all what he did at the Hall yesterday?"
"Av' he's not a prisoner, he's the next-door to it; it's not of his own free will and pleasure he'd come here to listen to all the lies them thundhering Saxon ruffians choose to say about him."
"And why not? Why wouldn't he come here and vindicate himself? When you hear Sheil by and by, you'll see then whether they think themselves likely to be prisoners! No--no; they never will be, av' there's a ghost of a conscience left in one of them Protesthant raps, that they've picked so carefully out of all Dublin to make jurors of. They can't convict 'em! I heard Ford, the night before last, offer four to one that they didn't find the lot guilty; and he knows what he's about, and isn't the man to thrust a Protestant half as far as he'd see him."
"Isn't Tom Steele a Protesthant himself, John?"
"Well, I believe he is. So's Gray, and more of 'em too; but there's a difference between them and the downright murdhering Tory set. Poor Tom doesn't throuble the Church much; but you'll be all for Protesthants now, Martin, when you've your new brother-in-law. Barry used to be one of your raal out-and-outers!"
"It's little, I'm thinking, I and Barry'll be having to do together, unless it be about the brads; and the law about them now, thank God, makes no differ for Roman and Protesthant. Anty's as good a Catholic as ever breathed, and so was her mother before her; and when she's Mrs Kelly, as I mane to make her, Master Barry may shell out the cash and go to heaven his own way for me."
"It ain't the family then, you're fond of, Martin! And I wondher at that, considering how old Sim loved us all."
"Niver mind Sim, John! he's dead and gone; and av' he niver did a good deed before, he did one when he didn't lave all his cash to that precious son of his, Barry Lynch."
"You're prepared for squalls with Barry, I suppose?"
"He'll have all the squalling on his own side, I'm thinking, John. I don't mane to squall, for one. I don't see why I need, with £400 a-year in my pocket, and a good wife to the fore."
"The £400 a-year's good enough, av' you touch it, certainly," said the man of law, thinking of his own insufficient guinea a-week, "and you must look to have some throuble yet afore you do that. But as to the wife--why, the less said the better--eh, Martin?
"Av' it's not asking too much, might I throuble you, sir, to set anywhere else but on my shouldher?" This was addressed to a very fat citizen, who was wheezing behind Martin, and who, to escape suffocation in the crowd, was endeavouring to raise himself on his neighbour's shoulders. "And why the less said the better? --I wish yourself may never have a worse."
"I wish I mayn't, Martin, as far as the cash goes; and a man like me might look a long time in Dublin before he got a quarter of the money. But you must own Anty's no great beauty, and she's not over young, either."
"Av' she's no beauty, she's not downright ugly, like many a girl that gets a good husband; and av' she's not over young, she's not over old. She's not so much older than myself, after all. It's only because her own people have always made nothing of her; that's what has made everybody else do the same."
"Why, Martin, I know she's ten years older than Barry, and Barry's older than you!"
"One year; and Anty's not full ten years older than him. Besides, what's ten years between man and wife?"
"Not much, when it's on the right side. But it's the wrong side with you, Martin!"
"Well, John, now, by virtue of your oath, as you chaps say, wouldn't you marry a woman twice her age, av' she'd half the money? --Begad you would, and leap at it!"
"Perhaps I would. I'd a deal sooner have a woman eighty than forty. There'd be some chance then of having the money after the throuble was over! Anty's neither ould enough nor young enough."
"She's not forty, any way; and won't be yet for five years and more; and, as I hope for glory, John--though I know you won't believe me--I wouldn't marry her av' she'd all Sim Lynch's ill-gotten property, instead of only half, av' I wasn't really fond of her, and av' I didn't think I'd make her a good husband."
"You didn't tell mother what you're afther, did you?"
"Sorrow a word! But she's so 'cute she partly guesses; and I think Meg let slip something. The girls and Anty are thick as thiefs since old Sim died; though they couldn't be at the house much since Barry came home, and Anty daren't for her life come down to the shop."
"Did mother say anything about the schame?"
"Faix, not much; but what she did say, didn't show she'd much mind for it. Since Sim Lynch tried to get Toneroe from her, when father died, she'd never a good word for any of them. Not but what she's always a civil look for Anty, when she sees her."
"There's not much fear she'll look black on the wife, when you bring the money home with her. But where'll you live, Martin? The little shop at Dunmore'll be no place for Mrs Kelly, when there's a lady of the name with £400 a-year of her own." " 'Deed then, John, and that's what I don't know. May-be I'll build up the ould house at Toneroe; some of the O'Kellys themselves lived there, years ago."
"I believe they did; but it was years ago, and very many years ago, too, since they lived there. Why you'd have to pull it all down, before you began to build it up!"
"May-be I'd build a new house, out and out. Av' I got three new lifes in the laise, I'd do that; and the lord wouldn't be refusing me, av' I asked him."
"Bother the lord, Martin; why you'd be asking anything of any lord, and you with £400 a-year of your own? Give up Toneroe, and go and live at Dunmore House at once."
"What! along with Barry--when I and Anty's married? The biggest house in county Galway wouldn't hould the three of us."
"You don't think Barry Lynch'll stay at Dunmore afther you've married his sisther?"
"And why not?"
"Why not! Don't you know Barry thinks himself one of the raal gentry now? Any ways, he wishes others to think so. Why, he'd even himself to Lord Ballindine av' he could! Didn't old Sim send him to the same English school with the lord on purpose? --tho' little he got by it, by all accounts! And d'you think he'll remain in Dunmore, to be brother-in-law to the son of the woman that keeps the little grocer's shop in the village? --Not he! He'll soon be out of Dunmore when he hears what his sister's afther doing, and you'll have Dunmore House to yourselves then, av' you like it."
"I'd sooner live at Toneroe, and that's the truth; and I'd not give up the farm av' she'd double the money! But, John, faith, here's the judges at last. Hark, to the boys screeching!"
"They'd not screech that way for the judges, my boy. It's the traversers--that's Dan and the rest of 'em. They're coming into court. Thank God, they'll soon be at work now!"
"And will they come through this way? Faith, av' they do, they'll have as hard work to get in, as they'll have to get out by and by."
"They'll not come this way--there's another way in for them: tho' they are traversers now, they didn't dare but let them go in at the same door as the judges themselves."
"Hurrah, Dan! More power to you! Three cheers for the traversers, and Repale for ever! Success to every mother's son of you, my darlings! You'll be free yet, in spite of John Jason Rigby and the rest of 'em! The prison isn't yet built that'd hould ye, nor won't be! Long life to you, Sheil--sure you're a Right Honourable Repaler now, in spite of Greenwich Hospital and the Board of Trade! More power, Gavan Duffy; you're the boy that'll settle 'em at last! Three cheers more for the Lord Mayor, God bless him! Well, yer reverence, Mr Tierney! --never mind, they could come to no good when they'd be parsecuting the likes of you! Bravo, Tom--Hurrah for Tom Steele!"
Such, and such like, were the exclamations which greeted the traversers, and their _cortège_, as they drew up to the front of the Four Courts. Dan O'Connell was in the Lord Mayor's state carriage, accompanied by that high official; and came up to stand his trial for conspiracy and sedition, in just such a manner as he might be presumed to proceed to take the chair at some popular municipal assembly; and this was just the thing qualified to please those who were on his own side, and mortify the feelings of the party so bitterly opposed to him. There was a bravado in it, and an apparent contempt, not of the law so much as of the existing authorities of the law, which was well qualified to have this double effect.
And now the outer doors of the Court were opened, and the crowd--at least as many as were able to effect an entrance--rushed in. Martin and John Kelly were among those nearest to the door, and, in reward of their long patience, got sufficiently into the body of the Court to be in a position to see, when standing on tiptoe, the noses of three of the four judges, and the wigs of four of the numerous counsel employed. The Court was so filled by those who had a place there by right, or influence enough to assume that they had so, that it was impossible to obtain a more favourable situation. But this of itself was a great deal--quite sufficient to justify Martin in detailing to his Connaught friends every particular of the whole trial. They would probably be able to hear everything; they could positively see three of the judges, and if those two big policemen, with high hats, could by any possibility be got to remove themselves, it was very probable that they would be able to see Sheil's back, when he stood up.
John soon began to show off his forensic knowledge. He gave a near guess at the names of the four counsel whose heads were visible, merely from the different shades and shapes of their wigs. Then he particularised the inferior angels of that busy Elysium.
"That's Ford--that's Gartlan--that's Peirce Mahony," he exclaimed, as the different attorneys for the traversers, furiously busy with their huge bags, fidgetted about rapidly, or stood up in their seats, telegraphing others in different parts of the Court.
"There's old Kemmis," as they caught a glimpse of the Crown agent; "he's the boy that doctored the jury list. Fancy, a jury chosen out of all Dublin, and not one Catholic! As if that could be fair!" And then he named the different judges. "Look at that big-headed, pig-faced fellow on the right--that's Pennefather! He's the blackest sheep of the lot--and the head of them! He's a thoroughbred Tory, and as fit to be a judge as I am to be a general. That queer little fellow, with the long chin, he's Burton--he's a hundred if he's a day--he was fifty when he was called, seventy when they benched him, and I'm sure he's a judge thirty years! But he's the sharpest chap of the whole twelve, and no end of a boy afther the girls. If you only saw him walking in his robes--I'm sure he's not three feet high! That next, with the skinny neck, he's Crampton--he's one of Father Mathews lads, an out and out teetotaller, and he looks it; he's a desperate cross fellow, sometimes! The other one, you can't see, he's Perrin. There, he's leaning over--you can just catch the side of his face--he's Perrin. It's he'll acquit the traversers av' anything does--he's a fair fellow, is Perrin, and not a red-hot thorough-going Tory like the rest of 'em."
Here John was obliged to give over the instruction of his brother, being enjoined so to do by one of the heavy-hatted policemen in his front, who enforced his commands for silence, with a backward shove of his wooden truncheon, which came with rather unnecessary violence against the pit of John's stomach.
The fear of being turned out made him for the nonce refrain from that vengeance of abuse which his education as a Dublin Jackeen well qualified him to inflict. But he put down the man's face in his retentive memory, and made up his mind to pay him off.
And now the business of the day commenced. After some official delays and arrangements Sheil arose, and began his speech in defence of John O'Connell. It would be out of place here to give either his words or his arguments; besides, they have probably before this been read by all who would care to read them. When he commenced, his voice appeared, to those who were not accustomed to hear him, weak, piping, and most unfit for a popular orator; but this effect was soon lost in the elegance of his language and the energy of his manner; and, before he had been ten minutes on his legs, the disagreeable tone was forgotten, though it was sounding in the eager ears of every one in the Court.
His speech was certainly brilliant, effective, and eloquent; but it satisfied none that heard him, though it pleased all. It was neither a defence of the general conduct and politics of the party, such as O'Connell himself attempted in his own case, nor did it contain a chain of legal arguments to prove that John O'Connell, individually, had not been guilty of conspiracy, such as others of the counsel employed subsequently in favour of their own clients.
Sheil's speech was one of those numerous anomalies with which this singular trial was crowded; and which, together, showed the great difficulty of coming to a legal decision on a political question, in a criminal court. Of this, the present day gave two specimens, which will not be forgotten; when a Privy Councillor, a member of a former government, whilst defending his client as a barrister, proposed in Court a new form of legislation for Ireland, equally distant from that adopted by Government, and that sought to be established by him whom he was defending; and when the traverser on his trial rejected the defence of his counsel, and declared aloud in Court, that he would not, by his silence, appear to agree in the suggestions then made.
This spirit of turning the Court into a political debating arena extended to all present. In spite of the vast efforts made by them all, only one of the barristers employed has added much to his legal reputation by the occasion. Imputations were made, such as I presume were never before uttered by one lawyer against another in a court of law. An Attorney-General sent a challenge from his very seat of office; and though that challenge was read in Court, it was passed over by four judges with hardly a reprimand. If any seditious speech was ever made by O'Connell, that which he made in his defence was especially so, and he was, without check, allowed to use his position as a traverser at the bar, as a rostrum from which to fulminate more thoroughly and publicly than ever, those doctrines for uttering which he was then being tried; and, to crown it all, even the silent dignity of the bench was forgotten, and the lawyers pleading against the Crown were unhappily alluded to by the Chief Justice as the "gentlemen on the _other_ side."
Martin and John patiently and enduringly remained standing the whole day, till four o'clock; and then the latter had to effect his escape, in order to keep an appointment which he had made to meet Lord Ballindine.
As they walked along the quays they both discussed the proceedings of the day, and both expressed themselves positively certain of the result of the trial, and of the complete triumph of O'Connell and his party. To these pleasant certainties Martin added his conviction, that Repeal must soon follow so decided a victory, and that the hopes of Ireland would be realised before the close of 1844. John was neither so sanguine nor so enthusiastic; it was the battle, rather than the thing battled for, that was dear to him; the strife, rather than the result. He felt that it would be dull times in Dublin, when they should have no usurping Government to abuse, no Saxon Parliament to upbraid, no English laws to ridicule, and no Established Church to curse.
The only thing which could reconcile him to immediate Repeal, would be the probability of having then to contend for the election of an Irish Sovereign, and the possible dear delight which might follow, of Ireland going to war with England, in a national and becoming manner.
Discussing these important measures, they reached the Dublin brother's lodgings, and Martin turned in to wash his face and hands, and put on clean boots, before he presented himself to his landlord and patron, the young Lord Ballindine.
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{
"id": "4917"
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2
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THE TWO HEIRESSES
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Francis John Mountmorris O'Kelly, Lord Viscount Ballindine, was twenty-four years of age when he came into possession of the Ballindine property, and succeeded to an Irish peerage as the third viscount; and he is now twenty-six, at this time of O'Connell's trial. The head of the family had for many years back been styled "The O'Kelly", and had enjoyed much more local influence under that denomination than their descendants had possessed, since they had obtained a more substantial though not a more respected title. The O'Kellys had possessed large tracts of not very good land, chiefly in County Roscommon, but partly in Mayo and Galway. Their property had extended from Dunmore nearly to Roscommon, and again on the other side to Castlerea and Ballyhaunis. But this had been in their palmy days, long, long ago. When the government, in consideration of past services, in the year 1800, converted "the O'Kelly" into Viscount Ballindine, the family property consisted of the greater portion of the land lying between the villages of Dunmore and Ballindine. Their old residence, which the peer still kept up, was called Kelly's Court, and is situated in that corner of County Roscommnon which runs up between Mayo and Galway.
The first lord lived long enough to regret his change of title, and to lament the increased expenditure with which he had thought it necessary to accompany his more elevated rank. His son succeeded, and showed in his character much more of the new-fangled viscount than of the ancient O'Kelly. His whole long life was passed in hovering about the English Court. From the time of his father's death, he never once put his foot in Ireland. He had been appointed, at different times from his youth upwards, Page, Gentleman in Waiting, Usher of the Black Rod, Deputy Groom of the Stole, Chief Equerry to the Princess Royal, (which appointment only lasted till the princess was five years old), Lord Gold Stick, Keeper of the Royal Robes; till, at last, he had culminated for ten halcyon years in a Lord of the Bedchamber. In the latter portion of his life he had grown too old for this, and it was reported at Ballindine, Dunmore, and Kelly's Court,--with how much truth I don't know,--that, since her Majesty's accession, he had been joined with the spinster sister of a Scotch Marquis, and an antiquated English Countess, in the custody of the laces belonging to the Queen Dowager.
This nobleman, publicly useful as his life had no doubt been, had done little for his own tenants, or his own property. On his father's death, he had succeeded to about three thousand a-year, and he left about one; and he would have spent or mortgaged this, had he not, on his marriage, put it beyond his own power to do so. It was not only by thriftless extravagance that he thus destroyed a property which, with care, and without extortion, would have doubled its value in the thirty-five years during which it was in his hands; but he had been afraid to come to Ireland, and had been duped by his agent. When he came to the title, Simeon Lynch had been recommended to him as a fit person to manage his property, and look after his interests; and Simeon had managed it well in that manner most conducive to the prosperity of the person he loved best in the world; and that was himself. When large tracts of land fell out of lease, Sim had represented that tenants could not be found--that the land was not worth cultivating--that the country was in a state which prevented the possibility of letting; and, ultimately put himself into possession, with a lease for ever, at a rent varying from half a crown to five shillings an acre.
The courtier lord had one son, of whom he made a soldier, but who never rose to a higher rank than that of Captain. About a dozen years before the date of my story, the Honourable Captain O'Kelly, after numerous quarrels with the Right Honourable Lord of the Bedchamber, had, at last, come to some family settlement with him; and, having obtained the power of managing the property himself, came over to live at his paternal residence of Kelly's Court.
A very sorry kind of Court he found it,--neglected, dirty, and out of repair. One of the first retainers whom he met was Jack Kelly, the family fool. Jack was not such a fool as those who, of yore, were valued appendages to noble English establishments. He resembled them in nothing but his occasional wit. He was a dirty, barefooted, unshorn, ragged ruffian, who ate potatoes in the kitchen of the Court, and had never done a day's work in his life. Such as he was, however, he was presented to Captain O'Kelly, as "his honour the masther's fool."
"So, you're my fool, Jack, are ye?" said the Captain.
"Faix, I war the lord's fool ance; but I'll no be anybody's fool but Sim Lynch's, now. I and the lord are both Sim's fools now. Not but I'm the first of the two, for I'd never be fool enough to give away all my land, av' my father'd been wise enough to lave me any."
Captain O'Kelly soon found out the manner in which the agent had managed his father's affairs. Simeon Lynch was dismissed, and proceedings at common law were taken against him, to break such of the leases as were thought, by clever attorneys, to have the ghost of a flaw in them. Money was borrowed from a Dublin house, for the purpose of carrying on the suit, paying off debts, and making Kelly's Court habitable; and the estate was put into their hands. Simeon Lynch built himself a large staring house at Dunmore, defended his leases, set up for a country gentleman on his own account, and sent his only son, Barry, to Eton,--merely because young O'Kelly was also there, and he was determined to show, that he was as rich and ambitious as the lord's family, whom he had done so much to ruin.
Kelly's Court was restored to such respectability as could ever belong to so ugly a place. It was a large red stone mansion, standing in a demesne of very poor ground, ungifted by nature with any beauty, and but little assisted by cultivation or improvement. A belt of bald-looking firs ran round the demesne inside the dilapidated wall; but this was hardly sufficient to relieve the barren aspect of the locality. Fine trees there were none, and the race of O'Kellys had never been great gardeners.
Captain O'Kelly was a man of more practical sense, or of better education, than most of his family, and he did do a good deal to humanise the place. He planted, tilled, manured, and improved; he imported rose-trees and strawberry-plants, and civilised Kelly's Court a little. But his reign was not long. He died about five years after he had begun his career as a country gentleman, leaving a widow and two daughters in Ireland; a son at school at Eton; and an expensive lawsuit, with numerous ramifications, all unsettled.
Francis, the son, went to Eton and Oxford, was presented at Court by his grandfather, and came hack to Ireland at twenty-two, to idle away his time till the old lord should die. Till this occurred, he could neither call himself the master of the place, nor touch the rents. In the meantime, the lawsuits were dropped, both parties having seriously injured their resources, without either of them obtaining any benefit. Barry Lynch was recalled from his English education, where he had not shown off to any great credit; and both he and his father were obliged to sit down prepared to make the best show they could on eight hundred pounds a-year, and to wage an underhand internecine war with the O'Kellys.
Simeon and his son, however, did not live altogether alone. Anastasia Lynch was Barry's sister, and older than him by about ten years. Their mother had been a Roman Catholic, whereas Sim was a Protestant; and, in consequence, the daughter had been brought up in the mother's, and the son in the father's religion. When this mother died, Simeon, no doubt out of respect to the memory of the departed, tried hard to induce his daughter to prove her religious zeal, and enter a nunnery; but this, Anty, though in most things a docile creature, absolutely refused to do. Her father advised, implored, and threatened; but in vain; and the poor girl became a great thorn in the side of both father and son. She had neither beauty, talent, nor attraction, to get her a husband; and her father was determined not to encumber his already diminished property with such a fortune as would make her on that ground acceptable to any respectable suitor.
Poor Anty led a miserable life, associating neither with superiors nor inferiors, and her own position was not sufficiently declared to enable her to have any equals. She was slighted by her father and the servants, and bullied by her brother; and was only just enabled, by humble, unpresuming disposition, to carry on her tedious life from year to year without grumbling.
In the meantime, the _ci-devant_ [9] Black Rod, Gold Stick, Royal Equerry, and Lord of the Bedchamber, was called away from his robes and his finery, to give an account of the manner in which he had renounced the pomps and vanities of this wicked world; and Frank became Lord Ballindine, with, as I have before said, an honourable mother, two sisters, a large red house, and a thousand a-year. He was not at all a man after the pattern of his grandfather, but he appeared as little likely to redeem the old family acres. He seemed to be a reviving chip of the old block of the O'Kellys. During the two years he had been living at Kelly's Court as Frank O'Kelly, he had won the hearts of all the tenants--of all those who would have been tenants if the property had not been sold, and who still looked up to him as their "raal young masther"--and of the whole country round. The "thrue dhrop of the ould blood", was in his veins; and, whatever faults he might have, he wasn't likely to waste his time and his cash with furs, laces, and hangings.
[FOOTNOTE 9: ci-devant--(French) former, previous] This was a great comfort to the neighbourhood, which had learned heartily to despise the name of Lord Ballindine; and Frank was encouraged in shooting, hunting, racing--in preparing to be a thorough Irish gentleman, and in determining to make good the prophecies of his friends, that he would be, at last, one more "raal O'Kelly to brighten the counthry."
And if he could have continued to be Frank O'Kelly, or even "the O'Kelly", he would probably have done well enough, for he was fond of his mother and sisters, and he might have continued to hunt, shoot, and farm on his remaining property without further encroaching on it. But the title was sure to be his ruin. When he felt himself to be a lord, he could not be content with the simple life of a country gentleman; or, at any rate, without taking the lead in the country. So, as soon as the old man was buried, he bought a pack of harriers, and despatched a couple of race-horses to the skilful hands of old Jack Igoe, the Curragh trainer.
Frank was a very handsome fellow, full six feet high, with black hair, and jet-black silky whiskers, meeting under his chin;--the men said he dyed them, and the women declared he did not. I am inclined, myself, to think he must have done so, they were so very black. He had an eye like a hawk, round, bright, and bold; a mouth and chin almost too well formed for a man; and that kind of broad forehead which conveys rather the idea of a generous, kind, open-hearted disposition, than of a deep mind or a commanding intellect.
Frank was a very handsome fellow, and he knew it; and when he commenced so many ill-authorised expenses immediately on his grandfather's death, he consoled himself with the idea, that with his person and rank, he would soon be able, by some happy matrimonial speculation, to make up for what he wanted in wealth. And he had not been long his own master, before he met with the lady to whom he destined the honour of doing so.
He had, however, not properly considered his own disposition, when he determined upon looking out for great wealth; and on disregarding other qualifications in his bride, so that he obtained that in sufficient quantity. He absolutely fell in love with Fanny Wyndham, though her twenty thousand pounds was felt by him to be hardly enough to excuse him in doing so,--certainly not enough to make his doing so an accomplishment of his prudential resolutions. What would twenty thousand pounds do towards clearing the O'Kelly property, and establishing himself in a manner and style fitting for a Lord Ballindine! However, he did propose to her, was accepted, and the match, after many difficulties, was acceded to by the lady's guardian, the Earl of Cashel. It was stipulated, however, that the marriage should not take place till the lady was of age; and at the time of the bargain, she wanted twelve months of that period of universal discretion. Lord Cashel had added, in his prosy, sensible, aristocratic lecture on the subject to Lord Ballindine, that he trusted that, during the interval, considering their united limited income, his lordship would see the wisdom of giving up his hounds, or at any rate of withdrawing from the turf.
Frank pooh-poohed at the hounds, said that horses cost nothing in Connaught, and dogs less, and that he could not well do there without them; but promised to turn in his mind what Lord Cashel had said about the turf; and, at last, went so far as to say that when a good opportunity offered of backing out, he would part with Finn M'Coul and Granuell--as the two nags at Igoe's were patriotically denominated.
They continued, however, appearing in the Curragh lists in Lord Ballindine's name, as a part of Igoe's string; and running for Queen's whips, Wellingtons and Madrids, sometimes with good and sometimes with indifferent success. While their noble owner, when staying at Grey Abbey, Lord Cashel's magnificent seat near Kilcullen, spent too much of his time (at least so thought the earl and Fanny Wyndham) in seeing them get their gallops, and in lecturing the grooms, and being lectured by Mr Igoe. Nothing more, however, could be done; and it was trusted that when the day of the wedding should come, he would be found minus the animals. What, however, was Lord Cashel's surprise, when, after an absence of two months from Grey Abbey, Lord Ballindine declared, in the earl's presence, with an air of ill-assumed carelessness, that he had been elected one of the stewards of the Curragh, in the room of Walter Blake, Esq., who had retired in rotation from that honourable office! The next morning the earl's chagrin was woefully increased by his hearing that that very valuable and promising Derby colt, Brien Boru, now two years old, by Sir Hercules out of Eloisa, had been added to his lordship's lot.
Lord Cashel felt that he could not interfere, further than by remarking that it appeared his young friend was determined to leave the turf with éclat; and Fanny Wyndham could only be silent and reserved for one evening. This occurred about four months before the commencement of my tale, and about five before the period fixed for the marriage; but, at the time at which Lord Ballindine will be introduced in person to the reader, he had certainly made no improvement in his manner of going on. He had, during this period, received from Lord Cashel a letter intimating to him that his lordship thought some further postponement advisable; that it was as well not to fix any day; and that, though his lordship would always be welcome at Grey Abbey, when his personal attendance was not required at the Curragh, it was better that no correspondence by letter should at present be carried on between him and Miss Wyndham; and that Miss Wyndham herself perfectly agreed in the propriety of these suggestions.
Now Grey Abbey was only about eight miles distant from the Curragh, and Lord Ballindine had at one time been in the habit of staying at his friend's mansion, during the period of his attendance at the race-course; but since Lord Cashel had shown an entire absence of interest in the doings of Finn M'Coul, and Fanny had ceased to ask after Granuell's cough, he had discontinued doing so, and had spent much of his time at his friend Walter Blake's residence at the Curragh. Now, Handicap Lodge offered much more dangerous quarters for him than did Grey Abbey.
In the meantime, his friends in Connaught were delighted at the prospect of his bringing home a bride. Fanny's twenty thousand were magnified to fifty, and the capabilities even of fifty were greatly exaggerated; besides, the connection was so good a one, so exactly the thing for the O'Kellys! Lord Cashel was one of the first resident noblemen in Ireland, a representative peer, a wealthy man, and possessed of great influence; not unlikely to be a cabinet minister if the Whigs came in, and able to shower down into Connaught a degree of patronage, such as had never yet warmed that poor unfriended region. And Fanny Wyndham was not only his lordship's ward, but his favourite niece also! The match was, in every way, a good one, and greatly pleasing to all the Kellys, whether with an O or without, for "shure they were all the one family."
Old Simeon Lynch and his son Barry did not participate in the general joy. They had calculated that their neighbour was on the high road to ruin, and that he would soon have nothing but his coronet left. They could not, therefore, bear the idea of his making so eligible a match. They had, moreover, had domestic dissensions to disturb the peace of Dunmore House. Simeon had insisted on Barry's taking a farm into his own hands, and looking after it. Barry had declared his inability to do so, and had nearly petrified the old man by expressing a wish to go to Paris. Then, Barry's debts had showered in, and Simeon had pledged himself not to pay them. Simeon had threatened to disinherit Barry; and Barry had called his father a d----d obstinate old fool.
These quarrels had got to the ears of the neighbours, and it was being calculated that, in the end, Barry would get the best of the battle; when, one morning, the war was brought to an end by a fit of apoplexy, and the old man was found dead in his chair. And then a terrible blow fell upon the son; for a recent will was found in the old man's desk, dividing his property equally, and without any other specification, between Barry and Anty.
This was a dreadful blow to Barry. He consulted with his friend Molloy, the attorney of Tuam, as to the validity of the document and the power of breaking it; but in vain. It was properly attested, though drawn up in the old man's own hand-writing; and his sister, whom he looked upon but as little better than a head main-servant, had not only an equal right to all the property, but was equally mistress of the house, the money at the bank, the wine in the cellar, and the very horses in the stable.
This was a hard blow; but Barry was obliged to bear it. At first, he showed his ill-humour plainly enough in his treatment of his sister; but he soon saw that this was folly, and that, though her quiet disposition prevented her from resenting it, such conduct would drive her to marry some needy man. Then he began, with an ill grace, to try what coaxing would do. He kept, however, a sharp watch on all her actions; and on once hearing that, in his absence, the two Kelly girls from the hotel had been seen walking with her, he gave her a long lecture on what was due to her own dignity, and the memory of her departed parents.
He made many overtures to her as to the division of the property; but, easy and humble as Anty was, she was careful enough to put her name to nothing that could injure her rights. They had divided the money at the banker's, and she had once rather startled Barry by asking him for his moiety towards paying the butcher's bill; and his dismay was completed shortly afterwards by being informed, by a steady old gentleman in Dunmore, whom he did not like a bit too well, that he had been appointed by Miss Lynch to manage her business and receive her rents.
As soon as it could be decently done, after his father's burial, Barry took himself off to Dublin, to consult his friends there as to what he should do; but he soon returned, determined to put a bold face on it, and come to some understanding with his sister.
He first proposed to her to go and live in Dublin, but she said she preferred Dunmore. He then talked of selling the house, and to this she agreed. He next tried to borrow money for the payment of his debts; on which she referred him to the steady old man. Though apparently docile and obedient, she would not put herself in his hands, nor would her agent allow him to take any unfair advantage of her.
Whilst this was going on, our friend Martin Kelly had set his eye upon the prize, and, by means of his sister's intimacy with Anty, and his own good looks, had succeeded in obtaining from her half a promise to become his wife. Anty had but little innate respect for gentry; and, though she feared her brother's displeasure, she felt no degradation at the idea of uniting herself to a man in Martin Kelly's rank. She could not, however, be brought to tell her brother openly, and declare her determination; and Martin had, at length, come to the conclusion that he must carry her off, before delay and unforeseen changes might either alter her mind, or enable her brother to entice her out of the country.
Thus matters stood at Dunmore when Martin Kelly started for Dublin, and at the time when he was about to wait on his patron at Morrison's hotel.
Both Martin and Lord Ballindine (and they were related in some distant degree, at least so always said the Kellys, and I never knew that the O'Kellys denied it)--both the young men were, at the time, anxious to get married, and both with the same somewhat mercenary views; and I have fatigued the reader with the long history of past affairs, in order to imbue him, if possible, with some interest in the ways and means which they both adopted to accomplish their objects.
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{
"id": "4917"
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3
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MORRISON'S HOTEL
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At about five o'clock on the evening of the day of Sheil's speech, Lord Ballindine and his friend, Walter Blake, were lounging on different sofas in a room at Morrison's Hotel, before they went up to dress for dinner. Walter Blake was an effeminate-looking, slight-made man, about thirty or thirty-three years of age; good looking, and gentlemanlike, but presenting quite a contrast in his appearance to his friend Lord Ballindine. He had a cold quiet grey eye, and a thin lip; and, though he was in reality a much cleverer, he was a much less engaging man. Yet Blake could be very amusing; but he rather laughed at people than with them, and when there were more than two in company, he would usually be found making a butt of one. Nevertheless, his society was greatly sought after. On matters connected with racing, his word was infallible. He rode boldly, and always rode good horses; and, though he was anything but rich, he managed to keep up a comfortable snuggery at the Curragh, and to drink the very best claret that Dublin could procure.
Walter Blake was a finished gambler, and thus it was, that with about six hundred a year, he managed to live on equal terms with the richest around him. His father, Laurence Blake of Castleblakeney, in County Galway, was a very embarrassed man, of good property, strictly entailed, and, when Walter came of age, he and his father, who could never be happy in the same house, though possessing in most things similar tastes, had made such a disposition of the estate, as gave the father a clear though narrowed income, and enabled the son at once to start into the world, without waiting for his father's death; though, by so doing, he greatly lessened the property which he must otherwise have inherited.
Blake was a thorough gambler, and knew well how to make the most of the numerous chances which the turf afforded him. He had a large stud of horses, to the training and working of which he attended almost as closely as the person whom he paid for doing so. But it was in the betting-ring that he was most formidable. It was said, in Kildare Street, that no one at Tattersall's could beat him at a book. He had latterly been trying a wider field than the Curragh supplied him and had, on one or two occasions, run a horse in England with such success, as had placed him, at any rate, quite at the top of the Irish sporting tree.
He was commonly called "Dot Blake", in consequence of his having told one of his friends that the cause of his, the friend's, losing so much money on the turf, was, that he did not mind "the dot and carry on" part of the business; meaning thereby, that he did not attend to the necessary calculations. For a short time after giving this piece of friendly caution, he had been nick-named, "Dot and carry on"; but that was too long to last, and he had now for some years been known to every sporting man in Ireland as "Dot" Blake.
This man was at present Lord Ballindine's most intimate friend, and he could hardly have selected a more dangerous one. They were now going down together to Handicap Lodge, though there was nothing to be done in the way of racing for months to come. Yet Blake knew his business too well to suppose that his presence was necessary only when the horses were running; and he easily persuaded his friend that it was equally important that he should go and see that it was all right with the Derby colt.
They were talking almost in the dark, on these all-absorbing topics, when the waiter knocked at the door and informed them that a young man named Kelly wished to see Lord Ballindine.
"Show him up," said Frank. "A tenant of mine, Dot; one of the respectable few of that cattle, indeed, almost the only one that I've got; a sort of subagent, and a fifteenth cousin, to boot, I believe. I am going to put him to the best use I know for such respectable fellows, and that is, to get him to borrow money for me."
"And he'll charge you twice as much for it, and make three times as much bother about it, as the fellows in the next street who have your title-deeds. When I want lawyer's business done, I go to a lawyer; and when I want to borrow money, I go to my own man of business; he makes it his business to find money, and he daren't rob me more than is decent, fitting, and customary, because he has a character to lose."
"Those fellows at Guinness's make such a fuss about everything; and I don't put my nose into that little back room, but what every word I say, by some means or other, finds its way down to Grey Abbey."
"Well, Frank, you know your own affairs best; but I don't think you'll make money by being afraid of your agent; or your wife's guardian, if she is to be your wife."
"Afraid, man? I'm as much afraid of Lord Cashel as you are. I don't think I've shown myself much afraid; but I don't choose to make him my guardian, just when he's ceasing to be hers; nor do I wish, just now, to break with Grey Abbey altogether."
"Do you mean to go over there from the Curragh next week?"
"I don't think I shall. They don't like me a bit too well, when I've the smell of the stables on me."
"There it is, again, Frank! What is it to you what Lord Cashel likes? If you wish to see Miss Wyndham, and if the heavy-pated old Don doesn't mean to close his doors against you, what business has he to inquire where you came from? I suppose he doesn't like me a bit too well; but you're not weak enough to be afraid to say that you've been at Handicap Lodge?"
"The truth is, Dot, I don't think I'll go to Grey Abbey at all, till Fanny's of age. She only wants a month of it now; and then I can meet Lord Cashel in a business way, as one man should meet another."
"I can't for the life of me," said Blake, "make out what it is that has set that old fellow so strong against horses. He won the Oaks twice himself, and that not so very long ago; and his own son, Kilcullen, is deeper a good deal on the turf than I am, and, by a long chalk less likely to pull through, as I take it. But here's the Connaught man on the stairs,--I could swear to Galway by the tread of his foot!" --and Martin knocked at the door, and walked in.
"Well, Kelly," said Lord Ballindine, "how does Dublin agree with you?" And, "I hope I see your lordship well, my lord?" said Martin.
"How are they all at Dunmore and Kelly's Court?"
"Why thin, they're all well, my lord, except Sim Lynch--and he's dead. But your lordship'll have heard that."
"What, old Simeon Lynch dead!" said Blake, "well then, there's promotion. Peter Mahon, that was the agent at Castleblakeney, is now the biggest rogue alive in Connaught."
"Don't swear to that," said Lord Ballindine. "There's some of Sim's breed still left at Dunmore. It wouldn't be easy to beat Barry, would it, Kelly?"
"Why then, I don't know; I wouldn't like to be saying against the gentleman's friend that he spoke of; and doubtless his honour knows him well, or he wouldn't say so much of him."
"Indeed I do," said Blake. "I never give a man a good character till I know he deserves it. Well, Frank, I'll go and dress, and leave you and Mr. Kelly to your business," and he left the room.
"I'm sorry to hear you speak so hard agin Mr. Barry, my lord," began Martin. "May-be he mayn't be so bad. Not but that he's a cross-grained piece of timber to dale with."
"And why should you be sorry I'd speak against him? There's not more friendship, I suppose, between you and Barry Lynch now, than there used to be?"
"Why, not exactly frindship, my lord; but I've my rasons why I'd wish you not to belittle the Lynches. Your lordship might forgive them all, now the old man's dead."
"Forgive them! --indeed I can, and easily. I don't know I ever did any of them an injury, except when I thrashed Barry at Eton, for calling himself the son of a gentleman. But what makes you stick up for them? You're not going to marry the daughter, are you?"
Martin blushed up to his forehead as his landlord thus hit the nail on the head; but, as it was dark, his blushes couldn't be seen. So, after dangling his hat about for a minute, and standing first on one foot, and then on the other, he took courage, and answered.
"Well, Mr. Frank, that is, your lordship, I mane--I b'lieve I might do worse."
"Body and soul, man!" exclaimed the other, jumping from his recumbent position on the sofa, "You don't mean to tell me you're going to marry Anty Lynch?"
"In course not," answered Martin; "av' your lordship objects."
"Object, man! --How the devil can I object? Why, she's six hundred a year, hasn't she?"
"About four, my lord, I think's nearest the mark."
"Four hundred a year! And I don't suppose you owe a penny in the world!"
"Not much unless the last gale [10] to your lordship and we never pay that till next May."
[FOOTNOTE 10: gale--rent payment. Gale day was the day on which rent was due.]
"And so you're going to marry Anty Lynch!" again repeated Frank, as though he couldn't bring himself to realise the idea; "and now, Martin, tell me all about it,--how the devil you managed it--when it's to come off--and how you and Barry mean to hit it off together when you're brothers. I suppose I'll lose a good tenant any way?"
"Not av' I'm a good one, you won't, with my consent, my lord."
"Ah! but it'll be Anty's consent, now, you know. She mayn't like Toneroe. But tell me all about it. What put it into your head?"
"Why, my lord, you run away so fast; one can't tell you anything. I didn't say I was going to marry her--at laist, not for certain;--I only said I might do worse."
"Well then; are you going to marry her, or rather, is she going to marry you, or is she not?"
"Why, I don't know. I'll tell your lordship just how it is. You know when old Sim died, my lord?"
"Of course I do. Why, I was at Kelly's Court at the time."
"So you were, my lord; I was forgetting. But you went away again immediately, and didn't hear how Barry tried to come round his sisther, when he heard how the will went; and how he tried to break the will and to chouse her out of the money."
"Why, this is the very man you wouldn't let me call a rogue, a minute or two ago!"
"Ah, my lord! that was just before sthrangers; besides, it's no use calling one's own people bad names. Not that he belongs to me yet, and may-be never will. But, between you and I, he is a rogue, and his father's son every inch of him."
"Well, Martin, I'll remember. I'll not abuse him when he's your brother-in-law. But how did you get round the sister? --That's the question."
"Well, my lord, I'll tell you. You know there was always a kind of frindship between Anty and the girls at home, and they set her up to going to old Moylan--he that receives the rents on young Barron's property, away at Strype. Moylan's uncle to Flaherty, that married mother's sister. Well, she went to him--he's a kind of office at Dunmore, my lord."
"Oh, I know him and his office! He knows the value of a name at the back of a bit of paper, as well as any one."
"May-be he does, my lord; but he's an honest old fellow, is Moylan, and manages a little for mother."
"Oh, of course he's honest, Martin, because he belongs to you. You know Barry's to be an honest chap, then."
"And that's what he niver will be the longest day he lives! But, however, Moylan got her to sign all the papers; and, when Barry was out, he went and took an inventhory to the house, and made out everything square and right, and you may be sure Barry'd have to get up very 'arly before he'd come round him. Well, after a little, the ould chap came to me one morning, and asked me all manner of questions--whether I knew Anty Lynch? whether we didn't used to be great friends? and a lot more. I never minded him much; for though I and Anty used to speak, and she'd dhrank tay on the sly with us two or three times before her father's death, I'd never thought much about her."
"Nor wouldn't now, Martin, eh? if it wasn't for the old man's will."
"In course I wouldn't, my lord. I won't be denying it. But, on the other hand, I wouldn't marry her now for all her money, av' I didn't mane to trate her well. Well, my lord, after beating about the bush for a long time, the ould thief popped it out, and told me that he thought Anty'd be all the betther for a husband; and that, av' I was wanting a wife, he b'lieved I might suit myself now. Well, I thought of it a little, and tould him I'd take the hint. The next day he comes to me again, all the way down to Toneroe, where I was walking the big grass-field by myself, and began saying that, as he was Anty's agent, of course he wouldn't see her wronged. 'Quite right, Mr. Moylan,' says I; 'and, as I mane to be her husband, I won't see her wronged neither.' 'Ah! but,' says he, 'I mane that I must see her property properly settled.' 'Why not?' says I, 'and isn't the best way for her to marry? and then, you know, no one can schame her out of it. There's lots of them schamers about now,' says I. 'That's thrue for you,' says he, 'and they're not far to look for,'--and that was thrue, too, my lord, for he and I were both schaming about poor Anty's money at that moment. 'Well,' says he, afther walking on a little, quite quiet, 'av' you war to marry her.' --'Oh, I've made up my mind about that, Mr. Moylan,' says I. 'Well, av' it should come to pass that you do marry her--of course you'd expect to have the money settled on herself?' 'In course I would, when I die,' says I. 'No, but,' says he, 'at once: wouldn't it be enough for you to have a warm roof over your head, and a leg of mutton on the table every day, and no work to do for it?' and so, my lord, it came out that the money was to be settled on herself, and that he was to be her agent."
"Well, Martin, after that, I think you needn't go to Sim Lynch, or Barry, for the biggest rogues in Connaught--to be settling the poor girl's money between you that way!"
"Well, but listen, my lord. I gave in to the ould man; that is, I made no objection to his schame. But I was determined, av' I ever did marry Anty Lynch, that I would be agent and owner too, myself, as long as I lived; though in course it was but right that they should settle it so that av' I died first, the poor crature shouldn't be out of her money. But I didn't let on to him about all that; for, av' he was angered, the ould fool might perhaps spoil the game; and I knew av' Anty married me at all, it'd be for liking; and av' iver I got on the soft side of her, I'd soon be able to manage matthers as I plazed, and ould Moylan'd soon find his best game'd be to go asy."
"Upon my soul, Martin, I think you seem to have been the sharpest rogue of the two! Is there an honest man in Connaught at all, I wonder?"
"I can't say rightly, just at present, my lord; but there'll be two, plaze God, when I and your lordship are there."
"Thank ye, Kelly, for the compliment, and especially for the good company. But let me hear how on earth you ever got face enough to go up and ask Anty Lynch to marry you."
"Oh! --a little soft sawther did it! I wasn't long in putting my com'ether on her when I once began. Well, my lord, from that day out--from afther Moylan's visit, you know--I began really to think of it. I'm sure the ould robber meant to have asked for a wapping sum of money down, for his good will in the bargain; but when he saw me he got afeard."
"He was another honest man, just now!"
"Only among sthrangers, my lord. I b'lieve he's a far-off cousin of your own, and I wouldn't like to spake ill of the blood."
"God forbid! But go on, Kelly."
"Well, so, from that out, I began to think of it in arnest. The Lord forgive me! but my first thoughts was how I'd like to pull down Barry Lynch; and my second that I'd not demane myself by marrying the sisther of such an out-and-out ruffian, and that it wouldn't become me to live on the money that'd been got by chating your lordship's grandfather."
"My lordship's grandfather ought to have looked after that himself. If those are all your scruples they needn't stick in your throat much."
"I said as much as that to myself, too. So I soon went to work. I was rather shy about it at first; but the girls helped me. They put it into her head, I think, before I mentioned it at all. However, by degrees, I asked her plump, whether she'd any mind to be Mrs. Kelly? and, though she didn't say 'yes,' she didn't say 'no.'"
"But how the devil, man, did you manage to get at her? I'm told Barry watches her like a dragon, ever since he read his father's will."
"He couldn't watch her so close, but what she could make her way down to mother's shop now and again. Or, for the matter of that, but what I could make my way up to the house."
"That's true, for what need she mind Barry, now? She may marry whom she pleases, and needn't tell him, unless she likes, until the priest has his book ready."
"Ah, my lord! but there's the rub. She is afraid of Barry; and though she didn't say so, she won't agree to tell him, or to let me tell him, or just to let the priest walk into the house without telling him. She's fond of Barry, though, for the life of me, I can't see what there is in him for anybody to be fond of. He and his father led her the divil's own life mewed up there, because she wouldn't be a nun. But still is both fond and afraid of him; and, though I don't think she'll marry anybody else--at laist not yet awhile, I don't think she'll ever get courage to marry me--at any rate, not in the ordinary way."
"Why then, Martin, you must do something extraordinary, I suppose."
"That's just it, my lord; and what I wanted was, to ask your lordship's advice and sanction, like."
"Sanction! Why I shouldn't think you'd want anybody's sanction for marrying a wife with four hundred a-year. But, if that's anything to you, I can assure you I approve of it."
"Thank you, my lord. That's kind."
"To tell the truth," continued Lord Ballindine, "I've a little of your own first feeling. I'd be glad of it, if it were only for the rise it would take out of my schoolfellow, Barry. Not but that I think you're a deal too good to be his brother-in-law. And you know, Kelly, or ought to know, that I'd be heartily glad of anything for your own welfare. So, I'd advise you to hammer away while the iron's hot, as the saying is."
"That's just what I'm coming to. What'd your lordship advise me to do?"
"Advise you? Why, you must know best yourself how the matter stands. Talk her over, and make her tell Barry."
"Divil a tell, my lord, in her. She wouldn't do it in a month of Sundays."
"Then do you tell him, at once. I suppose you're not afraid of him?"
"She'd niver come to the scratch, av' I did. He'd bully the life out of her, or get her out of the counthry some way."
"Then wait till his back's turned for a month or so. When he's out, let the priest walk in, and do the matter quietly that way."
"Well, I thought of that myself, my lord; but he's as wary as a weazel, and I'm afeard he smells something in the wind. There's that blackguard Moylan, too, he'd be telling Barry--and would, when he came to find things weren't to be settled as he intended."
"Then you must carry her off, and marry her up here, or in Galway or down in Connemara, or over at Liverpool, or any where you please."
"Now you've hit it, my lord. That's just what I'm thinking myself. Unless I take her off Gretna Green fashion, I'll never get her."
"Then why do you want my advice, if you've made up your mind to that? I think you're quite right; and what's more, I think you ought to lose no time in doing it. Will she go, do you think?"
"Why, with a little talking, I think she will."
"Then what are you losing your time for, man? Hurry down, and off with her! I think Dublin's probably your best ground."
"Then you think, my lord, I'd betther do it at once?"
"Of course, I do! What is there to delay you?"
"Why, you see, my lord, the poor girl's as good as got no friends, and I wouldn't like it to be thought in the counthry, I'd taken her at a disadvantage. It's thrue enough in one way, I'm marrying her for the money; that is, in course, I wouldn't marry her without it. And I tould her, out open, before her face, and before the girls, that, av' she'd ten times as much, I wouldn't marry her unless I was to be masther, as long as I lived, of everything in my own house, like another man; and I think she liked me the betther for it. But, for all that, I wouldn't like to catch her up without having something fair done by the property."
"The lawyers, Martin, can manage that, afterwards. When she's once Mrs Kelly, you can do what you like about the fortune."
"That's thrue, my lord. But I wouldn't like the bad name I'd get through the counthry av' I whisked her off without letting her settle anything. They'd be saying I robbed her, whether I did or no: and when a thing's once said, it's difficult to unsay it. The like of me, my lord, can't do things like you noblemen and gentry. Besides, mother'd never forgive me. They think, down there, that poor Anty's simple like; tho' she's cute enough, av' they knew her. I wouldn't, for all the money, wish it should be said that Martin Kelly ran off with a fool, and robbed her. Barry 'd be making her out a dale more simple than she is; and, altogether, my lord, I wouldn't like it."
"Well, Martin, perhaps you're right. At any rate you're on the right side. What is it then you think of doing?"
"Why, I was thinking, my lord, av' I could get some lawyer here to draw up a deed, just settling all Anty's property on herself when I die, and on her children, av' she has any,--so that I couldn't spend it you know; she could sign it, and so could I, before we started; and then I'd feel she'd been traited as well as tho' she'd all the friends in Connaught to her back."
"And a great deal better, probably. Well, Martin, I'm no lawyer, but I should think there'd not be much difficulty about that. Any attorney could do it."
"But I'd look so quare, my lord, walking into a sthranger's room and explaining what I wanted--all about the running away and everything. To be sure there's my brother John's people; they're attorneys; but it's about robberies, and hanging, and such things they're most engaged; and I was thinking, av' your lordship wouldn't think it too much throuble to give me a line to your own people; or, may-be, you'd say a word to them explaining what I want. It'd be the greatest favour in life."
"I'll tell you what I'll do, Kelly. I'll go with you, to-morrow, to Mr Blake's lawyers--that's my friend that was sitting here--and I've no doubt we'll get the matter settled. The Guinnesses, you know, do all my business, and they're not lawyers."
"Long life to your lordship, and that's just like yourself! I knew you'd stick by me. And shall I call on you to-morrow, my lord? and at what time?"
"Wait! here's Mr Blake. I'll ask him, and you might as well meet me there. Grey and Forrest's the name; it's in Clare Street, I think." Here Mr Blake again entered the room.
"What!" said he; "isn't your business over yet, Ballindine? I suppose I'm _de trop_ then. Only mind, dinner's ordered for half past six, and it's that now, and you're not dressed yet!"
"You're not _de trop_, and I was just wanting you. We're all friends here, Kelly, you know; and you needn't mind my telling Mr Blake. Here's this fellow going to elope with an heiress from Connaught, and he wants a decently honest lawyer first."
"I should have thought," said Blake, "that an indecently dishonest clergyman would have suited him better under those circumstances."
"May-be he'll want that, too, and I've no doubt you can recommend one. But at present he wants a lawyer; and, as I have none of my own, I think Forrest would serve his turn."
"I've always found Mr Forrest ready to do anything in the way of his profession--for money."
"No, but--he'd draw up a deed, wouldn't he, Blake? It's a sort of a marriage settlement."
"Oh, he's quite at home at that work! He drew up five, for my five sisters, and thereby ruined my father's property, and my prospects."
"Well, he'd see me to-morrow, wouldn't he?" said Lord Ballindine.
"Of course he would. But mind, we're to be off early. We ought to be at the Curragh, by three."
"I suppose I could see him at ten?" said his lordship.
It was then settled that Blake should write a line to the lawyer, informing him that Lord Ballindine wished to see him, at his office, at ten o'clock the next morning; it was also agreed that Martin should meet him there at that hour; and Kelly took his leave, much relieved on the subject nearest his heart.
"Well, Frank," said Blake, as soon as the door was closed, "and have you got the money you wanted?"
"Indeed I've not, then."
"And why not? If your protégé is going to elope with an heiress, he ought to have money at command."
"And so he will, and it'll be a great temptation to me to know where I can get it so easily. But he was telling me all about this woman before I thought of my own concerns--and I didn't like to be talking to him of what I wanted myself, when he'd been asking a favour of me. It would be too much like looking for payment."
"There, you're wrong; fair barter is the truest and honestest system, all the world over. --'Ca me, ca thee,' as the Scotch call it, is the best system to go by. I never do, or ask, _a favour_; that is, for whatever I do, I expect a return; and for whatever I get, I intend to make one."
"I'll get the money from Guinness. After all, that'll be the best, and as you say, the cheapest."
"There you're right. His business is to lend money, and he'll lend it you as long as you've means to repay it; and I'm sure no Connaught man will do more--that is, if I know them."
"I suppose he will, but heaven only knows how long that'll be!" and the young lord threw himself back on the sofa, as if he thought a little meditation would do him good. However, very little seemed to do for him, for he soon roused himself, and said, "I wonder how the devil, Dot, you do without borrowing? My income's larger than yours, bad as it is; I've only three horses in training, and you've, I suppose, above a dozen; and, take the year through, I don't entertain half the fellows at Kelly's Court that you do at Handicap Lodge; and yet, I never hear of your borrowing money."
"There's many reasons for that. In the first place, I haven't an estate; in the second, I haven't a mother; in the third, I haven't a pack of hounds; in the fourth, I haven't a title; and, in the fifth, no one would lend me money, if I asked it."
"As for the estate, it's devilish little I spend on it; as for my mother, she has her own jointure; as for the hounds, they eat my own potatoes; and as for the title, I don't support it. But I haven't your luck, Dot. You'd never want for money, though the mint broke."
"Very likely I mayn't when it does; but I'm likely to be poor enough till that happy accident occurs. But, as far as luck goes, you've had more than me; you won nearly as much, in stakes, as I did, last autumn, and your stable expenses weren't much above a quarter what mine were. But, the truth is, I manage better; I know where my money goes to, and you don't; I work hard, and you don't; I spend my money on what's necessary to my style of living, you spend yours on what's not necessary. What the deuce have the fellows in Mayo and Roscommon done for you, that you should mount two or three rascals, twice a-week, to show them sport, when you're not there yourself two months in the season? I suppose you don't keep the horses and men for nothing, if you do the dogs; and I much doubt whether they're not the dearest part of the bargain."
"Of course they cost something; but it's the only thing I can do for the country; and there were always hounds at Kelly's Court till my grandfather got the property, and they looked upon him as no better than an old woman, because he gave them up. Besides, I suppose I shall be living at Kelly's Court soon, altogether, and I could never get on then without hounds. It's bad enough, as it is."
"I haven't a doubt in the world it's bad enough. I know what Castleblakeney is. But I doubt your living there. I've no doubt you'll try; that is, if you _do_ marry Miss Wyndham; but she'll be sick of it in three months, and you in six, and you'll go and live at Paris, Florence, or Naples, and there'll be another end of the O'Kellys, for thirty or forty years, as far as Ireland's concerned. You'll never do for a poor country lord; you're not sufficiently proud, or stingy. You'd do very well as a country gentleman, and you'd make a decent nobleman with such a fortune as Lord Cashel's. But your game, if you lived on your own property, would be a very difficult one, and one for which you've neither tact nor temper."
"Well, I hope I'll never live out of Ireland. Though I mayn't have tact to make one thousand go as far as five, I've sense enough to see that a poor absentee landlord is a great curse to his country; and that's what I hope I never shall be."
"My dear Lord Ballindine; all poor men are curses, to themselves or some one else."
"A poor absentee's the worst of all. He leaves nothing behind, and can leave nothing. He wants all he has for himself; and, if he doesn't give his neighbours the profit which must arise somewhere, from his own consumption, he can give nothing. A rich man can afford to leave three or four thousand a year behind him, in the way of wages for labour."
"My gracious, Frank! You should put all that in a pamphlet, and not inflict it on a poor devil waiting for his dinner. At present, give your profit to Morrison, and come and consume some mock-turtle; and I'll tell you what Sheil's going to do for us all."
Lord Ballindine did as he was bid, and left the room to prepare for dinner. By the time that he had eaten his soup, and drank a glass of wine, he had got rid of the fit of blue devils which the thoughts of his poverty had brought on, and he spent the rest of the evening comfortably enough, listening to his friend's comical version of Shell's speech; receiving instruction from that great master of the art as to the manner in which he should treat his Derby colt, and being flattered into the belief that he would be a prominent favourite for that great race.
When they had finished their wine, they sauntered into the Kildare Street Club.
Blake was soon busy with his little betting-book, and Lord Ballindine followed his example. Brien Boru was, before long, in great demand. Blake took fifty to one, and then talked the horse up till he ended by giving twenty-five. He was soon ranked the first of the Irish lot; and the success of the Hibernians had made them very sanguine of late. Lord Ballindine found himself the centre of a little sporting circle, as being the man with the crack nag of the day. He was talked of, courted, and appealed to; and, I regret to say, that before he left the club he was again nearly forgetting Kelly's Court and Miss Wyndham, had altogether got rid of his patriotic notions as to the propriety of living on his own estate, had determined forthwith to send Brien Boru over to Scott's English stables; and then, went to bed, and dreamed that he was a winner of the Derby, and was preparing for the glories of Newmarket with five or six thousand pounds in his pocket.
Martin Kelly dined with his brother at Jude's, and spent his evening equally unreasonably; at least, it may be supposed so from the fact that at one o'clock in the morning he was to be seen standing on one of the tables at Burton Bindon's oyster-house, with a pewter pot, full of porter, in his hand, and insisting that every one in the room should drink the health of Anty Lynch, whom, on that occasion, he swore to be the prettiest and the youngest girl in Connaught.
It was lucky he was so intoxicated, that no one could understand him; and that his hearers were so drunk that they could understand nothing; as, otherwise, the publicity of his admiration might have had the effect of preventing the accomplishment of his design.
He managed, however, to meet his patron the next morning at the lawyer's, though his eyes were very red, and his cheeks pale; and, after being there for some half hour, left the office, with the assurance that, whenever he and the lady might please to call there, they should find a deed prepared for their signature, which would adjust the property in the manner required.
That afternoon Lord Ballindine left Dublin, with his friend, to make instant arrangements for the exportation of Brien Boru; and, at two o'clock the next day, Martin left, by the boat, for Ballinaslie, having evinced his patriotism by paying a year's subscription in advance to the "Nation" newspaper, and with his mind fully made up to bring Anty away to Dublin with as little delay as possible.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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4
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THE DUNMORE INN
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Anty Lynch was not the prettiest, or the youngest girl in Connaught; nor would Martin have affirmed her to be so, unless he had been very much inebriated indeed. However young she might have been once, she was never pretty; but, in all Ireland, there was not a more single-hearted, simple-minded young woman. I do not use the word simple as foolish; for, though uneducated, she was not foolish. But she was unaffected, honest, humble, and true, entertaining a very lowly idea of her own value, and unelated by her newly acquired wealth.
She had been so little thought of all her life by others, that she had never learned to think much of herself; she had had but few acquaintances, and no friends, and had spent her life, hitherto, so quietly and silently, that her apparent apathy was attributable rather to want of subjects of excitement, than to any sluggishness of disposition. Her mother had died early; and, since then, the only case in which Anty had been called on to exercise her own judgment, was in refusing to comply with her father's wish that she should become a nun. On this subject, though often pressed, she had remained positive, always pleading that she felt no call to the sacred duties which would be required, and innocently assuring her father, that, if allowed to remain at home, she would cause him no trouble, and but little expense.
So she had remained at home, and had inured herself to bear without grumbling, or thinking that she had cause for grumbling, the petulance of her father, and the more cruel harshness and ill-humour of her brother. In all the family schemes of aggrandisement she had been set aside, and Barry had been intended by the father as the scion on whom all the family honours were to fall. His education had been expensive, his allowance liberal, and his whims permitted; while Anty was never better dressed than a decent English servant, and had been taught nothing save the lessons she had learnt from her mother, who died when she was but thirteen.
Mrs Lynch had died before the commencement of Sim's palmy days. They had seen no company in her time,--for they were then only rising people; and, since that, the great friends to whom Sim, in his wealth, had attached himself, and with whom alone he intended that Barry should associate, were all of the masculine gender. He gave bachelor dinner-parties to hard-drinking young men, for whom Anty was well contented to cook; and when they--as they often, from the effect of their potations, were perforce obliged to do--stayed the night at Dunmore House, Anty never showed herself in the breakfast parlour, but boiled the eggs, made the tea, and took her own breakfast in the kitchen.
It was not wonderful, therefore, that no one proposed for Anty; and, though all who knew the Lynches, knew that Sim had a daughter, it was very generally given out that she was not so wise as her neighbours; and the father and brother took no pains to deny the rumour. The inhabitants of the village knew better; the Lynches were very generally disliked, and the shameful way "Miss Anty was trated," was often discussed in the little shops; and many of the townspeople were ready to aver that, "simple or no, Anty Lynch was the best of the breed, out-and-out."
Matters stood thus at Dunmore, when the quarrel before alluded to, occurred, and when Sim made his will, dividing his property and died before destroying it, as he doubtless would have done, when his passion was over.
Great was the surprise of every one concerned, and of many who were not at all concerned, when it was ascertained that Anty Lynch was an heiress, and that she was now possessed of four hundred pounds a-year in her own right; but the passion of her brother, it would be impossible to describe. He soon, however, found that it was too literally true, and that no direct means were at hand, by which he could deprive his sister of her patrimony. The lawyer, when he informed Anty of her fortune and present station, made her understand that she had an equal right with her brother in everything in the house; and though, at first, she tacitly acquiesced in his management, she was not at all simple enough to be ignorant of the rights of possession, or weak enough to relinquish them.
Barry soon made up his mind that, as she had and must have the property, all he could now do was to take care that it should revert to him as her heir; and the measure of most importance in effecting this, would be to take care that she did not marry. In his first passion, after his father's death, he had been rough and cruel to her; but he soon changed his conduct, and endeavoured to flatter her into docility at one moment, and to frighten her into obedience in the next.
He soon received another blow which was also a severe one. Moylan, the old man who proposed the match to Martin, called on him, and showed him that Anty had appointed him her agent, and had executed the necessary legal documents for the purpose. Upon this subject he argued for a long time with his sister,--pointing out to her that the old man would surely rob her--offering to act as her agent himself--recommending others as more honest and fitting--and, lastly, telling her that she was an obstinate fool, who would soon be robbed of every penny she had, and that she would die in a workhouse at last.
But Anty, though she dreaded her brother, was firm. Wonderful as it may appear, she even loved him. She begged him not to quarrel with her,--promised to do everything to oblige him, and answered his wrath with gentleness; but it was of no avail. Barry knew that her agent was a plotter--that he would plot against his influence--though he little guessed then what would be the first step Moylan would take, or how likely it would be, if really acted on, to lead to his sister's comfort and happiness. After this, Barry passed two months of great misery and vexation. He could not make up his mind what to do, or what final steps to take, either about the property, his sister, or himself. At first, he thought of frightening Moylan and his sister, by pretending that he would prove Anty to be of weak mind, and not fit to manage her own affairs, and that he would indict the old man for conspiracy; but he felt that Moylan was not a man to be frightened by such bugbears. Then, he made up his mind to turn all he had into money, to leave his sister to the dogs, or any one who might choose to rob her, and go and live abroad. Then he thought, if his sister should die, what a pity it would be, he should lose it all, and how he should blame himself, if she were to die soon after having married some low adventurer; and he reflected; how probable such a thing would be--how likely that such a man would soon get rid of her; and then his mind began to dwell on her death, and to wish for it. He found himself constantly thinking of it, and ruminating on it, and determining that it was the only event which could set him right. His own debts would swallow up half his present property; and how could he bring himself to live on the pitiful remainder, when that stupid idiot, as he called her to himself, had three times more than she could possibly want? Morning after morning, he walked about the small grounds round the house, with his hat over his eyes, and his hands tossing about the money in his pockets, thinking of this,--cursing his father, and longing--almost praying for his sister's death. Then he would have his horse, and flog the poor beast along the roads without going anywhere, or having any object in view, but always turning the same thing over and over in his mind. And, after dinner, he would sit, by the hour, over the fire, drinking, longing for his sister's money, and calculating the probabilities of his ever possessing it. He began to imagine all the circumstances which might lead to her death; he thought of all the ways in which persons situated as she was, might, and often did, die. He reflected, without knowing that he was doing so, on the probability of robbers breaking into the house, if she were left alone in it, and of their murdering her; he thought of silly women setting their own clothes on fire--of their falling out of window--drowning themselves--of their perishing in a hundred possible but improbable ways. It was after he had been drinking a while, that these ideas became most vivid before his eyes, and seemed like golden dreams, the accomplishment of which he could hardly wish for. And, at last, as the fumes of the spirit gave him courage, other and more horrible images would rise to his imagination, and the drops of sweat would stand on his brow as he would invent schemes by which, were he so inclined, he could accelerate, without detection, the event for which he so ardently longed. With such thoughts would he turn into bed; and though in the morning he would try to dispel the ideas in which he had indulged overnight, they still left their impression on his mind;--they added bitterness to his hatred--and made him look on himself as a man injured by his father and sister, and think that he owed it to himself to redress his injuries by some extraordinary means.
It was whilst Barry Lynch was giving way to such thoughts as these, and vainly endeavouring to make up his mind as to what he would do, that Martin made his offer to Anty. To tell the truth, it was Martin's sister Meg who had made the first overture; and, as Anty had not rejected it with any great disdain, but had rather shown a disposition to talk about it as a thing just possible, Martin had repeated it in person, and had reiterated it, till Anty had at last taught herself to look upon it as a likely and desirable circumstance. Martin had behaved openly and honourably with regard to the money part of the business; telling his contemplated bride that it was, of course, her fortune which had first induced him to think of her; but adding, that he would also value her and love her for herself, if she would allow him. He described to her the sort of settlement he should propose, and ended by recommending an early day for the wedding.
Anty had sense enough to be pleased at his straightforward and honest manner; and, though she did not say much to himself, she said a great deal in his praise to Meg, which all found its way to Martin's ears. But still, he could not get over the difficulty which he had described to Lord Ballindine. Anty wanted to wait till her brother should go out of the country, and Martin was afraid that he would not go; and things were in this state when he started for Dublin.
The village of Dunmore has nothing about it which can especially recommend it to the reader. It has none of those beauties of nature which have taught Irishmen to consider their country as the "first flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea". It is a dirty, ragged little town, standing in a very poor part of the country, with nothing about it to induce the traveller to go out of his beaten track. It is on no high road, and is blessed with no adventitious circumstances to add to its prosperity.
It was once the property of the O'Kellys; but, in those times the landed proprietors thought but little of the towns; and now it is parcelled out among different owners, some of whom would think it folly to throw away a penny on the place, and others of whom have not a penny to throw away. It consists of a big street, two little streets, and a few very little lanes. There is a Court-house, where the barrister sits twice a year; a Barrack, once inhabited by soldiers, but now given up to the police; a large slated chapel, not quite finished; a few shops for soft goods; half a dozen shebeen-houses [11], ruined by Father Mathew; a score of dirty cabins offering "lodging and enthertainment", as announced on the window-shutters; Mrs. Kelly's inn and grocery-shop; and, last though not least, Simeon Lynch's new, staring house, built just at the edge of the town, on the road to Roscommon, which is dignified with the name of Dunmore House. The people of most influence in the village were Mrs. Kelly of the inn, and her two sworn friends, the parish priest and his curate. The former, Father Geoghegan, lived about three miles out of Dunmore, near Toneroe; and his curate, Father Pat Connel, inhabited one of the small houses in the place, very little better in appearance than those which offered accommodation to travellers and trampers.
[FOOTNOTE 11: shebeen-houses--unlicensed drinking houses, where un-taxed ("moonshine") liquor was often served] Such was, and is, the town of Dunmore in the county of Galway; and I must beg the reader to presume himself to be present there with me on the morning on which the two young Kellys went to hear Sheil's speech. At about ten o'clock, the widow Kelly and her daughters were busy in the shop, which occupied the most important part of the ground-floor of the inn. It was a long, scrambling, ugly-looking house. Next to the shop, and opening out of it, was a large drinking-room, furnished with narrow benches and rickety tables; and here the more humble of Mrs. Kelly's guests regaled themselves. On the other side of this, was the hall, or passage of the house; and, next to that again, a large, dingy, dark kitchen, over which Sally reigned with her teapot dynasty, and in which were always congregated a parcel of ragged old men, boys, and noisy women, pretending to be busy, but usually doing but little good, and attracted by the warmth of the big fire, and the hopes of some scraps of food and drink.
"For the widow Kelly--God bless her! was a thrue Christhian, and didn't begrudge the poor--more power to her--like some upstarts who might live to be in want yet, glory be to the Almighty!"
The difference of the English and Irish character is nowhere more plainly discerned than in their respective kitchens. With the former, this apartment is probably the cleanest, and certainly the most orderly, in the house. It is rarely intruded into by those unconnected, in some way, with its business. Everything it contains is under the vigilant eye of its chief occupant, who would imagine it quite impossible to carry on her business, whether of an humble or important nature, if her apparatus was subjected to the hands of the unauthorised. An Irish kitchen is devoted to hospitality in every sense of the word. Its doors are open to almost all loungers and idlers; and the chances are that Billy Bawn, the cripple, or Judy Molloy, the deaf old hag, are more likely to know where to find the required utensil than the cook herself. It is usually a temple dedicated to the goddess of disorder; and, too often joined with her, is the potent deity of dirt. It is not that things are out of their place, for they have no place. It isn't that the floor is not scoured, for you cannot scour dry mud into anything but wet mud. It isn't that the chairs and tables look filthy, for there are none. It isn't that the pots, and plates, and pans don't shine, for you see none to shine. All you see is a grimy, black ceiling, an uneven clay floor, a small darkened window, one or two unearthly-looking recesses, a heap of potatoes in the corner, a pile of turf against the wall, two pigs and a dog under the single dresser, three or four chickens on the window-sill, an old cock moaning on the top of a rickety press, and a crowd of ragged garments, squatting, standing, kneeling, and crouching, round the fire, from which issues a babel of strange tongues, not one word of which is at first intelligible to ears unaccustomed to such eloquence.
And yet, out of these unfathomable, unintelligible dens, proceed in due time dinners, of which the appearance of them gives no promise. Such a kitchen was Mrs. Kelly's; and yet, it was well known and attested by those who had often tried the experiment, that a man need think it no misfortune to have to get his dinner, his punch, and his bed, at the widow's.
Above stairs were two sitting-rooms and a colony of bed-rooms, occupied indiscriminately by the family, or by such customers as might require them. If you came back to dine at the inn, after a day's shooting on the bogs, you would probably find Miss Jane's work-box on the table, or Miss Meg's album on the sofa; and, when a little accustomed to sojourn at such places, you would feel no surprise at discovering their dresses turned inside out, and hanging on the pegs in your bed-room; or at seeing their side-combs and black pins in the drawer of your dressing-table.
On the morning in question, the widow and her daughters were engaged in the shop, putting up pen'norths of sugar, cutting bits of tobacco, tying bundles of dip candles, attending to chance customers, and preparing for the more busy hours of the day. It was evident that something had occurred at the inn, which had ruffled the even tenor of its way. The widow was peculiarly gloomy. Though fond of her children, she was an autocrat in her house, and accustomed, as autocrats usually are, to scold a good deal; and now she was using her tongue pretty freely. It wasn't the girls, however, she was rating, for they could answer for themselves;--and did, when they thought it necessary. But now, they were demure, conscious, and quiet. Mrs. Kelly was denouncing one of the reputed sins of the province to which she belonged, and describing the horrors of "schaming."
"Them underhand ways," she declared, "niver come to no good. Av' it's thrue what Father Connel's afther telling me, there'll harum come of it before it's done and over. Schaming, schaming, and schaming for iver! The back of my hand to such doings! I wish the tongue had been out of Moylan's mouth, the ould rogue, before he put the thing in his head. Av' he wanted the young woman, and she was willing, why not take her in a dacent way, and have done with it. I'm sure she's ould enough. But what does he want with a wife like her? --making innimies for himself. I suppose he'll be sitting up for a gentleman now--bad cess to them for gentry; not but that he's as good a right as some, and a dale more than others, who are ashamed to put their hand to a turn of work. I hate such huggery muggery work up in a corner. It's half your own doing; and a nice piece of work it'll be, when he's got an ould wife and a dozen lawsuits! --when he finds his farm gone, and his pockets empty; for it'll be a dale asier for him to be getting the wife than the money--when he's got every body's abuse, and nothing else, by his bargain!"
It was very apparent that Martin's secret had not been well kept, and that the fact of his intended marriage with Anty Lynch was soon likely to be known to all Dunmore. The truth was, that Moylan had begun to think himself overreached in the matter--to be afraid that, by the very measure he had himself proposed, he would lose all share in the great prize he had put in Martin's way, and that he should himself be the means of excluding his own finger from the pie. It appeared to him that if he allowed this, his own folly would only be equalled by the young man's ingratitude; and he determined therefore, if possible, to prevent the match. Whereupon he told the matter as a secret, to those whom he knew would set it moving. In a very short space of time it reached the ears of Father Connel; and he lost none in stepping down to learn the truth of so important a piece of luck to one of his parishioners, and to congratulate the widow. Here, however, he was out in his reckoning, for she declared she did not believe it,--that it wasn't, and couldn't be true; and it was only after his departure that she succeeded in extracting the truth from her daughters.
The news, however, quickly reached the kitchen and its lazy crowd; and the inn door and its constant loungers; and was readily and gladly credited in both places.
Crone after crone, and cripple after cripple, hurried into the shop, to congratulate the angry widow on "masther Martin's luck; and warn't he worthy of it, the handsome jewel--and wouldn't he look the gintleman, every inch of him?" and Sally expatiated greatly on it in the kitchen, and drank both their healths in an extra pot of tea, and Kate grinned her delight, and Jack the ostler, who took care of Martin's horse, boasted loudly of it in the street, declaring that "it was a good thing enough for Anty Lynch, with all her money, to get a husband at all out of the Kellys, for the divil a know any one knowed in the counthry where the Lynchs come from; but every one knowed who the Kellys wor--and Martin wasn't that far from the lord himself."
There was great commotion, during the whole day, at the inn. Some said Martin had gone to town to buy furniture; others, that he had done so to prove the will. One suggested that he'd surely have to fight Barry, and another prayed that "if he did, he might kill the blackguard, and have all the fortin to himself, out and out, God bless him!"
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{
"id": "4917"
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5
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A LOVING BROTHER
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The great news was not long before it reached the ears of one not disposed to receive the information with much satisfaction, and this was Barry Lynch, the proposed bride's amiable brother. The medium through which he first heard it was not one likely to add to his good humour. Jacky, the fool, had for many years been attached to the Kelly's Court family; that is to say, he had attached himself to it, by getting his food in the kitchen, and calling himself the lord's fool. But, latterly, he had quarrelled with Kelly's Court, and had insisted on being Sim Lynch's fool, much to the chagrin of that old man; and, since his death, he had nearly maddened Barry by following him through the street, and being continually found at the house-door when he went out. Jack's attendance was certainly dictated by affection rather than any mercenary views, for he never got a scrap out of the Dunmore House kitchen, or a halfpenny from his new patron. But still, he was Barry's fool; and, like other fools, a desperate annoyance to his master.
On the day in question, as young Mr. Lynch was riding out of the gate, about three in the afternoon, there, as usual, was Jack.
"Now yer honour, Mr. Barry, darling, shure you won't forget Jacky to-day. You'll not forget your own fool, Mr. Barry?"
Barry did not condescend to answer this customary appeal, but only looked at the poor ragged fellow as though he'd like to flog the life out of him.
"Shure your honour, Mr. Barry, isn't this the time then to open yer honour's hand, when Miss Anty, God bless her, is afther making sich a great match for the family? --Glory be to God!"
"What d'ye mean, you ruffian?"
"Isn't the Kellys great people intirely, Mr. Barry? and won't it be a great thing for Miss Anty, to be sib to a lord? Shure yer honour'd not be refusing me this blessed day."
"What the d---- are you saying about Miss Lynch?" said Barry, his attention somewhat arrested by the mention of his sister's name.
"Isn't she going to be married then, to the dacentest fellow in Dunmore? Martin Kelly, God bless him! Ah! there'll be fine times at Dunmore, then. He's not the boy to rattle a poor divil out of the kitchen into the cold winther night! The Kellys was always the right sort for the poor."
Barry was frightened in earnest, now. It struck him at once that Jack couldn't have made the story out of his own head; and the idea that there was any truth in it, nearly knocked him off his horse. He rode on, however, trying to appear to be regardless of what had been said to him; and, as he trotted off, he heard the fool's parting salutation.
"And will yer honour be forgething me afther the news I've brought yer? Well, hard as ye are, Misther Barry, I've hot yer now, any way."
And, in truth, Jack had hit him hard. Of all things that could happen to him, this would be about the worst. He had often thought, with dread, of his sister's marrying, and of his thus being forced to divide everything--all his spoil, with some confounded stranger. But for her to marry a shopkeeper's son, in the very village in which he lived, was more than he could bear. He could never hold up his head in the county again. And then, he thought of his debts, and tried to calculate whether he might get over to France without paying them, and be able to carry his share of the property with him; and so he went on, pursuing his wretched, uneasy, solitary ride, sometimes sauntering along at a snail's pace, and then again spurring the poor brute, and endeavouring to bring his mind to some settled plan. But, whenever he did so, the idea of his sister's death was the only one which seemed to present either comfort or happiness.
He made up his mind, at last, to put a bold face on the matter; to find out from Anty herself whether there was any truth in the story; and, if there should be,--for he felt confident she would not be able to deceive him,--to frighten her and the whole party of the Kellys out of what he considered a damnable conspiracy to rob him of his father's property, He got off his horse, and stalked into the house. On inquiry, he found that Anty was in her own room. He was sorry she was not out; for, to tell the truth, he was rather anxious to put off the meeting, as he did not feel himself quite up to the mark, and was ashamed of seeming afraid of her. He went into the stable, and abused the groom; into the kitchen, and swore at the maid; and then into the garden. It was a nasty, cold, February day, and he walked up and down the damp muddy walks till he was too tired and cold to walk longer, and then turned into the parlour, and remained with his back to the fire, till the man came in to lay the cloth, thinking on the one subject that occupied all his mind--occasionally grinding his teeth, and heaping curses on his father and sister, who, together, had inflicted such grievous, such unexpected injuries upon him.
If, at this moment, there was a soul in all Ireland over whom Satan had full dominion--if there was a breast unoccupied by one good thought--if there was a heart wishing, a brain conceiving, and organs ready to execute all that was evil, from the worst motives, they were to be found in that miserable creature, as he stood there urging himself on to hate those whom he should have loved--cursing those who were nearest to him--fearing her, whom he had ill-treated all his life--and striving to pluck up courage to take such measures as might entirely quell her. Money was to him the only source of gratification. He had looked forward, when a boy, to his manhood, as a period when he might indulge, unrestrained, in pleasures which money would buy; and, when a man, to his father's death, as a time when those means would be at his full command. He had neither ambition, nor affection, in his nature; his father had taught him nothing but the excellence of money, and, having fully imbued him with this, had cut him off from the use of it.
He was glad when he found that dinner was at hand, and that he could not now see his sister until after he had fortified himself with drink. Anty rarely, if ever, dined with him; so he sat down, and swallowed his solitary meal. He did not eat much, but he gulped down three or four glasses of wine; and, immediately on having done so, he desired the servant, with a curse, to bring him hot water and sugar, and not to keep him waiting all night for a tumbler of punch, as he did usually. Before the man had got into the kitchen, he rang the bell again; and when the servant returned breathless, with the steaming jug, he threatened to turn him out of the house at once, if he was not quicker in obeying the orders given him. He then made a tumbler of punch, filling the glass half full of spirits, and drinking it so hot as to scald his throat; and when that was done he again rang the bell, and desired the servant to tell Miss Anty that he wanted to speak to her. When the door was shut, he mixed more drink, to support his courage during the interview, and made up his mind that nothing should daunt him from preventing the marriage, in one way or another. When Anty opened the door, he was again standing with his back to the fire, his hands in his pockets, the flaps of his coat hanging over his arms, his shoulders against the mantel-piece, and his foot on the chair on which he had been sitting. His face was red, and his eyes were somewhat blood-shot; he had always a surly look, though, from his black hair, and large bushy whiskers, many people would have called him good looking; but now there was a scowl in his restless eyes, which frightened Anty when she saw it; and the thick drops of perspiration on his forehead did not add benignity to his face.
"Were you wanting me, Barry?" said Anty, who was the first to speak.
"What do you stand there for, with the door open?" replied her brother, "d' you think I want the servants to hear what I've got to say?" " 'Deed I don't know," said Anty, shutting the door; "but they'll hear just as well now av' they wish, for they'll come to the kay-hole."
"Will they, by G----!" said Barry, and he rushed to the door, which he banged open; finding no victim outside on whom to exercise his wrath--"let me catch 'em!" and he returned to his position by the fire.
Anty had sat down on a sofa that stood by the wall opposite the fireplace, and Barry remained for a minute, thinking how he'd open the campaign. At last he began: "Anty, look you here, now. What scheme have you got in your head? --You'd better let me know, at once."
"What schame, Barry?"
"Well--what schame, if you like that better."
"I've no schame in my head, that I know of--at laist--" and then Anty blushed. It would evidently be easy enough to make the poor girl tell her own secret.
"Well, go on--at laist--" "I don't know what you mane, Barry. Av' you're going to be badgering me again, I'll go away."
"It's evident you're going to do something you're ashamed of, when you're afraid to sit still, and answer a common question. But you must answer me. I'm your brother, and have a right to know. What's this you're going to do?' He didn't like to ask her at once whether she was going to get married. It might not be true, and then he would only be putting the idea into her head. 'Well,--why don't you answer me? What is it you're going to do?"
"Is it about the property you mane, Barry?"
"What a d----d hypocrite you are! As if you didn't know what I mean! As for the property, I tell you there'll be little left the way you're going on. And as to that, I'll tell you what I'm going to do; so, mind, I warn you beforehand. You're not able--that is, you're too foolish and weak-headed to manage it yourself; and I mean, as your guardian, to put it into the hands of those that shall manage it for you. I'm not going to see you robbed and duped, and myself destroyed by such fellows as Moylan, and a crew of huxtering blackguards down in Dunmore. And now, tell me at once, what's this I hear about you and the Kellys?"
"What Kellys?" said Anty, blushing deeply, and half beside herself with fear--for Barry's face was very red, and full of fierce anger, and his rough words frightened her.
"What Kellys! Did you ever hear of Martin Kelly? d----d young robber that he is!" Anty blushed still deeper--rose a little way from the sofa, and then sat down again. "Look you here, Anty--I'll have the truth out of you. I'm not going to be bamboozled by such an idiot as you. You got an old man, when he was dying, to make a will that has robbed me of what was my own, and now you think you'll play your own low game; but you're mistaken! You've lived long enough without a husband to do without one now; and I can tell you I'm not going to see my property carried off by such a low, paltry blackguard as Martin Kelly."
"How can he take your property, Barry?" sobbed forth the poor creature, who was, by this time, far gone in tears.
"Then the long and the short of it is, he shan't have what you call yours. Tell me, at once, will you--is it true, that you've promised to marry him?"
Anty replied nothing, but continued sobbing violently.
"Cease your nonsense, you blubbering fool! A precious creature you are to take on yourself to marry any man! Are you going to answer me, Anty?" And he walked away from the fire, and came and stood opposite to her as she sat upon the sofa. "Are you going to answer me or not?" he continued, stamping on the floor.
"I'll not stop here--and be trated this way--Barry--I'm sure--I do all I--I can for you--and you're always--bullying me because father divided the property." And Anty continued sobbing more violently than ever. "I won't stop in the room any more," and she got up to go to the door.
Barry, however, rushed before her, and prevented her. He turned the lock, and put the key in his pocket; and then he caught her arm, as she attempted to get to the bell, and dragged her back to the sofa.
"You're not off so easy as that, I can tell you. Why, d' you think you're to marry whom you please, without even telling me of it? What d'you think the world would say of me, if I were to let such an idiot as you be caught up by the first sharper that tried to rob you of your money? Now, look here," and he sat down beside her, and laid his hand violently on her arm, as he spoke, "you don't go out of this room, alive, until you've given me your solemn promise, and sworn on the cross, that you'll never marry without my consent; and you'll give me that in writing, too."
Anty at first turned very pale when she felt his heavy hand on her arm, and saw his red, glaring eyes so near her own. But when he said she shouldn't leave the room alive, she jumped from the sofa, and shrieked, at the top of her shrill voice,--"Oh, Barry! you'll not murdher me! shure you wouldn't murdher your own sisther!"
Barry was rather frightened at the noise, and, moreover, the word "murder" quelled him. But when he found, after a moment's pause, that the servants had not heard, or had not heeded his sister, he determined to carry on his game, now that he had proceeded so far. He took, however, a long drink out of his tumbler, to give him fresh courage, and then returned to the charge.
"Who talked of murdering you? But, if you bellow in that way, I'll gag you. It's a great deal I'm asking, indeed--that, when I'm your only guardian, my advice should be asked for before you throw away your money on a low ruffian. You're more fit for a mad-house than to be any man's wife; and, by Heaven, that's where I'll put you, if you don't give me the promise I ask! Will you swear you'll marry no one without my leave?"
Poor Anty shook with fear as she sate, with her eyes fixed on her brother's face. He was nearly drunk now, and she felt that he was so,--and he looked so hot and so fierce--so red and cruel, that she was all but paralysed. Nevertheless, she mustered strength to say, "Let me go, now, Barry, and, to-morrow, I'll tell you everything--indeed I will--and I'll thry to do all you'd have me; indeed, and indeed, I will! Only do let me go now, for you've frighted me."
"You're likely to be more frighted yet, as you call it! And be tramping along the roads, I suppose, with Martin Kelly, before the morning. No! I'll have an answer from you, any way. I've a right to that!"
"Oh, Barry! --What is it you want? --Pray let me go--pray, pray, for the love of the blessed Jesus, let me go."
"I'll tell you where you'll go, and that's into Ballinasloe mad-house! Now, mark me--so help me--I'll set off with you this night, and have you there in the morning--as an idiot as you are, if you won't make the promise I'm telling you!"
By this time Anty's presence of mind had clean left her. Indeed, all the faculties of her reason had vanished; and, as she saw her brother's scowling face so near her own, and heard him threatening to drag her to a mad-house, she put her hands before her eyes, and made one rush to escape from him--to the door--to the window--anywhere to get out of his reach.
Barry was quite drunk now. Had he not been so, even he would hardly have done what he then did. As she endeavoured to rush by him, he raised his fist, and struck her on the face, with all his force. The blow fell upon her hands, as they were crossed over her face; but the force of the blow knocked her down, and she fell upon the floor, senseless, striking the back of her head against the table.
"Confound her," muttered the brute, between his teeth, as she fell, "for an obstinate, pig-headed fool! What the d----l shall I do now? Anty, get up! --get up, will you! --What ails you?" --and then again to himself, "the d----l seize her! What am I to do now?" and he succeeded in dragging her on to the sofa.
The man-servant and the cook although up to this point, they had considered it would be ill manners to interrupt the brother and sister in their family interview, were nevertheless at the door; and though they could see nothing, and did not succeed in hearing much, were not the less fully aware that the conversation was of a somewhat stormy nature on the part of the brother. When they heard the noise which followed the blow, though not exactly knowing what had happened, they became frightened, and began to think something terrible was being done.
"Go in, Terry, avich," whispered the woman,--"Knock, man, and go in--shure he's murdhering her!"
"What 'ud he do to me thin, av' he'd strick a woman, and she his own flesh and blood! He'll not murdher her--but, faix, he's afther doing something now! Knock, Biddy, knock, I say, and screech out that you're afther wanting Miss Anty."
The woman had more courage than the man--or else more compassion, for, without further parleying, she rapped her knuckles loudly against the door, and, as she did so, Terry sneaked away to the kitchen.
Barry had just succeeded in raising his sister to the sofa as he heard the knock.
"Who's that?" he called out loudly; "what do you want?"
"Plaze yer honer, Miss Anty's wanting in the kitchen."
"She's busy, and can't come at present; she'll be there directly."
"Is she ill at all, Mr. Barry? God bless you, spake, Miss Anty; in God's name, spake thin. Ah! Mr. Barry, thin, shure she'd spake av' she were able."
"Go away, you fool! Your mistress'll be out in a minute." Then, after a moment's consideration, he went and unlocked the door, "or--go in, and see what she wants. She's fainted, I think."
Barry Lynch walked out of the room, and into the garden before the house, to think over what he had done, and what he'd better do for the future, leaving Anty to the care of the frightened woman.
She soon came to herself, and, excepting that her head was bruised in the fall, was not much hurt. The blow, falling on her hands, had neither cut nor marked her; but she was for a long time so flurried that she did not know where she was, and, in answer to all Biddy's tender inquiries as to the cause of her fall, and anathemas as to the master's bad temper, merely said that "she'd get to bed, for her head ached so, she didn't know where she was."
To bed accordingly she went; and glad she was to have escaped alive from that drunken face, which had glared on her for the last half hour.
After wandering about round the house and through the grounds, for above an hour, Barry returned, half sobered, to the room; but, in his present state of mind, he could not go to bed sober. He ordered more hot water, and again sat down alone to drink, and drown the remorse he was beginning to feel for what he had done--or rather, not remorse, but the feeling of fear that every one would know how he had treated Anty, and that they would side with her against him. Whichever way he looked, all was misery and disappointment to him, and his only hope, for the present, was in drink. There he sat, for a long time, with his eyes fixed on the turf, till it was all burnt out, trying to get fresh courage from the spirits he swallowed, and swearing to himself that he would not be beat by a woman.
About one o'clock he seized one of the candles, and staggered up to bed. As he passed his sister's door, he opened it and went in. She was fast asleep; her shoes were off, and the bed-clothes were thrown over her, but she was not undressed. He slowly shut the door, and stood, for some moments, looking at her; then, walking to the bed, he took her shoulder, and shook it as gently as his drunkenness would let him. This did not wake her, so he put the candle down on the table, close beside the bed, and, steadying himself against the bedstead, he shook her again and again. "Anty", he whispered, "Anty"; and, at last, she opened her eyes. Directly she saw his face, she closed them again, and buried her own in the clothes; however, he saw that she was awake, and, bending his head, he muttered, loud enough for her to hear, but in a thick, harsh, hurried, drunken voice, "Anty--d'ye hear? If you marry that man, I'll have your life!" and then, leaving the candle behind him, he staggered off into his own room in the dark.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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6
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THE ESCAPE
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In vain, after that, did Anty try to sleep; turn which way she would, she saw the bloodshot eyes and horrid drunken face of her cruel brother. For a long time she lay, trembling and anxious; fearing she knew not what, and trying to compose herself--trying to make herself think that she had no present cause for fear; but in vain. If she heard a noise, she thought it was her brother's footstep, and when the house was perfectly silent and still, she feared the very silence itself. At last, she crept out of bed, and, taking the candle left by her brother, which had now burned down to the socket, stepped softly down the stairs, to the place where the two maid-servants slept, and, having awakened them, she made Biddy return with her and keep her company for the remainder of the night. She did not quite tell the good-natured girl all that had passed; she did not own that her brother had threatened to send her to a madhouse, or that he had sworn to have her life; but she said enough to show that he had shamefully ill-treated her, and to convince Biddy that wherever her mistress might find a home, it would be very unadvisable that she and Barry should continue to live under the same roof.
Early in the morning, "Long afore the break o' day," as the song says, Biddy got up from her hard bed on the floor of her mistress' room, and, seeing that Anty was at last asleep, started to carry into immediate execution the counsels she had given during the night. As she passed the head of the stairs, she heard the loud snore of Barry, in his drunken slumber; and, wishing that he might sleep as sound for ever and ever, she crept down to her own domicile, and awakened her comrade.
"Whist, Judy--whist, darlint! Up wid ye, and let me out."
"And what'd you be doing out now?" yawned Judy.
"An arrand of the misthress;--shure, he used her disperate. Faix, it's a wondher he didn't murther her outright!"
"And where are ye going now?"
"Jist down to Dunmore--to the Kellys then, avich. Asy now; I'll be telling you all bye and bye. She must be out of this intirely."
"Is't Miss Anty? Where'd she be going thin out of this?"
"Divil a matther where! He'd murther her, the ruffian 'av he cotched her another night in his dhrunkenness. We must git her out before he sleeps hisself right. But hurry now, I'll be telling you all when I'm back again."
The two crept off to the back door together, and, Judy having opened it, Biddy sallied out, on her important and good-natured mission. It was still dark, though the morning was beginning to break, as she stood, panting, at the front door of the inn. She tried to get in at the back, but the yard gates were fastened; and Jack, the ostler, did not seem to be about yet. So she gave a timid, modest knock, with the iron knocker, on the front door. A pause, and then a second knock, a little louder; another pause, and then a third; and then, as no one came, she remembered the importance of her message, and gave such a rap as a man might do, who badly wanted a glass of hot drink after travelling the whole night.
The servants had good or hardy consciences, for they slept soundly; but the widow Kelly, in her little bed-room behind the shop, well knew the sound of that knocker, and, hurrying on her slippers and her gown, she got to the door, and asked who was there.
"Is that Sally, ma'am?" said Biddy, well knowing the widow's voice.
"No, it's not. What is it you're wanting?"
"Is it Kate thin, ma'am?"
"No, it's not Kate. Who are you, I say; and what d'you want?"
"I'm Biddy, plaze ma'am--from Lynch's, and I'm wanting to spake to yerself, ma'am--about Miss Anty. She's very bad intirely, ma'am."
"What ails her;--and why d'you come here? Why don't you go to Doctor Colligan, av' she's ill; and not come knocking here?"
"It ain't bad that way, Miss Anty is, ma'am. Av' you'd just be good enough to open the door, I'd tell you in no time."
It would, I am sure, be doing injustice to Mrs Kelly to say that her curiosity was stronger than her charity; they both, however, no doubt had their effect, and the door was speedily opened.
"Oh, ma'am!" commenced Biddy, "sich terrible doings up at the house! Miss Anty's almost kilt!"
"Come out of the cowld, girl, in to the kitchen fire," said the widow, who didn't like the February blast, to which Biddy, in her anxiety, had been quite indifferent; and the careful widow again bolted the door, and followed the woman into certainly the warmest place in Dunmore, for the turf fire in the inn kitchen was burning day and night. "And now, tell me what is it ails Miss Anty? She war well enough yesterday, I think, and I heard more of her then than I wished."
Biddy now pulled her cloak from off her head, settled it over her shoulders, and prepared for telling a good substantial story.
"Oh, Misthress Kelly, ma'am, there's been disperate doings last night up at the house. We were all hearing, in the morn yesterday, as how Miss Anty and Mr Martin, God bless him! --were to make a match of it,--as why wouldn't they, ma'am? for wouldn't Mr Martin make her a tidy, dacent, good husband?"
"Well, well, Biddy--don't mind Mr Martin; he'll be betther without a wife for one while, and he needn't be quarrelling for one when he wants her. What ails Miss Anty?"
"Shure I'm telling you, ma'am; howsomever, whether its thrue or no about Mr Martin, we were all hearing it yestherday; and the masther, he war afther hearing it too, for he come into his dinner as black as tunder; and Terry says he dhrunk the whole of a bottle of wine, and then he called for the sperrits, and swilled away at them till he was nigh dhrunk. Well, wid that, ma'am, he sent for Miss Anty, and the moment she comes in, he locks to the door, and pulls her to the sofa, and swears outright that he'll murdher her av' she don't swear, by the blessed Mary and the cross, that she'll niver dhrame of marrying no one."
"Who tould you all this, Biddy? was it herself?"
"Why, thin, partly herself it war who tould me, ma'am, and partly--; you see, when Mr Barry war in his tantrums and dhrunken like, I didn't like to be laving Miss Anty alone wid him, and nobody nigh, so I and Terry betook ourselves nigh the door, and, partly heard what was going on; that's the thruth on it, Mrs Kelly; and, afther a dale of rampaging and scolding, may I niver see glory av' he didn't up wid his clenched fist, strik her in the face, and knock her down--all for one as 'av she wor a dhrunken blackguard at a fair!"
"You didn't see that, Biddy?"
"No, ma'am--I didn't see it; how could I, through the door? --but I heerd it, plain enough. I heerd the poor cratur fall for dead amongst the tables and chairs--I did, Mrs Kelly--and I heerd the big blow smash agin her poor head, and down she wint--why wouldn't she? and he, the born ruffian, her own brother, the big blackguard, stricking at her wid all his force! Well, wid that ma'am, I rushed into the room--at laist, I didn't rush in--for how could I, and the door locked? --but I knocked agin and agin, for I war afeard he would be murthering her out and out. So, I calls out, as loud as I could, as how Miss Anty war wanting in the kitchen: and wid that he come to the door, and unlocks it as bould as brass, and rushes out into the garden, saying as how Miss Anty war afther fainting. Well, in course I goes in to her, where he had dragged her upon the sofa, and, thrue enough, she war faint indeed."
"And, did she tell you, Biddy, that her own brother had trated her that way?"
"Wait, Mrs Kelly, ma'am, till I tell yer how it all happened. When she comed to herself--and she warn't long coming round--she didn't say much, nor did I; for I didn't just like then to be saying much agin the masther, for who could know where his ears were? --perish his sowl, the blackguard!"
"Don't be cursing, Biddy."
"No, ma'am; only he must be cursed, sooner or later. Well, when she comed to herself, she begged av' me to help her to bed, and she went up to her room, and laid herself down, and I thought to myself that at any rate it was all over for that night. When she war gone, the masther he soon come back into the house, and begun calling for the sperrits again, like mad; and Terry said that when he tuk the biling wather into the room, Mr Barry war just like the divil--as he's painted, only for his ears. After that Terry wint to bed; and I and Judy weren't long afther him, for we didn't care to be sitting up alone wid him, and he mad dhrunk. So we turned in, and we were in bed maybe two hours or so, and fast enough, when down come the misthress--as pale as a sheet, wid a candle in her hand, and begged me, for dear life, to come up into her room to her, and so I did, in coorse. And then she tould me all--and, not contint with what he'd done down stairs, but the dhrunken ruffian must come up into her bed-room and swear the most dreadfullest things to her you iver heerd, Mrs Kelly. The words he war afther using, and the things he said, war most horrid; and Miss Anty wouldn't for her dear life, nor for all the money in Dunmore, stop another night, nor another day in the house wid him."
"But, is she much hurt, Biddy?"
"Oh! her head's cut, dreadful, where she fell, ma'am: and he shuck the very life out of her poor carcase; so he did, Mrs Kelly, the ruffian!"
"Don't be cursing, I tell you, girl. And what is it your misthress is wishing to do now? Did she tell you to come to me?"
"No, ma'am; she didn't exactly tell me--only as she war saying that she wouldn't for anything be staying in the house with Mr Barry; and as she didn't seem to be knowing where she'd be going, and av' she be raally going to be married to Mr Martin--" "Drat Mr Martin, you fool! Did she tell you she wanted to come here?" .
"She didn't quite say as much as that. To tell the thruth, thin, it wor I that said it, and she didn't unsay it; so, wid that, I thought I'd come down here the first thing, and av' you, Mrs Kelly, wor thinking it right, we'd get her out of the house before the masther's stirring."
The widow was a prudent woman, and she stood, for some time, considering; for she felt that, if she held out her hand to Anty now, she must stick to her through and through in the battle which there would be between her and her brother; and there might be more plague than profit in that. But then, again, she was not at all so indifferent as she had appeared to be, to her favourite son's marrying four hundred a-year. She was angry at his thinking of such a thing without consulting her; she feared the legal difficulties he must encounter; and she didn't like the thoughts of its being said that her son had married an old fool, and cozened her out of her money. But still, four hundred a-year was a great thing; and Anty was a good-tempered tractable young woman, of the right religion, and would not make a bad wife; and, on reconsideration, Mrs Kelly thought the thing wasn't to be sneezed at. Then, again, she hated Barry, and, having a high spirit, felt indignant that he should think of preventing her son from marrying his sister, if the two of them chose to do it; and she knew she'd be able, and willing enough, too, to tell him a bit of her mind, if there should be occasion. And lastly, and most powerfully of all, the woman's feeling came in to overcome her prudential scruples, and to open her heart and her house to a poor, kindly, innocent creature, ill-treated as Anty Lynch had been. She was making up her mind what to do, and determining to give battle royal to Barry and all his satellites, on behalf of Anty, when Biddy interrupted her by saying,-- "I hope I warn't wrong, ma'am, in coming down and throubling you so arly? I thought maybe you'd be glad to befrind Miss Anty--seeing she and Miss Meg, and Miss Jane, is so frindly."
"No, Biddy;--for a wondher, you're right, this morning. Mr Barry won't be stirring yet?"
"Divil a stir, ma'am! The dhrunkenness won't be off him yet this long while. And will I go up, and be bringing Miss Anty down, ma'am?"
"Wait a while. Sit to the fire there, and warm your shins. You're a good girl. I'll go and get on my shoes and stockings, and my cloak, and bonnet. I must go up wid you myself, and ask yer misthress down, as she should be asked. They'll be telling lies on her 'av she don't lave the house dacently, as she ought."
"More power to you thin, Mrs Kelly, this blessed morning, for a kind good woman as you are, God bless you!" whimpered forth Biddy, who, now that she had obtained her request, began to cry, and to stuff the corner of her petticoat into her eyes.
"Whist, you fool--whist," said the widow. "Go and get up Sally--you know where she sleeps--and tell her to put down a fire in the little parlour upstairs, and to get a cup of tay ready, and to have Miss Meg up. Your misthress'll be the better of a quiet sleep afther the night she's had, and it'll be betther for her jist popping into Miss Meg's bed than getting between a pair of cowld sheets."
These preparations met with Biddy's entire approval, for she reiterated her blessings on the widow, as she went to announce all the news to Sally and Kate, while Mrs Kelly made such preparations as were fitting for a walk, at that early hour, up to Dunmore House.
They were not long before they were under weigh, but they did not reach the house quite so quickly as Biddy had left it. Mrs Kelly had to pick her way in the half light, and observed that "she'd never been up to the house since old Simeon Lynch built it, and when the stones were laying for it, she didn't think she ever would; but one never knowed what changes might happen in this world."
They were soon in the house, for Judy was up to let them in; and though she stared when she saw Mrs Kelly, she merely curtsied, and said nothing.
The girl went upstairs first, with the candle, and Mrs Kelly followed, very gently, on tiptoe. She need not have been so careful to avoid waking Barry, for, had a drove of oxen been driven upstairs, it would not have roused him. However, up she crept,--her thick shoes creaking on every stair,--and stood outside the door, while Biddy went in to break the news of her arrival.
Anty was still asleep, but it did not take much to rouse her; and she trembled in her bed, when, on her asking what was the matter, Mrs Kelly popped her bonnet inside the door, and said, "It's only me, my dear. Mrs Kelly, you know, from the inn," and then she very cautiously insinuated the rest of her body into the room, as though she thought that Barry was asleep under the bed, and she was afraid of treading on one of his stray fingers. "It's only me, my dear. Biddy's been down to me, like a good girl; and I tell you what--this is no place for you, just at present, Miss Anty; not till such time as things is settled a little. So I'm thinking you'd betther be slipping down wid me to the inn there, before your brother's up. There's nobody in it, not a sowl, only Meg, and Jane, and me, and we'll make you snug enough between us, never fear."
"Do, Miss Anty, dear do, darling," added Biddy. "It'll be a dale betther for you than waiting here to be batthered and bruised, and, perhaps, murthered out and out."
"Hush, Biddy--don't be saying such things," said the widow, who had a great idea of carrying on the war on her own premises, but who felt seriously afraid of Barry now that she was in his house, "don't be saying such things, to frighthen her. But you'll be asier there than here," she continued, to Anty; "and there's nothin like having things asy. So, get up alanna [12], and we'll have you warm and snug down there in no time."
[FOOTNOTE 12: alanna--my child] Anty did not want much persuading. She was soon induced to get up and dress herself, to put on her cloak and bonnet, and hurry off with the widow, before the people of Dunmore should be up to look at her going through the town to the inn; while Biddy was left to pack up such things as were necessary for her mistress' use, and enjoined to hurry down with them to the inn as quick as she could; for, as the widow said, "there war no use in letting every idle bosthoon [13] in the place see her crossing with a lot of baggage, and set them all asking the where and the why and the wherefore; though, for the matther of that, they'd all hear it soon enough."
[FOOTNOTE 13: bosthoon--a worthless fellow] To tell the truth, Mrs Kelly's courage waned from the moment of her leaving her own door, and it did not return till she felt herself within it again. Indeed, as she was leaving the gate of Dunmore House, with Anty on her arm, she was already beginning to repent what she was doing; for there were idlers about, and she felt ashamed of carrying off the young heiress. But these feelings vanished the moment she had crossed her own sill. When she had once got Anty home, it was all right. The widow Kelly seldom went out into the world; she seldom went anywhere except to mass; and, when out, she was a very modest and retiring old lady; but she could face the devil, if necessary, across her own counter.
And so Anty was rescued, for a while, from her brother's persecution. This happened on the morning on which Martin and Lord Ballindine met together at the lawyer's, when the deeds were prepared which young Kelly's genuine honesty made him think necessary before he eloped with old Sim Lynch's heiress. He would have been rather surprised to hear, at that moment, that his mother had been before him, and carried off his bride elect to the inn!
Anty was soon domesticated. The widow, very properly, wouldn't let her friends, Meg and Jane, ask her any questions at present. Sally had made, on the occasion, a pot of tea sufficient to supply the morning wants of half a regiment, and had fully determined that it should not be wasted. The Kelly girls were both up, and ready to do anything for their friend; so they got her to take a little of Sally's specific, and put her into a warm bed to sleep, quiet and secure from any interruption.
While her guest was sleeping, the widow made up her mind that her best and safest course, for the present, would be, as she expressed it to her daughter, Meg, "to keep her toe in her pump, and say nothing to nobody."
"Anty can just stay quiet and asy," she continued, "till we see what Master Barry manes to be afther; he'll find it difficult enough to move her out of this, I'm thinking, and I doubt his trying. As to money matthers, I'll neither meddle nor make, nor will you, mind; so listen to that, girls; and as to Moylan, he's a dacent quiet poor man--but it's bad thrusting any one. Av' he's her agent, however, I s'pose he'll look afther the estate; only, Barry'll be smashing the things up there at the house yonder in his anger and dhrunken fits, and it's a pity the poor girl's property should go to rack. But he's such a born divil, she's lucky to be out of his clutches alive; though, thank the Almighty, that put a good roof over the lone widow this day, he can't clutch her here. Wouldn't I like to see him come to the door and ax for her! And he can't smash the acres, nor the money they say Mulholland has, at Tuam; and faix, av' he does any harm up there at the house, shure enough Anty can make him pay for--it every pot and pan of it--out of his share, and she'll do it, too--av' she's said by me. But mind, I'll neither meddle nor make; neither do you, and then we're safe, and Anty too. And Martin'll be here soon--I wondher what good Dublin'll do him? --They might have the Repale without him, I suppose? --And when he's here, why, av' he's minded to marry her, and she's plased, why, Father Geoghegan may come down, and do it before the whole counthry, and who's ashamed? But there'll be no huggery-muggery, and schaming; that is, av' they're said by me. Faix, I'd like to know who she's to be afeared of, and she undher this roof! I s'pose Martin ain't fool enough to care for what such a fellow as Barry Lynch can do or say--and he with all the Kellys to back him; as shure they would, and why not, from the lord down? Not that I recommend the match; I think Martin a dale betther off as he is, for he's wanting nothing, and he's his own industhry--and, maybe, a handful of money besides. But, as for being afeard--I niver heard yet that a Kelly need be afeard of a Lynch in Dunmore."
In this manner did Mrs Kelly express the various thoughts that ran through her head, as she considered Anty's affairs; and if we could analyse the good lady's mind, we should probably find that the result of her reflections was a pleasing assurance that she could exercise the Christian virtues of charity and hospitality towards Anty, and, at the same time, secure her son's wishes and welfare, without subjecting her own name to any obloquy, or putting herself to any loss or inconvenience. She determined to put no questions to Anty, nor even to allude to her brother, unless spoken to on the subject; but, at the same time, she stoutly resolved to come to no terms with Barry, and to defy him to the utmost, should he attempt to invade her in her own territories.
After a sound sleep Anty got up, much strengthened and refreshed, and found the two Kelly girls ready to condole with, or congratulate her, according to her mood and spirits. In spite of their mother's caution, they were quite prepared for gossiping, as soon as Anty showed the slightest inclination that way; and, though she at first was afraid to talk about her brother, and was even, from kindly feeling, unwilling to do so, the luxury of such an opportunity of unrestrained confidence overcame her; and, before the three had been sitting together for a couple of hours, she had described the whole interview, as well as the last drunken midnight visit of Barry's to her own bed-room, which, to her imagination, was the most horrible of all the horrors of the night.
Poor Anty. She cried vehemently that morning--more in sorrow for her brother, than in remembrance of her own fears, as she told her friends how he had threatened to shut her up in a mad-house, and then to murder her, unless she promised him not to marry; and when she described how brutally he had struck her, and how, afterwards, he had crept to her room, with his red eyes and swollen face, in the dead of the night, and, placing his hot mouth close to her ears, had dreadfully sworn that she should die, if she thought of Martin Kelly as her husband, she trembled as though she was in an ague fit.
The girls said all they could to comfort her, and they succeeded in a great degree; but they could not bring her to talk of Martin. She shuddered whenever his name was mentioned, and they began to fear that Barry's threat would have the intended effect, and frighten her from the match. However, they kindly talked of other things--of how impossible it was that she should go back to Dunmore House, and how comfortable and snug they would make her at the inn, till she got a home for herself; of what she should do, and of all their little household plans together; till Anty, when she could forget her brother's threats for a time, seemed to be more comfortable and happy than she had been for years.
In vain did the widow that morning repeatedly invoke Meg and Jane, first one and then the other, to assist in her commercial labours. In vain were Sally and Kate commissioned to bring them down. If, on some urgent behest, one of them darted down to mix a dandy of punch, or weigh a pound of sugar, when the widow was imperatively employed elsewhere, she was upstairs again, before her mother could look about her; and, at last, Mrs Kelly was obliged to content herself with the reflection that girls would be girls, and that it was "nathural and right they shouldn't wish to lave Anty alone the first morning, and she sthrange to the place."
At five o'clock, the widow, as was her custom, went up to her dinner; and Meg was then obliged to come down and mind the shop, till her sister, having dined, should come down and relieve guard. She had only just ensconced herself behind the counter, when who should walk into the shop but Barry Lynch.
Had Meg seen an ogre, or the enemy of all mankind himself, she could not, at the moment, have been more frightened; and she stood staring at him, as if the sudden loss of the power of motion alone prevented her from running away.
"I want to see Mrs Kelly," said Barry; "d'ye hear? I want to see your mother; go and tell her."
But we must go back, and see how Mr Lynch had managed to get up, and pass his morning.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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7
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MR BARRY LYNCH MAKES A MORNING CALL
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It was noon before Barry first opened his eyes, and discovered the reality of the headache which the night's miserable and solitary debauch had entailed on him. For, in spite of the oft-repeated assurance that there is not a headache in a hogshead of it, whiskey punch will sicken one, as well as more expensive and more fashionable potent drinks. Barry was very sick when he first awoke; and very miserable, too; for vague recollections of what he had done, and doubtful fears of what he might have done, crowded on him. A drunken man always feels more anxiety about what he has not done in his drunkenness, than about what he has; and so it was with Barry. He remembered having used rough language with his sister, but he could not remember how far he had gone. He remembered striking her, and he knew that the servant had come in; but he could not remember how, or with what he had struck her, or whether he had done so more than once, or whether she had been much hurt. He could not even think whether he had seen her since or not; he remembered being in the garden after she had fallen, and drinking again after that, but nothing further. Surely, he could not have killed her? he could not even have hurt her very much, or he would have heard of it before this. If anything serious had happened, the servants would have taken care that he should have heard enough about it ere now. Then he began to think what o'clock it could be, and that it must be late, for his watch was run down; the general fate of drunkards, who are doomed to utter ignorance of the hour at which they wake to the consciousness of their miserable disgrace. He feared to ring the bell for the servant; he was afraid to ask the particulars of last night's work; so he turned on his pillow, and tried to sleep again. But in vain. If he closed his eyes, Anty was before them, and he was dreaming, half awake, that he was trying to stifle her, and that she was escaping, to tell all the world of his brutality and cruelty. This happened over and over again; for when he dozed but for a minute, the same thing re-occurred, as vividly as before, and made even his waking consciousness preferable to the visions of his disturbed slumbers. So, at last, he roused himself, and endeavoured to think what he should do.
Whilst he was sitting up in his bed, and reflecting that he must undress himself before he could dress himself--for he had tumbled into bed with most of his clothes on--Terry's red head appeared at the door, showing an anxiety, on the part of its owner, to see if "the masther" was awake, but to take no step to bring about such a state, if, luckily, he still slept.
"What's the time, Terry?" said Lynch, frightened, by his own state, into rather more courtesy than he usually displayed to those dependent on him.
"Well then, I b'lieve it's past one, yer honer."
"The d----l it is! I've such a headache. I was screwed last night; eh, Terry?"
"I b'lieve yer war, yer honer."
"What o'clock was it when I went to bed?"
"Well then, I don't rightly know, Mr Barry; it wasn't only about ten when I tuk in the last hot wather, and I didn't see yer honer afther that."
"Well; tell Miss Anty to make me a cup of tea, and do you bring it up here." This was a feeler. If anything was the matter with Anty, Terry would be sure to tell him now; but he only said, "Yis, yer honer," and retreated.
Barry now comforted himself with the reflection that there was no great harm done, and that though, certainly, there had been some row between him and Anty, it would probably blow over; and then, also, he began to reflect that, perhaps, what he had said and done, would frighten her out of her match with Kelly.
In the meantime. Terry went into the kitchen, with the news that "masther was awake, and axing for tay." Biddy had considered herself entitled to remain all the morning at the inn, having, in a manner, earned a right to be idle for that day, by her activity during the night; and the other girl had endeavoured to enjoy the same luxury, for she had been found once or twice during the morning, ensconced in the kitchen, under Sally's wing; but Mrs Kelly had hunted her back, to go and wait on her master, giving her to understand that she would not receive the whole household.
"And ye're afther telling him where Miss Anty's gone, Terry?" inquired the injured fair one.
"Divil a tell for me thin,--shure, he may find it out hisself, widout my telling him."
"Faix, it's he'll be mad thin, when he finds she's taken up with the likes of the widdy Kelly!"
"And ain't she betther there, nor being murthered up here? He'd be killing her out and out some night."
"Well, but Terry, he's not so bad as all that; there's worse than him, and ain't it rasonable he shouldn't be quiet and asy, and she taking up with the likes of Martin Kelly?"
"May be so; but wouldn't she be a dale happier with Martin than up here wid him? Any ways it don't do angering him, so, get him the tay, Judy."
It was soon found that this was easier said than done, for Anty, in her confusion, had taken away the keys in her pocket, and there was no tea to be had.
The bell was now rung, and, as Barry had gradually re-assured himself, rung violently; and Terry, when he arrived distracted at the bed-room door, was angrily asked by his thirsty master why the tea didn't appear? The truth was now obliged to come out, or at any rate, part of it: so Terry answered, that Miss Anty was out, and had the keys with her.
Miss Anty was so rarely out, that Barry instantly trembled again. Had she gone to a magistrate, to swear against him? Had she run away from him? Had she gone off with Martin?
"Where the d----l's she gone, Terry?" said he, in his extremity.
"Faix, yer honour, thin, I'm not rightly knowing; but I hear tell she's down at the widow Kelly's."
"Who told you, you fool?"
"Well thin, yer honer, it war Judy."
"And where's Judy?"
And it ended in Judy's being produced, and the two of them, at length, explained to their master, that the widow had come up early in the morning and fetched her away; and Judy swore "that not a know she knowed how it had come about, or what had induced the widow to come, or Miss Anty to go, or anything about it; only, for shure, Miss Anty was down there, snug enough, with Miss Jane and Miss Meg; and the widdy war in her tantrums, and wouldn't let ony dacent person inside the house-door--barring Biddy. And that wor all she knowed av' she wor on the book."
The secret was now out. Anty had left him, and put herself under the protection of Martin Kelly's mother; had absolutely defied him, after all his threats of the preceding night. What should he do now! All his hatred for her returned again, all his anxious wishes that she might be somehow removed from his path, as an obnoxious stumbling-block. A few minutes ago, he was afraid he had murdered her, and he now almost wished that he had done so. He finished dressing himself, and then sat down in the parlour, which had been the scene of his last night's brutality, to concoct fresh schemes for the persecution of his sister.
In the meantime, Terry rushed down to the inn, demanding the keys, and giving Mrs Kelly a fearful history of his master's anger. This she very wisely refrained from retailing, but, having procured the keys, gave them to the messenger, merely informing him, that "thanks to God's kind protection, Miss Anty was tolerably well over the last night's work, and he might tell his master so."
This message Terry thought it wisest to suppress, so he took the breakfast up in silence, and his master asked no more questions. He was very sick and pale, and could eat nothing; but he drank a quantity of tea, and a couple of glasses of brandy-and-water, and then he felt better, and again began to think what measures he should take, what scheme he could concoct, for stopping this horrid marriage, and making his sister obedient to his wishes. "Confound her," he said, almost aloud, as he thought, with bitter vexation of spirit, of her unincumbered moiety of the property, "confound them all!" grinding his teeth, and meaning by the "all" to include with Anty his father, and every one who might have assisted his father in making the odious will, as well as his own attorney in Tuam, who wouldn't find out some legal expedient by which he could set it aside. And then, as he thought of the shameful persecution of which he was the victim, he kicked the fender with impotent violence, and, as the noise of the falling fire irons added to his passion, he reiterated his kicks till the unoffending piece of furniture was smashed; and then with manly indignation he turned away to the window.
But breaking the furniture, though it was what the widow predicted of him, wouldn't in any way mend matters, or assist him in getting out of his difficulties. What was he to do? He couldn't live on £200 a-year; he couldn't remain in Dunmore, to be known by every one as Martin Kelly's brother-in-law; he couldn't endure the thoughts of dividing the property with such "a low-born huxtering blackguard", as he called him over and over again. He couldn't stay there, to be beaten by him in the course of legal proceedings, or to give him up amicable possession of what ought to have been--what should have been his--what he looked upon as his own. He came back, and sat down again over the fire, contemplating the debris of the fender, and turning all these miserable circumstances over in his mind. After remaining there till five o'clock, and having fortified himself with sundry glasses of wine, he formed his resolution. He would make one struggle more; he would first go down to the widow, and claim his sister, as a poor simple young woman, inveigled away from her natural guardian; and, if this were unsuccessful, as he felt pretty sure it would be, he would take proceedings to prove her a lunatic. If he failed, he might still delay, and finally put off the marriage; and he was sure he could get some attorney to put him in the way of doing it, and to undertake the work for him. His late father's attorney had been a fool, in not breaking the will, or at any rate trying it, and he would go to Daly. Young Daly, he knew, was a sharp fellow, and wanted practice, and this would just suit him. And then, if at last he found that nothing could be done by this means, if his sister and the property _must_ go from him, he would compromise the matter with the bridegroom, he would meet him half way, and, raising what money he could on his share of the estate, give leg bail to his creditors, and go to some place abroad, where tidings of Dunmore would never reach him. What did it matter what people said? he should never hear it. He would make over the whole property to Kelly, on getting a good life income out of it. Martin was a prudent fellow, and would jump at such a plan. As he thought of this, he even began to wish that it was done; he pictured to himself the easy pleasures, the card-tables, the billiard-rooms, and cafés of some Calais or Boulogne; pleasures which he had never known, but which had been so glowingly described to him; and he got almost cheerful again as he felt that, in any way, there might be bright days yet in store for him.
He would, however, still make the last effort for the whole stake. It would be time enough to give in, and make the best of a _pis aller_ [14], when he was forced to do so. If beaten, he would make use of Martin Kelly; but he would first try if he couldn't prove him to be a swindling adventurer, and his sister to be an idiot.
[FOOTNOTE 14: pis aller--(French) last resort] Much satisfied at having come to this salutary resolution, he took up his hat, and set out for the widow's, in order to put into operation the first part of the scheme. He rather wished it over, as he knew that Mrs Kelly was no coward, and had a strong tongue in her head. However, it must be done, and the sooner the better. He first of all looked at himself in his glass, to see that his appearance was sufficiently haughty and indignant, and, as he flattered himself, like that of a gentleman singularly out of his element in such a village as Dunmore; and then, having ordered his dinner to be ready on his return, he proceeded on his voyage for the recovery of his dear sister.
Entering the shop, he communicated his wishes to Meg, in the manner before described; and, while she was gone on her errand, he remained alone there, lashing his boot, in the most approved, but, still, in a very common-place manner.
"Oh, mother!" said Meg, rushing into the room where her mother, and Jane, and Anty, were at dinner, "there's Barry Lynch down in the shop, wanting you."
"Oh my!" said Jane. "Now sit still, Anty dear, and he can't come near you. Shure, he'll niver be afther coming upstairs, will he, Meg?"
Anty, who had begun to feel quite happy in her new quarters, and among her kind friends, turned pale, and dropped her knife and fork. "What'll I do, Mrs Kelly?" she said, as she saw the old lady complacently get up. "You're not going to give me up? You'll not go to him?"
"Faith I will thin, my dear," replied the widow; "never fear else--I'll go to him, or any one else that sends to me in a dacent manner. May-be it's wanting tay in the shop he is. I'll go to him immediately. But, as for giving you up, I mane you to stay here, till you've a proper home of your own; and Barry Lynch has more in him than I think, av' he makes me alter my mind. Set down quiet, Meg, and get your dinner." And the widow got up, and proceeded to the shop.
The girls were all in commotion. One went to the door at the top of the stairs, to overhear as much as possible of what was to take place; and the other clasped Anty's hand, to re-assure her, having first thrown open the door of one of the bed-rooms, that she might have a place of retreat in the event of the enemy succeeding in pushing his way upstairs.
"Your humble sarvant, Mr Lynch," said the widow, entering the shop and immediately taking up a position of strength in her accustomed place behind the counter. "Were you wanting me, this evening?" and she took up the knife with which she cut penn'orths of tobacco for her customers, and hitting the counter with its wooden handle looked as hard as copper, and as bold as brass.
"Yes, Mrs Kelly," said Barry, with as much dignity as he could muster, "I do want to speak to you. My sister has foolishly left her home this morning, and my servants tell me she is under your roof. Is this true?"
"Is it Anty? Indeed she is thin: ating her dinner, upstairs, this very moment;" and she rapped the counter again, and looked her foe in the face.
"Then, with your leave, Mrs Kelly, I'll step up, and speak to her. I suppose she's alone?"
"Indeed she ain't thin, for she's the two girls ating wid her, and myself too, barring that I'm just come down at your bidding. No; we're not so bad as that, to lave her all alone; and as for your seeing her, Mr Lynch, I don't think she's exactly wishing it at present; so, av' you've a message, I'll take it."
"You don't mean to say that Miss Lynch--my sister--is in this inn, and that you intend to prevent my seeing her? You'd better take care what you're doing, Mrs Kelly. I don't want to say anything harsh at present, but you'd better take care what you're about with me and my family, or you'll find yourself in a scrape that you little bargain for."
"I'll take care of myself, Mr Barry; never fear for me, darling; and, what's more, I'll take care of your sister, too. And, to give you a bit of my mind--she'll want my care, I'm thinking, while you're in the counthry."
"I've not come here to listen to impertinence, Mrs Kelly, and I will not do so. In fact, it is very unwillingly that I came into this house at all."
"Oh, pray lave it thin, pray lave it! We can do without you."
"Perhaps you will have the civility to listen to me. It is very unwillingly, I say, that I have come here at all; but my sister, who is, unfortunately, not able to judge for herself, is here. How she came here I don't pretend to say--" "Oh, she walked," said the widow, interrupting him; "she walked, quiet and asy, out of your door, and into mine. But that's a lie, for it was out of her own. She didn't come through the kay-hole, nor yet out of the window."
"I'm saying nothing about how she came here, but here she is, poor creature!"
"Poor crature, indeed! She was like to be a poor crature, av' she stayed up there much longer."
"Here she is, I say, and I consider it my duty to look after her. You cannot but be aware, Mrs Kelly, that this is not a fit place for Miss Lynch. You must be aware that a road-side public-house, however decent, or a village shop, however respectable, is not the proper place for my sister; and, though I may not yet be legally her guardian, I am her brother, and am in charge of her property, and I insist on seeing her. It will be at your peril if you prevent me."
"Have you done, now, Misther Barry?"
"That's what I've got to say; and I think you've sense enough to see the folly--not to speak of the danger, of preventing me from seeing my sister."
"That's your say, Misther Lynch; and now, listen to mine. Av' Miss Anty was wishing to see you, you'd be welcome upstairs, for her sake; but she ain't, so there's an end of that; for not a foot will you put inside this, unless you're intending to force your way, and I don't think you'll be for trying that. And as to bearing the danger, why, I'll do my best; and, for all the harm you're likely to do me--that's by fair manes,--I don't think I'll be axing any one to help me out of it. So, good bye t' ye, av' you've no further commands, for I didn't yet well finish the bit I was ating."
"And you mean to say, Mrs Kelly, you'll take upon yourself to prevent my seeing my sister?"
"Indeed I do; unless she was wishing it, as well as yourself; and no mistake."
"And you'll do that, knowing, as you do, that the unfortunate young woman is of weak mind, and unable to judge for herself, and that I'm her brother, and her only living relative and guardian?"
"All blathershin, Masther Barry," said the uncourteous widow, dropping the knife from her hand, and smacking her fingers: "as for wake mind, it's sthrong enough to take good care of herself and her money too, now she's once out of Dunmore House. There many waker than Anty Lynch, though few have had worse tratement to make them so. As for guardian, I'm thinking it's long since she was of age, and, av' her father didn't think she wanted one, when he made his will, you needn't bother yourself about it, now she's no one to plaze only herself. And as for brother, Masther Barry, why didn't you think of that before you struck her, like a brute, as you are--before you got dhrunk, like a baste, and then threatened to murdher her? Why didn't you think about brother and sisther before you thried to rob the poor _wake_ crature, as you call her; and when you found she wasn't quite wake enough, as you call it, swore to have her life, av' she wouldn't act at your bidding? That's being a brother and a guardian, is it, Masther Barry? Talk to me of danger, you ruffian," continued the widow, with her back now thoroughly up; "you'd betther look to yourself, or I know who'll be in most danger. Av' it wasn't the throuble it'd be to Anty,--and, God knows, she's had throubles enough, I'd have had her before the magisthrates before this, to tell of what was done last night up at the house, yonder. But mind, she can do it yet, and, av' you don't take yourself very asy, she shall. Danger, indeed! a robber and ruffian like you, to talk of danger to me--and his _dear_ sisther, too, and aftimer trying his best, last night, to murdher her!"
These last words, with a long drawl on the word _dear_, were addressed rather to the crowd, whom the widow's loud voice had attracted into the open shop, than to Barry, who stood, during this tirade, half stupefied with rage, and half frightened, at the open attack made on him with reference to his ill-treatment of Anty. However, he couldn't pull in his horns now, and he was obliged, in self-defence, to brazen it out.
"Very well, Mrs Kelly--you shall pay for this impudence, and that dearly. You've invented these lies, as a pretext for getting my sister and her property into your hands!"
"Lies!" screamed the widow; "av' you say lies to me agin, in this house, I'll smash the bones of ye myself, with the broom-handle. Lies, indeed! and from you, Barry Lynch, the biggest liar in all Connaught--not to talk of robber and ruffian! You'd betther take yourself out of that, fair and asy, while you're let. You'll find you'll have the worst of it, av' you come rampaging here wid me, my man;" and she turned round to the listening crowd for sympathy, which those who dared were not slow in giving her.
"And that's thrue for you, Mrs Kelly, Ma'am," exclaimed one.
"It's a shame for him to come storming here, agin a lone widdy, so it is," said a virago, who seemed well able, like the widow herself, to take her own part.
"Who iver knew any good of a Lynch--barring Miss Anty herself?" argued a third.
"The Kellys is always too good for the likes of them," put in a fourth, presuming that the intended marriage was the subject immediately in discourse.
"Faix, Mr Martin's too good for the best of 'em," declared another.
"Niver mind Mr Martin, boys," said the widow, who wasn't well pleased to have her son's name mentioned in the affair--"it's no business of his, one way or another; he ain't in Dunmore, nor yet nigh it. Miss Anty Lynch has come to me for protection; and, by the Blessed Virgin, she shall have it, as long as my name's Mary Kelly, and I ain't like to change it; so that's the long and short of it, Barry Lynch. So you may go and get dhrunk agin as soon as you plaze, and bate and bang Terry Rooney, or Judy Smith; only I think either on 'em's more than a match for you."
"Then I tell you, Mrs Kelly," replied Barry, who was hardly able to get in a word, "that you'll hear more about it. Steps are now being taken to prove Miss Lynch a lunatic, as every one here knows she unfortunately is; and, as sure as you stand there, you'll have to answer for detaining her; and you're much mistaken if you think you'll get hold of her property, even though she were to marry your son, for, I warn you, she's not her own mistress, or able to be so."
"Drat your impudence, you low-born ruffian," answered his opponent; "who cares for her money? It's not come to that yet, that a Kelly is wanting to schame money out of a Lynch."
"I've nothing more to say, since you insist on keeping possession of my sister," and Barry turned to the door. "But you'll be indicted for conspiracy, so you'd better be prepared."
"Conspiracy, is it?" said one of Mrs Kelly's admirers; "maybe, Ma'am, he'll get you put in along with Dan and Father Tierney, God bless them! It's conspiracy they're afore the judges for."
Barry now took himself off, before hearing the last of the widow's final peal of thunder.
"Get out wid you! You're no good, and never will be. An' it wasn't for the young woman upstairs, I'd have the coat off your back, and your face well mauled, before I let you out of the shop!" And so ended the interview, in which the anxious brother can hardly be said to have been triumphant, or successful.
The widow, on the other hand, seemed to feel that she had acquitted herself well, and that she had taken the orphan's part, like a woman, a Christian, and a mother; and merely saying, with a kind of inward chuckle, "Come to me, indeed, with his roguery! he's got the wrong pig by the ear!" she walked off, to join the more timid trio upstairs, one of whom was speedily sent down, to see that business did not go astray.
And then she gave a long account of the interview to Anty and Meg, which was hardly necessary, as they had heard most of what had passed. The widow however was not to know that, and she was very voluble in her description of Barry's insolence, and of the dreadfully abusive things he had said to her--how he had given her the lie, and called her out of her name. She did not, however, seem to be aware that she had, herself, said a word which was more than necessarily violent; and assured Anty over and over again, that, out of respect to her feelings, and because the man was, after all, her brother, she had refrained from doing and saying what she would have done and said, had she been treated in such a manner by anybody else. She seemed, however, in spite of the ill-treatment which she had undergone, to be in a serene and happy state of mind. She shook Anty's two hands in hers, and told her to make herself "snug and asy where she was, like a dear girl, and to fret for nothing, for no one could hurt or harum her, and she undher Mary Kelly's roof." Then she wiped her face in her apron, set to at her dinner; and even went so far as to drink a glass of porter, a thing she hadn't done, except on a Sunday, since her eldest daughter's marriage.
Barry Lynch sneaked up the town, like a beaten dog. He felt that the widow had had the best of it, and he also felt that every one in Dunmore was against him. It was however only what he had expected, and calculated upon; and what should he care for the Dunmore people? They wouldn't rise up and kill him, nor would they be likely even to injure him. Let them hate on, he would follow his own plan. As he came near the house gate, there was sitting, as usual, Jacky, the fool.
"Well, yer honer, Masther Barry," said Jacky, "don't forget your poor fool this blessed morning!"
"Away with you! If I see you there again, I'll have you in Bridewell, you blackguard."
"Ah, you're joking, Masther Barry. You wouldn't like to be afther doing that. So yer honer's been down to the widdy's? That's well; it's a fine thing to see you on good terms, since you're soon like to be so sib. Well, there an't no betther fellow, from this to Galway, than Martin Kelly, that's one comfort, Masther Barry."
Barry looked round for something wherewith to avenge himself for this, but Jacky was out of his reach; so he merely muttered some customary but inaudible curses, and turned into the house.
He immediately took pen, ink, and paper, and, writing the following note dispatched it to Tuam, by Terry, mounted for the occasion, and directed on no account to return without an answer. If Mr Daly wasn't at home, he was to wait for his return; that is, if he was expected home that night.
Dunmore House, Feb. 1844.
My dear Sir, I wish to consult you on legal business, which will _bear no delay_. The subject is of considerable importance, and I am induced to think it will be more ably handled by you than by Mr Blake, my father's man of business. There is a bed at your service at Dunmore House, and I shall be glad to see you to dinner to-morrow.
I am, dear Sir, Your faithful servant, BARRY LYNCH.
P.S.--You had better not mention in Tuam that you are coming to me,--not that my business is one that I intend to keep secret.
J. Daly, Esq., Solicitor, Tuam.
In about two hours' time, Terry had put the above into the hands of the person for whom it was intended, and in two more he had brought back an answer, saying that Mr Daly would be at Dunmore House to dinner on the following day. And Terry, on his journey there and back, did not forget to tell everyone he saw, from whom he came, and to whom he was going.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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8
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MR MARTIN KELLY RETURNS TO DUNMORE
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We will now return to Martin Kelly. I have before said that as soon as he had completed his legal business,--namely, his instructions for the settlement of Anty Lynch's property, respecting which he and Lord Ballindine had been together to the lawyer's in Clare Street,--he started for home, by the Ballinasloe canal-boat, and reached that famous depôt of the fleecy tribe without adventure. I will not attempt to describe the tedium of that horrid voyage, for it has been often described before; and to Martin, who was in no ways fastidious, it was not so unendurable as it must always be to those who have been accustomed to more rapid movement. Nor yet will I attempt to put on record the miserable resources of those, who, doomed to a twenty hours' sojourn in one of these floating prisons, vainly endeavour to occupy or amuse their minds. But I will advise any, who from ill-contrived arrangements, or unforeseen misfortune, [15] may find themselves on board the Ballinasloe canal-boat, to entertain no such vain dream. The _vis inertiæ_ [16] of patient endurance, is the only weapon of any use in attempting to overcome the lengthened ennui of this most tedious transit. Reading is out of the question. I have tried it myself, and seen others try it, but in vain. The sense of the motion, almost imperceptible, but still perceptible; the noises above you; the smells around you; the diversified crowd, of which you are a part; at one moment the heat this crowd creates; at the next, the draught which a window just opened behind your ears lets in on you; the fumes of punch; the snores of the man under the table; the noisy anger of his neighbour, who reviles the attendant sylph; the would-be witticisms of a third, who makes continual amorous overtures to the same overtasked damsel, notwithstanding the publicity of his situation; the loud complaints of the old lady near the door, who cannot obtain the gratuitous kindness of a glass of water; and the baby-soothing lullabies of the young one, who is suckling her infant under your elbow. These things alike prevent one from reading, sleeping, or thinking. All one can do is to wait till the long night gradually wears itself away, and reflect that, Time and the hour run through the longest day [17].
[FOOTNOTE 15: Of course it will be remembered that this was written before railways in Ireland had been constructed. (original footnote by Trollope)] [FOOTNOTE 16: vis inertiae--(Latin) the power of inertia] [FOOTNOTE 17: _Macbeth_, Act I, Sc. 3: "Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."]
I hardly know why a journey in one of these boats should be much more intolerable than travelling either outside or inside a coach; for, either in or on the coach, one has less room for motion, and less opportunity of employment. I believe the misery of the canal-boat chiefly consists in a pre-conceived and erroneous idea of its capabilities. One prepares oneself for occupation--an attempt is made to achieve actual comfort--and both end in disappointment; the limbs become weary with endeavouring to fix themselves in a position of repose, and the mind is fatigued more by the search after, than the want of, occupation.
Martin, however, made no complaints, and felt no misery. He made great play at the eternal half-boiled leg of mutton, floating in a bloody sea of grease and gravy, which always comes on the table three hours after the departure from Porto Bello. He, and others equally gifted with the _dura ilia messorum_ [18], swallowed huge collops [19] of the raw animal, and vast heaps of yellow turnips, till the pity with which a stranger would at first be inclined to contemplate the consumer of such unsavoury food, is transferred to the victim who has to provide the meal at two shillings a head. Neither love nor drink--and Martin had, on the previous day, been much troubled with both--had affected his appetite; and he ate out his money with the true persevering prudence of a Connaught man, who firmly determines not to be done.
[FOOTNOTE 18: dura ilia messorum--(Latin) the strong intestines of reapers--a quotation from Horace's _Epodes_ III. Trollope was an accomplished Latin scholar and later wrote a _Life of Cicero_. His books are full of quotations from many Roman writers.]
[FOOTNOTE 19: collops--portions of food or slices of meat] He was equally diligent at breakfast; and, at last, reached Ballinasloe, at ten o'clock the morning after he had left Dublin, in a flourishing condition. From thence he travelled, by Bianconi's car, as far as Tuam, and when there he went at once to the hotel, to get a hack car to take him home to Dunmore.
In the hotel yard he found a car already prepared for a journey; and, on giving his order for a similar vehicle for his own use, was informed, by the disinterested ostler, that the horse then being harnessed, was to take Mr Daly, the attorney, to Tuam, [20] and that probably that gentleman would not object to join him, Martin, in the conveyance. Martin, thinking it preferable to pay fourpence rather than sixpence a mile for his jaunt, acquiesced in this arrangement, and, as he had a sort of speaking acquaintance with Mr Daly, whom he rightly imagined would not despise the economy which actuated himself, he had his carpet-bag put into the well of the car, and, placing himself on it, he proceeded to the attorney's door.
[FOOTNOTE 20: The text says "Tuam," but the destination is really Dunmore.]
He soon made the necessary explanation to Mr Daly, who made no objection to the proposal; and he also throwing a somewhat diminutive carpet-bag into the same well, placed himself alongside of our friend, and they proceeded on their journey, with the most amicable feelings towards each other.
They little guessed, either the one or the other, as they commenced talking on the now all-absorbing subject of the great trial, that they were going to Dunmore for the express object--though not with the expressed purpose, of opposing each other--that Daly was to be employed to suggest any legal means for robbing Martin of a wife, and Anty of her property; and that Martin was going home with the fixed determination of effecting a wedding, to prevent which his companion was, in consideration of liberal payment, to use all his ingenuity and energy.
When they had discussed O'Connel and his companions, and their chances of liberation for four or five miles, and when Martin had warmly expressed his assurance that no jury could convict the saviours of their country, and Daly had given utterance to his legal opinion that saltpetre couldn't save them from two years in Newgate, Martin asked his companion whether he was going beyond Dunmore that night?
"No, indeed, then," replied Daly; "I have a client there now--a thing I never had in that part of the country before yesterday."
"We'll have you at the inn, then, I suppose, Mr Daly?"
"Faith, you won't, for I shall dine on velvet. My new client is one of the right sort, that can feed as well as fee a lawyer. I've got my dinner, and bed tonight, whatever else I may get."
"There's not many of that sort in Dunmore thin; any way, there weren't when I left it, a week since. Whose house are you going to, Mr Daly, av' it's not impertinent asking?"
"Barry Lynch's."
"Barry Lynch's!" re-echoed Martin; "the divil you are! I wonder what's in the wind with him now. I thought Blake always did his business?"
"The devil a know I know, so I can't tell you; and if I did, I shouldn't, you may be sure. But a man that's just come to his property always wants a lawyer; and many a one, besides Barry Lynch, ain't satisfied without two."
"Well, any way, I wish you joy of your new client. I'm not over fond of him myself, I'll own; but then there were always rasons why he and I shouldn't pull well together. Barry's always been a dale too high for me, since he was at school with the young lord. Well, good evening, Mr Daly. Never mind time car coming down the street, as you're at your friend's gate," and Martin took his bag on his arm, and walked down to the inn.
Though Martin couldn't guess, as he walked quickly down the street, what Barry Lynch could want with young Daly, who was beginning to be known as a clever, though not over-scrupulous practitioner, he felt a presentiment that it must have some reference to Anty and himself, and this made him rather uncomfortable. Could Barry have heard of his engagement? Had Anty repented of her bargain, during his short absence? Had that old reptile Moylan, played him false, and spoilt his game? "That must be it," said Martin to himself, "and it's odd but I'll be even with the schamer, yet; only she's so asy frightened! --Av' she'd the laist pluck in life, it's little I'd care for Moylan or Barry either."
This little soliloquy brought him to the inn door. Some of the tribe of loungers who were always hanging about the door, and whom in her hatred of idleness the widow would one day rout from the place, and, in her charity, feed the next, had seen Martin coming down the street, and had given intelligence in the kitchen. As he walked in, therefore, at the open door, Meg and Jane were ready to receive him in the passage. Their looks were big with some important news. Martin soon saw that they had something to tell.
"Well, girls," he said, as he chucked his bag and coat to Sally, "for heaven's sake get me something to ate, for I'm starved. What's the news at Dunmore?"
"It's you should have the news thin," said one, "and you just from Dublin."
"There's lots of news there, then; I'll tell you when I've got my dinner. How's the ould lady?" and he stepped on, as if to pass by them, upstairs.
"Stop a moment, Martin," said Meg; "don't be in a hurry; there's some one there."
"Who's there? is it a stranger?"
"Why, then, it is, and it isn't," said Jane.
"But you don't ask afther the young lady!" said her sister.
"May I be hanged thin, av' I know what the two of ye are afther! Is there people in both the rooms? Come, girls, av' ye've anything to tell, why don't you out wid it and have done? I suppose I can go into the bed-room, at any rate?"
"Aisy, Martin, and I'll tell you. Anty's in the parlour."
"In the parlour upstairs?" said he; "the deuce she is! And what brought her here? Did she quarrel with Barry, Meg?" added he, in a whisper.
"Indeed she did, out and out," said Meg.
"Oh, he used her horrible!" said Jane.
"He'll hear all about that by and by," said Meg. "Come up and see her now, Martin."
"But does mother know she's here?"
"Why, it was she brought her here! She fetched her down from the house, yesterday, before we was up."
Thus assured that Anty had not been smuggled upstairs, her lover, or suitor as he might perhaps be more confidently called, proceeded to visit her. If he wished her to believe that his first impulse, on hearing of her being in the house, had been to throw himself at her feet, it would have been well that this conversation should have been carried on out of her hearing. But Anty was not an exigent mistress, and was perfectly contented that as much of her recent history as possible should be explained before Martin presented himself.
Martin went slowly upstairs, and paused a moment at the door, as if he was a little afraid of commencing the interview; he looked round to his sisters, and made a sign to them to come in with him, and then, quickly pushing open the unfastened door, walked briskly up to Anty and shook hands with her.
"I hope you're very well, Anty," said he; "seeing you here is what I didn't expect, but I'm very glad you've come down."
"Thank ye, Martin," replied she; "it was very good of your mother, fetching me. She's been the best friend I've had many a day."
"Begad, it's a fine thing to see you and the ould lady pull so well together. It was yesterday you came here?"
"Yesterday morning. I was so glad to come! I don't know what they'd been saying to Barry; but the night before last he got drinking, and then he was very bad to me, and tried to frighten me, and so, you see, I come down to your mother till we could be friends again."
Anty's apology for being at the inn, was perhaps unnecessary; but, with the feeling so natural to a woman, she was half afraid that Martin would fancy she had run after him, and she therefore thought it as well to tell him that it was only a temporary measure. Poor Anty! At the moment she said so, she trembled at the very idea of putting herself again in her brother's power.
"Frinds, indeed!" said Meg; "how can you iver be frinds with the like of him? What nonsense you talk, Anty! Why, Martin, he was like to murdher her! --he raised his fist to her, and knocked her down--and, afther that, swore to her he'd kill her outright av' she wouldn't sware that she'd niver--" "Whist, Meg! How can you go on that way?" said Anty, interrupting her, and blushing. "I'll not stop in the room; don't you know he was dhrunk when he done all that?"
"And won't he be dhrunk again, Anty?" suggested Jane.
"Shure he will: he'll be dhrunk always, now he's once begun," replied Meg, who, of all the family was the most anxious to push her brother's suit; and who, though really fond of her friend, thought the present opportunity a great deal too good to be thrown away, and could not bear the idea of Anty's even thinking of being reconciled to her brother. "Won't he be always dhrunk now?" she continued; "and ain't we all frinds here? and why shouldn't you let me tell Martin all? Afther all's said and done, isn't he the best frind you've got?" --Here Anty blushed very red, and to tell the truth, so did Martin too--"well so he is, and unless you tell him what's happened, how's he to know what to advise; and, to tell the truth, wouldn't you sooner do what he says than any one else?"
"I'm sure I'm very much obliged to Mr Martin"--it had been plain Martin before Meg's appeal; "but your mother knows what's best for me, and I'll do whatever she says. Av' it hadn't been for her, I don't know where I'd be now."
"But you needn't quarrel with Martin because you're frinds with mother," answered Meg.
"Nonsense, Meg," said Jane, "Anty's not going to quarrel with him. You hurry her too much."
Martin looked rather stupid all this time, but he plucked up courage and said, "Who's going to quarrel? I'm shure, Anty, you and I won't; but, whatever it is Barry did to you, I hope you won't go back there again, now you're once here. But did he railly sthrike you in arnest?"
"He did, and knocked her down," said Jane.
"But won't you get your brother his dinner?" said Anty; "he must be very hungry, afther his ride--and won't you see your mother afther your journey, Mr Martin? I'm shure she's expecting you."
This, for the present, put an end to the conversation; the girls went to get something for their brother to eat, and he descended into the lower regions to pay his filial respects to his mother.
A considerable time passed before Martin returned to the meal the three young women had provided for him, during which he was in close consultation with the widow. In the first place, she began upbraiding him for his folly in wishing to marry an old maid for her money; she then taxed him with villany, for trying to cheat Anty out of her property; and when he defended himself from that charge by telling her what he had done about the settlement, she asked him how much he had to pay the rogue of a lawyer for that "gander's job". She then proceeded to point out all the difficulties which lay in the way of a marriage between him, Martin, and her, Anty; and showed how mad it was for either of them to think about it. From that, she got into a narrative of Barry's conduct, and Anty's sufferings, neither of which lost anything in the telling; and having by this time gossiped herself into a good humour, she proceeded to show how, through her means and assistance, the marriage might take place if he was still bent upon it. She eschewed all running away, and would hear of no clandestine proceedings. They should be married in the face of day, as the Kellys ought, with all their friends round them. "They'd have no huggery-muggery work, up in a corner; not they indeed! why should they? --for fear of Barry Lynch? --who cared for a dhrunken blackguard like that? --not she indeed! who ever heard of a Kelly being afraid of a Lynch? --They'd ax him to come and see his sister married, and av' he didn't like it, he might do the other thing."
And so, the widow got quite eloquent on the glories of the wedding, and the enormities of her son's future brother-in-law, who had, she assured Martin, come down and abused her horribly, in her own shop, before all the town, because she allowed Anty to stay in the house. She then proceeded to the consequences of the marriage, and expressed her hope that when Martin got all that ready money he would "do something for his poor sisthers--for Heaven knew they war like to be bad enough off, for all she'd be able to do for them!" From this she got to Martin's own future mode of life, suggesting a "small snug cottage on the farm, just big enough for them two, and, may-be, a slip of a girl servant, and not to be taring and tatthering away, as av' money had no eend; and, afther all," she added, "there war nothing like industhry; and who know'd whether that born villain, Barry, mightn't yet get sich a hoult of the money, that there'd be no getting it out of his fist?" and she then depicted, in most pathetic language, what would be the misery of herself and all the Kellys if Martin, flushed with his prosperity, were to give up the farm at Toneroe, and afterwards find that he had been robbed of his expected property, and that he had no support for himself and his young bride.
On this subject Martin considerably comforted her by assuring her that he had no thoughts of abandoning Toneroe, although he did not go so far as to acquiesce in the very small cottage; and he moreover expressed his thorough confidence that he would neither be led himself, nor lead Anty, into the imprudence of a marriage, until he had well satisfied himself that the property was safe.
The widow was well pleased to find, from Martin's prudent resolves, that he was her own son, and that she needn't blush for him; and then they parted, she to her shop, and he to his dinner: not however, before he had promised her to give up all ideas of a clandestine marriage, and to permit himself to be united to his wife in the face of day, as became a Kelly.
The evening passed over quietly and snugly at the inn. Martin had not much difficulty in persuading his three companions to take a glass of punch each out of his tumbler, and less in getting them to take a second, and, before they went to bed, he and Anty were again intimate. And, as he was sitting next her for a couple of hours on the little sofa opposite the fire, it is more than probable that he got his arm round her waist--a comfortable position, which seemed in no way to shock the decorum of either Meg or Jane.
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{
"id": "4917"
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9
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MR DALY, THE ATTORNEY
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We must now see how things went on in the enemy's camp.
The attorney drove up to the door of Dunmore House on his car, and was shown into the drawing-room, where he met Barry Lynch. The two young men were acquainted, though not intimate with each other, and they bowed, and then shook hands; and Barry told the attorney that he was welcome to Dunmore House, and the attorney made another bow, rubbed his hands before the fire and said it was a very cold evening; and Barry said it was 'nation cold for that time of the year; which, considering that they were now in the middle of February, showed that Barry was rather abroad, and didn't exactly know what to say. He remained for about a minute, silent before the fire, and then asked Daly if he'd like to see his room; and, the attorney acquiescing, he led him up to it, and left him there.
The truth was, that, as the time of the man's visit had drawn nearer, Barry had become more and more embarrassed; and now that the attorney had absolutely come, his employer felt himself unable to explain the business before dinner. "These fellows are so confoundedly sharp--I shall never be up to him till I get a tumbler of punch on board," said he to himself, comforting himself with the reflection; "besides, I'm never well able for anything till I get a little warmed. We'll get along like a house on fire when we've got the hot water between us." The true meaning of all which was, that he hadn't the courage to make known his villanous schemes respecting his sister till he was half drunk; and, in order the earlier to bring about this necessary and now daily consummation, he sneaked downstairs and took a solitary glass of brandy to fortify himself for entertaining the attorney.
The dinner was dull enough; for, of course, as long as the man was in the room there was no talking on business, and, in his present frame of mind Barry was not likely to be an agreeable companion. The attorney ate his dinner as if it was a part of the fee, received in payment of the work he was to do, and with a determination to make the most of it.
At last, the dishes disappeared, and with them Terry Rooney; who, however, like a faithful servant, felt too strong an interest in his master's affairs to be very far absent when matters of importance were likely to be discussed.
"And now, Mr Daly," said Lynch, "we can be snug here, without interruption, for an hour or two. You'll find that whiskey old and good, I think; but, if you prefer wine, that port on the table came from Barton's, in Sackville Street."
"Thank ye; if I take anything, it'll be a glass of punch. But as we've business to talk of, may-be I'd better keep my head clear."
"My head's never so clear then, as when I've done my second tumbler. I'm never so sure of what I'm about as when I'm a little warmed; 'but,' says you, 'because my head's strong, it's no reason another's shouldn't be weak:' but do as you like; liberty hall here now, Mr Daly; that is, as far as I'm concerned. You knew my father, I believe, Mr Daly?"
"Well then, Mr Lynch, I didn't exactly know him; but living so near him, and he having so much business in the county, and myself having a little, I believe I've been in company with him, odd times."
"He was a queer man: wasn't he, Mr Daly?"
"Was he, then? I dare say. I didn't know much about him. I'll take the sugar from you, Mr Lynch; I believe I might as well mix a drop, as the night's cold."
"That's right. I thought you weren't the fellow to sit with an empty glass before you. But, as I was saying before, the old boy was a queer hand; that is, latterly--for the last year or so. Of course you know all about his will?"
"Faith then, not much. I heard he left a will, dividing the property between you and Miss Lynch."
"He did! Just at the last moment, when the breath wasn't much more than left in him, he signed a will, making away half the estate, just as you say, to my sister. Blake could have broke the will, only he was so d---- pig-headed and stupid. It's too late now, I suppose?"
"Why, I could hardly answer that, you know, as I never heard the circumstances; but I was given to understand that Blake consulted McMahon; and that McMahon wouldn't take up the case, as there was nothing he could put before the Chancellor. Mind I'm only repeating what people said in Tuam, and about there. Of course, I couldn't think of advising till I knew the particulars. Was it on this subject, Mr Lynch, you were good enough to send for me?"
"Not at all, Mr Daly. I look upon that as done and gone; bad luck to Blake and McMahon, both. The truth is, between you and me, Daly--I don't mind telling you; as I hope now you will become my man of business, and it's only fair you should know all about it--the truth is, Blake was more interested on the other side, and he was determined the case shouldn't go before the Chancellor. But, when my father signed that will, it was just after one of those fits he had lately; that could be proved, and he didn't know what he was doing, from Adam! He didn't know what was in the will, nor, that he was signing a will at all; so help me, he didn't. However, that's over. It wasn't to talk about that that I sent for you; only, sorrow seize the rogue that made the old man rob me! It wasn't Anty herself, poor creature; she knew nothing about it; it was those who meant to get hold of my money, through her, that did it. Poor Anty! Heaven knows she wasn't up to such a dodge as that!"
"Well, Mr Lynch, of course I know nothing of the absolute facts; but from what I hear, I think it's as well to let the will alone. The Chancellor won't put a will aside in a hurry; it's always a difficult job--would cost an immense sum of money, which should, any way, come out of the property; and, after all, the chances are ten to one you'd be beat."
"Perhaps you're right, now; though I'm sure, had the matter been properly taken up at first--had you seen the whole case at the first start, the thing could have been done. I'm sure you would have said so; but that's over now; it's another business I want you for. But you don't drink your punch! --and it's dry work talking, without wetting one's whistle," and Barry carried out his own recommendation.
"I'm doing very well, thank ye, Mr Lynch. And what is it I can do for you?"
"That's what I'm coming to. You know that, by the will, my sister Anty gets from four to five hundred a year?"
"I didn't know the amount; but I believe she has half whatever there is."
"Exactly: half the land, half the cash, half the house, half everything, except the debts! and those were contracted in my name, and I must pay them all. Isn't that hard, Mr Daly?"
"I didn't know your father had debts."
"Oh, but he had--debts which ought to have been his; though, as I said, they stand in my name, and I must pay them."
"And, I suppose, what you now want is to saddle the debts on the entire property? If you can really prove that the debts were incurred for your father's benefit, I should think you might do that. But has your sister refused to pay the half? They can't be heavy. Won't Miss Lynch agree to pay the half herself?"
This last lie of Barry's--for, to give the devil his due, old Sim hadn't owed one penny for the last twenty years--was only a bright invention of the moment, thrown off by our injured hero to aggravate the hardships of his case; but he was determined to make the most of it.
"Not heavy? --faith, they _are_ heavy, and d----d heavy too, Mr Daly! --what'll take two hundred a-year out of my miserable share of the property; divil a less. Oh! there's never any knowing how a man'll cut up till he's gone."
"That's true; but how could your father owe such a sum as that, and no one know it? Why, that must be four or five thousand pounds?"
"About five, I believe."
"And you've put your name to them, isn't that it?"
"Something like it. You know, he and Lord Ballindine, years ago, were fighting about the leases we held under the old Lord; and then, the old man wanted ready money, and borrowed it in Dublin; and, some years since--that is, about three years ago,--sooner than see any of the property sold, I took up the debt myself. You know, it was all as good as my own then; and now, confound it! I must pay the whole out of the miserable thing that's left me under this infernal will. But it wasn't even about that I sent for you; only, I must explain exactly how matters are, before I come to the real point."
"But your father's name must be joined with yours in the debt; and, if so, you can come upon the entire property for the payment. There's no difficulty about that; your sister, of course, must pay the half."
"It's not so, my dear fellow. I can't explain the thing exactly, but it's I that owe the money, and I must pay it. But it's no good talking of that. Well, you see, Anty that's my sister, has this property all in her own hands. But you don't drink your punch," and Barry mixed his third tumbler.
"Of course she has; and, surely she won't refuse to pay half the claims on the estate?"
"Never mind the claims!" answered Barry, who began to fear that he had pushed his little invention a thought too far. "I tell you, I must stand to them; you don't suppose I'd ask her to pay a penny as a favour? No; I'm a little too proud for that. Besides, it'd be no use, not the least; and that's what I'm coming to. You see, Anty's got this money, and--You know, don't you, Mr Daly, poor Anty's not just like other people?"
"No," said Mr Daly--"I didn't. I can't say I know much about Miss Lynch. I never had the pleasure of seeing her."
"But did you never hear she wasn't quite right?"
"Indeed, I never did, then."
"Well that's odd; but we never had it much talked about, poor creature. Indeed, there was no necessity for people to know much about it, for she never gave any trouble; and, to tell the truth, as long as she was kept quiet, she never gave us occasion to think much about it. But, confound them for rogues--those who have got hold of her now, have quite upset her."
"But what is it ails your sister, Mr Lynch?"
"To have it out, at once, then--she's not right in her upper story. Mind, I don't mean she's a downright lunatic; but she's cracked, poor thing, and quite unable to judge for herself, in money-matters, and such like; and, though she might have done very well, poor thing, and passed without notice, if she'd been left quiet, as was always intended, I'm afraid now, unless she's well managed, she'd end her life in the Ballinasloe Asylum."
The attorney made no answer to this, although Barry paused, to allow him to do so. Daly was too sharp, and knew his employer's character too well to believe all he said, and he now began to fancy that he saw what the affectionate brother was after. "Well, Daly," continued Barry, after a minute's pause; "after the old man died, we went on quiet enough for some time. I was up in Dublin mostly, about that confounded loan, and poor Anty was left here by herself; and what should she do, but take up with a low huxter's family in the town here."
"That's bad," said the attorney. "Was there an unmarried young man among them at all?"
"Faith there was so; as great a blackguard as there is in Connaught."
"And Miss Lynch is going to marry him?"
"That's just it, Daly; that's what we must prevent. You know, for the sake of the family, I couldn't let it go on. Then, poor creature, she'd be plundered and ill-treated--she'd be a downright idiot in no time; and, you know, Daly, the property'd go to the devil; and where'd I be then?"
Daly couldn't help thinking that, in all probability, his kind host would not be long in following the property; but he did not say so. He merely asked the name of the "blackguard" whom Miss Anty meant to marry?
"Wait till I tell you the whole of it. The first thing I heard was, that Anty had made a low ruffian, named Moylan, her agent."
"I know him; she couldn't have done much worse. Well?"
"She made him her agent without speaking to me, or telling me a word about it; and I couldn't make out what had put it into her head, till I heard that this old rogue was a kind of cousin to some people living here, named Kelly."
"What, the widow, that keeps the inn?"
"The very same! confound her, for an impertinent scheming old hag, as she is. Well; that's the house that Anty was always going to; drinking tea with the daughters, and walking with the son--an infernal young farmer, that lives with them, the worst of the whole set."
"What, Martin Kelly? --There's worse fellows than him, Mr Lynch."
"I'll be hanged if I know them, then; but if there are, I don't choose my poor sister--only one remove from an idiot, and hardly that--to be carried off from her mother's house, and married to such a fellow as that. Why, it's all the same infernal plot; it's the same people that got the old man to sign the will, when he was past his senses!"
"Begad, they must have been clever to do that! How the deuce could they have got the will drawn?"
"I tell you, they _did_ do it!" answered Barry, whose courage was now somewhat raised by the whiskey. "That's neither here nor there, but they did it; and, when the old fool was dead, they got this Moylan made Anty's agent: and then, the hag of a mother comes up here, before daylight, and bribes the servant, and carries her off down to her filthy den, which she calls an inn; and when I call to see my sister, I get nothing but insolence and abuse."
"And when did this happen? When did Miss Lynch leave the house?"
"Yesterday morning, about four o'clock."
"She went down of her own accord, though?"
"D----l a bit. The old hag came up here, and filched her out of her bed."
"But she couldn't have taken your sister away, unless she had wished to go."
"Of course she wished it; but a silly creature like her can't be let to do all she wishes. . She wishes to get a husband, and doesn't care what sort of a one she gets; but you don't suppose an old maid--forty years old, who has always been too stupid and foolish ever to be seen or spoken to, should be allowed to throw away four hundred a-year, on the first robber that tries to cheat her? You don't mean to say there isn't a law to prevent that?"
"I don't know how you'll prevent it, Mr Lynch. She's her own mistress."
"What the d----l! Do you mean to say there's nothing to prevent an idiot like that from marrying?"
"If she _was_ an idiot! But I think you'll find your sister has sense enough to marry whom she pleases."
"I tell you she _is_ an idiot; not raving, mind; but everybody knows she was never fit to manage anything."
"Who'd prove it!"
"Why, I would. Divil a doubt of it! I could prove that she never could, all her life."
"Ah, my dear Sir! you couldn't do it; nor could I advise you to try--that is, unless there were plenty more who could swear positively that she was out of her mind. Would the servants swear that? Could you yourself, now, positively swear that she was out of her mind?"
"Why--she never had any mind to be out of."
"Unless you are very sure she is, and, for a considerable time back, has been, a confirmed lunatic, you'd be very wrong--very ill-advised, I mean, Mr Lynch, to try that game at all. Things would come out which you wouldn't like; and your motives would be--would be--" seen through at once, the attorney was on the point of saying, but he stopped himself, and finished by the words "called in question".
"And I'm to sit here, then, and see that young blackguard Kelly, run off with what ought to be my own, and my sister into the bargain? I'm blessed if I do! If you can't put me in the way of stopping it, I'll find those that can."
"You're getting too much in a hurry, Mr Lynch. Is your sister at the inn now?"
"To be sure she is."
"And she is engaged to this young man?"
"She is."
"Why, then, she might be married to him to-morrow, for anything you know."
"She might, if he was here. But they tell me he's away, in Dublin."
"If they told you so to-day, they told you wrong: he came into Dunmore, from Tuam, on the same car with myself, this very afternoon."
"What, Martin Kelly? Then he'll be off with her this night, while we're sitting here!" and Barry jumped up, as if to rush out, and prevent the immediate consummation of his worst fears.
"Stop a moment, Mr Lynch," said the more prudent and more sober lawyer. "If they were off, you couldn't follow them; and, if you did follow and find them, you couldn't prevent their being married, if such were their wish, and they had a priest ready to do it. Take my advice; remain quiet where you are, and let's talk the matter over. As for taking out a commission 'de lunatico', as we call it, you'll find you couldn't do it. Miss Lynch may be a little weak or so in the upper story, but she's not a lunatic; and you couldn't make her so, if you had half Dunmore to back you, because she'd be brought before the Commissioners herself, and that, you know, would soon settle the question. But you might still prevent the marriage, for a time, at any rate--at least, I think so; and, after that, you must trust to the chapter of accidents."
"So help me, that's all I want! If I got her once up here again, and was sure the thing was off, for a month or so, let me alone, then, for bringing her to reason!"
As Daly watched his comrade's reddening face, and saw the malicious gleam of his eyes as he declared how easily he'd manage the affair, if poor Anty was once more in the house, his heart misgave him, even though he was a sharp attorney, at the idea of assisting such a cruel brute in his cruelty; and, for a moment, he had determined to throw up the matter. Barry was so unprincipled, and so wickedly malicious in his want of principle, that he disgusted even Daly. But, on second thoughts, the lawyer remembered that if he didn't do the job, another would; and, quieting his not very violent qualms of conscience with the idea that, though employed by the brother, he might also, to a certain extent, protect the sister, he proceeded to give his advice as to the course which would be most likely to keep the property out of the hands of the Kellys.
He explained to Barry that, as Anty had left her own home in company with Martin's mother, and as she now was a guest at the widow's, it was unlikely that any immediate clandestine marriage should be resorted to; that their most likely course would be to brazen the matter out, and have the wedding solemnised without any secrecy, and without any especial notice to him, Barry. That, on the next morning, a legal notice should be prepared in Tuam, and served on the widow, informing her that it was his intention to indict her for conspiracy, in enticing away from her own home his sister Anty, for the purpose of obtaining possession of her property, she being of weak mind, and not able properly to manage her own affairs; that a copy of this notice should also be sent to Martin, warning him that he would be included in the indictment if he took any proceedings with regard to Miss Lynch; and that a further copy should, if possible, be put into the hands of Miss Lynch herself.
"You may be sure that'll frighten them," continued Daly; "and then, you know, when we see what sort of fight they make, we'll be able to judge whether we ought to go on and prosecute or not. I think the widow'll be very shy of meddling, when she finds you're in earnest. And you see, Mr Lynch," he went on, dropping his voice, "if you _do_ go into court, as I don't think you will, you'll go with clean hands, as you ought to do. Nobody can say anything against you for trying to prevent your sister from marrying a man so much younger than herself, and so much inferior in station and fortune; you won't seem to gain anything by it, and that's everything with a jury; and then, you know, if it comes out that Miss Lynch's mind is rather touched, it's an additional reason why you should protect her from intriguing and interested schemers. Don't you see?"
Barry did see, or fancied he saw, that he had now got the Kellys in a dead fix, and Anty back into his own hands again; and his self-confidence having been fully roused by his potations, he was tolerably happy, and talked very loudly of the manner in which he would punish those low-bred huxters, who had presumed to interfere with him in the management of his family.
Towards the latter end of the evening, he became even more confidential, and showed the cloven foot, if possible, more undisguisedly than he had hitherto done. He spoke of the impossibility of allowing four hundred a year to be carried off from him, and suggested to Daly that his sister would soon drop off,--that there would then be a nice thing left, and that he, Daly, should have the agency, and if he pleased, the use of Dunmore House. As for himself, he had no idea of mewing himself up in such a hole as that; but, before he went, he'd take care to drive that villain, Moylan, out of the place. "The cursed villany of those Kellys, to go and palm such a robber as that off on his sister, by way of an agent!"
To all this, Daly paid but little attention, for he saw that his host was drunk. But when Moylan's name was mentioned, he began to think that it might be as well either to include him in the threatened indictment, or else, which would be better still, to buy him over to their side, as they might probably learn from him what Martin's plans really were. Barry was, however, too tipsy to pay much attention to this, or to understand any deep-laid plans. So the two retired to their beds, Barry determined, as he declared to the attorney in his drunken friendship, to have it out of Anty, when he caught her; and Daly promising to go to Tuam early in the morning, have the notices prepared and served, and come back in the evening to dine and sleep, and have, if possible, an interview with Mr Moylan. As he undressed, he reflected that, during his short professional career, he had been thrown into the society of many unmitigated rogues of every description; but that his new friend, Barry Lynch, though he might not equal them in energy of villany and courage to do serious evil, beat them all hollow in selfishness, and utter brutal want of feeling, conscience, and principle.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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10
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DOT BLAKE'S ADVICE
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In hour or two after Martin Kelly had left Porto Bello in the Ballinasloe fly-boat, our other hero, Lord Ballindine, and his friend Dot Blake, started from Morrison's hotel, with post horses, for Handicap Lodge; and, as they travelled in Blake's very comfortable barouche, they reached their destination in time for a late dinner, without either adventure or discomfort. Here they remained for some days, fully occupied with the education of their horses, the attention necessary to the engagements for which they were to run, and with their betting-books.
Lord Ballindine's horse, Brien Boru, was destined to give the Saxons a dressing at Epsom, and put no one knows how many thousands into his owner's hands, by winning the Derby; and arrangements had already been made for sending him over to John Scott, the English trainer, at an expense, which, if the horse should by chance fail to be successful, would be of very serious consequence to his lordship. But Lord Ballindine had made up his mind, or rather, Blake had made it up for him, and the thing was to be done; the risk was to be run, and the preparations--the sweats and the gallops, the physicking, feeding, and coddling, kept Frank tolerably well employed; though the whole process would have gone on quite as well, had he been absent.
It was not so, however, with Dot Blake. The turf, to him, was not an expensive pleasure, but a very serious business, and one which, to give him his due, he well understood. He himself, regulated the work, both of his horses and his men, and saw that both did what was allotted to them. He took very good care that he was never charged a guinea, where a guinea was not necessary; and that he got a guinea's worth for every guinea he laid out. In fact, he trained his own horses, and was thus able to assure himself that his interests were never made subservient to those of others who kept horses in the same stables. Dot was in his glory, and in his element on the Curragh, and he was never quite happy anywhere else.
This, however, was not the case with his companion. For a couple of days the excitement attending Brien Boru was sufficient to fill Lord Ballindine's mind; but after that, he could not help recurring to other things. He was much in want of money, and had been civilly told by his agent's managing clerk, before he left town, that there was some difficulty in the way of his immediately getting the sum required. This annoyed him, for he could not carry on the game without money. And then, again, he was unhappy to be so near Fanny Wyndham, from day to day, without seeing her. He was truly and earnestly attached to her, and miserable at the threat which had been all but made by her guardian, that the match should be broken off.
It was true that he had made up his mind not to go to Grey Abbey, as long as he remained at Handicap Lodge, and, having made the resolution, he thought he was wise in keeping it; but still, he continually felt that she must be aware that he was in the neighbourhood, and could not but be hurt at his apparent indifference. And then he knew that her guardian would make use of his present employment--his sojourn at such a den of sporting characters as his friend Blake's habitation--and his continued absence from Grey Abbey though known to be in its vicinity, as additional arguments for inducing his ward to declare the engagement at an end.
These troubles annoyed him, and though he daily stood by and saw Brien Boru go through his manoeuvres, he was discontented and fidgety.
He had been at Handicap Lodge about a fortnight, and was beginning to feel anything but happy. His horse was to go over in another week, money was not plentiful with him, and tradesmen were becoming obdurate and persevering. His host, Blake, was not a soothing or a comfortable friend, under these circumstances: he gave him a good deal of practical advice, but he could not sympathise with him. Blake was a sharp, hard, sensible man, who reduced everything to pounds shillings and pence. Lord Ballindine was a man of feeling, and for the time, at least, a man of pleasure; and, though they were, or thought themselves friends, they did not pull well together; in fact, they bored each other terribly.
One morning, Lord Ballindine was riding out from the training-ground, when he met, if not an old, at any rate an intimate acquaintance, named Tierney. Mr or, as he was commonly called, Mat Tierney, was a bachelor, about sixty years of age, who usually inhabited a lodge near the Curragh; and who kept a horse or two on the turf, more for the sake of the standing which it gave him in the society he liked best, than from any intense love of the sport. He was a fat, jolly fellow, always laughing, and usually in a good humour; he was very fond of what he considered the world; and the world, at least that part of it which knew him, returned the compliment.
"Well, my lord," said he, after a few minutes of got-up enthusiasm respecting Brien Boru, "I congratulate you, sincerely."
"What about?" said Lord Ballindine.
"Why, I find you've got a first-rate horse, and I hear you've got rid of a first-rate lady. You're very lucky, no doubt, in both; but I think fortune has stood to you most, in the latter."
Lord Ballindine was petrified: he did not know what to reply. He was aware that his engagement with Miss Wyndham was so public that Tierney could allude to no other lady; but he could not conceive how any one could have heard that his intended marriage was broken off--at any rate how he could have heard it spoken of so publicly, as to induce him to mention it in that sort of way, to himself. His first impulse was to be very indignant; but he felt that no one would dream of quarrelling with Mat Tierney; so he said, as soon as he was able to collect his thoughts sufficiently, "I was not aware of the second piece of luck, Mr Tierney. Pray who is the lady?"
"Why, Miss Wyndham," said Mat, himself a little astonished at Lord Ballindine's tone.
"I'm sure, Mr Tierney," said Frank, "you would say nothing, particularly in connection with a lady's name, which you intended either to be impertinent, or injurious. Were it not that I am quite certain of this, I must own that what you have just said would appear to be both."
"My dear lord," said the other, surprised and grieved, "I beg ten thousand pardons, if I have unintentionally said anything, which you feel to be either. But, surely, if I am not wrong in asking, the match between you and Miss Wyndham is broken off?"
"May I ask you, Mr Tierney, who told you so?"
"Certainly--Lord Kilcullen; and, as he is Miss Wyndham's cousin, and Lord Cashel's son, I could not but think the report authentic."
This overset Frank still more thoroughly. Lord Kilcullen would never have spread the report publicly unless he had been authorised to do so by Lord Cashel. Frank and Lord Kilcullen had never been intimate; and the former was aware that the other had always been averse to the proposed marriage; but still, he would never have openly declared that the marriage was broken off, had he not had some authority for saying so.
"As you seem somewhat surprised," continued Mat, seeing that Lord Ballindine remained silent, and apparently at a loss for what he ought to say, "perhaps I ought to tell you, that Lord Kilcullen mentioned it last night very publicly--at a dinner-party, as an absolute fact. Indeed, from his manner, I thought he wished it to be generally made known. I presumed, therefore, that it had been mutually agreed between you, that the event was not to come off--that the match was not to be run; and, with my peculiar views, you know, on the subject of matrimony, I thought it a fair point for congratulation. If Lord Kilcullen had misled me, I heartily beg to apologise; and at the same time, by giving you my authority, to show you that I could not intend anything impertinent. If it suits you, you are quite at liberty to tell Lord Kilcullen all I have told you; and, if you wish me to contradict the report, which I must own I have spread, I will do so."
Frank felt that he could not be angry with Mat Tierney; he therefore thanked him for his open explanation, and, merely muttering something about private affairs not being worthy of public interest, rode off towards Handicap Lodge.
It appeared very plain to him that the Grey Abbey family must have discarded him--that Fanny Wyndham, Lord and Lady Cashel, and the whole set, must have made up their minds to drop him altogether; otherwise, one of the family would not have openly declared the match at an end. And yet he was at a loss to conceive how they could have done so--how even Lord Cashel could have reconciled it to himself to do so, without the common-place courtesy of writing to him on the subject. And then, when he thought of her, "his own Fanny," as he had so often called her, he was still more bewildered: she, with whom he had sat for so many sweet hours talking of the impossibility of their ever forgetting, deserting, or even slighting each other; she, who had been so entirely devoted to him--so much more than engaged to him--could she have lent her name to such a heartless mode of breaking her faith?
"If I had merely proposed for her through her guardian," thought Frank, to himself--"if I had got Lord Cashel to make the engagement, as many men do, I should not be surprised; but after all that has passed between us--after all her vows, and all her--" and then Lord Ballindine struck his horse with his heel, and made a cut at the air with his whip, as he remembered certain passages more binding even than promises, warmer even than vows, which seemed to make him as miserable now as they had made him happy at the time of their occurrence. "I would not believe it," he continued, meditating, "if twenty Kilcullens said it, or if fifty Mat Tierneys swore to it!" and then he rode on towards the lodge, in a state of mind for which I am quite unable to account, if his disbelief in Fanny Wyndham's constancy was really as strong as he had declared it to be. And, as he rode, many unusual thoughts--for, hitherto, Frank had not been a very deep-thinking man--crowded his mind, as to the baseness, falsehood, and iniquity of the human race, especially of rich cautious old peers who had beautiful wards in their power.
By the time he had reached the lodge, he had determined that he must now do something, and that, as he was quite unable to come to any satisfactory conclusion on his own unassisted judgment, he must consult Blake, who, by the bye, was nearly as sick of Fanny Wyndham as he would have been had he himself been the person engaged to marry her.
As he rode round to the yard, he saw his friend standing at the door of one of the stables, with a cigar in his mouth.
"Well, Frank, how does Brien go to-day? Not that he'll ever be the thing till he gets to the other side of the water. They'll never be able to bring a horse out as he should be, on the Curragh, till they've regular trained gallops. The slightest frost in spring, or sun in summer, and the ground's so hard, you might as well gallop your horse down the pavement of Grafton Street."
"Confound the horse," answered Frank; "come here, Dot, a minute. I want to speak to you."
"What the d----l's the matter? --he's not lame, is he?"
"Who? --what? --Brien Boru? Not that I know of. I wish the brute had never been foaled."
"And why so? What crotchet have you got in your head now? Something wrong about Fanny, I suppose?"
"Why, did you hear anything?"
"Nothing but what you've told me."
"I've just seen Mat Tierney, and he told me that Kilcullen had declared, at a large dinner-party, yesterday, that the match between me and his cousin was finally broken off."
"You wouldn't believe what Mat Tierney would say? Mat was only taking a rise out of you."
"Not at all: he was not only speaking seriously, but he told me what I'm very sure was the truth, as far as Lord Kilcullen was concerned. I mean, I'm sure Kilcullen said it, and in the most public manner he could; and now, the question is, what had I better do?"
"There's no doubt as to what you'd better do; the question is what you'd rather do?"
"But what had I _better_ do? call on Kilcullen for an explanation?"
"That's the last thing to think of. No; but declare what he reports to be the truth; return Miss Wyndham the lock of hair you have in your desk, and next your heart, or wherever you keep it; write her a pretty note, and conclude by saying that the 'Adriatic's free to wed another'. That's what I should do."
"It's very odd, Blake, that you won't speak seriously to a man for a moment. You've as much heart in you as one of your own horses. I wish I'd never come to this cursed lodge of yours. I'd be all right then."
"As for my heart, Frank, if I have as much as my horses, I ought to be contented--for race-horses are usually considered to have a good deal; as for my cursed lodge, I can assure you I have endeavoured, and, if you will allow me, I will still endeavour, to make it as agreeable to you as I am able; and as to my speaking seriously, upon my word, I never spoke more so. You asked me what I thought you had better do--and I began by telling you there would be a great difference between that and what you'd rather do."
"But, in heaven's name, why would you have me break off with Miss Wyndham, when every one knows I'm engaged to her; and when you know that I wish to marry her?"
"Firstly, to prevent her breaking off with you--though I fear there's hardly time for that; and secondly, in consequence--as the newspapers say, of incompatibility of temper."
"Why, you don't even know her!"
"But I know you, and I know what your joint income would be, and I know that there would be great incompatibility between you, as Lord Ballindine, with a wife and family--and fifteen hundred a year, or so. But mind, I'm only telling you what I think you'd better do."
"Well, I shan't do that. If I was once settled down, I could live as well on fifteen hundred a year as any country gentleman in Ireland. It's only the interference of Lord Cashel that makes me determined not to pull in till I am married. If he had let me have my own way, I shouldn't, by this time, have had a horse in the world, except one or two hunters or so, down in the country."
"Well, Frank, if you're determined to get yourself married, I'll give you the best advice in my power as to the means of doing it. Isn't that what you want?"
"I want to know what you think I ought to do, just at this minute."
"With matrimony as the winning-post?"
"You know I wish to marry Fanny Wyndham."
"And the sooner the better--is that it?"
"Of course. She'll be of age now, in a few days," replied Lord Ballindine.
"Then I advise you to order a new blue coat, and to buy a wedding-ring."
"Confusion!" cried Frank, stamping his foot; and turning away in a passion; and then he took up his hat, to rush out of the room, in which the latter part of the conversation had taken place.
"Stop a minute, Frank," said Blake, "and don't be in a passion. What I said was only meant to show you how easy I think it is for you to marry Miss Wyndham if you choose."
"Easy! and every soul at Grey Abbey turned against me, in consequence of my owning that brute of a horse! I'll go over there at once, and I'll show Lord Cashel that at any rate he shall not treat me like a child. As for Kilcullen, if he interferes with me or my name in any way, I'll--" "You'll what? --thrash him?"
"Indeed, I'd like nothing better!"
"And then shoot him--be tried by your peers--and perhaps hung; is that it?"
"Oh, that's nonsense. I don't wish to fight any one, but I am not going to be insulted."
"I don't think you are: I don't think there's the least chance of Kilcullen insulting you; he has too much worldly wisdom. But to come back to Miss Wyndham: if you really mean to marry her, and if, as I believe, she is really fond of you, Lord Cashel and all the family can't prevent it. She is probably angry that you have not been over there; he is probably irate at your staying here, and, not unlikely, has made use of her own anger to make her think that she has quarrelled with you; and hence Kilcullen's report."
"And what shall I do now?"
"Nothing to-day, but eat your dinner, and drink your wine. Ride over to-morrow, see Lord Cashel, and tell him--but do it quite coolly, if you can--exactly what you have heard, and how you have heard it, and beg him to assure Lord Kilcullen that he is mistaken in his notion that the match is off; and beg also that the report may not be repeated. Do this; and do it as if you were Lord Cashel's equal, not as if you were his son, or his servant. If you are collected and steady with him for ten minutes, you'll soon find that he will become bothered and unsteady."
"That's very easy to say here, but it's not so easy to do there. You don't know him as I do: he's so sedate, and so slow, and so dull--especially sitting alone, as he does of a morning, in that large, dingy, uncomfortable, dusty-looking book-room of his. He measures his words like senna and salts, and their tone is as disagreeable."
"Then do you drop out yours like prussic acid, and you'll beat him at his own game. Those are all externals, my dear fellow. When a man knows he has nothing within his head to trust to,--when he has neither sense nor genius, he puts on a wig, ties up his neck in a white choker, sits in a big chair, and frightens the world with his silence. Remember, if you were not a baby, he would not be a bugbear."
"And should I not ask to see Fanny?"
"By all means. Don't leave Grey Abbey without seeing and making your peace with Miss Wyndham. That'll be easy with you, because it's your _métier_. I own that with myself it would be the most difficult part of the morning's work. But don't ask to see her as a favour. When you've done with the lord (and don't let your conference be very long)--when you've done with the lord, tell him you'll say a word to the lady; and, whatever may have been his pre-determination, you'll find that, if you're cool, he'll be bothered, and he won't know how to refuse; and if he doesn't prevent you, I'm sure Miss Wyndham won't."
"And if he asks about these wretched horses of mine?"
"Don't let him talk more about your affairs than you can help; but, if he presses you--and he won't if you play your game well--tell him that you're quite aware your income won't allow you to keep up an establishment at the Curragh after you're married."
"But about Brien Boru, and the Derby?"
"Brien Boru! You might as well talk to him about your washing-bills! Don't go into particulars--stick to generals. He'll never ask you those questions unless he sees you shiver and shake like a half-whipped school-boy."
After a great deal of confabulation, in which Dot Blake often repeated his opinion of Lord Ballindine's folly in not rejoicing at an opportunity of breaking off the match, it was determined that Frank should ride over the next morning, and do exactly what his friend proposed. If, however, one might judge from his apparent dread of the interview with Lord Cashel, there was but little chance of his conducting it with the coolness or assurance insisted on by Dot. The probability was, that when the time did come, he would, as Blake said, shiver and shake like a half-whipped school-boy.
"And what will you do when you're married, Frank?" said Blake; "for I'm beginning to think the symptoms are strong, and you'll hardly get out of it now."
"Do! why, I suppose I'll do much the same as others--have two children, and live happy ever afterwards."
"I dare say you're right about the two children, only you might say two dozen; but as to the living happy, that's more problematical. What do you mean to eat and drink?"
"Eggs--potatoes and bacon--buttermilk, and potheen [21]. It's odd if I can't get plenty of them in Mayo, if I've nothing better."
[FOOTNOTE 21: pootheen--illegal (untaxed) whiskey, "moonshine"] "I suppose you will, Frank; but bacon won't go down well after venison; and a course of claret is a bad preparative for potheen punch. You're not the man to live, with a family, on a small income, and what the d----l you'll do I don't know. You'll fortify Kelly's Court--that'll be the first step."
"Is it against the Repealers?"
"Faith, no; you'll join them, of course: but against the sub-sheriff, and his officers--an army much more likely to crown their enterprises with success."
"You seem to forget, Dot, that, after all, I'm marrying a girl with quite as large a fortune as I had any right to expect."
"The limit to your expectations was only in your own modesty; the less you had a right--in the common parlance--to expect, the more you wanted, and the more you ought to have looked for. Say that Miss Wyndham's fortune clears a thousand a year of your property, you would never be able to get along on what you'd have. No; I'll tell you what you'll do. You'll shut up Kelly's Court, raise the rents, take a moderate house in London; and Lord Cashel, when his party are in, will get you made a court stick of, and you'll lead just such a life as your grandfather. If it's not very glorious, at any rate it's a useful kind of life. I hope Miss Wyndham will like it. You'll have to christen your children Ernest and Albert, and that sort of thing; that's the worst of it; and you'll never be let to sit down, and that's a bore. But you've strong legs. It would never do for me. I could never stand out a long tragedy in Drury Lane, with my neck in a stiff white choker, and my toes screwed into tight dress boots. I'd sooner be a porter myself, for he can go to bed when the day's over."
"You're very witty, Dot; but you know I'm the last man in Ireland, not excepting yourself, to put up with that kind of thing. Whatever I may have to live on, I shall live in my own country, and on my own property."
"Very well; if you won't be a gold stick, there's the other alternative: fortify Kelly's Court, and prepare for the sheriff's officers. Of the two, there's certainly more fun in it; and you can go out with the harriers on a Sunday afternoon, and live like a 'ra'al O'Kelly of the ould times';--only the punch'll kill you in about ten years."
"Go on, Dot, go on. You want to provoke me, but you won't. I wonder whether you'd bear it as well, if I told you you'd die a broken-down black-leg, without a friend or a shilling to bless you."
"I don't think I should, because I should know that you were threatening me with a fate which my conduct and line of life would not warrant any one in expecting."
"Upon my word, then, I think there's quite as much chance of that as there is of my getting shut up by bailiffs in Kelly's Court, and dying drunk. I'll bet you fifty pounds I've a better account at my bankers than you have in ten years."
"Faith, I'll not take it. It'll be hard work getting fifty pounds out of you, then! In the meantime, come and play a game of billiards before dinner."
To this Lord Ballindine consented, and they adjourned to the billiard-room; but, before they commenced playing, Blake declared that if the names of Lord Cashel or Miss Wyndham were mentioned again that evening, he should retreat to his own room, and spend the hours by himself; so, for the rest of that day, Lord Ballindine was again driven back upon Brien Boru and the Derby for conversation, as Dot was too close about his own stable to talk much of his own horses and their performances, except when he was doing so with an eye to business.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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11
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THE EARL OF CASHEL
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About two o'clock on the following morning, Lord Ballindine set off for Grey Abbey, on horseback, dressed with something more than ordinary care, and with a considerable palpitation about his heart. He hardly knew, himself, what or whom he feared, but he knew that he was afraid of something. He had a cold, sinking sensation within him, and he felt absolutely certain that he should be signally defeated in his present mission. He had plenty of what is usually called courage; had his friend recommended him instantly to call out Lord Kilcullen and shoot him, and afterwards any number of other young men who might express a thought in opposition to his claim on Miss Wyndham's hand, he would have set about it with the greatest readiness and aptitude; but he knew he could not baffle the appalling solemnity of Lord Cashel, in his own study. Frank was not so very weak a man as he would appear to be when in the society of Blake. He unfortunately allowed Blake to think for him in many things, and he found a convenience in having some one to tell him what to do; but he was, in most respects, a better, and in some, even a wiser man than his friend. He often felt that the kind of life he was leading--contracting debts which he could not pay, and spending his time in pursuits which were not really congenial to him, was unsatisfactory and discreditable: and it was this very feeling, and the inability to defend that which he knew to be wrong and foolish, which made him so certain that he would not be able successfully to persist in his claim to Miss Wyndham's hand in opposition to the trite and well-weighed objections, which he knew her guardian would put forward. He consoled himself, however, with thinking that, at any rate, they could not prevent his seeing her; and he was quite sanguine as to her forgiveness, if he but got a fair opportunity of asking it. And when that was obtained, why should the care for any one? Fanny would be of age, and her own mistress, in a few days, and all the solemn earls in England, and Ireland too, could not then prevent her marrying whom and when she liked.
He thought a great deal on all his friend had said to his future poverty; but then, his ideas and Blake's were very different about life. Blake's idea of happiness was, the concentrating of every thing into a focus for his own enjoyment; whereas he, Frank, had only had recourse to dissipation and extravagance, because he had nothing to make home pleasant to him. If he once had Fanny Wyndham installed as Lady Ballindine, at Kelly's Court, he was sure he could do his duty as a country gentleman, and live on his income, be it what it might, not only without grumbling, but without wishing for anything more. He was fond of his country, his name, and his countrymen: he was fully convinced of his folly in buying race-horses, and in allowing himself to be dragged on the turf: he would sell Brien Boru, and the other two Irish chieftains, for what they would fetch, and show Fanny and her guardian that he was in earnest in his intention of reforming. Blake might laugh at him if he liked; but he would not stay to be laughed at. He felt that Handicap Lodge was no place for him; and besides, why should he bear Dot's disagreeable sarcasms? It was not the part of a real friend to say such cutting things as he continually did. After all, Lord Cashel would be a safer friend, or, at any rate, adviser; and, instead of trying to defeat him by coolness or insolence, he would at once tell him of all his intentions, explain to him exactly how matters stood, and prove his good resolutions by offering to take whatever steps the earl might recommend about the horses. This final determination made him easier in this mind, and, as he entered the gates of Grey Abbey Park, he was tolerably comfortable, trusting to his own good resolutions, and the effect which he felt certain the expression of them must have on Lord Cashel.
Grey Abbey is one of the largest but by no means one of the most picturesque demesnes in Ireland. It is situated in the county of Kildare, about two miles from the little town of Kilcullen, in a flat, uninteresting, and not very fertile country. The park itself is extensive and tolerably well wooded, but it wants water and undulation, and is deficient of any object of attraction, except that of size and not very magnificent timber. I suppose, years ago, there was an Abbey here, or near the spot, but there is now no vestige of it remaining. In a corner of the demesne there are standing the remains of one of those strong, square, ugly castles, which, two centuries since, were the real habitations of the landed proprietors of the country, and many of which have been inhabited even to a much later date. They now afford the strongest record of the apparently miserable state of life which even the favoured of the land then endured, and of the numberless domestic comforts which years and skill have given us, apt as we are to look back with fond regret to the happy, by-gone days of past periods.
This old castle, now used as a cow-shed, is the only record of antiquity at Grey Abbey; and yet the ancient family of the Greys have lived there for centuries. The first of them who possessed property in Ireland, obtained in the reign of Henry II, grants of immense tracts of land, stretching through Wicklow, Kildare, and the Queen's and King's Counties; and, although his descendants have been unable to retain, through the various successive convulsions which have taken place in the interior of Ireland since that time, anything like an eighth of what the family once pretended to claim, the Earl of Cashel, their present representative, has enough left to enable him to consider himself a very great man.
The present mansion, built on the site of that in which the family had lived till about seventy years since, is, like the grounds, large, commodious, and uninteresting. It is built of stone, which appears as if it had been plastered over, is three stories high, and the windows are all of the same size, and at regular intervals. The body of the house looks like a huge, square, Dutch old lady, and the two wings might be taken for her two equally fat, square, Dutch daughters. Inside, the furniture is good, strong, and plain. There are plenty of drawing-rooms, sitting-rooms, bed-rooms, and offices; a small gallery of very indifferent paintings, and a kitchen, with an excellent kitchen-range, and patent boilers of every shape.
Considering the nature of the attractions, it is somewhat strange that Lord Cashel should have considered it necessary to make it generally known that the park might be seen any day between the hours of nine and six, and the house, on Tuesdays and Fridays between the hours of eleven and four. Yet such is the case, and the strangeness of this proceeding on his part is a good deal diminished by the fact that persons, either induced by Lord Cashel's good nature, or thinking that any big house must be worth seeing, very frequently pay half-a-crown to the housekeeper for the privilege of being dragged through every room in the mansion.
There is a bed there, in which the Regent slept when in Ireland, and a room which was tenanted by Lord Normanby, when Lord Lieutenant. There is, moreover, a satin counterpane, which was made by the lord's aunt, and a snuff-box which was given to the lord's grandfather by Frederick the Great. These are the lions of the place, and the gratification experienced by those who see them is, no doubt, great; but I doubt if it equals the annoyance and misery to which they are subjected in being obliged to pass one unopened door--that of the private room of Lady Selina, the only daughter of the earl at present unmarried.
It contains only a bed, and the usual instruments of a lady's toilet; but Lady Selina does not choose to have it shown, and it has become invested, in the eyes of the visitors, with no ordinary mystery. Many a petitionary whisper is addressed to the housekeeper on the subject, but in vain; and, consequently, the public too often leave Grey Abbey dissatisfied.
As Lord Ballindine rode through the gates, and up the long approach to the house, he was so satisfied of the wisdom of his own final resolution, and of the successful termination of his embassy under such circumstances, that he felt relieved of the uncomfortable sensation of fear which had oppressed him; and it was only when the six-foot high, powdered servant told him, with a very solemn face, that the earl was alone in the book-room--the odious room he hated so much--that he began again to feel a little misgiving. However, there was nothing left for him now, so he gave up his horse to the groom, and followed the sober-faced servant into the book-room.
Lord Cashel was a man about sixty-three, with considerable external dignity of appearance, though without any personal advantage, either in face, figure, or manner. He had been an earl, with a large income, for thirty years; and in that time he had learned to look collected, even when his ideas were confused; to keep his eye steady, and to make a few words go a long way. He had never been intemperate, and was, therefore, strong and hale for his years,--he had not done many glaringly foolish things, and, therefore, had a character for wisdom and judgment. He had run away with no man's wife, and, since his marriage, had seduced no man's daughter; he was, therefore, considered a moral man. He was not so deeply in debt as to have his affairs known to every one; and hence was thought prudent. And, as he lived in his own house, with his own wife, paid his servants and labourers their wages regularly, and nodded in church for two hours every Sunday, he was thought a good man. Such were his virtues; and by these negative qualities--this _vis inertiæ_, he had acquired, and maintained, a considerable influence in the country.
When Lord Ballindine's name was announced, he slowly rose, and, just touching the tip of Frank's fingers, by way of shaking hands with him, hoped he had the pleasure of seeing him well.
The viscount hoped the same of the earl--and of the ladies. This included the countess and Lady Selina, as well as Fanny, and was, therefore, not a particular question; but, having hoped this, and the earl remaining silent, he got confused, turned red, hummed and hawed a little, sat down, and then, endeavouring to drown his confusion in volubility, began talking quickly about his anxiety to make final arrangements concerning matters, which, of course, he had most deeply at heart; and, at last, ran himself fairly aground, from not knowing whether, under the present circumstances, he ought to speak of his affianced to her guardian as "Fanny", or "Miss Wyndham".
When he had quite done, and was dead silent, and had paused sufficiently long to assure the earl that he was going to say nothing further just at present, the great man commenced his answer.
"This is a painful subject, my lord--most peculiarly painful at the present time; but, surely, after all that has passed--but especially after what has _not_ passed"--Lord Cashel thought this was a dead hit--"you cannot consider your engagement with Miss Wyndham to be still in force?"
"Good gracious! --and why not, my lord? I am ready to do anything her friends--in fact I came solely, this morning, to consult yourself, about--I'm sure Fanny herself can't conceive the engagement to be broken off. Of course, if Miss Wyndham wishes it--but I can't believe--I can't believe--if it's about the horses, Lord Cashel, upon my word, I'm ready to sell them to-day."
This was not very dignified in poor Frank, and to tell the truth, he was completely bothered. Lord Cashel looked so more than ordinarily glum; had he been going to put on a black cap and pass sentence of death, or disinherit his eldest son, he could not have looked more stern or more important. Frank's lack of dignity added to his, and made him feel immeasurably superior to any little difficulty which another person might have felt in making the communication he was going to make. He was really quite in a solemn good humour. Lord Ballindine's confusion was so flattering.
"I can assure you, my lord, Miss Wyndham calls for no such sacrifice, nor do I. There was a time when, as her guardian, I ventured to hint--and I own I was taking a liberty, a fruitless liberty, in doing so--that I thought your remaining on the turf was hardly prudent. But I can assure you, with all kindly feeling--with no approach to animosity--that I will not offend in a similar way again. I hear, by mere rumour, that you have extended your operations to the other kingdom. I hope I have not been the means of inducing you to do so; but, advice, if not complied with, often gives a bias in an opposite direction. With regard to Miss Wyndham, I must express--and I really had thought it was unnecessary to do so, though it was certainly my intention, as it was Miss Wyndham's wish, that I should have written to you formally on the subject--but your own conduct--excuse me, Lord Ballindine--your own evident indifference, and continued, I fear I must call it, dissipation--and your, as I considered, unfortunate selection of acquaintance, combined with the necessary diminution of that attachment which I presume Miss Wyndham once felt for you--necessary, inasmuch as it was, as far as I understand, never of a sufficiently ardent nature to outlive the slights--indeed, my lord, I don't wish to offend you, or hurt your feelings--but, I must say, the slights which it encountered--." Here the earl felt that his sentence was a little confused, but the viscount looked more so; and, therefore, not at all abashed by the want of a finish to his original proposition, he continued glibly enough: "In short, in considering all the features of the case, I thought the proposed marriage a most imprudent one; and, on questioning Miss Wyndham as to her feelings, I was, I must own, gratified to learn that she agreed with me; indeed, she conceived that your conduct gave ample proof, my lord, of your readiness to be absolved from your engagement; pardon me a moment, my lord--as I said before, I still deemed it incumbent on me, and on my ward, that I, as her guardian, should give you an absolute and written explanation of her feelings:--that would have been done yesterday, and this most unpleasant meeting would have been spared to both of us, but for the unexpected--Did you hear of the occurrence which has happened in Miss Wyndham's family, my lord?"
"Occurrence? No, Lord Cashel; I did not hear of any especial occurrence."
There had been a peculiarly solemn air about Lord Cashel during the whole of the interview, which deepened into quite funereal gloom as he asked the last question; but he was so uniformly solemn, that this had not struck Lord Ballindine. Besides, an appearance of solemnity agreed so well with Lord Cashel's cast of features and tone of voice, that a visage more lengthened, and a speech somewhat slower than usual, served only to show him off as so much the more clearly identified by his own characteristics. Thus a man who always wears a green coat does not become remarkable by a new green coat; he is only so much the more than ever, the man in the green coat.
Lord Ballindine, therefore, answered the question without the appearance of that surprise which Lord Cashel expected he would feel, if he had really not yet heard of the occurrence about to be related to him. The earl, therefore, made up his mind, as indeed he had nearly done before, that Frank knew well what was going to be told him, though it suited his purpose to conceal his knowledge. He could not, however, give his young brother nobleman the lie; and he was, therefore, constrained to tell his tale, as if to one to whom it was unknown. He was determined, however, though he could not speak out plainly, to let Frank see that he was not deceived by his hypocrisy, and that he, Lord Cashel, was well aware, not only that the event about to be told had been known at Handicap Lodge, but that the viscount's present visit to Grey Abbey had arisen out of that knowledge.
Lord Ballindine, up to this moment, was perfectly ignorant of this event, and it is only doing justice to him to say that, had he heard of it, it would at least have induced him to postpone his visit for some time. Lord Cashel paused for a few moments, looking at Frank in a most diplomatic manner, and then proceeded to unfold his budget.
"I am much surprised that you should not have heard of it. The distressing news reached Grey Abbey yesterday, and must have been well known in different circles in Dublin yesterday morning. Considering the great intercourse between Dublin and the Curragh, I wonder you can have been left so long in ignorance of a circumstance so likely to be widely discussed, and which at one time might have so strongly affected your own interests." Lord Cashel again paused, and looked hard at Frank. He flattered himself that he was reading his thoughts; but he looked as if he had detected a spot on the other's collar, and wanted to see whether it was ink or soot.
Lord Ballindine was, however, confounded. When the earl spoke of "a circumstance so likely to be widely discussed", Mat Tierney's conversation recurred to him, and Lord Kilcullen's public declaration that Fanny Wyndham's match was off. --It was certainly odd for Lord Cashel to call this an occurrence in Miss Wyndham's family, but then, he had a round-about way of saying everything.
"I say," continued the earl, after a short pause, "that I cannot but be surprised that an event of so much importance, of so painful a nature, and, doubtless, already so publicly known, should not before this have reached the ears of one to whom, I presume, Miss Wyndham's name was not always wholly indifferent. But, as you have not heard it, my lord, I will communicate it to you," and again he paused, as though expecting another assurance of Lord Ballindine's ignorance.
"Why, my lord," said Frank, "I did hear a rumour, which surprised me very much, but I could not suppose it to be true. To tell the truth, it was very much in consequence of what I heard that I came to Grey Abbey to-day."
It was now Lord Cashel's turn to be confounded. First, to deny that he had heard anything about it--and then immediately to own that he had heard it, and had been induced to renew his visits to Grey Abbey in consequence! Just what he, in his wisdom, had suspected was the case. But how could Lord Ballindine have the face to own it?
I must, however, tell the reader the event of which Frank was ignorant, and which, it appears, Lord Cashel is determined not to communicate to him.
Fanny Wyndham's father had held a governorship, or some golden appointment in the golden days of India, and consequently had died rich. He left eighty thousand pounds to his son, who was younger than Fanny, and twenty to his daughter. His son had lately been put into the Guards, but he was not long spared to enjoy his sword and his uniform. He died, and his death had put his sister in possession of his money; and Lord Cashel thought that, though Frank might slight twenty thousand pounds, he would be too glad to be allowed to remain the accepted admirer of a hundred thousand.
"I thought you must have heard it, my lord," resumed the senior, as soon as he had collected his shreds of dignity, which Frank's open avowal had somewhat scattered, "I felt certain you must have heard it, and you will, I am sure, perceive that this is no time for you--excuse me if I use a word which may appear harsh--it is no time for any one, not intimately connected with Miss Wyndham by ties of family, to intrude upon her sorrow."
Frank was completely bothered. He thought that if she were so sorrowful, if she grieved so deeply at the match being broken off, that was just the reason why he should see her. After all, it was rather flattering to himself to hear of her sorrows; dear Fanny! was she so grieved that she was forced to part from him?
"But, Lord Cashel," he said, "I am ready to do whatever you please. I'll take any steps you'll advise. But I really cannot see why I'm to be told that the engagement between me and Miss Wyndham is off, without hearing any reason from herself. I'll make any sacrifice you please, or she requires; I'm sure she was attached to me, and she cannot have overcome that affection so soon."
"I have already said that we require--Miss Wyndham requires--no sacrifice from you. The time for sacrifice is past; and I do not think her affection was of such a nature as will long prey on her spirits."
"My affection for her is, I can assure you--" "Pray excuse me--but I think this is hardly the time either to talk of, or to show, your affection. Had it been proved to be of a lasting, I fear I must say, a sincere nature, it would now have been most valued. I will leave yourself to say whether this was the case."
"And so you mean to say, Lord Cashel, that I cannot see Miss Wyndham?"
"Assuredly, Lord Ballindine. And I must own, that I hardly appreciate your delicacy in asking to do so at the present moment."
There was something very hard in this. The match was to be broken off without any notice to him; and when he requested, at any rate, to hear this decision from the mouth of the only person competent to make it, he was told that it was indelicate for him to wish to do so. This put his back up.
"Well, my lord," he said with some spirit, "Miss Wyndham is at present your ward, and in your house, and I am obliged to postpone the exercise of the right, to which, at least, I am entitled, of hearing her decision from her own mouth. I cannot think that she expects I should be satisfied with such an answer as I have now received. I shall write to her this evening, and shall expect at any rate the courtesy of an answer from herself."
"My advice to my ward will be, not to write to you; at any rate for the present. I presume, my lord, you cannot doubt my word that Miss Wyndham chooses to be released from an engagement, which I must say your own conduct renders it highly inexpedient for her to keep."
"I don't doubt your word, of course, Lord Cashel; but such being the case, I think Miss Wyndham might at least tell me so herself."
"I should have thought, Lord Ballindine, that you would have felt that the sudden news of a dearly loved brother's death, was more than sufficient to excuse Miss Wyndham from undergoing an interview which, even under ordinary circumstances, would be of very doubtful expediency."
"Her brother's death! Good gracious! Is Harry Wyndham dead!"
Frank was so truly surprised--so effectually startled by the news, which he now for the first time heard, that, had his companion possessed any real knowledge of human nature, he would at once have seen that his astonishment was not affected. But he had none, and, therefore, went on blundering in his own pompous manner.
"Yes, my lord, he is dead. I understood you to say that you had already heard it; and, unless my ears deceived me, you explained that his demise was the immediate cause of your present visit. I cannot, however, go so far as to say that I think you have exercised a sound discretion in the matter. In expressing such an opinion, however, I am far from wishing to utter anything which may be irritating or offensive to your feelings."
"Upon my word then, I never heard a word about it till this moment! Poor Harry! And is Fanny much cut up?"
"Miss Wyndham is much afflicted."
"I wouldn't for worlds annoy her, or press on her at such a moment. Pray tell her, Lord Cashel, how deeply I feel her sorrows: pray tell her this, with my kindest--best compliments."
This termination was very cold--but so was Lord Cashel's face. His lordship had also risen from his chair; and Frank saw it was intended that the interview should end. But he would now have been glad to stay. He wanted to ask a hundred questions;--how the poor lad had died? whether he had been long ill? --whether it had been expected? But he saw that he must go; so he rose and putting out his hand which Lord Cashel just touched, he said, "Good bye, my lord. I trust, after a few months are gone by, you may see reason to alter the opinion you have expressed respecting your ward. Should I not hear from you before then, I shall again do myself the honour of calling at Grey Abbey; but I will write to Miss Wyndham before I do so."
Lord Cashel had the honour of wishing Lord Ballindine a very good morning, and of bowing him to the door; and so the interview ended.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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12
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FANNY WYNDHAM
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When Lord Cashel had seen Frank over the mat which lay outside his study door, and that there was a six foot servitor to open any other door through which he might have to pass, he returned to his seat, and, drawing his chair close to the fire, began to speculate on Fanny and her discarded lover.
He was very well satisfied with himself, and with his own judgment and firmness in the late conversation. It was very evident that Frank had heard of Harry Wyndham's death, and of Fanny's great accession of wealth; that he had immediately determined that the heiress was no longer to be neglected, and that he ought to strike while the iron was hot: hence his visit to Grey Abbey. His pretended ignorance of the young man's death, when he found he could not see Miss Wyndham, was a ruse; but an old bird like Lord Cashel was not to be caught with chaff. And then, how indelicate of him to come and press his suit immediately after news of so distressing a nature had reached Miss Wyndham! How very impolitic, thought Lord Cashel, to show such a hurry to take possession of the fortune! --How completely he had destroyed his own game. And then, other thoughts passed through his mind. His ward had now one hundred thousand pounds clear, which was, certainly, a great deal of ready money. Lord Cashel had no younger sons; but his heir, Lord Kilcullen, was an expensive man, and owed, he did not exactly know, and was always afraid to ask, how much. He must marry soon, or he would be sure to go to the devil. He had been living with actresses and opera-dancers quite long enough for his own respectability; and, if he ever intended to be such a pattern to the country as his father, it was now time for him to settle down. And Lord Cashel bethought himself that if he could persuade his son to marry Fanny Wyndham and pay his debts with her fortune--(surely he couldn't owe more than a hundred thousand pounds?) --he would be able to give them a very handsome allowance to live on.
To do Lord Cashel justice, we must say that he had fully determined that it was his duty to break off the match between Frank and his ward, before he heard of the accident which had so enriched her. And Fanny herself, feeling slighted and neglected--knowing how near to her her lover was, and that nevertheless he never came to see her--hearing his name constantly mentioned in connection merely with horses and jockeys--had been induced to express her acquiescence in her guardian's views, and to throw poor Frank overboard. In all this the earl had been actuated by no mercenary views, as far as his own immediate family was concerned. He had truly and justly thought that Lord Ballindine, with his limited fortune and dissipated habits, was a bad match for his ward; and he had, consequently, done his best to break the engagement. There could, therefore, he thought, be nothing unfair in his taking advantage of the prudence which he had exercised on her behalf. He did not know, when he was persuading her to renounce Lord Ballindine, that, at that moment, her young, rich, and only brother, was lying at the point of death. He had not done it for his own sake, or Lord Kilcullen's; there could, therefore, be nothing unjust or ungenerous in their turning to their own account the two losses, that of her lover and her brother, which had fallen on Miss Wyndham at the same time. If he, as her guardian, would have been wrong to allow Lord Ballindine to squander her twenty thousands, he would be so much the more wrong to let him make ducks and drakes of five times as much. In this manner he quieted his conscience as to his premeditated absorption of his ward's fortune. It was true that Lord Kilcullen was a heartless roué, whereas Lord Ballindine was only a thoughtless rake; but then, Lord Kilcullen would be an earl, and a peer of parliament, and Lord Ballindine was only an Irish viscount. It was true that, in spite of her present anger, Fanny dearly loved Lord Ballindine, and was dearly loved by him; and that Lord Kilcullen was not a man to love or be loved; but then, the Kelly's Court rents--what were they to the Grey Abbey rents? Not a twentieth part of them! And, above all, Lord Kilcullen's vices were filtered through the cleansing medium of his father's partiality, and Lord Ballindine's faults were magnified by the cautious scruples of Fanny's guardian.
The old man settled, therefore, in his own mind, that Fanny should be his dear daughter, and the only difficulty he expected to encounter was with his hopeful son. It did not occur to him that Fanny might object, or that she could be other than pleased with the arrangement. He determined, however, to wait a little before the tidings of her future destiny should be conveyed to her, although no time was to be lost in talking over the matter with Lord Kilcullen. In the meantime, it would be necessary for him to tell Fanny of Lord Ballindine's visit; and the wily peer was glad to think that she could not but be further disgusted at the hurry which her former lover had shown to renew his protestations of affection, as soon as the tidings of her wealth had reached him. However, he would say nothing on that head: he would merely tell her that Lord Ballindine had called, had asked to see her, and had been informed of her determination to see him no more.
He sat, for a considerable time, musing over the fire, and strengthening his resolution; and then he stalked and strutted into the drawing-room, where the ladies were sitting, to make his communication to Miss Wyndham.
Miss Wyndham, and her cousin, Lady Selina Grey, the only unmarried daughter left on the earl's hands, were together. Lady Selina was not in her _première jeunesse_ [22], and, in manner, face, and disposition, was something like her father: she was not, therefore, very charming; but his faults were softened down in her; and what was pretence in him, was, to a certain degree, real in her. She had a most exaggerated conception of her own station and dignity, and of what was due to her, and expected from her. Because her rank enabled her to walk out of a room before other women, she fancied herself better than them, and entitled to be thought better. She was plain, red-haired, and in no ways attractive; but she had refused the offer of a respectable country gentleman, because he was only a country gentleman, and then flattered herself that she owned the continuance of her maiden condition to her high station, which made her a fit match only for the most exalted magnates of the land. But she was true, industrious, and charitable; she worked hard to bring her acquirements to that pitch which she considered necessary to render her fit for her position; she truly loved her family, and tried hard to love her neighbours, in which she might have succeeded but for the immeasurable height from which she looked down on them. She listened, complacently, to all those serious cautions against pride, which her religion taught her, and considered that she was obeying its warnings, when she spoke condescendingly to those around her. She thought that condescension was humility, and that her self-exaltation was not pride, but a proper feeling of her own and her family's dignity.
[FOOTNOTE 22: première jeunesse--(French) prime of youth] Fanny Wyndham was a very different creature. She, too, was proud, but her pride was of another, if not of a less innocent cast; she was proud of her own position; but it was as Fanny Wyndham, not as Lord Cashel's niece, or anybody's daughter. She had been brought out in the fashionable world, and liked, and was liked by, it; but she felt that she owed the character which three years had given her, to herself, and not to those around her. She stood as high as Lady Selina, though on very different grounds. Any undue familiarity would have been quite as impossible with one as with the other. Lady Selina chilled intruders to a distance; Fanny Wyndham's light burned with so warm a flame, that butterflies were afraid to trust their wings within its reach. She was neither so well read, nor so thoughtful on what she did read, as her friend; but she could turn what she learned to more account, for the benefit of others. The one, in fact, could please, and the other could not.
Fanny Wyndham was above the usual height; but she did not look tall, for her figure was well-formed and round, and her bust full. She had dark-brown hair, which was never curled, but worn in plain braids, fastened at the back of her head, together with the long rich folds which were collected there under a simple comb. Her forehead was high, and beautifully formed, and when she spoke, showed the animation of her character. Her eyes were full and round, of a hazel colour, bright and soft when she was pleased, but full of pride and displeasure when her temper was ruffled, or her dignity offended. Her nose was slightly _retroussé_ [23], but not so much so as to give to her that pertness, of which it is usually the index. The line of her cheeks and chin was very lovely: it was this which encouraged her to comb back that luxuriant hair, and which gave the greatest charm to her face. Her mouth was large, too large for a beauty, and therefore she was not a regular beauty; but, were she talking to you, and willing to please you, you could hardly wish it to be less. I cannot describe the shade of her complexion, but it was rich and glowing; and, though she was not a brunette, I believe that in painting her portrait, an artist would have mixed more brown than other colours.
[FOOTNOTE 23: retroussé--(French) turned-up] At the time of which I am now speaking, she was sitting, or rather lying, on a sofa, with her face turned towards her cousin, but her eyes fixed on vacancy. As might have been expected, she was thinking of her brother, and his sudden death; but other subjects crowded with that into her mind, and another figure shared with him her thoughts. She had been induced to give her guardian an unqualified permission to reject, in her name, any further intercourse with Frank; and though she had doubtless been induced to do so by the distressing consciousness that she had been slighted by him, she had cheated herself into the belief that prudence had induced her to do so. She felt that she was not fitted to be a poor man's wife, and that Lord Ballindine was as ill suited for matrimonial poverty. She had, therefore, induced herself to give him up; may-be she was afraid that if she delayed doing so, she might herself be given up. Now, however, the case was altered; though she sincerely grieved for her brother, she could not but recollect the difference which his death made in her own position; she was now a great heiress, and, were she to marry Lord Ballindine, if she did not make him a rich man, she would, at any rate, free him from all embarrassment.
Besides, could she give him up now? now that she was rich? He would first hear of her brother's death and her wealth, and then would immediately be told that she had resolved to reject him. Could she bear that she should be subjected to the construction which would fairly be put upon her conduct, if she acted in this manner? And then, again, she felt that she loved him; and she did love him, more dearly than she was herself aware. She began to repent of her easy submission to her guardian's advice, and to think how she could best unsay what she had already said. She had lost her brother; could she afford also to lose her lover? She had had none she could really love but those two. And the tears again came to her eyes, and Lady Selina saw her, for the twentieth time that morning, turn her face to the back of the sofa, and heard her sob.
Lady Selina was sitting at one of the windows, over her carpet-work frame. She had talked a great deal of sound sense to Fanny that morning, about her brother, and now prepared to talk some more. Preparatory to this, she threw back her long red curls from her face, and wiped her red nose, for it was February.
"Fanny, you should occupy yourself, indeed you should, my dear. It's no use your attempting your embroidery, for your mind would still wander to him that is no more. You should read; indeed you should. Do go on with Gibbon. I'll fetch it for you, only tell me where you were."
"I could not read, Selina; I could not think about what I read, more than about the work."
"But you should try, Fanny,--the very attempt would be work to your mind: besides, you would be doing your duty. Could all your tears bring him back to you? Can all your sorrow again restore him to his friends? No! and you have great consolation, Fanny, in reflecting that your remembrance of your brother is mixed with no alloy. He had not lived to be contaminated by the heartless vices of that portion of the world into which he would probably have been thrown; he had not become dissipated--extravagant--and sensual. This should be a great consolation to you."
It might be thought that Lady Selina was making sarcastic allusions to her own brother and to Fanny's lover; but she meant nothing of the kind. Her remarks were intended to be sensible, true, and consolatory; and they at any rate did no harm, for Fanny was thinking of something else before she had half finished her speech.
They had both again been silent for a short time, when the door opened, and in came the earl. His usual pomposity of demeanour was somewhat softened by a lachrymose air, which, in respect to his ward's grief, he put on as he turned the handle of the door; and he walked somewhat more gently than usual into the room.
"Well, Fanny, how are you now?" he said, as he crept up to her. "You shouldn't brood over these sad thoughts. Your poor brother has gone to a better world; we shall always think of him as one who had felt no sorrow, and been guilty of but few faults. He died before he had wasted his fortune and health, as he might have done:--this will always be a consolation."
It was singular how nearly alike were the platitudes of the daughter and the father. The young man had not injured his name, or character, in the world, and had left his money behind him: and, therefore, his death was less grievous!
Fanny did not answer, but she sat upright on the sofa as he came up to her--and he then sat down beside her.
"Perhaps I'm wrong, Fanny, to speak to you on other subjects so soon after the sad event of which we heard last night; but, on the whole, I think it better to do so. It is good for you to rouse yourself, to exert yourself to think of other things; besides it will be a comfort to you to know that I have already done, what I am sure you strongly wished to have executed at once."
It was not necessary for the guardian to say anything further to induce his ward to listen. She knew that he was going to speak about Lord Ballindine, and she was all attention.
"I shall not trouble, you, Fanny, by speaking to you now, I hope?"
"No;" said Fanny, with her heart palpitating. "If it's anything I ought to hear, it will be no trouble to me."
"Why, my dear, I do think you ought to know, without loss of time that Lord Ballindine has been with me this morning."
Fanny blushed up to her hair--not with shame, but with emotion as to what was coming next.
"I have had a long conversation with him," continued the earl, "in the book-room, and I think I have convinced him that it is for your mutual happiness"--he paused, for he couldn't condescend to tell a lie; but in his glib, speechifying manner, he was nearly falling into one--"mutual happiness" was such an appropriate prudential phrase that he could not resist the temptation; but he corrected himself--"at least, I think I have convinced him that it is impossible that he should any longer look upon Miss Wyndham as his future wife."
Lord Cashel paused for some mark of approbation. Fanny saw that she was expected to speak, and, therefore, asked whether Lord Ballindine was still in the house. She listened tremulously for his answer; for she felt that if her lover were to be rejected, he had a right, after what had passed between them, to expect that she should, in person, express her resolution to him. And yet, if she had to see him now, could she reject him? could she tell him that all the vows that had been made between them were to be as nothing? No! she could only fall on his shoulder, and weep in his arms. But Lord Cashel had managed better than that.
"No, Fanny; neither he nor I, at the present moment, could expect you--could reasonably expect you, to subject yourself to anything so painful as an interview must now have been. Lord Ballindine has left the house--I hope, for the last time--at least, for many months."
These words fell cold upon Fanny's ears, "Did he leave any--any message for me?"
"Nothing of any moment; nothing which it can avail to communicate to you: he expressed his grief for your brother's death, and desired I should tell you how grieved he was that you should be so afflicted."
"Poor Harry!" sobbed Fanny, for it was a relief to cry again, though her tears were more for her lover than her brother. "Poor Harry! they were very fond of each other. I'm sure he must have been sorry--I'm sure he'd feel it"--and she paused, and sobbed again--"He had heard of Harry's death, then?"
When she said this, she had in her mind none of the dirty suspicion that had actuated Lord Cashel; but he guessed at her feelings by his own, and answered accordingly.
"At first I understood him to say he had; but then, he seemed to wish to express that he had not. My impression, I own, is, that he must have heard of it; the sad news must have reached him."
Fanny still did not understand the earl. The idea of her lover coming after her money immediately on her obtaining possession of it, never entered her mind; she thought of her wealth as far as it might have affected him, but did not dream of its altering his conduct towards her.
"And did he seem unhappy about it?" she continued. "I am sure it would make him very unhappy. He could not have loved Harry better if he had been his brother," and then she blushed again through her tears, as she remembered that she had intended that they should be brothers.
Lord Cashel did not say anything more on this head; he was fully convinced that Lord Ballindine only looked on the young man's death as a windfall which he might turn to his own advantage; but he thought it would be a little too strong to say so outright, just at present.
"It will be a comfort for you to know that this matter is now settled," continued the earl, "and that no one can attach the slightest blame to you in the matter. Lord Ballindine has shown himself so very imprudent, so very unfit, in every way, for the honour you once intended him, that no other line of conduct was open to you than that which you have wisely pursued."
This treading on the fallen was too much for Fanny. "I have no right either to speak or to think ill of him," said she, through her tears; "and if any one is ill-treated in the matter it is he. But did he not ask to see me?"
"Surely, Fanny, you would not, at the present moment, have wished to see him!"
"Oh, no; it is a great relief, under all the circumstances, not having to do so. But was he contented? I should be glad that he were satisfied--that he shouldn't think I had treated him harshly, or rudely. Did he appear as if he wished to see me again?"
"Why, he certainly did ask for a last interview--which, anticipating your wishes, I have refused."
"But was he satisfied? Did he appear to think that he had been badly treated?"
"Rejected lovers," answered the earl with a stately smile, "seldom express much satisfaction with the terms of their rejection; but I cannot say that Lord Ballindine testified any strong emotion." He rose from the sofa as he said this, and then, intending to clinch the nail, added as he went to the door--"to tell the truth, Fanny, I think Lord Ballindine is much more eager for an alliance with your fair self now, than he was a few days back, when he could never find a moment's time to leave his horses, and his friend Mr Blake, either to see his intended wife, or to pay Lady Cashel the usual courtesy of a morning visit." He then opened the door, and, again closing it, added--"I think, however, Fanny, that what has now passed between us will secure you from any further annoyance from him."
Lord Cashel, in this last speech, had greatly overshot his mark; his object had been to make the separation between his ward and her lover permanent; and, hitherto, he had successfully appealed to her pride and her judgment. Fanny had felt Lord Cashel to be right, when he told her that she was neglected, and that Frank was dissipated, and in debt. She knew she should be unhappy as the wife of a poor nobleman, and she felt that it would break her proud heart to be jilted herself. She had, therefore, though unwillingly, still entirely agreed with her, guardian as to the expediency of breaking off, the match; and, had Lord Cashel been judicious, he might have confirmed her in this resolution; but his last thunderbolt, which had been intended to crush Lord Ballindine, had completely recoiled upon himself. Fanny now instantly understood the allusion, and, raising her face, which was again resting on her hands, looked at him with an indignant glance through her tears.
Lord Cashel, however, had left the room without observing the indignation expressed in Fanny's eyes; but she was indignant; she knew Frank well enough to be sure that he had come to Grey Abbey that morning with no such base motives as those ascribed to him. He might have heard of Harry's death, and come there to express his sorrow, and offer that consolation which she felt she could accept from him sooner than from any living creature:--or, he might have been ignorant of it altogether; but that he should come there to press his suit because her brother was dead--immediately after his death--was not only impossible; but the person who could say it was possible, must be false and untrue to her. Her uncle could not have believed it himself: he had basely pretended to believe it, that he might widen the breach which he had made.
Fanny was alone, in the drawing-room--for her cousin had left it as soon as her father began to talk about Lord Ballindine, and she sat there glowering through her tears for a long time. Had Lord Ballindine been able to know all her thoughts at this moment, he would have felt little doubt as to the ultimate success of his suit.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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13
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FATHER AND SON
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Lord Cashel firmly believed, when he left the room, that he had shown great tact in discovering Frank's mercenary schemes, and in laying them open before Fanny; and that she had firmly and finally made up her mind to have nothing more to do with him. He had not long been re-seated in his customary chair in the book-room, before he began to feel a certain degree of horror at the young lord's baseness, and to think how worthily he had executed his duty as a guardian, in saving Miss Wyndham from so sordid a suitor. From thinking of his duties as a guardian, his mind, not unnaturally, recurred to those which were incumbent on him as a father, and here nothing disturbed his serenity. It is true that, from an appreciation of the lustre which would reflect back upon himself from allowing his son to become a decidedly fashionable young man, he had encouraged him in extravagance, dissipation, and heartless worldliness; he had brought him up to be supercilious, expensive, unprincipled, and useless. But then, he was gentlemanlike, dignified, and sought after; and now, the father reflected, with satisfaction, that, if he could accomplish his well-conceived scheme, he would pay his son's debts with his ward's fortune, and, at the same time, tie him down to some degree of propriety and decorum, by a wife. Lord Kilcullen, when about to marry, would be obliged to cashier his opera-dancers and their expensive crews; and, though he might not leave the turf altogether, when married he would gradually be drawn out of turf society, and would doubtless become a good steady family nobleman, like his father. Why, he--Lord Cashel himself--wise, prudent, and respectable as he was--example as he knew himself to be to all peers, English, Irish, and Scotch,--had had his horses, and his indiscretions, when he was young. And then he stroked the calves of his legs, and smiled grimly; for the memory of his juvenile vices was pleasant to him.
Lord Cashel thought, as he continued to reflect on the matter, that Lord Ballindine was certainly a sordid schemer; but that his son was a young man of whom he had just reason to be proud, and who was worthy of a wife in the shape of a hundred thousand pounds. And then, he congratulated himself on being the most anxious of guardians and the best of fathers; and, with these comfortable reflections, the worthy peer strutted off, through his ample doors, up his lofty stairs, and away through his long corridors, to dress for dinner. You might have heard his boots creaking till he got inside his dressing-room, but you must have owned that they did so with a most dignified cadence.
It was pleasant enough, certainly, planning all these things; but there would be some little trouble in executing them. In the first place, Lord Kilcullen--though a very good son, on the whole, as the father frequently remarked to himself--was a little fond of having a will of his own, and may-be, might object to dispense with his dancing-girls. And though there was, unfortunately, but little doubt that the money was indispensably necessary to him, it was just possible that he might insist on having the cash without his cousin. However, the proposal must be made, and, as the operations necessary to perfect the marriage would cause some delay, and the money would certainly be wanted as soon as possible, no time was to be lost. Lord Kilcullen was, accordingly, summoned to Grey Abbey; and, as he presumed his attendance was required for the purpose of talking over some method of raising the wind, he obeyed the summons. --I should rather have said of raising a storm, for no gentle puff would serve to waft him through his present necessities.
Down he came, to the great delight of his mother, who thought him by far the finest young man of the day, though he usually slighted, snubbed, and ridiculed her--and of his sister, who always hailed with dignified joy the return of the eldest scion of her proud family to the ancestral roof. The earl was also glad to find that no previous engagement detained him; that is, that he so far sacrificed his own comfort as to leave Tattersall's and the _Figuranti_ of the Opera-House, to come all the way to Grey Abbey, in the county of Kildare. But, though the earl was glad to see his son, he was still a little consternated: the business interview could not be postponed, as it was not to be supposed that Lord Kilcullen would stay long at Grey Abbey during the London season; and the father had yet hardly sufficiently crammed himself for the occasion. Besides, the pressure from without must have been very strong to have produced so immediate a compliance with a behest not uttered in a very peremptory manner, or, generally speaking, to a very obedient child.
On the morning after his arrival, the earl was a little uneasy in his chair during breakfast. It was rather a sombre meal, for Fanny had by no means recovered her spirits, nor did she appear to be in the way to do so. The countess tried to chat a little to her son, but he hardly answered her; and Lady Selina, though she was often profound, was never amusing. Lord Cashel made sundry attempts at general conversation, but as often failed. It was, at last, however, over; and the father requested the son to come with him into the book-room.
When the fire was poked, and the chairs were drawn together over the rug, there were no further preliminaries which could be decently introduced, and the earl was therefore forced to commence.
"Well, Kilcullen, I'm glad you're come to Grey Abbey. I'm afraid, however, we shan't induce you to stay with us long, so it's as well perhaps to settle our business at once. You would, however, greatly oblige your mother, and I'm sure I need not add, myself, if you could make your arrangements so as to stay with us till after Easter. We could then return together."
"Till after Easter, my lord! I should be in the Hue and Cry before that time, if I was so long absent from my accustomed haunts. Besides I should only put out your own arrangements, or rather, those of Lady Cashel. There would probably be no room for me in the family coach." .
"The family coach won't go, Lord Kilcullen. I am sorry to say, that the state of my affairs at present renders it advisable that the family should remain at Grey Abbey this season. I shall attend my parliamentary duties alone."
This was intended as a hit the first at the prodigal son, but Kilcullen was too crafty to allow it to tell. He merely bowed his head, and opened his eyes, to betoken his surprise at such a decision, and remained quiet.
"Indeed," continued Lord Cashel, "I did not even intend to have gone myself, but the unexpected death of Harry Wyndham renders it necessary. I must put Fanny's affairs in a right train. Poor Harry! --did you see much of him during his illness?"
"Why, no--I can't say I did. I'm not a very good hand at doctoring or nursing. I saw him once since he got his commission, glittering with his gold lace like a new weather-cock on a Town Hall. He hadn't time to polish the shine off."
"His death will make a great difference, as far as Fanny is concerned--eh?"
"Indeed it will: her fortune now is considerable;--a deuced pretty thing, remembering that it's all ready money, and that she can touch it the moment she's of age. She's entirely off with Ballindine, isn't she?"
"Oh, entirely," said the earl, with considerable self-complacency; "that affair is entirely over."
"I've stated so everywhere publicly; but I dare say, she'll give him her money, nevertheless. She's not the girl to give over a man, if she's really fond of him."
"But, my dear Kilcullen, she has authorised me to give him a final answer, and I have done so. After that, you know, it would be quite impossible for her to--to--" "You'll see;--she'll marry Lord Ballindine. Had Harry lived, it might have been different; but now she's got all her brother's money, she'll think it a point of honour to marry her poor lover. Besides, her staying this year in the country will be in his favour: she'll see no one here--and she'll want something to think of. I understand he has altogether thrown himself into Blake's hands--the keenest fellow in Ireland, with as much mercy as a foxhound. He's a positive fool, is Ballindine."
"I'm afraid he is--I'm afraid he is. And you may be sure I'm too fond of Fanny--that is, I have too much regard for the trust reposed in me, to allow her to throw herself away upon him."
"That's all very well; but what can you do?"
"Why, not allow him to see her; and I've another plan in my head for her."
"Ah! --but the thing is to put the plan into _her_ head. I'd be sorry to hear of a fine girl like Fanny Wyndham breaking her heart in a half-ruined barrack in Connaught, without money to pay a schoolmaster to teach her children to spell. But I've too many troubles of my own to think of just at present, to care much about hers;" and the son and heir got up, and stood with his back to the fire, and put his arms under his coat-laps. "Upon my soul, my lord, I never was so hard up in my life!"
Lord Cashel now prepared himself for action. The first shot was fired, and he must go on with the battle.
"So I hear, Kilcullen; and yet, during the last four years, you've had nearly double your allowance; and, before that, I paid every farthing you owed. Within the last five years, you've had nearly forty thousand pounds! Supposing you'd had younger brothers, Lord Kilcullen--supposing that I had had six or eight sons instead of only one; what would you have done? How then would you have paid your debts?"
"Fate having exempted me and your lordship from so severe a curse, I have never turned my mind to reflect what I might have done under such an infliction."
"Or, supposing I had chosen, myself, to indulge in those expensive habits, which would have absorbed my income, and left me unable to do more for you, than many other noblemen in my position do for their sons--do you ever reflect how impossible it would then have been for me to have helped you out of your difficulties?"
"I feel as truly grateful for your self-denial in this respect, as I do in that of my non-begotten brethren."
Lord Cashel saw that he was laughed at, and he looked angry; but he did not want to quarrel with his son, so he continued: "Jervis writes me word that it is absolutely necessary that thirty thousand pounds should be paid for you at once; or, that your remaining in London--or, in fact, in the country at all, is quite out of the question."
"Indeed, my lord, I'm afraid Jervis is right."
"Thirty thousand pounds! Are you aware what your income is?"
"Why, hardly. I know Jervis takes care that I never see much of it."
"Do you mean that you don't receive it?"
"Oh, I do not at all doubt its accurate payment. I mean to say, that I don't often have the satisfaction of seeing much of it at the right side of my banker's book."
"Thirty thousand pounds! And will that sum set you completely free in the world?"
"I am sorry to say it will not--nor nearly."
"Then, Lord Kilcullen," said the earl, with most severe, but still most courteous dignity, "may I trouble you to be good enough to tell me what, at the present moment, you do owe?"
"I'm afraid I could not do so with any accuracy; but it is more than double the sum you have named."
"Do you mean, that you have no schedule of your debts? --no means of acquainting me with the amount? How can you expect that I can assist you, when you think it too much trouble to make yourself thoroughly acquainted with the state of your own affairs?"
"A list could certainly be made out, if I had any prospect of being able to settle the amount. If your lordship can undertake to do so at once, I will undertake to hand you a correct list of the sums due, before I leave Grey Abbey. I presume you would not require to know exactly to whom all the items were owing."
This effrontery was too much, and Lord Cashel was very near to losing his temper.
"Upon my honour, Kilcullen, you're cool, very cool. You come upon me to pay, Heaven knows how many thousands--more money, I know, than I'm able to raise; and you condescendingly tell me that you will trouble yourself so far as to let me know how much money I am to give you--but that I am not to know what is done with it! No; if I am to pay your debts again, I will do it through Jervis."
"Pray remember," replied Lord Kilcullen, not at all disturbed from his equanimity, "that I have not proposed that you should pay my debts without knowing where the money went; and also that I have not yet asked you to pay them at all."
"Who, then, do you expect will pay them? I can assure you I should be glad to be relieved from the honour."
"I merely said that I had not yet made any proposition respecting them. Of course, I expect your assistance. Failing you, I have no resource but the Jews. I should regret to put the property into their hands; especially as, hitherto, I have not raised money on post obits [24]."
[FOOTNOTE 24: post obit--a loan that need not be repaid until the death of a specified individual, usually someone from whom the borrower expected to inherit enough to repay the loan] "At any rate, I'm glad of that," said the father, willing to admit any excuse for returning to his good humour. "That would be ruin; and I hope that anything short of that may be--may be--may be done something with."
The expression was not dignified, and it pained the earl to make it; but it was expressive, and he didn't wish at once to say that he had a proposal for paying off his son's debts. "But now, Kilcullen, tell me fairly, in round figures, what do you think you owe? --as near as you can guess, without going to pen and paper, you know?"
"Well, my lord, if you will allow me, I will make a proposition to you. If you will hand over to Mr Jervis fifty thousand pounds, for him to pay such claims as have already been made upon him as your agent, and such other debts as I may have sent in to him: and if you will give myself thirty thousand, to pay such debts as I do not choose to have paid by an agent, I will undertake to have everything settled."
"Eighty thousand pounds in four years! Why, Kilcullen, what have you done with it? --where has it gone? You have five thousand a-year, no house to keep up, no property to support, no tenants to satisfy, no rates to pay--five thousand a-year for your own personal expenses--and, in four years, you have got eighty thousand in debt! The property never can stand that, you know. It never can stand at that rate. Why, Kilcullen, what have you done with it?"
"Mr Crockford has a portion of it, and John Scott has some of it. A great deal of it is scattered rather widely--so widely that it would be difficult now to trace it. But, my lord, it has gone. I won't deny that the greater portion of it has been lost at play, or on the turf. I trust I may, in future, be more fortunate and more cautious."
"I trust so. I trust so, indeed. Eighty thousand pounds! And do you think I can raise such a sum as that at a week's warning?"
"Indeed, I have no doubt as to your being able to do so: it may be another question whether you are willing."
"I am not--I am not able," said the libelled father. "As you know well enough, the incumbrances on the property take more than a quarter of my income."
"There can, nevertheless, be no doubt of your being able to have the money, and that at once, if you chose to go into the market for it. I have no doubt but that Mr Jervis could get it for you at once at five per cent."
"Four thousand a-year gone for ever from the property! --and what security am I to have that the same sacrifice will not be again incurred, after another lapse of four years?"
"You can have no security, my lord, against my being in debt. You can, however, have every security that you will not again pay my debts, in your own resolution. I trust, however, that I have some experience to prevent my again falling into so disagreeable a predicament. I think I have heard your Lordship say that you incurred some unnecessary expenses yourself in London, before your marriage!"
"I wish, Kilcullen, that you had never exceeded your income more than I did mine. But it is no use talking any further on this subject. I cannot, and I will not--I cannot in justice either to myself or to you, borrow this money for you; nor, if I could, should I think it right to do so."
"Then what the devil's the use of talking about it so long?" said the dutiful son, hastily jumping up from the chair in which he had again sat down. "Did you bring me down to Grey Abbey merely to tell me that you knew of my difficulties, and that you could do nothing to assist me?"
"Now, don't put yourself into a passion--pray don't!" said the father, a little frightened by the sudden ebullition. "If you'll sit down, and listen to me, I'll tell you what I propose. I did not send for you here without intending to point out to you some method of extricating yourself from your present pecuniary embarrassment; and, if you have any wish to give up your course, of--I must say, reckless profusion, and commence that upright and distinguished career, which I still hope to see you take, you will, I think, own that my plan is both a safer and a more expedient one than that which you have proposed. It is quite time for you now to abandon the expensive follies of youth; and,"--Lord Cashel was getting into a delightfully dignified tone, and felt himself prepared for a good burst of common-place eloquence; but his son looked impatient, and as he could not take such liberty with him as he could with Lord Ballindine, he came to the point at once, and ended abruptly by saying, "and get married."
"For the purpose of allowing my wife to pay my debts?"
"Why, not exactly that; but as, of course, you could not marry any woman but a woman with a large fortune, that would follow as a matter of consequence."
"Your lordship proposes the fortune not as the first object of my affection, but merely as a corollary. But, perhaps, it will be as well that you should finish your proposition, before I make any remarks on the subject." And Lord Kilcullen, sat down, with a well-feigned look of listless indifference.
"Well, Kilcullen, I have latterly been thinking much about you, and so has your poor mother. She is very uneasy that you should still--still be unmarried; and Jervis has written to me very strongly. You see it is quite necessary that something should be done--or we shall both be ruined. Now, if I did raise this sum--and I really could not do it--I don't think I could manage it, just at present; but, even if I did, it would only be encouraging you to go on just in the same way again. Now, if you were to marry, your whole course of life would be altered, and you would become, at the same time, more respectable and more happy."
"That would depend a good deal upon circumstances, I should think."
"Oh! I am sure you would. You are just the same sort of fellow I was when at your age, and I was much happier after I was married, so I know it. Now, you see, your cousin has a hundred thousand pounds; in fact something more than that."
"What? --Fanny! Poor Ballindine! So that's the way with him is it! When I was contradicting the rumour of his marriage with Fanny, I little thought that I was to be his rival! At any rate, I shall have to shoot him first."
"You might, at any rate, confine yourself to sense, Lord Kilcullen, when I am taking so much pains to talk sensibly to you, on a subject which, I presume, cannot but interest you."
"Indeed, my lord, I'm all attention; and I do intend to talk sensibly when I say that I think you are proposing to treat Ballindine very ill. The world will think well of your turning him adrift on the score of the match being an imprudent one; but it won't speak so leniently of you if you expel him, as soon as your ward becomes an heiress, to make way for your own son."
"You know that I'm not thinking of doing so. I've long seen that Lord Ballindine would not make a fitting husband for Fanny--long before Harry died."
"And you think that I shall?"
"Indeed I do. I think she will be lucky to get you."
"I'm flattered into silence: pray go on."
"You will be an earl--a peer--and a man of property. What would she become if she married Lord Ballindine?"
"Oh, you are quite right! Go on. I wonder it never occurred to her before to set her cap at me."
"Now do be serious. I wonder how you can joke on such a subject, with all your debts. I'm sure I feel them heavy enough, if you don't. You see Lord Ballindine was refused--I may say he was refused--before we heard about that poor boy's unfortunate death. It was the very morning we heard of it, three or four hours before the messenger came, that Fanny had expressed her resolution to declare it off, and commissioned me to tell him so. And, therefore, of course, the two things can't have the remotest reference to each other."
"I see. There are, or have been, two Fanny Wyndhams--separate persons, though both wards of your lordship. Lord Ballindine was engaged to the girl who had a brother; but he can have no possible concern with Fanny Wyndham, the heiress, who has no brother."
"How can you be so unfeeling? --but you may pay your debts in your own way. You won't ever listen to what I have to say! I should have thought that, as your father, I might have considered myself entitled to more respect from you."
"Indeed, my lord, I'm all respect and attention, and I won't say one more word till you've finished."
"Well--you must see, there can be no objection on the score of Lord Ballindine?"
"Oh, none at all."
"And then, where could Fanny wish for a better match than yourself? it would be a great thing for her, and the match would be, in all things, so--so respectable, and just what it ought to be; and your mother would be so delighted, and so should I, and--" "Her fortune would so nicely pay all my debts."
"Exactly. Of course, I should take care to have your present income--five thousand a year--settled on her, in the shape of jointure; and I'm sure that would be treating her handsomely. The interest of her fortune would not be more than that."
"And what should we live on?"
"Why, of course, I should continue your present allowance."
"And you think that that which I have found so insufficient for myself, would be enough for both of us?"
"You must make it enough, Kilcullen--in order that there may be something left to enable you to keep up your title when I am gone."
By this time, Lord Kilcullen appeared to be as serious, and nearly as solemn, as his father, and he sat, for a considerable time, musing, till his father said, "Well, Kilcullen, will you take my advice?"
"It's impracticable, my lord. In the first place, the money must be paid immediately, and considerable delay must occur before I could even offer to Miss Wyndham; and, in the next place, were I to do so, I am sure she would refuse me."
"Why; there must be some delay, of course. But I suppose, if I passed my word, through Jervis, for so much of the debts as are immediate, that a settlement might be made whereby they might stand over for twelve months, with interest, of course. As to refusing you, it's not at all likely: where would she look for a better offer?"
"I don't know much of my cousin; but I don't think she's exactly the girl to take a man because he's a good match for her."
"Perhaps not. But then, you know, you understand women so well, and would have such opportunities; you would be sure to make yourself agreeable to her, with very little effort on your part."
"Yes, poor thing--she would be delivered over, ready bound, into the lion's den." And then the young man sat silent again, for some time, turning the matter over in his mind. At last, he said,-- "Well, my lord; I am a considerate and a dutiful son, and I will agree to your proposition: but I must saddle it with conditions. I have no doubt that the sum which I suggested should be paid through your agent, could be arranged to be paid in a year, or eighteen months, by your making yourself responsible for it, and I would undertake to indemnify you. But the thirty thousand pounds I must have at once. I must return to London, with the power of raising it there, without delay. This, also, I would repay you out of Fanny's fortune. I would then undertake to use my best endeavours to effect a union with your ward. But I most positively will not agree to this--nor have any hand in the matter, unless I am put in immediate possession of the sum I have named, and unless you will agree to double my income as soon as I am married."
To both these propositions the earl, at first, refused to accede; but his son was firm. Then, Lord Cashel agreed to put him in immediate possession of the sum of money he required, but would not hear of increasing his income. They argued, discussed, and quarrelled over the matter, for a long time; till, at last, the anxious father, in his passion, told his son that he might go his own way, and that he would take no further trouble to help so unconscionable a child. Lord Kilcullen rejoined by threatening immediately to throw the whole of the property, which was entailed on himself, into the hands of the Jews.
Long they argued and bargained, till each was surprised at the obstinacy of the other. They ended, however, by splitting the difference, and it was agreed, that Lord Cashel was at once to hand over thirty thousand pounds, and to take his son's bond for the amount; that the other debts were to stand over till Fanny's money was forthcoming; and that the income of the newly married pair was to be seven thousand five hundred a-year.
"At least," thought Lord Kilcullen to himself, as he good-humouredly shook hands with his father at the termination of the interview--"I have not done so badly, for those infernal dogs will be silenced, and I shall get the money. I could not have gone back without that. I can go on with the marriage, or not, as I may choose, hereafter. It won't be a bad speculation, however."
To do Lord Cashel justice, he did not intend cheating his son, nor did he suspect his son of an intention to cheat him. But the generation was deteriorating.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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14
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THE COUNTESS
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It was delightful to see on what good terms the earl and his son met that evening at dinner. The latter even went so far as to be decently civil to his mother, and was quite attentive to Fanny. She, however, did not seem to appreciate the compliment. It was now a fortnight since she had heard of her brother's death, and during the whole of that time she had been silent, unhappy, and fretful. Not a word more had been said to her about Lord Ballindine, nor had she, as yet, spoken about him to any one; but she had been thinking about little else, and had ascertained,--at least, so she thought,--that she could never be happy, unless she were reconciled to him.
The more she brooded over the subject, the more she felt convinced that such was the case; she could not think how she had ever been induced to sanction, by her name, such an unwarrantable proceeding as the unceremonious dismissal of a man to whom her troth had been plighted, merely because he had not called to see her. As for his not writing, she was aware that Lord Cashel had recommended that, till she was of age, they should not correspond. As she thought the matter over in her own room, long hour after hour, she became angry with herself for having been talked into a feeling of anger for him. What right had she to be angry because he kept horses? She could not expect him to put himself into Lord Cashel's leading-strings. Indeed, she thought she would have liked him less if he had done so. And now, to reject him just when circumstances put it in her power to enable her to free him from his embarrassments, and live a manner becoming his station! What must Frank think of her? --For he could not but suppose that her rejection had been caused by her unexpected inheritance.
In the course of the fortnight, she made up her mind that all Lord Cashel had said to Lord Ballindine should be unsaid;--but who was to do it? It would be a most unpleasant task to perform; and one which, she was aware, her guardian would be most unwilling to undertake. She fully resolved that she would do it herself, if she could find no fitting ambassador to undertake the task, though that would be a step to which she would fain not be driven. At one time, she absolutely thought of asking her cousin, Kilcullen, about it:--this was just before his leaving Grey Abbey; he seemed so much more civil and kind than usual. But then, she knew so little of him, and so little liked what she did know: that scheme, therefore, was given up. Lady Selina was so cold, and prudent--would talk to her so much about propriety, self-respect, and self-control, that she could not make a confidante of her. No one could talk to Selina on any subject more immediately interesting than a Roman Emperor, or a pattern for worsted-work. Fanny felt that she would not be equal, herself, to going boldly to Lord Cashel, and desiring him to inform Lord Ballindine that he had been mistaken in the view he had taken of his ward's wishes: no--that was impossible; such a proceeding would probably bring on a fit of apoplexy.
There was no one else to whom she could apply, but her aunt. Lady Cashel was a very good-natured old woman, who slept the greatest portion of her time, and knitted through the rest of her existence. She did not take a prominent part in any of the important doings of Grey Abbey; and, though Lord Cashel constantly referred to her, for he thought it respectable to do so, no one regarded her much. Fanny felt, however, that she would neither scold her, ridicule her, nor refuse to listen: to Lady Cashel, therefore, at last, she went for assistance.
Her ladyship always passed the morning, after breakfast, in a room adjoining her own bed-room, in which she daily held deep debate with Griffiths, her factotum, respecting household affairs, knitting-needles, and her own little ailments and cossetings. Griffiths, luckily, was a woman of much the same tastes as her ladyship, only somewhat of a more active temperament; and they were most stedfast friends. It was such a comfort to Lady Cashel to have some one to whom she could twaddle!
The morning after Lord Kilcullen's departure Fanny knocked at her door, and was asked to come in. The countess, as usual, was in her easy chair, with the knitting-apparatus in her lap, and Griffiths was seated at the table, pulling about threads, and keeping her ladyship awake by small talk.
"I'm afraid I'm disturbing you, aunt," said Fanny, "but I wanted to speak to you for a minute or two. Good morning, Mrs Griffiths."
"Oh, no! you won't disturb me, Fanny. I was a little busy this morning, for I wanted to finish this side of the--You see what a deal I've done,"--and the countess lugged up a whole heap of miscellaneous worsted from a basket just under her arm--"and I must finish it by lady-day [25], or I shan't get the other done, I don't know when. But still, I've plenty of time to attend to you."
[FOOTNOTE 25: lady-day--Annunciation Day, March 25] "Then I'll go down, my lady, and see about getting the syrup boiled," said Griffiths. "Good morning, Miss Wyndham."
"Do; but mind you come up again immediately--I'll ring the bell when Miss Wyndham is going; and pray don't leave me alone, now."
"No, my lady--not a moment," and Griffiths escaped to the syrup.
Fanny's heart beat quick and hard, as she sat down on the sofa, opposite to her aunt. It was impossible for any one to be afraid of Lady Cashel, there was so very little about her that could inspire awe; but then, what she had to say was so very disagreeable to say! If she had had to tell her tale out loud, merely to the empty easy chair, it would have been a dreadful undertaking.
"Well, Fanny, what can I do for you? I'm sure you look very nice in your bombazine; and it's very nicely made up. Who was it made it for you?"
"I got it down from Dublin, aunt; from Foley's."
"Oh, I remember; so you told me. Griffiths has a niece makes those things up very well; but then she lives at Namptwich, and one couldn't send to England for it. I had such a quantity of mourning by me, I didn't get any made up new; else, I think I must have sent for her."
"My dear aunt, I am very unhappy about something, and I want you to help me. I'm afraid, though, it will give you a great deal of trouble."
"Good gracious, Fanny! --what is it? Is it about poor Harry? I'm sure I grieved about him more than I can tell."
"No, aunt: he's gone now, and time is the only cure for that grief. I know I must bear that without complaining. But, aunt, I feel--I think, that is, that I've used Lord Ballindine very ill."
"Good gracious me, my love! I thought Lord Cashel had managed all that--I thought that was all settled. You know, he would keep those horrid horses, and all that kind of thing; and what more could you do than just let Lord Cashel settle it?"
"Yes, but aunt--you see, I had engaged myself to Lord Ballindine, and I don't think--in fact--oh, aunt! I did not wish to break my word to Lord Ballindine, and I am very very sorry for what has been done," and Fanny was again in tears.
"But, my dear Fanny," said the countess, so far excited as to commence rising from her seat--the attempt, however, was abandoned, when she felt the ill effects of the labour to which she was exposing herself--"but, my dear Fanny--what would you have? It's done, now, you know; and, really, it's for the best."
"Oh, but, dear aunt, I must get somebody to see him. I've been thinking about it ever since he was here with my uncle. I wouldn't let him think that I broke it all off, merely because--because of poor Harry's money," and Fanny sobbed away dreadfully.
"But you don't want to marry him!" said the naïve countess.
Now, Fanny did want to marry him, though she hardly liked saying so, even to Lady Cashel.
"You know, I promised him I would," said she; "and what will he think of me? --what must he think of me, to throw him off so cruelly, so harshly, after all that's past? --Oh, aunt! I must see him again."
"I know something of human nature," replied the aunt, "and if you do, I tell you, it will end in your being engaged to him again. You know it's off now. Come, my dear; don't think so much about it: I'm sure Lord Cashel wouldn't do anything cruel or harsh."
"Oh, I must see him again, whatever comes of it;" and then she paused for a considerable time, during which the bewildered old lady was thinking what she could do to relieve her sensitive niece. "Dear, dear aunt, I don't want to deceive you!" and Fanny, springing up, knelt at her aunt's feet, and looked up into her face. "I do love him--I always loved him, and I cannot, cannot quarrel with him." And then she burst out crying vehemently, hiding her face in the countess's lap.
Lady Cashel was quite overwhelmed. Fanny was usually so much more collected than herself, that her present prostration, both of feeling and body, was dreadful to see. Suppose she was to go into hysterics--there they would be alone, and Lady Cashel felt that she had not strength to ring the bell.
"But, my dear Fanny! oh dear, oh dear, this is very dreadful! --but, Fanny--he's gone away now. Lift up your face, Fanny, for you frighten me. Well, I'm sure I'll do anything for you. Perhaps he wouldn't mind coming back again,--he always was very good-natured. I'm sure I always liked Lord Ballindine very much,--only he would have all those horses. But I'm sure, if you wish it, I should be very glad to see him marry you; only, you know, you must wait some time, because of poor Harry; and I'm sure I don't know how you'll manage with Lord Cashel."
"Dear aunt--I want you to speak to Lord Cashel. When I was angry because I thought Frank didn't come here as he might have done, I consented that my uncle should break off the match: besides, then, you know, we should have had so little between us. But I didn't know then how well I loved him. Indeed, indeed, aunt, I cannot bring my heart to quarrel with him; and I am quite, _quite_ sure he would never wish to quarrel with me. Will you go to my uncle--tell him that I've changed my mind; tell him that I was a foolish girl, and did not know my mind. But tell him I _must_ be friends with Frank again."
"Well, of course I'll do what you wish me,--indeed, I would do anything for you, Fanny, as if you were one of my own; but really, I don't know--Good gracious! What am I to say to him? Wouldn't it be better, Fanny, if you were to go to him yourself?"
"Oh, no, aunt; pray do you tell him first. I couldn't go to him; besides, he would do anything for you, you know. I want you to go to him--do, now, dear aunt--and tell him--not from me, but from yourself--how very, very much I--that is, how very very--but you will know what to say; only Frank must, _must_ come back again."
"Well, Fanny, dear, I'll go to Lord Cashel; or, perhaps, he wouldn't mind coming here. Ring the bell for me, dear. But I'm sure he'll be very angry. I'd just write a line and ask Lord Ballindine to come and dine here, and let him settle it all himself, only I don't think Lord Cashel would like it."
Griffiths answered the summons, and was despatched to the book-room to tell his lordship that her ladyship would be greatly obliged if he would step upstairs to her for a minute or two; and, as soon as Griffiths was gone on her errand, Fanny fled to her own apartment, leaving her aunt in a very bewildered and pitiable state of mind: and there she waited, with palpitating heart and weeping eyes, the effects of the interview.
She was dreadfully nervous, for she felt certain that she would be summoned before her uncle. Hitherto, she alone, in all the house, had held him in no kind of awe; indeed, her respect for her uncle had not been of the most exalted kind; but now she felt she was afraid of him.
She remained in her room much longer than she thought it would have taken her aunt to explain what she had to say. At last, however, she heard footsteps in the corridor, and Griffiths knocked at the door. Her aunt would be obliged by her stepping into her room. She tried not to look disconcerted, and asked if Lord Cashel were still there. She was told that he was; and she felt that she had to muster up all her courage to encounter him.
When she went into the room, Lady Cashel was still in her easy-chair, but the chair seemed to lend none of its easiness to its owner. She was sitting upright, with her hands on her two knees, and she looked perplexed, distressed, and unhappy. Lord Cashel was standing with his back to the fire-place, and Fanny had never seen his face look so black. He really seemed, for the time, to have given over acting, to have thrown aside his dignity, and to be natural and in earnest.
Lady Cashel began the conversation.
"Oh, Fanny," she said, "you must really overcome all this sensitiveness; you really must. I've spoken to your uncle, and it's quite impossible, and very unwise; and, indeed, it can't be done at all. In fact, Lord Ballindine isn't, by any means, the sort of person I supposed."
Fanny knit her brows a little at this, and felt somewhat less humble than she did before. She knew she should get indignant if her uncle abused her lover, and that, if she did, her courage would rise in proportion. Her aunt continued-- "Your uncle's very kind about it, and says he can, of course, forgive your feeling a little out of sorts just at present; and, I'm sure, so can I, and I'm sure I'd do anything to make you happy; but as for making it all up with Lord Ballindine again, indeed it cannot be thought of, Fanny; and so your uncle will tell you."
And then Lord Cashel opened his oracular mouth, for the purpose of doing so.
"Really, Fanny, this is the most unaccountable thing I ever heard of. But you'd better sit down, while I speak to you," and Fanny sat down on the sofa. "I think I understood you rightly, when you desired me, less than a month ago, to inform Lord Ballindine that circumstances--that is, his own conduct--obliged you to decline the honour of his alliance. Did you not do so spontaneously, and of your own accord?"
"Certainly, uncle, I agreed to take your advice; though I did so most unwillingly."
"Had I not your authority for desiring him--I won't say to discontinue his visits, for that he had long done--but to give up his pretensions to your hand? Did you not authorise me to do so?"
"I believe I did. But, uncle--" "And I have done as you desired me; and now, Fanny, that I have done so--now that I have fully explained to him what you taught me to believe were your wishes on the subject, will you tell me--for I really think your aunt must have misunderstood you--what it is that you wish me to do?"
"Why, uncle, you pointed out--and it was very true then, that my fortune was not sufficient to enable Lord Ballindine to keep up his rank. It is different now, and I am very, very sorry that it is so; but it is different now, and I feel that I ought not to reject Lord Ballindine, because I am so much richer than I was when he--when he proposed to me."
"Then it's merely a matter of feeling with you, and not of affection? If I understand you, you are afraid that you should be thought to have treated Lord Ballindine badly?"
"It's not only that--" And then she paused for a few moments, and added, "I thought I could have parted with him, when you made me believe that I ought to do so, but I find I cannot."
"You mean that you love him?" and the earl looked very black at his niece. He intended to frighten her out of her resolution, but she quietly answered, "Yes, uncle, I do."
"And you want me to tell him so, after having banished him from my house?"
Fanny's eyes again shot fire at the word "banished", but she answered, very quietly, and even with a smile, "No, uncle; but I want you to ask him here again. I might tell him the rest myself."
"But, Fanny, dear," said the countess, "your uncle couldn't do it: you know, he told him to go away before. Besides, I really don't think he'd come; he's so taken up with those horrid horses, and that Mr Blake, who is worse than any of 'em. Really, Fanny, Kilcullen says that he and Mr Blake are quite notorious."
"I think, aunt, Lord Kilcullen might be satisfied with looking after himself. If it depended on him, he never had a kind word to say for Lord Ballindine."
"But you know, Fanny," continued the aunt, "he knows everybody; and if he says Lord Ballindine is that sort of person, why, it must be so, though I'm sure I'm very sorry to hear it."
Lord Cashel saw that he could not trust any more to his wife: that last hit about Kilcullen had been very unfortunate; so he determined to put an end to all Fanny's yearnings after her lover with a strong hand, and said, "If you mean, Fanny, after what has passed, that I should go to Lord Ballindine, and give him to understand that he is again welcome to Grey Abbey, I must at once tell you that it is absolutely--absolutely impossible. If I had no personal objection to the young man on any prudential score, the very fact of my having already, at your request, desired his absence from my house, would be sufficient to render it impossible. I owe too much to my own dignity, and am too anxious for your reputation, to think of doing such a thing. But when I also remember that Lord Ballindine is a reckless, dissipated gambler--I much fear, with no fixed principle, I should consider any step towards renewing the acquaintance between you a most wicked and unpardonable proceeding."
When Fanny heard her lover designated as a reckless gambler, she lost all remaining feelings of fear at her uncle's anger, and, standing up, looked him full in the face through her tears.
"It's not so, my lord!" she said, when he had finished. "He is not what you have said. I know him too well to believe such things of him, and I will not submit to hear him abused."
"Oh, Fanny, my dear!" said the frightened countess; "don't speak in that way. Surely, your uncle means to act for your own happiness; and don't you know Lord Ballindine has those horrid horses?"
"If I don't mind his horses, aunt, no one else need; but he's no gambler, and he's not dissipated--I'm sure not half so much so as Lord Kilcullen."
"In that, Fanny, you're mistaken," said the earl; "but I don't wish to discuss the matter with you. You must, however, fully understand this: Lord Ballindine cannot be received under this roof. If you regret him, you must remember that his rejection was your own act. I think you then acted most prudently, and I trust it will not be long before you are of the same opinion yourself," and Lord Cashel moved to the door as though he had accomplished his part in the interview.
"Stop one moment, uncle," said Fanny, striving hard to be calm, and hardly succeeding. "I did not ask my aunt to speak to you on this subject, till I had turned it over and over in my mind, and resolved that I would not make myself and another miserable for ever, because I had been foolish enough not to know my mind. You best know whether you can ask Lord Ballindine to Grey Abbey or not; but I am determined, if I cannot see him here, that I will see him somewhere else," and she turned towards the door, and then, thinking of her aunt, she turned back and kissed her, and immediately left the room.
The countess looked up at her husband, quite dumbfounded, and he seemed rather distressed himself. However, he muttered something about her being a hot-headed simpleton and soon thinking better about it, and then betook himself to his private retreat, to hold sweet converse with his own thoughts--having first rung the bell for Griffiths, to pick up the scattered threads of her mistress's knitting.
Lord Cashel certainly did not like the look of things. There was a determination in Fanny's eye, as she made her parting speech, which upset him rather, and which threw considerable difficulties in the way of Lord Kilcullen's wooing. To be sure, time would do a great deal: but then, there wasn't so much time to spare. He had already taken steps to borrow the thirty thousand pounds, and had, indeed, empowered his son to receive it: he had also pledged himself for the other fifty; and then, after all, that perverse fool of a girl would insist on being in love with that scapegrace, Lord Ballindine! This, however, might wear away, and he would take very good care that she should hear of his misdoings. It would be very odd if, after all, his plans were to be destroyed, and his arrangements disconcerted by his own ward, and niece--especially when he designed so great a match for her!
He could not, however, make himself quite comfortable, though he had great confidence in his own diplomatic resources.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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15
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HANDICAP LODGE
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Lord Ballindine left Grey Abbey, and rode homewards, towards Handicap Lodge, in a melancholy and speculative mood. His first thoughts were all of Harry Wyndham. Frank, as the accepted suitor of his sister, had known him well and intimately, and had liked him much; and the poor young fellow had been much attached to him. He was greatly shocked to hear of his death. It was not yet a month since he had seen him shining in all the new-blown splendour of his cavalry regimentals, and Lord Ballindine was unfeignedly grieved to think how short a time the lad had lived to enjoy them. His thoughts, then, naturally turned to his own position, and the declaration which Lord Cashel had made to him respecting himself. Could it be absolutely true that Fanny had determined to give him up altogether? --After all her willing vows, and assurances of unalterable affection, could she be so cold as to content herself with sending him a formal message, by her uncle, that she did not wish to see him again? Frank argued with himself that it was impossible; he was sure he knew her too well. But still, Lord Cashel would hardly tell him a downright lie, and he had distinctly stated that the rejection came from Miss Wyndham herself.
Then, he began to feel indignant, and spurred his horse, and rode a little faster, and made a few resolutions as to upholding his own dignity. He would run after neither Lord Cashel nor his niece; he would not even ask her to change her mind, since she had been able to bring herself to such a determination as that expressed to him. But he would insist on seeing her; she could not refuse that to him, after what had passed between them, and he would then tell her what he thought of her, and leave her for ever. But no; he would do nothing to vex her, as long as she was grieving for her brother. Poor Harry! --she loved him so dearly! Perhaps, after all, his sudden rejection was, in some manner, occasioned by this sad event, and would be revoked as her sorrow grew less with time. And then, for the first time, the idea shot across his mind, of the wealth Fanny must inherit by her brother's death.
It certainly had a considerable effect on him, for he breathed slow awhile, and was some little time before he could entirely realise the conception that Fanny was now the undoubted owner of a large fortune. "That is it," thought he to himself, at last; "that sordid earl considers that he can now be sure of a higher match for his niece, and Fanny has allowed herself to be persuaded out of her engagement: she has allowed herself to be talked into the belief that it was her duty to give up a poor man like me." And then, he felt very angry again. "Heavens!" said he to himself--"is it possible she should be so servile and so mean? Fanny Wyndham, who cared so little for the prosy admonitions of her uncle, a few months since, can she have altered her disposition so completely? Can the possession of her brother's money have made so vile a change in her character? Could she be the same Fanny who had so entirely belonged to him, who had certainly loved him truly once? Perish her money! he had sought her from affection alone; he had truly and fondly loved her; he had determined to cling to her, in spite of the advice of his friends! And then, he found himself deserted and betrayed by her, because circumstances had given her the probable power of making a better match!"
Such were Lord Ballindine's thoughts; and he flattered himself with the reflection that he was a most cruelly used, affectionate, and disinterested lover. He did not, at the moment, remember that it was Fanny's twenty thousand pounds which had first attracted his notice; and that he had for a considerable time wavered, before he made up his mind to part with himself at so low a price. It was not to be expected that he should remember that, just at present; and he rode on, considerably out of humour with all the world except himself.
As he got near to Handicap Lodge, however, the genius of the master-spirit of that classic spot came upon him, and he began to bethink himself that it would be somewhat foolish of him to give up the game just at present. He reflected that a hundred thousand pounds would work a wondrous change and improvement at Kelly's Court--and that, if he was before prepared to marry Fanny Wyndham in opposition to the wishes of her guardian, he should now be doubly determined to do so, even though all Grey Abbey had resolved to the contrary. The last idea in his mind, as he got off his horse at his friend's door was, as to what Dot Blake would think, and say, of the tidings he brought home with him?
It was dark when he reached Handicap Lodge, and, having first asked whether Mr Blake was in, and heard that he was dressing for dinner, he went to perform the same operation himself. When he came down, full of his budget, and quite ready, as usual, to apply to Dot for advice, he was surprised, and annoyed, to find two other gentlemen in the room, together with Blake. What a bore! to have to make one of a dinner-party of four, and the long protracted rubber of shorts which would follow it, when his mind was so full of other concerns! However, it was not to be avoided.
The guests were, the fat, good-humoured, ready-witted Mat Tierney, and a little Connaught member of Parliament, named Morris, who wore a wig, played a very good rubber of whist, and knew a good deal about selling hunters. He was not very bright, but he told one or two good stories of his own adventures in the world, which he repeated oftener than was approved of by his intimate friends; and he drank his wine plentifully and discreetly--for, if he didn't get a game of cards after consuming a certain quantum, he invariably went to sleep.
There was something in the manner in which the three greeted him, on entering the room, which showed him that they had been speaking of him and his affairs. Dot was the first to address him.
"Well, Frank, I hope I am to wish you joy. I hope you've made a good morning's work of it?"
Frank looked rather distressed: before he could answer, however, Mat Tierney said, "Well, Ballindine, upon my soul I congratulate you sincerely, though, of course, you've seen nothing at Grey Abbey but tears and cambric handkerchiefs. I'm very glad, now, that what Kilcullen told me wasn't true. He left Dublin for London yesterday, and I suppose he won't hear of his cousin's death before he gets there."
"Upon my honour, Lord Ballindine," said the horse-dealing member, "you are a lucky fellow. I believe old Wyndham was a regular golden nabob, and I suppose, now, you'll touch the whole of his gatherings."
Dot and his guests had heard of Harry Wyndham's death, and Fanny's accession of fortune; but they had not heard that she had rejected her lover, and that he had been all but turned out of her guardian's house. Nor did he mean to tell them; but he did not find himself pleasantly situated in having to hear their congratulations and listen to their jokes, while he himself felt that the rumour which he had so emphatically denied to Mat Tierney, only two days since, had turned out to be true.
Not one of the party made the slightest reference to the poor brother from whom Fanny's new fortune had come, except as the lucky means of conveying it to her. There was no regret even pretended for his early death, no sympathy expressed with Fanny's sorrow. And there was, moreover, an evident conviction in the minds of all the three, that Frank, of course, looked on the accident as a piece of unalloyed good fortune--a splendid windfall in his way, unattended with any disagreeable concomitants. This grated against his feelings, and made him conscious that he was not yet heartless enough to be quite fit for, the society in which he found himself.
The party soon went into the dining-room; and Frank at first got a little ease, for Fanny Wyndham seemed to be forgotten in the willing devotion which was paid to Blake's soup; the interest of the fish, also, seemed to be absorbing; and though conversation became more general towards the latter courses, still it was on general subjects, as long as the servants were in the room. But, much to his annoyance, his mistress again came on the tapis [26], together with the claret.
[FOOTNOTE 26: A tapis was a small cloth or tapestry sometimes used to cover a table; hence the expression "on the tapis" meant "on the table" or "under consideration."]
"You and Kilcullen don't hit it off together--eh, Ballindine?" said Mat.
"We never quarrelled," answered Frank; "we never, however, were very intimate."
"I wonder at that, for you're both fond of the turf. There's a large string of his at Murphy's now, isn't there, Dot?"
"Too many, I believe," said Blake. "If you've a mind to be a purchaser, you'll find him a very pleasant fellow--especially if you don't object to his own prices."
"Faith I'll not trouble him," said Mat; "I've two of them already, and a couple on the turf and a couple for the saddle are quite enough to suit me. But what the deuce made him say, so publicly, that your match was off, Ballindine? He couldn't have heard of Wyndham's death at the time, or I should think he was after the money himself."
"I cannot tell; he certainly had not my authority," said Frank.
"Nor the lady's either, I hope."
"You had better ask herself, Tierney; and, if she rejects me, maybe she'll take you."
"There's a speculation for you," said Blake; "you don't think yourself too old yet, I hope, to make your fortune by marriage? --and, if you don't, I'm sure Miss Wyndham can't."
"I tell you what, Dot, I admire Miss Wyndham much, and I admire a hundred thousand pounds more. I don't know anything I admire more than a hundred thousand pounds, except two; but, upon my word, I wouldn't take the money and the lady together."
"Well, that's kind of him, isn't it, Frank? So, you've a chance left, yet."
"Ah! but you forget Morris," said Tierney; "and there's yourself, too. If Ballindine is not to be the lucky man, I don't see why either of you should despair."
"Oh! as for me, I'm the devil. I've a tail, only I don't wear it, except on state occasions; and I've horns and hoofs, only people can't see them. But I don't see why Morris should not succeed: he's the only one of the four that doesn't own a racehorse, and that's much in his favour. What do you say, Morris?"
"I'd have no objection," said the member; "except that I wouldn't like to stand in Lord Ballindine's way."
"Oh! he's the soul of good-nature. You wouldn't take it ill of him, would you, Frank?"
"Not the least," said Frank, sulkily; for he didn't like the conversation, and he didn't know how to put a stop to it.
"Perhaps you wouldn't mind giving him a line of introduction to Lord Cashel," said Mat.
"But, Morris," said Blake, "I'm afraid your politics would go against you. A Repealer would never go down at Grey Abbey."
"Morris'll never let his politics harm him," said Tierney. "Repeal's a very good thing the other side of the Shannon; or one might, carry it as far as Conciliation Hall, if one was hard pressed, and near an election. Were you ever in Conciliation Hall yet, Morris?"
"No, Mat; but I'm going next Thursday. Will you go with me?"
"Faith, I will not: but I think you should go; you ought to do something for your country, for you're a patriot. I never was a public man."
"Well, when I can do any good for my country, I'll go there. Talking of that, I saw O'Connell in town yesterday, and I never saw him looking so well. The verdict hasn't disturbed him much. I wonder what steps the Government will take now? They must be fairly bothered. I don't think they dare imprison him."
"Not dare!" said Blake--'and why not? When they had courage to indict him, you need not fear but what they'll dare to go on with a strong hand, now they have a verdict."
"I'll tell you what, Dot; if they imprison the whole set," said Mat, "and keep them in prison for twelve months, every Catholic in Ireland will be a Repealer by the end of that time."
"And why shouldn't they all be Repealers?" said Morris. "It seems to me that it's just as natural for us to be Repealers, as it is for you to be the contrary."
"I won't say they don't dare to put them in prison," continued Mat; "but I will say they'll be great fools to do it. The Government have so good an excuse for not doing so: they have such an easy path out of the hobble. There was just enough difference of opinion among the judges--just enough irregularity in the trial, such as the omissions of the names from the long panel--to enable them to pardon the whole set with a good grace."
"If they did," said Blake, "the whole high Tory party in this country--peers and parsons--would be furious. They'd lose one set of supporters, and wouldn't gain another. My opinion is, they'll lock the whole party up in the stone jug--for some time, at least."
"Why," said Tierney, "their own party could not quarrel with them for not taking an advantage of a verdict, as to the legality of which there is so much difference of opinion even among the judges. I don't know much about these things, myself; but, as far as I can understand, they would have all been found guilty of high treason a few years back, and probably have been hung or beheaded; and if they could do that now, the country would be all the quieter. But they can't: the people will have their own way; and if they want the people to go easy, they shouldn't put O'Connell into prison. Rob them all of the glories of martyrdom, and you'd find you'll cut their combs and stop their crowing."
"It's not so easy to do that now, Mat," said Morris. "You'll find that the country will stick to O'Connell, whether he's in prison or out of it;--but Peel will never dare to put him there. They talk of the Penitentiary; but I'll tell you what, if they put him there, the people of Dublin won't leave one stone upon another; they'd have it all down in a night."
"You forget, Morris, how near Richmond barracks are to the Penitentiary."
"No, I don't. Not that I think there'll be any row of the kind, for I'll bet a hundred guineas they're never put in prison at all."
"Done," said Dot, and his little book was out--"put that down, Morris, and I'll initial it: a hundred guineas, even, that O'Connell is not in prison within twelve months of this time."
"Very well: that is, that he's not put there and kept there for six months, in consequence of the verdict just given at the State trials."
"No, my boy; that's not it. I said nothing about being kept there six months. They're going to try for a writ of error, or what the devil they call it, before the peers. But I'll bet you a cool hundred he is put in prison before twelve months are over, in consequence of the verdict. If he's locked up there for one night, I win. Will you take that?"
"Well, I will," said Morris; and they both went to work at their little books.
"I was in London," said Mat, "during the greater portion of the trial--and it's astonishing what unanimity of opinion there was at the club that the whole set would be acquitted. I heard Howard make bet, at the Reform Club, that the only man put in prison would be the Attorney-General."
"He ought to have included the Chief Justice," said Morris. "By the bye, Mat, is that Howard the brother of the Honourable and Riverind Augustus?"
"Upon my soul, I don't know whose brother he is. Who is the Riverind Augustus?"
"Morris wants to tell a story, Mat,' said Blake; 'don't spoil him, now."
"Indeed I don't," said the member: "I never told it to any one till I mentioned it to you the other day. It only happened the other day, but it _is_ worth telling."
"Out with it, Morris," said Mat, "it isn't very long, is it? --because, if it is, we'll get Dot to give us a little whiskey and hot water first. I'm sick of the claret."
"Just as you like, Mat," and Blake rang the bell, and the hot water was brought.
"You know Savarius O'Leary," said Morris, anxious to tell his story, "eh, Tierney?"
"What, Savy, with the whiskers?" said Tierney, "to be sure I do. Who doesn't know Savy?"
"You know him, don't you, Lord Ballindine?" Morris was determined everybody should listen to him.
"Oh yes, I know him; he comes from County Mayo--his property's close to mine; that is, the patch of rocks and cabins--which he has managed to mortgage three times over, and each time for more than its value--which he still calls the O'Leary estate."
"Well; some time ago--that is, since London began to fill, O'Leary was seen walking down Regent Street, with a parson. How the deuce he'd ever got hold of the parson, or the parson of him, was never explained; but Phil Mahon saw him, and asked him who his friend in the white choker was. 'Is it my friend in black, you mane?' says Savy, 'thin, my frind was the Honourable and the Riverind Augustus Howard, the Dane.' 'Howard the Dane,' said Mahon, 'how the duce did any of the Howards become Danes?' 'Ah, bother!' said Savy, 'it's not of thim Danes he is; it's not the Danes of Shwaden I mane, at all, man; but a rural Dane of the Church of England.'"
Mat Tierney laughed heartily at this, and even Frank forgot that his dignity had been hurt, and that he meant to be sulky; and he laughed also: the little member was delighted with his success, and felt himself encouraged to persevere.
"Ah, Savy's a queer fellow, if you knew him," he continued, turning to Lord Ballindine, "and, upon my soul, he's no fool. Oh, if you knew him as well--" "Didn't you hear Ballindine say he was his next door neighbour in Mayo?" said Blake, "or, rather, next barrack neighbour; for they dispense with doors in Mayo--eh, Frank? and their houses are all cabins or barracks."
"Why, we certainly don't pretend to all the Apuleian luxuries of Handicap Lodge; but we are ignorant enough to think ourselves comfortable, and swinish enough to enjoy our pitiable state."
"I beg ten thousand pardons, my dear fellow. I didn't mean to offend your nationality. Castlebar, we must allow, is a fine provincial city--though Killala's the Mayo city, I believe; and Claremorris, which is your own town I think, is, as all admit, a gem of Paradise: only it's a pity so many of the houses have been unroofed lately. It adds perhaps to the picturesque effect, but it must, I should think, take away from the comfort."
"Not a house in Claremorris belongs to me," said Lord Ballindine, again rather sulky, "or ever did to any of my family. I would as soon own Claremorris, though, as I would Castleblakeney. Your own town is quite as shattered-looking a place."
"That's quite true--but I have some hopes that Castleblakeney will be blotted out of the face of creation before I come into possession."
"But I was saying about Savy O'Leary," again interposed Morris, "did you ever hear what he did?"
But Blake would not allow his guest the privilege of another story. "If you encourage Morris," said he, "we shall never get our whist," and with that he rose from the table and walked away into the next room.
They played high. Morris always played high if he could, for he made money by whist. Tierney was not a gambler by profession; but the men he lived among all played, and he, therefore, got into the way of it, and played the game well, for he was obliged to do so in his own defence. Blake was an adept at every thing of the kind; and though the card-table was not the place where his light shone brightest, still he was quite at home at it.
As might be supposed, Lord Ballindine did not fare well among the three. He played with each of them, one after the other, and lost with them all. Blake, to do him justice, did not wish to see his friend's money go into the little member's pocket, and, once or twice, proposed giving up; but Frank did not second the proposal, and Morris was inveterate. The consequence was that, before the table was broken up, Lord Ballindine had lost a sum of money which he could very ill spare, and went to bed in a very unenviable state of mind, in spite of the brilliant prospects on which his friends congratulated him.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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16
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BRIEN BORU
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The next morning, at breakfast, when Frank was alone with Blake, he explained to him how matters really stood at Grey Abbey. He told him how impossible he had found it to insist on seeing Miss Wyndham so soon after her brother's death, and how disgustingly disagreeable, stiff and repulsive the earl had been; and, by degrees, they got to talk of other things, and among them, Frank's present pecuniary miseries.
"There can be no doubt, I suppose," said Dot, when Frank had consoled himself by anathematising the earl for ten minutes, "as to the fact of Miss Wyndham's inheriting her brother's fortune?"
"Faith, I don't know; I never thought about her fortune if you'll believe me. I never even remembered that her brother's death would in any way affect her in the way of money, until after I left Grey Abbey."
"Oh, I can believe you capable of anything in the way of imprudence."
"Ah, but, Dot, to think of that pompous fool--who sits and caws in that dingy book-room of his, with as much wise self-confidence as an antiquated raven--to think of him insinuating that I had come there looking for Harry Wyndham's money; when, as you know, I was as ignorant of the poor fellow's death as Lord Cashel was himself a week ago. Insolent blackguard! I would never, willingly, speak another word to him, or put my foot inside that infernal door of his, if it were to get ten times all Harry Wyndham's fortune."
"Then, if I understand you, you now mean to relinquish your claims to Miss Wyndham's hand."
"No; I don't believe she ever sent the message her uncle gave me. I don't see why I'm to give her up, just because she's got this money."
"Nor I, Frank, to tell the truth; especially considering how badly you want it yourself. But I don't think quarrelling with the uncle is the surest way to get the niece."
"But, man, he quarrelled with me."
"It takes two people to quarrel. If he quarrelled with you, do you be the less willing to come to loggerheads with him."
"Wouldn't it be the best plan, Dot, to carry her off?"
"She wouldn't go, my boy: rope ladders and post-chaises are out of fashion."
"But if she's really fond of me--and, upon my honour, I don't believe I'm flattering myself in thinking that she is--why the deuce shouldn't she marry me, _malgré_ [27] Lord Cashel? She must be her own mistress in a week or two. By heavens, I cannot stomach that fellow's arrogant assumption of superiority."
[FOOTNOTE 27: malgré--(French) in spite of; notwithstanding] "It will be much more convenient for her to marry you _bon gré_ [28] Lord Cashel, whom you may pitch to the devil, in any way you like best, as soon as you have Fanny Wyndham at Kelly's Court. But, till that happy time, take my advice, and submit to the cawing. Rooks and ravens are respectable birds, just because they do look so wise. It's a great thing to look wise; the doing so does an acknowledged fool, like Lord Cashel, very great credit."
[FOOTNOTE 28: bon gré--(French) with the consent of] "But what ought I to do? I can't go to the man's house when he told me expressly not to do so."
"Oh, yes, you can: not immediately, but by and by--in a month or six weeks. I'll tell you what I should do, in your place; and remember, Frank, I'm quite in earnest now, for it's a very different thing playing a game for twenty thousand pounds, which, to you, joined to a wife, would have been a positive irreparable loss, and starting for five or six times that sum, which would give you an income on which you might manage to live."
"Well, thou sapient counsellor--but, I tell you beforehand, the chances are ten to one I sha'n't follow your plan."
"Do as you like about that: you sha'n't, at any rate, have me to blame. I would in the first place, assure myself that Fanny inherited her brother's money."
"There's no doubt about that. Lord Cashel said as much."
"Make sure of it however. A lawyer'll do that for you, with very little trouble. Then, take your name off the turf at once; it's worth your while to do it now. You may either do it by a _bona fide_ sale of the horses, or by running them in some other person's name. Then, watch your opportunity, call at Grey Abbey, when the earl is not at home, and manage to see some of the ladies. If you can't do that, if you can't effect an _entrée_, write to Miss Wyndham; don't be too lachrymose, or supplicatory, in your style, but ask her to give you a plain answer personally, or in her own handwriting."
"And if she declines the honour?"
"If, as you say and as I believe, she loves, or has loved you, I don't think she'll do so. She'll submit to a little parleying, and then she'll capitulate. But it will be much better that you should see her, if possible, without writing at all."
"I don't like the idea of calling at Grey Abbey. I wonder whether they'll go to London this season?"
"If they do, you can go after them. The truth is simply this, Ballindine; Miss Wyndham will follow her own fancy in the matter, in spite of her guardian; but, if you make no further advances to her, of course she can make none to you. But I think the game is in your own hand. You haven't the head to play it, or I should consider the stakes as good as won."
"But then, about these horses, Dot. I wish I could sell them, out and out, at once."
"You'll find it very difficult to get anything like the value for a horse that's well up for the Derby. You see, a purchaser must make up his mind to so much outlay: there's the purchase-money, and expense of English training, with so remote a chance of any speedy return."
"But you said you'd advise me to sell them."
"That's if you can get a purchaser:--or else run them in another name. You may run them in my name, if you like it; but Scott must understand that I've nothing whatever to do with the expense."
"Would you not buy them yourself, Blake?"
"No. I would not."
"Why not?"
"If I gave you anything like the value for them, the bargain would not suit me; and if I got them for what they'd be worth to me, you'd think, and other people would say, that I'd robbed you."
Then followed a lengthened and most intricate discourse on the affairs of the stable. Frank much wanted his friend to take his stud entirely off his hands, but this Dot resolutely refused to do. In the course of conversation, Frank owned that the present state of his funds rendered it almost impracticable for him to incur the expense of sending his favourite, Brien Boru, to win laurels in England. He had lost nearly three hundred pounds the previous evening which his account at his banker's did not enable him to pay; his Dublin agent had declined advancing him more money at present, and his tradesmen were very importunate. In fact, he was in a scrape, and Dot must advise him how to extricate himself from it.
"I'll tell you the truth, Ballindine," said he; "as far as I'm concerned myself, I never will lend money, except where I see, as a matter of business, that it is a good speculation to do so. I wouldn't do it for my father."
"Who asked you?" said Frank, turning very red, and looking very angry.
"You did not, certainly; but I thought you might, and you would have been annoyed when I refused you; now, you have the power of being indignant, instead. However, having said so much, I'll tell you what I think you should do, and what I will do to relieve you, as far as the horses are concerned. Do you go down to Kelly's Court, and remain there quiet for a time. You'll be able to borrow what money you absolutely want down there, if the Dublin fellows actually refuse; but do with as little as you can. The horses shall run in my name for twelve months. If they win, I will divide with you at the end of the year the amount won, after deducting their expenses. If they lose, I will charge you with half the amount lost, including the expenses. Should you not feel inclined, at the end of the year, to repay me this sum, I will then keep the horses, instead, or sell them at Dycer's, if you like it better, and hand you the balance if there be any. What do you say to this? You will be released from all trouble, annoyance, and expense, and the cattle will, I trust, be in good hands."
"That is to say, that, for one year, you are to possess one half of whatever value the horses may be?"
"Exactly: we shall be partners for one year."
"To make that fair," said Frank, "you ought to put into the concern three horses, as good and as valuable as my three."
"Yes; and you ought to bring into the concern half the capital to be expended in their training; and knowledge, experience, and skill in making use of them, equal to mine. No, Frank; you're mistaken if you think that I can afford to give up my time, merely for the purpose of making an arrangement to save you from trouble."
"Upon my word, Dot," answered the other, "you're about the coolest hand I ever met! Did I ask you for your precious time, or anything else? You're always afraid that you're going to be done. Now, you might make a distinction between me and some of your other friends, and remember that I am not in the habit of doing anybody."
"Why, I own I don't think it very likely that I, or indeed anyone else, should suffer much from you in that way, for your sin is not too much sharpness."
"Then why do you talk about what you can afford to do?"
"Because it's necessary. I made a proposal which you thought an unfair one. You mayn't believe me, but it is a most positive fact, that my only object in making that proposal was, to benefit you. You will find it difficult to get rid of your horses on any terms; and yet, with the very great stake before you in Miss Wyndham's fortune, it would be foolish in you to think of keeping them; and, on this account, I thought in what manner I could take them from you. If they belong to my stables I shall consider myself bound to run them to the best advantage, and"-- "Well, well--for heaven's sake don't speechify about it."
"Stop a moment, Frank, and listen, for I must make you understand. I must make you see that I am not taking advantage of your position, and trying to rob my own friend in my own house. I don't care what most people say of me, for in my career I must expect people to lie of me. I must, also, take care of myself. But I do wish you to know, that though I could not disarrange my schemes for you, I would not take you in."
"Why, Dot--how can you go on so? I only thought I was taking a leaf out of your book, by being careful to make the best bargain I could."
"Well, as I was saying--I would run the horses to the best advantage--especially Brien, for the Derby: by doing so, my whole book would be upset: I should have to bet all round again--and, very likely, not be able to get the bets I want. I could not do this without a very strong interest in the horse. Besides, you remember that I should have to go over with him to England myself, and that I should be obliged to be in England a great deal at a time when my own business would require me here."
"My dear fellow," said Frank, "you're going on as though it were necessary to defend yourself. I never accused you of anything."
"Never mind whether you did or no. You understand me now: if it will suit you, you can take my offer, but I should be glad to know at once."
While this conversation was going on, the two young men had left the house, and sauntered out into Blake's stud-yard. Here were his stables, where he kept such horses as were not actually in the trainer's hands--and a large assortment of aged hunters, celebrated timber-jumpers, brood mares, thoroughbred fillies, cock-tailed colts, and promising foals. They were immediately joined by Blake's stud groom, who came on business intent, to request a few words with his master; which meant that Lord Ballindine was to retreat, as it was full time for his friend to proceed to his regular day's work. Blake's groom was a very different person in appearance, from the sort of servant in the possession of which the fashionable owner of two or three horses usually rejoices. He had no diminutive top boots; no loose brown breeches, buttoned low beneath the knee; no elongated waistcoat with capacious pockets; no dandy coat with remarkably short tail. He was a very ugly man of about fifty, named John Bottom, dressed somewhat like a seedy gentleman; but he understood his business well, and did it; and was sufficiently wise to know that he served his own pocket best, in the long run, by being true to his master, and by resisting the numerous tempting offers which were made to him by denizens of the turf to play foul with his master's horses. He was, therefore, a treasure to Blake; and he knew it, and valued himself accordingly.
"Well, John," said his master, "I suppose I must desert Lord Ballindine again, and obey your summons. Your few words will last nearly till dinner, I suppose?"
"Why, there is a few things, to be sure, 'll be the better for being talked over a bit, as his lordship knows well enough. I wish we'd as crack a nag in our stables, as his lordship."
"Maybe we may, some day; one down and another come on, you know; as the butcher-boy said."
"At any rate, your horses don't want bottom" said Frank.
He--he--he! laughed John, or rather tried to do so. He had laughed at that joke a thousand times; and, in the best of humours, he wasn't a merry man.
"Well, Frank," said Blake, "the cock has crowed; I must away. I suppose you'll ride down to Igoe's, and see Brien: but think of what I've said, and," he added, whispering--"remember that I will do the best I can for the animals, if you put them into my stables. They shall be made second to nothing, and shall only and always run to win."
So, Blake and John Bottom walked off to the box stables and home paddocks.
Frank ordered his horse, and complied with his friend's suggestion, by riding down to Igoe's. He was not in happy spirits as he went; he felt afraid that his hopes, with regard to Fanny, would be blighted; and that, if he persevered in his suit, he would only be harassed, annoyed, and disappointed. He did not see what steps he could take, or how he could manage to see her. It would be impossible for him to go to Grey Abbey, after having been, as he felt, turned out by Lord Cashel. Other things troubled him also. What should he now do with himself? It was true that he could go down to his own house; but everyone at Kelly's Court expected him to bring with him a bride and a fortune; and, instead of that, he would have to own that he had been jilted, and would be reduced to the disagreeable necessity of borrowing money from his own tenants. And then, that awful subject, money--took possession of him. What the deuce was he to do? What a fool he had been, to be seduced on to the turf by such a man as Blake! And then, he expressed a wish to himself that Blake had been--a long way off before he ever saw him. There he was, steward of the Curragh, the owner of the best horse in Ireland, and absolutely without money to enable him to carry on the game till he could properly retreat from it!
Then he was a little unfair upon his friend: he accused him of knowing his position, and wishing to take advantage of it; and, by the time he had got to Igoe's, his mind was certainly not in a very charitable mood towards poor Dot. He had, nevertheless, determined to accept his offer, and to take a last look at the three Milesians.
The people about the stables always made a great fuss with Lord Ballindine, partly because he was one of the stewards, and partly because he was going to run a crack horse for the Derby in England; and though, generally speaking, he did not care much for personal complimentary respect, he usually got chattered and flattered into good humour at Igoe's.
"Well, my lord," said a sort of foreman, or partner, or managing man, who usually presided over the yard, "I think we'll be apt to get justice to Ireland on the downs this year. That is, they'll give us nothing but what we takes from 'em by hard fighting, or running, as the case may be."
"How's Brien looking this morning, Grady?"
"As fresh as a primrose, my lord, and as clear as crystal: he's ready, this moment, to run through any set of three years old as could be put on the Curragh, anyway."
"I'm afraid you're putting him on too forward."
"Too forrard, is it, my lord? not a bit. He's a hoss as naturally don't pick up flesh; though he feeds free, too. He's this moment all wind and bottom, though, as one may say, he's got no training. He's niver been sthretched yet. Faith it's thrue I'm telling you, my lord."
"I know Scott doesn't like getting horses, early in the season, that are too fine--too much drawn up; he thinks they lose power by it, and so they do;--it's the distance that kills them, at the Derby. It's so hard to get a young horse to stay the distance."
"That's thrue, shure enough, my lord; and there isn't a gentleman this side the wather, anyway, undherstands thim things betther than your lordship."
"Well, Grady, let's have a look at the young chieftain: he's all right about the lungs, anyway."
"And feet too, my lord; niver saw a set of claner feet with plates on: and legs too! If you were to canter him down the road, I don't think he'd feel it; not that I'd like to thry, though."
"Why, he's not yet had much to try them."
"Faix, he has, my lord: didn't he win the Autumn Produce Stakes?"
"The only thing he ever ran for."
"Ah, but I tell you, as your lordship knows very well--no one betther--that it's a ticklish thing to bring a two year old to the post, in anything like condition--with any running in him at all, and not hurt his legs."
"But I think he's all right--eh, Grady?"
"Right? --your lordship knows he's right. I wish he may be made righter at John Scott's, that's all. But that's unpossible."
"Of course, Grady, you think he might be trained here, as well as at the other side of the water?"
"No, I don't, my lord: quite different. I've none of thim ideas at all, and never had, thank God. I knows what we can do, and I knows what they can do:--breed a hoss in Ireland, train him in the North of England, and run him in the South; and he'll do your work for you, and win your money, steady and shure."
"And why not run in the North, too?"
"They're too 'cute, my lord: they like to pick up the crumbs themselves--small blame to thim in that matther. No; a bright Irish nag, with lots of heart, like Brien Boru, is the hoss to stand on for the Derby; where all run fair and fair alike, the best wins;--but I won't say but he'll be the betther for a little polishing at Johnny Scott's."
"Besides, Grady, no horse could run immediately after a sea voyage. Do you remember what a show we made of Peter Simple at Kilrue?"
"To be shure I does, my lord: besides, they've proper gallops there, which we haven't--and they've betther manes of measuring horses:--why, they can measure a horse to half a pound, and tell his rale pace on a two-mile course, to a couple of seconds. --Take the sheets off, Larry, and let his lordship run his hand over him. He's as bright as a star, isn't he?"
"I think you're getting him too fine. I'm sure Scott'll say so."
"Don't mind him, my lord. He's not like one of those English cats, with jist a dash of speed about 'em, and nothing more--brutes that they put in training half a dozen times in as many months. Thim animals pick up a lot of loose, flabby flesh in no time, and loses it in less; and, in course, av' they gets a sweat too much, there's nothin left in 'em; not a hapoth. Brien's a different guess sort of animal from that."
"Were you going to have him out, Grady?"
"Why, we was not--that is, only just for walking exercise, with his sheets on: but a canter down the half mile slope, and up again by the bushes won't go agin him."
"Well, saddle him then, and let Pat get up."
"Yes, my lord"; and Brien was saddled by the two men together, with much care and ceremony; and Pat was put up--"and now, Pat," continued Grady, "keep him well in hand down the slope--don't let him out at all at all, till you come to the turn: when you're fairly round the corner, just shake your reins the laste in life, and when you're halfway up the rise, when the lad begins to snort a bit, let him just see the end of the switch--just raise it till it catches his eye; and av' he don't show that he's disposed for running, I'm mistaken. We'll step across to the bushes, my lord, and see him come round."
Lord Ballindine and the managing man walked across to the bushes accordingly, and Pat did exactly as he was desired. It was a pretty thing to see the beautiful young animal, with his sleek brown coat shining like a lady's curls, arching his neck, and throwing down his head, in his impatience to start. He was the very picture of health and symmetry; when he flung up his head you'd think the blood was running from his nose, his nostrils were so ruddy bright. He cantered off in great impatience, and fretted and fumed because the little fellow on his back would be the master, and not let him have his play--down the slope, and round the corner by the trees. It was beautiful to watch him, his motions were so easy, so graceful. At the turn he answered to the boy's encouragement, and mended his pace, till again he felt the bridle, and then, as the jock barely moved his right arm, he bounded up the rising ground, past the spot where Lord Ballindine and the trainer were standing, and shot away till he was beyond the place where he knew his gallop ordinarily ended. As Grady said, he hadn't yet been stretched; he had never yet tried his own pace, and he had that look so beautiful in a horse when running, of working at his ease, and much within his power.
"He's a beautiful creature," said Lord Ballindine, as he mournfully reflected that he was about to give up to Dot Blake half the possession of his favourite, and the whole of the nominal title. It was such a pity he should be so hampered; the mere _éclat_ of possessing such a horse was so great a pleasure; "He is a fine creature," said he, "and, I am sure, will do well."
"Your lordship may say that: he'll go precious nigh to astonish the Saxons, I think. I suppose the pick-up at the Derby'll be nigh four thousand this year."
"I suppose it will--something like that."
"Well; I would like a nag out of our stables to do the trick on the downs, and av' we does it iver, it'll be now. Mr Igoe's standing a deal of cash on him. I wonder is Mr Blake standing much on him, my lord?"
"You'd be precious deep, Grady, if you could find what he's doing in that way."
"That's thrue for you, my lord; but av' he, or your lordship, wants to get more on, now's the time. I'll lay twenty thousand pounds this moment, that afther he's been a fortnight at Johnny Scott's the odds agin him won't be more than ten to one, from that day till the morning he comes out on the downs."
"I dare say not."
"I wondher who your lordship'll put up?"
"That must depend on Scott, and what sort of a string he has running. He's nothing, as yet, high in the betting, except Hardicanute."
"Nothing, my lord; and, take my word for it, that horse is ownly jist run up for the sake of the betting; that's not his nathural position. Well, Pat, you may take the saddle off. Will your lordship see the mare out to-day?"
"Not to-day, Grady. Let's see, what's the day she runs?"
"The fifteenth of May, my lord. I'm afraid Mr Watts' Patriot 'll be too much for her; that's av' he'll run kind; but he don't do that always. Well, good morning to your lordship."
"Good morning, Grady;" and Frank rode back towards Handicap Lodge.
He had a great contest with himself on his road home. He had hated the horses two days since, when he was at Grey Abbey, and had hated himself, for having become their possessor; and now he couldn't bear the thought of parting with them. To be steward of the Curragh--to own the best horse of the year--and to win the Derby, were very pleasant things in themselves; and for what was he going to give over all this glory, pleasure and profit, to another? To please a girl who had rejected him, even jilted him, and to appease an old earl who had already turned him out of his house! No, he wouldn't do it. By the time that he was half a mile from Igoe's stables he had determined that, as the girl was gone it would be a pity to throw the horses after her; he would finish this year on the turf; and then, if Fanny Wyndham was still her own mistress after Christmas, he would again ask her her mind. "If she's a girl of spirit," he said to himself--"and nobody knows better than I do that she is, she won't like me the worse for having shown that I'm not to be led by the nose by a pompous old fool like Lord Cashel," and he rode on, fortifying himself in this resolution, for the second half mile. "But what the deuce should he do about money?" There was only one more half mile before he was again at Handicap Lodge. --Guinness's people had his title-deeds, and he knew he had twelve hundred a year after paying the interest of the old incumbrances. They hadn't advanced him much since he came of age; certainly not above five thousand pounds; and it surely was very hard he could not get five or six hundred pounds when he wanted it so much; it was very hard that he shouldn't be able to do what he liked with his own, like the Duke of Newcastle. However, the money must be had: he must pay Blake and Tierney the balance of what they had won at whist, and the horse couldn't go over the water till the wind was raised. If he was driven very hard he might get something from Martin Kelly. These unpleasant cogitations brought him over the third half mile, and he rode through the gate of Handicap Lodge in a desperate state of indecision.
"I'll tell you what I'll do, Dot," he said, when he met his friend coming in from his morning's work; "and I'm deuced sorry to do it, for I shall be giving you the best horse of his year, and something tells me he'll win the Derby."
"I suppose 'something' means old Jack Igoe, or that blackguard Grady," said Dot. "But as to his winning, that's as it may be. You know the chances are sixteen to one he won't."
"Upon my honour I don't think they are."
"Will you take twelve to one?"
"Ah! youk now, Dot, I'm not now wanting to bet on the horse with you. I was only saying that I've a kind of inward conviction that he will win."
"My dear Frank," said the other, "if men selling horses could also sell their inward convictions with them, what a lot of articles of that description there would be in the market! But what were you going to say you'd do?"
"I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll agree to your terms providing you'll pay half the expenses of the horses since the last race each of them ran. You must see that would be only fair, supposing the horses belonged to you, equally with me, ever since that time."
"It would be quite fair, no doubt, if I agreed to it: it would be quite fair also if I agreed to give you five hundred pounds; but I will do neither one nor the other."
"But look here, Dot--Brien ran for the Autumn Produce Stakes last October, and won them: since then he has done nothing to reimburse me for his expense, nor yet has anything been taken out of him by running. Surely, if you are to have half the profits, you should at any rate pay half the expenses?"
"That's very well put, Frank; and if you and I stood upon equal ground, with an arbiter between us by whose decision we were bound to abide, and to whom the settlement of the question was entrusted, your arguments would, no doubt, be successful, but--" "Well that's the fair way of looking at it."
"But, as I was going to say, that's not the case. We are neither of us bound to take any one's decision; and, therefore, any terms which either of us chooses to accept must be fair. Now I have told you my terms--the lowest price, if you like to call it so,--at which I will give your horses the benefit of my experience, and save you from their immediate pecuniary pressure; and I will neither take any other terms, nor will I press these on you."
"Why, Blake, I'd sooner deal with all the Jews of Israel--" "Stop, Frank: one word of abuse, and I'll wash my hands of the matter altogether."
"Wash away then, I'll keep the horses, though I have to sell my hunters and the plate at Kelly's Court into the bargain."
"I was going to add--only your energy's far too great to allow of a slow steady man like me finishing his sentence--I was going to say that, if you're pressed for money as you say, and if it will be any accommodation, I will let you have two hundred and fifty pounds at five per cent. on the security of the horses; that is, that you will be charged with that amount, and the interest, in the final closing of the account at the end of the year, before the horses are restored to you."
Had an uninterested observer been standing by he might have seen with half an eye that Blake's coolness was put on, and that his indifference to the bargain was assumed. This offer of the loan was a second bid, when he found the first was likely to be rejected: it was made, too, at the time that he was positively declaring that he would make none but the first offer. Poor Frank! --he was utterly unable to cope with his friend at the weapons with which they were playing, and he was consequently most egregiously plundered. But it was in an affair of horse-flesh, and the sporting world, when it learned the terms on which the horses were transferred from Lord Ballindine's name to that of Mr Blake, had not a word of censure to utter against the latter. He was pronounced to be very wide awake, and decidedly at the top of his profession; and Lord Ballindine was spoken of, for a week, with considerable pity and contempt.
When Blake mentioned the loan Frank got up, and stood with his back to the fire; then bit his lips, and walked twice up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, and then he paused, looked out of the window, and attempted to whistle: then he threw himself into an armchair, poked out both his legs as far as he could, ran his fingers through his hair, and set to work hard to make up his mind. But it was no good; in about five minutes he found he could not do it; so he took out his purse, and, extracting half-a-crown, threw it up to the ceiling, saying, "Well, Dot--head or harp? If you're right, you have them."
"Harp," cried Dot.
They both examined the coin. "They're yours," said Frank, with much solemnity; "and now you've got the best horse--yes, I believe the very best horse alive, for nothing."
"Only half of him, Frank."
"Well," said Frank; "it's done now, I suppose."
"Oh, of course it is," said Dot: "I'll draw out the agreement, and give you a cheque for the money to-night."
And so he did; and Frank wrote a letter to Igoe, authorizing him to hand over the horses to Mr Blake's groom, stating that he had sold them--for so ran his agreement with Dot--and desiring that his bill for training, &c., might be forthwith forwarded to Kelly's Court. Poor Frank! he was ashamed to go to take a last look at his dear favourites, and tell his own trainer that he had sold his own horses.
The next morning saw him, with his servant, on the Ballinasloe coach, travelling towards Kelly's Court; and, also, saw Brien Boru, Granuell, and Finn M'Goul led across the downs, from Igoe's stables to Handicap Lodge.
The handsome sheets, hoods, and rollers, in which they had hitherto appeared, and on which the initial B was alone conspicuous, were carefully folded up, and they were henceforth seen in plainer, but as serviceable apparel, labelled W. B. "Will you give fourteen to one against Brien Boru?" said Viscount Avoca to Lord Tathenham Corner, about ten days after this, at Tattersall's.
"I will," said Lord Tathenham.
"In hundreds?" said the sharp Irishman.
"Very well," said Lord Tathenham; and the bet was booked.
"You didn't know, I suppose," said the successful viscount, "that Dot Blake has bought Brien Boru?"
"And who the devil's Dot Blake?" said Lord Tathenham.
"Oh! you'll know before May's over," said the viscount.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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17
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MARTIN KELLY'S COURTSHIP
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It will be remembered that the Tuam attorney, Daly, dined with Barry Lynch, at Dunmore House, on the same evening that Martin Kelly reached home after his Dublin excursion; and that, on that occasion, a good deal of interesting conversation took place after dinner. Barry, however, was hardly amenable to reason at that social hour, and it was not till the following morning that he became thoroughly convinced that it would be perfectly impossible for him to make his sister out a lunatic to the satisfaction of the Chancellor.
He then agreed to abandon the idea, and, in lieu of it, to indict, or at any rate to threaten to indict, the widow Kelly and her son for a conspiracy, and an attempt to inveigle his sister Anty into a disgraceful marriage, with the object of swindling her out of her property.
"I'll see Moylan, Mr Lynch," said Daly; "and if I can talk him over, I think we might succeed in frightening the whole set of them, so far as to prevent the marriage. Moylan must know that if your sister was to marry young Kelly, there'd be an end to his agency; but we must promise him something, Mr Lynch."
"Yes; I suppose we must pay him, before we get anything out of him."
"No, not before--but he must understand that he will get something, if he makes himself useful. You must let me explain to him that if the marriage is prevented, you will make no objection to his continuing to act as Miss Lynch's agent; and I might hint the possibility of his receiving the rents on the whole property."
"Hint what you like, Daly, but don't tie me down to the infernal ruffian. I suppose we can throw him overboard afterwards, can't we?"
"Why, not altogether, Mr Lynch. If I make him a definite promise, I shall expect you to keep to it."
"Confound him! --but tell me, Daly; what is it he's to do? --and what is it we're to do?"
"Why, Mr Lynch, it's more than probable, I think, that this plan of Martin Kelly's marrying your sisther may have been talked over between the ould woman, Moylan, and the young man; and if so, that's something like a conspiracy. If I could worm that out of him, I think I'd manage to frighten them."
"And what the deuce had I better do? You see, there was a bit of a row between us. That is, Anty got frightened when I spoke to her of this rascal, and then she left the house. Couldn't you make her understand that she'd be all right if she'd come to the house again?"
While Barry Lynch had been sleeping off the effects of the punch, Daly had been inquiring into the circumstances under which Anty had left the house, and he had pretty nearly learned the truth; he knew, therefore, how much belief to give to his client's representation.
"I don't think," said he, "that your sister will be likely to come back at present; she will probably find herself quieter and easier at the inn. You see, she has been used to a quiet life."
"But, if she remains there, she can marry that young ruffian any moment she takes it into her head to do so. There's always some rogue of a priest ready to do a job of that sort."
"Exactly so, Mr Lynch. Of course your sister can marry whom she pleases, and when she pleases, and neither you nor any one else can prevent her; but still--" "Then what the devil's the use of my paying you to come here and tell me that?"
"That's your affair: I didn't come without being sent for. But I was going to tell you that, though we can't prevent her from marrying if she pleases, we may make her afraid to do so. You had better write her a kind, affectionate note, regretting what has taken place between you, and promising to give her no molestation of any kind, if she will return to her own house,--and keep a copy of this letter. Then I will see Moylan; and, if I can do anything with him, it will be necessary that you should also see him. You could come over to Tuam, and meet him in my office; and then I will try and force an entrance into the widow's castle, and, if possible, see your sister, and humbug the ould woman into a belief that she has laid herself open to criminal indictment. We might even go so far as to have notices served on them; but, if they snap their fingers at us, we can do nothing further. My advice in that case would be, that you should make the best terms in your power with Martin Kelly."
"And let the whole thing go! I'd sooner--Why, Daly, I believe you're as bad as Blake! You're afraid of these huxtering thieves!"
"If you go on in that way, Mr Lynch, you'll get no professional gentleman to act with you. I give you my best advice; it you don't like it, you needn't follow it; but you won't get a solicitor in Connaught to do better for you than what I'm proposing."
"Confusion!" muttered Barry, and he struck the hot turf in the grate a desperate blow with the tongs which he had in his hands, and sent the sparks and bits of fire flying about the hearth.
"The truth is, you see, your sister's in her full senses; there's the divil a doubt of that; the money's her own, and she can marry whom she pleases. All that we can do is to try and make the Kellys think they have got into a scrape."
"But this letter--What on earth am I to say to her?"
"I'll just put down what I would say, were I you; and if you like you can copy it." Daly then wrote the following letter-- My Dear Anty, Before taking other steps, which could not fail of being very disagreeable to you and to others, I wish to point out to you how injudiciously you are acting in leaving your own house; and to try to induce you to do that which will be most beneficial to yourself, and most conducive to your happiness and respectability. If you will return to Dunmore House, I most solemnly promise to leave you unmolested. I much regret that my violence on Thursday should have annoyed you, but I can assure you it was attributable merely to my anxiety on your account. Nothing, however, shall induce me to repeat it. But you must be aware that a little inn is not a fit place for you to be stopping at; and I am obliged to tell you that I have conclusive evidence of a conspiracy having been formed, by the family with whom you are staying, to get possession of your money; and that this conspiracy was entered into very shortly after the contents of my father's will had been made public. I _must_ have this fact proved at the Assizes, and the disreputable parties to it punished, unless you will consent, at any rate for a time, to put yourself under the protection of your brother.
In the meantime pray believe me, dear Anty, in spite of appearances, Your affectionate brother, BARRY LYNCH.
It was then agreed that this letter should be copied and signed by Barry, and delivered by Terry on the following morning, which was Sunday. Daly then returned to Tuam, with no warm admiration for his client.
In the meantime the excitement at the inn, arising from Anty's arrival and Martin's return, was gradually subsiding. These two important events, both happening on the same day, sadly upset the domestic economy of Mrs Kelly's establishment. Sally had indulged in tea almost to stupefaction, and Kattie's elfin locks became more than ordinarily disordered. On the following morning, however, things seemed to fall a little more into their places: the widow was, as usual, behind her counter; and if her girls did not give her as much assistance as she desired of them, and as much as was usual with them, they were perhaps excusable, for they could not well leave their new guest alone on the day after her coming to them.
Martin went out early to Toneroe; doubtless the necessary labours of the incipient spring required him at the farm but I believe that if his motives were analysed, he hardly felt himself up to a _tête-à-tête_ with his mistress, before he had enjoyed a cool day's consideration of the extraordinary circumstances which had brought her into the inn as his mother's guest. He, moreover, wished to have a little undisturbed conversation with Meg, and to learn from her how Anty might be inclined towards him just at present. So Martin spent his morning among his lambs and his ploughs; and was walking home, towards dusk, tired enough, when he met Barry Lynch, on horseback, that hero having come out, as usual, for his solitary ride, to indulge in useless dreams of the happy times he would have, were his sister only removed from her tribulations in this world. Though Martin had never been on friendly terms with his more ambitious neighbour, there had never, up to this time, been any quarrel between them, and he therefore just muttered "Good morning, Mr Lynch," as he passed him on the road.
Barry said nothing, and did not appear to see him as he passed; but some idea struck him as soon as he had passed, and he pulled in his horse and hallooed out "Kelly!" --and, as Martin stopped, he added, "Come here a moment--I want to speak to you."
"Well, Mr Barry, what is it?" said the other, returning. Lynch paused, and evidently did not know whether to speak or let it alone. At last he said, "Never mind--I'll get somebody else to say what I was going to say. But you'd better look sharp what you're about, my lad, or you'll find yourself in a scrape that you don't dream of."
"And is that all you called me back for?" said Martin.
"That's all I mean to say to you at present."
"Well then, Mr Lynch, I must say you're very good, and I'm shure I will look sharp enough. But, to my thinking, d'you know, you want looking afther yourself a precious dale more than I do," and then he turned to proceed homewards, but said, as he was going--"Have you any message for your sisther, Mr Lynch?"
"By--! my young man, I'll make you pay for what you're doing," answered Barry.
"I know you'll be glad to hear she's pretty well: she's coming round from the thratement she got the other night; though, by all accounts, it's a wondher she's alive this moment to tell of it."
Barry did not attempt any further reply, but rode on, sorry enough that he had commenced the conversation. Martin got home in time for a snug tea with Anty and his sisters, and succeeded in prevailing on the three to take each a glass of punch; and, before Anty went to bed he began to find himself more at his ease with her, and able to call her by her Christian name without any disagreeable emotion. He certainly had a most able coadjutor in Meg. She made room on the sofa for him between herself and his mistress, and then contrived that the room should be barely sufficient, so that Anty was rather closely hemmed up in one corner: moreover, she made Anty give her opinion as to Martin's looks after his metropolitan excursion, and tried hard to make Martin pay some compliments to Anty's appearance. But in this she failed, although she gave him numerous opportunities.
However, they passed the evening very comfortably,--quite sufficiently so to make Anty feel that the kindly, humble friendship of the inn was infinitely preferable to the miserable grandeur of Dunmore House; and it is probable that all the lovemaking in the world would not have operated so strongly in Martin's favour as this feeling. Meg, however, was not satisfied, for as soon as she had seen Jane and Anty into the bed-room she returned to her brother, and lectured him as to his lukewarm manifestations of affection.
"Martin," said she, returning into the little sitting-room, and carefully shutting the door after her, "you're the biggest bosthoon of a gandher I ever see, to be losing your opportunities with Anty this way! I b'lieve it's waiting you are for herself to come forward to you. Do you think a young woman don't expect something more from a lover than jist for you to sit by her, and go on all as one as though she was one of your own sisthers? Av' once she gets out of this before the priest has made one of the two of you, mind, I tell you, it'll be all up with you. I wondher, Martin, you haven't got more pluck in you!"
"Oh! bother, Meg. You're thinking of nothing but kissing and slobbhering. --Anty's not the same as you and Jane, and doesn't be all agog for such nonsense!"
"I tell you, Martin, Anty's a woman; and, take my word for it, what another girl likes won't come amiss to her. Besides, why don't you spake to her?"
"Spake? --why, what would you have me spake?"
"Well, Martin, you're a fool. Have you, or have you not, made up your mind to marry Anty?"
"To be shure I will, av' she'll have me."
"And do you expect her to have you without asking?"
"Shure, you know, didn't I ask her often enough?"
"Ah, but you must do more than jist ask her that way. She'll never make up her mind to go before the priest, unless you say something sthronger to her. Jist tell her, plump out, you're ready and willing, and get the thing done before Lent. What's to hindher you? --shure, you know," she added, in a whisper, "you'll not get sich a fortune as Anty's in your way every day. Spake out, man, and don't be afraid of her: take my word she won't like you a bit the worse for a few kisses."
Martin promised to comply with his sister's advice, and to sound Anty touching their marriage on the following morning after mass.
On the Sunday morning, at breakfast, the widow proposed to Anty that she should go to mass with herself and her daughters; but Anty trembled so violently at the idea of showing herself in public, after her escape from Dunmore House, that the widow did not press her to do so, although afterwards she expressed her disapprobation of Anty's conduct to her own girls.
"I don't see what she has to be afeard of," said she, "in going to get mass from her own clergyman in her own chapel. She don't think, I suppose, that Barry Lynch'd dare come in there to pull her out, before the blessed altar, glory be to God."
"Ah but, mother, you know, she has been so frighted."
"Frighted, indeed! She'll get over these tantrums, I hope, before Sunday next, or I know where I'll wish her again."
So Anty was left at home, and the rest of the family went to mass. When the women returned, Meg manoeuvred greatly, and, in fine, successfully, that no one should enter the little parlour to interrupt the wooing she intended should take place there. She had no difficulty with Jane, for she told her what her plans were; and though her less energetic sister did not quite agree in the wisdom of her designs, and pronounced an opinion that it would be "better to let things settle down a bit," still she did not presume to run counter to Meg's views; but Meg had some work to dispose of her mother. It would not have answered at all, as Meg had very well learned herself, to caution her mother not to interrupt Martin in his love-making, for the widow had no charity for such follies. She certainly expected her daughters to get married, and wished them to be well and speedily settled; but she watched anything like a flirtation on their part as closely as a cat does a mouse. If any young man were in the house, she'd listen to the fall of his footsteps with the utmost care; and when she had reason to fear that there was anything like a lengthened _tête-à-tête_ upstairs, she would steal on the pair, if possible, unawares, and interrupt, without the least reserve, any billing and cooing which might be going on, sending the delinquent daughter to her work, and giving a glower at the swain, which she expected might be sufficient to deter him from similar offences for some little time.
The girls, consequently, were taught to be on the alert--to steal about on tiptoe, to elude their mother's watchful ear, to have recourse to a thousand little methods of deceiving her, and to baffle her with her own weapons. The mother, if she suspected that any prohibited frolic was likely to be carried on, at a late hour, would tell her daughters that she was going to bed, and would shut herself up for a couple of hours in her bed-room, and then steal out eavesdropping, peeping through key-holes and listening at door-handles; and the daughters, knowing their mother's practice, would not come forth till the listening and peeping had been completed, and till they had ascertained, by some infallible means, that the old woman was between the sheets.
Each party knew the tricks of the other; and yet, taking it all in all, the widow got on very well with her children, and everybody said what a good mother she had been: she was accustomed to use deceit, and was therefore not disgusted by it in others. Whether the system of domestic manners which I have described is one likely to induce to sound restraint and good morals is a question which I will leave to be discussed by writers on educational points.
However Meg managed it, she did contrive that her mother should not go near the little parlour this Sunday morning, and Anty was left alone, to receive her lover's visit. I regret to say that he was long in paying it. He loitered about the chapel gates before he came home; and seemed more than usually willing to talk to anyone about anything. At last, however, just as Meg was getting furious, he entered the inn.
"Why, Martin, you born ideot--av' she ain't waiting for you this hour and more!"
"Thim that's long waited for is always welcome when they do come," replied Martin.
"Well afther all I've done for you! Are you going in now? --cause, av' you don't, I'll go and tell her not to be tasing herself about you. I'll neither be art or part in any such schaming."
"Schaming, is it, Meg? Faith, it'd be a clever fellow'd beat you at that," and, without waiting for his sister's sharp reply, he walked into the little room where Anty was sitting.
"So, Anty, you wouldn't come to mass?" he began.
"Maybe I'll go next Sunday," said she.
"It's a long time since you missed mass before, I'm thinking."
"Not since the Sunday afther father's death."
"It's little you were thinking then how soon you'd be stopping down here with us at the inn."
"That's thrue for you, Martin, God knows."
At this point of the conversation Martin stuck fast: he did not know Rosalind's recipe [29] for the difficulty a man feels, when he finds himself gravelled for conversation with his mistress; so he merely scratched his head, and thought hard to find what he'd say next. I doubt whether the conviction, which was then strong on his mind, that Meg was listening at the keyhole to every word that passed, at all assisted him in the operation. At last, some Muse came to his aid, and he made out another sentence.
[FOOTNOTE 29: Rosalind's recipe--In _As You Like It_, Act III, Sc. ii, Rosalind, disguised as a young man, instructs Orlando to practice his wooing on her.]
"It was very odd my finding you down here, all ready before me, wasn't it?" " 'Deed it was: your mother was a very good woman to me that morning, anyhow."
"And tell me now, Anty, do you like the inn?" " 'Deed I do--but it's quare, like."
"How quare?"
"Why, having Meg and Jane here: I wasn't ever used to anyone to talk to, only just the servants."
"You'll have plenty always to talk to now--eh, Anty?" and Martin tried a sweet look at his lady love.
"I'm shure I don't know. Av' I'm only left quiet, that's what I most care about."
"But, Anty, tell me--you don't want always to be what you call quiet?"
"Oh! but I do--why not?"
"But you don't mane, Anty, that you wouldn't like to have some kind of work to do--some occupation, like?"
"Why, I wouldn't like to be idle; but a person needn't be idle because they're quiet."
"And that's thrue, Anty." And Martin broke down again.
"There'd be a great crowd in chapel, I suppose?" said Anty.
"There was a great crowd."
"And what was father Geoghegan preaching about?"
"Well, then, I didn't mind. To tell the truth, Anty, I came out most as soon as the preaching began; only I know he told the boys to pray that the liberathor might be got out of his throubles; and so they should--not that there's much to throuble him, as far as the verdict's concerned."
"Isn't there then? I thought they made him out guilty?"
"So they did, the false ruffians: but what harum 'll that do? they daren't touch a hair of his head!"
Politics, however, are not a favourable introduction to love-making: so Martin felt, and again gave up the subject, in the hopes that he might find something better. "What a fool the man is!" thought Meg to herself, at the door--"if I had a lover went on like that, wouldn't I pull his ears!"
Martin got up--walked across the room--looked out of the little window--felt very much ashamed of himself, and, returning, sat himself down on the sofa.
"Anty," he said, at last, blushing nearly brown as he spoke; "Were you thinking of what I was spaking to you about before I went to Dublin?"
Anty blushed also, now. "About what?" she said.
"Why, just about you and me making a match of it. Come, Anty, dear, what's the good of losing time? I've been thinking of little else; and, after what's been between us, you must have thought the matther over too, though you do let on to be so innocent. Come, Anty, now that you and mother's so thick, there can be nothing against it."
"But indeed there is, Martin, a great dale against it--though I'm sure it's good of you to be thinking of me. There's so much against it, I think we had betther be of one mind, and give it over at once."
"And what's to hinder us marrying, Anty, av' yourself is plazed? Av' you and I, and mother are plazed, sorrow a one that I know of has a word to say in the matther."
"But Barry don't like it!"
"And, afther all, are you going to wait for what Barry likes? You didn't wait for what was plazing to Barry Lynch when you came down here; nor yet did mother when she went up and fetched you down at five in the morning, dreading he'd murdher you outright. And it was thrue for her, for he would, av' he was let, the brute. And are you going to wait for what he likes?"
"Whatever he's done, he's my brother; and there's only the two of us."
"But it's not that, Anty--don't you know it's not that? Isn't it because you're afraid of him? because he threatened and frightened you? And what on 'arth could he do to harum you av' you was the wife of--of a man who'd, anyway, not let Barry Lynch, or anyone else, come between you and your comfort and aise?"
"But you don't know how wretched I've been since he spoke to me about--about getting myself married: you don't know what I've suffered; and I've a feeling that good would never come of it."
"And, afther all, are you going to tell me now, that I may jist go my own way? Is that to be your answer, and all I'm to get from you?"
"Don't be angry with me, Martin. I'm maning to do everything for the best."
"Maning? --what's the good of maning? Anyways, Anty, let me have an answer, for I'll not be making a fool of myself any longer. Somehow, all the boys here, every sowl in Dunmore, has it that you and I is to be married--and now, afther promising me as you did--" "Oh, I never promised, Martin."
"It was all one as a promise--and now I'm to be thrown overboard. And why? --because Barry Lynch got dhrunk, and frightened you. Av' I'd seen the ruffian striking you, I think I'd 've been near putting it beyond him to strike another woman iver again."
"Glory be to God that you wasn't near him that night," said Anty, crossing herself. "It was bad enough, but av' the two of you should ever be set fighting along of me, it would kill me outright."
"But who's talking of fighting, Anty, dear?" and Martin drew a little nearer to her--"who's talking of fighting? I never wish to spake another word to Barry the longest day that ever comes. Av' he'll get out of my way, I'll go bail he'll not find me in his."
"But he wouldn't get out of your way, nor get out of mine, av' you and I got married: he'd be in our way, and we'd be in his, and nothing could iver come of it but sorrow and misery, and maybe bloodshed."
"Them's all a woman's fears. Av' you an I were once spliced by the priest, God bless him, Barry wouldn't trouble Dunmore long afther."
"That's another rason, too. Why should I be dhriving him out of his own house? you know he's a right to the house, as well as I." "Who's talking of dhriving him out? Faith, he'd be welcome to stay there long enough for me! He'd go, fast enough, without dhriving, though; you can't say the counthry wouldn't have a good riddhance of him. But never mind that, Anty: it wasn't about Barry, one way or the other, I was thinking, when I first asked you to have me; nor it wasn't about myself altogether, as I could let you know; though, in course, I'm not saying but that myself's as dear to myself as another, an' why not? But to tell the blessed truth, I was thinking av' you too; and that you'd be happier and asier, let alone betther an' more respecthable, as an honest man's wife, as I'd make you, than being mewed up there in dread of your life, never daring to open your mouth to a Christian, for fear of your own brother, who niver did, nor niver will lift a hand to sarve you, though he wasn't backward to lift it to sthrike you, woman and sisther though you were. Come, Anty, darlin," he added, after a pause, during which he managed to get his arm behind her back, though he couldn't be said to have it fairly round her waist--"Get quit of all these quandaries, and say at once, like an honest girl, you'll do what I'm asking--and what no living man can hindher you from or say against it. --Or else jist fairly say you won't, and I'll have done with it."
Anty sat silent, for she didn't like to say she wouldn't; and she thought of her brother's threats, and was afraid to say she would. Martin advanced a little in his proceedings, however, and now succeeded in getting his arm round her waist--and, having done so, he wasn't slow in letting her feel its pressure. She made an attempt, with her hand, to disengage herself--certainly not a successful, and, probably, not a very energetic attempt, when the widow's step was heard on the stairs. Martin retreated from his position on the sofa, and Meg from hers outside the door, and Mrs Kelly entered the room, with Barry's letter in her hand, Meg following, to ascertain the cause of the unfortunate interruption.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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18
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AN ATTORNEY'S OFFICE IN CONNAUGHT
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"Anty, here's a letter for ye," began the widow. "Terry's brought it down from the house, and says it's from Misther Barry. I b'lieve he was in the right not to bring it hisself."
"A letther for me, Mrs Kelly? what can he be writing about? I don't just know whether I ought to open it or no;" and Anty trembled, as she turned the epistle over and over again in her hands.
"What for would you not open it? The letther can't hurt you, girl, whatever the writher might do."
Thus encouraged, Anty broke the seal, and made herself acquainted with the contents of the letter which Daly had dictated; but she then found that her difficulties had only just commenced. Was she to send an answer, and if so, what answer? And if she sent none, what notice ought she to take of it? The matter was one evidently too weighty to be settled by her own judgment, so she handed the letter to be read, first by the widow, and then by Martin, and lastly by the two girls, who, by this time, were both in the room.
"Well, the dethermined impudence of that blackguard!" exclaimed Mrs Kelly. "Conspiracy! --av' that don't bang Banagher! What does the man mean by 'conspiracy,' eh, Martin?"
"Faith, you must ask himself that, mother; and then it's ten to one he can't tell you."
"I suppose," said Meg, "he wants to say that we're all schaming to rob Anty of her money--only he daren't, for the life of him, spake it out straight forrard."
"Or, maybe," suggested Jane, "he wants to bring something agen us like this affair of O'Connell's--only he'll find, down here, that he an't got Dublin soft goods to deal wid."
Then followed a consultation, as to the proper steps to be taken in the matter.
The widow advised that father Geoghegan should be sent for to indite such a reply as a Christian ill-used woman should send to so base a letter. Meg, who was very hot on the subject, and who had read of some such proceeding in a novel, was for putting up in a blank envelope the letter itself, and returning it to Barry by the hands of Jack, the ostler; at the same time, she declared that "No surrender" should be her motto. Jane was of opinion that "Miss Anastasia Lynch's compliments to Mr Barry Lynch, and she didn't find herself strong enough to move to Dunmore House at present," would answer all purposes, and be, on the whole, the safest course. While Martin pronounced that "if Anty would be led by him, she'd just pitch the letter behind the fire an' take no notice of it, good, bad, or indifferent."
None of these plans pleased Anty, for, as she remarked, "After all, Barry was her brother, and blood was thickher than wather." So, after much consultation, pen, ink, and paper were procured, and the following letter was concocted between them, all the soft bits having been great stumbling-blocks, in which, however, Anty's quiet perseverance carried the point, in opposition to the wishes of all the Kellys. The words put in brackets were those peculiarly objected to.
Dunmore Inn. February, 1844.
DEAR BARRY, I (am very sorry I) can't come back to the house, at any rate just at present. I am not very sthrong in health, and there are kind female friends about me here, which you know there couldn't be up at the house.
Anty herself, in the original draft inserted "ladies," but the widow's good sense repudiated the term, and insisted on the word "females": Jane suggested that "females" did not sound quite respectful alone, and Martin thought that Anty might call them "female friends," which was consequently done.
--Besides, there are reasons why I'm quieter here, till things are a little more settled. I will forgive (and forget) all that happened up at the house between us-- "Why, you can't forget it," said Meg. "Oh, I could, av' he was kind to me. I'd forget it all in a week av' he was kind to me," answered Anty-- (and I will do nothing particular without first letting you know).
They were all loud against this paragraph, but they could not carry their point.
I must tell you, dear Barry, that you are very much mistaken about the people of this house: they are dear, kind friends to me, and, wherever I am, I must love them to the last day of my life--but indeed I am, and hope you believe so, Your affectionate sister, ANASTASIA LYNCH.
When the last paragraph was read over Anty's shoulder, Meg declared she was a dear, dear creature: Jane gave her a big kiss, and began crying; even the widow put the corner of her apron to her eye, and Martin, trying to look manly and unconcerned, declared that he was "quite shure they all loved her, and they'd be brutes and bastes av' they didn't!"
The letter, as given above, was finally decided on; written, sealed, and despatched by Jack, who was desired to be very particular to deliver it at the front door, with Miss Lynch's love, which was accordingly done. All the care, however, which had been bestowed on it did not make it palatable to Barry, who was alone when he received it, and merely muttered, as he read it, "Confound her, low-minded slut! friends, indeed! what business has she with friends, except such as I please? --if I'd the choosing of her friends, they'd be a strait waistcoat, and the madhouse doctor. Good Heaven! that half my property--no, but two-thirds of it,--should belong to her! --the stupid, stiff-necked robber!"
These last pleasant epithets had reference to his respected progenitor.
On the same evening, after tea, Martin endeavoured to make a little further advance with Anty, for he felt that he had been interrupted just as she was coming round; but her nerves were again disordered, and he soon found that if he pressed her now, he should only get a decided negative, which he might find it very difficult to induce her to revoke.
Anty's letter was sent off early on the Monday morning--at least, as early as Barry now ever managed to do anything--to the attorney at Tuam, with strong injunctions that no time was to be lost in taking further steps, and with a request that Daly would again come out to Dunmore. This, however, he did not at present think it expedient to do. So he wrote to Barry, begging him to come into Tuam on the Wednesday, to meet Moylan, whom he, Daly, would, if possible, contrive to see on the intervening day.
"Obstinate puppy!" said Barry to himself--"if he'd had the least pluck in life he'd have broken the will, or at least made the girl out a lunatic. But a Connaught lawyer hasn't half the wit or courage now that he used to have." However, he wrote a note to Daly, agreeing to his proposal, and promising to be in Tuam at two o'clock on the Wednesday.
On the following day Daly saw Moylan, and had a long conversation with him. The old man held out for a long time, expressing much indignation at being supposed capable of joining in any underhand agreement for transferring Miss Lynch's property to his relatives the Kellys, and declaring that he would make public to every one in Dunmore and Tuam the base manner in which Barry Lynch was treating his sister. Indeed, Moylan kept to his story so long and so firmly that the young attorney was nearly giving him up; but at last he found his weak side.
"Well, Mr Moylan," he said, "then I can only say your own conduct is very disinterested;--and I might even go so far as to say that you appear to me foolishly indifferent to your own concerns. Here's the agency of the whole property going a-begging: the rents, I believe, are about a thousand a-year: you might be recaving them all by jist a word of your mouth, and that only telling the blessed truth; and here, you're going to put the whole thing into the hands of young Kelly; throwing up even the half of the business you have got!"
"Who says I'm afther doing any sich thing, Mr Daly?"
"Why, Martin Kelly says so. Didn't as many as four or five persons hear him say, down at Dunmore, that divil a one of the tenants'd iver pay a haporth [30] of the November rents to anyone only jist to himself? There was father Geoghegan heard him, an Doctor Ned Blake."
[FOOTNOTE 30: haporth--half-penny's worth] "Maybe he'll find his mistake, Mr Daly."
"Maybe he will, Mr Moylan. Maybe we'll put the whole affair into the courts, and have a regular recaver over the property, under the Chancellor. People, though they're ever so respectable in their way,--and I don't mane to say a word against the Kellys, Mr Moylan, for they were always friends of mine--but people can't be allowed to make a dead set at a property like this, and have it all their own way, like the bull in the china-shop. I know there has been an agreement made, and that, in the eye of the law, is a conspiracy. I positively know that an agreement has been made to induce Miss Lynch to become Martin Kelly's wife; and I know the parties to it, too; and I also know that an active young fellow like him wouldn't be paying an agent to get in his rents; and I thought, if Mr Lynch was willing to appoint you his agent, as well as his sister's, it might be worth your while to lend us a hand to settle this affair, without forcing us to stick people into a witness-box whom neither I nor Mr Lynch--" "But what the d----l can I--" "Jist hear me out, Mr Moylan; you see, if they once knew--the Kellys I mane--that you wouldn't lend a hand to this piece of iniquity--" "Which piece of iniquity, Mr Daly? --for I'm entirely bothered."
"Ah, now, Mr Moylan, none of your fun: this piece of iniquity of theirs, I say; for I can call it no less. If they once knew that you wouldn't help 'em, they'd be obliged to drop it all; the matter'd never have to go into court at all, and you'd jist step into the agency fair and aisy; and, into the bargain, you'd do nothing but an honest man's work."
The old man broke down, and consented to "go agin the Kellys," as he somewhat ambiguously styled his apostasy, provided the agency was absolutely promised to him; and he went away with the understanding that he was to come on the following day and meet Mr Lynch.
At two o'clock, punctual to the time of his appointment, Moylan was there, and was kept waiting an hour in Daly's little parlour. At the end of this time Barry came in, having invigorated his courage and spirits with a couple of glasses of brandy. Daly had been for some time on the look-out for him, for he wished to say a few words to him in private, and give him his cue before he took him into the room where Moylan was sitting. This could not well be done in the office, for it was crowded. It would, I think, astonish a London attorney in respectable practice, to see the manner in which his brethren towards the west of Ireland get through their work. Daly's office was open to all the world; the front door of the house, of which he rented the ground floor, was never closed, except at night; nor was the door of the office, which opened immediately into the hail.
During the hour that Moylan was waiting in the parlour, Daly was sitting, with his hat on, upon a high stool, with his feet resting on a small counter which ran across the room, smoking a pipe: a boy, about seventeen years of age, Daly's clerk, was filling up numbers of those abominable formulas of legal persecution in which attorneys deal, and was plying his trade as steadily as though no February blasts were blowing in on him through the open door, no sounds of loud and boisterous conversation were rattling in his ears. The dashing manager of one of the branch banks in the town was sitting close to the little stove, and raking out the turf ashes with the office rule, while describing a drinking-bout that had taken place on the previous Sunday at Blake's of Blakemount; he had a cigar in his mouth, and was searching for a piece of well-kindled turf, wherewith to light it. A little fat oily shopkeeper in the town, who called himself a woollen merchant, was standing with the raised leaf of the counter in his hand, roaring with laughter at the manager's story. Two frieze coated farmers, outside the counter, were stretching across it, and whispering very audibly to Daly some details of litigation which did not appear very much to interest him; and a couple of idle blackguards were leaning against the wall, ready to obey any behest of the attorney's which might enable them to earn a sixpence without labour, and listening with all their ears to the different interesting topics of conversation which might be broached in the inner office.
"Here's the very man I'm waiting for, at last," said Daly, when, from his position on the stool, he saw, through the two open doors, the bloated red face of Barry Lynch approaching; and, giving an impulse to his body by a shove against the wall behind him, he raised himself on to the counter, and, assisting himself by a pull at the collar of the frieze coat of the farmer who was in the middle of his story, jumped to the ground, and met his client at the front door.
"I beg your pardon, Mr Lynch," said he as soon as he had shaken hands with him, "but will you just step up to my room a minute, for I want to spake to you;" and he took him up into his bed-room, for he hadn't a second sitting-room. "You'll excuse my bringing you up here, for the office was full, you see, and Moylan's in the parlour."
"The d----l he is! He came round then, did he, eh, Daly?"
"Oh, I've had a terrible hard game to play with him. I'd no idea he'd be so tough a customer, or make such a good fight; but I think I've managed him."
"There was a regular plan then, eh, Daly? Just as I said. It was a regular planned scheme among them?"
"Wait a moment, and you'll know all about it, at least as much as I know myself; and, to tell the truth, that's devilish little. But, if we manage to break off the match, and get your sister clane out of the inn there, you must give Moylan your agency, at any rate for two or three years."
"You haven't promised that?"
"But I have, though. We can do nothing without it: it was only when I hinted that, that the old sinner came round."
"But what the deuce is it he's to do for us, after all?"
"He's to allow us to put him forward as a bugbear, to frighten the Kellys with: that's all, and, if we can manage that, that's enough. But come down now. I only wanted to warn you that, if you think the agency is too high a price to pay for the man's services, whatever they may be, you must make up your mind to dispense with them."
"Well," answered Barry, as he followed the attorney downstairs, "I can't understand what you're about; but I suppose you must be right;" and they went into the little parlour where Moylan was sitting.
Moylan and Barry Lynch had only met once, since the former had been entrusted to receive Anty's rents, on which occasion Moylan had been grossly insulted by her brother. Barry, remembering the meeting, felt very awkward at the idea of entering into amicable conversation with him, and crept in at the door like a whipped dog. Moylan was too old to feel any such compunctions, and consequently made what he intended to be taken as a very complaisant bow to his future patron. He was an ill-made, ugly, stumpy man, about fifty; with a blotched face, straggling sandy hair, and grey shaggy whiskers. He wore a long brown great coat, buttoned up to his chin, and this was the only article of wearing apparel visible upon him: in his hands he twirled a shining new four-and-fourpenny hat.
As soon as their mutual salutations were over, Daly commenced his business.
"There is no doubt in the world, Mr Lynch," said he, addressing Barry, "that a most unfair attempt has been made by this family to get possession of your sister's property--a most shameful attempt, which the law will no doubt recognise as a misdemeanour. But I think we shall be able to stop their game without any law at all, which will save us the annoyance of putting Mr Moylan here, and other respectable witnesses, on the table. Mr Moylan says that very soon afther your father's will was made known--" "Now, Mr Daly--shure I niver said a word in life at all about the will," said Moylan, interrupting him.
"No, you did not: I mane, very soon afther you got the agency--" "Divil a word I said about the agency, either."
"Well, well; some time ago--he says that, some time ago, he and Martin Kelly were talking over your sister's affairs; I believe the widow was there, too."
"Ah, now, Mr Daly--why'd you be putting them words into my mouth? sorrow a word of the kind I iver utthered at all."
"What the deuce was it you did say, then?"
"Faix, I don't know that I said much, at all."
"Didn't you say, Mr Moylan, that Martin Kelly was talking to you about marrying Anty, some six weeks ago?"
"Maybe I did; he was spaking about it."
"And, if you were in the chair now, before a jury, wouldn't you swear that there was a schame among them to get Anty Lynch married to Martin Kelly? Come, Mr Moylan, that's all we want to know: if you can't say as much as that for us now, just that we may let the Kellys know what sort of evidence we could bring against them, if they push us, we must only have you and others summoned, and see what you'll have to say then."
"Oh, I'd say the truth, Mr Daly--divil a less--and I'd do as much as that now; but I thought Mr Lynch was wanting to say something about the property?"
"Not a word then I've to say about it," said Barry, "except that I won't let that robber, young Kelly, walk off with it, as long as there's law in the land."
"Mr Moylan probably meant about the agency," observed Daly.
Barry looked considerably puzzled, and turned to the attorney for assistance. "He manes," continued Daly, "that he and the Kellys are good friends, and it wouldn't be any convenience to him just to say anything that wouldn't be pleasing to them, unless we could make him independent of them:--isn't that about the long and the short of it, Mr Moylan?"
"Indepindent of the Kellys, is it, Mr Daly? --Faix, thin, I'm teetotally indepindent of them this minute, and mane to continue so, glory be to God. Oh, I'm not afeard to tell the thruth agin ere a Kelly in Galway or Roscommon--and, av' that was all, I don't see why I need have come here this day. When I'm called upon in the rigular way, and has a rigular question put me before the Jury, either at Sessions or 'Sizes, you'll find I'll not be bothered for an answer, and, av' that's all, I b'lieve I may be going,"--and he made a movement towards the door.
"Just as you please, Mr Moylan," said Daly; "and you may be sure that you'll not be long without an opportunity of showing how free you are with your answers. But, as a friend, I tell you you'll be wrong to lave this room till you've had a little more talk with Mr Lynch and myself. I believe I mentioned to you Mr Lynch was looking out for someone to act as agent over his portion of the Dunmore property?"
Barry looked as black as thunder, but he said nothing.
"You war, Mr Daly. Av' I could accommodate Mr Lynch, I'm shure I'd be happy to undhertake the business."
"I believe, Mr Lynch," said Daly, turning to the other, "I may go so far as to promise Mr Moylan the agency of the whole property, provided Miss Lynch is induced to quit the house of the Kellys? Of course, Mr Moylan, you can see that as long as Miss Lynch is in a position of unfortunate hostility to her brother, the same agent could not act for both; but I think my client is inclined to put his property under your management, providing his sister returns to her own home. I believe I'm stating your wishes, Mr Lynch."
"Manage it your own way," said Barry, "for I don't see what you're doing. If this man can do anything for me, why, I suppose I must pay him for it; and if so, your plan's as good a way of paying him as another."
The attorney raised his hat with his hand, and scratched his head: he was afraid that Moylan would have again gone off in a pet at Lynch's brutality, but the old man sat quite quiet. He wouldn't have much minded what was said to him, as long as he secured the agency.
"You see, Mr Moylan," continued Daly, "you can have the agency. Five per cent. upon the rents is what my client--" "No, Daly--Five per cent. ! --I'm shot if I do!" exclaimed Barry.
"I'm gething twenty-five pounds per annum from Miss Anty, for her half, and I wouldn't think of collecting the other for less," declared Moylan.
And then a long battle followed on this point, which it required all Daly's tact and perseverance to adjust. The old man was pertinacious, and many whispers had to be made into Barry's ear before the matter could be settled. It was, however, at last agreed that notice was to be served on the Kellys, of Barry Lynch's determination to indict them for a conspiracy; that Daly was to see the widow, Martin, and, if possible, Anty, and tell them all that Moylan was prepared to prove that such a conspiracy had been formed;--care was also to be taken that copies of the notices so served should be placed in Anty's hands. Moylan, in the meantime, agreed to keep out of the way, and undertook, should he be unfortunate enough to encounter any of the family of the Kellys, to brave the matter out by declaring that "av' he war brought before the Judge and Jury he couldn't do more than tell the blessed thruth, and why not?" In reward for this, he was to be appointed agent over the entire property the moment that Miss Lynch left the inn, at which time he was to receive a document, signed by Barry, undertaking to retain him in the agency for four years certain, or else to pay him a hundred pounds when it was taken from him.
These terms having been mutually agreed to, and Barry having, with many oaths, declared that he was a most shamefully ill-used man, the three separated. Moylan skulked off to one of his haunts in the town; Barry went to the bank, to endeavour to get a bill discounted [30]; and Daly returned to his office, to prepare the notices for the unfortunate widow and her son.
[FOOTNOTE 30: bill discounted--A common way for young men to borrow money in nineteenth century Britain was to sign a promissory note (an "I.O.U."), often called a "bill," to repay the loan at a specified time. The lender gave the borrower less than the face value of the note (that is, he "discounted" the note), the difference being the interest. Sometimes these notes were co-signed by a third party, who became responsible for repaying the loan if the borrower defaulted; this is one of the major themes in Trollope's later book _Framley Parsonage_. Trollope himself was quite familiar with methods of borrowing, having gotten into debt in his youth.]
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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19
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MR DALY VISITS THE DUNMORE INN
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Daly let no grass grow under his feet, for early on the following morning he hired a car, and proceeded to Dunmore, with the notices in his pocket. His feelings were not very comfortable on his journey, for he knew that he was going on a bad errand, and he was not naturally either a heartless or an unscrupulous man, considering that he was a provincial attorney; but he was young in business, and poor, and he could not afford to give up a client. He endeavoured to persuade himself that it certainly was a wrong thing for Martin Kelly to marry such a woman as Anty Lynch, and that Barry had some show of justice on his side; but he could not succeed. He knew that Martin was a frank, honourable fellow, and that a marriage with him would be the very thing most likely to make Anty happy; and he was certain, moreover, that, however anxious Martin might naturally be to secure the fortune, he would take no illegal or even unfair steps to do so. He felt that his client was a ruffian of the deepest die: that his sole object was to rob his sister, and that he had no case which it would be possible even to bring before a jury. His intention now was, merely to work upon the timidity and ignorance of Anty and the other females, and to frighten them with a bugbear in the shape of a criminal indictment; and Daly felt that the work he was about was very, very dirty work. Two or three times on the road, he had all but made up his mind to tear the letters he had in his pocket, and to drive at once to Dunmore House, and tell Barry Lynch that he would do nothing further in the case. And he would have done so, had he not reflected that he had gone so far with Moylan, that he could not recede, without leaving it in the old rogue's power to make the whole matter public.
As he drove down the street of Dunmore, he endeavoured to quiet his conscience, by reflecting that he might still do much to guard Anty from the ill effects of her brother's rapacity; and that at any rate he would not see her property taken from her, though she might be frightened out of her matrimonial speculation.
He wanted to see the widow, Martin, and Anty, and if possible to see them, at first, separately; and fortune so far favoured him that, as he got off the car, he saw our hero standing at the inn door.
"Ah! Mr Daly," said he, coming up to the car and shaking hands with the attorney, for Daly put out his hand to him--"how are you again? --I suppose you're going up to the house? They say you're Barry's right hand man now. Were you coming into the inn?"
"Why, I will step in just this minute; but I've a word I want to spake to you first."
"To me!" said Martin.
"Yes, to you, Martin Kelly: isn't that quare?" and then he gave directions to the driver to put up the horse, and bring the car round again in an hour's time. "D' you remember my telling you, the day we came into Dunmore on the car together, that I was going up to the house?"
"Faith I do, well; it's not so long since."
"And do you mind my telling you, I didn't know from Adam what it was for, that Barry Lynch was sending for me?"
"And I remember that, too."
"And that I tould you, that when I did know I shouldn't tell you?"
"Begad you did, Mr Daly; thim very words."
"Why then, Martin, I tould you what wasn't thrue, for I'm come all the way from Tuam, this minute, to tell you all about it."
Martin turned very red, for he rightly conceived that when an attorney came all the way from Tuam to talk to him, the tidings were not likely to be agreeable.
"And is it about Barry Lynch's business?"
"It is."
"Then it's schames there's divil a doubt of that."
"It is schames, as you say, Martin," said Daly, slapping him on the shoulder--"fine schames--no less than a wife with four hundred a-year! Wouldn't that be a fine schame?" " 'Deed it would, Mr Daly, av' the wife and the fortune were honestly come by."
"And isn't it a hundred pities that I must come and upset such a pretty schame as that? But, for all that, it's thrue. I'm sorry for you, Martin, but you must give up Anty Lynch."
"Give her up, is it? Faith I haven't got her to give up, worse luck."
"Nor never will, Martin; and that's worse luck again."
"Well, Mr Daly, av' that's all you've come to say, you might have saved yourself car-hire. Miss Lynch is nothing to me, mind; how should she be? But av' she war, neither Barry Lynch--who's as big a rogue as there is from this to hisself and back again--nor you, who, I take it, ain't rogue enough to do Barry's work, wouldn't put me off it."
"Well, Martin; thank 'ee for the compliment. But now, you know what I've come about, and there's no joke in it. Of course I don't want you to tell me anything of your plans; but, as Mr Lynch's lawyer, I must tell you so much as this of his:--that, if his sister doesn't lave the inn, and honestly assure him that she'll give up her intention of marrying you, he's determined to take proceedings." He then fumbled in his pocket, and, bringing out the two notices, handed to Martin the one addressed to him. "Read that, and it'll give you an idea what we're afther. And when I tell you that Moylan owns, and will swear to it too, that he was present when all the plans were made, you'll see that we're not going to sea without wind in our sails."
"Well--I'm shot av' I know the laist in the world what all this is about!" said Martin, as he stood in the street, reading over the legally-worded letter--"'conspiracy!' --well that'll do, Mr Daly; go on--'enticing away from her home!' --that's good, when the blackguard nearly knocked the life out of her, and mother brought her down here, from downright charity, and to prevent murdher--'wake intellects!' --well, Mr Daly, I didn't expect this kind of thing from you: begorra, I thought you were above this! --wake intellects! faith, they're a dale too sthrong, and too good--and too wide awake too, for Barry to get the betther of her that way. Not that I'm in the laist in life surprised at anything he'd do; but I thought that you, Mr Daly, wouldn't put your hands to such work as that."
Daly felt the rebuke, and felt it strongly, too; but now that he was embarked in the business, he must put the best face he could upon it. Still it was a moment or two before he could answer the young farmer.
"Why," he said--"why did you put your hands to such a dirty job as this, Martin? --you were doing well, and not in want--and how could you let anyone persuade you to go and sell yourself to, an ugly ould maid, for a few hundred pounds? Don't you know, that if you were married to her this minute, you'd have a lawsuit that'd go near to ruin you before you could get possession of the property?"
"Av' I'm in want of legal advice, Mr Daly, which thank God, I'm not, nor likely to be--but av' I war, it's not from Barry Lynch's attorney I'd be looking for it."
"I'd be sorry to see you in want of it, Martin; but if you mane to keep out of the worst kind of law, you'd better have done with Anty Lynch. I'd a dale sooner be drawing up a marriage settlement between you and some pretty girl with five or six hundred pound fortune, than I'd be exposing to the counthry such a mane trick as this you're now afther, of seducing a poor half-witted ould maid, like Anty Lynch, into a disgraceful marriage."
"Look here, Mr Daly," said the other; "you've hired yourself out to Barry Lynch, and you must do his work, I suppose, whether it's dirthy or clane; and you know yourself, as well as I can tell you, which it's likely to be--" "That's my concern; lave that to me; you've quite enough to do to mind yourself."
"But av' he's nothing betther for you to do, than to send you here bally-ragging and calling folks out of their name, he must have a sight more money to spare than I give him credit for; and you must be a dale worse off than your neighbours thought you, to do it for him."
"That'll do," said Mr Daly, knocking at the door of the inn; "only, remember, Mr Kelly, you've now received notice of the steps which my client feels himself called upon to take."
Martin turned to go away, but then, reflecting that it would be as well not to leave the women by themselves in the power of the enemy, he also waited at the door till it was opened by Katty.
"Is Miss Lynch within?" asked Daly.
"Go round to the shop, Katty," said Martin, "and tell mother to come to the door. There's a gentleman wanting her."
"It was Miss Lynch I asked for," said Daly, still looking to the girl for an answer.
"Do as I bid you, you born ideot, and don't stand gaping there," shouted Martin to the girl, who immediately ran off towards the shop.
"I might as well warn you, Mr Kelly, that, if Miss Lynch is denied to me, the fact of her being so denied will be a very sthrong proof against you and your family. In fact, it amounts to an illegal detention of her person, in the eye of the law." Daly said this in a very low voice, almost a whisper.
"Faith, the law must have quare eyes, av' it makes anything wrong with a young lady being asked the question whether or no she wishes to see an attorney, at eleven in the morning."
"An attorney!" whispered Meg to Jane and Anty at the top of the stairs.
"Heaven and 'arth," said poor Anty, shaking and shivering--"what's going to be the matter now?"
"It's young Daly," said Jane, stretching forward and peeping clown the stairs: "I can see the curl of his whiskers."
By this time the news had reached Mrs Kelly, in the shop, "that a sthrange gentleman war axing for Miss Anty, but that she warn't to be shown to him on no account;" so the widow dropped her tobacco knife, flung off her dirty apron, and, having summoned Jane and Meg to attend to the mercantile affairs of the establishment--turned into the inn, and met Mr Daly and her son still standing at the bottom of the stairs.
The widow curtsied ceremoniously, and wished Mr. Daly good morning, and he was equally civil in his salutation.
"Mr Daly's going to have us all before the assizes, mother. We'll never get off without the treadmill, any way: it's well av' the whole kit of us don't have to go over the wather at the queen's expense."
"The Lord be good to us;" said the widow, crossing herself. What's the matter, Mr Daly?"
"Your son's joking, ma'am. I was only asking to see Miss Lynch, on business."
"Step upstairs, mother, into the big parlour, and don't let's be standing talking here where all the world can hear us."
"And wilcome, for me, I'm shure"--said the widow, stroking down the front of her dress with the palms of her hands, as she walked upstairs--"and wilcome too for me I'm very shure. I've said or done nothing as I wish to consail, Mr Daly. Will you be plazed to take a chair?" and the widow sat down herself on a chair in the middle of the room, with her hands folded over each other in her lap, as if she was preparing to answer questions from that time to a very late hour in the evening.
"And now, Mr Daly--av' you've anything to say to a poor widdy like me, I'm ready."
"My chief object in calling, Mrs Kelly, was to see Miss Lynch. Would you oblige me by letting Miss Lynch know that I'm waiting to see her on business."
"Maybe it's a message from her brother, Mr Daly?" said Mrs Kelly.
"You had better go in to Miss Lynch, mother," said Martin, "and ask her av' it's pleasing to her to see Mr Daly. She can see him, in course, av' she likes."
"I don't see what good 'll come of her seeing him," rejoined the widow. "With great respect to you, Mr Daly, and not maning to say a word agin you, I don't see how Anty Lynch 'll be the betther for seeing ere an attorney in the counthry."
"I don't want to frighten you, ma'am," said Daly; "but I can assure you, you will put yourself in a very awkward position if you refuse to allow me to see Miss Lynch."
"Ah, mother!" said Martin, "don't have a word to say in the matther at all, one way or the other. Just tell Anty Mr Daly wishes to see her--let her come or not, just as she chooses. What's she afeard of, that she shouldn't hear what anyone has to say to her?"
The widow seemed to be in great doubt and perplexity, and continued whispering with Martin for some time, during which Daly remained standing with his back to the fire. At length Martin said, "Av' you've got another of them notices to give my mother, Mr Daly, why don't you do it?"
"Why, to tell you the thruth," answered the attorney, "I don't want to throuble your mother unless it's absolutely necessary; and although I have the notice ready in my pocket, if I could see Miss Lynch, I might be spared the disagreeable job of serving it on her."
"The Holy Virgin save us!" said the widow; "an' what notice is it at all, you're going to serve on a poor lone woman like me?"
"Be said by me, mother, and fetch Anty in here. Mr Daly won't expect, I suppose, but what you should stay and hear what it is he has to say?"
"Both you and your mother are welcome to hear all that I have to say to the lady," said Daly; for he felt that it would be impossible for him to see Anty alone.
The widow unwillingly got up to fetch her guest. When she got to the door, she turned round, and said, "And is there a notice, as you calls it, to be sarved on Miss Lynch?"
"Not a line, Mrs Kelly; not a line, on my honour. I only want her to hear a few words that I'm commissioned by her brother to say to her."
"And you're not going to give her any paper--nor nothing of that sort at all?"
"Not a word, Mrs Kelly."
"Ah, mother," said Martin, "Mr Daly couldn't hurt her, av' he war wishing, and he's not. Go and bring her in."
The widow went out, and in a few minutes returned, bringing Anty with her, trembling from head to foot. The poor young woman had not exactly heard what had passed between the attorney and the mother and her son, but she knew very well that his visit had reference to her, and that it was in some way connected with her brother. She had, therefore, been in a great state of alarm since Meg and Jane had left her alone. When Mrs Kelly came into the little room where she was sitting, and told her that Mr Daly had come to Dunmore on purpose to see her, her first impulse was to declare that she wouldn't go to him; and had she done so, the widow would not have pressed her. But she hesitated, for she didn't like to refuse to do anything which her friend asked her; and when Mrs Kelly said, "Martin says as how the man can't hurt you, Anty, so you'd betther jist hear what it is he has to say," she felt that she had no loophole of escape, and got up to comply.
"But mind, Anty," whispered the cautious widow, as her hand was on the parlour door, "becase this Daly is wanting to speak to you, that's no rason you should be wanting to spake to him; so, if you'll be said by me, you'll jist hould your tongue, and let him say on."
Fully determined to comply with this prudent advice, Anty followed the old woman, and, curtseying at Daly without looking at him, sat herself down in the middle of the old sofa, with her hands crossed before her.
"Anty," said Martin, making great haste to speak, before Daly could commence, and then checking himself as he remembered that he shouldn't have ventured on the familiarity of calling her by her Christian name in Daly's presence--"Miss Lynch, I mane--as Mr Daly here has come all the way from Tuam on purpose to spake to you, it wouldn't perhaps be manners in you to let him go back without hearing him. But remember, whatever your brother says, or whatever Mr Daly says for him--and it's all--one you're still your own mistress, free to act and to spake, to come and to go; and that neither the one nor the other can hurt you, or mother, or me, nor anybody belonging to us."
"God knows," said Daly, "I want to have no hand in hurting any of you; but, to tell the truth, Martin, it would be well for Miss Lynch to have a better adviser than you or she may get herself, and, what she'll think more of, she'll get her friends--maning you, Mrs Kelly, and your family--into a heap of throubles."
"Oh, God forbid, thin!" exclaimed Anty.
"Niver mind us, Mr Daly," said the widow. "The Kellys was always able to hould their own; thanks be to glory."
"Well, I've said my say, Mr Daly," said Martin, "and now do you say your'n: as for throubles, we've all enough of thim; but your own must have been bad, when you undhertook this sort of job for Barry Lynch."
"Mind yourself, Martin, as I told you before, and you'll about have enough to do. --Miss Lynch, I've been instructed by your brother to draw up an indictment against Mrs Kelly and Mr Kelly, charging them with conspiracy to get possession of your fortune."
"A what!" shouted the widow, jumping up from her chair--"to rob Anty Lynch of her fortune! I'd have you to know, Mr Daly, I wouldn't demane myself to rob the best gentleman in Connaught, let alone a poor unprotected young woman, whom I've--" "Whist, mother--go asy," said Martin. "I tould you that that was what war in the paper he gave me; he'll give you another, telling you all about it just this minute."
"Well, the born ruffian! Does he dare to accuse me of wishing to rob his sister! Now, Mr Daly, av' the blessed thruth is in you this minute, don't your own heart know who it is, is most likely to rob Anty Lynch? --Isn't it Barry Lynch himself is thrying to rob his own sisther this minute? ay, and he'd murdher her too, only the heart within him isn't sthrong enough."
"Ah, mother! don't be saying such things," said Martin; "what business is that of our'n? Let Barry send what messages he plazes; I tell you it's all moonshine; he can't hurt the hair of your head, nor Anty's neither. Go asy, and let Mr Daly say what he has to say, and have done with it."
"It's asy to say 'go asy'--but who's to sit still and be tould sich things as that? Rob Anty Lynch indeed!"
"If you'll let me finish what I have to say, Mrs Kelly, I think you'll find it betther for the whole of us," said Daly.
"Go on thin, and be quick with it; but don't talk to dacent people about robbers any more. Robbers indeed! they're not far to fitch; and black robbers too, glory be to God."
"Your brother, Miss Lynch, is determined to bring this matter before a jury at the assizes, for the sake of protecting you and your property."
"Protecthing Anty Lynch! --is it Barry? The Holy Virgin defind her from sich prothection! a broken head the first moment the dhrink makes his heart sthrong enough to sthrike her!"
"Ah, mother! you're a fool," exclaimed Martin: "why can't you let the man go on? --ain't he paid for saying it? Well, Mr Daly, begorra I pity you, to have such things on your tongue; but go on, go on, and finish it."
"Your brother conceives this to be his duty," continued Daly, rather bothered by the manner in which he had to make his communication, "and it is a duty which he is determined to go through with."
"Duty!" said the widow, with a twist of her nose, and giving almost a whistle through her lips, in a manner which very plainly declared the contempt she felt for Barry's ideas of duty.
"With this object," continued Daly, "I have already handed to Martin Kelly a notice of what your brother means to do; and I have another notice prepared in my pocket for his mother. The next step will be to swear the informations before a magistrate, and get the committals made out; Mrs Kelly and her son will then have to give bail for their appearance at the assizes."
"And so we can," said the widow; "betther bail than e'er a Lynch or Daly--not but what the Dalys is respictable--betther bail, any way, than e'er a Lynch in Galway could show, either for sessions or 'sizes, by night or by day, winter or summer."
"Ah, mother! you don't understhand: he's maning that we're to be tried in the dock, for staling Anty's money."
"Faix, but that'd be a good joke! Isn't Anty to the fore herself to say who's robbed her? Take an ould woman's advice, Mr Daly, and go back to Tuam: it ain't so asy to put salt on the tail of a Dunmore bird."
"And so I will, Mrs Kelly," said Daly; "but you must let me finish what I have to tell Miss Lynch. --This will be a proceeding most disagreeable to your brother's feelings."
"Failings, indeed!" muttered the widow; "faix, I b'lieve his chief failing at present's for sthrong dhrink!" " --But he must go on with it, unless you at once lave the inn, return to your own home, and give him your promise that you will never marry Martin Kelly."
Anty blushed deep crimson over her whole face at the mention of her contemplated marriage; and, to tell the truth, so did Martin.
"Here is the notice," said Daly, taking the paper out of his pocket; "and the matter now rests with yourself. If you'll only tell me that you'll be guided by your brother on this subject, I'll burn the notice at once; and I'll undertake to say that, as far as your property is concerned, your brother will not in the least interfere with you in the management of it."
"And good rason why, Mr Daly," said the widow--"jist becase he can't."
"Well, Miss Lynch, am I to tell your brother that you are willing to oblige him in this matter?"
Whatever effect Daly's threats may have had on the widow and her son, they told strongly upon Anty; for she sat now the picture of misery and indecision. At last she said: "Oh, Lord defend me! what am I to do, Mrs Kelly?"
"Do?" said Martin; "why, what should you do--but just wish Mr Daly good morning, and stay where you are, snug and comfortable?"
"Av' you war to lave this, Anty, and go up to Dunmore House afther all that's been said and done, I'd say Barry was right, and that Ballinasloe Asylum was the fitting place for you," said the widow.
"The blessed virgin guide and prothect me," said Anty, "for I want her guidance this minute. Oh, that the walls of a convent was round me this minute--I wouldn't know what throuble was!"
"And you needn't know anything about throuble," said Martin, who didn't quite like his mistress's allusion to a convent. "You don't suppose there's a word of thruth in all this long story of Mr Daly's? --He knows,--and I'll say it out to his face--he knows Barry don't dare carry on with sich a schame. He knows he's only come here to frighten you out of this, that Barry may have his will on you again."
"And God forgive him his errand here this day," said the widow, "for it was a very bad one."
"If you will allow me to offer you my advice, Miss Lynch," said Daly, "you will put yourself, at any rate for a time, under your brother's protection."
"She won't do no sich thing," said the widow. "What! to be locked into the parlour agin--and be nigh murdhered? holy father!"
"Oh, no," said Anty, at last, shuddering in horror at the remembrance of the last night she passed in Dunmore House, "I cannot go back to live with him, but I'll do anything else, av' he'll only lave me, and my kind, kind friends, in pace and quiet."
"Indeed, and you won't, Anty," said the widow; "you'll do nothing for him. Your frinds--that's av' you mane the Kellys--is very able to take care of themselves."
"If your brother, Miss Lynch, will lave Dunmore House altogether, and let you have it to yourself, will you go and live there, and give him the promise not to marry Martin Kelly?"
"Indeed an' she won't," said the widow. "She'll give no promise of the kind. Promise, indeed! what for should she promise Barry Lynch whom she will marry, or whom she won't?"
"Raily, Mrs Kelly, I think you might let Miss Lynch answer for herself."
"I wouldn't, for all the world thin, go to live at Dunmore House," said Anty.
"And you are determined to stay in this inn here?"
"In course she is--that's till she's a snug house of her own," said the widow.
"Ah, mother!" said Martin, "what for will you be talking?"
"And you're determined," repeated Daly, "to stay here?"
"I am," faltered Anty.
"Then I have nothing further to do than to hand you this, Mrs Kelly"--and he offered the notice to the widow, but she refused to touch it, and he consequently put it down on the table. "But it is my duty to tell you, Miss Lynch, that the gentry of this counthry, before whom you will have to appear, will express very great indignation at your conduct in persevering in placing poor people like the Kellys in so dreadful a predicament, by your wilful and disgraceful obstinacy."
Poor Anty burst into tears. She had been for some time past trying to restrain herself, but Daly's last speech, and the horrible idea of the gentry of the country browbeating and frowning at her, completely upset her, and she hid her face on the arm of the sofa, and sobbed aloud.
"Poor people like the Kellys!" shouted the widow, now for the first time really angry with Daly--"not so poor, Mr Daly, as to do dirthy work for anyone. I wish I could say as much this day for your mother's son! Poor people, indeed! I suppose, now, you wouldn't call Barry Lynch one of your poor people; but in my mind he's the poorest crature living this day in county Galway. Av' you've done now, Mr Daly, you've my lave to be walking; and the less you let the poor Kellys see of you, from this time out, the betther."
When Anty's sobs commenced, Martin had gone over to her to comfort her, "Ah, Anty, dear," he whispered to her, "shure you'd not be minding what such a fellow as he'd be saying to you? --shure he's jist paid for all this--he's only sent here by Barry to thry and frighten you,"--but it was of no avail: Daly had succeeded at any rate in making her miserable, and it was past the power of Martin's eloquence to undo what the attorney had done.
"Well, Mr Daly," he said, turning round sharply, "I suppose you have done here now, and the sooner you turn your back on this place the betther--An' you may take this along with you. Av' you think you've frightened my mother or me, you're very much mistaken."
"Yes," said Daly, "I have done now, and I am sorry my business has been so unpleasant. Your mother, Martin, had betther not disregard that notice. Good morning, Miss Lynch: good morning, Mrs Kelly; good morning, Martin;" and Daly took up his hat, and left the room.
"Good morning to you, Mr Daly," said Martin: "as I've said before, I'm sorry to see you've taken to this line of business."
As soon as the attorney was gone, both Martin and his mother attempted to console and re-assure poor Anty, but they did not find the task an easy one. "Oh, Mrs Kelly," she said, as soon as she was able to say anything, "I'm sorry I iver come here, I am: I'm sorry I iver set my foot in the house!"
"Don't say so, Anty, dear," said the widow. "What'd you be sorry for--an't it the best place for you?"
"Oh! but to think that I'd bring all these throubles on you! Betther be up there, and bear it all, than bring you and yours into law, and sorrow, and expense. Only I couldn't find the words in my throat to say it, I'd 've tould the man that I'd 've gone back at once. I wish I had--indeed, Mrs Kelly, I wish I had."
"Why, Anty," said Martin, "you an't fool enough to believe what Daly's been saying? Shure all he's afther is to frighthen you out of this. Never fear: Barry can't hurt us a halfporth, though no doubt he's willing enough, av' he had the way."
"I wish I was in a convent, this moment," said Anty. "Oh! I wish I'd done as father asked me long since. Av' the walls of a convent was around me, I'd niver know what throubles was."
"No more you shan't now," said Martin: "Who's to hurt you? Come, Anty, look up; there's nothing in all this to vex you."
But neither son nor mother were able to soothe the poor young woman. The very presence of an attorney was awful to her; and all the jargon which Daly had used, of juries, judges, trials, and notices, had sounded terribly in her ears. The very names of such things were to her terrible realities, and she couldn't bring herself to believe that her brother would threaten to make use of such horrible engines of persecution, without having the power to bring them into action. Then, visions of the lunatic asylum, into which he had declared that he would throw her, flitted across her, and made her whole body shiver and shake; and again she remembered the horrid glare of his eye, the hot breath, and the frightful form of his visage, on the night when he almost told her that he would murder her.
Poor Anty had at no time high or enduring spirits, but such as she had were now completely quelled. A dreadful feeling of coming evil--a foreboding of misery, such as will sometimes overwhelm stronger minds than Anty's, seemed to stifle her; and she continued sobbing till she fell into hysterics, when Meg and Jane were summoned to her assistance. They sat with her for above an hour, doing all that kindness and affection could suggest; but after a time Anty told them that she had a cold, sick feeling within herself, that she felt weak and ill, and that she'd sooner go to bed. To bed they accordingly took her; and Sally brought her tea, and Katty lighted a fire in her room, and Jane read to her an edifying article from the lives of the Saints, and Meg argued with her as to the folly of being frightened. But it was all of no avail; before night, Anty was really ill.
The next morning, the widow was obliged to own to herself that such was the case. In the afternoon, Doctor Colligan was called in; and it was many, many weeks before Anty recovered from the effects of the attorney's visit.
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{
"id": "4917"
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VERY LIBERAL
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When the widow left the parlour, after having placed her guest in the charge of her daughters, she summoned her son to follow her down stairs, and was very careful not to leave behind her the notice which Daly had placed on the table. As soon as she found herself behind the shutter of her little desk, which stood in the shop-window, she commenced very eagerly spelling it over. The purport of the notice was, to inform her that Barry Lynch intended immediately to apply to the magistrates to commit her and her son, for conspiring together to inveigle Anty into a marriage; and that the fact of their having done so would be proved by Mr Moylan, who was prepared to swear that he had been present when the plan had been arranged between them. The reader is aware that whatever show of truth there might be for this accusation, as far as Martin and Moylan himself were concerned, the widow at any rate was innocent; and he can conceive the good lady's indignation at the idea of her own connection, Moylan, having been seduced over to the enemy. Though she had put on a bold front against Daly, and though she did not quite believe that Barry was in earnest in taking proceedings against her, still her heart failed her as she read the legal technicalities of the papers she held in her hand, and turned to her son for counsel in considerable tribulation.
"But there must be something in it, I tell you," said she. "Though Barry Lynch, and that limb o' the divil, young Daly, 'd stick at nothin in the way of lies and desait, they'd niver go to say all this about Moylan, unless he'd agree to do their bidding."
"That's like enough, mother: I dare say Moylan has been talked over--bought over rather; for he's not one of them as'd do mischief for nothin."
"And does the ould robber mane to say that I--. As I live, I niver as much as mentioned Anty's name to Moylan, except jist about the agency!"
"I'm shure you didn't, mother."
"And what is it then he has to say agin us?"
"Jist lies; that's av' he were called on to say anything; but he niver will be. This is all one of Barry's schames to frighten you, and get Anty turned out of the inn."
"Thin Master Barry doesn't know the widdy Kelly, I can tell him that; for when I puts my hand to a thing, I mane to pull through wid it. But tell me--all this'll be costing money, won't, it? Attorneys don't bring thim sort of things about for nothing," and she gave a most contemptuous twist to the notice.
"Oh, Barry must pay for that."
"I doubt that, Martin: he's not fond of paying, the mane, dirthy blackguard. I tell you what, you shouldn't iver have let Daly inside the house: he'll make us pay for the writing o' thim as shure as my name's Mary Kelly: av' he hadn't got into the house, he couldn't've done a halfporth."
"I tell you, mother, it wouldn't have done not to let him see Anty. They'd have said we'd got her shut up here, and wouldn't let any one come nigh her."
"Well, Martin, you'll see we'll have to pay for it. This comes of meddling with other folks! I wonder how I was iver fool enough to have fitched her down here! --Good couldn't come of daling with such people as Barry Lynch."
"But you wouldn't have left her up there to be murdhered?"
"She's nothin' to me, and I don't know as she's iver like to be."
"May-be not."
"But, tell me, Martin--was there anything said between you and Moylan about Anty before she come down here?"
"How, anything said, mother?"
"Why, was there any schaming betwixt you?"
"Schaming? --when I want to schame, I'll not go shares with sich a fellow as Moylan."
"Ah, but was there anything passed about Anty and you getting married? Come now, Martin; I'm in all this throuble along of you, and you shouldn't lave me in the dark. Was you talking to Moylan about Anty and her fortune?"
"Why, thin, I'll jist tell you the whole thruth, as I tould it all before to Mister Frank--that is, Lord Ballindine, up in Dublin; and as I wouldn't mind telling it this minute to Barry, or Daly, or any one else in the three counties. When Moylan got the agency, he come out to me at Toneroe; and afther talking a bit about Anty and her fortune, he let on as how it would be a bright spec for me to marry her, and I won't deny that it was he as first put it into my head. Well, thin, he had schames of his own about keeping the agency, and getting a nice thing out of the property himself, for putting Anty in my way; but I tould him downright I didn't know anything about that; and that 'av iver I did anything in the matter it would be all fair and above board; and that was all the conspiracy I and Moylan had."
"And enough too, Martin," said the widow. "You'll find it's quite enough to get us into throuble. And why wouldn't you tell me what was going on between you?"
"There was nothing going on between us."
"I say there was;--and to go and invaigle me into your schames without knowing a word about it! --It was a murdhering shame of you--and av' I do have to pay for it, I'll never forgive you."
"That's right, mother; quarrel with me about it, do. It was I made you bring Anty down here, wasn't it? when I was up in Dublin all the time."
"But to go and put yourself in the power of sich a fellow as Moylan! I didn't think you were so soft."
"Ah, bother, mother! Who's put themselves in the power of Moylan?"
"I'll moyle him, and spoil him too, the false blackguard, to turn agin the family--them as has made him! I wondher what he's to get for swearing agin us?" --And then, after a pause, she added in a most pathetic voice "oh, Martin, to think of being dragged away to Galway, before the whole counthry, to be made a conspirather of! I, that always paid my way, before and behind, though only a poor widdy! Who's to mind the shop, I wondher? --I'm shure Meg's not able; and there'll be Mary'll be jist nigh her time, and won't be able to come! Martin, you've been and ruined me with your plots and your marriages! What did you want with a wife, I wondher, and you so well off!" --and Mrs Kelly began wiping her eyes, for she was affected to tears at the prospect of her coming misery.
"Av' you take it so to heart, mother, you'd betther give Anty a hint to be out of this. You heard Daly tell her, that was all Barry wanted."
Martin knew his mother tolerably well, or he would not have made this proposition. He understood what the real extent of her sorrow was, and how much of her lamentation he was to attribute to her laudable wish to appear a martyr to the wishes and pleasures of her children.
"Turn her out!" replied she, "no, niver; and I didn't think I'd 've heard you asking me to."
"I didn't ask you, mother,--only anything'd be betther than downright ruin."
"I wouldn't demane myself to Barry so much as to wish her out of this now she's here. But it was along of you she came here, and av' I've to pay for all this lawyer work, you oughtn't to see me at a loss. I'm shure I don't know where your sisthers is to look for a pound or two when I'm gone, av' things goes on this way," and again the widow whimpered.
"Don't let that throuble you, mother: av' there's anything to pay, I won't let it come upon you, any way. But I tell you there'll be nothing more about it."
Mrs Kelly was somewhat quieted by her son's guarantee, and, muttering that she couldn't afford to be wasting her mornings in that way, diligently commenced weighing out innumerable three-halfporths of brown sugar, and Martin went about his own business.
Daly left the inn, after his interview with Anty and the Kellys, in anything but a pleasant frame of mind. In the first place, he knew that he had been signally unsuccessful, and that his want of success had been mainly attributable to his having failed to see Anty alone; and, in the next place, he felt more than ever disgusted with his client. He began to reflect, for the first time, that he might, and probably would, irretrievably injure his character by undertaking, as Martin truly called it, such a very low line of business: that, if the matter were persevered in, every one in Connaught would be sure to hear of Anty's persecution; and that his own name would be so mixed up with Lynch's in the transaction as to leave him no means of escaping the ignominy which was so justly due to his employer. Beyond these selfish motives of wishing to withdraw from the business, he really pitied Anty, and felt a great repugnance at being the means of adding to her troubles; and he was aware of the scandalous shame of subjecting her again to the ill-treatment of such a wretch as her brother, by threatening proceedings which he knew could never be taken.
As he got on the car to return to Tuam, he determined that whatever plan he might settle on adopting, he would have nothing further to do with prosecuting or persecuting either Anty or the Kellys. "I'll give him the best advice I can about it," said Daly to himself; "and if he don't like it he may do the other thing. I wouldn't carry on with this game for all he's worth, and that I believe is not much." He had intended to go direct to Dunmore House from the Kellys, and to have seen Barry, but he would have had to stop for dinner if he had done so; and though, generally speaking, not very squeamish in his society, he did not wish to enjoy another after-dinner _tête-à-tête_ with him--"It's better to get him over to Tuam," thought he, "and try and make him see rason when he's sober: nothing's too hot or too bad for him, when he's mad dhrunk afther dinner."
Accordingly, Lynch was again summoned to Tuam, and held a second council in the attorney's little parlour. Daly commenced by telling him that his sister had seen him, and had positively refused to leave the inn, and that the widow and her son had both listened to the threats of a prosecution unmoved and undismayed. Barry indulged in his usual volubility of expletives; expressed his fixed intention of exterminating the Kellys; declared, with many asseverations, his conviction that his sister was a lunatic; swore, by everything under, in, and above the earth, that he would have her shut up in the Lunatic Asylum in Ballinasloe, in the teeth of the Lord Chancellor and all the other lawyers in Ireland; cursed the shades of his father, deeply and copiously; assured Daly that he was only prevented from recovering his own property by the weakness and ignorance of his legal advisers, and ended by asking the attorney's advice as to his future conduct.
"What the d----l, then, am I to do with the confounded ideot?" said he.
"If you'll take my advice, you'll do nothing."
"What, and let her marry and have that young blackguard brought up to Dunmore under my very nose?"
"I'm very much afraid, Mr Lynch, if you wish to be quit of Martin Kelly, it is you must lave Dunmore. You may be shure he won't."
"Oh, as for that, I've nothing to tie me to Dunmore. I hate the place; I never meant to live there. If I only saw my sister properly taken care of, and that it was put out of her power to throw herself away, I should leave it at once."
"Between you and me, Mr Lynch, she will be taken care of; and as for throwing herself away, she must judge of that herself. Take my word for it, the best thing for you to do is to come to terms with Martin Kelly, and to sell out your property in Dunmore. You'll make much better terms before marriage than you would afther, it stands to rason."
Barry was half standing, and half sitting on the small parlour table, and there he remained for a few minutes, meditating on Daly's most unpleasant proposal. It was a hard pill for him to swallow, and he couldn't get it down without some convulsive grimaces. He bit his under lip, till the blood came through it, and at last said, "Why, you've taken this thing up, Daly, as if you were to be paid by the Kellys instead of by me! I can't understand it, confound me if I can!"
Daly turned very red at the insinuation. He was within an ace of seizing Lynch by the collar, and expelling him in a summary way from his premises, a feat which he was able to perform; and willing also, for he was sick of his client; but he thought of it a second time, and restrained himself.
"Mr Lynch," he said, after a moment or two, "that's the second time you've made an observation of that kind to me; and I'll tell you what; if your business was the best in the county, instead of being as bad a case as was ever put into a lawyer's hands, I wouldn't stand it from you. If you think you can let out your passion against me, as you do against your own people, you'll find your mistake out very soon; so you'd betther mind what you're saying."
"Why, what the devil did I say?" said Lynch, half abashed.
"I'll not repeat it--and you hadn't betther, either. And now, do you choose to hear my professional advice, and behave to me as you ought and shall do? or will you go out of this and look out for another attorney? To tell you the truth, I'd jist as lieve you'd take your business to some one else."
Barry's brow grew very black, and he looked at Daly as though he would much like to insult him again if he dared. But he did not dare. He had no one else to look to for advice or support; he had utterly estranged from him his father's lawyer; and though he suspected that Daly was not true to him, he felt that he could not break with him. He was obliged, therefore, to swallow his wrath, though it choked him, and to mutter something in the shape of an apology.
It was a mutter: Daly heard something about its being only a joke, and not expecting to be taken up so d---- sharp; and, accepting these sounds as an _amende honorable_ [32], again renewed his functions as attorney.
[FOOTNOTE 32: amende honorable--(French) apology] "Will you authorise me to see Martin Kelly, and to treat with him? You'll find it the cheapest thing you can do; and, more than that, it'll be what nobody can blame you for."
"How treat with him? --I owe him nothing--I don't see what I've got to treat with him about. Am I to offer him half the property on condition he'll consent to marry my sister? Is that what you mean?"
"No: that's not what I mean; but it'll come to much the same thing in the end. In the first place, you must withdraw all opposition to Miss Lynch's marriage; indeed, you must give it your direct sanction; and, in the next place, you must make an amicable arrangement with Martin about the division of the property."
"What--coolly give him all he has the impudence to ask? --throw up the game altogether, and pitch the whole stakes into his lap? --Why, Daly, you--" "Well, Mr Lynch, finish your speech," said Daly, looking him full in the face.
Barry had been on the point of again accusing the attorney of playing false to him, but he paused in time; he caught Daly's eye, and did not dare to finish the sentence which he had begun.
"I can't understand you, I mean," said he; "I can't understand what you're after: but go on; may-be you're right, but I can't see, for the life of me. What am I to get by such a plan as that?"
Barry was now cowed and frightened; he had no dram-bottle by him to reassure him, and he became, comparatively speaking, calm and subdued. Indeed, before the interview was over he fell into a pitiably lachrymose tone, and claimed sympathy for the many hardships he had to undergo through the ill-treatment of his family.
"I'll try and explain to you, Mr Lynch, what you'll get by it. As far as I can understand, your father left about eight hundred a-year between the two--that's you and your sisther; and then there's the house and furniture. Nothing on earth can keep her out of her property, or prevent her from marrying whom she plases. Martin Kelly, who is an honest fellow, though sharp enough, has set his eye on her, and before many weeks you'll find he'll make her his wife. Undher these circumstances, wouldn't he be the best tenant you could find for Dunmore? You're not fond of the place, and will be still less so when he's your brother-in-law. Lave it altogether, Mr Lynch; give him a laise of the whole concern, and if you'll do that now at once, take my word for it you'll get more out of Dunmore than iver you will by staying here, and fighting the matther out."
"But about the debts, Daly?"
"Why, I suppose the fact is, the debts are all your own, eh?"
"Well--suppose they are?"
"Exactly so: personal debts of your own. Why, when you've made some final arrangement about the property, you must make some other arrangement with your creditors. But that's quite a separate affair; you don't expect Martin Kelly to pay your debts, I suppose?"
"But I might get a sum of money for the good-will, mightn't I?"
"I don't think Martin's able to put a large sum down. I'll tell you what I think you might ask; and what I think he would give, to get your good-will and consent to the match, and to prevent any further difficulty. I think he'd become your tenant, for the whole of your share, at a rent of five-hundred a year; and maybe he'd give you three hundred pounds for the furniture and stock, and things about the place. If so, you should give him a laise of three lives."
There was a good deal in this proposition that was pleasing to Barry's mind: five hundred a-year without any trouble in collecting it; the power of living abroad in the unrestrained indulgence of hotels and billiard rooms; the probable chance of being able to retain his income and bilk his creditors; the prospect of shaking off from himself the consequences of a connection with the Kellys, and being for ever rid of Dunmore encumbrances. These things all opened before his eyes a vista of future, idle, uncontrolled enjoyment, just suited to his taste, and strongly tempted him at once to close with Daly's offer. But still, he could hardly bring himself to consent to be vanquished by his own sister; it was wormwood to him to think that after all she should be left to the undisturbed enjoyment of her father's legacy. He had been brow-beaten by the widow, insulted by young Kelly, cowed and silenced by the attorney whom he had intended to patronise and convert into a creature of his own: he could however have borne and put up with all this, if he could only have got his will of his sister; but to give up to her, who had been his slave all his life--to own, at last, that he had no power over her, whom he had always looked upon as so abject, so mean a thing; to give in, of his own accord, to the robbery which had been committed on him by his own father; and to do this, while he felt convinced as he still did, that a sufficiently unscrupulous attorney could save him from such cruel disgrace and loss, was a trial to which he could hardly bring himself to submit, crushed and tamed as he was.
He still sat on the edge of the parlour table, and there he remained mute, balancing the pros and cons of Daly's plan. Daly waited a minute or two for his answer, and, finding that he said nothing, left him alone for a time, to make up his mind, telling him that he would return in about a quarter of an hour. Barry never moved from his position; it was an important question he had to settle, and so he felt it, for he gave up to the subject his undivided attention. Since his boyhood he had looked forward to a life of ease, pleasure, and licence, and had longed for his father's death that he might enjoy it. It seemed now within his reach; for his means, though reduced, would still be sufficient for sensual gratification. But, idle, unprincipled, brutal, castaway wretch as Barry was, he still felt the degradation of inaction, when he had such stimulating motives to energy as unsatisfied rapacity and hatred for his sister: ignorant as he was of the meaning of the word right, he tried to persuade himself that it would be wrong in him to yield.
Could he only pluck up sufficient courage to speak his mind to Daly, and frighten him into compliance with his wishes, he still felt that he might be successful--that he might, by some legal tactics, at any rate obtain for himself the management of his sister's property. But this he could not do: he felt that Daly was his master; and though he still thought that he might have triumphed had he come sufficiently prepared, that is, with a considerable quantum of spirits inside him, he knew himself well enough to be aware that he could do nothing without this assistance; and, alas, he could not obtain it there. He had great reliance in the efficacy of whiskey; he would trust much to a large dose of port wine; but with brandy he considered himself invincible.
He sat biting his lip, trying to think, trying to make up his mind, trying to gain sufficient self-composure to finish his interview with Daly with some appearance of resolution and self-confidence, but it was in vain; when the attorney returned, his face still plainly showed that he was utterly unresolved, utterly unable to resolve on anything.
"Well, Mr Lynch," said Daly, "will you let me spake to Kelly about this, or would you rather sleep on the matther?"
Barry gave a long sigh--"Wouldn't he give six hundred, Daly? he'd still have two hundred clear, and think what that'd be for a fellow like him!"
"You must ask him for it yourself then; I'll not propose to him any such thing. Upon my soul, he'll be a great fool to give the five hundred, because he's no occasion to meddle with you in the matther at all, at all. But still I think he may give it; but as for asking for more--at any rate I won't do it; you can do what you like, yourself."
"And am I to sell the furniture, and everything--horses, cattle, and everything about the place--for three hundred pounds?"
"Not unless you like it, you ain't, Mr Lynch; but I'll tell you this--if you can do so, and do do so, it'll be the best bargain you ever made:--mind, one-half of it all belongs to your sisther."
Barry muttered an oath through his ground teeth; he would have liked to scratch the ashes of his father from their resting-place, and wreak his vengeance on them, whenever this degrading fact was named to him.
"But I want the money, Daly," said he: "I couldn't get afloat unless I had more than that: I couldn't pay your bill, you know, unless I got a higher figure down than that. Come, Daly, you must do something for me; you must do something, you know, to earn the fees," and he tried to look facetious, by giving a wretched ghastly grin.
"My bill won't be a long one, Mr Lynch, and you may be shure I'm trying to make it as short as I can. And as for earning it, whatever you may think, I can assure you I shall never have got money harder. I've now given you my best advice; if your mind's not yet made up, perhaps you'll have the goodness to let me hear from you when it is?" and Daly walked from the fire towards the door, and placed his hand upon the handle of it.
This was a hint which Barry couldn't misunderstand. "Well, I'll write to you," he said, and passed through the door. He felt, however, that it was useless to attempt to trust himself to his own judgment, and he turned back, as Daly passed into his office--"Daly," he said, "step out one minute: I won't keep you a second." The attorney unwillingly lifted up the counter, and came out to him. "Manage it your own way," said he; "do whatever you think best; but you must see that I've been badly used--infernally cruelly treated, and you ought to do the best you can for me. Here am I, giving away, as I may say, my own property to a young shopkeeper, and upon my soul you ought to make him pay something for it; upon my soul you ought, for it's only fair!"
"I've tould you, Mr Lynch, what I'll propose to Martin Kelly; if you don't think the terms fair, you can propose any others yourself; or you're at liberty to employ any other agent you please."
Barry sighed again, but he yielded. He felt broken-hearted, and unhappy, and he longed to quit a country so distasteful to him, and relatives and neighbours so ungrateful; he longed in his heart for the sweet, easy haunts of Boulogne, which he had never known, but of which he had heard many a glowing description from congenial spirits whom he knew. He had heard enough of the ways and means of many a leading star in that Elysium, to be aware that, with five hundred a-year, unembarrassed and punctually paid, he might shine as a prince indeed. He would go at once to that happy foreign shore, where the memory of no father would follow him, where the presence of no sister would degrade and irritate him, where billiard-tables were rife, and brandy cheap; where virtue was easy, and restraint unnecessary; where no duties would harass him, no tenants upbraid him, no duns persecute him. There, carefully guarding himself against the schemes of those less fortunate followers of pleasure among whom he would be thrown in his social hours, he would convert every shilling of his income to some purpose of self-enjoyment, and live a life of luxurious abandonment. And he need not be altogether idle, he reflected within himself afterwards, as he was riding home: he felt that he was possessed of sufficient energy and talent to make himself perfectly master of a pack of cards, to be a proficient over a billiard-table, and even to get the upper hand of a box of dice. With such pursuits left to him, he might yet live to be talked of, feared, and wealthy; and Barry's utmost ambition would have carried him no further.
As I said before, he yielded to the attorney, and commissioned him fully to treat with Martin Kelly in the manner proposed by himself. Martin was to give him five hundred a-year for his share of the property, and three hundred pounds for the furniture, &c.; and Barry was to give his sister his written and unconditional assent to her marriage; was to sign any document which might be necessary as to her settlement, and was then to leave Dunmore for ever. Daly made him write an authority for making such a proposal, by which he bound himself to the terms, should they be acceded to by the other party.
"But you must bear in mind," added Daly, as his client for the second time turned from the door, "that I don't guarantee that Martin Kelly will accept these terms: it's very likely he may be sharp enough to know that he can manage as well without you as he can with you. You'll remember that, Mr Lynch."
"I will--I will, Daly; but look here--if he bites freely--and I think he will, and if you find you could get as much as a thousand out of him, or even eight hundred, you shall have one hundred clear for yourself."
This was Barry's last piece of diplomacy for that day. Daly vouchsafed him no answer, but returned into his office, and Barry mounted his horse, and returned home not altogether ill-pleased with his prospects, but still regretting that he should have gone about so serious a piece of business, so utterly unprepared.
These regrets rose stronger, when his after-dinner courage returned to him as he sate solitary over his fire. "I should have had him here," said he to himself, "and not gone to that confounded cold hole of his. After all, there's no place for a cock to fight on like his own dunghill; and there's nothing able to carry a fellow well through a tough bit of jobation [33] with a lawyer like a stiff tumbler of brandy punch. It'd have been worth a couple of hundred to me, to have had him out here--impertinent puppy! Well, devil a halfpenny I'll pay him!" This thought was consolatory, and he began again to think of Boulogne.
[FOOTNOTE 33: jobation--a tedious session; scolding]
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{
"id": "4917"
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21
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LORD BALLINDINE AT HOME
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Two days after the last recorded interview between Lord Ballindine and his friend, Dot Blake, the former found himself once more sitting down to dinner with his mother and sisters, the Honourable Mrs O'Kelly and the Honourable Misses O'Kelly; at least such were the titular dignities conferred on them in County Mayo, though I believe, strictly speaking, the young ladies had no claim to the appellation.
Mrs O'Kelly was a very small woman, with no particularly developed character, and perhaps of no very general utility. She was fond of her daughters, and more than fond of her son, partly because he was so tall and so handsome, and partly because he was the lord, the head of the family, and the owner of the house. She was, on the whole, a good-natured person, though perhaps her temper was a little soured by her husband having, very unfairly, died before he had given her a right to call herself Lady Ballindine. She was naturally shy and reserved, and the seclusion of O'Kelly's Court did not tend to make her less so; but she felt that the position and rank of her son required her to be dignified; and consequently, when in society, she somewhat ridiculously aggravated her natural timidity with an assumed rigidity of demeanour. She was, however, a good woman, striving, with small means, to do the best for her family; prudent and self-denying, and very diligent in looking after the house servants.
Her two daughters had been, at the instance of their grandfather, the courtier, christened Augusta and Sophia, after the two Princesses of that name, and were now called Guss and Sophy: they were both pretty, good-natured girls--one with dark brown and the other light brown hair: they both played the harp badly, sung tolerably, danced well, and were very fond of nice young men. They both thought Kelly's Court rather dull; but then they had known nothing better since they had grown up, and there were some tolerably nice people not very far off, whom they occasionally saw: there were the Dillons, of Ballyhaunis, who had three thousand a-year, and spent six; they were really a delightful family--three daughters and four sons, all unmarried, and up to anything: the sons all hunted, shot, danced, and did everything that they ought to do--at least in the eyes of young ladies; though some of their more coldly prudent acquaintances expressed an opinion that it would be as well if the three younger would think of doing something for themselves; but they looked so manly and handsome when they breakfasted at Kelly's Court on a hunt morning, with their bright tops, red coats, and hunting-caps, that Guss and Sophy, and a great many others, thought it would be a shame to interrupt them in their career. And then, Ballyhaunis was only eight miles from Kelly's Court; though they were Irish miles, it is true, and the road was not patronised by the Grand Jury; but the distance was only eight miles, and there were always beds for them when they went to dinner at Peter Dillon's. Then there were the Blakes of Castletown. To be sure they could give no parties, for they were both unmarried; but they were none the worse for that, and they had plenty of horses, and went out everywhere. And the Blakes of Morristown; they also were very nice people; only unfortunately, old Blake was always on his keeping, and couldn't show himself out of doors except on Sundays, for fear of the bailiffs. And the Browns of Mount Dillon, and the Browns of Castle Brown; and General Bourke of Creamstown. All these families lived within fifteen or sixteen miles of Kelly's Court, and prevented the O'Kellys from feeling themselves quite isolated from the social world. Their nearest neighbours, however, were the Armstrongs, and of them they saw a great deal.
The Reverend Joseph Armstrong was rector of Ballindine, and Mrs O'Kelly was his parishioner, and the only Protestant one he had; and, as Mr Armstrong did not like to see his church quite deserted, and as Mrs O'Kelly was, as she flattered herself, a very fervent Protestant, they were all in all to each other.
Ballindine was not a good living, and Mr Armstrong had a very large family; he was, therefore, a poor man. His children were helpless, uneducated, and improvident; his wife was nearly worn out with the labours of bringing them forth and afterwards catering for them; and a great portion of his own life was taken up in a hard battle with tradesmen and tithe-payers, creditors, and debtors. Yet, in spite of the insufficiency of his two hundred a-year to meet all or half his wants, Mr Armstrong was not an unhappy man. At any moment of social enjoyment he forgot all his cares and poverty, and was always the first to laugh, and the last to cease to do so. He never refused an invitation to dinner, and if he did not entertain many in his own house, it was his fortune, and not his heart, that prevented him from doing so. He could hardly be called a good clergyman, and yet his remissness was not so much his own fault as that of circumstances. How could a Protestant rector be a good parish clergyman, with but one old lady and her daughters, for the exercise of his clerical energies and talents? He constantly lauded the zeal of St. Paul for proselytism; but, as he himself once observed, even St. Paul had never had to deal with the obstinacy of an Irish Roman Catholic. He often regretted the want of work, and grieved that his profession, as far as he saw and had been instructed, required nothing of him but a short service on every Sunday morning, and the celebration of the Eucharist four times a-year; but such were the facts; and the idleness which this want of work engendered, and the habits which his poverty induced, had given him a character as a clergyman, very different from that which the high feelings and strict principles which animated him at his ordination would have seemed to ensure. He was, in fact, a loose, slovenly man, somewhat too fond of his tumbler of punch; a little lax, perhaps, as to clerical discipline, but very staunch as to doctrine. He possessed no industry or energy of any kind; but he was good-natured and charitable, lived on friendly terms with all his neighbours, and was intimate with every one that dwelt within ten miles of him, priest and parson, lord and commoner.
Such was the neighbourhood of Kelly's Court, and among such Lord Ballindine had now made up his mind to remain a while, till circumstances should decide what further steps he should take with regard to Fanny Wyndham. There were a few hunting days left in the season, which he intended to enjoy; and then he must manage to make shift to lull the time with shooting, fishing, farming, and nursing his horses and dogs.
His mother and sisters had heard nothing of the rumour of the quarrel between Frank and Fanny, which Mat Tierney had so openly alluded to at Handicap Lodge; and he was rather put out by their eager questions on the subject. Nothing was said about it till the servant withdrew, after dinner, but the three ladies were too anxious for information to delay their curiosity any longer.
"Well, Frank," said the elder sister, who was sitting over the fire, close to his left elbow--(he had a bottle of claret at his right)--"well, Frank, do tell us something about Fanny Wyndham; we are so longing to hear; and you never will write, you know."
"Everybody says it's a brilliant match," said the mother. "They say here she's forty thousand pounds: I'm sure I hope she has, Frank."
"But when is it to be?" said Sophy. "She's of age now, isn't she? and I thought you were only waiting for that. I'm sure we shall like her; come, Frank, do tell us--when are we to see Lady Ballindine?"
Frank looked rather serious and embarrassed, but did not immediately make any reply.
"You haven't quarrelled, have you, Frank?" said the mother.
"The match isn't off--is it?" said Guss.
"Miss Wyndham has just lost her only brother," said he; "he died quite suddenly in London about ten days since; she was very much attached to him."
"Good gracious, how shocking!" said Sophy.
"I'm sorry," said Guss.
"Why, Frank," said their mother, now excited into absolute animation; "his fortune was more than double hers, wasn't it? --who'll have it now?"
"It was, mother; five times as much as hers, I believe."
"Gracious powers! and who has it now? Why don't you tell me, Frank?"
"His sister Fanny."
"Heavens and earth! --I hope you're not going to let her quarrel with you, are you? Has there been anything between you? Have there been any words between you and Lord Cashel? Why don't you tell me, Frank, when you know how anxious I am?"
"If you must know all about it, I have not had any words, as you call them, with Fanny Wyndham; but I have with her guardian. He thinks a hundred and twenty thousand pounds much too great a fortune for a Connaught viscount. However, I don't think so. It will be for time to show what Fanny thinks. Meanwhile, the less said about it the better; remember that, girls, will you?"
"Oh, we will--we won't say a word about it; but she'll never change her mind because of her money, will she?"
"That's what would make me love a man twice the more," said Guss; "or at any rate show it twice the stronger."
"Frank," said the anxious mother, "for heaven's sake don't let anything stand between you and Lord Cashel; think what a thing it is you'd lose! Why; it'd pay all the debts, and leave the property worth twice what it ever was before. If Lord Cashel thinks you ought to give up the hounds, do it at once, Frank; anything rather than quarrel with him. You could get them again, you know, when all's settled."
"I've given up quite as much as I intend for Lord Cashel."
"Now, Frank, don't be a fool, or you'll repent it all your life: what does it signify how much you give up to such a man as Lord Cashel? You don't think, do you, that he objects to our being at Kelly's Court? Because I'm sure we wouldn't stay a moment if we thought that."
"Mother, I wouldn't part with a cur dog out of the place to please Lord Cashel. But if I were to do everything on earth at his beck and will, it would make no difference: he will never let me marry Fanny Wyndham if he can help it; but, thank God, I don't believe he can."
"I hope not--I hope not. You'll never see half such a fortune again."
"Well, mother, say nothing about it one way or the other, to anybody. And as you now know how the matter stands, it's no good any of us talking more about it till I've settled what I mean to do myself."
"I shall hate her," said Sophy, "if her getting all her brother's money changes her; but I'm sure it won't." And so the conversation ended.
Lord Ballindine had not rested in his paternal halls the second night, before he had commenced making arrangements for a hunt breakfast, by way of letting all his friends know that he was again among them. And so missives, in Guss and Sophy's handwriting, were sent round by a bare-legged little boy, to all the Mounts, Towns, and Castles, belonging to the Dillons, Blakes, Bourkes, and Browns of the neighbourhood, to tell them that the dogs would draw the Kelly's Court covers at eleven o'clock on the following Tuesday morning, and that the preparatory breakfast would be on the table at ten. This was welcome news to the whole neighbourhood. It was only on the Sunday evening that the sportsmen got the intimation, and very busy most of them were on the following Monday to see that their nags and breeches were all right--fit to work and fit to be seen. The four Dillons, of Ballyhaunis, gave out to their grooms a large assortment of pipe-clay and putty-powder. Bingham Blake, of Castletown, ordered a new set of girths to his hunting saddle; and his brother Jerry, who was in no slight degree proud of his legs, but whose nether trappings were rather the worse from the constant work of a heavy season, went so far as to go forth very early on the Monday morning to excite the Ballinrobe tailor to undertake the almost impossible task of completing him a pair of doeskin by the Tuesday morning. The work was done, and the breeches home at Castletown by eight--though the doeskin had to be purchased in Tuam, and an assistant artist taken away from his mother's wake, to sit up all night over the seams. But then the tailor owed a small trifle of arrear of rent for his potato-garden, and his landlord was Jerry Blake's cousin-german [34]. There's nothing carries one further than a good connexion, thought both Jerry and the tailor when the job was finished.
[FOOTNOTE 34: cousin-german--first cousin] Among the other invitations sent was one to Martin Kelly,--not exactly worded like the others, for though Lord Ballindine was perhaps more anxious to see him than anyone else, Martin had not yet got quite so high in the ladder of life as to be asked to breakfast at Kelly's Court. But the fact that Frank for a moment thought of asking him showed that he was looking upwards in the world's estimation. Frank wrote him a note himself, saying that the hounds would throw off at Kelly's Court, at eleven; that, if he would ride over, he would be sure to see a good hunt, and that he, Lord Ballindine, had a few words to say to him on business, just while the dogs were being put into the cover. Martin, as usual, had a good horse which he was disposed to sell, if, as he said, he got its value; and wrote to say he would wait on Lord Ballindine at eleven. The truth was, Frank wanted to borrow money from him.
Another note was sent to the Glebe, requesting the Rector to come to breakfast and to look at the hounds being thrown off. The modest style of the invitation was considered as due to Mr Armstrong's clerical position, but was hardly rendered necessary by his habits; for though the parson attended such meetings in an old suit of rusty black, and rode an equally rusty-looking pony, he was always to be seen, at the end of the day, among those who were left around the dogs.
On the Tuesday morning there was a good deal of bustle at Kelly's Court. All the boys about the place were collected in front of the house, to walk the gentlemen's horses about while the riders were at breakfast, and earn a sixpence or a fourpenny bit; and among them, sitting idly on the big steppingstone placed near the door, was Jack the fool, who, for the day, seemed to have deserted the service of Barry Lynch.
And now the red-coats flocked up to the door, and it was laughable to see the knowledge of character displayed by the gossoons in the selection of their customers. One or two, who were known to be "bad pays," were allowed to dismount without molestation of any kind, and could not even part with their steeds till they had come to an absolute bargain as to the amount of gratuity to be given. Lambert Brown was one of these unfortunate characters--a younger brother who had a little, and but a very little money, and who was determined to keep that. He was a miserable hanger-on at his brother's house, without profession or prospects; greedy, stingy, and disagreeable; endowed with a squint, and long lank light-coloured hair: he was a bad horseman, always craning and shirking in the field, boasting and lying after dinner; nevertheless, he was invited and endured because he was one of the Browns of Mount Dillon, cousin to the Browns of Castle Brown, nephew to Mrs Dillon the member's wife, and third cousin of Lord Ballaghaderrin.
He dismounted in the gravel circle before the door, and looked round for someone to take his horse; but none of the urchins would come to him. At last he caught hold of a little ragged boy whom he knew, from his own side of the country, and who had come all the way there, eight long Irish miles, on the chance of earning sixpence and seeing a hunt.
"Here, Patsy, come here, you born little divil," and he laid hold of the arm of the brat, who was trying to escape from him--"come and hold my horse for me--and I'll not forget you."
"Shure, yer honer, Mr Lambert, I can't thin, for I'm afther engaging myself this blessed minute to Mr Larry Dillon, only he's jist trotted round to the stables to spake a word to Mick Keogh."
"Don't be lying, you little blackguard; hould the horse, and don't stir out of that."
"Shure how can I, Mr Lambert, when I've been and guv my word to Mr Larry?" and the little fellow put his hands behind him, that he might not be forced to take hold of the reins.
"Don't talk to me, you young imp, but take the horse. I'll not forget you when I come out. What's the matter with you, you fool; d'ye think I'd tell you a lie about it?"
Patsy evidently thought he would; for though he took the horse almost upon compulsion, he whimpered as he did so, and said: "Shure, Mr Lambert, would you go and rob a poor boy of his chances? --I come'd all the way from Ballyglass this blessed morning to 'arn a tizzy, and av' I doesn't get it from you this turn, I'll--" But Lambert Brown had gone into the house, and on his return after breakfast he fully justified the lad's suspicion, for he again promised him that he wouldn't forget him, and that he'd see him some day at Mr Dillon's.
"Well, Lambert Brown," said the boy, as that worthy gentleman rode off, "it's you're the raal blackguard--and it's well all the counthry knows you: sorrow be your bed this night; it's little the poor'll grieve for you, when you're stretched, or the rich either, for the matther of that."
Very different was the reception Bingham Blake got, as he drove up with his tandem and tax-cart: half-a-dozen had kept themselves idle, each in the hope of being the lucky individual to come in for Bingham's shilling.
"Och, Mr Bingham, shure I'm first," roared one fellow.
But the first, as he styled himself, was soon knocked down under the wheels of the cart by the others.
"Mr Blake, thin--Mr Blake, darlint--doesn't ye remimber the promise you guv me?"
"Mr Jerry, Mr Jerry, avick,"--this was addressed to the brother--"spake a word for me; do, yer honour; shure it was I come all the way from Teddy Mahony's with the breeches this morning, God bless 'em, and the fine legs as is in 'em."
But they were all balked, for Blake had his servant there.
"Get out, you blackguards!" said he, raising his tandem whip, as if to strike them. "Get out, you robbers! Are you going to take the cart and horses clean away from me? That mare'll settle some of ye, if you make so free with her! she's not a bit too chary of her hind feet. Get out of that, I tell you;" and he lightly struck with the point of his whip the boy who had Lambert Brown's horse.
"Ah, Mr Bingham," said, the boy, pretending to rub the part very hard, "you owe me one for that, anyhow, and it's you are the good mark for it, God bless you."
"Faix," said another, "one blow from your honour is worth two promises from Lambert Brown, any way."
There was a great laugh at this among the ragged crew, for Lambert Brown was still standing on the doorsteps: when he heard this sally, however, he walked in, and the different red-coats and top-boots were not long in crowding after him.
Lord Ballindine received them in the same costume, and very glad they all seemed to see him again. When an Irish gentleman is popular in his neighbourhood, nothing can exceed the real devotion paid to him; and when that gentleman is a master of hounds, and does not require a subscription, he is more than ever so.
"Welcome back, Ballindine--better late than never; but why did you stay away so long?" said General Bourke, an old gentleman with long, thin, flowing grey hairs, waving beneath his broad-brimmed felt hunting-hat. "You're not getting so fond of the turf, I hope, as to be giving up the field for it? Give me the sport where I can ride my own horse myself; not where I must pay a young rascal for doing it for me, and robbing me into the bargain, most likely."
"Quite right, General," said Frank; "so you see I've given up the Curragh, and come down to the dogs again."
"Yes, but you've waited too long, man; the dogs have nearly done their work for this year. I'm sorry for it; the last day of the season is the worst day in the year to me. I'm ill for a week after it."
"Well, General, please the pigs, we'll be in great tune next October. I've as fine a set of puppies to enter as there is in Ireland, let alone Connaught. You must come down, and tell me what you think of them."
"Next October's all very well for you young fellows, but I'm seventy-eight. I always make up my mind that I'll never turn out another season, and it'll be true for me this year. I'm hunting over sixty years, Ballindine, in these three counties. I ought to have had enough of it by this time, you'll say."
"I'll bet you ten pounds," said Bingham Blake, "that you hunt after eighty."
"Done with you Bingham," said the General, and the bet was booked.
General Bourke was an old soldier, who told the truth in saying that he had hunted over the same ground sixty years ago. But he had not been at it ever since, for he had in the meantime seen a great deal of hard active service, and obtained high military reputation. But he had again taken kindly to the national sport of his country, on returning to his own estate at the close of the Peninsular War; and had ever since attended the meets twice a week through every winter, with fewer exceptions than any other member of the hunt. He always wore top-boots--of the ancient cut, with deep painted tops and square toes, drawn tight up over the calf of his leg; a pair of most capacious dark-coloured leather breeches, the origin of which was unknown to any other present member of the hunt, and a red frock coat, very much soiled by weather, water, and wear. The General was a rich man, and therefore always had a horse to suit him. On the present occasion, he was riding a strong brown beast, called Parsimony, that would climb over anything, and creep down the gable end of a house if he were required to do so. He was got by OEconomy; those who know county Mayo know the breed well.
They were now all crowded into the large dining-room at Kelly's Court; about five-and-twenty redcoats, and Mr Armstrong's rusty black. In spite of his shabby appearance, however, and the fact that the greater number of those around him were Roman Catholics, he seemed to be very popular with the lot; and his opinion on the important subject of its being a scenting morning was asked with as much confidence in his judgment, as though the foxes of the country were peculiarly subject to episcopalian jurisdiction.
"Well, then, Peter," said he, "the wind's in the right quarter. Mick says there's a strong dog-fox in the long bit of gorse behind the firs; if he breaks from that he must run towards Ballintubber, and when you're once over the meering [5] into Roscommon, there's not an acre of tilled land, unless a herd's garden, between that and--the deuce knows where all--further than most of you'll like to ride, I take it."
[FOOTNOTE 35: meering--a well-marked boundary, such as a ditch or fence, between farms, fields, bogs, etc] "How far'll you go yourself, Armstrong? Faith, I believe it's few of the crack nags'll beat the old black pony at a long day."
"Is it I?" said the Parson, innocently. "As soon as I've heard the dogs give tongue, and seen them well on their game, I'll go home. I've land ploughing, and I must look after that. But, as I was saying, if the fox breaks well away from the gorse, you'll have the best run you've seen this season; but if he dodges back into the plantation, you'll have enough to do to make him break at all; and when he does, he'll go away towards Ballyhaunis, through as cross a country as ever a horse put a shoe into."
And having uttered this scientific prediction, which was listened to with the greatest deference by Peter Dillon, the Rev. Joseph Armstrong turned his attention to the ham and tea.
The three ladies were all smiles to meet their guests; Mrs O'Kelly, dressed in a piece of satin turk, came forward to shake hands with the General, but Sophy and Guss kept their positions, beneath the coffee-pot and tea-urn, at each end of the long table, being very properly of opinion that it was the duty of the younger part of the community to come forward, and make their overtures to them. Bingham Blake, the cynosure on whom the eyes of the beauty of county Mayo were most generally placed, soon found his seat beside Guss, rather to Sophy's mortification; but Sophy was good-natured, and when Peter Dillon placed himself at her right hand, she was quite happy, though Peter's father was still alive, and Bingham's had been dead this many a year and Castletown much in want of a mistress.
"Now, Miss O'Kelly," said Bingham, "do let me manage the coffee-pot; the cream-jug and sugar-tongs will be quite enough for your energies."
"Indeed and I won't, Mr Blake; you're a great deal too awkward, and a great deal too hungry. The last hunt-morning you breakfasted here you threw the coffee-grouts into the sugar-basin, when I let you help me."
"To think of your remembering that! --but I'm improved since then. I've been taking lessons with my old aunt at Castlebar."
"You don't mean you've really been staying with Lady Sarah?"
"Oh, but I have, though. I was there three days; made tea every night; washed the poodle every morning, and clear-starched her Sunday pelerine, with my own hands on Saturday evening."
"Oh, what a useful animal! What a husband you'll make, when you're a little more improved!"
"Shan't I? As you're so fond of accomplishments, perhaps you'll take me yourself by-and-by?"
"Why, as you're so useful, maybe I may."
"Well, Lambert," said Lord Ballindine, across the table, to the stingy gentleman with the squint, "are you going to ride hard to-day?"
"I'll go bail I'm not much behind, my lord," said Lambert; "if the dogs go, I'll follow."
"I'll bet you a crown, Lambert," said his cousin, young Brown of Mount Brown, "the dogs kill, and you don't see them do it."
"Oh, that may be, and yet I mayn't be much behind."
"I'll bet you're not in the next field to them."
"Maybe you'll not be within ten fields yourself."
"Come, Lambert, I'll tell you what--we'll ride together, and I'll bet you a crown I pound you before you're over three leaps."
"Ah, now, take it easy with yourself," said Lambert; "there are others ride better than you."
"But no one better than yourself; is that it, eh?"
"Well, Jerry, how do the new articles fit?" said Nicholas Dillon.
"Pretty well, thank you: they'd be a deal more comfortable though, if you'd pay for them."
"Did you hear, Miss O'Kelly, what Jerry Blake did yesterday?" said Nicholas Dillon aloud, across the table.
"Indeed, I did not," said Guss--"but I hope, for the sake of the Blakes in general, he didn't do anything much amiss?"
"I'll tell you then," continued Nicholas. "A portion of his ould hunting-dress--I'll not specify what, you know--but a portion, which he'd been wearing since the last election, were too shabby to show: well, he couldn't catch a hedge tailor far or near, only poor lame Andy Oulahan, who was burying his wife, rest her sowl, the very moment Jerry got a howld of him. Well, Jerry was wild that the tailors were so scarce, so he laid his hands on Andy, dragged him away from the corpse and all the illigant enthertainment of the funeral, and never let him out of sight till he'd put on the last button."
"Oh, Mr Blake!" said Guss, "you did not take the man away from his dead wife?"
"Indeed I did not, Miss O'Kelly: Andy'd no such good chance; his wife's to the fore this day, worse luck for him. It was only his mother he was burying."
"But you didn't take him away from his mother's funeral?"
"Oh, I did it according to law, you know. I got Bingham to give me a warrant first, before I let the policeman lay a hand on him."
"Now, General, you've really made no breakfast at all," said the hospitable hostess: "do let Guss give you a hot cup of coffee."
"Not a drop more, Mrs O'Kelly. I've done more than well; but, if you'll allow me, I'll just take a crust of bread in my pocket."
"And what would you do that for? --you'll be coming back to lunch, you know."
"Is it lunch, Mrs O'Kelly, pray don't think of troubling yourself to have lunch on the table. Maybe we'll be a deal nearer Creamstown than Kelly's Court at lunch time. But it's quite time we were off. As for Bingham Blake, from the look of him, he's going to stay here with your daughter Augusta all the morning."
"I believe then he'd much sooner be with the dogs, General, than losing his time with her."
"Are you going to move at all, Ballindine," said the impatient old sportsman. "Do you know what time it is? --it'll be twelve o'clock before you have the dogs in the cover."
"Very good time, too, General: men must eat, you know, and the fox won't stir till we move him. But come, gentlemen, you seem to be dropping your knives and forks. Suppose we get into our saddles?"
And again the red-coats sallied out. Bingham gave Guss a tender squeeze, which she all but returned, as she bade him take care and not go and kill himself. Peter Dillon stayed to have a few last words with Sophy, and to impress upon her his sister Nora's message, that she and _her_ sister were to be sure to come over on Friday to Ballyhaunis, and spend the night there.
"We will, if we're let, tell Nora," said Sophy; "but now Frank's at home, we must mind him, you know."
"Make him bring you over: there'll be a bed for him; the old house is big enough, heaven knows."
"Indeed it is. Well, I'll do my best; but tell Nora to be sure and get the fiddler from Hollymount. It's so stupid for her to be sitting there at the piano while we're dancing."
"I'll manage that; only do you bring Frank to dance with her," and another tender squeeze was given--and Peter hurried out to the horses.
And now they were all gone but the Parson. "Mrs O'Kelly," said he, "Mrs Armstrong wants a favour from you. Poor Minny's very bad with her throat; she didn't get a wink of sleep last night."
"Dear me--poor thing; Can I send her anything?"
"If you could let them have a little black currant jelly, Mrs Armstrong would be so thankful. She has so much to think of, and is so weak herself, poor thing, she hasn't time to make those things."
"Indeed I will, Mr Armstrong. I'll send it down this morning; and a little calf's foot jelly won't hurt her. It is in the house, and Mrs Armstrong mightn't be able to get the feet, you know. Give them my love, and if I can get out at all to-morrow, I'll go and see them."
And so the Parson, having completed his domestic embassy for the benefit of his sick little girl, followed the others, keen for the hunt; and the three ladies were left alone, to see the plate and china put away.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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22
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THE HUNT
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Though the majority of those who were in the habit of hunting with the Kelly's Court hounds had been at the breakfast, there were still a considerable number of horsemen waiting on the lawn in front of the house, when Frank and his friends sallied forth. The dogs were collected round the huntsman, behaving themselves, for the most part, with admirable propriety; an occasional yelp from a young hound would now and then prove that the whipper [36] had his eye on them, and would not allow rambling; but the old dogs sat demurely on their haunches, waiting the well-known signal for action. There they sat, as grave as so many senators, with their large heads raised, their heavy lips hanging from each side of their jaws, and their deep, strong chests expanded so as to show fully their bone, muscle, and breeding.
[FOOTNOTE 36: whipper--an officer of the hunt whose duty was to help the hunstman control the hounds] Among the men who had arrived on the lawn during breakfast were two who certainly had not come together, and who had not spoken since they had been there. They were Martin Kelly and Barry Lynch. Martin was dressed just as usual, except that he had on a pair of spurs, but Barry was armed cap-a-pie [37]. Some time before his father's death he had supplied himself with all the fashionable requisites for the field,--not because he was fond of hunting, for he was not,--but in order to prove himself as much a gentleman as other people. He had been out twice this year, but had felt very miserable, for no one spoke to him, and he had gone home, on both occasions, early in the day; but he had now made up his mind that he would show himself to his old schoolfellow in his new character as an independent country gentleman; and what was more, he was determined that Lord Ballindine should not cut him.
[FOOTNOTE 37: cap-a-pie--from head to foot] He very soon had an opportunity for effecting his purpose, for the moment that Frank got on his horse, he unintentionally rode close up to him.
"How d'ye do, my lord? --I hope I see your lordship well?" said Barry, with a clumsy attempt at ease and familiarity. "I'm glad to find your lordship in the field before the season's over."
"Good morning, Mr Lynch," said Frank, and was turning away from him, when, remembering that he must have come from Dunmore, he asked, "did you see Martin Kelly anywhere?"
"Can't say I did, my lord," said Barry, and he turned away completely silenced, and out of countenance.
Martin had been talking to the huntsman, and criticizing the hounds. He knew every dog's name, character, and capabilities, and also every horse in Lord Ballindine's stable, and was consequently held in great respect by Mick Keogh and his crew.
And now the business began. "Mick," said the lord, "we'll take them down to the young plantation, and bring them back through the firs and so into the gorse. If the lad's lying there, we must hit him that way."
"That's thrue for yer honer, my lord;" and he started off with his obedient family.
"You're wrong, Ballindine," said the Parson; "for you'll drive him up into the big plantation, and you'll be all day before you make him break; and ten to one they'll chop him in the cover."
"Would you put them into the gorse at once then?"
"Take 'em gently through the firs; maybe he's lying out--and down into the gorse, and then, if he's there, he must go away, and into a tip-top country too--miles upon miles of pasture--right away to Ballintubber," "That's thrue, too, my lord: let his Rivirence alone for understandhing a fox," said Mick, with a wink.
The Parson's behests were obeyed. The hounds followed Mick into the plantation, and were followed by two or three of the more eager of the party, who did not object to receiving wet boughs in their faces, or who delighted in riding for half an hour with their heads bowed close down over their saddle-bows. The rest remained with the whipper, outside.
"Stay a moment here, Martin," said Lord Ballindine. "They can't get away without our seeing them, and I want to speak a few words to you."
"And I want particularly to spake to your lordship," said Martin; "and there's no fear of the fox! I never knew a fox lie in those firs yet."
"Nor I either, but you see the Parson would have his way. I suppose, if the priest were out, and he told you to run the dogs through the gooseberry-bushes, you'd do it?"
"I'm blessed if I would, my lord! Every man to his trade. Not but what Mr Armstrong knows pretty well what he's about."
"Well but, Martin, I'll tell you what I want of you. I want a little money, without bothering those fellows up in Dublin; and I believe you could let me have it; at any rate, you and your mother together. Those fellows at Guinness's are stiff about it, and I want three hundred pounds, without absolutely telling them that they must give it me. I'd give you my bill for the amount at twelve months, and, allow you six per cent.; but then I want it immediately. Can you let me have it?"
"Why, my lord," said Martin, after pausing awhile and looking very contemplative during the time, "I certainly have the money; that is, I and mother together; but--" "Oh, if you've any doubt about it--or if it puts you out, don't do it."
"Divil a doubt on 'arth, my lord; but I'll tell you I was just going to ask your lordship's advice about laying out the same sum in another way, and I don't think I could raise twice that much."
"Very well, Martin; if you've anything better to do with your money, I'm sure I'd be sorry to take it from you."
"That's jist it, my lord. I don't think I can do betther--but I want your advice about it."
"My advice whether you ought to lend me three hundred pounds or not! Why, Martin, you're a fool. I wouldn't ask you to lend it me, if I thought you oughtn't to lend it."
"Oh--I'm certain sure of that, my lord; but there's an offer made me, that I'd like to have your lordship's mind about. It's not much to my liking, though; and I think it'll be betther for me to be giving you the money," and then Martin told his landlord the offer which had been made to him by Daly, on the part of Barry Lynch. "You see, my lord," he concluded by saying, "it'd be a great thing to be shut of Barry entirely out of the counthry, and to have poor Anty's mind at ase about it, should she iver live to get betther; but thin, I don't like to have dailings with the divil, or any one so much of his colour as Barry Lynch."
"This is a very grave matter, Martin, and takes some little time to think about. To tell the truth, I forgot your matrimonial speculation when I asked for the money. Though I want the cash, I think you should keep it in your power to close with Barry: no, you'd better keep the money by you."
"After all, the ould woman could let me have it on the security of the house, you know, av' I did take up with the offer. So, any way, your lordship needn't be balked about the cash."
"But is Miss Lynch so very ill, Martin?" " 'Deed, and she is, Mr Frank; very bad intirely. Doctor Colligan was with her three times yestherday."
"And does Barry take any notice of her now she's ill?"
"Why, not yet he didn't; but then, we kept it from him as much as we could, till it got dangerous like. Mother manes to send Colligan to him to-day, av' he thinks she's not betther."
"If she were to die, Martin, there'd be an end of it all, wouldn't there?"
"Oh, in course there would, my lord"--and then he added, with a sigh, "I'd be sorry she'd die, for, somehow, I'm very fond of her, quare as it'll seem to you. I'd be very sorry she should die."
"Of course you would, Martin; and it doesn't seem queer at all."
"Oh, I wasn't thinking about the money, then, my lord; I was only thinking of Anty herself: you don't know what a good young woman she is--it's anything but herself she's thinking of always."
"Did she make any will?"
"Deed she didn't, my lord: nor won't, it's my mind."
"Ah! but she should, after all that you and your mother've gone through. It'd be a thousand pities that wretch Barry got all the property again."
"He's wilcome to it for the Kellys, av' Anty dies. But av' she lives he shall niver rob a penny from her. Oh, my lord! we wouldn't put sich a thing as a will into her head, and she so bad, for all the money the ould man their father iver had. But, hark! my lord--that's Gaylass, I know the note well, and she's as true as gould: there's the fox there, just inside the gorse, as the Parson said"--and away they both trotted, to the bottom of the plantation, from whence the cheering sound of the dog's voices came, sharp, sweet, and mellow.
Yes; the Parson was as right as if he had been let into the fox's confidence overnight, and had betrayed it in the morning. Gaylass was hardly in the gorse before she discovered the doomed brute's vicinity, and told of it to the whole canine confraternity. Away from his hiding-place he went, towards the open country, but immediately returned into the covert, for he saw a lot of boys before him, who had assembled with the object of looking at the hunt, but with the very probable effect of spoiling it; for, as much as a fox hates a dog, he fears the human race more, and will run from an urchin with a stick into the jaws of his much more fatal enemy.
"As long as them blackguards is there, a hollowing, and a screeching, divil a fox in all Ireland'd go out of this," said Mick to his master.
"Ah, boys," said Frank, riding up, "if you want to see a hunt, will you keep back!"
"Begorra we will, yer honer," said one.
"Faix--we wouldn't be afther spiling your honer's divarsion, my lord, on no account," said another.
"We'll be out o' this althogether, now this blessed minute," said a third, but still there they remained, each loudly endeavouring to banish the others.
At last, however, the fox saw a fair course before him, and away he went; and with very little start, for the dogs followed him out of the covert almost with a view.
And now the men settled themselves to the work, and began to strive for the pride of place, at least the younger portion of them: for in every field there are two classes of men. Those who go out to get the greatest possible quantity of riding, and those whose object is to get the least. Those who go to work their nags, and those who go to spare them. The former think that the excellence of the hunt depends on the horses; the latter, on the dogs. The former go to act, and the latter to see. And it is very generally the case that the least active part of the community know the most about the sport.
They, the less active part above alluded to, know every high-road and bye-road; they consult the wind, and calculate that a fox won't run with his nose against it; they remember this stream and this bog, and avoid them; they are often at the top of eminences, and only descend when they see which way the dogs are going; they take short cuts, and lay themselves out for narrow lanes; they dislike galloping, and eschew leaping; and yet, when a hard-riding man is bringing up his two hundred guinea hunter, a minute or two late for the finish, covered with foam, trembling with his exertion, not a breath left in him--he'll probably find one of these steady fellows there before him, mounted on a broken-down screw, but as cool and as fresh as when he was brought out of the stable; and what is, perhaps, still more amazing, at the end of the day, when the hunt is canvassed after dinner, our dashing friend, who is in great doubt whether his thoroughbred steeplechaser will ever recover his day's work, and who has been personally administering warm mashes and bandages before he would venture to take his own boots off, finds he does not know half as much about the hunt, or can tell half as correctly where the game went, as our, quiet-going friend, whose hack will probably go out on the following morning under the car, with the mistress and children. Such a one was Parson Armstrong; and when Lord Ballindine and most of the others went away after the hounds, he coolly turned round in a different direction, crept through a broken wall into a peasant's garden, and over a dunghill, by the cabin door into a road, and then trotted along as demurely and leisurely as though he were going to bury an old woman in the next parish.
Frank was, generally speaking, as good-natured a man as is often met, but even he got excited and irritable when hunting his own pack. All masters of hounds do. Some one was always too forward, another too near the dogs, a third interfering with the servants, and a fourth making too much noise.
"Confound it, Peter," he said, when they had gone over a field or two, and the dogs missed the scent for a moment, "I thought at any rate you knew better than to cross the dogs that way."
"Who crossed the dogs?" said the other--"what nonsense you're talking: why I wasn't out of the potato-field till they were nearly all at the next wall."
"Well, it may be nonsense," continued Frank; "but when I see a man riding right through the hounds, and they hunting, I call that crossing them."
"Hoicks! tally"--hollowed some one--"there's Graceful has it again--well done, Granger! Faith, Frank, that's a good dog! if he's not first, he's always second."
"Now, gentlemen, steady, for heaven's sake. Do let the dogs settle to their work before you're a-top of them. Upon my soul, Nicholas Brown, it's ridiculous to see you!"
"It'd be a good thing if he were half as much in a hurry to get to heaven," said Bingham Blake.
"Thank'ee," said Nicholas; "go to heaven yourself. I'm well enough where I am."
And now they were off again. In the next field the whole pack caught a view of the fox just as he was stealing out; and after him they went, with their noses well above the ground, their voices loud and clear, and in one bevy.
Away they went: the game was strong; the scent was good; the ground was soft, but not too soft; and a magnificent hunt they had; but there were some misfortunes shortly after getting away. Barry Lynch, wishing, in his ignorance, to lead and show himself off, and not knowing how--scurrying along among the dogs, and bothered at every leap, had given great offence to Lord Ballindine. But, not wishing to speak severely to a man whom he would not under any circumstances address in a friendly way, he talked at him, and endeavoured to bring him to order by blowing up others in his hearing. But this was thrown away on Barry, and he continued his career in a most disgusting manner; scrambling through gaps together with the dogs, crossing other men without the slightest reserve, annoying every one, and evidently pluming himself on his performance. Frank's brow was getting blacker and blacker. Jerry Blake and young Brown were greatly amusing themselves at the exhibition, and every now and then gave him a word or two of encouragement, praising his mare, telling how well he got over that last fence, and bidding him mind and keep well forward. This was all new to Barry, and he really began to feel himself in his element;--if it hadn't been for those abominable walls, he would have enjoyed himself. But this was too good to last, and before very long he made a _faux pas_, which brought down on him in a torrent the bottled-up wrath of the viscount.
They had been galloping across a large, unbroken sheep-walk, which exactly suited Barry's taste, and he had got well forward towards the hounds. Frank was behind, expostulating with Jerry Blake and the others for encouraging him, when the dogs came to a small stone wall about two feet and a half high. In this there was a broken gap, through which many of them crept. Barry also saw this happy escape from the grand difficulty of jumping, and, ignorant that if he rode the gap at all, he should let the hounds go first, made for it right among them, in spite of Frank's voice, now raised loudly to caution him. The horse the man rode knew his business better than himself, and tried to spare the dogs which were under his feet; but, in getting out, he made a slight spring, and came down on the haunches of a favourite young hound called "Goneaway"; he broke the leg close to the socket, and the poor beast most loudly told his complaint.
This was too much to be borne, and Frank rode up red with passion; and a lot of others, including the whipper, soon followed.
"He has killed the dog!" said he. "Did you ever see such a clumsy, ignorant fool? Mr Lynch, if you'd do me the honour to stay away another day, and amuse yourself in any other way, I should be much obliged."
"It wasn't my fault then," said Barry.
"Do you mean to give me the lie, sir?" replied Frank.
"The dog got under the horse's feet. How was I to help it?"
There was a universal titter at this, which made Barry wish himself at home again, with his brandy-bottle.
"Ah! sir," said Frank; "you're as fit to ride a hunt as you are to do anything else which gentlemen usually do. May I trouble you to make yourself scarce? Your horse, I see, can't carry you much farther, and if you'll take my advice, you'll go home, before you're ridden over yourself. Well, Martin, is the bone broken?"
Martin had got off his horse, and was kneeling down beside the poor hurt brute. "Indeed it is, my lord, in two places. You'd better let Tony kill him; he has an awful sprain in the back, as well; he'll niver put a foot to the ground again."
"By heavens, that's too bad! isn't it Bingham? He was, out and out, the finest puppy we entered last year."
"What can you expect," said Bingham, "when such fellows as that come into a field? He's as much business here as a cow in a drawing-room."
"But what can we do? --one can't turn him off the land; if he chooses to come, he must."
"Why, yes," said Bingham, "if he will come he must. But then, if he insists on doing so, he may be horsewhipped; he may be ridden over; he may be kicked; and he may be told that he's a low, vulgar, paltry scoundrel; and, if he repeats his visits, that's the treatment he'll probably receive."
Barry was close to both the speakers, and of course heard, and was intended to hear, every word that was said. He contented himself, however, with muttering certain inaudible defiances, and was seen and heard of no more that day.
The hunt was continued, and the fox was killed; but Frank and those with him saw but little more of it. However, as soon as directions were given for the death of poor Goneaway, they went on, and received a very satisfactory account of the proceedings from those who had seen the finish. As usual, the Parson was among the number, and he gave them a most detailed history, not only of the fox's proceedings during the day, but also of all the reasons which actuated the animal, in every different turn he took.
"I declare, Armstrong," said Peter Dillon, "I think you were a fox yourself, once! Do you remember anything about it?"
"What a run he would give!" said Jerry; "the best pack that was ever kennelled wouldn't have a chance with him."
"Who was that old chap," said Nicholas Dillon, showing off his classical learning, "who said that dead animals always became something else? --maybe it's only in the course of nature for a dead fox to become a live parson."
"Exactly: you've hit it," said Armstrong; "and, in the same way, the moment the breath is out of a goose it becomes an idle squireen [38], and, generally speaking, a younger brother."
[FOOTNOTE 38: squireen--diminutive of squire; a minor Irish gentleman given to "putting on airs" or imitating the manners and haughtiness of men of greater wealth] "Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nick," said Jerry; "and take care how you meddle with the Church again."
"Who saw anything of Lambert Brown?" said another; "I left him bogged below there at Gurtnascreenagh, and all he could do, the old grey horse wouldn't move a leg to get out for him."
"Oh, he's there still," said Nicholas. "He was trying to follow me, and I took him there on purpose. It's not deep, and he'll do no hurt: he'll keep as well there, as anywhere else."
"Nonsense, Dillon!" said the General--"you'll make his brother really angry, if you go on that way. If the man's a fool, leave him in his folly, but don't be playing tricks on him. You'll only get yourself into a quarrel with the family."
"And how shall we manage about the money, my lord?" said Martin, as he drew near the point at which he would separate from the rest, to ride towards Dunmore. "I've been thinking about it, and there's no doubt about having it for you on Friday, av that'll suit."
"That brother-in-law of yours is a most unmitigated blackguard, isn't he, Martin?" said Frank, who was thinking more about poor Goneaway than the money.
"He isn't no brother-in-law of mine yet, and probably niver will be, for I'm afeard poor Anty'll go. But av he iver is, he'll soon take himself out of the counthry, and be no more throuble to your lordship or any of us."
"But to think of his riding right a-top of the poor brute, and then saying that the dog got under his horse's feet! Why, he's a fool as well as a knave. Was he ever out before?"
"Well, then, I believe he was, twice this year; though I didn't see him myself."
"Then I hope this'll be the last time: three times is quite enough for such a fellow as that."
"I don't think he'll be apt to show again afther what you and Mr Bingham said to him. Well, shure, Mr Bingham was very hard on him!"
"Serve him right; nothing's too bad for him."
"Oh, that's thrue for you, my lord: I don't pity him one bit. But about the money, and this job of my own. Av it wasn't asking too much, it'd be a great thing av your lordship'd see Daly."
It was then settled that Lord Ballindine should ride over to Dunmore on the following Friday, and if circumstances seemed to render it advisable, that he and Martin should go on together to the attorney at Tuam.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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23
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DOCTOR COLLIGAN
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Doctor Colligan, the Galen of Dunmore, though a practitioner of most unprepossessing appearance and demeanour, was neither ignorant nor careless. Though for many years he had courted the public in vain, his neighbours had at last learned to know and appreciate him; and, at the time of Anty's illness, the inhabitants of three parishes trusted their corporeal ailments to his care, with comfort to themselves and profit to him. Nevertheless, there were many things about Doctor Colligan not calculated to inspire either respect or confidence. He always seemed a little afraid of his patient, and very much afraid of his patient's friends: he was always dreading the appearance at Dunmore of one of those young rivals, who had lately established themselves at Tuam on one side, and Hollymount on the other; and, to prevent so fatal a circumstance, was continually trying to be civil and obliging to his customers. He would not put on a blister, or order a black dose, without consulting with the lady of the house, and asking permission of the patient, and consequently had always an air of doubt and indecision. Then, he was excessively dirty in his person and practice: he carried a considerable territory beneath his nails; smelt equally strongly of the laboratory and the stable; would wipe his hands on the patient's sheets, and wherever he went left horrid marks of his whereabouts: he was very fond of good eating and much drinking, and would neglect the best customer that ever was sick, when tempted by the fascination of a game of loo. He was certainly a bad family-man; for though he worked hard for the support of his wife and children, he was little among them, paid them no attention, and felt no scruple in assuring Mrs C. that he had been obliged to remain up all night with that dreadful Mrs Jones, whose children were always so tedious; or that Mr Blake was so bad after his accident that he could not leave him for a moment; when, to tell the truth, the Doctor had passed the night with the cards in his hands, and a tumbler of punch beside him.
He was a tall, thick-set, heavy man, with short black curly hair; was a little bald at the top of his head; and looked always as though he had shaved himself the day before yesterday, and had not washed since. His face was good-natured, but heavy and unintellectual. He was ignorant of everything but his profession, and the odds on the card-table or the race-course. But to give him his due, on these subjects he was not ignorant; and this was now so generally known that, in dangerous cases, Doctor Colligan had been sent for, many, many miles.
This was the man who attended poor Anty in her illness, and he did as much for her as could be done; but it was a bad case, and Doctor Colligan thought it would be fatal. She had intermittent fever, and was occasionally delirious; but it was her great debility between the attacks which he considered so dangerous.
On the morning after the hunt, he told Martin that he greatly feared she would go off, from exhaustion, in a few days, and that it would be wise to let Barry know the state in which his sister was. There was a consultation on the subject between the two and Martin's mother, in which it was agreed that the Doctor should go up to Dunmore House, and tell Barry exactly the state of affairs.
"And good news it'll be for him," said Mrs Kelly; "the best he heard since the ould man died. Av he had his will of her, she'd niver rise from the bed where she's stretched. But, glory be to God, there's a providence over all, and maybe she'll live yet to give him the go-by."
"How you talk, mother," said Martin; "and what's the use? Whatever he wishes won't harum her; and maybe, now she's dying, his heart'll be softened to her. Any way, don't let him have to say she died here, without his hearing a word how bad she was."
"Maybe he'd be afther saying we murdhered her for her money," said the widow, with a shudder.
"He can hardly complain of that, when he'll be getting all the money himself. But, however, it's much betther, all ways, that Doctor Colligan should see him."
"You know, Mrs Kelly," said the Doctor, "as a matter of course he'll be asking to see his sister."
"You wouldn't have him come in here to her, would you? --Faix, Doctor Colligan, it'll be her death out right at once av he does."
"It'd not be nathural, to refuse to let him see her," said the Doctor; "and I don't think it would do any harm: but I'll be guided by you, Mrs Kelly, in what I say to him."
"Besides," said Martin, "I know Anty would wish to see him: he is her brother; and there's only the two of 'em."
"Between you be it," said the widow; "I tell you I don't like it. You neither of you know Barry Lynch, as well as I do; he'd smother her av it come into his head."
"Ah, mother, nonsense now; hould your tongue; you don't know what you're saying."
"Well; didn't he try to do as bad before?"
"It wouldn't do, I tell you," continued Martin, "not to let him see her; that is, av Anty wishes it."
It ended in the widow being sent into Anty's room, to ask her whether she had any message to send to her brother. The poor girl knew how ill she was, and expected her death; and when the widow told her that Doctor Colligan was going to call on her brother, she said that she hoped she should see Barry once more before all was over.
"Mother," said Martin, as soon as the Doctor's back was turned, "you'll get yourself in a scrape av you go on saying such things as that about folk before strangers."
"Is it about Barry?"
"Yes; about Barry. How do you know Colligan won't be repating all them things to him?"
"Let him, and wilcome. Shure wouldn't I say as much to Barry Lynch himself? What do I care for the blagguard? --only this, I wish I'd niver heard his name, or seen his foot over the sill of the door. I'm sorry I iver heard the name of the Lynches in Dunmore."
"You're not regretting the throuble Anty is to you, mother?"
"Regretting? I don't know what you mane by regretting. I don't know is it regretting to be slaving as much and more for her than I would for my own, and no chance of getting as much as thanks for it."
"You'll be rewarded hereafther, mother; shure won't it all go for charity?"
"I'm not so shure of that," said the widow. "It was your schaming to get her money brought her here, and, like a poor wake woman, as I was, I fell into it; and now we've all the throuble and the expinse, and the time lost, and afther all, Barry'll be getting everything when she's gone. You'll see, Martin; we'll have the wake, and the funeral, and the docthor and all, on us--mind my words else. Och musha, musha! what'll I do at all? Faix, forty pounds won't clear what this turn is like to come to; an' all from your dirthy undherhand schaming ways."
In truth, the widow was perplexed in her inmost soul about Anty; torn and tortured by doubts and anxieties. Her real love of Anty and true charity was in state of battle with her parsimony; and then, avarice was strong within her; and utter, uncontrolled hatred of Barry still stronger. But, opposed to these was dread of some unforeseen evil--some tremendous law proceedings: she had a half-formed idea that she was doing what she had no right to do, and that she might some day be walked off to Galway assizes. Then again, she had an absurd pride about it, which often made her declare that she'd never be beat by such a "scum of the 'arth" as Barry Lynch, and that she'd fight it out with him if it cost her a hundred pounds; though no one understood what the battle was which she was to fight.
Just before Anty's illness had become so serious, Daly called, and had succeeded in reconciling both Martin and the widow to himself; but he had not quite made them agree to his proposal. The widow, indeed, was much averse to it. She wouldn't deal with such a Greek as Barry, even in the acceptance of a boon. When she found him willing to compromise, she became more than ever averse to any friendly terms; but now the whole ground was slipping from under her feet. Anty was dying: she would have had her trouble for nothing; and that hated Barry would gain his point, and the whole of his sister's property, in triumph.
Twenty times the idea of a will had come into her mind, and how comfortable it would be if Anty would leave her property, or at any rate a portion of it, to Martin. But though the thoughts of such a delightful arrangement kept her in a continual whirlwind of anxiety, she never hinted at the subject to Anty. As she said to herself, "a Kelly wouldn't demane herself to ask a brass penny from a Lynch." She didn't even speak to her daughters about it, though the continual twitter she was in made them aware that there was some unusual burthen on her mind.
It was not only to the Kellys that the idea occurred that Anty in her illness might make a will. The thoughts of such a catastrophe had robbed Barry of half the pleasure which the rumours of his sister's dangerous position had given him. He had not received any direct intimation of Anty's state, but had heard through the servants that she was ill--very ill--dangerously--"not expected," as the country people call it; and each fresh rumour gave him new hopes, and new life. He now spurned all idea of connexion with Martin; he would trample on the Kellys for thinking of such a thing: he would show Daly, when in the plenitude of his wealth and power, how he despised the lukewarmness and timidity of his councils. These and other delightful visions were floating through his imagination; when, all of a sudden, like a blow, like a thunderbolt, the idea of _a will_ fell as it were upon him with a ton weight. His heart sunk low within him; he became white, and his jaw dropped. After all, there were victory and triumph, plunder and wealth, _his_ wealth, in the very hands of his enemies! Of course the Kellys would force her to make a will, if she didn't do it of her own accord; if not, they'd forge one. There was some comfort in that thought: he could at any rate contest the will, and swear that it was a forgery.
He swallowed a dram, and went off, almost weeping to Daly.
"Oh, Mr Daly, poor Anty's dying: did you hear, Mr Daly--she's all but gone?" Yes; Daly had been sorry to hear that Miss Lynch was very ill. "What shall I do," continued Barry, "if they say that she's left a will?"
"Go and hear it read. Or, if you don't like to do that yourself, stay away, and let me hear it."
"But they'll forge one! They'll make out what they please, and when she's dying, they'll make her put her name to it; or they'll only just put the pen in her hand, when she's not knowing what she's doing. They'd do anything now, Daly, to get the money they've been fighting for so hard."
"It's my belief," answered the attorney, "that the Kellys not only won't do anything dishonest, but that they won't even take any unfair advantage of you. But at any rate you can do nothing. You must wait patiently; you, at any rate, can take no steps till she's dead."
"But couldn't she make a will in my favour? I know she'd do it if I asked her--if I asked her now--now she's going off, you know. I'm sure she'd do it. Don't you think she would?"
"You're safer, I think, to let it alone," said Daly, who could hardly control the ineffable disgust he felt.
"I don't know that," continued Barry. "She's weak, and 'll do what she's asked: besides, _they'll_ make her do it. Fancy if, when she's gone, I find I have to share everything with those people!" And he struck his forehead and pushed the hair off his perspiring face, as he literally shook with despair. "I must see her, Daly. I'm quite sure she'll make a will if I beg her; they can't hinder me seeing my own, only, dying sister; can they, Daly? And when I'm once there, I'll sit with her, and watch till it's all over. I'm sure, now she's ill, I'd do anything for her."
Daly said nothing, though Barry paused for him to reply. "Only about the form," continued he, "I wouldn't know what to put. By heavens, Daly! you must come with me. You can be up at the house, and I can have you down at a minute's warning." Daly utterly declined, but Barry continued to press him. "But you must, Daly; I tell you I know I'm right. I know her so well--she'll do it at once for the sake--for the sake of--You know she is my own sister, and all that--and she thinks so much of that kind of thing. I'll tell you what, Daly; upon my honour and soul," and he repeated the words in a most solemn tone, "if you'll draw the will, and she signs it, so that I come in for the whole thing--and I know she will I'll make over fifty--ay, seventy pounds a year for you for ever and ever. I will, as I live."
The interview ended by the attorney turning Barry Lynch into the street, and assuring him that if he ever came into his office again, on any business whatsoever, he would unscrupulously kick him out. So ended, also, the connexion between the two; for Daly never got a farthing for his labour. Indeed, after all that had taken place, he thought it as well not to trouble his _ci-devant_ client with a bill. Barry went home, and of course got drunk.
When Doctor Colligan called on Lynch, he found that he was not at home. He was at that very moment at Tuam, with the attorney. The doctor repeated his visit later in the afternoon, but Barry had still not returned, and he therefore left word that he would call early after breakfast the following morning. He did so; and, after waiting half an hour in the dining-room, Barry, only half awake and half dressed, and still half drunk, came down to him.
The doctor, with a long face, delivered his message, and explained to him the state in which his sister was lying; assured him that everything in the power of medicine had been and should be done; that, nevertheless, he feared the chance of recovery was remote; and ended by informing him that Miss Lynch was aware of her danger, and had expressed a wish to see him before it might be too late. Could he make it convenient to come over just now--in half an hour--or say an hour? --said the doctor, looking at the red face and unfinished toilet of the distressed brother.
Barry at first scarcely knew what reply to give. On his return from Tuam, he had determined that he would at any rate make his way into his sister's room, and, as he thought to himself, see what would come of it. In his after-dinner courage he had further determined, that he would treat the widow and her family with a very high hand, if they dared to make objection to his seeing his sister; but now, when the friendly overture came from Anty herself, and was brought by one of the Kelly faction, he felt himself a little confounded, as though he rather dreaded the interview, and would wish to put it off for a day or two.
"Oh, yes--certainly, Doctor Colligan; to be sure--that is--tell me, doctor, is she really so bad?"
"Indeed, Mr Lynch, she is very weak."
"But, doctor, you don't think there is any chance--I mean, there isn't any danger, is there, that she'd go off at once?"
"Why, no, I don't think there is; indeed, I have no doubt she will hold out a fortnight yet."
"Then, perhaps, doctor, I'd better put it off till to-morrow; I'll tell you why: there's a person I wish--" "Why, Mr Lynch, to-day would be better. The fever's periodical, you see, and will be on her again to-morrow--" "I beg your pardon, Doctor Colligan," said Barry, of a sudden remembering to be civil,--"but you'll take a glass of wine?"
"Not a drop, thank ye, of anything."
"Oh, but you will;" and Barry rang the bell and had the wine brought. "And you expect she'll have another attack to-morrow?"
"That's a matter of course, Mr Lynch; the fever'll come on her again to-morrow. Every attack leaves her weaker and weaker, and we fear she'll go off, before it leaves her altogether."
"Poor thing!" said Barry, contemplatively.
"We had her head shaved," said the doctor.
"Did you, indeed!" answered Barry. "She was my favourite sister, Doctor Colligan--that is, I had no other."
"I believe not," said Doctor Colligan, looking sympathetic.
"Take another glass of wine, doctor? --now do," and he poured out another bumper.
"Thank'ee, Mr Lynch, thank'ee; not a drop more. And you'll be over in an hour then? I'd better go and tell her, that she may be prepared, you know," and the doctor returned to the sick room of his patient.
Barry remained standing in the parlour, looking at the glasses and the decanter, as though he were speculating on the manner in which they had been fabricated. "She may recover, after all," thought he to himself. "She's as strong as a horse--I know her better than they do. I know she'll recover, and then what shall I do? Stand to the offer Daly made to Kelly, I suppose!" And then he sat down close to the table, with his elbow on it, and his chin resting on his hand; and there he remained, full of thought. To tell the truth, Barry Lynch had never thought more intensely than he did during those ten minutes. At last he jumped up suddenly, as though surprised at what had been passing within himself; he looked hastily at the door and at the window, as though to see that he had not been watched, and then went upstairs to dress himself, preparatory to his visit to the inn.
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{
"id": "4917"
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24
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ANTY LYNCH'S BED-SIDE SCENE THE FIRST
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Anty had borne her illness with that patience and endurance which were so particularly inherent in her nature. She had never complained; and had received the untiring attentions and care of her two young friends, with a warmth of affection and gratitude which astonished them, accustomed as they had been in every little illness to give and receive that tender care with which sickness is treated in affectionate families. When ill, they felt they had a right to be petulant, and to complain; to exact, and to be attended to: they had been used to it from each other, and thought it an incidental part of the business. But Anty had hitherto had no one to nurse her, and she looked on Meg and Jane as kind ministering angels, emulous as they were to relieve her wants and ease her sufferings.
Her thin face had become thinner, and was very pale; her head had been shaved close, and there was nothing between the broad white border of her nightcap and her clammy brow and wan cheek. But illness was more becoming to Anty than health; it gave her a melancholy and beautiful expression of resignation, which, under ordinary circumstances, was wanting to her features, though not to her character. Her eyes were brighter than they usually were, and her complexion was clear, colourless, and transparent. I do not mean to say that Anty in her illness was beautiful, but she was no longer plain; and even to the young Kellys, whose feelings and sympathies cannot be supposed to have been of the highest order, she became an object of the most intense interest, and the warmest affection.
"Well, doctor," she said, as Doctor Colligan crept into her room, after the termination of his embassy to Barry; "will he come?"
"Oh, of course he will; why wouldn't he, and you wishing it? He'll be here in an hour, Miss Lynch. He wasn't just ready to come over with me."
"I'm glad of that," said Anty, who felt that she had to collect her thoughts before she saw him; and then, after a moment, she added, "Can't I take my medicine now, doctor?"
"Just before he comes you'd better have it, I think. One of the girls will step up and give it you when he's below. He'll want to speak a word or so to Mrs Kelly before he comes up."
"Spake to me, docthor!" said the widow, alarmed. "What'll he be spaking to me about? Faix, I had spaking enough with him last time he was here."
"You'd better just see him, Mrs Kelly," whispered the, doctor. "You'll find him quiet enough, now; just take him fair and asy; keep him downstairs a moment, while Jane gives her the medicine. She'd better take it just before he goes to her, and don't let him stay long, whatever you do. I'll be back before the evening's over; not that I think that she'll want me to see her, but I'll just drop in."
"Are you going, doctor?" said Anty, as he stepped up to the bed. He told her he was. "You've told Mrs Kelly, haven't you, that I'm to see Barry alone?"
"Why, I didn't say so," said the doctor, looking at the widow; "but I suppose there'll be no harm--eh, Mrs Kelly?"
"You must let me see him alone, dear Mrs Kelly!"
"If Doctor Colligan thinks you ought, Anty dear, I wouldn't stay in the room myself for worlds."
"But you won't keep him here long, Miss Lynch--eh? And you won't excite yourself? --indeed, you mustn't. You'll allow them fifteen minutes, Mrs Kelly, not more, and then you'll come up;" and with these cautions, the doctor withdrew.
"I wish he was come and gone," said the widow to her elder daughter. "Well; av I'd known all what was to follow, I'd niver have got out of my warm bed to go and fetch Anty Lynch down here that cowld morning! Well, I'll be wise another time. Live and larn they say, and it's thrue, too."
"But, mother, you ain't wishing poor Anty wasn't here?"
"Indeed, but I do; everything to give and nothin to get--that's not the way I have managed to live. But it's not that altogether, neither. I'm not begrudging Anty anything for herself; but that I'd be dhriven to let that blagguard of a brother of hers into the house, and that as a frind like, is what I didn't think I'd ever have put upon me!"
Barry made his appearance about an hour after the time at which they had begun to expect him; and as soon as Meg saw him, one of them flew upstairs, to tell Anty and give her her tonic. Barry had made himself quite a dandy to do honour to the occasion of paying probably a parting visit to his sister, whom he had driven out of her own house to die at the inn. He had on his new blue frock-coat, and a buff waistcoat with gilt buttons, over which his watch-chain was gracefully arranged. His pantaloons were strapped clown very tightly over his polished boots; a shining new silk hat was on one side of his head; and in his hand he was dangling an ebony cane. In spite, however, of all these gaudy trappings, he could not muster up an easy air; and, as he knocked, he had that look proverbially attributed to dogs who are going to be hung.
Sally opened the door for him, and the widow, who had come out from the shop, made him a low courtesy in the passage.
"Oh--ah--yes--Mrs Kelly, I believe?" said Barry.
"Yes, Mr Lynch, that's my name; glory be to God!"
"My sister, Miss Lynch, is still staying here, I believe?"
"Why, drat it, man; wasn't Dr Colligan with you less than an hour ago, telling you you must come here, av you wanted to see her?"
"You'll oblige me by sending up the servant to tell Miss Lynch I'm here."
"Walk up here a minute, and I'll do that errand for you myself. --Well," continued she, muttering to herself "for him to ax av she war staying here, as though he didn't know it! There niver was his ditto for desait, maneness and divilry!"
A minute or two after the widow had left him, Barry found himself by his sister's bed-side, but never had he found himself in a position for which he was less fitted, or which was less easy to him. He assumed, however, a long and solemn face, and crawling up to the bed-side, told his sister, in a whining voice, that he was very glad to see her.
"Sit down, Barry, sit down," said Anty, stretching out her thin pale hand, and taking hold of her brother's.
Barry did as he was told, and sat down. "I'm so glad to see you, Barry," said she: "I'm so very glad to see you once more--" and then after a pause, "and it'll be the last time, Barry, for I'm dying."
Barry told her he didn't think she was, for he didn't know when he'd seen her looking better.
"Yes, I am, Barry: Doctor Colligan has said as much; and I should know it well enough myself, even if he'd never said a word. We're friends now, are we not? --Everything's forgiven and forgotten, isn't it, Barry?"
Anty had still hold of her brother's hand, and seemed desirous to keep it. He sat on the edge of his chair, with his knees tucked in against the bed, the very picture of discomfort, both of body and mind.
"Oh, of course it is, Anty," said he; "forgive and forget; that was always my motto. I'm sure I never bore any malice--indeed I never was so sorry as when you went away, and--" "Ah, Barry," said Anty; "it was better I went then; may-be it's all better as it is. When the priest has been with me and given me comfort, I won't fear to die. But there are other things, Barry, I want to spake to you about."
"If there's anything I can do, I'm sure I'd do it: if there's anything at all you wish done. --Would you like to come up to the house again?"
"Oh no, Barry, not for worlds."
"Why, perhaps, just at present, you are too weak to move; only wouldn't it be more comfortable for you to be in your own house? These people here are all very well, I dare say, but they must be a great bother to you, eh? --so interested, you know, in everything they do."
"Ah! Barry, you don't know them."
Barry remembered that he would be on the wrong tack to abuse the Kellys. "I'm sure they're very nice people," said he; "indeed I always thought so, and said so--but they're not like your own flesh and blood, are they, Anty? --and why shouldn't you come up and be--" "No, Barry," said she; "I'll not do that; as they're so very, very kind as to let me stay here, I'll remain till--till God takes me to himself. But they're not my flesh and blood"--and she turned round and looked affectionately in the face of her brother--"there are only the two of us left now; and soon, very soon you'll be all alone." Barry felt very uncomfortable, and wished the interview was over: he tried to say something, but failed, and Anty went on--"when that time comes, will you remember what I say to you now? --When you're all alone, Barry; when there's nothing left to trouble you or put you out--will you think then of the last time you ever saw your sister, and--" "Oh, Anty, sure I'll be seeing you again!"
"No, Barry, never again. This is the last time we shall ever meet, and think how much we ought to be to each other! We've neither of us father or mother, husband or wife. --When I'm gone you'll be alone: will you think of me then--and will you remember, remember every day--what I say to you now?"
"Indeed I will, Anty. I'll do anything, everything you'd have me. Is there anything you'd wish me to give to any person?"
"Barry," she continued, "no good ever came of my father's will." --Barry almost jumped off his chair as he heard his sister's words, so much did they startle him; but he said nothing. --"The money has done me no good, but the loss of it has blackened your heart, and turned your blood to gall against me. Yes, Barry--yes--don't speak now, let me go on;--the old man brought you up to look for it, and, alas, he taught you to look for nothing else; it has not been your fault, and I'm not blaming you--I'm not maning to blame you, my own brother, for you are my own"--and she turned round in the bed and shed tears upon his hand, and kissed it. --"But gold, and land, will never make you happy,--no, not all the gold of England, nor all the land the old kings ever had could make you happy, av the heart was bad within you. You'll have it all now, Barry, or mostly all. You'll have what you think the old man wronged you of; you'll have it with no one to provide for but yourself, with no one to trouble you, no one to thwart you. But oh, Barry, av it's in your heart that that can make you happy--there's nothing before you but misery--and death--and hell." Barry shook like a child in the clutches of its master--"Yes, Barry; misery and death, and all the tortures of the damned. It's to save you from this, my own brother, to try and turn your heart from that foul love of money, that your sister is now speaking to you from her grave. --Oh, Barry! try and cure it. Learn to give to others, and you'll enjoy what you have yourself. --Learn to love others, and then you'll know what it is to be loved yourself. Try, try to soften that hard heart. Marry at once, Barry, at once, before you're older and worse to cure; and you'll have children, and love them; and when you feel, as feel you must, that the money is clinging round your soul, fling it from you, and think of the last words your sister said to you."
The sweat was now running down the cheeks of the wretched man, for the mixed rebuke and prayer of his sister had come home to him, and touched him; but it was neither with pity, with remorse, nor penitence. No; in that foul heart there was no room, even for remorse; but he trembled with fear as he listened to her words, and, falling on his knees, swore to her that he would do just as she would have him.
"If I could but think," continued she, "that you would remember what I am saying--" "Oh, I will, Anty: I will--indeed, indeed, I will!"
"If I could believe so, Barry--I'd die happy and in comfort, for I love you better than anything on earth;" and again she pressed his hot red hand--"but oh, brother! I feel for you:--you never kneel before the altar of God--you've no priest to move the weight of sin from your soul--and how heavy that must be! Do you remember, Barry; it's but a week or two ago and you threatened to kill me for the sake of our father's money? you wanted to put me in a mad-house; you tried to make me mad with fear and cruelty; me, your sister; and I never harmed or crossed you. God is now doing what you threatened; a kind, good God is now taking me to himself, and you will get what you so longed for without more sin on your conscience; but it'll never bless you, av you've still the same wishes in your heart, the same love of gold--the same hatred of a fellow-creature."
"Oh, Anty!" sobbed out Barry, who was now absolutely in tears, "I was drunk that night; I was indeed, or I'd never have said or done what I did."
"And how often are you so, Barry? --isn't it so with you every night? That's another thing; for my sake, for your own sake--for God's sake, give up the dhrink. It's killing you from day to day, and hour to hour. I see it in your eyes, and smell it in your breath, and hear it in your voice; it's that that makes your heart so black:--it's that that gives you over, body and soul, to the devil. I would not have said a word about that night to hurt you now; and, dear Barry, I wouldn't have said such words as these to you at all, but that I shall never speak to you again. And oh! I pray that you'll remember them. You're idle now, always:--don't continue so; earn your money, and it will be a blessing to you and to others. But in idleness, and drunkenness, and wickedness, it will only lead you quicker to the devil."
Barry reiterated his promises; he would take the pledge; he would work at the farm; he would marry and have a family; he would not care the least for money; he would pay his debts; he would go to church, or chapel, if Anty liked it better; at any rate, he'd say his prayers; he would remember every word she had said to the last day of his life; he promised everything or anything, as though his future existence depended on his appeasing his dying sister. But during the whole time, his chief wish, his longing desire, was to finish the interview, and get out of that horrid room. He felt that he was mastered and cowed by the creature whom he had so despised, and he could not account for the feeling. Why did he not dare to answer her? She had told him he would have her money: she had said it would come to him as a matter of course; and it was not the dread of losing that which prevented his saying a word in his own defence. No; she had really frightened him: she had made him really feel that he was a low, wretched, wicked creature, and he longed to escape from her, that he might recover his composure.
"I have but little more to say to you, Barry," she continued, "and that little is about the property. You will have it all, but a small sum of money--" Here Anty was interrupted by a knock at the door, and the entrance of the widow. She came to say that the quarter of an hour allowed by the doctor had been long exceeded, and that really Mr Barry ought to take his leave, as so much talking would be bad for Anty.
This was quite a god-send for Barry, who was only anxious to be off; but Anty begged for a respite.
"One five minutes longer, dear Mrs Kelly," said she, "and I shall have done; only five minutes--I'm much stronger now, and really it won't hurt me."
"Well, then--mind, only five minutes," said the widow, and again left them alone.
"You don't know, Barry--you can never know how good that woman has been to me; indeed all of them--and all for nothing. They've asked nothing of me, and now that they know I'm dying, I'm sure they expect nothing from me. She has enough; but I wish to leave something to Martin, and the girls;" and a slight pale blush covered her wan cheeks and forehead as she mentioned Martin's name. "I will leave him five hundred pounds, and them the same between them. It will be nothing to you, Barry, out of the whole; but see and pay it at once, will you?" and she looked kindly into his face.
He promised vehemently that he would, and told her not to bother herself about a will: they should have the money as certainly as if twenty wills were made. To give Barry his due, at that moment, he meant to be as good as his word. Anty, however, told him that she would make a will; that she would send for a lawyer, and have the matter properly settled.
"And now," she said, "dear Barry, may God Almighty bless you--may He guide you and preserve you; and may He, above all, take from you that horrid love of the world's gold and wealth. Good bye," and she raised herself up in her bed--"good bye, for the last time, my own dear brother; and try to remember what I've said to you this day. Kiss me before you go, Barry."
Barry leaned over the bed, and kissed her, and then crept out of the room, and down the stairs, with the tears streaming down his red cheeks; and skulked across the street to his own house, with his hat slouched over his face, and his handkerchief held across his mouth.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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25
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ANTY LYNCH'S BED-SIDE SCENE THE SECOND
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Anty was a good deal exhausted by her interview with her brother, but towards evening she rallied a little, and told Jane, who was sitting with her, that she wanted to say one word in private, to Martin. Jane was rather surprised, for though Martin was in the habit of going into the room every morning to see the invalid, Anty had never before asked for him. However, she went for Martin, and found him.
"Martin," said she; "Anty wants to see you alone, in private."
"Me?" said Martin, turning a little red. "Do you know what it's about?"
"She didn't say a word, only she wanted to see you alone; but I'm thinking it's something about her brother; he was with her a long long time this morning, and went away more like a dead man than a live one. But come, don't keep her waiting; and, whatever you do, don't stay long; every word she spakes is killing her."
Martin followed his sister into the sick-room, and, gently taking Anty's offered hand, asked her in a whisper, what he could do for her. Jane went out; and, to do her justice sat herself down at a distance from the door, though she was in a painful state of curiosity as to what was being said within.
"You're all too good to me, Martin," said Anty; "you'll spoil me, between you, minding every word I say so quick."
Martin assured her again, in a whisper, that anything and everything they could do for her was only a pleasure.
"Don't mind whispering," said Anty; "spake out; your voice won't hurt me. I love to hear your voices, they're all so kind and good. But Martin, I've business you must do for me, and that at once, for I feel within me that I'll soon be gone from this."
"We hope not, Anty; but it's all with God now--isn't it? No one knows that betther than yourself."
"Oh yes, I do know that; and I feel it is His pleasure that it should be so, and I don't fear to die. A few weeks back the thoughts of death, when they came upon me, nearly killed me; but that feeling's all gone now."
Martin did not know what answer to make; he again told her he hoped she would soon get better. It is a difficult task to talk properly to a dying person about death, and Martin felt that he was quite incompetent to do so.
"But," she continued, after a little, "there's still much that I want to do,--that I ought to do. In the first place, I must make my will."
Martin was again puzzled. This was another subject on which he felt himself equally unwilling to speak; he could not advise her not to make one; and he certainly would not advise her to do so.
"Your will, Anty? --there's time enough for that; you'll be sthronger you know, in a day or two. Doctor Colligan says so--and then we'll talk about it."
"I hope there is time enough, Martin; but there isn't more than enough; it's not much that I'll have to say--" "Were you spaking to Barry about it this morning?"
"Oh, I was. I told him what I'd do: he'll have the property now, mostly all as one as av the ould man had left it to him. It would have been betther so, eh Martin?" Anty never doubted her lover's disinterestedness; at this moment she suspected him of no dirty longing after her money, and she did him only justice. When he came into her room he had no thoughts of inheriting anything from her. Had he been sure that by asking he could have induced her to make a will in his favour, he would not have done so. But still his heart sunk a little within him when he heard her declare that she was going to leave everything back to her brother. It was, however, only for a moment; he remembered his honest determination firmly and resolutely to protect their joint property against any of her brother's attempts, should he ever marry her; but in no degree to strive or even hanker after it, unless it became his own in a fair, straightforward manner.
"Well, Anty; I think you're right," said he. "But wouldn't it all go to Barry, nathurally, without your bothering yourself about a will, and you so wake."
"In course it would, at laist I suppose so; but Martin," and she smiled faintly as she looked up into his face, "I want the two dear, dear girls, and I want yourself to have some little thing to remember me by; and your dear kind mother,--she doesn't want money, but if I ask her to take a few of the silver things in the house, I'm sure she'll keep them for my sake. Oh, Martin! I do love you all so very--so very much!" and the warm tears streamed down her cheeks.
Martin's eyes were affected, too: he made a desperate struggle to repress the weakness, but he could not succeed, and was obliged to own it by rubbing his eyes with the sleeve of his coat. "And I'm shure, Anty," said he, "we all love you; any one must love you who knew you." And then he paused: he was trying to say something of his own true personal regard for her, but he hardly knew how to express it. "We all love you as though you were one of ourselves--and so you are--it's all the same--at any rate it is to me."
"And I would have been one of you, had I lived. I can talk to you more about it now, Martin, than I ever could before, because I know I feel I am dying."
"But you mustn't talk, Anty; it wakens you, and you've had too much talking already this day."
"It does me good, Martin, and I must say what I have to say to you. I mayn't be able again. Had it plazed God I should have lived, I would have prayed for nothing higher or betther than to be one of such a family as yourselves. Had I been--had I been"--and now Anty blushed again, and she also found a difficulty in expressing herself; but she soon got over it, and continued, "had I been permitted to marry you, Martin, I think I would have been a good wife to you. I am very, very sure I would have been an affectionate one."
"I'm shure you would--I'm shure you would, Anty. God send you may still: av you war only once well again there's nothing now to hindher us."
"You forget Barry," Anty said, with a shudder. "But it doesn't matther talking of that now"--Martin was on the point of telling her that Barry had agreed, under certain conditions, to their marriage: but, on second thoughts, he felt it would be useless to do so; and Anty continued, "I would have done all I could, Martin. I would have loved you fondly and truly. I would have liked what you liked, and, av I could, I would've made your home quiet and happy. Your mother should have been my mother, and your sisthers my sisthers."
"So they are now, Anty--so they are now, my own, own Anty--they love you as much as though they were."
"God Almighty bless them for their goodness, and you too, Martin. I cannot tell you, I niver could tell you, how I've valued your honest thrue love, for I know you have loved me honestly and thruly; but I've always been afraid to spake to you. I've sometimes thought you must despise me, I've been so wake and cowardly."
"Despise you, Anty? --how could I despise you, when I've always loved you?"
"But now, Martin, about poor Barry--for he is poor. I've sometimes thought, as I've been lying here the long long hours awake, that, feeling to you as I do, I ought to be laving you what the ould man left to me."
"I'd be sorry you did, Anty. I'll not be saying but what I thought of that when I first looked for you, but it was never to take it from you, but to share it with you, and make you happy with it."
"I know it, Martin: I always knew it and felt it."
"And now, av it's God's will that you should go from us, I'd rather Barry had the money than us. We've enough, the Lord be praised; and I wouldn't for worlds it should be said that it war for that we brought you among us; nor for all County Galway would I lave it to Barry to say, that when you were here, sick, and wake, and dying, we put a pen into your hand to make you sign a will to rob him of what should by rights be his."
"That's it, dear Martin; it wouldn't bless you if you had it; it can bless no one who looks to it alone for a blessing. It wouldn't make you happy--it would make you miserable, av people said you had that which you ought not to have. Besides, I love my poor brother; he is my brother, my only real relation; we've lived all our lives together; and though he isn't what he should be, the fault is not all his own, I should not sleep in my grave, av I died with his curse upon me; as I should, av he found, when I am gone, that I'd willed the property all away. I've told him he'd have it all--nearly all; and I've begged him, prayed to him, from my dying bed, to mend his ways; to try and be something betther in the world than what I fear he's like to be. I think he minded what I said when he was here, for death-bed words have a solemn sound to the most worldly; but when I'm gone he'll be all alone, there'll be no one to look afther him. Nobody loves him--no one even likes him; no one will live with him but those who mane to rob him; and he will be robbed, and plundered, and desaved, when he thinks he's robbing and desaving others." Anty paused, more for breath than for a reply, but Martin felt that he must say something.
"Indeed, Anty, I fear he'll hardly come to good. He dhrinks too much, by all accounts; besides, he's idle, and the honest feeling isn't in him."
"It's thrue, dear Martin; it's too thrue. Will you do me a great great favour, Martin"--and she rose up a little and turned her moist clear eye full upon him--"will you show your thrue love to your poor Anty, by a rale lasting kindness, but one that'll be giving you much much throuble and pain? Afther I'm dead and gone--long long after I'm in my cold grave, will you do that for me, Martin?" .
"Indeed I will, Anty," said Martin, rather astonished, but with a look of solemn assurance; "anything that I can do, I will: you needn't dread my not remembering, but I fear it isn't much that I can do for you."
"Will you always think and spake of Barry--will you always act to him and by him, and for him, not as a man whom you know and dislike, but as my brother--your own Anty's only brother? --Whatever he does, will you thry to make him do betther? Whatever troubles he's in, will you lend him your hand? Come what come may to him, will you be his frind? He has no frind now. When I'm gone, will you be a frind to him?"
Martin was much confounded. "He won't let me be his frind," he said; "he looks down on us and despises us; he thinks himself too high to be befrinded by us. Besides, of all Dunmore he hates us most."
"He won't when he finds you haven't got the property from him: but frindship doesn't depend on letting--rale frindship doesn't. I don't want you to be dhrinking, and ating, and going about with him. God forbid! --you're too good for that. But when you find he wants a frind, come forward, and thry and make him do something for himself. You can't but come together; you'll be the executhor in the will; won't you, Martin? and then he'll meet you about the property; he can't help it, and you must meet then as frinds. And keep that up. If he insults you, forgive it or my sake; if he's fractious and annoying, put up with it for my sake; for my sake thry to make him like you, and thry to make others like him." Martin felt that this would be impossible, but he didn't say so--"No one respects him now, but all respect you. I see it in people's eyes and manners, without hearing what they say. Av you spake well of him--at any rate kindly of him, people won't turn themselves so against him. Will you do all this, for my sake?"
Martin solemnly promised that, as far as he could, he would do so; that, at any rate as far as himself was concerned, he would never quarrel with him.
"You'll have very, very much to forgive," continued Anty; "but then it's so sweet to forgive; and he's had no fond mother like you; he has not been taught any duties, any virtues, as you have. He has only been taught that money is the thing to love, and that he should worship nothing but that. Martin, for my sake, will you look on him as a brother? --a wicked, bad, castaway brother; but still as a brother, to be forgiven, and, if possible, redeemed?"
"As I hope for glory in Heaven, I will," said Martin; "but I think he'll go far from this; I think he'll quit Dunmore."
"Maybe he will; perhaps it's betther he should; but he'll lave his name behind him. Don't be too hard on that, and don't let others; and even av he does go, it'll not be long before he'll want a frind, and I don't know anywhere he can go that he's likely to find one. Wherever he may go, or whatever he may do, you won't forget he was my brother; will you, Martin? You won't forget he was your own Anty's only brother."
Martin again gave her his solemn word that he would, to the best of his ability, act as a friend and brother to Barry.
"And now about the will." Martin again endeavoured to dissuade her from thinking about a will just at present.
"Ah! but my heart's set upon it," she said; "I shouldn't be happy unless I did it, and I'm sure you don't want to make me unhappy, now. You must get me some lawyer here, Martin; I'm afraid you're not lawyer enough for that yourself."
"Indeed I'm not, Anty; it's a trade I know little about."
"Well; you must get me a lawyer; not to-morrow, for I know I shan't be well enough; but I hope I shall next day, and you may tell him just what to put in it. I've no secrets from you." And she told him exactly what she had before told her brother. "That'll not hurt him," she continued; "and I'd like to think you and the dear girls should accept something from me."
Martin then agreed to go to Daly. He was on good terms with them all now, since making the last offer to them respecting the property; besides, as Martin said, "he knew no other lawyer, and, as the will was so decidedly in Barry's favour, who was so proper to make it as Barry's own lawyer?"
"Good-bye now, Martin," said Anty; "we shall be desperately scolded for talking so long; but it was on my mind to say it all, and I'm betther now it's all over."
"Good night, dear Anty," said Martin, "I'll be seeing you to-morrow."
"Every day, I hope, Martin, till it's all over. God bless you, God bless you all--and you above all. You don't know, Martin--at laist you didn't know all along, how well, how thruly I've loved you. Good night," and Martin left the room, as Barry had done, in tears. But he had no feeling within him of which he had cause to be ashamed. He was ashamed, and tried to hide his face, for he was not accustomed to be seen with the tears running down his cheeks; but still he had within him a strong sensation of gratified pride, as he reflected that he was the object of the warmest affection to so sweet a creature as Anty Lynch.
"Well, Martin--what was it she wanted?" said his mother, as she met him at the bottom of the stairs.
"I couldn't tell you now, mother," said he; "but av there was iver an angel on 'arth, it's Anty Lynch." And saying so, he pushed open the door and escaped into the street.
"I wondher what she's been about now?" said the widow, speculating to herself--"well, av she does lave it away from Barry, who can say but what she has a right to do as she likes with her own? --and who's done the most for her, I'd like to know?" --and pleasant prospects of her son's enjoying an independence flitted before her mind's eye. "But thin," she continued, talking to herself, "I wouldn't have it said in Dunmore that a Kelly demaned hisself to rob a Lynch, not for twice all Sim Lynch ever had. Well--we'll see; but no good 'll ever come of meddling with them people. Jane, Jane," she called out, at the top of her voice, "are you niver coming down, and letting me out of this? --bad manners to you."
Jane answered, in the same voice, from the parlour upstairs, "Shure, mother, ain't I getting Anty her tay?"
"Drat Anty and her tay! --Well, shure, I'm railly bothered now wid them Lynches! --Well, glory be to God, there's an end to everything--not that I'm wishing her anywhere but where she is; she's welcome, for Mary Kelly."
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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26
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LOVE'S AMBASSADOR
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Two days after the hunt in which poor Goneaway was killed by Barry's horse, Ballindine received the following letter from his friend Dot Blake.
Limmer's Hotel, 27th March, 1844.
Dear Frank, I and Brien, and Bottom, crossed over last Friday night, and, thanks to the God of storms, were allowed to get quietly through it. The young chieftain didn't like being boxed on the quay a bit too well; the rattling of the chains upset him, and the fellows there are so infernally noisy and awkward, that I wonder he was ever got on board. It's difficult to make an Irishman handy, but it's the very devil to make him quiet. There were four at his head, and three at his tail, two at the wheel, turning, and one up aloft, hallooing like a demon in the air; and when Master Brien showed a little aversion to this comic performance, they were going to drag him into the box _bon gré, mal gré_, till Bottom interposed and saved the men and the horse from destroying each other.
We got safe to Middleham on Saturday night, the greatest part of the way by rail. Scott has a splendid string of horses. These English fellows do their work in tiptop style, only they think more of spending money than they do of making it. I waited to see him out on Monday, when he'd got a trot, and he was as bright as though he'd never left the Curragh. Scott says he's a little too fine; but you know of course he must find some fault. To give Igoe his due, he could not be in better condition, and Scott was obliged to own that, _considering where he came from_, he was very well. I came on here on Tuesday, and have taken thirteen wherever I could get it, and thought the money safe. I have got a good deal on, and won't budge till I do it at six to one; and I'm sure I'll bring him to that. I think he'll rise quickly, as he wants so little training, and as his qualities must be at once known now he's in Scott's stables; so if you mean to put any more on you had better do it at once.
So much for the stables. I left the other two at home, but have one of my own string here, as maybe I'll pick up a match: and now I wish to let you know a report that I heard this morning--at least a secret, which bids fair to become a report. It is said that Kilcullen is to marry F---- W----, and that he has already paid Heaven only knows how many thousand pounds of debt with her money; that the old earl has arranged it all, and that the beautiful heiress has reluctantly agreed to be made a viscountess. I'm very far from saying that I believe this; but it may suit you to know that I heard the arrangement mentioned before two other persons, one of whom was Morris;--strange enough this, as he was one of the set at Handicap Lodge when you told them that the match with yourself was still on. I have no doubt the plan would suit father and son; you best know how far the lady may have been likely to accede. At any rate, my dear Frank, if you'll take my advice, you'll not sit quiet till she does marry some one. You can't expect she'll wear the willow for you very long, if you do nothing yourself. Write to her by post, and write to the earl by the same post, saying you have done so. Tell her in the sweetest way you can, that you cannot live without seeing her, and getting your _congé_ [39], if _congé_ it is to be, from her own dear lips; and tell him, in as few words, as you please, that you mean to do yourself the honour of knocking at his door on such and such a day--and do it.
[FOOTNOTE 39: congé--(French) dismissal, notice to quit] By the bye, Kilcullen certainly returns to Ireland immediately. There's been the devil's own smash among him and the Jews. He has certainly been dividing money among them; but not near enough, by all accounts, to satisfy the half of them. For the sake of your reputation, if not of your pocket, don't let him walk off with the hundred and thirty thousand pounds. They say it's not a penny less.
Very faithfully yours, W. BLAKE.
Shall I do anything for you here about Brien? I think I might still get you eleven to one, but let me hear at once.
As Frank read the first portion of this epistle, his affection for his poor dear favourite nag returned in full force, and he felt all the pangs of remorse for having parted with him; but when he came to the latter part, to Lord Kilcullen's name, and the initials by which his own Fanny was designated, he forgot all about horse and owner; became totally regardless of thirteen, eleven, and six to one, and read on hastily to the end; read it all again--then closed the letter, and put it in his pocket, and remained for a considerable time in silent contemplation, trying to make up his mind what he would do.
Nobody was with him as he opened his post-bag, which he took from the messenger as the boy was coming up to the house; he therefore read his letter alone, on the lawn, and he continued pacing up and down before the house with a most perturbed air, for half an hour.
Kilcullen going to marry Fanny Wyndham! So, that was the cause of Lord Cashel's singular behaviour--his incivility, and refusal to allow Frank to see his ward. "What! to have arranged it all in twenty-four hours," thought Frank to himself; "to have made over his ward's money to his son, before her brother, from whom she inherited it, was in his grave: to determine at once to reject an accepted suitor for the sake of closing on the poor girl's money--and without the slightest regard for her happiness, without a thought for her welfare! And then, such lies," said the viscount, aloud, striking his heel into the grass in his angry impetuosity; "such base, cruel lies! --to say that she had authorised him, when he couldn't have dared to make such a proposal to her, and her brother but two days dead. Well; I took him for a stiff-necked pompous fool, but I never thought him such an avaricious knave." And Fanny, too--could Fanny have agreed, so soon, to give her hand to another? She could not have transferred her heart. His own dear, fond Fanny! A short time ago they had been all in all to each other; and now so completely estranged as they were! However, Dot was right; up to this time Fanny might be quite true to him; indeed, there was not ground even for doubting her, for it was evident that no reliance was to be placed in Lord Cashel's asseverations. But still he could not expect that she should continue to consider herself engaged, if she remained totally neglected by her lover. He must do something, and that at once; but there was very great difficulty in deciding what that something was to be. It was easy enough for Dot to say, first write, and then go. If he were to write, what security was there that his letter would be allowed to reach Fanny? and, if he went, how much less chance was there that he would be allowed to see her. And then, again to be turned out of the house! again informed, by that pompous scheming earl, that his visits there were not desired. Or, worse still, not to be admitted; to be driven from the door by a footman who would well know for what he came! No; come what come might, he would never again go to Grey Abbey; at least not unless he was specially and courteously invited thither by the owner; and then it should only be to marry his ward, and take her from the odious place, never to return again.
"The impudent impostor!" continued Frank to himself; "to pretend to suspect me, when he was himself hatching his dirty, mercenary, heartless schemes!"
But still the same question recurred,--what was to be done? Venting his wrath on Lord Cashel would not get him out of the difficulty: going was out of the question; writing was of little use. Could he not send somebody else? Some one who could not be refused admittance to Fanny, and who might at any rate learn what her wishes and feelings were? He did not like making love by deputy; but still, in his present dilemma, he could think of nothing better. But whom was he to send? Bingham Blake was a man of character, and would not make a fool of himself; but he was too young; he would not be able to make his way to Fanny. No--a young unmarried man would not do. --Mat Tierney? --he was afraid of no one, and always cool and collected; but then, Mat was in London; besides, he was a sort of friend of Kilcullen's. General Bourke? No one could refuse an _entrée_ to his venerable grey hairs, and polished manner; besides, his standing in the world was so good, so unexceptionable; but then the chances were he would not go on such an errand; he was too old to be asked to take such a troublesome service; and besides, if asked, it was very probable he would say that he considered Lord Cashel entitled to his ward's obedience. The rector--the Rev. Joseph Armstrong? He must be the man: there was, at any rate, respectability in his profession; and he had sufficient worldly tact not easily to be thrust aside from his object: the difficulty would be, whether he had a coat sufficiently decent to appear in at Grey Abbey.
After mature consideration he made up his mind that the parson should be his ambassador. He would sooner have confided in Bingham Blake, but an unmarried man would not do. No; the parson must be the man. Frank was, unfortunately, but little disposed to act in any case without advice, and in his anxiety to consult some one as to consulting the parson, returned into the house, to make a clear breast of it to his mother. He found her in the breakfast-room with the two girls, and the three were holding council deep.
"Oh, here's Frank," said Sophy; "we'd better tell him all about it at once--and he'll tell us which she'd like best."
"We didn't mean to tell you," said Guss; "but I and Sophy are going to work two sofas for the drawing-room--in Berlin wool, you know: they'll be very handsome--everybody has them now, you know; they have a splendid pair at Ballyhaunis which Nora and her cousin worked."
"But we want to know what pattern would suit Fanny's taste," said Sophy.
"Well; you can't know that," said Frank rather pettishly, "so you'd better please yourselves."
"Oh, but you must know what she likes," continued Guss; "I'm for this," and she, displayed a pattern showing forth two gorgeous macaws--each with plumage of the brightest colours. "The colours are so bright, and the feathers will work in so well."
"I don't like anything in worsted-work but flowers," said Sophy; "Nora Dillon says she saw two most beautiful wreaths at that shop in Grafton Street, both hanging from bars, you know; and that would be so much prettier. I'm sure Fanny would like flowers best; wouldn't she now, Frank? --Mamma thinks the common cross-bar patterns are nicer for furniture."
"Indeed I do, my dear," said Mrs O'Kelly; "and you see them much more common now in well-furnished drawing-rooms. But still I'd much sooner have them just what Fanny would like best. Surely, Frank, you must have heard her speak about worsted-work?"
All this completely disconcerted Frank, and made him very much out of love with his own plan of consulting his mother. He gave the trio some not very encouraging answer as to their good-natured intentions towards his drawing-room, and again left them alone. "Well; there's nothing for it but to send the parson; I don't think he'll make a fool of himself, but then I know he'll look so shabby. However, here goes," and he mounted his nag, and rode off to Ballindine glebe.
The glebe-house was about a couple of miles from Kelly's Court, and it was about half-past four when Lord Ballindine got there. He knocked at the door, which was wide open, though it was yet only the last day of March, and was told by a remarkably slatternly maid-servant, that her master was "jist afther dinner;" that he was stepped out, but was about the place, and could be "fetched in at oncet;"--and would his honour walk in? And so Lord Ballindine was shown into the rectory drawing-room on one side of the passage (alias hall), while the attendant of all work went to announce his arrival in the rectory dining-room on the other side. Here Mrs Armstrong was sitting among her numerous progeny, securing the _débris_ of the dinner from their rapacious paws, and endeavouring to make two very unruly boys consume the portions of fat which had been supplied to them with, as they loudly declared, an unfairly insufficient quantum of lean. As the girl was good-natured enough to leave both doors wide open, Frank had the full advantage of the conversation.
"Now, Greg," said the mother, "if you leave your meat that way I'll have it put by for you, and you shall have nothing but potatoes till it's ate."
"Why, mother, it's nothing but tallow; look here; you gave me all the outside part."
"I'll tell your dada, and see what he'll say, if you call the meat tallow; and you're just as bad, Joe; worse if anything--gracious me, here's waste! well, I'll lock it up for you, and you shall both of you eat it to-morrow, before you have a bit of anything else."
Then followed a desperate fit of coughing.
"My poor Minny!" said the mother, "you're just as bad as ever. Why would you go out on the wet grass? --Is there none of the black currant jam left?"
"No, mother," coughed Minny, "not a bit."
"Greg ate it all," peached Sarah, an elder sister; "I told him not, but he would."
"Greg, I'll have you flogged, and you never shall come from school again. What's that you're saying, Mary?"
"There's a jintleman in the drawing-room as is axing afther masther."
"Gentleman--what gentleman?" asked the lady.
"Sorrow a know I know, ma'am!" said Mary, who was a new importation--"only, he's a dark, sightly jintleman, as come on a horse."
"And did you send for the master?"
"I did, ma'am; I was out in the yard, and bad Patsy go look for him."
"It's Nicholas Dillon, I'll bet twopence," said Greg, jumping up to rush into the other room: "he's come about the black colt, I know."
"Stay where you are, Greg; and don't go in there with your dirty face and fingers;" and, after speculating a little longer, the lady went into the drawing-room herself; though, to tell the truth, her own face and fingers were hardly in a state suitable for receiving company.
Mrs Armstrong marched into the drawing-room with something of a stately air, to meet the strange gentleman, and there she found her old friend Lord Ballindine. Whoever called at the rectory, and at whatever hour the visit might be made, poor Mrs Armstrong was sure to apologise for the confusion in which she was found. She had always just got rid of a servant, and could not get another that suited her; or there was some other commonplace reason for her being discovered _en déshabille_ [40]. However, she managed to talk to Frank for a minute or two with tolerable volubility, till her eyes happening to dwell on her own hands, which were certainly not as white as a lady's should be, she became a little uncomfortable and embarrassed--tried to hide them in her drapery--then remembered that she had on her morning slippers, which were rather the worse for wear; and, feeling too much ashamed of her _tout ensemble_ to remain, hurried out of the room, saying that she would go and see where Armstrong could possibly have got himself to. She did not appear again to Lord Ballindine.
[FOOTNOTE 40: en déshabille--(French) partly or scantily dressed] Poor Mrs Armstrong! --though she looked so little like one, she had been brought up as a lady, carefully and delicately; and her lot was the more miserable, for she knew how lamentable were her present deficiencies. When she married a poor curate, having, herself, only a few hundred pounds' fortune, she had made up her mind to a life of comparative poverty; but she had meant even in her poverty to be decent, respectable, and lady-like. Weak health, nine children, an improvident husband, and an income so lamentably ill-suited to her wants, had however been too much for her, and she had degenerated into a slatternly, idle scold.
In a short time the parson came in from his farm, rusty and muddy--rusty, from his clerical dress; muddy from his farming occupations; and Lord Ballindine went into the business of his embassy. He remembered, however, how plainly he had heard the threats about the uneaten fat, and not wishing the household to hear all he had to say respecting Fanny Wyndham, he took the parson out into the road before the house, and, walking up and down, unfolded his proposal.
Mr Armstrong expressed extreme surprise at the nature of the mission on which he was to be sent; secondly at the necessity of such a mission at all; and thirdly, lastly, and chiefly, at the enormous amount of the heiress's fortune, to lose which he declared would be an unpardonable sin on Lord Ballindine's part. He seemed to be not at all surprised that Lord Cashel should wish to secure so much money in his own family; nor did he at all participate in the unmeasured reprobation with which Frank loaded the worthy earl's name. One hundred and thirty thousand pounds would justify anything, and he thought of his nine poor children, his poor wife, his poor home, his poor two hundred a-year, and his poor self. He calculated that so very rich a lady would most probably have some interest in the Church, which she could not but exercise in his favour, if he were instrumental in getting her married; and he determined to go. Then the, difficult question as to the wardrobe occurred to him. Besides, he had no money for the road. Those, however, were minor evils to be got over, and he expressed himself willing to undertake the embassy.
"But, my dear Ballindine; what is it I'm to do?" said he. "Of course you know, I'd do anything for you, as of course I ought--anything that ought to be done; but what is it exactly you wish me to say?"
"You see, Armstrong, that pettifogging schemer told me he didn't wish me to come to his house again, and I wouldn't, even for Fanny Wyndham, force myself into any man's house. He would not let me see her when I was there, and I could not press it, because her brother was only just dead; so I'm obliged to take her refusal second hand. Now I don't believe she ever sent the message he gave me. I think he has made her believe that I'm deserting and ill-treating her; and in this way she may be piqued and tormented into marrying Kilcullen."
"I see it now: upon my word then Lord Cashel knows how to play his cards! But if I go to Grey Abbey I can't see her without seeing him."
"Of course not--but I'm coming to that. You see, I have no reason to doubt Fanny's love; she has assured me of it a thousand times. I wouldn't say so to you even, as it looks like boasting, only it's so necessary you should know how the land lies; besides, everybody knew it; all the world knew we were engaged."
"Oh, boasting--it's no boasting at all: it would be very little good my going to Grey Abbey, if she had not told you so."
"Well, I think that if you were to see Lord Cashel and tell him, in your own quiet way, who you are; that you are rector of Ballindine, and my especial friend; and that you had come all the way from County Mayo especially to see Miss Wyndham, that you might hear from herself whatever message she had to send to me--if you were to do this, I don't think he would dare to prevent you from seeing her."
"If he did, of course I would put it to him that you, who were so long received as Miss Wyndham's accepted swain, were at least entitled to so much consideration at her hands; and that I must demand so much on your behalf, wouldn't that be it, eh?"
"Exactly. I see you understand it, as if you'd been at it all your life; only don't call me her swain."
"Well, I'll think of another word--her beau."
"For Heaven's sake, no! --that's ten times worse."
"Well, her lover?"
"That's at any rate English: but say, her accepted husband--that'll be true and plain: if you do that I think you will manage to see her, and then--" "Well, then--for that'll be the difficult part."
"Oh, when you see her, one simple word will do: Fanny Wyndham loves plain dealing. Merely tell her that Lord Ballindine has not changed his mind; and that he wishes to know from herself, by the mouth of a friend whom he can trust, whether she has changed hers. If she tells you that she has, I would not follow her farther though she were twice as rich as Croesus. I'm not hunting her for her money; but I am determined that Lord Cashel shall not make us both miserable by forcing her into a marriage with his _roué_ of a son."
"Well, Ballindine, I'll go; but mind, you must not blame me if I fail. I'll do the best I can for you."
"Of course I won't. When will you be able to start?"
"Why, I suppose there's no immediate hurry?" said the parson, remembering that the new suit of clothes must be procured.
"Oh, but there is. Kilcullen will be there at once; and considering how long it is since I saw Fanny--three months, I believe--no time should be lost."
"How long is her brother dead?"
"Oh, a month--or very near it."
"Well, I'll go Monday fortnight; that'll do, won't it?"
It was at last agreed that the parson was to start for Grey Abbey on the Monday week following; that he was to mention to no one where he was going; that he was to tell his wife that he was going on business he was not allowed to talk about;--she would be a very meek woman if she rested satisfied with that! --and that he was to present himself at Grey Abbey on the following Wednesday.
"And now," said the parson, with some little hesitation, "my difficulty commences. We country rectors are never rich; but when we've nine children, Ballindine, it's rare to find us with money in our pockets. You must advance me a little cash for the emergencies of the road."
"My dear fellow! Of course the expense must be my own. I'll send you down a note between this and then; I haven't enough about me now. Or, stay--I'll give you a cheque," and he turned into the house, and wrote him a cheque for twenty pounds.
That'll get the coat into the bargain, thought the rector, as he rather uncomfortably shuffled the bit of paper into his pocket. He had still a gentleman's dislike to be paid for his services. But then, Necessity--how stern she is! He literally could not have gone without it.
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{
"id": "4917"
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27
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MR LYNCH'S LAST RESOURCE
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On the following morning Lord Ballindine as he had appointed to do, drove over to Dunmore, to settle with Martin about the money, and, if necessary, to go with him to the attorney's office in Tuam. Martin had as yet given Daly no answer respecting Barry Lynch's last proposal; and though poor Anty's health made it hardly necessary that any answer should be given, still Lord Ballindine had promised to see the attorney, if Martin thought it necessary.
The family were all in great confusion that morning, for Anty was very bad--worse than she had ever been. She was in a paroxysm of fever, was raving in delirium, and in such a state that Martin and his sister were occasionally obliged to hold her in bed. Sally, the old servant, had been in the room for a considerable time during the morning, standing at the foot of the bed with a big tea-pot in her hand, and begging in a whining voice, from time to time, that "Miss Anty, God bless her, might get a dhrink of tay!" But, as she had been of no other service, and as the widow thought it as well that she should not hear what Anty said in her raving, she had been desired to go down-stairs, and was sitting over the fire. She had fixed the big tea-pot among the embers, and held a slop-bowl of tea in her lap, discoursing to Nelly, who with her hair somewhat more than ordinarily dishevelled, in token of grief for Anty's illness, was seated on a low stool, nursing a candle-stick.
"Well, Nelly," said the prophetic Sally, boding evil in her anger--for, considering how long she had been in the family, she had thought herself entitled to hear Anty's ravings; "mind, I tell you, good won't come of this. The Virgin prothect us from all harum! --it niver war lucky to have sthrangers dying in the house."
"But shure Miss Anty's no stranger."
"Faix thin, her words must be sthrange enough when the likes o' me wouldn't be let hear 'em. Not but what I did hear, as how could I help it? There'll be no good come of it. Who's to be axed to the wake, I'd like to know."
"Axed to the wake, is it? Why, shure, won't there be rashions of ating and lashings of dhrinking? The misthress isn't the woman to spare, and sich a frind as Miss Anty dead in the house. Let 'em ax whom they like."
"You're a fool, Nelly--Ax whom they like! --that's asy said. Is they to ax Barry Lynch, or is they to let it alone, and put the sisther into the sod without a word said to him about it? God be betwixt us and all evil"--and she took a long pull at the slop-bowl; and, as the liquid flowed down her throat, she gradually threw back her head till the top of her mop cap was flattened against the side of the wide fire-place, and the bowl was turned bottom upwards, so that the half-melted brown sugar might trickle into her mouth. She then gave a long sigh, and repeated that difficult question--"Who is they to ax to the wake?"
It was too much for Nelly to answer: she re-echoed the sigh, and more closely embraced the candlestick.
"Besides, Nelly, who'll have the money when she's gone? --and she's nigh that already, the Blessed Virgin guide and prothect her. Who'll get all her money?"
"Why; won't Mr Martin? Sure, an't they as good as man and wife--all as one?"
"That's it; they'll be fighting and tearing, and tatthering about that money, the two young men will, you'll see. There'll be lawyering, an' magisthrate's work--an' factions--an' fighthins at fairs; an' thin, as in course the Lynches can't hould their own agin the Kellys, there'll be undherhand blows, an' blood, an' murdher! --you'll see else."
"Glory be to God," involuntarily prayed Nelly, at the thoughts suggested by Sally's powerful eloquence.
"There will, I tell ye," continued Sally, again draining the tea-pot into the bowl. "Sorrow a lie I'm telling you;" and then, in a low whisper across the fire, "didn't I see jist now Miss Anty ketch a hould of Misther Martin, as though she'd niver let him go agin, and bid him for dear mercy's sake have a care of Barry Lynch? --Shure I knowed what that meant. And thin, didn't he thry and do for herself with his own hands? Didn't Biddy say she'd swear she heard him say he'd do it? --and av he wouldn't boggle about his own sisther, it's little he'd mind what he'd do to an out an out inemy like Misther Martin."
"Warn't that a knock at the hall-door, Sally?"
"Run and see, girl; may-be it's the docthor back again; only mostly he don't mind knocking much."
Nelly went to the door, and opened it to Lord Ballindine, who had left his gig in charge of his servant. He asked for Martin, who in a short time, joined him in the parlour.
"This is a dangerous place for your lordship, now," said he: "the fever is so bad in the house. Thank God, nobody seems to have taken it yet, but there's no knowing."
"Is she still so bad, Martin?"
"Worse than iver, a dale worse; I don't think It'll last long, now: another bout such as this last 'll about finish it. But I won't keep your lordship. I've managed about the money;"--and the necessary writing was gone through, and the cash was handed to Lord Ballindine.
"You've given over all thoughts then, about Lynch's offer--eh, Martin? --I suppose you've done with all that, now?"
"Quite done with it, my lord; and done with fortune-hunting too. I've seen enough this last time back to cure me altogether--at laist, I hope so."
"She doesn't mean to make any will, then?"
"Why, she wishes to make one, but I doubt whether she'll ever be able;" and then Martin gave his landlord an account of all that Anty had said about her will, her wishes as to the property, her desire to leave something to him (Martin) and his sisters: and last he repeated the strong injunctions which Anty had given him respecting her poor brother, and her assurance, so full of affection, that had she lived she would have done her best to make him happy as her husband.
Lord Ballindine was greatly affected; he warmly shook hands with Martin, told him how highly he thought of his conduct, and begged him to take care that Anty had the gratification of making her will as she had desired to do. "The fact," Lord Ballindine said, "of your being named in the will as her executor will give you more control over Barry than anything else could do." He then proposed at once to go, himself, to Tuam, and explain to Daly what it was Miss Lynch wished him to do. This Lord Ballindine did, and the next day the will was completed.
For a week or ten days Anty remained in much the same condition. After each attack of fever it was expected that she would perish from weakness and exhaustion; but she still held on, and then the fever abated, and Doctor Colligan thought that it was possible she might recover: she was, however, so dreadfully emaciated and worn out, there was so little vitality left in her, that he would not encourage more than the faintest hope. Anty herself was too weak either to hope or fear;--and the women of the family, who from continual attendance knew how very near to death she was, would hardly allow themselves to think that she could recover.
There were two persons, however, who from the moment of her amendment felt an inward sure conviction of her convalescence. They were Martin and Barry. To the former this feeling was of course one of unalloyed delight. He went over to Kelly's Court, and spoke there of his betrothed as though she were already sitting up and eating mutton chops; was congratulated by the young ladies on his approaching nuptials, and sauntered round the Kelly's Court shrubberies with Frank, talking over his future prospects; asking advice about this and that, and propounding the pros and cons on that difficult question, whether he would live at Dunmore, or build a house at Toneroe for himself and Anty. With Barry, however, the feeling was very different: he was again going to have his property wrenched from him; he was again to suffer the pangs he had endured, when first he learned the purport of his father's will; after clutching the fruit for which he had striven, as even he himself felt, so basely, it was again to be torn from him so cruelly.
He had been horribly anxious for a termination to Anty's sufferings; horribly impatient to feel himself possessor of the whole. From day to day, and sometimes two or three times a day, he had seen Dr Colligan, and inquired how things were going on: he had especially enjoined that worthy man to come up after his morning call at the inn, and get a glass of sherry at Dunmore House; and the doctor had very generally done so. For some time Barry endeavoured to throw the veil of brotherly regard over the true source of his anxiety; but the veil was much too thin to hide what it hardly covered, and Barry, as he got intimate with the doctor, all but withdrew it altogether. When Barry would say, "Well, doctor, how is she to-day?" and then remark, in answer to the doctor's statement that she was very bad--"Well, I suppose it can't last much longer; but it's very tedious, isn't it, poor thing?" it was plain enough that the brother was not longing for the sister's recovery. And then he would go a little further, and remark that "if the poor thing was to go, it would be better for all she went at once," and expressed an opinion that he was rather ill-treated by being kept so very long in suspense.
Doctor Colligan ought to have been shocked at this; and so he was, at first, to a certain extent, but he was not a man of a very high tone of feeling. He had so often heard of heirs to estates longing for the death of the proprietors of them; he had so often seen relatives callous and indifferent at the loss of those who ought to have been dear to them; it seemed so natural to him that Barry should want the estate, that he gradually got accustomed to his impatient inquiries, and listened to, and answered them, without disgust. He fell too into a kind of intimacy with Barry; he liked his daily glass, or three or four glasses, of sherry; and besides, it was a good thing for him to stand well in a professional point of view with a man who had the best house in the village, and who would soon have eight hundred a-year.
If Barry showed his impatience and discontent as long as the daily bulletins told him that Anty was still alive, though dying, it may easily be imagined that he did not hide his displeasure when he first heard that she was alive and better. His brow grew very black, his cheeks flushed, the drops of sweat stood on his forehead, and he said, speaking through his closed teeth, "D---- it, doctor, you don't mean to tell me she's recovering now?"
"I don't say, Mr Lynch, whether she is or no; but it's certain the fever has left her. She's very weak, very weak indeed; I never knew a person to be alive and have less life in 'em; but the fever has left her and there certainly is hope."
"Hope!" said Barry--"why, you told me she couldn't live!"
"I don't say she will, Mr Lynch, but I say she may. Of course we must do what we can for her," and the doctor took his sherry and went his way.
How horrible then was the state of Barry's mind! For a time he was absolutely stupified with despair; he stood fixed on the spot where the doctor had left him, realising, bringing home to himself, the tidings which he had heard. His sister to rise again, as though it were from the dead, to push him off his stool! Was he to fall again into that horrid low abyss in which even the Tuam attorney had scorned him; in which he had even invited that odious huxter's son to marry his sister and live in his house? What! was he again to be reduced to poverty, to want, to despair, by her whom he so hated? Could nothing be done? --Something must be done--she should not be, could not be allowed to leave that bed of sickness alive. "There must be an end of her," he muttered through his teeth, "or she'll drive me mad!" And then he thought how easily he might have smothered her, as she lay there clasping his hand, with no one but themselves in the room; and as the thought crossed his brain his eyes nearly started from his head, the sweat ran down his face, he clutched the money in his trousers' pocket till the coin left an impression on his flesh, and he gnashed his teeth till his jaws ached with his own violence. But then, in that sick-room, he had been afraid of her; he could not have touched her then for the wealth of the Bank of England! --but now!
The devil sat within him, and revelled with full dominion over his soul: there was then no feeling left akin to humanity to give him one chance of escape; there was no glimmer of pity, no shadow of remorse, no sparkle of love, even though of a degraded kind; no hesitation in the will for crime, which might yet, by God's grace, lead to its eschewal: all there was black, foul, and deadly, ready for the devil's deadliest work. Murder crouched there, ready to spring, yet afraid;--cowardly, but too thirsty alter blood to heed its own fears. Theft,--low, pilfering, pettifogging, theft; avarice, lust, and impotent, scalding hatred. Controlled by these the black blood rushed quick to and from his heart, filling him with sensual desires below the passions of a brute, but denying him one feeling or one appetite for aught that was good or even human.
Again the next morning the doctor was questioned with intense anxiety; "Was she going? --was she drooping? --had yesterday's horrid doubts raised only a false alarm?" It was utterly beyond Barry's power to make any attempt at concealment, even of the most shallow kind. "Well, doctor, is she dying yet?" was the brutal question he put.
"She is, if anything, rather stronger;" answered the doctor, shuddering involuntarily at the open expression of Barry's atrocious wish, and yet taking his glass of wine.
"The devil she is!" muttered Barry, throwing himself into an arm-chair. He sat there some little time, and the doctor also sat down, said nothing, but continued sipping his wine.
"In the name of mercy, what must I do?" said Barry, speaking more to himself than to the other.
"Why, you've enough, Mr Lynch, without hers; you can do well enough without it."
"Enough! Would you think you had enough if you were robbed of more than half of all you have. Half, indeed," he shouted--"I may say all, at once. I don't believe there's a man in Ireland would bear it. Nor will I." Again there was a silence; but still, somehow, Colligan seemed to stay longer than usual. Every now and then Barry would for a moment look full in his face, and almost instantly drop his eyes again. He was trying to mature future plans; bringing into shape thoughts which had occurred to him, in a wild way at different times; proposing to himself schemes, with which his brain had been long loaded, but which he had never resolved on,--which he had never made palpable and definite. One thing he found sure and certain; on one point he was able to become determined: he could not do it alone; he must have an assistant; he must buy some one's aid; and again he looked at Colligan, and again his eyes fell. There was no encouragement there, but there was no discouragement. Why did he stay there so long? Why did he so slowly sip that third glass of wine? Was he waiting to be asked? was he ready, willing, to be bought? There must be something in his thoughts--he must have some reason for sitting there so long, and so silent, without speaking a word, or taking his eyes off the fire.
Barry had all but made up his mind to ask the aid he wanted; but he felt that he was not prepared to do so--that he should soon quiver and shake, that he could not then carry it through. He felt that he wanted spirit to undertake his own part in the business, much less to inspire another with the will to assist him in it. At last he rose abruptly from his chair, and said, "Will you dine with me to-day, Colligan? --I'm so down in the mouth, so deucedly hipped, it will be a charity."
"Well," said Colligan, "I don't care if I do. I must go down to your sister in the evening, and I shall be near her here."
"Yes, of course; you'll be near her here, as you say: come at six, then. By the bye, couldn't you go to Anty first, so that we won't be disturbed over our punch?"
"I must see her the last thing,--about nine, but I can look up again afterwards, for a minute or so. I don't stay long with her now: it's better not."
"Well, then, you'll be here at six?"
"Yes, six sharp;" and at last the doctor got up and went away.
It was odd that Doctor Colligan should have sat thus long; it showed a great want of character and of good feeling in him. He should never have become intimate, or even have put up with a man expressing such wishes as those which so often fell from Barry's lips. But he was entirely innocent of the thoughts which Barry attributed to him. It had never even occurred to him that Barry, bad as he was, would wish to murder his sister. No; bad, heedless, sensual as Doctor Colligan might be, Barry was a thousand fathoms deeper in iniquity than he.
As soon as he had left the room the other uttered a long, deep sigh. It was a great relief to him to be alone: he could now collect his thoughts, mature his plans, and finally determine. He took his usual remedy in his difficulties, a glass of brandy; and, going out into the garden, walked up and down the gravel walk almost unconsciously, for above an hour.
Yes: he would do it. He would not be a coward. The thing had been done a thousand times before. Hadn't he heard of it over and over again? Besides, Colligan's manner was an assurance to him that he would not boggle at such a job. But then, of course, he must be paid--and Barry began to calculate how much he must offer for the service; and, when the service should be performed, how he might avoid the fulfilment of his portion of the bargain.
He went in and ordered the dinner; filled the spirit decanters, opened a couple of bottles of wine, and then walked out again. In giving his orders, and doing the various little things with which he had to keep himself employed, everybody, and everything seemed strange to him. He hardly knew what he was about, and felt almost as though he were in a dream. He had quite made up his mind as to what he would do; his resolution was fixed to carry it through but:--still there was the but,--how was he to open it to Doctor Colligan? He walked up and down the gravel path for a long time, thinking of this; or rather trying to think of it, for his thoughts would fly away to all manner of other subjects, and he continually found himself harping upon some trifle, connected with Anty, but wholly irrespective of her death; some little thing that she had done for him, or ought to have done; something she had said a long time ago, and which he had never thought of till now; something she had worn, and which at the time he did not even know that he had observed; and as often as he found his mind thus wandering, he would start off at a quicker pace, and again endeavour to lay out a line of conduct for the evening.
At last, however, he came to the conclusion that it would be better to trust to the chapter of chances: there was one thing, or rather two things, he could certainly do: he could make the doctor half drunk before he opened on the subject, and he would take care to be in the same state himself. So he walked in and sat still before the fire, for the two long remaining hours, which intervened before the clock struck six.
It was about noon when the doctor left him, and during those six long solitary hours no one feeling of remorse had entered his breast. He had often doubted, hesitated as to the practicability of his present plan, but not once had he made the faintest effort to overcome the wish to have the deed done. There was not one moment in which he would not most willingly have had his sister's blood upon his hands, upon his brain, upon his soul; could he have willed and accomplished her death, without making himself liable to the penalties of the law.
At length Doctor Colligan came, and Barry made a great effort to appear unconcerned and in good humour.
"And how is she now, doctor?" he said, as they sat down to table.
"Is it Anty? --why, you know I didn't mean to see her since I was here this morning, till nine o'clock."
"Oh, true; so you were saying. I forgot. Well, will you take a glass of wine?" --and Barry filled his own glass quite full.
He drank his wine at dinner like a glutton, who had only a short time allowed him, and wished during that time to swallow as much as possible; and he tried to hurry his companion in the same manner. But the doctor didn't choose to have wine forced down his throat; he wished to enjoy himself, and remonstrated against Barry's violent hospitality.
At last, dinner was over; the things were taken away, they both drew their chairs over the fire, and began the business of the evening--the making and consumption of punch. Barry had determined to begin upon the subject which lay so near his heart, at eight o'clock. He had thought it better to fix an exact hour, and had calculated that the whole matter might be completed before Colligan went over to the inn. He kept continually looking at his watch, and gulping down his drink, and thinking over and over again how he would begin the conversation.
"You're very comfortable here, Lynch," said the doctor, stretching his long legs before the fire, and putting his dirty boots upon the fender.
"Yes, indeed," said Barry, not knowing what the other was saying.
"All you want's a wife, and you'd have as warm a house as there is in Galway. You'll be marrying soon, I suppose?"
"Well, I wouldn't wonder if I did. You don't take your punch; there's brandy there, if you like it better than whiskey."
"This is very good, thank you--couldn't be better. You haven't much land in your own hands, have you?"
"Why, no--I don't think I have. What's that you're saying? --land? --No, not much: if there's a thing I hate, it's farming."
"Well, upon my word you're wrong. I don't see what else a gentleman has to do in the country. I wish to goodness I could give up the gallipots [41] and farm a few acres of my own land. There's nothing I wish so much as to get a bit of land: indeed, I've been looking out for it, but it's so difficult to get."
[FOOTNOTE 41: gallipots--A gallipot was a small ceramic vessel used by apothecaries to hold medicines. The term was also used colloquially to refer to apothecaries themselves and even physicians (Trollope so uses the term in later chapters).]
Up to this, Barry had hardly listened to what the doctor had been saying; but now he was all attention. "So that is to be his price," thought he to himself, "he'll cost me dear, but I suppose he must have it."
Barry looked at his watch: it was near eight o'clock, but he seemed to feel that all he had drank had had no effect on him: it had not given him the usual pluck; it had not given him the feeling of reckless assurance, which he mistook for courage and capacity.
"If you've a mind to be a tenant of mine, Colligan, I'll keep a look out for you. The land's crowded now, but there's a lot of them cottier [42] devils I mean to send to the right about. They do the estate no good, and I hate the sight of them. But you know how the property's placed, and while Anty's in this wretched state, of course I can do nothing."
[FOOTNOTE 42: cottier--an Irish tenant renting land directly from the owner, with the price determined by bidding] "Will you bear it in mind though, Lynch? When a bit of land does fall into your hands, I should be glad to be your tenant. I'm quite in earnest, and should take it as a great favour."
"I'll not forget it;" and then he remained silent for a minute. What an opportunity this was for him to lose! Colligan so evidently wished to be bribed--so clearly showed what the price was which was to purchase him. But still he could not ask the fatal question.
Again he sat silent for a while, till he looked at his watch, and found it was a quarter past eight. "Never fear," he said, referring to the farm; "you shall have it, and it shall not be the worst land on the estate that I'll give you, you may be sure; for, upon my soul, I have a great regard for you; I have indeed."
The doctor thanked him for his good opinion.
"Oh! I'm not blarneying you; upon my soul I'm not; that's not the way with me at all; and when you know me better you'll say so,--and you may be sure you shall have the farm by Michaelmas." And then, in a voice which he tried to make as unconcerned as possible, he continued: "By the bye, Colligan, when do you think this affair of Anty's _will_ be over? It's the devil and all for a man not to know when he'll be his own master."
"Oh, you mustn't calculate on your sister's property at all now," said the other, in an altered voice. "I tell you it's very probable she may recover."
This again silenced Barry, and he let the time go by, till the doctor took up his hat, to go down to his patient.
"You'll not be long, I suppose?" said Barry.
"Well, it's getting late," said Colligan, "and I don't think I'll be coming back to-night."
"Oh, but you will; indeed, you must. You promised you would, you know, and I want to hear how she goes on."
"Well, I'll just come up, but I won't stay, for I promised Mrs Colligan to be home early." This was always the doctor's excuse when he wished to get away. He never allowed his domestic promises to draw him home when there was anything to induce him to stay abroad; but, to tell the truth, he was getting rather sick of his companion. The doctor took his hat, and went to his patient.
"He'll not be above ten minutes or at any rate a quarter of an hour," thought Barry, "and then I must do it. How he sucked it all in about the farm! --that's the trap, certainly." And he stood leaning with his back against the mantel-piece, and his coat-laps hanging over his arm, waiting for and yet fearing, the moment of the doctor's return. It seemed an age since he went. Barry looked at his watch almost every minute; it was twenty minutes past nine, five-and-twenty--thirty--forty--three quarters of an hour--"By Heaven!" said he, "the man is not coming! he is going to desert me--and I shall be ruined! Why the deuce didn't I speak out when the man was here!"
At last his ear caught the sound of the doctor's heavy foot on the gravel outside the door, and immediately afterwards the door bell was rung. Barry hastily poured out a glass of raw spirits and swallowed it; he then threw himself into his chair, and Doctor Colligan again entered the room.
"What a time you've been, Colligan! Why I thought you weren't coming all night. Now, Terry, some hot water, and mind you look sharp about it. Well, how's Anty to-night?"
"Weak, very weak; but mending, I think. The disease won't kill her now; the only thing is whether the cure will."
"Well, doctor, you can't expect me to be very anxious about it: unfortunately, we had never any reason to be proud of Anty, and it would be humbug in me to pretend that I wish she should recover, to rob me of what you know I've every right to consider my own." Terry brought the hot water in, and left the room.
"Well, I can't say you do appear very anxious about it. I'll just swallow one dandy of punch, and then I'll get home. I'm later now than I meant to be."
"Nonsense, man. The idea of your being in a hurry, when everybody knows that a doctor can never tell how long he may be kept in a sick-room! But come now, tell the truth; put yourself in my condition, and do you mean to say you'd be very anxious that Anty should recover? --Would you like your own sister to rise from her death-bed to rob you of everything you have? For, by Heaven! it is robbery--nothing less. She's so stiff-necked, that there's no making any arrangement with her. I've tried everything, fair means and foul, and nothing'll do but she must go and marry that low young Kelly--so immeasurably beneath her, you know, and of course only scheming for her money. Put yourself in my place, I say; and tell me fairly what your own wishes would be?"
"I was always fond of my brothers and sisters," answered the doctor; "and we couldn't well rob each other, for none of us had a penny to lose."
"That's a different thing, but just supposing you were exactly in my shoes at this moment, do you mean to tell me that you'd be glad she should get well? --that you'd be glad she should be able to deprive you of your property, disgrace your family, drive you from your own home, and make your life miserable for ever after?"
"Upon my soul I can't say; but good night now, you're getting excited, and I've finished my drop of punch."
"Ah! nonsense, man, sit down. I've something in earnest I want to say to you," and Barry got up and prevented the doctor from leaving the room. Colligan had gone so far as to put on his hat and great coat, and now sat down again without taking them off.
"You and I, Colligan, are men of the world, and too wide awake for all the old woman's nonsense people talk. What can I, or what could you in my place, care for a half-cracked old maid like Anty, who's better dead than alive, for her own sake and everybody's else; unless it is some scheming ruffian like young Kelly there, who wants to make money by her?"
"I'm not asking you to care for her; only, if those are your ideas, it's as well not to talk about them for appearance sake."
"Appearance sake! There's nothing makes me so sick, as for two men like you and me, who know what's what, to be talking about appearance sake, like two confounded parsons, whose business it is to humbug everybody, and themselves into the bargain. I'll tell you what: had my father--bad luck to him for an old rogue--not made such a will as he did, I'd 've treated Anty as well as any parson of 'em all would treat an old maid of a sister; but I'm not going to have her put over my head this way. Come, doctor, confound all humbug. I say it openly to you--to please me, Anty must never come out of that bed alive."
"As if your wishes could make any difference. If it is to be so, she'll die, poor creature, without your saying so much about it; but may-be, and it's very likely too, she'll be alive and strong, after the two of us are under the sod."
"Well; if it must be so, it must; but what I wanted to say to you is this: while you were away, I was thinking about what you said of the farm--of being a tenant of mine, you know."
"We can talk about that another time," said the doctor, who began to feel an excessive wish to be out of the house.
"There's no time like the present, when I've got it in my mind; and, if you'll wait, I can settle it all for you to-night. I was telling you that I hate farming, and so I do. There are thirty or five-and-thirty acres of land about the house, and lying round to the back of the town; you shall take them off my hands, and welcome."
This was too good an offer to be resisted, and Colligan said he would take the land, with many thanks, if the rent any way suited him.
"We'll not quarrel about that, you may be sure, Colligan," continued Barry; "and as I said fifty acres at first--it was fifty acres I think you were saying you wished for--I'll not baulk you, and go back from my own word."
"What you have yourself, round the house, 'll be enough; only I'm thinking the rent 'll be too high."
"It shall not; it shall be low enough; and, as I was saying, you shall have the remainder, at the same price, immediately after Michaelmas, as soon as ever those devils are ejected."
"Well;" said Colligan, who was now really interested, "what's the figure?"
Barry had been looking steadfastly at the fire during the whole conversation, up to this: playing with the poker, and knocking the coals about. He was longing to look into the other's face, but he did not dare. Now, however, was his time; it was now or never: he took one furtive glance at the doctor, and saw that he was really anxious on the subject--that his attention was fixed.
"The figure," said he; "the figure should not trouble you if you had no one but me to deal, with. But there'll be Anty, confound her, putting her fist into this and every other plan of mine!"
"I'd better deal with the agent, I'm thinking," said Colligan; "so, good night."
"You'll find you'd a deal better be dealing with me: you'll never find an easier fellow to deal with, or one who'll put a better thing in your way."
Colligan again sat down. He couldn't quite make Barry out: he suspected he was planning some iniquity, but he couldn't tell what; and he remained silent, looking full into the other's face till he should go on. Barry winced under the look, and hesitated; but at last he screwed himself up to the point, and said, "One word, between two friends, is as good as a thousand. If Anty dies of this bout, you shall have the fifty acres, with a lease for perpetuity, at sixpence an acre. Come, that's not a high figure, I think."
"What?" said Colligan, apparently not understanding him, "a lease for perpetuity at how much an acre?"
"Sixpence--a penny--a pepper-corn--just anything you please. But it's all on Anty's dying. While she's alive I can do nothing for the best friend I have."
"By the Almighty above us," said the doctor, almost in a whisper, "I believe the wretched man means me to murder her--his own sister!"
"Murder? --Who talked or said a word of murder?" said Barry, with a hoarse and croaking voice--"isn't she dying as she is? --and isn't she better dead than alive? It's only just not taking so much trouble to keep the life in her; you're so exceeding clever you know!" --and he made a ghastly attempt at smiling. "With any other doctor she'd have been dead long since: leave her to herself a little, and the farm's your own; and I'm sure there'll 've been nothing at all like murder between us."
"By Heavens, he does!" --and Colligan rose quickly from his seat "he means to have her murdered, and thinks to make me do the deed! Why, you vile, thieving, murdering reptile!" and as he spoke the doctor seized him by the throat, and shook him violently in his strong grasp--"who told you I was a fit person for such a plan? who told you to come to me for such a deed? who told you I would sell my soul for your paltry land?" --and he continued grasping Barry's throat till he was black in the face, and nearly choked. "Merciful Heaven! that I should have sat here, and listened to such a scheme! Take care of yourself," said he; and he threw him violently backwards over the chairs--"if you're to be found in Connaught to-morrow, or in Ireland the next day, I'll hang you!" --and so saying, he hurried out of the room, and went home.
"Well," thought he, on his road: "I have heard of such men as that before, and I believe that when I was young I read of such: but I never expected to meet so black a villain! What had I better do? --If I go and swear an information before a magistrate there'll be nothing but my word and his. Besides, he said nothing that the law could take hold of. And yet I oughtn't to let it pass: at any rate I'll sleep on it." And so he did; but it was not for a long time, for the recollection of Barry's hideous proposal kept him awake.
Barry lay sprawling among the chairs till the sound of the hall door closing told him that his guest had gone, when he slowly picked himself up, and sat down upon the sofa. Colligan's last words were ringing in his ear--"If you're found in Ireland the next day, I'll hang you." --Hang him! --and had he really given any one the power to speak to him in such language as that? After all, what had he said? --He had not even whispered a word of murder; he had only made an offer of what he would do if Anty should die: besides, no one but themselves had heard even that; and then his thoughts went off to another train. "Who'd have thought," he said to himself, "the man was such a fool! He meant it, at first, as well as I did myself. I'm sure he did. He'd never have caught as he did about the farm else, only he got afraid--the confounded fool! As for hanging, I'll let him know; it's just as easy for me to tell a story, I suppose, as it is for him." And then Barry, too, dragged himself up to bed, and cursed himself to sleep. His waking thoughts, however, were miserable enough.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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28
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FANNY WYNDHAM REBELS
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We will now return to Grey Abbey, Lord Cashel, and that unhappy love-sick heiress, his ward, Fanny Wyndham. Affairs there had taken no turn to give increased comfort either to the earl or to his niece, during the month which succeeded the news of young Harry Wyndham's death.
The former still adhered, with fixed pertinacity of purpose, to the matrimonial arrangement which he had made with his son. Circumstances, indeed, rendered it even much more necessary in the earl's eyes than it had appeared to be when he first contemplated this scheme for releasing himself from his son's pecuniary difficulties. He had, as the reader will remember, advanced a very large sum of money to Lord Kilcullen, to be repaid out of Fanny Wyndham's fortune, This money Lord Kilcullen had certainly appropriated in the manner intended by his father, but it had anything but the effect of quieting the creditors. The payments were sufficiently large to make the whole hungry crew hear that his lordship was paying his debts, but not at all sufficient to satisfy their craving. Indeed, nearly the whole went in liquidation of turf engagements, and gambling debts. The Jews, money-lenders, and tradesmen merely heard that money was going from Lord Kilcullen's pocket; but with all their exertions they got very little of it themselves.
Consequently, claims of all kinds--bills, duns, remonstrances and threats, poured in not only upon the son but also upon the father. The latter, it is true, was not in his own person liable for one penny of them, nor could he well, on his own score, be said to be an embarrassed man; but he was not the less uneasy. He had determined if possible to extricate his son once more, and as a preliminary step had himself already raised a large sum of money which it would much trouble him to pay; and he moreover, as he frequently said to Lord Kilcullen, would not and could not pay another penny for the same purpose, until he saw a tolerably sure prospect of being repaid out of his ward's fortune.
He was therefore painfully anxious on the subject; anxious not only that the matter should be arranged, but that it should be done at once. It was plain that Lord Kilcullen could not remain in London, for he would be arrested; the same thing would happen at Grey Abbey, if he were to remain there long without settling his affairs; and if he were once to escape his creditors by going abroad, there would be no such thing as getting him back again. Lord Cashel saw no good reason why there should be any delay; Harry Wyndham was dead above a month, and Fanny was evidently grieving more for the loss of her lover than that of her brother; she naturally felt alone in the world--and, as Lord Cashel thought, one young viscount would be just as good as another. The advantages, too, were much in favour of his son; he would one day be an earl, and possess Grey Abbey. So great an accession of grandeur, dignity, and rank could not but be, as the earl considered, very delightful to a sensible girl like his ward. The marriage, of course, needn't be much hurried; four or five months' time would do for that; he was only anxious that they should be engaged--that Lord Kilcullen should be absolutely accepted--Lord Ballindine finally rejected.
The earl certainly felt some scruples of conscience at the sacrifice he was making of his ward, and stronger still respecting his ward's fortune; but he appeased them with the reflection that if his son were a gambler, a _roué_, and a scamp, Lord Ballindine was probably just as bad; and that if the latter were to spend all Fanny's money there would be no chance of redemption; whereas he could at any rate settle on his wife a jointure, which would be a full compensation for the loss of her fortune, should she outlive her husband and father-in-law. Besides, he looked on Lord Kilcullen's faults as a father is generally inclined to look on those of a son, whom he had not entirely given up--whom he is still striving to redeem. He called his iniquitous vices, follies--his licentiousness, love of pleasure--his unprincipled expenditure and extravagance, a want of the knowledge of what money was: and his worst sin of all, because the one least likely to be abandoned, his positive, unyielding damning selfishness, he called "fashion"--the fashion of the young men of the day.
Poor Lord Cashel! he wished to be honest to his ward; and yet to save his son, and his own pocket at the same time, at her expense: he wished to be, in his own estimation, high-minded, honourable, and disinterested, and yet he could not resist the temptation to be generous to his own flesh and blood at the expense of another. The contest within him made him miserable; but the devil and mammon were too strong for him, particularly coming as they did, half hidden beneath the gloss of parental affection. There was little of the Roman about the earl, and he could not condemn his own son; so he fumed and fretted, and twisted himself about in the easy chair in his dingy book-room, and passed long hours in trying to persuade himself that it was for Fanny's advantage that he was going to make her Lady Kilcullen.
He might have saved himself all his anxiety. Fanny Wyndham had much too strong a mind--much too marked a character of her own, to be made Lady Anything by Lord Anybody. Lord Cashel might possibly prevent her from marrying Frank, especially as she had been weak enough, through ill-founded pique and anger, to lend him her name for dismissing him; but neither he nor anyone else could make her accept one man, while she loved another, and while that other was unmarried.
Since the interview between Fanny and her uncle and aunt, which has been recorded, she had been nearly as uncomfortable as Lord Cashel, and she had, to a certain extent, made the whole household as much so as herself. Not that there was anything of the kill-joy character in Fanny's composition; but that the natural disposition of Grey Abbey and all belonging to it was to be dull, solemn, slow, and respectable. Fanny alone had ever given any life to the place, or made the house tolerable; and her secession to the ranks of the sombre crew was therefore the more remarked. If Fanny moped, all Grey Abbey might figuratively be said to hang down its head. Lady Cashel was, in every sense of the words, continually wrapped up in wools and worsteds. The earl was always equally ponderous, and the specific gravity of Lady Selina could not be calculated. It was beyond the power of figures, even in algebraic denominations, to describe her moral weight.
And now Fanny did mope, and Grey Abbey was triste [43] indeed. Griffiths in my lady's boudoir rolled and unrolled those huge white bundles of mysterious fleecy hosiery with more than usually slow and unbroken perseverance. My lady herself bewailed the fermentation among the jam-pots with a voice that did more than whine, it was almost funereal. As my lord went from breakfast-room to book-room, from book-room to dressing-room, and from dressing-room to dining-room, his footsteps creaked with a sound more deadly than that of a death-watch. The book-room itself had caught a darker gloom; the backs of the books seemed to have lost their gilding, and the mahogany furniture its French polish. There, like a god, Lord Cashel sate alone, throned amid clouds of awful dulness, ruling the world of nothingness around by the silent solemnity of his inertia.
[FOOTNOTE 43: triste--(French) sad, mournful, dull, dreary] Lady Selina was always useful, but with a solid, slow activity, a dignified intensity of heavy perseverance, which made her perhaps more intolerable than her father. She was like some old coaches which we remember--very sure, very respectable; but so tedious, so monotonous, so heavy in their motion, that a man with a spark of mercury in his composition would prefer any danger from a faster vehicle to their horrid, weary, murderous, slow security. Lady Selina from day to day performed her duties in a most uncompromising manner; she knew what was due to her position, and from it, and exacted and performed accordingly with a stiff, steady propriety which made her an awful if not a hateful creature. One of her daily duties, and one for the performance of which she had unfortunately ample opportunity, was the consolation of Fanny under her troubles. Poor Fanny! how great an aggravation was this to her other miseries! For a considerable time Lady Selma had known nothing of the true cause of Fanny's gloom; for though the two cousins were good friends, as far as Lady Selina was capable of admitting so human a frailty as friendship, still Fanny could not bring herself to make a confidante of her. Her kind, stupid, unpretending old aunt was a much better person to talk to, even though she did arch her eyebrows, and shake her head when Lord Ballindine's name was mentioned, and assure her niece that though she had always liked him herself, he could not be good for much, because Lord Kilcullen had said so. But Fanny could not well dissemble; she was tormented by Lady Selina's condolements, and recommendations of Gibbon, her encomiums on industry, and anathemas against idleness; she was so often reminded that weeping would not bring back her brother, nor inactive reflection make his fate less certain, that at last she made her monitor understand that it was about Lord Ballindine's fate that she was anxious, and that it was his coming back which might be effected by weeping--or other measures.
Lady Selina was shocked by such feminine, girlish weakness, such want of dignity and character, such forgetfulness, as she said to Fanny, of what was due to her own position. Lady Selina was herself unmarried, and not likely to marry; and why had she maintained her virgin state, and foregone the blessings of love and matrimony? Because, as she often said to herself, and occasionally said to Fanny, she would not step down from the lofty pedestal on which it had pleased fortune and birth to place her.
She learned, however, by degrees, to forgive, though she couldn't approve, Fanny's weakness; she remembered that it was a very different thing to be an earl's niece and an earl's daughter, and that the same conduct could not be expected from Fanny Wyndham and Lady Selina Grey.
The two were sitting together, in one of the Grey Abbey drawing-rooms, about the middle of April. Fanny had that morning again been talking to her guardian on the subject nearest to her heart, and had nearly distracted him by begging him to take steps to make Frank understand that a renewal of his visits at Grey Abbey would not be ill received. Lord Cashel at first tried to frighten her out of her project by silence, frowns, and looks: but not finding himself successful, he commenced a long oration, in which he broke down, or rather, which he had to cut up into sundry short speeches; in which he endeavoured to make it appear that Lord Ballindine's expulsion had originated with Fanny herself, and that, banished or not banished, the less Fanny had to do with him the better. His ward, however, declared, in rather a tempestuous manner, that if she could not see him at Grey Abbey she would see him elsewhere; and his lordship was obliged to capitulate by promising that if Frank were unmarried in twelve months' time, and Fanny should then still be of the same mind, he would consent to the match and use his influence to bring it about. This by no means satisfied Fanny, but it was all that the earl would say, and she had now to consider whether she would accept those terms or act for herself. Had she had any idea what steps she could with propriety take in opposition to the earl, she would have withdrawn herself and her fortune from his house and hands, without any scruples of conscience. But what was she to do? She couldn't write to her lover and ask him to come back to her! --Whither could she go? She couldn't well set up house for herself.
Lady Selina was bending over her writing-desk, and penning most decorous notes, with a precision of calligraphy which it was painful to witness. She was writing orders to Dublin tradesmen, and each order might have been printed in the Complete Letter-Writer, as a specimen of the manner in which young ladies should address such correspondents. Fanny had a volume of French poetry in her hand, but had it been Greek prose it would have given her equal occupation and amusement. It had been in her hands half-an-hour, and she had not read a line.
"Fanny," said Lady Selina, raising up her thin red spiral tresses from her desk, and speaking in a firm, decided tone, as if well assured of the importance of the question she was going to put; "don't you want some things from Ellis's?"
"From where, Selina?" said Fanny, slightly starting.
"From Ellis's," repeated Lady Selina.
"Oh, the man in Grafton Street. --No, thank you." And Fanny returned to her thoughts.
"Surely you do, Fanny," said her ladyship. "I'm sure you want black crape; you were saying so on Friday last."
"Was I? --Yes; I think I do. It'll do another time, Selina; never mind now."
"You had better have it in the parcel he will send to-morrow; if you'll give me the pattern and tell me how much you want, I'll write for it."
"Thank you, Selina. You're very kind, but I won't mind it to-day."
"How very foolish of you, Fanny; you know you want it, and then you'll be annoyed about it. You'd better let me order it with the other things."
"Very well, dear: order it then for me."
"How much will you want? you must send the pattern too, you know."
"Indeed, Selina, I don't care about having it at all; I can do very well without it, so don't mind troubling yourself."
"How very ridiculous, Fanny! You know you want black crape--and you must get it from Ellis's." Lady Selina paused for a reply, and then added, in a voice of sorrowful rebuke, "It's to save yourself the trouble of sending Jane for the pattern."
"Well, Selina, perhaps it is. Don't bother me about it now, there's a dear. I'll be more myself by-and-by; but indeed, indeed, I'm neither well nor happy now."
"Not well, Fanny! What ails you?"
"Oh, nothing ails me; that is, nothing in the doctor's way. I didn't mean I was ill."
"You said you weren't well; and people usually mean by that, that they are ill."
"But I didn't mean it," said Fanny, becoming almost irritated, "I only meant--" and she paused and did not finish her sentence.
Lady Selina wiped her pen, in her scarlet embroidered pen-wiper, closed the lid of her patent inkstand, folded a piece of blotting-paper over the note she was writing, pushed back the ruddy ringlets from her contemplative forehead, gave a slight sigh, and turned herself towards her cousin, with the purpose of commencing a vigorous lecture and cross-examination, by which she hoped to exorcise the spirit of lamentation from Fanny's breast, and restore her to a healthful activity in the performance of this world's duties. Fanny felt what was coming; she could not fly; so she closed her book and her eyes, and prepared herself for endurance.
"Fanny," said Lady Selina, in a voice which was intended to be both severe and sorrowful, "you are giving way to very foolish feelings in a very foolish way; you are preparing great unhappiness for yourself, and allowing your mind to waste itself in uncontrolled sorrow in a manner--in a manner which cannot but be ruinously injurious. My dear Fanny, why don't you do something? --why don't you occupy yourself? You've given up your work; you've given up your music; you've given up everything in the shape of reading; how long, Fanny, will you go on in this sad manner?" Lady Selina paused, but, as Fanny did not immediately reply, she continued her speech "I've begged you to go on with your reading, because nothing but mental employment will restore your mind to its proper tone. I'm sure I've brought you the second volume of Gibbon twenty times, but I don't believe you've read a chapter this month back. How long will you allow yourself to go on in this sad manner?"
"Not long, Selina. As you say, I'm sad enough."
"But is it becoming in you, Fanny, to grieve in this way for a man whom you yourself rejected because he was unworthy of you?"
"Selina, I've told you before that such was not the case. I believe him to be perfectly worthy of me, and of any one much my superior too."
"But you did reject him, Fanny: you bade papa tell him to discontinue his visits--didn't you?"
Fanny felt that her cousin was taking an unfair advantage in throwing thus in her teeth her own momentary folly in having been partly persuaded, partly piqued, into quarrelling with her lover; and she resented it as such. "If I did," she said, somewhat angrily, "it does not make my grief any lighter, to know that I brought it on myself."
"No, Fanny; but it should show you that the loss for which you grieve is past recovery. Sorrow, for which there is no cure, should cease to be grieved for, at any rate openly. If Lord Ballindine were to die you would not allow his death to doom you to perpetual sighs, and perpetual inactivity. No; you'd then know that grief was hopeless, and you'd recover."
"But Lord Ballindine is not dead," said Fanny.
"Ah! that's just the point," continued her ladyship; "he should be dead to you; to you he should now be just the same as though he were in his grave. You loved him some time since, and accepted him; but you found your love misplaced,--unreturned, or at any rate coldly returned. Though you loved him, you passed a deliberate judgment on him, and wisely rejected him. Having done so, his name should not be on your lips; his form and figure should be forgotten. No thoughts of him should sully your mind, no love for him should be permitted to rest in your heart; it should be rooted out, whatever the exertion may cost you."
"Selina, I believe you have no heart yourself."
"Perhaps as much as yourself, Fanny. I've heard of some people who were said to be all heart; I flatter myself I am not one of them. I trust I have some mind, to regulate my heart; and some conscience, to prevent my sacrificing my duties for the sake of my heart."
"If you knew," said Fanny, "the meaning of what love was, you'd know that it cannot be given up in a moment, as you suppose; rooted out, as you choose to call it. But, to tell you the truth, Selina, I don't choose to root it out. I gave my word to Frank not twelve months since, and that with the consent of every one belonging to me. I owned that I loved him, and solemnly assured him I would always do so. I cannot, and I ought not, and I will not break my word. You would think of nothing but what you call your own dignity; I will not give up my own happiness, and, I firmly believe his, too, for anything so empty."
"Don't be angry with me, Fanny," said Lady Selina; "my regard for your dignity arises only from my affection for you. I should be sorry to see you lessen yourself in the eyes of those around you. You must remember that you cannot act as another girl might, whose position was less exalted. Miss O'Joscelyn might cry for her lost lover till she got him back again, or got another; and no one would be the wiser, and she would not be the worse; but you cannot do that. Rank and station are in themselves benefits; but they require more rigid conduct, much more control over the feelings than is necessary in a humbler position. You should always remember, Fanny, that much is expected from those to whom much is given."
"And I'm to be miserable all my life because I'm not a parson's daughter, like Miss O'Joscelyn!"
"God forbid, Fanny! If you'd employ your time, engage your mind, and cease to think of Lord Ballindine, you'd soon cease to be miserable. Yes; though you might never again feel the happiness of loving, you might still be far from miserable."
"But I can't cease to think of him, Selina;--I won't even try."
"Then, Fanny, I truly pity you."
"No, Selina; it's I that pity you," said Fanny, roused to energy as different thoughts crowded to her mind. "You, who think more of your position as an earl's daughter--an aristocrat, than of your nature as a woman! Thank Heaven, I'm not a queen, to be driven to have other feelings than those of my sex. I do love Lord Ballindine, and if I had the power to cease to do so this moment, I'd sooner drown myself than exercise it."
"Then why were you weak enough to reject him?"
"Because I was a weak, wretched, foolish girl. I said it in a moment of passion, and my uncle acted on it at once, without giving me one minute for reflection--without allowing me one short hour to look into my own heart, and find how I was deceiving myself in thinking that I ought to part from him. I told Lord Cashel in the morning that I would give him up; and before I had time to think of what I had said, he had been here, and had been turned out of the house. Oh, Selina! it was very, very cruel in your father to take me at my word so shortly!" And Fanny hid her face in her handkerchief, and burst into tears.
"That's unfair, Fanny; it couldn't be cruel in him to do for you that which he would have done for his own daughter. He thought, and thinks, that Lord Ballindine would not make you happy."
"Why should he think so? --he'd no business to think so," sobbed Fanny through her tears.
"Who could have a business to think for you, if not your guardian?"
"Why didn't he think so then, before he encouraged me to receive him? It was because Frank wouldn't do just what he was bid; it was because he wouldn't become stiff, and solemn, and grave like--like--" Fanny was going to make a comparison that would not have been flattering either to Lady Selina or to her father, but she did not quite forget herself, and stopped short without expressing the likeness. "Had he spoken against him at first, I would have obeyed; but I will not destroy myself now for his prejudices." And Fanny buried her face among the pillows of the sofa, and sobbed aloud.
Lady Selina walked over to the sofa, and stood at the head of it bending over her cousin. She wished to say something to soothe and comfort her, but did not know how; there was nothing soothing or comforting in her nature, nothing soft in her voice; her manner was repulsive, and almost unfeeling; and yet she was not unfeeling. She loved Fanny as warmly as she was capable of loving; she would have made almost any personal sacrifice to save her cousin from grief; she would, were it possible, have borne her sorrows herself; but she could not unbend; she could not sit down by Fanny's side, and, taking her hand, say soft and soothing things; she could not make her grief easier by expressing hope for the future or consolation for the past. She would have felt that she was compromising truth by giving hope, and dignity by uttering consolation for the loss of that which she considered better lost than retained. Lady Selina's only recipe was endurance and occupation. And at any rate, she practised what she preached; she was never idle, and she never complained.
As she saw Fanny's grief, and heard her sobs, she at first thought that in mercy she should now give up the subject of the conversation; but then she reflected that such mercy might be the greatest cruelty, and that the truest kindness would be to prove to Fanny the hopelessness of her passion.
"But, Fanny," she said, when the other's tears were a little subsided, "it's no use either saying or thinking impossibilities. What are you to do? You surely will not willingly continue to indulge a hopeless passion?"
"Selina, you'll drive me mad, if you go on! Let me have my own way."
"But, Fanny, if your own way's a bad way? Surely you won't refuse to listen to reason? You must know that what I say is only from my affection. I want you to look before you; I want you to summon courage to look forward; and then I'm sure your common sense will tell you that Lord Ballindine can never be anything to you."
"Look here, Selina," and Fanny rose, and wiped her eyes, and somewhat composed her ruffled hair, which she shook back from her face and forehead, as she endeavoured to repress the palpitation which had followed her tears; "I have looked forward, and I have determined what I mean to do. It was your father who brought me to this, by forcing me into a childish quarrel with the man I love. I have implored him, almost on my knees, to invite Lord Ballindine again to Grey Abbey: he has refused to do so, at any rate for twelve months--" "And has he consented to ask him at the end of twelve months?" asked Selina, much astonished, and, to tell the truth, considerably shocked at this instance of what she considered her father's weakness.
"He might as well have said twelve years," replied Fanny. "How can I, how can any one, suppose that he should remain single for my sake for twelve months, after being repelled without a cause, or without a word of explanation; without even seeing me;--turned out of the house, and insulted in every way? No; whatever he might do, I will not wait twelve months. I'll ask Lord Cashel once again, and then--" Fanny paused for a moment, to consider in what words she would finish her declaration.
"Well, Fanny," said Selina, waiting with eager expectation for Fanny's final declaration; for she expected to hear her say that she would drown herself, or lock herself up for ever, or do something equally absurd.
"Then," continued Fanny,--and a deep blush covered her face as she spoke, "I will write to Lord Ballindine, and tell him that I am still his own if he chooses to take me."
"Oh, Fanny! do not say such a horrid thing. Write to a man, and beg him to accept you? No, Fanny; I know you too well, at any rate, to believe that you'll do that."
"Indeed, indeed, I will."
"Then you'll disgrace yourself for ever. Oh, Fanny! though my heart were breaking, though I knew I were dying for very love, I'd sooner have it break, I'd sooner die at once, than disgrace my sex by becoming a suppliant to a man."
"Disgrace, Selina! --and am I not now disgraced? Have I not given him my solemn word? Have I not pledged myself to him as his wife? Have I not sworn to him a hundred times that my heart was all his own? Have I not suffered those caresses which would have been disgraceful had I not looked on myself as almost already his bride? And is it no disgrace, after that, to break my word? --to throw him aside like a glove that wouldn't fit? --to treat him as a servant that wouldn't suit me? --to send him a contemptuous message to be gone? --and so, to forget him, that I might lay myself out for the addresses and admiration of another? Could any conduct be worse than that? --any disgrace deeper? Oh, Selina! I shudder as I think of it. Could I ever bring my lips to own affection for another, without being overwhelmed with shame and disgrace? And then, that the world should say that I had accepted, and rejoiced in his love when I was poor, and rejected it with scorn when I was rich! No; I would sooner--ten thousand times sooner my uncle should do it for me! but if he will not write to Frank, I will. And though my hand will shake, and my face will be flushed as I do so, I shall never think that I have disgraced myself."
"And if, Fanny--if, after that he refuses you?"
Fanny was still standing, and she remained so for a moment or two, meditating her reply, and then she answered:-- "Should he do so, then I have the alternative which you say you would prefer; then I will endeavour to look forward to a broken heart, and death, without a complaint and without tears. Then, Selina," and she tried to smile through the tears which were again running down her cheeks, "I'll come to you, and endeavour to borrow your stoic endurance, and patient industry;" and, as she said so, she walked to the door and escaped, before Lady Selina had time to reply.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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29
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THE COUNTESS OF CASHEL IN TROUBLE
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After considerable negotiation between the father and the son, the time was fixed for Lord Kilcullen's arrival at Grey Abbey. The earl tried much to accelerate it, and the viscount was equally anxious to stave off the evil day; but at last it was arranged that, on the 3rd of April, he was to make his appearance, and that he should commence his wooing as soon as possible after that day.
When this was absolutely fixed, Lord Cashel paid a visit to his countess, in her boudoir, to inform her of the circumstance, and prepare her for the expected guest. He did not, however, say a word of the purport of his son's visit. He had, at one time, thought of telling the old lady all about it, and bespeaking her influence with Fanny for the furtherance of his plan; but, on reconsideration, he reflected that his wife was not the person to be trusted with any intrigue. So he merely told her that Lord Kilcullen would be at Grey Abbey in five days; that he would probably remain at home a long time; that, as he was giving up his London vices and extravagances, and going to reside at Grey Abbey, he wished that the house should be made as pleasant for him as possible; that a set of friends, relatives, and acquaintances should be asked to come and stay there; and, in short, that Lord Kilcullen, having been a truly prodigal son, should have a fatted calf prepared for his arrival.
All this flurried and rejoiced, terrified and excited my lady exceedingly. In the first place it was so truly delightful that her son should turn good and proper, and careful and decorous, just at the right time of life; so exactly the thing that ought to happen. Of course young noblemen were extravagant, and wicked, and lascivious, habitual breakers of the commandments, and self-idolators; it was their nature. In Lady Cashel's thoughts on the education of young men, these evils were ranked with the measles and hooping cough; it was well that they should be gone through and be done with early in life. She had a kind of hazy idea that an opera-dancer and a gambling club were indispensable in fitting a young aristocrat for his future career; and I doubt whether she would not have agreed to the expediency of inoculating a son of hers with these ailments in a mild degree--vaccinating him as it were with dissipation, in order that he might not catch the disease late in life in a violent and fatal form. She had not therefore made herself unhappy about her son for a few years after his first entrance on a life in London, but latterly she had begun to be a little uneasy. Tidings of the great amount of his debts reached even her ears; and, moreover, it was nearly time that he should reform and settle down. During the last twelve months she had remarked fully twelve times, to Griffiths, that she wondered when Kilcullen would marry? --and she had even twice asked her husband, whether he didn't think that such a circumstance would be advantageous. She was therefore much rejoiced to hear that her son was coming to live at home. But then, why was it so sudden? It was quite proper that the house should be made a little gay for his reception; that he shouldn't be expected to spend his evenings with no other society than that of his father and mother, his sister and his cousin; but how was she to get the house ready for the people, and the people ready for the house, at so very short a notice? --What trouble, also, it would be to her! --Neither she nor Griffiths would know another moment's rest; besides--and the thought nearly drove her into hysterics,--where was she to get a new cook?
However, she promised her husband to do her best. She received from him a list of people to be invited, and, merely stipulating that she shouldn't be required to ask any one except the parson of the parish under a week, undertook to make the place as bearable as possible to so fastidious and distinguished a person as her own son.
Her first confidante was, of course, Griffiths; and, with her assistance, the wool and the worsted, and the knitting-needles, the unfinished vallances and interminable yards of fringe, were put up and rolled out of the way; and it was then agreed that a council should be held, to which her ladyship proposed to invite Lady Selina and Fanny. Griffiths, however, advanced an opinion that the latter was at present too lack-a-daisical to be of any use in such a matter, and strengthened her argument by asserting that Miss Wyndham had of late been quite mumchance [44]. Lady Cashel was at first rather inclined to insist on her niece being called to the council, but Griffiths's eloquence was too strong, and her judgment too undoubted; so Fanny was left undisturbed, and Lady Selina alone summoned to join the aged female senators of Grey Abbey.
[FOOTNOTE 44: mumchance--silent and idle] "Selina," said her ladyship, as soon as her daughter was seated on the sofa opposite to her mother's easy chair, while Griffiths, having shut the door, had, according to custom, sat herself down on her own soft-bottomed chair, on the further side of the little table that always stood at the countess's right hand. "Selina, what do you think your father tells me?"
Lady Selina couldn't think, and declined guessing; for, as she remarked, guessing was a loss of time, and she never guessed right.
"Adolphus is coming home on Tuesday."
"Adolphus! why it's not a month since he was here."
"And he's not coming only for a visit; he's coming to stay here; from what your father says, I suppose he'll stay here the greater part of the summer."
"What, stay at Grey Abbey all May and June?" said Lady Selina, evidently discrediting so unlikely a story, and thinking it all but impossible that her brother should immure himself at Grey Abbey during the London season.
"It's true, my lady," said Griffiths, oracularly; as if her word were necessary to place the countess's statement beyond doubt.
"Yes," continued Lady Cashel; "and he has given up all his establishment in London--his horses, and clubs, and the opera, and all that. He'll go into Parliament, I dare say, now, for the county; at any rate he's coming to live at home here for the summer."
"And has he sold all his horses?" asked Lady Selina.
"If he's not done it, he's doing it," said the countess. "I declare I'm delighted with him; it shows such proper feeling. I always knew he would; I was sure that when the time came for doing it, Adolphus would not forget what was due to himself and to his family."
"If what you say is true, mamma, he's going to be married."
"That's just what I was thinking, my lady," said Griffiths. "When her ladyship first told me all about it,--how his lordship was coming down to live regular and decorous among his own people, and that he was turning his back upon his pleasures and iniquities, thinks I to myself there'll be wedding favours coming soon to Grey Abbey."
"If it is so, Selina, your father didn't say anything to me about it," said the countess, somewhat additionally flustered by the importance of the last suggestion; "and if he'd even guessed such a thing, I'm sure he'd have mentioned it."
"It mightn't be quite fixed, you know, mamma: but if Adolphus is doing as you say, you may be sure he's either engaged, or thinking of becoming so."
"Well, my dear, I'm sure I wish it may be so; only I own I'd like to know, because it makes a difference, as to the people he'd like to meet, you know. I'm sure nothing would delight me so much as to receive Adolphus's wife. Of course she'd always be welcome to lie in here--indeed it'd be the fittest place. But we should be dreadfully put about, eh, Griffiths?"
"Why, we should, my lady; but, to my mind, this would be the only most proper place for my lord's heir to be born in. If the mother and child couldn't have the best of minding here, where could they?"
"Of course, Griffiths; and we wouldn't mind the trouble, on such an occasion. I think the south room would be the best, because of the dressing-room being such a good size, and neither of the fireplaces smoking, you know."
"Well, I don't doubt but it would, my lady; only the blue room is nearer to your ladyship here, and in course your ladyship would choose to be in and out."
And visions of caudle cups, cradles, and monthly nurses, floated over Lady Cashel's brain, and gave her a kind of dreamy feel that the world was going to begin again with her.
"But, mamma, is Adolphus really to be here on Tuesday?" said Lady Selina, recalling the two old women from their attendance on the unborn, to the necessities of the present generation.
"Indeed he is, my dear, and that's what I sent for you for. Your papa wishes to have a good deal of company here to meet your brother; and indeed it's only reasonable, for of course this place would be very dull for him, if there was nobody here but ourselves--and he's always used to see so many people; but the worst is, it's all to be done at once, and you know there'll be so much to be got through before we'll be ready for a house full of company,--things to be got from Dublin, and the people to be asked. And then, Selina," and her ladyship almost wept as the latter came to her great final difficulty--"What are we to do about a cook? --Richards'll never do; Griffiths says she won't even do for ourselves, as it is."
"Indeed she won't, my lady; it was only impudence in her coming to such a place at all. --She'd never be able to send a dinner up for eighteen or twenty."
"What are we to do, Griffiths? What can have become of all the cooks? --I'm sure there used to be cooks enough when I was first married."
"Well, my lady, I think they must be all gone to England, those that are any good; but I don't know what's come to the servants altogether; as your ladyship says, they're quite altered for the worse since we were young."
"But, mamma," said Lady Selina, "you're not going to ask people here just immediately, are you?"
"Directly, my dear; your papa wishes it done at once. We're to have a dinner-party this day week--that'll be Thursday; and we'll get as many of the people as we can to stay afterwards; and we'll get the O'Joscelyns to come on Wednesday, just to make the table look not quite so bare, and I want you to write the notes at once. There'll be a great many things to be got from Dublin too."
"It's very soon after poor Harry Wyndham's death, to be receiving company," said Lady Selina, solemnly. "Really, mamma, I don't think it will be treating Fanny well to be asking all these people so soon. The O'Joscelyns, or the Fitzgeralds, are all very well--just our own near neighbours; but don't you think, mamma, it's rather too soon to be asking a house-full of strange people?"
"Well, my love, I was thinking so, and I mentioned it to your father; but he said that poor Harry had been dead a month now--and that's true, you know--and that people don't think so much now about those kind of things as they used to; and that's true too, I believe."
"Indeed you may say that, my lady," interposed Griffiths. "I remember when bombazines used to be worn three full months for an uncle or cousin, and now they're hardly ever worn at all for the like, except in cases where the brother or sister of him or her as is dead may be stopping in the house, and then only for a month: and they were always worn the full six months for a brother or sister, and sometimes the twelve months round. Your aunt, Lady Charlotte, my lady, wore hers the full twelve months, when your uncle, Lord Frederick, was shot by Sir Patrick O'Donnel; and now they very seldom, never, I may say, wear them the six months! --Indeed, I think mourning is going out altogether; and I'm very sorry for it, for it's a very decent, proper sort of thing; at least, such was always my humble opinion, my lady."
"Well; but what I was saying is," continued the countess, "that what would be thought strange a few years ago, isn't thought at all so now; and though I'm sure, Selina, I wouldn't like to do anything that looked unkind to Fanny, I really don't see how we can help it, as your father makes such a point of it."
"I can't say I think it's right, mamma, for I don't. But if you and papa do, of course I've nothing further to say."
"Well, my love, I don't know that I do exactly think it's right; and I'm sure it's not my wish to be having people, especially when I don't know where on earth to turn for a cook. But what can we do, my dear? Adolphus wouldn't stay the third night here, I'm sure, if there was nobody to amuse him; and you wouldn't have him turned out of the house, would you?" " _I_ have him turned out, mamma? God forbid! I'd sooner he should be here than anywhere, for here he must be out of harm's way; but still I think that if he comes to a house of mourning, he might, for a short time, submit to put up with its decent tranquillity."
"Selina," said the mother, pettishly, "I really thought you'd help me when I've so much to trouble and vex me--and not make any fresh difficulties. How can I help it? --If your father says the people are to come, I can't say I won't let them in. I hope you won't make Fanny think I'm doing it from disrespect to her. I'm sure I wouldn't have a soul here for a twelvemonth, on my own account."
"I'm sure Miss Wyndham won't think any such thing, my lady," said Griffiths; "will she, Lady Selina? --Indeed, I don't think she'll matter it one pin."
"Indeed, Selina, I don't think she will," said the countess; and then she half whispered to her daughter. "Poor Fanny! it's not about her brother she's grieving; it's that horrid man, Ballindine. She sent him away, and now she wants to have him back. I really think a little company will be the best thing to bring her to herself again." There was a little degree of humbug in this whisper, for her ladyship meant her daughter to understand that she wouldn't speak aloud about Fanny's love-affair before Griffiths; and yet she had spent many a half hour talking to her factotum on that very subject. Indeed, what subject was there of any interest to Lady Cashel on which she did not talk to Griffiths!
"Well, mamma," said Lady Selina, dutifully, "I'll not say another word about it; only let me know what you want me to do, and I'll do it. Who is it you mean to ask?"
"Why, first of all, there's the Fitzgeralds: your father thinks that Lord and Lady George would come for a week or so, and you know the girls have been long talking of coming to Grey Abbey--these two years I believe, and more."
"The girls will come, I dare say, mamma; though I don't exactly think they're the sort of people who will amuse Adolphus; but I don't think Lord George or Lady George will sleep away from home. We can ask them, however; Mountains is only five miles from here, and I'm sure they'll go back after dinner."
"Well, my dear, if they will, they must, and I can't help it; only I must say it'll be very ill-natured of them. I'm sure it's a long time since they were asked to stay here."
"As you say, mamma, at any rate we can ask them. And who comes next?"
"Why your father has put down the Swinburn people next; though I'm sure I don't know how they are to come so far."
"Why, mamma, the colonel is a martyr to the gout!"
"Yes, my lady," said Griffiths, "and Mrs. Ellison is worse again, with rheumatics. There would be nothing to do, the whole time, but nurse the two of them."
"Never mind, Griffiths; you'll not have to nurse them, so you needn't be so ill-natured."
"Me, ill-natured, my lady? I'm sure I begs pardon, but I didn't mean nothing ill-natured; besides, Mrs. Ellison was always a very nice lady to me, and I'm sure I'd be happy to nurse her, if she wanted it; only that, as in duty bound, I've your ladyship to look to first, and so couldn't spare time very well for nursing any one."
"Of course you couldn't, Griffiths; but, Selina, at any rate you must ask the Ellisons: your papa thinks a great deal about the colonel--he has so much influence in the county, and Adolphus will very likely stand, now. Your papa and the colonel were members together for the county more than forty years since."
"Well, mamma, I'll write Mrs. Ellison. Shall I say for a week or ten days?"
"Say for ten days or a fortnight, and then perhaps they'll stay a week. Then there's the Bishop of Maryborough, and Mrs. Moore. I'm sure Adolphus will be glad to meet the bishop, for it was he that christened him."
"Very well, mamma, I'll write to Mrs. Moore. I suppose the bishop is in Dublin at present?"
"Yes, my dear, I believe so. There can't be anything to prevent their coming."
"Only that he's the managing man on the Education Board, and he's giving up his time very much to that at present. I dare say he'll come, but he won't stay long."
"Well, Selina, if he won't, I can't help it; and I'm sure, now I think about the cook, I don't see how we're to expect anybody to stay. What am I to do, Griffiths, about that horrid woman?"
"I'll tell you what I was thinking, my lady; only I don't know whether your ladyship would like it, either, and if you didn't you could easily get rid of him when all these people are gone."
"Get rid of who?"
"I was going to say, my lady--if your ladyship would consent to have a man cook for a time, just to try."
"Then I never will, Griffiths: there'd be no peace in the house with him!"
"Well, your ladyship knows best, in course; only if you thought well of trying it, of course you needn't keep the man; and I know there's Murray in Dublin, that was cook so many years to old Lord Galway. I know he's to be heard of at the hotel in Grafton Street."
"I can't bear the thoughts of a man cook, Griffiths: I'd sooner have three women cooks, and I'm sure one's enough to plague anybody."
"But none's worse, my lady," said Griffiths.
"You needn't tell me that. I wonder, Selina, if I were to write to my sister, whether she could send me over anything that would answer?"
"What, from London, my lady?" answered Griffiths--"You'd find a London woman cook sent over in that way twice worse than any man: she'd be all airs and graces. If your ladyship thought well of thinking about Murray, Richards would do very well under him: she's a decent poor creature, poor woman--only she certainly is not a cook that'd suit for such a house as this; and it was only impudence her thinking to attempt it."
"But, mamma," said Lady Selina, "do let me know to whom I am to write, and then you and Griffiths can settle about the cook afterwards; the time is so very short that I ought not to lose a post."
The poor countess threw herself back in her easy chair, the picture of despair. Oh, how much preferable were rolls of worsted and yards of netting, to the toils and turmoil of preparing for, and entertaining company! She was already nearly overcome by the former: she didn't dare to look forward to the miseries of the latter. She already began to feel the ill effects of her son's reformation, and to wish that it had been postponed just for a month or two, till she was a little more settled.
"Well, mamma," said Lady Selina, as undisturbed and calm as ever, and as resolved to do her duty without flinching, "shall we go on?"
The countess groaned and sighed--"There's the list there, Selina, which your father put down in pencil. You know the people as well as I do: just ask them all--" "But, mamma, I'm not to ask them all to stay here:--I suppose some are only to come to dinner? --the O'Joscelyns, and the Parchments?"
"Ask the O'Joscelyns for Wednesday and Thursday: the girls might as well stay and sleep here. But what's the good of writing to them? --can't you drive over to the Parsonage and settle it all there? --you do nothing but make difficulties, Selina, and my head's racking."
Lady Selina sate silent for a short time, conning the list, and endeavouring to see her way through the labyrinth of difficulties which was before her, without further trouble to her mother; while the countess leaned back, with her eyes closed, and her hands placed on the arms of her chair, as though she were endeavouring to get some repose, after the labour she had gone through. Her daughter, however, again disturbed her.
"Mamma," she said, trying by the solemnity of her tone to impress her mother with the absolute necessity she was under of again appealing to her upon the subject, "what _are_ we to do about young men?"
"About young men, my dear?"
"Yes, mamma: there'll be a house-full of young ladies--there's the Fitzgeralds--and Lady Louisa Pratt--and Miss Ellison--and the three O'Joscelyns--and not a single young man, except Mr O'Joscelyn's curate!"
"Well, my dear, I'm sure Mr. Hill's a very nice young man."
"So he is, mamma; a very good young man; but he won't do to amuse such a quantity of girls. If there were only one or two he'd do very well; besides, I'm sure Adolphus won't like it."
"Why; won't he talk to the young ladies? --I'm sure he was always fond of ladies' society."
"I tell you, mamma, it won't do. There'll be the bishop and two other clergymen, and old Colonel Ellison, who has always got the gout, and Lord George, if he comes--and I'm sure he won't. If you want to make a pleasant party for Adolphus, you must get some young men; besides, you can't ask all those girls, and have nobody to dance with them or talk to them."
"I'm sure, my dear, I don't know what you're to do. I don't know any young men except Mr. Hill; and there's that young Mr. Grundy, who lives in Dublin. I promised his aunt to be civil to him: can't you ask him down?"
"He was here before, mamma, and I don't think he liked it. I'm sure we didn't. He didn't speak a word the whole day he was here. He's not at all the person to suit Adolphus."
"Then, my dear, you _must_ go to your papa, and ask him: it's quite clear I can't make young men. I remember, years ago, there always used to be too many of them, and I don't know where they're all gone to. At any rate, when they do come, there'll be nothing for them to eat," and Lady Cashel again fell back upon her deficiencies in the kitchen establishment.
Lady Selina saw that nothing more could be obtained from her mother, no further intelligence as regarded the embryo party. The whole burden was to lie on her shoulders, and very heavy she felt it. As far as concerned herself, she had no particular wish for one kind of guest more than another: it was not for herself that she wanted young men; she knew that at any rate there were none within reach whom she could condescend to notice save as her father's guests; there could be no one there whose presence could be to her of any interest: the gouty colonel, and the worthy bishop, would be as agreeable to her as any other men that would now be likely to visit Grey Abbey. But Lady Selina felt a real desire that others in the house might be happy while there. She was no flirt herself, nor had she ever been; it was not in her nature to be so. But though she herself might be contented to twaddle with old men, she knew that other girls would not. Yet it was not that she herself had no inward wish for that admiration which is desired by nearly every woman, or that she thought a married state was an unenviable one. No; she could have loved and loved truly, and could have devoted herself most scrupulously to the duties of a wife; but she had vainly and foolishly built up for herself a pedestal, and there she had placed herself; nor would she come down to stand on common earth, though Apollo had enticed her, unless he came with the coronet of a peer upon his brow.
She left her mother's boudoir, went down into the drawing-room, and there she wrote her notes of invitation, and her orders to the tradesmen; and then she went to her father, and consulted him on the difficult subject of young men. She suggested the Newbridge Barracks, where the dragoons were; and the Curragh, where perhaps some stray denizen of pleasure might be found, neither too bad for Grey Abbey, nor too good to be acceptable to Lord Kilcullen; and at last it was decided that a certain Captain Cokely, and Mat Tierney, should be asked. They were both acquaintances of Adolphus; and though Mat was not a young man, he was not very old, and was usually very gay.
So that matter was settled, and the invitations were sent off. The countess overcame her difficulty by consenting that Murray the man cook should be hired for a given time, with the distinct understanding that he was to take himself off with the rest of the guests, and so great was her ladyship's sense of the importance of the negotiation, that she absolutely despatched Griffiths to Dublin to arrange it, though thereby she was left two whole days in solitary misery at Grey Abbey; and had to go to bed, and get up, she really hardly knew how, with such assistance as Lady Selina's maid could give her.
When these things were all arranged, Selina told her cousin that Adolphus was coming home, and that a house full of company had been asked to meet him. She was afraid that Fanny would be annoyed and offended at being forced to go into company so soon after her brother's death, but such was not the case. She felt, herself, that her poor brother was not the cause of the grief that was near her heart; and she would not pretend what she didn't really feel.
"You were quite right, Selina," she said, smiling, "about the things you said yesterday I should want from Dublin: now, I shall want them; and, as I wouldn't accept of your good-natured offer, I must take the trouble of writing myself."
"If you like it, Fanny, I'll write for you," said Selina.
"Oh no, I'm not quite so idle as that"--and she also began her preparations for the expected festivities. Little did either of them think that she, Fanny Wyndham, was the sole cause of all the trouble which the household and neighbourhood were to undergo:--the fatigue of the countess; Griffiths's journey; the arrival of the dread man cook; Richards's indignation at being made subordinate to such authority; the bishop's desertion of the Education Board; the colonel's dangerous and precipitate consumption of colchicum; the quarrel between Lord and Lady George as to staying or not staying; the new dresses of the Miss O'Joscelyns, which their worthy father could so ill afford; and, above all, the confusion, misery, rage, and astonishment which attended Lord Kilcullen's unexpected retreat from London, in the middle of the summer. And all in vain!
How proud and satisfied Lord Ballindine might have been, had he been able to see all this, and could he have known how futile was every effort Lord Cashel could make to drive from Fanny Wyndham's heart the love she felt for him.
The invitations, however, were, generally speaking, accepted. The bishop and his wife would be most happy; the colonel would come if the gout would possibly allow; Lady George wrote a note to say they would be very happy to stay a few days, and Lord George wrote another soon after to say he was sorry, but that they must return the same evening. The O'Joscelyns would be delighted; Mat Tierney would be very proud; Captain Cokely would do himself the honour; and, last but not least, Mr. Murray would preside below stairs--for a serious consideration.
What a pity so much trouble should have been taken! They might all have stayed at home; for Fanny Wyndham will never become Lady Kilcullen.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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30
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LORD KILCULLEN OBEYS HIS FATHER
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On the appointed day, or rather on the night of the appointed day, Lord Kilcullen reached Grey Abbey; for it was about eleven o'clock when his travelling-phaëton rattled up to the door. He had been expected to dinner at seven, and the first attempts of Murray in the kitchens of Grey Abbey had been kept waiting for him till half-past eight; but in vain. At that hour the earl, black with ill-humour, ordered dinner; and remarked that he considered it criminal in any man to make an appointment, who was not sufficiently attached to veracity to keep it.
The evening was passed in moody silence. The countess was disappointed, for she always contrived to persuade herself that she was very anxious to see her son. Lady Selina was really vexed, and began to have her doubts as to her brother's coming at all: what was to be done, if it turned out that all the company had been invited for nothing? As to Fanny, though very indifferent to the subject of her cousin's coming, she was not at all in a state of mind to dissipate the sullenness which prevailed. The ladies went to bed early, the countess grumbling at her lot, in not being allowed to see her son, and her daughter and niece marching off with their respective candlesticks in solemn silence. The earl retired to his book-room soon afterwards; but he had not yet sat down, when the quick rattle of the wheels was heard upon the gravel before the house.
Lord Cashel walked out into the hall, prepared to meet his son in a befitting manner; that is, with a dignified austerity that could not fail to convey a rebuke even to his hardened heart. But he was balked in his purpose, for he found that Lord Kilcullen was not alone; Mat Tierney had come down with him. Kilcullen had met his friend in Dublin, and on learning that he also was bound for Grey Abbey on the day but one following, had persuaded him to accelerate his visit, had waited for him, and brought him down in his own carriage. The truth was, that Lord Kilcullen had thought that the shades of Grey Abbey would be too much for him, without some genial spirit to enlighten them: he was delighted to find that Mat Tierney was to be there, and was rejoiced to be able to convey him with him, as a sort of protection from his father's eloquence for the first two days of the visit.
"Lord Kilcullen, your mother and I--" began the father, intent on at once commenting on the iniquity of the late arrival; when he saw the figure of a very stout gentleman, amply wrapped up in travelling habiliments, follow his son into the inner hall.
"Tierney, my lord," said the son, "was good enough to come down with me. I found that he intended to be here to-morrow, and I told him you and my mother would be delighted to see him to-day instead."
The earl shook Mr. Tierney's hand, and told him how very welcome he was at all times, and especially at present--unexpected pleasures were always the most agreeable; and then the earl bustled about, and ordered supper and wine, and fussed about the bed-rooms, and performed the necessary rites of hospitality, and then went to bed, without having made one solemn speech to his son. So far, Lord Kilcullen had been successful in his manoeuvre; and he trusted that by making judicious use of Mat Tierney, he might be able to stave off the evil hour for at any rate a couple of days.
But he was mistaken. Lord Cashel was now too much in earnest to be put off his purpose; he had been made too painfully aware that his son's position was desperate, and that he must at once be saved by a desperate effort, or given over to utter ruin. And, to tell the truth, so heavy were the new debts of which he heard from day to day, so insurmountable seemed the difficulties, that he all but repented that he had not left him to his fate. The attempt, however, must again be made; he was there, in the house, and could not be turned out; but Lord Cashel determined that at any rate no time should be lost.
The two new arrivals made their appearance the next morning, greatly to Lady Cashel's delight; she was perfectly satisfied with her son's apology, and delighted to find that at any rate one of her expected guests would not fail her in her need. The breakfast went over pleasantly enough, and Kilcullen was asking Mat to accompany him into the stables, to see what novelties they should find there, when Lord Cashel spoiled the arrangement by saying, "Could you spare me half-an-hour in the bookroom first, Kilcullen?"
This request, of course, could not be refused; and the father and son walked off, leaving Mat Tierney to the charity of the ladies.
There was much less of flippant overbearing impudence now, about Lord Kilcullen, much less of arrogance and insult from the son towards the father, than there had been in the previous interview which has been recorded. He seemed to be somewhat in dread, to be cowed, and ill at ease; he tried, however, to assume his usual manner, and followed his father into the book-room with an affected air of indifference, which very ill concealed his real feelings.
"Kilcullen," began the earl, "I was very sorry to see Tierney with you last night. It would have been much better that we should have been alone together, at any rate for one morning. I suppose you are aware that there is a great deal to be talked over between us?"
"I suppose there is," said the son; "but I couldn't well help bringing the man, when he told me he was coming here."
"He didn't ask you to bring him, I suppose? --but we will not talk about that. Will you do me the favour to inform me what your present plans are?"
"My present plans, my lord? Indeed, I've no plans! --It's a long time since I had a plan of my own. I am, however, prepared to acquiesce entirely in any which you may propose. I have come quite prepared to throw at Miss Wyndham's feet myself and my fortune."
"And do you expect her to accept you?"
"You said she would, my lord: so I have taken that for granted. I, at any rate, will ask her; if she refuses me, your lordship will perhaps be able to persuade her to a measure so evidently beneficial to all parties."
"The persuading must be with yourself; but if you suppose you can carry her with a high hand, without giving yourself the trouble to try to please her, you are very much mistaken. If you think she'll accept you merely because you ask her, you might save yourself the trouble, and as well return to London at once."
"Just as you please, my lord; but I thought I came in obedience to your express wishes."
"So you did; but, to tell you the truth--your manner in coming is very different from what I would wish it to be. Your--" "Did you want me to crawl here on my hands and knees?"
"I wanted you to come, Kilcullen, with some sense of what you owe to those who are endeavouring to rescue you from ruin: with some feeling of, at any rate, sorrow for the mad extravagance of your past career. Instead of that, you come gay, reckless, and unconcerned as ever; you pick up the first jovial companion you meet, and with him disturb the house at a most unseasonable hour. You are totally regardless of the appointments you make; and plainly show, that as you come here solely for your own pleasure, you consider it needless to consult my wishes or my comfort. Are you aware that you kept your mother and myself two hours waiting for dinner yesterday?"
The pathos with which Lord Cashel terminated his speech--and it was one the thrilling effect of which he intended to be overwhelming--almost restored Lord Kilcullen to his accustomed effrontery.
"My lord," he said, "I did not consider myself of sufficient importance to have delayed your dinner ten minutes."
"I have always endeavoured, Kilcullen, to show the same respect to you in my house, which my father showed to me in his; but you do not allow me the opportunity. But let that pass; we have more important things to speak of. When last we were here together why did you not tell me the whole truth?"
"What truth, my lord?"
"About your debts, Kilcullen: why did you conceal from me their full amount? Why, at any rate, did you take pains to make me think them so much less than they really are?"
"Conceal, my lord? --that is hardly fair, considering that I told you expressly I could not give you any idea what was the amount I owed. I concealed nothing; if you deceived yourself, the fault was not mine."
"You could not but have known that the claims against you were much larger than I supposed them to be--double, I suppose. Good heaven! --why in ten years more, at this rate, you would more than consume the fee simple of the whole property! What can I say to you, Kilcullen, to make you look on your own conduct in the proper light?"
"I think you have said enough for the purpose; you have told me to marry, and I have consented to do so."
"Do you think, Kilcullen, you have spent the last eight years in a way which it can please a father to contemplate? Do you think I can look back on your conduct with satisfaction or content? And yet you have no regret to express for the past--no promises to make for the future. I fear it is all in vain. I fear that what I am doing what I am striving to do, is now all in vain. I fear it is hopeless to attempt to recall you from the horrid, reckless, wicked mode of life you have adopted." The sombre mantle of expostulatory eloquence had now descended on the earl, and he continued, turning full upon his victim, and raising and lowering his voice with monotonous propriety. --"I fear it is to no good purpose that I am subjecting your mother and myself to privation, restraint, and inconvenience; that I am straining every nerve to place you again in a position of respectability, a position suitable to my fortune and your own rank. I am endeavouring to retrieve the desperate extravagance--the--I must say--though I do not wish to hurt your feelings, yet I must say, disgraceful ruin of your past career. And how do you help me? what regret do you show? what promises of amendment do you afford? You drive up to my hall-door at midnight with your boon companion; you disturb the whole household at most unseasonable hours, and subject my family to the same disreputable irregularity in which you have yourself so long indulged. Can such doings, Kilcullen, give me any hopes for the future? Can--" "My lord--I am extremely sorry for the dinner: what can I say more? And as for Mat Tierney, he is your own guest or her ladyship's--not mine. It is my misfortune to have come in the same carriage with him, but that is the extent of my offence."
"Well, Kilcullen; if you think your conduct has always been such as it ought to be, it is of little use for me to bring up arguments to the contrary."
"I don't think so, my lord. What can I say more? I have done those things which I ought not to have done. Were I to confess my transgressions for the hour together, I could not say more; except that I have left undone the things which I ought to have done. Or, do you want me to beat my breast and tear my hair?"
"I want you, Lord Kilcullen, to show some sense of decency--some filial respect."
"Well, my lord, here I am, prepared to marry a wife of your own choosing, and to set about the business this morning, if you please. I thought you would have called that decent, filial, and respectable."
The earl could hardly gainsay this; but still he could not bring himself to give over so soon the unusual pleasure of blowing up his only son. It was so long since Lord Kilcullen had been regularly in his power, and it might never occur again. So he returned from consideration of the future to a further retrospect on the past.
"You certainly have played your cards most foolishly; you have thrown away your money--rather, I should say, my money, in a manner which nothing can excuse or palliate. You might have made the turf a source of gratifying amusement; your income was amply sufficient to enable you to do so; but you have possessed so little self-control, so little judgment, so little discrimination, that you have allowed yourself to be plundered by every blackleg, and robbed by every--everybody in short, who chose to rob you. The same thing has been the case in all your other amusements and pursuits--" "Well, my lord, I confess it all; isn't that enough?"
"Enough, Kilcullen!" said the earl, in a voice of horrified astonishment, "how enough? --how can anything be enough after such a course--so wild, so mad, so ruinous!"
"For Heaven's sake, my lord, finish the list of my iniquities, or you'll make me feel that I am utterly unfit to become my cousin's husband."
"I fear you are--indeed I fear you are. Are the horses disposed of yet, Kilcullen?"
"Indeed they are not, my lord; nor can I dispose of them. There is more owing for them than they are worth; you may say they belong to the trainer now."
"Is the establishment in Curzon Street broken up?"
"To tell the truth, not exactly; but I've no thoughts of returning there. I'm still under rent for the house."
The cross-examination was continued for a considerable time--till the earl had literally nothing more to say, and Lord Kilcullen was so irritated that he told his father he would not stand it any longer. Then they went into money affairs, and the earl spoke despondingly about ten thousands and twenty thousands, and the viscount somewhat flippantly of fifty thousands and sixty thousands; and this was continued till the earl felt that his son was too deep in the mire to be pulled out, and the son thought that, deep as he was there, it would be better to remain and wallow in it than undergo so disagreeable a process as that to which his father subjected him in extricating him from it. It was settled, however, that Mr. Jervis, Lord Cashel's agent, should receive full authority to deal summarily in all matters respecting the horses and their trainers, the house in Curzon Street, and its inhabitants, and all other appendages and sources of expense which Lord Kilcullen had left behind him; and that he, Kilcullen, should at once commence his siege upon his cousin's fortune. And on this point the son bargained that, as it would be essentially necessary that his spirits should be light and easy, he was not, during the operation, to be subjected to any of his father's book-room conversations: for this he stipulated as an absolute _sine quâ non_ in the negotiation, and the clause was at last agreed to, though not without much difficulty.
Both father and son seemed to think that the offer should be made at once. Lord Cashel really feared that his son would be arrested at Grey Abbey, and he was determined to pay nothing further for him, unless he felt secure of Fanny's fortune; and whatever were Lord Kilcullen's hopes and fears as to his future lot, he was determined not to remain long in suspense, as far as his projected marriage was concerned. He was determined to do his best to accomplish it, for he would have done anything to get the command of ready money; if he was not successful, at any rate he need not remain in the purgatory of Grey Abbey. The Queen's Bench would be preferable to that. He was not, however, very doubtful; he felt but little confidence in the constancy of any woman's affection, and a great deal in his own powers of fascination: he had always been successful in his appeals to ladies' hearts, and did not doubt of being so now, when the object of his adoration must, as he thought, be so dreadfully in want of some excitement, something to interest her. Any fool might have her now, thought he, and she can't have any violent objection to being Lady Kilcullen for the present, and Lady Cashel in due time. He felt, however, something like remorse at the arrangement to which he was a party; it was not that he was about to make a beautiful creature, his own cousin, miserable for life, by uniting her to a spendthrift, a _roué_, and a gambler--such was the natural lot of women in the higher ranks of life--but he felt that he was robbing her of her money. He would have thought it to be no disgrace to carry her off had another person been her guardian. She would then have had fair play, and it would be the guardian's fault if her fortune were not secure. But she had no friend now to protect her: it was her guardian himself who was betraying her to ruin.
However, the money must be had, and Lord Kilcullen was not long in quieting his conscience.
"Tierney," said Kilcullen, meeting his friend after his escape from the book-room; "you are not troubled with a father now, I believe;--do you recollect whether you ever had one?"
"Well, I can't say I remember just at present," said Mat; "but I believe I had a sort of one, once."
"I'm a more dutiful son than you," said the other; "I never can forget mine. I have no doubt an alligator on the banks of the Nile is a fearful creature--a shark when one's bathing, or a jungle tiger when one's out shooting, ought, I'm sure, to be avoided; but no creature yet created, however hungry, or however savage, can equal in ferocity a governor who has to shell out his cash! I've no wish for a _tête-à-tête_ with any bloody-minded monster; but I'd sooner meet a starved hyena, single-handed in the desert, than be shut up for another hour with my Lord Cashel in that room of his on the right-hand side of the hall. If you hear of my having beat a retreat from Grey Abbey, without giving you or any one else warning of my intention, you will know that I have lacked courage to comply with a second summons to those gloomy realms. If I receive another invite such as that I got this morning, I am off."
Lady Cashel's guests came on the day appointed; the carriages were driven up, one after another, in quick succession, about an hour before dinner-time; and, as her ladyship's mind became easy on the score of disappointments, it was somewhat troubled as to the multitude of people to be fed and entertained. Murray had not yet forgiven the injury inflicted on him when the family dinner was kept waiting for Lord Kilcullen, and Richards was still pouting at her own degraded position. The countess had spent the morning pretending to make arrangements, which were in fact all settled by Griffiths; and when she commenced the operation of dressing herself, she declared she was so utterly exhausted by what she had gone through during the last week, as to be entirely unfit to entertain her company. Poor dear Lady Cashel! Was she so ignorant of her own nature as to suppose it possible that she should ever entertain anybody?
However, a glass of wine, and some mysterious drops, and a little paint; a good deal of coaxing, the sight of her diamonds, and of a large puce-coloured turban, somewhat revivified her; and she was in her drawing-room in due time, supported by Lady Selina and Fanny, ready to receive her visitors as soon as they should descend from their respective rooms.
Lady Cashel had already welcomed Lord George, and shaken hands with the bishop: and was now deep in turnips and ten-pound freeholders with the gouty colonel, who had hobbled into the room on a pair of crutches, and was accommodated with two easy chairs in a corner--one for himself, and the other for his feet.
"Now, my dear Lady George," said the countess, "you must not think of returning to Mountains tonight: indeed, we made sure of you and Lord George for a week."
"My dear Lady Cashel, it's impossible; indeed, we wished it of all things, and tried it every way: but we couldn't manage it; Lord George has so much to do: there's the Sessions to-morrow at Dunlavin, and he has promised to meet Sir Glenmalure Aubrey, about a road, or a river, or a bridge--I forget which it is; and they must attend to those things, you know, or the tenants couldn't get their corn to market. But you don't know how sorry we are, and such a charming set you have got here!"
"Well, I know it's no use pressing you; but I can't tell you how vexed I am, for I counted on you, above all, and Adolphus will be so sorry. You know Lord Kilcullen's come home, Lady George?"
"Yes; I was very glad to hear we were to meet him."
"Oh, yes! He's come to stay here some time, I believe; he's got quite fond of Grey Abbey lately. He and his father get on so well together, it's quite a delight to me."
"Oh, it must be, I'm sure," said Lady George; and the countess sidled off to the bishop's fat wife.
"Well, this is very kind of you and the bishop, to come at so short a notice: indeed I hardly dared expect it. I know he has so much to do in Dublin with those horrid boards and things."
"He is busy there, to be sure, Lady Cashel; but he couldn't deny himself the pleasure of coming to Grey Abbey; he thinks so very much of the earl. Indeed, he'd contrive to be able to come here, when he couldn't think of going anywhere else."
"I'm sure Lord Cashel feels how kind he is; and so do I, and so does Adolphus. Lord Kilcullen will be delighted to meet you and the bishop."
The bishop's wife assured the countess that nothing on earth, at the present moment, would give the bishop so much pleasure as meeting Lord Kilcullen.
"You know the bishop christened him, don't you?" said Lady Cashel.
"No! did he though?" said the bishop's wife; "how very interesting!"
"Isn't it? And Adolphus longs to meet him. He's so fond of everything that's high-minded and talented, Adolphus is: a little sarcastic perhaps--I don't mind saying so to you; but that's only to inferior sort of people--not talented, you know: some people are stupid, and Adolphus can't bear that."
"Indeed they are, my lady. I was dining last week at Mrs. Prijean's, in Merrion Square; you know Mrs. Prijean?"
"I think I met her at Carton, four years ago."
"Well, she is very heavy: what do you think, Lady Cashel, she--" "Adolphus can't bear people of that sort, but he'll be delighted with the bishop: it's so delightful, his having christened him. Adolphus means to live a good deal here now. Indeed, he and his father have so much in common that they can't get on very well apart, and I really hope he and the bishop'll see a good deal of each other;" and the countess left the bishop's wife and sat herself down by old Mrs. Ellison.
"My dear Mrs. Ellison, I am so delighted to see you once again at Grey Abbey; it's such ages since you were here!"
"Indeed it is, Lady Cashel, a very long time; but the poor colonel suffers so much, it's rarely he's fit to be moved; and, indeed, I'm not much better myself. I was not able to move my left shoulder from a week before Christmas-day till a few days since!"
"You don't say so! Rheumatism, I suppose?"
"Oh, yes--all rheumatism: no one knows what I suffer."
"And what do you use for it?"
"Oh, there's nothing any use. I know the very nature of rheumatism now, I've had it so long--and it minds nothing at all: there's no preventing it, and no curing it. It's like a bad husband, Lady Cashel; the best way is to put up with it."
"And how is the dear colonel, Mrs. Ellison?"
"Why, he was just able to come here, and that was all; but he was dying to see Lord Cashel. He thinks the ministers'll be shaken about this business of O'Connell's; and if so, that there'll be a general election, and then what'll they do about the county?"
"I'm sure Lord Cashel wanted to see the colonel on that very subject; so does Adolphus--Lord Kilcullen, you know. I never meddle with those things; but I really think Adolphus is thinking of going into Parliament. You know he's living here at present: his father's views and his own are so exactly the same on all those sort of things, that it's quite delightful. He's taking a deal of interest about the county lately, is Adolphus, and about Grey Abbey too: he's just the same his father used to be, and that kind of thing is so pleasant, isn't it, Mrs Ellison?"
Mrs Ellison said it was, and at the same moment groaned, for her shoulder gave her a twinge.
The subject of these eulogiums, in the meantime, did not make his appearance till immediately before dinner was announced, and certainly did not evince very strongly the delight which his mother had assured her friends he would feel at meeting them, for he paid but very little attention to any one but Mat Tierney and his cousin Fanny; he shook hands with all the old gentlemen, bowed to all the old ladies, and nodded at the young ones. But if he really felt that strong desire, which his mother had imputed to him, of opening his heart to the bishop and the colonel respecting things temporal and spiritual, he certainly very successfully suppressed his anxiety.
He had, during the last two or three days, applied himself to the task of ingratiating himself with Fanny. He well knew how to suit himself to different characters, and to make himself agreeable when he pleased; and Fanny, though she had never much admired her dissipated cousin, certainly found his conversation a relief after the usual oppressive tedium of Grey Abbey society.
He had not begun by making love to her, or expressing admiration, or by doing or saying anything which could at all lead her to suspect his purpose, or put her on her guard. He had certainly been much more attentive to her, much more intimate with her, than he usually had been in his flying visits to Grey Abbey; but then he was now making his first appearance as a reformed rake; and besides, he was her first cousin, and she therefore felt no inclination to repel his advances.
He was obliged, in performance of a domestic duty, to walk out to dinner with one of Lady George's daughters, but he contrived to sit next to Fanny--and, much to his father's satisfaction, talked to her during the whole ceremony.
"And where have you hidden yourself all the morning, Fanny," said he, "that nobody has seen anything of you since breakfast?"
"Whither have _you_ taken yourself all the day, rather, that you had not a moment to come and look after us? The Miss O'Joscelyns have been expecting you to ride with them, walk with them, talk with them, and play _la grace_ with them. They didn't give up the sticks till it was quite dark, in the hope of you and Mr Tierney making your appearance."
"Well, Fanny, don't tell my mother, and I'll tell you the truth:-- promise now."
"Oh, I'm no tell-tale."
"Well then," and he whispered into her ear--"I was running away from the Miss O'Joscelyns."
"But that won't do at all; don't you know they were asked here for your especial edification and amusement?"
"Oh, I know they were. So were the bishop, and the colonel, and Lord George, and their respective wives, and Mr Hill. My dear mamma asked them all here for my amusement; but, you know, one man may lead a horse to water--a hundred can't make him drink. I cannot, cannot drink of the Miss O'Joscelyns, and the Bishop of Maryborough."
"For shame, Adolphus! you ought at any rate to do something to amuse them."
"Amuse them! My dear Fanny, who ever heard of amusing a bishop? But it's very easy to find fault; what have you done, yourself, for their amusement?"
"I didn't run away from them; though, had I done so, there would have been more excuse for me than for you."
"So there would, Fanny," said Kilcullen, feeling that she had alluded to her brother's death; "and I'm very, very sorry all these people are here to bore you at such a time, and doubly sorry that they should have been asked on my account. They mistake me greatly, here. They know that I've thought Grey Abbey dull, and have avoided it; and now that I've determined to get over the feeling, because I think it right to do so, they make it ten times more unbearable than ever, for my gratification! It's like giving a child physic mixed in sugar; the sugar's sure to be the nastiest part of the dose. Indeed I have no dislike to Grey Abbey at present; though I own I have no taste for the sugar in which my kind mother has tried to conceal its proper flavour."
"Well, make the best of it; they'll all be gone in ten days."
"Ten days! Are they to stay ten days? Will you tell me, Fanny, what was the object in asking Mat Tierney to meet such a party?"
"To help you to amuse the young ladies."
"Gracious heavens! Does Lady Cashel really expect Mat Tierney to play _la grace_ with the Miss O'Joscelyns? --Well, the time will come to an end, I suppose. But in truth I'm more sorry for you than for any one. It was very ill-judged, their getting such a crowd to bore you at such a time," and Lord Kilcullen contrived to give his voice a tone of tender solicitude.
"Kilcullen," said the earl, across the table, "you don't hear the bishop. His lordship is asking you to drink wine with him."
"I shall be most proud of the honour," said the son, and bobbed his head at the bishop across the table.
Fanny was on the point of saying something respecting her brother to Lord Kilcullen, which would have created a kind of confidence between them, but the bishop's glass of wine broke it off, and from that time Lord Kilcullen was forced by his father into a general conversation with his guests.
In the evening there was music and singing. The Miss O'Joscelyns, and Miss Fitzgeralds, and Mr Hill, performed: even Mat Tierney condescended to amuse the company by singing the "Coronation", first begging the bishop to excuse the peculiar allusions to the "_clargy_", contained in one of the verses; and then Fanny was asked to sing. She had again become silent, dull, and unhappy, was brooding over her miseries and disappointments, and she declined. Lord Kilcullen was behind her chair, and when they pressed her, he whispered to her, "Don't sing for them, Fanny; it's a shame that they should tease you at such a time; I wonder how my mother can have been so thoughtless."
Fanny persisted in declining to sing--and Lord Kilcullen again sat down beside her. "Don't trouble yourself about them, Fanny," said he, "they're just fit to sing to each other; it's very good work for them."
"I should think it very good work, as you call it, for myself, too, another time; only I'm hardly in singing humour at present, and, therefore, obliged to you for your assistance and protection."
"Your most devoted knight as long as this fearful invasion lasts! --your Amadis de Gaul--your Bertrand du Guesclin [45]! And no paladin of old ever attempted to defend a damsel from more formidable foes."
[FOOTNOTE 45: Amadis . . . du Guesclin--mediaeval heroes. Amadis de Gaul was the title hero of a 14th century romantic novel, probably first written in Spanish, which was popular throughout Europe. Bertrand du Guesclin was a historical figure, a fourteenth century French soldier and Marshall of France.]
"Indeed, Adolphus, I don't think them so formidable. Many of them are my own friends."
"Is Mrs Ellison your own friend? --or Mrs Moore?"
"Not exactly those two, in particular."
"Who then? Is it Miss Judith O'Joscelyn? or is the Reverend Mr Hill one of those to whom you give that sweetest of all names?"
"Yes; to both of them. It was only this morning I had a long _tête-à-tête_--" "What, with Mr Hill?"
"No, not with Mr Hill though it wouldn't be the first even with him, but with Judith O'Joscelyn. I lent her a pattern for worsted work."
"And does that make her your friend? Do you give your friendship so easily?"
"You forget that I've known her for years."
"Well, now, I've not. I've seen her about three times in my life, and spoken two words to her perhaps twice; and yet I'll describe her character to you; and if you can say that the description is incorrect, I will permit you to call her your friend."
"Well, let's hear the character."
"It wouldn't be kind in me, though, to laugh at your _friend_."
"Oh, she's not so especially and particularly my friend that you need mind that."
"Then you'll promise not to be angry?"
"Oh no, I won't be angry."
"Well, then; she has two passions: they are for worsted and hymn-books. She has a moral objection to waltzing. Theoretically she disapproves of flirtations: she encourages correspondence between young ladies; always crosses her letters, and never finished one for the last ten years without expressing entire resignation to the will of God,--as if she couldn't be resigned without so often saying so. She speaks to her confidential friends of young men as a very worthless, insignificant race of beings; she is, however, prepared to take the very first that may be unfortunate enough to come in her way; she has no ideas of her own, but is quick enough at borrowing those of other people; she considers herself a profound theologian; dotes on a converted papist, and looks on a Puseyite [46] as something one shade blacker than the devil. Now isn't that sufficiently like for a portrait?"
[FOOTNOTE 46: Puseyite--a follower of Edward Pusey (1800-1882), one of three scholars at Oxford who started a movement critical of the Church of England. One of the three, John Henry Newman, converted to Catholicism, and Pusey and his followers were accused of advocating Catholic practices.]
"It's the portrait of a set, I fear, rather than an individual. I don't know that it's particularly like Miss O'Joscelyn, except as to the worsted and hymn-books."
"What, not as to the waltzing, resignation, and worthless young men? Come, are they not exactly her traits? Does she waltz?"
"No, she does not."
"And haven't you heard her express a moral objection to it?"
"Well, I believe I have."
"Did you ever get a letter from her, or see a letter of hers?"
"I don't remember; yes, I did once, a long time ago."
"And wasn't she very resigned in it?"
"Well, I declare I believe she was; and it's very proper too; people ought to be resigned."
"Oh, of course. And now doesn't she love a convert and hate a Puseyite?"
"All Irish clergyman's daughters do that."
"Well, Fanny, you can't say but that it was a good portrait; and after that, will you pretend to say you call Miss O'Joscelyn your friend?"
"Not my very friend of friends; but, as friends go, she's as good as most others."
"And who is the friend of friends, Fanny?"
"Come, you're not my father confessor. I'm not to tell you all. If I told you that, you'd make another portrait."
"I'm sure I couldn't draw a disparaging picture of anybody you would really call your friend. But indeed I pity you, living among so many such people. There can be nobody here who understands you."
"Oh, I'm not very unintelligible."
"Much more so than Miss O'Joscelyn. I shouldn't wish to have to draw your portrait."
"Pray don't; if it were frightful I should think you uncivil; and if you made it handsome, I should know you were flattering. Besides, you don't know enough of me to tell me my character."
"I think I do; but I'll study it a little more before I put it on the canvass. Some likenesses are very hard to catch."
Fanny felt, when she went to bed, that she had spent a pleasanter evening than she usually did, and that it was a much less nuisance to talk to her cousin Adolphus than to either his father, mother, or sister; and as she sat before her fire, while her maid was brushing her hair, she began to think that she had mistaken his character, and that he couldn't be the hard, sensual, selfish man for which she had taken him. Her ideas naturally fell back to Frank and her love, her difficulties and sorrows; and, before she went to sleep, she had almost taught herself to think that she might make Lord Kilcullen the means of bringing Lord Ballindine back to Grey Abbey.
She had, to be sure, been told that her cousin had spoken ill of Frank; that it was he who had been foremost in decrying Lord Ballindine's folly and extravagance; but she had never heard him do so; she had only heard of it through Lord Cashel; and she quite ceased to believe anything her guardian might say respecting her discarded lover. At any rate she would try. Some step she was determined to take about Lord Ballindine; and, if her cousin refused to act like a cousin and a friend, she would only be exactly where she was before.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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31
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THE TWO FRIENDS
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The next three days passed slowly and tediously for most of the guests assembled at Grey Abbey. Captain Cokely, and a Mr Battersby, came over from Newbridge barracks, but they did not add much to the general enjoyment of the party, though their arrival was hailed with delight by some of the young ladies. At any rate they made the rooms look less forlorn in the evenings, and made it worth the girls' while to put on their best bibs and tuckers.
"But what's the use of it at all?" said Matilda Fitzgerald to little Letty O'Joscelyn, when she had spent three-quarters of an hour in adjusting her curls, and setting her flounces properly, on the evening before the arrival of the two cavalry officers; "not a soul to look at us but a crusty old colonel, a musty old bishop, and a fusty old beau!"
"Who's the old beau?" said Letty.
"Why, that Mr Tierney. I can't conceive how Lady Cashel can have asked us to meet such a set," and Matilda descended, pouting, and out of humour.
But on the next day she went through her work much more willingly, if not more carefully.
"That Captain Cokely's a very nice fellow," said Matilda; "the best of that Newbridge set, out and out."
"Well now, I really think he's not so nice as Mr Battersby," said Letty. "I'm sure he's not so good-looking."
"Oh, Battersby's only a boy. After all, Letty, I don't know whether I like officers so much better than other men,"--and she twisted her neck round to get a look at her back in the pier-glass, and gave her dress a little pull just above her bustle.
"I'm sure I do," said Letty; "they've so much more to say for themselves, and they're so much smarter."
"Why, yes, they are smarter," said Matilda; "and there's nothing on earth so dowdy as an old black coat, But, then, officers are always going away: you no sooner get to know one or two of a set, and to feel that one of them is really a darling fellow, but there, they are off--to Jamaica, China, Hounslow barracks, or somewhere; and then it's all to do over again."
"Well, I do wish they wouldn't move them about quite so much."
"But let's go down. I think I'll do now, won't I?" and they descended, to begin the evening campaign.
"Wasn't Miss Wyndham engaged to some one?" said old Mrs Ellison to Mrs Moore. "I'm sure some one told me so."
"Oh, yes, she was," said Mrs Moore; "the affair was settled, and everything arranged; but the man was very poor, and a gambler,--Lord Ballindine: he has the name of a property down in Mayo somewhere; but when she got all her brother's money, Lord Cashel thought it a pity to sacrifice it,--so he got her out of the scrape. A very good thing for the poor girl, for they say he's a desperate scamp."
"Well, I declare I think," said Mrs Ellison, "she'll not have far to look for another."
"What, you think there's something between her and Lord Kilcullen?" said Mrs Moore.
"It looks like it, at any rate, don't it?" said Mrs Ellison.
"Well, I really think it does," said Mrs Moore; "I'm sure I'd be very glad of it. I know he wants money desperately, and it would be such a capital thing for the earl."
"At any rate, the lady does not look a bit unwilling," said Mrs Ellison. "I suppose she's fond of rakish young men. You say Lord Ballindine was of that set; and I'm sure Lord Kilcullen's the same,--he has the reputation, at any rate. They say he and his father never speak, except just in public, to avoid the show of the thing."
And the two old ladies set to work to a good dish of scandal.
"Miss Wyndham's an exceedingly fine girl," said Captain Cokely to Mat Tierney, as they were playing a game of piquet in the little drawing-room.
"Yes," said Mat; "and she's a hundred thousand exceedingly fine charms too, independently of her fine face."
"So I hear," said Cokely; "but I only believe half of what I hear about those things."
"She has more than that; I know it."
"Has she though? Faith, do you know I think Kilcullen has a mind to keep it in the family. He's very soft on her, and she's just as sweet to him. I shouldn't be surprised if he were to marry now, and turn steady."
"Not at all; there are two reasons against it. In the first place, he's too much dipped for even Fanny's fortune to be any good to him; and secondly, she's engaged."
"What, to Ballindine?" said Cokely.
"Exactly so," said Mat.
"Ah, my dear fellow, that's all off long since. I heard Kilcullen say so myself. I'll back Kilcullen to marry her against Ballindine for a hundred pounds."
"Done," said Mat; and the bet was booked.
The same evening, Tierney wrote to Dot Blake, and said in a postscript, "I know you care for Ballindine; so do I, but I don't write to him. If he really wants to secure his turtle-dove, he should see that she doesn't get bagged in his absence. Kilcullen is here, and I tell you he's a keen sportsman. They say it's quite up with him in London, and I should be sorry she were sacrificed: she seems a nice girl."
Lord Kilcullen had ample opportunities of forwarding his intimacy with Fanny, and he did not neglect them. To give him his due, he played his cards as well as his father could wish him. He first of all overcame the dislike with which she was prepared to regard him; he then interested her about himself; and, before he had been a week at Grey Abbey, she felt that she had a sort of cousinly affection for him. He got her to talk with a degree of interest about himself; and when he could do that, there was no wonder that Tierney should have fears for his friend's interests. Not that there was any real occasion for them. Fanny Wyndham was not the girl to be talked out of, or into, a real passion, by anyone.
"Now, tell me the truth, Fanny," said Kilcullen, as they were sitting over the fire together in the library, one dark afternoon, before they went to dress for dinner; "hadn't you been taught to look on me as a kind of ogre--a monster of iniquity, who spoke nothing but oaths, and did nothing but sin?"
"Not exactly that: but I won't say I thought you were exactly just what you ought to be."
"But didn't you think I was exactly what I ought not to have been? Didn't you imagine, now, that I habitually sat up all night, gambling, and drinking buckets of champagne and brandy-and-water? And that I lay in bed all day, devising iniquity in my dreams? Come now, tell the truth, and shame the devil; if I am the devil, I know people have made me out to be."
"Why, really, Adolphus, I never calculated how your days and nights were spent. But if I am to tell the truth, I fear some of them might have been passed to better advantage."
"Which of us, Fanny, mightn't, with truth, say the same of ourselves?"
"Of course, none of us," said Fanny; "don't think I'm judging you; you asked me the question,--and I suppose you wanted an answer."
"I did; I wanted a true one--for though you may never have given yourself much trouble to form an opinion about me, I am anxious that you should do so now. I don't want to trouble you with what is done and past; I don't want to make it appear that I have not been thoughtless and imprudent--wicked and iniquitous, if you are fond of strong terms; neither do I want to trouble you with confessing all my improprieties, that I may regularly receive absolution. But I do wish you to believe that I have done nothing which should exclude me from your future good opinion; from your friendship and esteem."
"I am not of an unforgiving temperament, even had you done anything for me to forgive: but I am not aware that you have."
"No; nothing for you to forgive, in the light of an offence to yourself; but much, perhaps, to prevent your being willing to regard me as a personal friend. We're not only first cousins, Fanny, but are placed more closely together than cousins usually are. You have neither father nor mother; now, also, you have no brother," and he took her hands in his own as he said so. "Who should be a brother to you, if I am not? who, at any rate, should you look on as a friend, if not on me? Nobody could be better, I believe, than Selina; but she is stiff, and cold--unlike you in everything. I should be so happy if I could be the friend--the friend of friends you spoke of the other evening; if I could fill the place which must be empty near your heart. I can never be this to you, if you believe that anything in my past life has been really disgraceful. It is for this reason that I want to know what you truly think of me. I won't deny that I am anxious you should think well of me:--well, at any rate for the present, and the future, and charitably as regards the past."
Fanny had been taken much by surprise by the turn her cousin had given to the conversation; and was so much affected, that, before he had finished, she was in tears. She had taken her hand out of his, to put her handkerchief to her eyes, and as she did not immediately answer, he continued: "I shall probably be much here for some time to come--such, at least, are my present plans; and I hope that while I am, we shall become friends: not such friends, Fanny, as you and Judith O'Joscelyn--friends only of circumstance, who have neither tastes, habits, or feelings in common--friends whose friendship consists in living in the same parish, and meeting each other once or twice a week; but friends in reality--friends in confidence--friends in mutual dependence--friends in love--friends, dear Fanny, as cousins situated as we are should be to each other."
Fanny's heart was very full, for she felt how much, how desperately, she wanted such a friend as Kilcullen described. How delightful it would be to have such a friend, and to find him in her own cousin! The whole family, hitherto, were so cold to her--so uncongenial. The earl she absolutely disliked; she loved her aunt, but it was only because she was her aunt--she couldn't like her; and though she loved Lady Selina, and, to a degree, admired her, it was like loving a marble figure. There was more true feeling in what Kilcullen had now said to her, than in all that had fallen from the whole family for the four years she had lived at Grey Abbey, and she could not therefore but close on the offer of his affection.
"Shall we be such friends, then?" said he; "or, after all, am I too bad? Have I too much of the taint of the wicked world to be the friend of so pure a creature as you?"
"Oh no, Adolphus; I'm sure I never thought so," said she. "I never judged you, and indeed I am not disposed to do so now. I'm too much in want of kindness to reject yours,--even were I disposed to do so, which I am not."
"Then, Fanny, we are to be friends--true, loving, trusting friends?"
"Oh, yes!" said Fanny. "I am really, truly grateful for your affection and kindness. I know how precious they are, and I will value them accordingly."
Again Lord Kilcullen took her hand, and pressed it in his; and then he kissed it, and told her she was his own dear cousin Fanny; and then recommended her to go and dress, which she did. He sat himself down for a quarter of an hour, ruminating, and then also went off to dress; but, during that quarter of an hour, very different ideas passed through his mind, than such as those who knew him best would have given him credit for.
In the first place, he thought that he really began to feel an affection for his cousin Fanny, and to speculate whether it were absolutely within the verge of possibility that he should marry her--retrieve his circumstances--treat her well, and live happily for the rest of his life as a respectable nobleman.
For two or three minutes the illusion remained, till it was banished by retrospection. It was certainly possible that he should marry her: it was his full intention to do so: but as to retrieving his circumstances and treating her well! --the first was absolutely impossible--the other nearly so; and as to his living happily at Grey Abbey as a family man, he yawned as he felt how impossible it would be that he should spend a month in such a way, let alone a life. But then Fanny Wyndham was so beautiful, so lively, so affectionate, so exactly what a cousin and a wife ought to be: he could not bear to think that all his protestations of friendship and love had been hypocritical; that he could only look upon her as a gudgeon, and himself as a bigger fish, determined to swallow her! Yet such must be his views regarding her. He departed to dress, absolutely troubled in his conscience.
And what were Fanny's thoughts about her cousin? She was much surprised and gratified, but at the same time somewhat flustered and overwhelmed, by the warmth and novelty of his affection. However, she never for a moment doubted his truth towards her, or had the slightest suspicion of his real object. Her chief thought was whether she could induce him to be a mediator for her, between Lord Cashel and Lord Ballindine.
During the next two days he spoke to her a good deal about her brother--of whom, by-the-bye, he had really known nothing. He contrived, however, to praise him as a young man of much spirit and great promise; then he spoke of her own large fortune, asked her what her wishes were about its investment, and told her how happy he would be to express those wishes at once to Lord Cashel, and to see that they were carried out. Once or twice she had gradually attempted to lead the conversation to Lord Ballindine, but Kilcullen was too crafty, and had prevented her; and she had not yet sufficient courage to tell him at once what was so near her heart.
"Fanny," said Lady Selina, one morning, about a week after the general arrival of the company at Grey Abbey, and when some of them had taken their departure, "I am very glad to see you have recovered your spirits: I know you have made a great effort, and I appreciate and admire it."
"Indeed, Selina, I fear you are admiring me too soon. I own I have been amused this week past, and, to a certain degree, pleased; but I fear you'll find I shall relapse. There's been no radical reform; my thoughts are all in the same direction as they were."
"But the great trial in this world is to behave well and becomingly in spite of oppressive thoughts: and it always takes a struggle to do that, and that struggle you've made. I hope it may lead you to feel that you may be contented and in comfort without having everything which you think necessary to your happiness. I'm sure I looked forward to this week as one of unmixed trouble and torment; but I was very wrong to do so. It has given me a great deal of unmixed satisfaction."
"I'm very glad of that, Selina, but what was it? I'm sure it could not have come from poor Mrs Ellison, or the bishop's wife; and you seemed to me to spend all your time in talking to them. Virtue, they say, is its own reward: I don't know what other satisfaction you can have had from them."
"In the first place, it has given me great pleasure to see that you were able to exert yourself in company, and that the crowd of people did not annoy you: but I have chiefly been delighted by seeing that you and Adolphus are such good friends. You must think, Fanny, that I am anxious about an only brother--especially when we have all had so much cause to be anxious about him; and don't you think it must be a delight to me to find that he is able to take pleasure in your society? I should be doubly pleased, doubly delighted, if I could please him myself. But I have not the vivacity to amuse him."
"What nonsense, Selina! Don't say that."
"But it's true, Fanny; I have not; and Grey Abbey has become distasteful to him because we are all sedate, steady people. Perhaps some would call us dull, and heavy; and I have grieved that it should be so, though I cannot alter my nature; but you are so much the contrary--there is so much in your character like his own, before he became fond of the world, that I feel he can become attached to and fond of you; and I am delighted to see that he thinks so himself. What do you think of him, now that you have seen more of him than you ever did before?"
"Indeed," said Fanny, "I like him very much."
"He is very clever, isn't he? He might have been anything if he had given himself fair play. He seems to have taken greatly to you."
"Oh yes; we are great friends:" and then Fanny paused--"so great friends," she continued, looking somewhat gravely in Lady Selina's face, "that I mean to ask the greatest favour of him that I could ask of anyone: one I am sure I little dreamed I should ever ask of him."
"What is it, Fanny? Is it a secret?"
"Indeed it is, Selina; but it's a secret I will tell you. I mean to tell him all I feel about Lord Ballindine, and I mean to ask him to see him for me. Adolphus has offered to be a brother to me, and I mean to take him at his word."
Lady Selina turned very pale, and looked very grave as she replied, "That is not giving him a brother's work, Fanny. A brother should protect you from importunity and insult, from injury and wrong; and that, I am sure, Adolphus would do: but no brother would consent to offer your hand to a man who had neglected you and been refused, and who, in all probability, would now reject you with scorn if he has the opportunity--or if not that, will take you for your money's sake. That, Fanny, is not a brother's work; and it is an embassy which I am sure Adolphus will not undertake. If you take my advice you will not ask him."
As Lady Selina finished speaking she walked to the door, as if determined to hear no reply from her cousin; but, as she was leaving the room, she fancied that she heard her sobbing, and her heart softened, and she again turned towards her and said, "God knows, Fanny, I do not wish to be severe or ill-natured to you; I would do anything for your comfort and happiness, but I cannot bear to think that you should"--Lady Selina was puzzled for a word to express her meaning--"that you should forget yourself," and she attempted to put her arm round Fanny's waist.
But she was mistaken; Fanny was not sobbing, but was angry; and what Selina now said about her forgetting herself, did not make her less so.
"No," she said, withdrawing herself from her cousin's embrace and standing erect, while her bosom was swelling with indignation: "I want no affection from you, Selina, that is accompanied by so much disapprobation. You don't wish to be severe, only you say that I am likely to forget myself. Forget myself!" and Fanny threw back her beautiful head, and clenched her little fists by her side: "The other day you said 'disgrace myself', and I bore it calmly then; but I will not any longer bear such imputations. I tell you plainly, Selina, I will not forget myself, nor will I be forgotten. Nor will I submit to whatever fate cold, unfeeling people may doom me, merely because I am a woman and alone. I will not give up Lord Ballindine, if I have to walk to his door and tell him so. And were I to do so, I should never think that I had forgotten myself."
"Listen to me, Fanny," said Selina.
"Wait a moment," continued Fanny, "I have listened enough: it is my turn to speak now. For one thing I have to thank you: you have dispelled the idea that I could look for help to anyone in this family. I will not ask your brother to do anything for me which you think so disgraceful. I will not subject him to the scorn with which you choose to think my love will be treated by him who loved me so well. That you should dare to tell me that he who did so much for my love should now scorn it! --Oh, Selina, that I may live to forget that you said those words!" and Fanny, for a moment, put her handkerchief to her eyes--but it was but for a moment. "However," she continued, "I will now act for myself. As you think I might forget myself, I tell you I will do it in no clandestine way. I will write to Lord Ballindine, and I will show my letter to my uncle. The whole house shall read it if they please. I will tell Lord Ballindine all the truth--and if Lord Cashel turns me from his house, I shall probably find some friend to receive me, who may still believe that I have not forgotten myself." And Fanny Wyndham sailed out of the room.
Lady Selina, when she saw that she was gone, sat down on the sofa and took her book. She tried to make herself believe that she was going to read; but it was no use: the tears dimmed her eyes, and she put the book down.
The same evening the countess sent for Selina into her boudoir, and, with a fidgety mixture of delight and surprise, told her that she had a wonderful piece of good news to communicate to her.
"I declare, my dear," she said, "it's the most delightful thing I've heard for years and years; and it's just exactly what I had planned myself, only I never told anybody. Dear me; it makes me so happy!"
"What is it, mamma?"
"Your papa has been talking to me since dinner, my love, and he tells me Adolphus is going to marry Fanny Wyndham."
"Going to marry whom?" said Lady Selina, almost with a shout.
"Fanny, I say: it's the most delightful match in the world: it's just what ought to be done. I suppose they won't have the wedding before summer; though May is a very nice month. Let me see; it only wants three weeks to May."
"Mamma, what are you talking about? --you're dreaming."
"Dreaming, my dear? I'm not dreaming at all: it's a fact. Who'd've thought of all this happening so soon, out of this party, which gave us so much trouble! However, I knew your father was right. I said all along that he was in the right to ask the people."
"Mamma," said Lady Selina, gravely, "listen to me: calmly now, and attentively. I don't know what papa has told you; but I tell you Fanny does not dream of marrying Adolphus. He has never asked her, and if he did she would never accept him. Fanny is more than ever in love with Lord Ballindine."
The countess opened her eyes wide, and looked up into her daughter's face, but said nothing.
"Tell me, mamma, as nearly as you can recollect, what it is papa has said to you, that, if possible, we may prevent mischief and misery. Papa couldn't have said that Fanny had accepted Adolphus?"
"He didn't say exactly that, my dear; but he said that it was his wish they should be married; that Adolphus was very eager for it, and that Fanny had received his attentions and admiration with evident pleasure and satisfaction. And so she has, my dear; you couldn't but have seen that yourself."
"Well, mamma, what else did papa say?"
"Why, he said just what I'm telling you: that I wasn't to be surprised if we were called on to be ready for the wedding at a short notice; or at any rate to be ready to congratulate Fanny. He certainly didn't say she had accepted him. But he said he had no doubt about it; and I'm sure, from what was going on last week, I couldn't have any doubt either. But he told me not to speak to anyone about it yet; particularly not to Fanny; only, my dear, I couldn't help, you know, talking it over with you;" and the countess leaned back in her chair, very much exhausted with the history she had narrated.
"Now, mamma, listen to me. It is not many hours since Fanny told me she was unalterably determined to throw herself at Lord Ballindine's feet."
"Goodness gracious me, how shocking!" said the countess.
"She even said that she would ask Adolphus to be the means of bringing Lord Ballindine back to Grey Abbey."
"Lord have mercy!" said the countess.
"I only tell you this, mamma, to show you how impossible it is that papa should be right."
"What are we to do, my dear? Oh, dear, there'll be such a piece of work! What a nasty thing Fanny is. I'm sure she's been making love to Adolphus all the week!"
"No, mamma, she has not. Don't be unfair to Fanny. If there is anyone in fault it is Adolphus; but, as you say, what shall we do to prevent further misunderstanding? I think I had better tell papa the whole."
And so she did, on the following morning. But she was too late; she did not do it till after Lord Kilcullen had offered and had been refused.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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32
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HOW LORD KILCULLEN FARES IN HIS WOOING
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About twelve o'clock the same night, Lord Kilcullen and Mat Tierney were playing billiards, and were just finishing their last game: the bed-candles were lighted ready for them, and Tierney was on the point of making the final hazard.
"So you're determined to go to-morrow, Mat?" said Kilcullen.
"Oh, yes, I'll go to-morrow: your mother'll take me for a second Paddy Rea, else," said Mat.
"Who the deuce was Paddy Rea?"
"Didn't you ever hear of Paddy Rea? --Michael French of Glare Abbey--he's dead now, but he was alive enough at the time I'm telling you of, and kept the best house in county Clare--well, he was coming down on the Limerick coach, and met a deuced pleasant, good-looking, talkative sort of a fellow a-top of it. They dined and got a tumbler of punch together at Roscrea; and when French got down at Bird Hill, he told his acquaintance that if he ever found himself anywhere near Ennis, he'd be glad to see him at Glare Abbey. He was a hospitable sort of a fellow, and had got into a kind of way of saying the same thing to everybody, without meaning anything except to be civil--just as I'd wish a man good morning. Well, French thought no more about the man, whose name he didn't even know; but about a fortnight afterwards, a hack car from Ennis made its appearance at Glare Abbey, and the talkative traveller, and a small portmanteau, had soon found their way into the hail. French was a good deal annoyed, for he had some fashionables in the house, but he couldn't turn the man out; so he asked his name, and introduced Paddy Rea to the company. How long do you think he stayed at Glare Abbey?"
"Heaven only knows! --Three months."
"Seventeen years!" said Mat. "They did everything to turn him out, and couldn't do it. It killed old French; and at last his son pulled the house down, and Paddy Rea went then, because there wasn't a roof to cover him. Now I don't want to drive your father to pull down this house, so I'll go to-morrow."
"The place is so ugly, that if you could make him do so, it would be an advantage; but I'm afraid the plan wouldn't succeed, so I won't press you. But if you go, I shan't remain long. If it was to save my life and theirs, I can't get up small talk for the rector and his curate."
"Well, good night," said Mat; and the two turned off towards their bed-rooms.
As they passed from the billiard-room through the hall, Lord Cashel shuffled out of his room, in his slippers and dressing-gown.
"Kilcullen," said he, with a great deal of unconcerned good humour affected in his tone, "just give me one moment--I've a word to say to you. Goodnight, Mr Tierney, goodnight; I'm sorry to hear we're to lose you to-morrow."
Lord Kilcullen shrugged his shoulders, winked at his friend and then turned round and followed his father.
"It's only one word, Kilcullen," said the father, who was afraid of angering or irritating his son, now that he thought he was in so fair a way to obtain the heiress and her fortune. "I'll not detain you half a minute;" and then he said in a whisper, "take my advice, Kilcullen, and strike when the iron's hot."
"I don't quite understand you, my lord," said his son, affecting ignorance of his father's meaning.
"I mean, you can't stand better than you do with Fanny: you've certainly played your cards admirably, and she's a charming girl, a very charming girl, and I long to know that she's your own. Take my advice and ask her at once."
"My lord," said the dutiful son, "if I'm to carry on this affair, I must be allowed to do it in my own way. You, I dare say, have more experience than I can boast, and if you choose to make the proposal yourself to Miss Wyndham on my behalf, I shall be delighted to leave the matter in your hands; but in that case, I shall choose to be absent from Grey Abbey. If you wish me to do it, you must let me do it when I please and how I please."
"Oh, certainly, certainly, Kilcullen," said the earl; "I only want to point out that I think you'll gain nothing by delay."
"Very well, my lord. Good night." And Lord Kilcullen went to bed, and the father shuffled back to his study. He had had three different letters that day from Lord Kilcullen's creditors, all threatening immediate arrest unless he would make himself responsible for his son's debts. No wonder that he was in a hurry, poor man!
And Lord Kilcullen, though he had spoken so coolly on the subject, and had snubbed his father, was equally in a hurry. He also received letters, and threats, and warnings, and understood, even better than his father did, the perils which awaited him. He knew that he couldn't remain at Grey Abbey another week; that in a day or two it wouldn't be safe for him to leave the house; and that his only chance was at once to obtain the promise of his cousin's hand, and then betake himself to some place of security, till he could make her fortune available.
When Fanny came into the breakfast-room next morning, he asked her to walk with him in the demesne after breakfast. During the whole of the previous evening she had sat silent and alone, pretending to read, although he had made two or three efforts to engage her in conversation. She could not, however, refuse to walk with him, nor could she quite forgive herself for wishing to do so. She felt that her sudden attachment for him was damped by what had passed between her and Lady Selina; but she knew, at the same time, that she was very unreasonable for quarrelling with one cousin for what another had said. She accepted his invitation, and shortly after breakfast went upstairs to get ready. It was a fine, bright, April morning, though the air was cold, and the ground somewhat damp; so she put on her boa and strong boots, and sallied forth with Lord Kilcullen; not exactly in a good humour, but still feeling that she could not justly be out of humour with him. At the same moment, Lady Selina knocked at her father's door, with the intention of explaining to him how impossible it was that Fanny should be persuaded to marry her brother. Poor Lord Cashel! his life, at that time, was certainly not a happy one.
The two cousins walked some way, nearly in silence. Fanny felt very little inclined to talk, and even Kilcullen, with all his knowledge of womankind--with all his assurance, had some difficulty in commencing what he had to get said and done that morning.
"So Grey Abbey will once more sink into its accustomed dullness," said he. "Cokely went yesterday, and Tierney and the Ellisons go to-day. Don't you dread it, Fanny?"
"Oh, I'm used to it: besides, I'm one of the component elements of the dullness, you know. I'm a portion of the thing itself: it's you that must feel it."
"I feel it? I suppose I shall. But, as I told you before, the physic to me was not nearly so nauseous as the sugar. I'm at any rate glad to get rid of such sweetmeats as the bishop and Mrs Ellison;" and they were both silent again for a while.
"But you're not a portion of the heaviness of Grey Abbey, Fanny," said he, referring to what she had said. "You're not an element of its dullness. I don't say this in flattery--I trust nothing so vile as flattery will ever take place between us; but you know yourself that your nature is intended for other things; that you were not born to pass your life in such a house as this, without society, without excitement, without something to fill your mind. Fanny, you can't be happy here, at Grey Abbey."
Happy! thought Fanny to herself. No, indeed, I'm not happy! She didn't say so, however; and Kilcullen, after a little while, went on speaking.
"I'm sure you can't be comfortable here. You don't feel it, I dare say, so intolerable as I do; but still you have been out enough, enough in the world, to feel strongly the everlasting do-nothingness of this horrid place. I wonder what possesses my father, that he does not go to London--for your sake if for no one else's. It's not just of him to coop you up here."
"Indeed it is, Adolphus," said she. "You mistake my character. I'm not at all anxious for London parties and gaiety. Stupid as you may think me, I'm quite as well contented to stay here as I should be to go to London."
"Do you mean me to believe," said Kilcullen, with a gentle laugh, "that you are contented to live and die in single blessedness at Grey Abbey? --that your ambition does not soar higher than the interchange of worsted-work patterns with Miss O'Joscelyn?"
"I did not say so, Adolphus."
"What is your ambition then? what kind and style of life would you choose to live? Come, Fanny, I wish I could get you to talk with me about yourself. I wish I could teach you to believe how anxious I am that your future life should be happy and contented, and at the same time splendid and noble, as it should be. I'm sure you must have ambition. I have studied Lavater [47] well enough to know that such a head and face as yours never belonged to a mind that could satisfy itself with worsted-work."
[FOOTNOTE 47: Lavater--Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), Swiss writer whose only widely read book was a tract on physiognomy (Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe). The Victorians put much stock in physiognomy.]
"You are very severe on the poor worsted-work."
"But am I not in the right?"
"Decidedly not. Lavater, and my head and face, have misled you."
"Nonsense, Fanny. Do you mean to tell me that you have no aspiration for a kind of life different from this you are leading? --If so, I am much disappointed in you; much, very much astray in my judgment of your character." Then he walked on a few yards, looking on the ground, and said, "Come, Fanny, I am talking very earnestly to you, and you answer me only in joke. You don't think me impertinent, do you, to talk about yourself?"
"Impertinent, Adolphus--of course I don't."
"Why won't you talk to me then, in the spirit in which I am talking to you? If you knew, Fanny, how interested I am about you, how anxious that you should be happy, how confidently I look forward to the distinguished position I expect you to fill--if you could guess how proud I mean to be of you, when you are the cynosure of all eyes--the admired of all admirers--admired not more for your beauty than your talent--if I could make you believe, Fanny, how much I expect from you, and how fully I trust that my expectations will be realised, you would not, at any rate, answer me lightly."
"Adolphus," said Fanny, "I thought there was to be no flattering between us?"
"And do you think I would flatter you? Do you think I would stoop to flatter you? Oh! Fanny, you don't understand me yet; you don't at all understand, how thoroughly from the heart I'm speaking--how much in earnest I am; and, so far from flattering you, I am quite as anxious to find fault with you as I am to praise you, could I feel that I had liberty to do so."
"Pray do," said Fanny: "anything but flattery; for a friend never flatters."
But Kilcullen had intended to flatter his fair cousin, and he had been successful. She was gratified and pleased by his warmth of affection. "Pray do," repeated Fanny; "I have more faults than virtues to be told of, and so I'm afraid you'll find out, when you know me better."
"To begin, then," said Kilcullen, "are you not wrong--but no, Fanny, I will not torment you now with a catalogue of faults. I did not ask you to come out with me for that object. You are now in grief for the death of poor Harry"--Fanny blushed as she reflected how much more poignant a sorrow weighed upon her heart--"and are therefore unable to exert yourself; but, as soon as you are able--when you have recovered from this severe blow, I trust you will not be content to loiter and dawdle away your existence at Grey Abbey."
"Not the whole of it," said Fanny.
"None of it," replied her cousin. "Every month, every day, should have its purpose. My father has got into a dull, heartless, apathetic mode of life, which suits my mother and Selina, but which will never suit you. Grey Abbey is like the Dead Sea, of which the waters are always bitter as well as stagnant. It makes me miserable, dearest Fanny, to see you stifled in such a pool. Your beauty, talents, and energies--your disposition to enjoy life, and power of making it enjoyable for others, are all thrown away. Oh, Fanny, if I could rescue you from this!"
"You are inventing imaginary evils," said she; "at any rate they are not palpable to my eyes."
"That's it; that's just what I fear," said the other, "that time, habit, and endurance may teach you to think that nothing further is to be looked for in this world than vegetation at Grey Abbey, or some other place of the kind, to which you may be transplanted. I want to wake you from such a torpor; to save you from such ignominy. I wish to restore you to the world."
"There's time enough, Adolphus; you'll see me yet the gayest of the gay at Almack's."
"Ah! but to please me, Fanny, it must be as one of the leaders, not one of the led."
"Oh, that'll be in years to come: in twenty years' time; when I come forth glorious in a jewelled turban, and yards upon yards of yellow satin--fat, fair, and forty. I've certainly no ambition to be one of the leaders yet."
Lord Kilcullen walked on silent for a considerable time, during which Fanny went on talking about London, Almack's, and the miserable life of lady patronesses, till at last she also became silent, and began thinking of Lord Ballindine. She had, some little time since, fully made up her mind to open her heart to Lord Kilcullen about him, and she had as fully determined not to do so after what Selina had said upon the subject; but now she again wavered. His manner was so kind and affectionate, his interest in her future happiness appeared to be so true and unaffected: at any rate he would not speak harshly or cruelly to her, if she convinced him how completely her happiness depended on her being reconciled to Lord Ballindine. She had all but brought herself to the point; she had almost determined to tell him everything, when he stopped rather abruptly, and said, "I also am leaving Grey Abbey again, Fanny."
"Leaving Grey Abbey?" said Fanny. "You told me the other day you were going to live here," "So I intended; so I do intend; but still I must leave it for a while. I'm going about business, and I don't know how long I may be away. I go on Saturday."
"I hope, Adolphus, you haven't quarrelled with your father," said she.
"Oh, no," said he: "it is on his advice that I am going. I believe there is no fear of our quarrelling now. I should rather say I trust there is none. He not only approves of my going, but approves of what I am about to do before I go."
"And what is that?"
"I had not intended, Fanny, to say what I have to say to you for some time, for I feel that different circumstances make it premature. But I cannot bring myself to leave you without doing so;" and again he paused and walked on a little way in silence--"and yet," he continued, "I hardly know how to utter what I wish to say; or rather what I would wish to have said, were it not that I dread so much the answer you may make me. Stop, Fanny, stop a moment; the seat is quite dry; sit down one moment."
Fanny sat down in a little alcove which they had reached, considerably embarrassed and surprised. She had not, however, the most remote idea of what he was about to say to her. Had any other man in the world, almost, spoken to her in the same language, she would have expected an offer; but from the way in which she had always regarded her cousin, both heretofore, when she hardly knew him, and now, when she was on such affectionate terms with him, she would as soon have thought of receiving an offer from Lord Cashel as from his son.
"Fanny," he said, "I told you before that I have my father's warmest and most entire approval for what I am now going to do. Should I be successful in what I ask, he will be delighted; but I have no words to tell you what my own feelings will be. Fanny, dearest Fanny," and he sat down close beside her--"I love you better--ah! how much better, than all the world holds beside. Dearest, dearest Fanny, will you, can you, return my love?"
"Adolphus," said Fanny, rising suddenly from her seat, more for the sake of turning round so as to look at him, than with the object of getting from him, "Adolphus, you are joking with me."
"No, by heavens then," said he, following her, and catching her hand; "no man in Ireland is this moment more in earnest: no man more anxiously, painfully in earnest. Oh, Fanny! why should you suppose that I am not so? How can you think I would joke on such a subject? No: hear me," he said, interrupting her, as she prepared to answer him, "hear me out, and then you will know how truly I am in earnest."
"No, not a word further!" almost shrieked Fanny--"Not a word more, Adolphus--not a syllable; at any rate till you have heard me. Oh, you have made me so miserable!" and Fanny burst into tears.
"I have spoken too suddenly to you, Fanny; I should have given you more time--I should have waited till--" "No, no, no," said Fanny, "it is not that--but yes; what you say is true: had you waited but one hour--but ten minutes--I should have told you that which would for ever have prevented all this. I should have told you, Adolphus, how dearly, how unutterably I love another." And Fanny again sat down, hid her face in her handkerchief against the corner of the summer-house, and sobbed and cried as though she were broken-hearted: during which time Kilcullen stood by, rather perplexed as to what he was to say next, and beginning to be very doubtful as to his ultimate success.
"Dear Fanny!" he said, "for both our sakes, pray try to be collected: all my future happiness is at this moment at stake. I did not bring you here to listen to what I have told you, without having become too painfully sure that your hand, your heart, your love, are necessary to my happiness. All my hopes are now at stake; but I would not, if I could, secure my own happiness at the expense of yours. Pray believe me, Fanny, when I say that I love you completely, unalterably, devotedly: it is necessary now for my own sake that I should say as much as that. Having told you so much of my own heart, let me hear what you wish to tell me of yours. Oh, that I might have the most distant gleam of hope, that it would ever return the love which fills my own!"
"It cannot, Adolphus--it never can," said she, still trying to hide her tears. "Oh, why should this bitter misery have been added!" She then rose quickly from her seat, wiped her eyes, and, pushing back her hair, continued, "I will no longer continue to live such a life as I have done--miserable to myself, and the cause of misery to others. Adolphus,--I love Lord Ballindine. I love him with, I believe, as true and devoted a love as woman ever felt for a man. I valued, appreciated, gloried in your friendship; but I can never return your, love. My heart is wholly, utterly, given away; and I would not for worlds receive it back, till I learn from his own mouth that he has ceased to love me."
"Oh, Fanny! my poor Fanny!" said Kilcullen; "if such is the case, you are really to be pitied. If this be true, your condition is nearly as unhappy as my own."
"I am unhappy, very unhappy in your love," said Fanny, drawing herself up proudly; "but not unhappy in my own. My misery is that I should be the cause of trouble and unhappiness to others. I have nothing to regret in my own choice."
"You are harsh, Fanny. It may be well that you should be decided, but it cannot become you also to be unfeeling. I have offered to you all that a man can offer; my name, my fortune, my life, my heart; though you may refuse me, you have no right to be offended with me."
"Oh, Adolphus!" said she, now in her turn offering him her hand: "pray forgive me: pray do not be angry. Heaven knows I feel no offence: and how strongly, how sincerely, I feel the compliment you have offered me. But I want you to see how vain it would be in me to leave you--leave you in any doubt. I only spoke as I did to show you I could not think twice, when my heart was given to one whom I so entirely love, respect--and--and approve."
Lord Kilcullen's face became thoughtful, and his brow grew black: he stood for some time irresolute what to say or do.
"Let us walk on, Fanny, for this is cold and damp," he said, at last.
"Let us go back to the house, then."
"As you like, Fanny. Oh, how painful all this is! how doubly painful to know that ray own love is hopeless, and that yours is no less so. Did you not refuse Lord Ballindine?"
"If I did, is it not sufficient that I tell you I love him? If he were gone past all redemption, you would not have me encourage you while I love another?"
"I never dreamed of this! What, Fanny, what are your hopes? what is it you wish or intend? Supposing me, as I wish I were, fathoms deep below the earth, what would you do? You cannot marry Lord Ballindine."
"Then I will marry no one," said Fanny, striving hard to suppress her tears, and barely succeeding.
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Kilcullen; "what an infatuation is this!" --and then again he walked on silent a little way. "Have you told any one of this, Fanny? --do they know of it at Grey Abbey? Come, Fanny, speak to me: forget, if you will, that I would be your lover: remember me only as your cousin and your friend, and speak to me openly. Do they know that you have repented of the refusal you gave Lord Ballindine?"
"They all know that I love him: your father, your mother, and Selina."
"You don't say my father?"
"Yes," said Fanny, stopping on the path, and speaking with energy, as she confronted her cousin. "Yes, Lord Cashel. He, above all others, knows it. I have told him so almost on my knees. I have implored him, as a child may implore her father, to bring back to me the only man I ever loved. I have besought him not to sacrifice me. Oh! how I have implored him to spare me the dreadful punishment of my own folly--wretchedness rather--in rejecting the man I loved. But he has not listened to me; he will never listen to me, and I will never ask again. He shall find that I am not a tree or a stone, to be planted or placed as he chooses. I will not again be subjected to what I have to-day suffered. I will not--I will not--" But Fanny was out of breath; and could not complete the catalogue of what she would not do.
"And did you intend to tell me all this, had I not spoken to you as I have done?" said Kilcullen.
"I did," said she. "I was on the point of telling you everything: twice I had intended to do so. I intended to implore you, as you loved me as your cousin, to use your exertions to reconcile my uncle and Lord Ballindine--and now instead of that--" "You find I love you too well myself?"
"Oh, forget, Adolphus, forget that the words ever passed your lips. You have not loved me long, and therefore will not continue to love me, when you know I never can be yours: forget your short-lived love; won't you, Adolphus?" --and she put her clasped hands upon his breast--"forget,--let us both forget that the words were ever spoken. Be still my cousin, my friend, my brother; and we shall still both be happy."
Different feelings were disturbing Lord Kilcullen's breast--different from each other, and some of them very different from those which usually found a place there. He had sought Fanny's hand not only with most sordid, but also with most dishonest views: he not only intended to marry her for her fortune, but also to rob her of her money; to defraud her, that he might enable himself once more to enter the world of pleasure, with the slight encumbrance of a wretched wife. But, in carrying out his plan, he had disturbed it by his own weakness: he had absolutely allowed himself to fall in love with his cousin; and when, as he had just done, he offered her his hand, he was quite as anxious that she should accept him for her own sake as for that of her money. He had taught himself to believe that she would accept him, and many misgivings had haunted him as to the ruined state to which he should bring her as his wife. But these feelings, though strong enough to disturb him, were not strong enough to make him pause: he tried to persuade himself that he could yet make her happy, and hurried on to the consummation of his hopes. He now felt strongly tempted to act a generous part; to give her up, and to bring Lord Ballindine back to her feet; to deserve at any rate well of her, and leave all other things to chance. But Lord Kilcullen was not accustomed to make such sacrifices: he had never learned to disregard himself; and again and again he turned it over in his mind--"how could he get her fortune? --was there any way left in which he might be successful?"
"This is child's play, Fanny," he said. "You may reject me: to that I have nothing further to say, for I am but an indifferent wooer; but you can never marry Lord Ballindine."
"Oh, Adolphus, for mercy's sake don't say so!"
"But I do say so, Fanny. God knows, not to wound you, or for any unworthy purpose, but because it is so. He was your lover, and you sent him away; you cannot whistle him back as you would a dog."
Fanny made no answer to this, but walked on towards the house, anxious to find herself alone in her own room, that she might compose her mind and think over all that she had heard and said; nor did Lord Kilcullen renew the conversation till he got to the house. He could not determine what to do. Under other circumstances it might, he felt, have been wise for him to wait till time had weakened Fanny's regret for her lost lover; but in his case this was impracticable; if he waited anywhere it would be in the Queen's Bench. And yet, he could not but feel that, at present, it was hopeless for him to push his suit.
They reached the steps together, and as he opened the front door, Fanny turned round to wish him good morning, as she was hurrying in; but he stopped her, and said, "One word more, Fanny, before we part. You must not refuse me; nor must we part in this way. Step in here; I will not keep you a minute;" and he took her into a room off the hall--"do not let us be children, Fanny; do not let us deceive each other, or ourselves: do not let us persist in being irrational if we ourselves see that we are so;" and he paused for a reply.
"Well, Adolphus?" was all she said.
"If I could avoid it," continued he, "I would not hurt your feelings; but you must see, you must know, that you cannot marry Lord Ballindine." --Fanny, who was now sitting, bit her lips and clenched her hands, but she said nothing; "If this is so--if you feel that so far your fate is fixed, are you mad enough to give yourself up to a vain and wicked passion--for wicked it will be? Will you not rather strive to forget him who has forgotten you?"
"That is not true," interposed Fanny.
"His conduct, unfortunately, proves that it is too true," continued Kilcullen. "He has forgotten you, and you cannot blame him that he should do so, now that you have rejected him; but he neglected you even before you did so. Is it wise, is it decorous, is it maidenly in you, to indulge any longer in so vain a passion? Think of this, Fanny. As to myself, Heaven knows with what perfect truth, with what true love, I offered you, this morning, all that a man can offer: how ardently I hoped for an answer different from that you have now given me. You cannot give me your heart now; love cannot, at a moment, be transferred. But think, Fanny, think whether it is not better for you to accept an offer which your friends will all approve, and which I trust will never make you unhappy, than to give yourself up to a lasting regret,--to tears, misery, and grief."
"And would you take my hand without my heart?" said she.
"Not for worlds," replied the other, "were I not certain that your heart would follow your hand. Whoever may be your husband, you will love him. But ask my mother, talk to her, ask her advice; she at any rate will only tell you that which must be best for your own happiness. Go to her, Fanny; if her advice be different from mine, I will not say a word farther to urge my suit."
"I will go to no one," said Fanny, rising. "I have gone to too many with a piteous story on my lips. I have no friend, now, in this house. I had still hoped to find one in you, but that hope is over. I am, of course, proud of the honour your declaration has conveyed; but I should be wicked indeed if I did not make you perfectly understand that it is one which I cannot accept. Whatever may be your views, your ideas, I will never marry unless I thoroughly love, and feel that I am thoroughly loved by my future husband. Had you not made this ill-timed declaration--had you not even persisted in repeating it after I had opened my whole heart to you, I could have loved and cherished you as a brother; under no circumstances could I ever have accepted you as a husband. Good morning." And she left him alone, feeling that he could have but little chance of success, should he again renew the attempt.
He did not see her again till dinner-time, when she appeared silent and reserved, but still collected and at her ease; nor did he speak to her at dinner or during the evening, till the moment the ladies were retiring for the night. He then came up to her as she was standing alone turning over some things on a side-table, and said, "Fanny, I probably leave Grey Abbey to-morrow. I will say good bye to you tonight."
"Good bye, Adolphus; may we both be happier when next we meet," said she.
"My happiness, I fear, is doubtful: but I will not speak of that now. If I can do anything for yours before I go, I will. Fanny, I will ask my father to invite Lord Ballindine here. He has been anxious that we should be married: when I tell him that that is impossible, he may perhaps be induced to do so."
"Do that," said Fanny, "and you will be a friend to me. Do that, and you will be more than a brother to me."
"I will; and in doing so I shall crush every hope that I have had left in me."
"Do not say so, Adolphus:--do not--" "You'll understand what I mean in a short time. I cannot explain everything to you now. But this will I do; I will make Lord Cashel understand that we never can be more to each other than we are now, and I will advise him to seek a reconciliation with Lord Ballindine. And now, good bye," and he held out his hand.
"But I shall see you to-morrow."
"Probably not; and if you do, it will be but for a moment, when I shall have other adieux to make."
"Good bye, then, Adolphus; and may God bless you; and may we yet live to have many happy days together," and she shook hands with him, and went to her room.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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33
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LORD KILCULLEN MAKES ANOTHER VISIT TO THE BOOK-ROOM
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Lord Cashel's plans were certainly not lucky. It was not that sufficient care was not used in laying them, nor sufficient caution displayed in maturing them. He passed his time in care and caution; he spared no pains in seeing that the whole machinery was right; he was indefatigable in deliberation, diligent in manoeuvring, constant in attention. But, somehow, he was unlucky; his schemes were never successful. In the present instance he was peculiarly unfortunate, for everything went wrong with him. He had got rid of an obnoxious lover, he had coaxed over his son, he had spent an immensity of money, he had undergone worlds of trouble and self-restraint;--and then, when he really began to think that his ward's fortune would compensate him for this, his own family came to him, one after another, to assure him that he was completely mistaken--that it was utterly impossible that such a thing as a family marriage between the two cousins could never take place, and indeed, ought not to be thought of.
Lady Selina gave him the first check. On the morning on which Lord Kilcullen made his offer, she paid her father a solemn visit in his book-room, and told him exactly what she had before told her mother; assured him that Fanny could not be induced, at any rate at present, to receive her cousin as her lover; whispered to him, with unfeigned sorrow and shame, that Fanny was still madly in love with Lord Ballindine; and begged him to induce her brother to postpone his offer, at any rate for some months.
"I hate Lord Ballindine's very name," said the earl, petulant with irritation.
"We none of us approve of him, papa: we don't think of supposing that he could now be a fitting husband for Fanny, or that they could possibly ever be married. Of course it's not to be thought of. But if you would advise Adolphus not to be premature, he might, in the end, be more successful."
"Kilcullen has made his own bed and he must lie in it; I won't interfere between them," said the angry father.
"But if you were only to recommend delay," suggested the daughter; "a few months' delay; think how short a time Harry Wyndham has been dead!"
Lord Cashel knew that delay was death in this case, so he pished, and hummed, and hawed; quite lost the dignity on which he piqued himself, and ended by declaring that he would not interfere; that they might do as they liked; that young people would not be guided, and that he would not make himself unhappy about them. And so, Lady Selina, crestfallen and disappointed, went away.
Then, Lady Cashel, reflecting on what her daughter had told her, and yet anxious that the marriage should, if possible, take place at some time or other, sent Griffiths down to her lord, with a message--"Would his lordship be kind enough to step up-stairs to her ladyship?" Lord Cashel went up, and again had all the difficulties of the case opened out before him.
"But you see," said her ladyship, "poor Fanny--she's become so unreasonable--I don't know what's come to her--I'm sure I do everything I can to make her happy: but I suppose if she don't like to marry, nobody can make her."
"Make her? --who's talking of making her?" said the earl.
"No, of course not," continued the countess; "that's just what Selina says; no one can make her do anything, she's got so obstinate, of late: but it's all that horrid Lord Ballindine, and those odious horses. I'm sure I don't know what business gentlemen have to have horses at all; there's never any good comes of it. There's Adolphus--he's had the good sense to get rid of his, and yet Fanny's so foolish, she'd sooner have that other horrid man--and I'm sure he's not half so good-looking, nor a quarter so agreeable as Adolphus."
All these encomiums on his son, and animadversions on Lord Ballindine, were not calculated to put the earl into a good humour; he was heartily sick of the subject; thoroughly repented that he had not allowed his son to ruin himself in his own way; detested the very name of Lord Ballindine, and felt no very strong affection for his poor innocent ward. He accordingly made his wife nearly the same answer he had made his daughter, and left her anything but comforted by the visit.
It was about eleven o'clock on the same evening, that Lord Kilcullen, after parting with Fanny, opened the book-room door. He had been quite sincere in what he had told her. He had made up his mind entirely to give over all hopes of marrying her himself, and to tell his father that the field was again open for Lord Ballindine, as far as he was concerned.
There is no doubt that he would not have been noble enough to do this, had he thought he had himself any chance of being successful; but still there was something chivalrous in his resolve, something magnanimous in his determination to do all he could for the happiness of her he really loved, when everything in his own prospects was gloomy, dark, and desperate. As he entered his father's room, feeling that it would probably be very long before he should be closeted with him again, he determined that he would not quietly bear reproaches, and even felt a source of satisfaction in the prospect of telling his father that their joint plans were overturned--their schemes completely at an end.
"I'm disturbing you, my lord, I'm afraid," said the son, walking into the room, not at all with the manner of one who had any hesitation at causing the disturbance.
"Who's that?" said the earl--"Adolphus? --no--yes. That is, I'm just going to bed; what is it you want?" The earl had been dozing after all the vexations of the day.
"To tell the truth, my lord, I've a good deal that I wish to say: will it trouble you to listen to me?"
"Won't to-morrow morning do?"
"I shall leave Grey Abbey early to-morrow, my lord; immediately after breakfast."
"Good heavens, Kilcullen! what do you mean? You're not going to run off to London again?"
"A little farther than that, I'm afraid, will be necessary," said the son. "I have offered to Miss Wyndham--have been refused--and, having finished my business at Grey Abbey, your lordship will probably think that in leaving it I shall be acting with discretion."
"You have offered to Fanny and been refused!"
"Indeed I have; finally and peremptorily refused. Not only that: I have pledged my word to my cousin that I will never renew my suit."
The earl sat speechless in his chair--so much worse was this catastrophe even than his expectations. Lord Kilcullen continued.
"I hope, at any rate, you are satisfied with me. I have not only implicitly obeyed your directions, but I have done everything in my power to accomplish what you wished. Had my marriage with my cousin been a project of my own, I could not have done more for its accomplishment. Miss Wyndham's affections are engaged; and she will never, I am sure, marry one man while she loves another."
"Loves another--psha!" roared the earl. "Is this to be the end of it all? After your promises to me--after your engagement! After such an engagement, sir, you come to me and talk about a girl loving another? Loving another! Will her loving another pay your debts?"
"Exactly the reverse, my lord," said the son. "I fear it will materially postpone their payment."
"Well, sir," said the earl. He did not exactly know how to commence the thunder of indignation with which he intended to annihilate his son, for certainly Kilcullen had done the best in his power to complete the bargain. But still the storm could not be stayed, unreasonable as it might be for the earl to be tempestuous on the occasion. "Well, sir," and he stood up from his chair, to face his victim, who was still standing--and, thrusting his hands into his trowsers' pockets, frowned awfully--"Well, sir; am I to be any further favoured with your plans?"
"I have none, my lord," said Kilcullen; "I am again ready to listen to yours."
"My plans? --I have no further plans to offer for you. You are ruined, utterly ruined: you have done your best to ruin me and your mother; I have pointed out to you, I arranged for you, the only way in which your affairs could be redeemed; I made every thing easy for you."
"No, my lord: you could not make it easy for me to get my cousin's love."
"Don't contradict me, sir. I say I did. I made every thing straight and easy for you: and now you come to me with a whining story about a girl's love! What's her love to me, sir? Where am I to get my thirty thousand pounds, sir? --and my note of hand is passed for as much more, at this time twelve-month! Where am I to raise that, sir? Do you remember that you have engaged to repay me these sums? --do you remember that, or have such trifles escaped your recollection?"
"I remember perfectly well, my lord, that if I married my cousin, you were to repay yourself those sums out of her fortune. But I also remember, and so must you, that I beforehand warned you that I thought she would refuse me."
"Refuse you," said the earl, with a contortion of his nose and lips intended to convey unutterable scorn; "of course she refused you, when you asked her as a child would ask for an apple, or a cake! What else could you expect?"
"I hardly think your lordship knows--" "Don't you hardly think? --then I do know; and know well too. I know you have deceived me, grossly deceived me--induced me to give you money--to incur debts, with which I never would have burdened myself had I not believed you were sincere in your promise. But you have deceived me, sir--taken me in; for by heaven it's no better! --it's no better than downright swindling--and that from a son to his father! But it's for the last time; not a penny more do you get from me: you can ruin the property; indeed, I believe you have; but, for your mother's and sister's sake, I'll keep till I die what little you have left me."
Lord Cashel had worked himself up into a perfect frenzy, and was stamping about the room as he uttered this speech; but, as he came to the end of it, he threw himself into his chair again, and buried his face in his hands.
Lord Kilcullen was standing with his back resting against the mantel-piece, with a look of feigned indifference on his face, which he tried hard to maintain. But his brow became clouded, and he bit his lips when his father accused him of swindling; and he was just about to break forth into a torrent of recrimination, when Lord Cashel turned off into a pathetic strain, and Kilcullen thought it better to leave him there.
"What I'm to do, I don't know; what I am to do, I do not know!" said the earl, beating the table with one hand, and hiding his face with the other. "Sixty thousand pounds in one year; and that after so many drains! --And there's only my own life--there's only my own life!" --and then there was a pause for four or five minutes, during which Lord Kilcullen took snuff, poked the fire, and then picked up a newspaper, as though he were going to read it. This last was too much for the father, and he again roared out, "Well, sir, what are you standing there for? If you've nothing else to say; why don't you go? I've done with you--you can not get more out of me, I promise you!"
"I've a good deal to say before I go, my lord," said Kilcullen. "I was waiting till you were disposed to listen to me. I've a good deal to say, indeed, which you must hear; and I trust, therefore, you will endeavour to be cool, whatever your opinions may be about my conduct."
"Cool? --no, sir, I will not be cool. You're too cool yourself!"
"Cool enough for both, you think, my lord."
"Kilcullen," said the earl, "you've neither heart nor principle: you have done your worst to ruin me, and now you come to insult me in my own room. Say what you want to say, and then leave me."
"As to insulting language, my lord, I think you need not complain, when you remember that you have just called me a swindler, because I have been unable to accomplish your wish and my own, by marrying my cousin. However, I will let that pass. I have done the best I could to gain that object. I did more than either of us thought it possible that I should do, when I consented to attempt it. I offered her my hand, and assured her of my affection, without falsehood or hypocrisy. My bargain was that I should offer to her. I have done more than that, for I have loved her. I have, however, been refused, and in such a manner as to convince me that it would be useless for me to renew my suit. If your lordship will allow me to advise you on such a subject, I would suggest that you make no further objection to Fanny's union with Lord Ballindine. For marry him she certainly will."
"What, sir?" again shouted Lord Cashel.
"I trust Fanny will receive no further annoyance on the subject. She has convinced me that her own mind is thoroughly made up; and she is not the person to change her mind on such a subject."
"And haven't you enough on hand in your own troubles, but what you must lecture me about my ward? --Is it for that you have come to torment me at this hour? Had not you better at once become her guardian yourself, sir, and manage the matter in your own way?"
"I promised Fanny I would say as much to you. I will not again mention her name unless you press me to do so."
"That's very kind," said the earl.
"And now, about myself. I think your lordship will agree with me that it is better that I should at once leave Grey Abbey, when I tell you that, if I remain here, I shall certainly be arrested before the week is over, if I am found outside the house. I do not wish to have bailiffs knocking at your lordship's door, and your servants instructed to deny me."
"Upon my soul, you are too good."
"At any rate," said Kilcullen, "you'll agree with me that this is no place for me to remain in."
"You're quite at liberty to go," said the earl. "You were never very ceremonious with regard to me; pray don't begin to be so now. Pray go--to-night if you like. Your mother's heart will be broken, that's all."
"I trust my mother will be able to copy your lordship's indifference."
"Indifference! Is sixty thousand pounds in one year, and more than double within three or four, indifference? I have paid too much to be indifferent. But it is hopeless to pay more. I have no hope for you; you are ruined, and I couldn't redeem you even if I would. I could not set you free and tell you to begin again, even were it wise to do so; and therefore I tell you to go. And now, good night; I have not another word to say to you," and the earl got up as if to leave the room.
"Stop, my lord, you must listen to me," said Kilcullen.
"Not a word further. I have heard enough;" and he put out the candles on the book-room table, having lighted a bed candle which he held in his hand.
"Pardon me, my lord," continued the son, standing just before his father, so as to prevent his leaving the room; "pardon me, but you must listen to what I have to say."
"Not another word--not another word. Leave the door, sir, or I will ring for the servants to open it."
"Do so," said Kilcullen, "and they also shall hear what I have to say. I am going to leave you to-morrow, perhaps for ever; and you will not listen to the last word I wish to speak to you?"
"I'll stay five minutes," said the earl, taking out his watch, "and then I'll go; and if you attempt again to stop me, I'll ring the bell for the servants."
"Thank you, my lord, for the five minutes; it will be time enough. I purpose leaving Grey Abbey to-morrow, and I shall probably be in France in three days' time. When there, I trust I shall cease to trouble you; but I cannot, indeed I will not go, without funds to last me till I can make some arrangement. Your lordship must give me five hundred pounds. I have not the means even of carrying myself from hence to Calais."
"Not one penny. Not one penny--if it were to save you from the gaol to-morrow! This is too bad!" and the earl again walked to the door, against which Lord Kilcullen leaned his back. "By Heaven, sir, I'll raise the house if you think to frighten me by violence!"
"I'll use no violence, but you must hear the alternative: if you please it, the whole house shall hear it too. If you persist in refusing the small sum I now ask--" "I will not give you one penny to save you from gaol. Is that plain?"
"Perfectly plain, and very easy to believe. But you will give more than a penny; you would even give more than I ask, to save yourself from the annoyance you will have to undergo."
"Not on any account will I give you one single farthing."
"Very well. Then I have only to tell you what I must do. Of course, I shall remain here. You cannot turn me out of your house, or refuse me a seat at your table."
"By Heavens, though, I both can and will!"
"You cannot, my lord. If you think of it, you'll find you cannot, without much disagreeable trouble. An eldest son would be a very difficult tenant to eject summarily: and of my own accord I will not go without the money I ask."
"By heavens, this exceeds all I ever heard. Would you rob your own father?"
"I will not rob him, but I'll remain in his house. The sheriff's officers, doubtless, will hang about the doors, and be rather troublesome before the windows; but I shall not be the first Irish gentleman that has remained at home upon his keeping. And, like other Irish gentlemen, I will do so rather than fall into the hands of these myrmidons. I have no wish to annoy you; I shall be most sorry to do so; most sorry to subject my mother to the misery which must attend the continual attempts which will be made to arrest me; but I will not put my head into the lion's jaw."
"This is the return for what I have done for him!" ejaculated the earl, in his misery. "Unfortunate reprobate! unfortunate reprobate! --that I should be driven to wish that he was in gaol!"
"Your wishing so won't put me there, my lord. If it would I should not be weak enough to ask you for this money. Do you mean to comply with my request?"
"I do not, sir: not a penny shall you have--not one farthing more shall you get from me."
"Then good night, my lord. I grieve that I should have to undergo a siege in your lordship's house, more especially as it is likely to be a long one. In a week's time there will be a '_ne exeat_' [48] issued against me, and then it will be too late for me to think of France." And so saying, the son retired to his own room, and left the father to consider what he had better do in his distress.
[FOOTNOTE 48: ne exeat--(Latin) "let him not leave"; a legal writ forbidding a person to leave the jurisdiction of the court] Lord Cashel was dreadfully embarrassed. What Lord Kilcullen said was perfectly true; an eldest son was a most difficult tenant to eject; and then, the ignominy of having his heir arrested in his own house, or detained there by bailiffs lurking round the premises! He could not determine whether it would be more painful to keep his son, or to give him up. If he did the latter, he would be driven to effect it by a most disagreeable process. He would have to assist the officers of the law in their duty, and to authorise them to force the doors locked by his son. The prospect, either way, was horrid. He would willingly give the five hundred pounds to be rid of his heir, were it not for his word's sake, or rather his pride's sake. He had said he would not, and, as he walked up and down the room he buttoned up his breeches pocket, and tried to resolve that, come what come might, he would not expedite his son's departure by the outlay of one shilling.
The candles had been put out, and the gloom of the room was only lightened by a single bed-room taper, which, as it stood near the door, only served to render palpable the darkness of the further end of the chamber. For half an hour Lord Cashel walked to and fro, anxious, wretched, and in doubt, instead of going to his room. How he wished that Lord Ballindine had married his ward, and taken her off six months since! --all this trouble would not then have come upon him. And as he thought of the thirty thousand pounds that he had spent, and the thirty thousand more that he must spend, he hurried on with such rapidity that in the darkness he struck his shin violently against some heavy piece of furniture, and, limping back to the candlestick, swore through his teeth--"No, not a penny, were it to save him from perdition! I'll see the sheriff's officer. I'll see the sheriff himself, and tell him that every door in the house--every closet--every cellar, shall be open to him. My house shall enable no one to defy the law." And, with this noble resolve, to which, by the bye, the blow on his shin greatly contributed, Lord Cashel went to bed, and the house was at rest.
About nine o'clock on the following morning Lord Kilcullen was still in bed, but awake. His servant had been ordered to bring him hot water, and he was seriously thinking of getting up, and facing the troubles of the day, when a very timid knock at the door announced to him that some stranger was approaching. He adjusted his nightcap, brought the bed-clothes up close to his neck, and on giving the usual answer to a knock at the door, saw a large cap introduce itself, the head belonging to which seemed afraid to follow.
"Who's that?" he called out.
"It's me, my lord," said the head, gradually following the cap. "Griffiths, my lord."
"Well?"
"Lady Selina, my lord; her ladyship bids me give your lordship her love, and would you see her ladyship for five minutes before you get up?"
Lord Kilcullen having assented to this proposal, the cap and head retired. A second knock at the door was soon given, and Lady Selina entered the room, with a little bit of paper in her hand.
"Good morning, Adolphus," said the sister.
"Good morning, Selina," said the brother. "It must be something very particular, which brings you here at this hour."
"It is indeed, something very particular. I have been with papa this morning, Adolphus: he has told me of the interview between you last night."
"Well."
"Oh, Adolphus! he is very angry--he's--" "So am I, Selina. I am very angry, too;--so we're quits. We laid a plan together, and we both failed, and each blames the other; so you need not tell me anything further about his anger. Did he send any message to me?"
"He did. He told me I might give you this, if I would undertake that you left Grey Abbey to-day:" and Lady Selina held up, but did not give him, the bit of paper.
"What a dolt he is."
"Oh, Adolphus!" said Selina, "don't speak so of your father."
"So he is: how on earth can you undertake that I shall leave the house?"
"I can ask you to give me your word that you will do so; and I can take back the check if you refuse," said Lady Selina, conceiving it utterly impossible that one of her own family could break his word.
"Well, Selina, I'll answer you fairly. If that bit of paper is a cheque for five hundred pounds, I will leave this place in two hours. If it is not--" "It is," said Selina. "It is a cheque for five hundred pounds, and I may then give it to you?"
"I thought as much," said Lord Kilcullen; "I thought he'd alter his mind. Yes, you may give it me, and tell my father I'll dine in London to-morrow evening."
"He says, Adolphus, he'll not see you before you go."
"Well, there's comfort in that, anyhow."
"Oh, Adolphus! how can you speak in that manner now? --how can you speak in that wicked, thoughtless, reckless manner?" said his sister.
"Because I'm a wicked, thoughtless, reckless man, I suppose. I didn't mean to vex you, Selina; but my father is so pompous, so absurd, and so tedious. In the whole of this affair I have endeavoured to do exactly as he would have me; and he is more angry with me now, because his plan has failed, than he ever was before, for any of my past misdoings. --But let me get up now, there's a good girl; for I've no time to lose."
"Will you see your mother before you go, Adolphus?"
"Why, no; it'll be no use--only tormenting her. Tell her something, you know; anything that won't vex her."
"But I cannot tell her anything about you that will not vex her."
"Well, then, say what will vex her least. Tell her--tell her. Oh, you know what to tell her, and I'm sure I don't."
"And Fanny: will you see her again?"
"No," said Kilcullen. "I have bid her good bye. But give her my kindest love, and tell her that I did what I told her I would do."
"She told me what took place between you yesterday."
"Why, Selina, everybody tells you everything! And now, I'll tell you something. If you care for your cousin's happiness, do not attempt to raise difficulties between her and Lord Ballindine. And now, I must say good bye to you. I'll have my breakfast up here, and go directly down to the yard. Good bye, Selina; when I'm settled I'll write to you, and tell you where I am."
"Good bye, Adolphus; God bless you, and enable you yet to retrieve your course. I'm afraid it is a bad one;" and she stooped down and kissed her brother.
He was as good as his word. In two hours' time he had left Grey Abbey. He dined that day in Dublin, the next in London, and the third in Boulogne; and the sub-sheriff of County Kildare in vain issued half-a-dozen writs for his capture.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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34
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THE DOCTOR MAKES A CLEAN BREAST OF IT
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We will now return for a while to Dunmore, and settle the affairs of the Kellys and Lynches, which we left in rather a precarious state.
Barry's attempt on Doctor Colligan's virtue was very unsuccessful, for Anty continued to mend under the treatment of that uncouth but safe son of Galen. As Colligan told her brother, the fever had left her, though for some time it was doubtful whether she had strength to recover from its effects. This, however, she did gradually; and, about a fortnight after the dinner at Dunmore House, the doctor told Mrs Kelly and Martin that his patient was out of danger.
Martin had for some time made up his mind that Anty was to live for many years in the character of Mrs Martin, and could not therefore be said to be much affected by the communication. But if he was not, his mother was. She had made up her mind that Anty was to die; that she was to pay for the doctor--the wake, and the funeral, and that she would have a hardship and grievance to boast of, and a subject of self-commendation to enlarge on, which would have lasted her till her death; and she consequently felt something like disappointment at being ordered to administer to Anty a mutton chop and a glass of sherry every day at one o'clock. Not that the widow was less assiduous, or less attentive to Anty's wants now that she was convalescent; but she certainly had not so much personal satisfaction, as when she was able to speak despondingly of her patient to all her gossips.
"Poor cratur!" she used to say--"it's all up with her now; the Lord be praised for all his mercies. She's all as one as gone, glory be to God and the Blessed Virgin. Shure no good ever come of ill-got money;--not that she was iver to blame. Thank the Lord, av' I have a penny saved at all, it was honestly come by; not that I shall have when this is done and paid for, not a stifle; (stiver [49] Mrs Kelly probably meant)--but what's that!" and she snapped her fingers to show that the world's gear was all dross in her estimation. --"She shall be dacently sthretched, though she is a Lynch, and a Kelly has to pay for it. Whisper, neighbour; in two years' time there'll not be one penny left on another of all the dirthy money Sim Lynch scraped together out of the gutthers."
[FOOTNOTE 49: stiver--a Dutch coin worth almost nothing] There was a degree of triumph in these lamentations, a tone of self-satisfied assurance in the truth of her melancholy predictions, which showed that the widow was not ill at ease with herself. When Anty was declared out of danger, her joy was expressed with much more moderation.
"Yes, thin," she said to Father Pat Geoghegan, "poor thing, she's rallying a bit. The docthor says maybe she'll not go this time; but he's much in dread of a re-claps--" "Relapse, Mrs Kelly, I suppose?"
"Well, relapse, av' you will, Father Pat--relapse or reclaps, it's pretty much the same I'm thinking; for she'd niver get through another bout. God send we may be well out of the hobble this day twelvemonth. Martin's my own son, and ain't above industhrying, as his father and mother did afore him, and I won't say a word agin him; but he's brought more throuble on me with them Lynches than iver I knew before. What has a lone woman like me, Father Pat, to do wid sthrangers like them? jist to turn their backs on me when I ain't no furder use, and to be gitting the hights of insolence and abuse, as I did from that blagguard Barry. He'd betther keep his toe in his pump and go asy, or he'll wake to a sore morning yet, some day."
Doctor Colligan, also, was in trouble from his connection with the Lynches: not that he had any dissatisfaction at the recovery of his patient, for he rejoiced at it, both on her account and his own. He had strongly that feeling of self-applause, which must always be enjoyed by a doctor who brings a patient safely through a dangerous illness. But Barry's iniquitous proposal to him weighed heavy on his conscience. It was now a week since it had been made, and he had spoken of it to no one. He had thought much and frequently of what he ought to do; whether he should publicly charge Lynch with the fact; whether he should tell it confidentially to some friend whom he could trust; or whether--by far the easiest alternative, he should keep it in his own bosom, and avoid the man in future as he would an incarnation of the devil. It preyed much upon his spirits, for he lived in fear of Barry Lynch--in fear lest he should determine to have the first word, and, in his own defence, accuse him (Colligan) of the very iniquity which he had himself committed. Nothing, the doctor felt, would be too bad or too false for Barry Lynch; nothing could be more damnable than the proposal he had made; and yet it would be impossible to convict him, impossible to punish him. He would, of course, deny the truth of the accusation, and probably return the charge on his accuser. And yet Colligan felt that he would be compromising the matter, if he did not mention it to some one; and that he would outrage his own feelings if he did not express his horror at the murder which he had been asked to commit.
For one week these feelings quite destroyed poor Colligan's peace of mind; during the second, he determined to make a clean breast of it; and, on the first day of the third week, after turning in his mind twenty different people--Martin Kelly--young Daly--the widow--the parish priest--the parish parson--the nearest stipendiary magistrate--and a brother doctor in Tuam, he at last determined on going to Lord Ballindine, as being both a magistrate and a friend of the Kellys. Doctor Colligan himself was not at all acquainted with Lord Ballindine: he attended none of the family, who extensively patronised his rival, and he had never been inside Kelly's Court house. He felt, therefore, considerable embarrassment at his mission; but he made up his mind to go, and, manfully setting himself in his antique rickety gig, started early enough, to catch Lord Ballindine, as he thought, before he left the house after breakfast.
Lord Ballindine had spent the last week or ten days restlessly enough. Armstrong, his clerical ambassador, had not yet started on his mission to Grey Abbey, and innumerable difficulties seemed to arise to prevent his doing so. First of all, the black cloth was to be purchased, and a tailor, sufficiently adept for making up the new suit, was to be caught. This was a work of some time; for though there is in the West of Ireland a very general complaint of the stagnation of trade, trade itself is never so stagnant as are the tradesmen, when work, is to be done; and it is useless for a poor wight to think of getting his coat or his boots, till such time as absolute want shall have driven the artisan to look for the price of his job--unless some private and underhand influence be used, as was done in the case of Jerry Blake's new leather breeches.
This cause of delay was, however, not mentioned to Lord Ballindine; but when it was well got over, and a neighbouring parson procured to preach on the next Sunday to Mrs O'Kelly and the three policemen who attended Ballindine Church, Mrs Armstrong broke her thumb with the rolling-pin while making a beef pudding for the family dinner, and her husband's departure was again retarded. And then, on the next Sunday, the neighbouring parson could not leave his own policemen, and the two spinsters, who usually formed his audience.
All this tormented Lord Ballindine. and he was really thinking of giving up the idea of sending Mr Armstrong altogether, when he received the following letter from his friend Dot Blake.
Limmer's Hotel. April, 1847.
Dear Frank, One cries out, "what are you at?" the other, "what are you after?" Every one is saying what a fool you are! Kilcullen is at Grey Abbey, with the evident intention of superseding you in possession of Miss W----, and, what is much more to his taste, as it would be to mine, of her fortune. Mr T. has written to me _from Grey Abbey_, where he has been staying: he is a good-hearted fellow, and remembers how warmly you contradicted the report that your match was broken off. For heaven's sake, follow up your warmth of denial with some show of positive action, a little less cool than your present quiescence, or you cannot expect that any amount of love should be strong enough to prevent your affianced from resenting your conduct. I am doubly anxious; quite as anxious that Kilcullen, whom I detest, should not get young Wyndham's money, as I am that you should. He is utterly, _utterly_ smashed. If he got double the amount of Fanny Wyndham's cash, it could not keep him above water for more than a year or so; and then she must go down with him. I am sure the old fool, his father, does not half know the amount of his son's liabilities, or he could not be heartless enough to consent to sacrifice the poor girl as she will be sacrificed, if Kilcullen gets her. I am not usually very anxious about other people's concerns; but I do feel anxious about this matter. I want to have a respectable house in the country, in which I can show my face when I grow a little older, and be allowed to sip my glass of claret, and talk about my horses, in spite of my iniquitous propensities--and I expect to be allowed to do so at Kelly's Court. But, if you let Miss Wyndham slip through your fingers, you won't have a house over your head in a few years' time, much less a shelter to offer a friend. For God's sake, start for Grey Abbey at once. Why, man alive, the ogre can't eat you!
The whole town is in the devil of a ferment about Brien. Of course you heard the rumour, last week, of his heels being cracked? Some of the knowing boys want to get out of the trap they are in; and, despairing of bringing the horse down in the betting by fair means, got a boy out of Scott's stables to swear to the fact. I went down at once to Yorkshire, and published a letter in _Bell's Life_ last Saturday, stating that he is all right. This you have probably seen. You will be astonished to hear it, but I believe Lord Tattenham Corner got the report spread. For heaven's sake don't mention this, particularly not as coming from me. They say that if Brien does the trick, he will lose more than he has made these three years, and I believe he will. He is nominally at 4 to 1; but you can't get 4 to anything like a figure from a safe party.
For heaven's sake go to Grey Abbey, and at once.
Always faithfully, W. BLAKE.
This letter naturally increased Lord Ballindine's uneasiness, and he wrote a note to Mr Armstrong, informing him that he would not trouble him to go at all, unless he could start the next day. Indeed, that he should then go himself, if Mr Armstrong did not do so.
This did not suit Mr Armstrong. He had made up his mind to go; he could not well return the twenty pounds he had received, nor did he wish to forego the advantage which might arise from the trip. So he told his wife to be very careful about her thumb, made up his mind to leave the three policemen for once without spiritual food, and wrote to Lord Ballindine to say that he would be with him the next morning, immediately after breakfast, on his road to catch the mail-coach at Ballyglass.
He was as good as his word, or rather better; for he breakfasted at Kelly's Court, and induced Lord Ballindine to get into his own gig, and drive him as far as the mail-coach road.
"But you'll be four or five hours too soon," said Frank; "the coach doesn't pass Ballyglass till three."
"I want to see those cattle of Rutledge's. I'll stay there, and maybe get a bit of luncheon; it's not a bad thing to be provided for the road."
"I'll tell you what, though," said Frank. "I want to go to Tuam, so you might as well get the coach there; and if there's time to spare, you can pay your respects to the bishop."
It was all the same to Mr Armstrong, and the two therefore started for Tuam together. They had not, however, got above half way down the avenue, when they saw another gig coming towards them; and, after sundry speculations as to whom it might contain, Mr Armstrong pronounced the driver to be "that dirty gallipot, Colligan."
It was Colligan; and, as the two gigs met in the narrow road, the dirty gallipot took off his hat, and was very sorry to trouble Lord Ballindine, but had a few words to say to him on very important and pressing business.
Lord Ballindine touched his hat, and intimated that he was ready to listen, but gave no signs of getting out of his gig.
"My lord," said Colligan, "it's particularly important, and if you could, as a magistrate, spare me five minutes."
"Oh, certainly, Mr Colligan," said Frank; "that is, I'm rather hurried--I may say very much hurried just at present. But still--I suppose there's no objection to Mr Armstrong hearing what you have to say?"
"Why, my lord," said Colligan, "I don't know. Your lordship can judge yourself afterwards; but I'd rather--" "Oh, I'll get down," said the parson. "I'll just take a walk among the trees: I suppose the doctor won't be long?"
"If you wouldn't mind getting into my buggy, and letting me into his lordship's gig, you could be following us on, Mr Armstrong," suggested Colligan.
This suggestion was complied with. The parson and the doctor changed places; and the latter, awkwardly enough, but with perfect truth, whispered his tale into Lord Ballindine's ear.
At first, Frank had been annoyed at the interruption; but, as he learned the cause of it, he gave his full attention to the matter, and only interrupted the narrator by exclamations of horror and disgust.
When Doctor Colligan had finished, Lord Ballindine insisted on repeating the whole affair to Mr Armstrong. "I could not take upon myself," said he, "to advise you what to do; much less to tell you what you should do. There is only one thing clear; you cannot let things rest as they are. Armstrong is a man of the world, and will know what to do; you cannot object to talking the matter over with him."
Colligan consented: and Armstrong, having been summoned, drove the doctor's buggy up alongside of Lord Ballindine's gig.
"Armstrong," said Frank, "I have just heard the most horrid story that ever came to my ears. That wretch, Barry Lynch, has tried to induce Doctor Colligan to poison his sister!"
"What!" shouted Armstrong; "to poison his sister?"
"Gently, Mr Armstrong; pray don't speak so loud, or it'll be all through the country in no time."
"Poison his sister!" repeated Armstrong. "Oh, it'll hang him! There's no doubt it'll hang him! Of course you'll take the doctor's information?"
"But the doctor hasn't tendered me any information," said Frank, stopping his horse, so that Armstrong was able to get close up to his elbow.
"But I presume it is his intention to do so?" said the parson.
"I should choose to have another magistrate present then," said Frank. "Really, Doctor Colligan, I think the best thing you can do is to come before myself and the stipendiary magistrate at Tuam. We shall be sure to find Brew at home to-day."
"But, my lord," said Colligan, "I really had no intention of doing that. I have no witnesses. I can prove nothing. Indeed, I can't say he ever asked me to do the deed: he didn't say anything I could charge him with as a crime: he only offered me the farm if his sister should die. But I knew what he meant; there was no mistaking it: I saw it in his eye."
"And what did you do, Doctor Colligan, at the time?" said the parson.
"I hardly remember," said the doctor; "I was so flurried. But I know I knocked him down, and then I rushed out of the room. I believe I threatened I'd have him hung."
"But you did knock him down?"
"Oh, I did. He was sprawling on the ground when I left him."
"You're quite sure you knocked him down?" repeated the parson.
"The divil a doubt on earth about that!" replied Colligan. "I tell you, when I left the room he was on his back among the chairs."
"And you did not hear a word from him since?"
"Not a word."
"Then there can't be any mistake about it, my lord," said Armstrong. "If he did not feel that his life was in the doctor's hands, he would not put up with being knocked down. And I'll tell you what's more--if you tax him with the murder, he'll deny it and defy you; but tax him with having been knocked down, and he'll swear his foot slipped, or that he'd have done as much for the doctor if he hadn't run away. And then ask him why the doctor knocked him down? --you'll have him on the hip so."
"There's something in that," said Frank; "but the question is, what is Doctor Colligan to do? He says he can't swear any information on which a magistrate could commit him."
"Unless he does, my lord," said Armstrong, "I don't think you should listen to him at all; at least, not as a magistrate."
"Well, Doctor Colligan, what do you say?"
"I don't know what to say, my lord. I came to your lordship for advice, both as a magistrate and as a friend of the young man who is to marry Lynch's sister. Of course, if you cannot advise me, I will go away again."
"You won't come before me and Mr Brew, then?"
"I don't say I won't," said Colligan; "but I don't see the use. I'm not able to prove anything."
"I'll tell you what, Ballindine," said the parson; "only I don't know whether it mayn't be tampering with justice--suppose we were to go to this hell-hound, you and I together, and, telling him what we know, give him his option to stand his trial or quit the country? Take my word for it, he'd go; and that would be the best way to be rid of him. He'd leave his sister in peace and quiet then, to enjoy her fortune."
"That's true," said Frank; "and it would be a great thing to rid the country of him. Do you remember the way he rode a-top of that poor bitch of mine the other day--Goneaway, you know; the best bitch in the pack?"
"Indeed I do," said the parson; "but for all that, she wasn't the best bitch in the pack: she hadn't half the nose of Gaylass."
"But, as I was saying, Armstrong, it would be a great thing to rid the country of Barry Lynch."
"Indeed it would."
"And there'd be nothing then to prevent young Kelly marrying Anty at once."
"Make him give his consent in writing before you let him go," said Armstrong.
"I'll tell you what, Doctor Colligan," said Frank; "do you get into your own gig, and follow us on, and I'll talk the matter over with Mr Armstrong."
The doctor again returned to his buggy, and the parson to his own seat, and Lord Ballindine drove off at a pace which made it difficult enough for Doctor Colligan to keep him in sight.
"I don't know how far we can trust that apothecary," said Frank to his friend.
"He's an honest man, I believe," said Armstrong, "though he's a dirty, drunken blackguard."
"Maybe he was drunk this evening, at Lynch's?"
"I was wrong to call him a drunkard. I believe he doesn't get drunk, though he's always drinking. But you may take my word for it, what he's telling you now is as true as gospel. If he was telling a lie from malice, he'd be louder, and more urgent about it: you see he's half afraid to speak, as it is. He would not have come near you at all, only his conscience makes him afraid to keep the matter to himself. You may take my word for it, Ballindine, Barry Lynch did propose to him to murder his sister. Indeed, it doesn't surprise me. He is so utterly worthless."
"But murder, Armstrong! downright murder; of the worst kind; studied--premeditated. He must have been thinking of it, and planning it, for days. A man may be worthless, and yet not such a wretch as that would make him. Can you really think he meant Colligan to murder his sister?"
"I can, and do think so," said the parson. "The temptation was great: he had been waiting for his sister's death; and he could not bring himself to bear disappointment. I do not think he could do it with his own hand, for he is a coward; but I can quite believe that he could instigate another person to do it."
"Then I'd hang him. I wouldn't raise my hand to save him from the rope!"
"Nor would I: but we can't hang him. We can do nothing to him, if he defies us; but, if he's well handled, we can drive him from the country."
The lord and the parson talked the matter over till they reached Dunmore, and agreed that they would go, with Colligan, to Barry Lynch; tell him of the charge which was brought against him, and give him his option of standing his trial, or of leaving the country, under a written promise that he would never return to it. In this case, he was also to write a note to Anty, signifying his consent that she should marry Martin Kelly, and also execute some deed by which all control over the property should be taken out of his own hands; and that he should agree to receive his income, whatever it might be, through the hands of an agent.
There were sundry matters connected with the subject, which were rather difficult of arrangement. In the, first place, Frank was obliged, very unwillingly, to consent that Mr Armstrong should remain, at any rate one day longer, in the country. It was, however, at last settled that he should return that night and sleep at Kelly's Court. Then Lord Ballindine insisted that they should tell young Kelly what they were about, before they went to Barry's house, as it would be necessary to consult him as to the disposition he would wish to have made of the property. Armstrong was strongly against this measure,--but it was, at last, decided on; and then they had to induce Colligan to go with them. He much wished them to manage the business without him. He had had quite enough of Dunmore House; and, in spite of the valiant manner in which he had knocked its owner down the last time he was there, seemed now quite afraid to face him. But Mr Armstrong informed him that he must go on now, as he had said so much, and at last frightened him into an unwilling compliance.
The three of them went up into the little parlour of the inn, and summoned Martin to the conference, and various were the conjectures made by the family as to the nature of the business which brought three such persons to the inn together. But the widow settled them all by asserting that "a Kelly needn't be afeared, thank God, to see his own landlord in his own house, nor though he brought an attorney wid him as well as a parson and a docther." And so, Martin was sent for, and soon heard the horrid story. Not long after he had joined them, the four sallied out together, and Meg remarked that something very bad was going to happen, for the lord never passed her before without a kind word or a nod; and now he took no more notice of her than if it had been only Sally herself that met him on the stairs.
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{
"id": "4917"
}
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35
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MR LYNCH BIDS FAREWELL TO DUNMORE
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Poor Martin was dreadfully shocked; and not only shocked, but grieved and astonished. He had never thought well of his intended brother-in-law, but he had not judged him so severely as Mr Armstrong had done. He listened to all Lord Ballindine said to him, and agreed as to the propriety of the measures he proposed. But there was nothing of elation about him at the downfall of the man whom he could not but look on as his enemy: indeed, he was not only subdued and modest in his demeanour, but he appeared so reserved that he could hardly be got to express any interest in the steps which were to be taken respecting the property. It was only when Lord Ballindine pointed out to him that it was his duty to guard Anty's interests, that he would consent to go to Dunmore House with them, and to state, when called upon to do so, what measures he would wish to have adopted with regard to the property.
"Suppose he denies himself to us?" said Frank, as the four walked across the street together, to the great astonishment of the whole population.
"If he's in the house, I'll go bail we won't go away without seeing him," said the parson. "Will he be at home, Kelly, do you think?"
"Indeed he will, Mr Armstrong," said Martin; "he'll be in bed and asleep. He's never out of bed, I believe, much before one or two in the day. It's a bad life he's leading since the ould man died."
"You may say that," said the doctor:--"cursing and drinking; drinking and cursing; nothing else. You'll find him curse at you dreadful, Mr Armstrong, I'm afraid."
"I can bear that, doctor; it's part of my own trade, you know; but I think we'll find him quiet enough. I think you'll find the difficulty is to make him speak at all. You'd better be spokesman, my lord, as you're a magistrate."
"No, Armstrong, I will not. You're much more able, and more fitting: if it's necessary for me to act as a magistrate, I'll do so--but at first we'll leave him to you."
"Very well," said the parson; "and I'll do my best. But I'll tell you what I am afraid of: if we find him in bed we must wait for him, and when the servant tells him who we are, and mentions the doctor's name along with yours, my lord, he'll guess what we're come about, and he'll be out of the window, or into the cellar, and then there'd be no catching him without the police. We must make our way up into his bed-room."
"I don't think we could well do that," said the doctor.
"No, Armstrong," said Lord Ballindine. "I don't think we ought to force ourselves upstairs: we might as well tell all the servants what we'd come about."
"And so we must," said Armstrong, "if it's necessary. The more determined we are--in fact, the rougher we are with him, the more likely we are to bring him on his knees. I tell you, you must have no scruples in dealing with such a fellow; but leave him to me;" and so saying, the parson gave a thundering rap at the hail door, and in about one minute repeated it, which brought Biddy running to the door without shoes or stockings, with her hair streaming behind her head, and, in her hand, the comb with which she had been disentangling it.
"Is your master at home?" said Armstrong.
"Begorra, he is," said the girl out of breath. "That is, he's not up yet, nor awake, yer honer," and she held the door in her hand, as though this answer was final.
"But I want to see him on especial and immediate business," said the parson, pushing back the door and the girl together, and walking into the hall. "I must see him at once. Mr Lynch will excuse me: we've known each other a long time."
"Begorra, I don't know," said the girl, "only he's in bed and fast. Couldn't yer honer call agin about four or five o'clock? That's the time the masther's most fittest to be talking to the likes of yer honer."
"These gentlemen could not wait," said the parson.
"Shure the docther there, and Mr Martin, knows well enough I'm not telling you a bit of a lie, Misther Armstrong," said the girl.
"I know you're not, my good girl; I know you're not telling a lie;--but, nevertheless, I must see Mr Lynch. Just step up and wake him, and tell him I'm waiting to say two words to him."
"Faix, yer honer, he's very bitther intirely, when he's waked this early. But in course I'll be led by yer honers. I'll say then, that the lord, and Parson Armstrong, and the docther, and Mr Martin, is waiting to spake two words to him. Is that it?"
"That'll do as well as anything," said Armstrong; and then, when the girl went upstairs, he continued, "You see she knew us all, and of course will tell him who we are; but I'll not let him escape, for I'll go up with her," and, as the girl slowly opened her master's bed-room door, Mr Armstrong stood close outside it in the passage.
After considerable efforts, Biddy succeeded in awaking her master sufficiently to make him understand that Lord Ballindine, and Doctor Colligan were downstairs, and that Parson Armstrong was just outside the bed-room door. The poor girl tried hard to communicate her tidings in such a whisper as would be inaudible to the parson; but this was impossible, for Barry only swore at her, and asked her "what the d---- she meant by jabbering there in that manner?" When, however, he did comprehend who his visitors were, and where they were, he gnashed his teeth and clenched his fist at the poor girl, in sign of his anger against her for having admitted so unwelcome a party; but he was too frightened to speak.
Mr Armstrong soon put an end to this dumb show, by walking into the bed-room, when the girl escaped, and he shut the door. Barry sat up in his bed, rubbed his eyes, and stared at him, but he said nothing.
"Mr Lynch," said the parson, "I had better at once explain the circumstances which have induced me to make so very strange a visit."
"Confounded strange, I must say! to come up to a man's room in this way, and him in bed!"
"Doctor Colligan is downstairs--" "D---- Doctor Colligan! He's at his lies again, I suppose? Much I care for Doctor Colligan."
"Doctor Colligan is downstairs," continued Mr Armstrong, "and Lord Ballindine, who, you are aware, is a magistrate. They wish to speak to you, Mr Lynch, and that at once."
"I suppose they can wait till a man's dressed?"
"That depends on how long you're dressing, Mr Lynch."
"Upon my word, this is cool enough, in a man's own house!" said Barry. "Well, you don't expect me to get up while you're there, I suppose?"
"Indeed I do, Mr Lynch: never mind me; just wash and dress yourself as though I wasn't here. I'll wait here till we go down together."
"I'm d----d if I do," said Barry. "I'll not stir while you remain there!" and he threw himself back in the bed, and wrapped the bedclothes round him.
"Very well," said Mr Armstrong; and then going out on to the landing-place, called out over the banisters--"Doctor--Doctor Colligan! tell his lordship Mr Lynch objects to a private interview: he had better just step down to the Court-house, and issue his warrant. You might as well tell Constable Nelligan to be in the way."
"D----n!" exclaimed Barry, sitting bolt upright in his bed. "Who says I object to see anybody? Mr Armstrong, what do you go and say that for?" Mr Armstrong returned into the room. "It's not true. I only want to have my bed-room to myself, while I get up."
"For once in the way, Mr Lynch, you must manage to get up although your privacy be intruded on. To tell you the plain truth, I will not leave you till you come downstairs with me, unless it be in the custody of a policeman. If you will quietly dress and come downstairs with me, I trust we may be saved the necessity of troubling the police at all."
Barry, at last, gave way, and, gradually extricating himself from the bedclothes, put his feet down on the floor, and remained sitting on the side of his bed. He leaned his head down on his hands, and groaned inwardly; for he was very sick, and the fumes of last night's punch still disturbed his brain. His stockings and drawers were on; for Terry, when he put him to bed, considered it only waste of time to pull them off, for "shure wouldn't they have jist to go on agin the next morning?"
"Don't be particular, Mr Lynch: never mind washing or shaving till we're gone. We won't keep you long, I hope."
"You're very kind, I must say," said Barry. "I suppose you won't object to my having a bottle of soda water?" --and he gave a terrible tug at the bell.
"Not at all--nor a glass of brandy in it, if you like it. Indeed, Mr Lynch, I think that, just at present, it will be the better thing for you."
Barry got his bottle of soda water, and swallowed about two glasses of whiskey in it, for brandy was beginning to be scarce with him; and then commenced his toilet. He took Parson Armstrong's hint, and wasn't very particular about it. He huddled on his clothes, smoothed his hair with his brush, and muttering something about it's being their own fault, descended into the parlour, followed by Mr Armstrong. He made a kind of bow to Lord Ballindine; took no notice of Martin, but, turning round sharp on the doctor, said: "Of all the false ruffians, I ever met, Colligan--by heavens, you're the worst! There's one comfort, no man in Dunmore will believe a word you say." He then threw himself back into the easy chair, and said, "Well, gentlemen--well, my lord--here I am. You can't say I'm ashamed to show my face, though I must say your visit is not made in the genteelest manner."
"Mr Lynch," said the parson, "do you remember the night Doctor Colligan knocked you down in this room? In this room, wasn't it, doctor?"
"Yes; in this room," said the doctor, rather _sotto voce_.
"Do you remember the circumstance, Mr Lynch?"
"It's a lie!" said Barry.
"No it's not," said the parson. "If you forget it, I can call in the servant to remember so much as that for me; but you'll find it better, Mr Lynch, to let us finish this business among ourselves. Come, think about it. I'm sure you remember being knocked down by the doctor."
"I remember a scrimmage there was between us. I don't care what the girl says, she didn't see it. Colligan, I suppose, has given her half-a-crown, and she'd swear anything for that."
"Well, you remember the night of the scrimmage?"
"I do: Colligan got drunk here one night. He wanted me to give him a farm, and said cursed queer things about my sister. I hardly know what he said; but I know I had to turn him out of the house, and there was a scrimmage between us."
"I see you're so far prepared, Mr Lynch: now, I'll tell you my version of the story. --Martin Kelly, just see that the door is shut. You endeavoured to bribe Doctor Colligan to murder your own sister."
"It's a most infernal lie!" said Barry. "Where's your evidence? --where's your evidence? What's the good of your all coming here with such a story as that? Where's your evidence?"
"You'd better be quiet, Mr Lynch, or we'll adjourn at once from here to the open Court-house."
"Adjourn when you like; it's all one to me. Who'll believe such a drunken ruffian as that Colligan, I'd like to know? Such a story as that!"
"My lord," said Armstrong, "I'm afraid we must go on with this business at the Court-house. Martin, I believe I must trouble you to go down to the police barrack." And the whole party, except Barry, rose from their seats.
"What the devil are you going to drag me down to the Court-house for, gentlemen?" said he. "I'll give you any satisfaction, but you can't expect I'll own to such a lie as this about my sister. I suppose my word's as good as Colligan's, gentlemen? I suppose my character as a Protestant gentleman stands higher than his--a dirty Papist apothecary. He tells one story; I tell another; only he's got the first word of me, that's all. I suppose, gentlemen, I'm not to be condemned on the word of such a man as that?"
"I think, Mr Lynch," said Armstrong, "if you'll listen to me, you'll save yourself and us a great deal of trouble. You asked me who my witness was: my witness is in this house. I would not charge you with so horrid, so damnable a crime, had I not thoroughly convinced myself you were guilty--now, do hold your tongue, Mr Lynch, or I will have you down to the Court-house. We all know you are guilty, you know it yourself--" "I'm--" began Barry.
"Stop, Mr Lynch; not one word till I've done; or what I have to say, shall be said in public. We all know you are guilty, but we probably mayn't be able to prove it--" "No, I should think not!" shouted Barry.
"We mayn't be able to prove it in such a way as to enable a jury to hang you, or, upon my word, I wouldn't interfere to prevent it: the law should have its course. I'd hang you with as little respite as I would a dog."
Barry grinned horribly at this suggestion, but said nothing, and the parson continued: "It is not the want of evidence that stands in the way of so desirable a proceeding, but that Doctor Colligan, thoroughly disgusted and shocked at the iniquity of your proposal--" "Oh, go on, Mr Armstrong! --go on; I see you are determined to have it all your own way, but my turn'll come soon."
"I say that Doctor Colligan interrupted you before you fully committed yourself."
"Fully committed myself, indeed! Why, Colligan knows well enough, that when he got up in such a fluster, there'd not been a word at all said about Anty."
"Hadn't there, Mr Lynch? --just now you said you turned the doctor out of your house for speaking about your sister. You're only committing yourself. I say, therefore, the evidence, though quite strong enough to put you into the dock as a murderer in intention, might not be sufficient to induce a jury to find you guilty. But guilty you would be esteemed in the mind of every man, woman, and child in this county: guilty of the wilful, deliberate murder of your own sister."
"By heavens I'll not stand this!" exclaimed Barry. --"I'll not stand this! I didn't do it, Mr Armstrong. I didn't do it. He's a liar, Lord Ballindine: upon my sacred word and honour as a gentleman, he's a liar. Why do you believe him, when you won't believe me? Ain't I a Protestant, Mr Armstrong, and ain't you a Protestant clergyman? Don't you know that such men as he will tell any lie; will do any dirty job? On my sacred word of honour as a gentleman, Lord Ballindine, he offered to poison Anty, on condition he got the farm round the house for nothing! --He knows it's true, and why should you believe him sooner than me, Mr Armstrong?"
Barry had got up from his seat, and was walking up and down the room, now standing opposite Lord Ballindine, and appealing to him, and then doing the same thing to Mr Armstrong. He was a horrid figure: he had no collar round his neck, and his handkerchief was put on in such a way as to look like a hangman's knot: his face was blotched, and red, and greasy, for he had neither shaved nor washed himself since his last night's debauch; he had neither waistcoat nor braces on, and his trousers fell on his hips; his long hair hung over his eyes, which were bleared and bloodshot; he was suffering dreadfully from terror, and an intense anxiety to shift the guilt from himself to Doctor Colligan. He was a most pitiable object--so wretched, so unmanned, so low in the scale of creation. Lord Ballindine did pity his misery, and suggested to Mr Armstrong whether by any possibility there could be any mistake in the matter--whether it was possible Doctor Colligan could have mistaken Lynch's object? --The poor wretch jumped at this loop-hole, and doubly condemned himself by doing so.
"He did, then," said Barry; "he must have done so. As I hope for heaven, Lord Ballindine, I never had the idea of getting him to--to do anything to Anty. I wouldn't have done it for worlds--indeed I wouldn't. There must be some mistake, indeed there must. He'd been drinking, Mr Armstrong--drinking a good deal that night--isn't that true, Doctor Colligan? Come, man, speak the truth--don't go and try and hang a fellow out of mistake! His lordship sees it's all a mistake, and of course he's the best able to judge of the lot here; a magistrate, and a nobleman and all. I know you won't see me wronged, Lord Ballindine, I know you won't. I give you my sacred word of honour as a gentleman, it all came from mistake when we were both drunk, or nearly drunk. Come, Doctor Colligan, speak man--isn't that the truth? I tell you, Mr Armstrong, Lord Ballindine's in the right of it. There is some mistake in all this."
"As sure as the Lord's in heaven," said the doctor, now becoming a little uneasy at the idea that Lord Ballindine should think he had told so strange a story without proper foundation--"as sure as the Lord's in heaven, he offered me the farm for a reward, should I manage to prevent his sister's recovery."
"What do you think, Mr Armstrong?" said Lord Ballindine.
"Think!" said the parson--"There's no possibility of thinking at all. The truth becomes clearer every moment. Why, you wretched creature, it's not ten minutes since you yourself accused Doctor Colligan of offering to murder your sister! According to your own showing, therefore, there was a deliberate conversation between you; and your own evasion now would prove which of you were the murderer, were any additional proof wanted. But it is not. Barry Lynch, as sure as you now stand in the presence of your Creator, whose name you so constantly blaspheme, you endeavoured to instigate that man to murder your own sister."
"Oh, Lord Ballindine! --oh, Lord Ballindine!" shrieked Barry, in his agony, "don't desert me! pray, pray don't desert me! I didn't do it--I never thought of doing it. We were at school together, weren't we? --And you won't see me put upon this way. You mayn't think much of me in other things, but you won't believe that a school-fellow of your own ever--ever--ever--" Barry couldn't bring himself to use the words with which his sentence should be finished, and so he flung himself back into his armchair and burst into tears.
"You appeal to me, Mr Lynch," said Lord Ballindine, "and I must say I most firmly believe you to be guilty. My only doubt is whether you should not at once be committed for trial at the next assizes."
"Oh, my G----!" exclaimed Barry, and for some time he continued blaspheming most horribly--swearing that there was a conspiracy against him--accusing Mr Armstrong, in the most bitter terms, of joining with Doctor Colligan and Martin Kelly to rob and murder him.
"Now, Mr Lynch," continued the parson, as soon as the unfortunate man would listen to him, "as I before told you, I am in doubt--we are all in doubt--whether or not a jury would hang you; and we think that we shall do more good to the community by getting you out of the way, than by letting you loose again after a trial which will only serve to let everyone know how great a wretch there is in the county. We will, therefore, give you your option either to stand your trial, or to leave the country at once--and for ever."
"And my property? --what's to become of my property?" said Barry.
"Your property's safe, Mr Lynch; we can't touch that. We're not prescribing any punishment to you. We fear, indeed we know, you're beyond the reach of the law, or we shouldn't make the proposal." Barry breathed freely again as he heard this avowal. "But you're not beyond the reach of public opinion--of public execration--of general hatred, and of a general curse. For your sister's sake--for the sake of Martin Kelly, who is going to marry the sister whom you wished to murder, and not for your own sake, you shall be allowed to leave the country without this public brand being put upon your name. If you remain, no one shall speak to you but as to a man who would have murdered his sister: murder shall be everlastingly muttered in your ears; nor will your going then avail you, for your character shall go with you, and the very blackguards with whom you delight to assort, shall avoid you as being too bad even for their society. Go now, Mr Lynch--go at once;--leave your sister to happiness which you cannot prevent; and she at least shall know nothing of your iniquity, and you shall enjoy the proceeds of your property anywhere you will--anywhere, that is, but in Ireland. Do you agree to this?"
"I'm an innocent man, Mr Armstrong. I am indeed."
"Very well," said the parson, "then we may as well go away, and leave you to your fate. Come, Lord Ballindine, we can have nothing further to say," and they again all rose from their seats.
"Stop, Mr Armstrong; stop," said Barry.
"Well," said the parson; for Barry repressed the words which were in his mouth, when he found that his visitors did stop as he desired them.
"Well, Mr Lynch, what have you further to say."
"Indeed I am not guilty." Mr Armstrong put on his hat and rushed to the door--"but--" continued Barry.
"I will have no 'buts,' Mr Lynch; will you at once and unconditionally agree to the terms I have proposed?"
"I don't want to live in the country," said Barry; "the country's nothing to me."
"You will go then, immediately?" said the parson.
"As soon as I have arranged about the property, I will," said Barry.
"That won't do," said the parson. "You must go at once, and leave your property to the care of others. You must leave Dunmore _to-day_, for ever."
"To-day!" shouted Barry.
"Yes, to-day. You can easily get as far as Roscommon. You have your own horse and car. And, what is more, before you go, you must write to your sister, telling her that you have made up your mind to leave the country, and expressing your consent to her marrying whom she pleases."
"I can't go to-day," said Barry, sulkily. "Who's to receive my rents? who'll send me my money? --besides--besides. Oh, come--that's nonsense. I ain't going to be turned out in that style."
"You ain't in earnest, are you, about his going to-day?" whispered Frank to the parson.
"I am, and you'll find he'll go, too," said Armstrong. "It must be to-day--this very day, Mr Lynch. Martin Kelly will manage for you about the property."
"Or you can send for Mr Daly, to meet you at Roscommon," suggested Martin.
"Thank you for nothing," said Barry; "you'd better wait till you're spoken to. I don't know what business you have here at all."
"The business that all honest men have to look after all rogues," said Mr Armstrong. "Come, Mr Lynch, you'd better make up your mind to prepare for your journey."
"Well, I won't--and there's an end of it," said Barry. "It's all nonsense. You can't do anything to me: you said so yourself. I'm not going to be made a fool of that way--I'm not going to give up my property and everything."
"Don't you know, Mr Lynch," said the parson, "that if you are kept in jail till April next, as will be your fate if you persist in staying at Dunmore tonight, your creditors will do much more damage to your property, than your own immediate absence will do? If Mr Daly is your lawyer, send for him, as Martin Kelly suggests. I'm not afraid that he will recommend you to remain in the country, even should you dare to tell him of the horrid accusation which is brought against you. But at any rate make up your mind, for if you do stay in Dunmore tonight it shall be in the Bridewell, and your next move shall be to Galway."
Barry sat silent for a while, trying to think. The parson was like an incubus upon him, which he was totally unable to shake off. He knew neither how to resist nor how to give way. Misty ideas got into his head of escaping to his bed-room and blowing his own brains out. Different schemes of retaliation and revenge flitted before him, but he could decide on nothing. There he sat, silent, stupidly gazing at nothing, while Lord Ballindine and Mr Armstrong stood whispering over the fire.
"I'm afraid we're in the wrong: I really think we are," said Frank.
"We must go through with it now, any way," said the parson. "Come, Mr Lynch, I will give you five minutes more, and then I go;" and he pulled out his watch, and stood with his back to the fire, looking at it. Lord Ballindine walked to the window, and Martin Kelly and Doctor Colligan sat in distant parts of the room, with long faces, silent and solemn, breathing heavily. How long those five minutes appeared to them, and how short to Barry! The time was not long enough to enable him to come to any decision: at the end of the five minutes he was still gazing vacantly before him: he was still turning over in his brain, one after another, the same crowd of undigested schemes.
"The time is out, Mr Lynch: will you go?" said the parson.
"I've no money," hoarsely croaked Barry.
"If that's the only difficulty, we'll raise money for him," said Frank.
"I'll advance him money," said Martin.
"Do you mean you've no money at all?" said the parson.
"Don't you hear me say so?" said Barry.
"And you'll go if you get money--say ten pounds?" said the parson.
"Ten pounds! I can go nowhere with ten pounds. You know that well enough."
"I'll give him twenty-five," said Martin. "I'm sure his sister'll do that for him."
"Say fifty," said Barry, "and I'm off at once."
"I haven't got it," said Martin.
"No," said the parson; "I'll not see you bribed to go: take the twenty-five--that will last you till you make arrangements about your property. We are not going to pay you for going, Mr Lynch."
"You seem very anxious about it, any way."
"I am anxious about it," rejoined the parson. "I am anxious to save your sister from knowing what it was that her brother wished to accomplish."
Barry scowled at him as though he would like, if possible, to try his hand at murdering him; but he did not answer him again. Arrangements were at last made for Barry's departure, and off he went, that very day--not to Roscommon, but to Tuam; and there, at the instigation of Martin, Daly the attorney took upon himself the division and temporary management of the property. From thence, with Martin's, or rather with his sister's twenty-five pounds in his pocket, he started to that Elysium for which he had for some time so ardently longed, and soon landed at Boulogne, regardless alike of his sister, his future brother, Lord Ballindine, or Mr Armstrong. The parson had found it quite impossible to carry out one point on which he had insisted. He could not induce Barry Lynch to write to his sister: no, not a line; not a word. Had it been to save him from hanging he could hardly have induced himself to write those common words, "_dear sister_".
"Oh! you can tell her what you like," said he. "It's you're making me go away at once in this manner. Tell her whatever confounded lies you like; tell her I'm gone because I didn't choose to stay and see her make a fool of herself--and that's the truth, too. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't move a step for any of you."
He went, however, as I have before said, and troubled the people of Dunmore no longer, nor shall he again trouble us.
"Oh! but Martin, what nonsense!" said the widow, coaxingly to her son, that night before she went to bed. "The lord wouldn't be going up there just to wish him good bye--and Parson Armstrong too. What the dickens could they be at there so long? Come, Martin--you're safe with me, you know; tell us something about it now."
"Nonsense, mother; I've nothing to tell: Barry Lynch has left the place for good and all, that's all about it."
"God bless the back of him, thin; he'd my lave for going long since. But you might be telling us what made him be starting this way all of a heap."
"Don't you know, mother, he was head and ears in debt?"
"Don't tell me," said the widow. "Parson Armstrong's not a sheriff's officer, that he should be looking after folks in debt."
"No, mother, he's not, that I know of; but he don't like, for all that, to see his tithes walking out of the country."
"Don't be coming over me that way, Martin. Barry Lynch, nor his father before him, never held any land in Ballindine parish."
"Didn't they--well thin, you know more than I, mother, so it's no use my telling you," and Martin walked off to bed.
"I'll even you, yet, my lad," said she, "close as you are; you see else. Wait awhile, till the money's wanting, and then let's see who'll know all about it!" And the widow slapped herself powerfully on that part where her pocket depended, in sign of the great confidence she had in the strength of her purse.
"Did I manage that well?" said the parson, as Lord Ballindine drove him home to Kelly's Court, as soon as the long interview was over. "If I can do as well at Grey Abbey, you'll employ me again, I think!"
"Upon my word, then, Armstrong," said Frank, "I never was in such hot water as I have been all this day: and, now it's over, to tell you the truth, I'm sorry we interfered. We did what we had no possible right to do."
"Nonsense, man. You don't suppose I'd have dreamed of letting him off, if the law could have touched him? But it couldn't. No magistrates in the county could have committed him; for he had done, and, as far as I can judge, had said, literally nothing. It's true we know what he intended; but a score of magistrates could have done nothing with him: as it is, we've got him out of the country: he'll never come back again."
"What I mean is, we had no business to drive him out of the country with threats."
"Oh, Ballindine, that's nonsense. One can keep no common terms with such a blackguard as that. However, it's done now; and I must say I think it was well done."
"There's no doubt of your talent in the matter, Armstrong: upon my soul I never saw anything so cool. What a wretch--what an absolute fiend the fellow is!"
"Bad enough," said the parson. "I've seen bad men before, but I think he's the worst I ever saw. What'll Mrs O'Kelly say of my coming in this way, without notice?"
The parson enjoyed his claret at Kelly's Court that evening, after his hard day's work, and the next morning he started for Grey Abbey.
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{
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36
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MR ARMSTRONG VISITS GREY ABBEY ON A DELICATE MISSION
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Lord Cashel certainly felt a considerable degree of relief when his daughter told him that Lord Kilcullen had left the house, and was on his way to Dublin, though he had been forced to pay so dearly for the satisfaction, had had to falsify his solemn assurance that he would not give his son another penny, and to break through his resolution of acting the Roman father [50]. He consoled himself with the idea that he had been actuated by affection for his profligate son; but such had not been the case. Could he have handed him over to the sheriff's officer silently and secretly, he would have done so; but his pride could not endure the reflection that all the world should know that bailiffs had forced an entry into Grey Abbey.
[FOOTNOTE 50: Roman father--Lucius Junius Brutus, legendary founder of the Roman republic, was said to have passed sentence of death on his two sons for participating in a rebellion.]
He closely questioned Lady Selina, with regard to all that had passed between her and her brother.
"Did he say anything?" at last he said--"did he say anything about--about Fanny?"
"Not much, papa; but what he did say, he said with kindness and affection," replied her ladyship, glad to repeat anything in favour of her brother.
"Affection--pooh!" said the earl. "He has no affection; no affection for any one; he has no affection even for me. --What did he say about her, Selina?"
"He seemed to wish she should marry Lord Ballindine."
"She may marry whom she pleases, now," said the earl. "I wash my hands of her. I have done my best to prevent what I thought a disgraceful match for her--" "It would not have been disgraceful, papa, had she married him six months ago."
"A gambler and a _roué_!" said the earl, forgetting, it is to be supposed, for the moment, his own son's character. "She'll marry him now, I suppose, and repent at her leisure. I'll give myself no further trouble about it."
The earl thought upon the subject, however, a good deal; and before Mr Armstrong's arrival he had all but made up his mind that he must again swallow his word, and ask his ward's lover back to his house. He had at any rate become assured that if he did not do so, some one else would do it for him.
Mr Armstrong was, happily, possessed of a considerable stock of self-confidence, and during his first day's journey, felt no want of it with regard to the delicate mission with which he was entrusted. But when he had deposited his carpet-bag at the little hotel at Kilcullen bridge, and found himself seated on a hack car, and proceeding to Grey Abbey, he began to feel that he had rather a difficult part to play; and by the time that the house was in sight, he felt himself completely puzzled as to the manner in which he should open his negotiation.
He had, however, desired the man to drive to the house, and he could not well stop the car in the middle of the demesne, to mature his plans; and when he was at the door he could not stay there without applying for admission. So he got his card-case in his hand, and rang the bell. After a due interval, which to the parson did not seem a bit too long, the heavy-looking, powdered footman appeared, and announced that Lord Cashel was at home; and, in another minute Mr Armstrong found himself in the book-room.
It was the morning after Lord Kilcullen's departure, and Lord Cashel was still anything but comfortable. Her ladyship had been bothering him about the poor boy, as she called her son, now that she learned he was in distress; and had been beseeching him to increase his allowance. The earl had not told his wife the extent of their son's pecuniary delinquencies, and consequently she was greatly dismayed when her husband very solemnly said, "My lady, Lord Kilcullen has no longer any allowance from me."
"Good gracious!" screamed her ladyship; "no allowance? --how is the poor boy to live?"
"That I really cannot tell. I cannot even guess; but, let him live how he may, I will not absolutely ruin myself for his sake."
The interview was not a comfortable one, either to the father or mother. Lady Cashel cried a great deal, and was very strongly of opinion that her son would die of cold and starvation: "How could he get shelter or food, any more than a common person, if he had no allowance? Mightn't he, at any rate, come back, and live at Grey Abbey? --That wouldn't cost his father anything." And then the countess remembered how she had praised her son to Mrs Ellison, and the bishop's wife; and she cried worse than ever, and was obliged to be left to Griffiths and her drops.
This happened on the evening of Lord Kilcullen's departure, and on the next morning her ladyship did not appear at breakfast. She was weak and nervous, and had her tea in her own sitting-room. There was no one sitting at breakfast but the earl, Fanny, and Lady Selina, and they were all alike, stiff, cold, and silent. The earl felt as if he were not at home even in his own breakfast-parlour; he felt afraid of his ward, as though he were conscious that she knew how he had intended to injure her: and, as soon as he had swallowed his eggs, he muttered something which was inaudible to both the girls, and retreated to his private den.
He had not been there long before the servant brought in our friend's name. "The Rev. George Armstrong", written on a plain card. The parson had not put the name of his parish, fearing that the earl, knowing from whence he came, might guess his business, and decline seeing him. As it was, no difficulty was made, and the parson soon found himself _tête-à-tête_ with the earl.
"I have taken the liberty of calling on you, Lord Cashel," said Mr Armstrong, having accepted the offer of a chair, "on a rather delicate mission."
The earl bowed, and rubbed his hands, and felt more comfortable than he had done for the last week. He liked delicate missions coming to him, for he flattered himself that he knew how to receive them in a delicate manner; he liked, also, displaying his dignity to strangers, for he felt that strangers stood rather in awe of him: he also felt, though he did not own it to himself, that his manner was not so effective with people who had known him some time.
"I may say, a very delicate mission," said the parson; "and one I would not have undertaken had I not known your lordship's character for candour and honesty."
Lord Cashel again bowed and rubbed his hands.
"I am, my lord, a friend of Lord Ballindine; and as such I have taken the liberty of calling on your lordship."
"A friend of Lord Ballindine?" said the earl, arching his eyebrows, and assuming a look of great surprise.
"A very old friend, my lord; the clergyman of his parish, and for many years an intimate friend of his father. I have known Lord Ballindine since he was a child."
"Lord Ballindine is lucky in having such a friend: few young men now, I am sorry to say, care much for their father's friends. Is there anything, Mr Armstrong, in which I can assist either you or his lordship?"
"My lord," said the parson, "I need not tell you that before I took the perhaps unwarrantable liberty of troubling you, I was made acquainted with Lord Ballindine's engagement with your ward, and with the manner in which that engagement was broken off."
"And your object is, Mr Armstrong--?"
"My object is to remove, if possible, the unfortunate misunderstanding between your lordship and my friend."
"Misunderstanding, Mr Armstrong? --There was no misunderstanding between us. I really think we perfectly understood each other. Lord Ballindine was engaged to my ward; his engagement, however, being contingent on his adoption of a certain line of conduct. This line of conduct his lordship did not adopt; perhaps, he used a wise discretion; however, I thought not. I thought the mode of life which he pursued--" "But--" "Pardon me a moment, Mr Armstrong, and I shall have said all which appears to me to be necessary on the occasion; perhaps more than is necessary; more probably than I should have allowed myself to say, had not Lord Ballindine sent as his ambassador the clergyman of his parish and the friend of his father," and Lord Cashel again bowed and rubbed his hands. "I thought, Mr Armstrong, that your young friend appeared wedded to a style of life quite incompatible with his income--with his own income as a single man, and the income which he would have possessed had he married my ward. I thought that their marriage would only lead to poverty and distress, and I felt that I was only doing my duty to my ward in expressing this opinion to her. I found that she was herself of the same opinion; that she feared a union with Lord Ballindine would not ensure happiness either to him or to herself. His habits were too evidently those of extravagance, and hers had not been such as to render a life of privation anything but a life of misery."
"I had thought--" "One moment more, Mr Armstrong, and I shall have done. After mature consideration, Miss Wyndham commissioned me to express her sentiments,--and I must say they fully coincided with my own,--to Lord Ballindine, and to explain to him, that she found herself obliged to--to--to retrace the steps which she had taken in the matter. I did this in a manner as little painful to Lord Ballindine as I was able. It is difficult, Mr Armstrong, to make a disagreeable communication palatable; it is very difficult to persuade a young man who is in love, to give up the object of his idolatry; but I trust Lord Ballindine will do me the justice to own that, on the occasion alluded to, I said nothing unnecessarily harsh--nothing calculated to harass his feelings. I appreciate and esteem Lord Ballindine's good qualities, and I much regretted that prudence forbad me to sanction the near alliance he was anxious to do me the honour of making with me."
Lord Cashel finished his harangue, and felt once more on good terms with himself. He by no means intended offering any further vehement resistance to his ward's marriage. He was, indeed, rejoiced to have an opportunity of giving way decently. But he could not resist the temptation of explaining his conduct, and making a speech.
"My lord," said the parson, "what you tell me is only a repetition of what I heard from my young friend."
"I am glad to hear it. I trust, then, I may have the pleasure of feeling that Lord Ballindine attributes to me no personal unkindness?"
"Not in the least, Lord Cashel; very far from it. Though Lord Ballindine may not be--may not hitherto have been, free from the follies of his age, he has had quite sense enough to appreciate your lordship's conduct."
"I endeavoured, at any rate, that it should be such as to render me liable to no just imputation of fickleness or cruelty."
"No one would for a moment accuse your lordship of either. It is my knowledge of your lordship's character in this particular which has induced me to undertake the task of begging you to reconsider the subject. Lord Ballindine has, you are aware, sold his race-horses."
"I had heard so, Mr Armstrong; though, perhaps, not on good authority."
"He has; and is now living among his own tenantry and friends at Kelly's Court. He is passionately, devotedly attached to your ward, Lord Cashel; and with a young man's vanity he still thinks that she may not be quite indifferent to him."
"It was at her own instance, Mr Armstrong, that his suit was rejected."
"I am well aware of that, my lord. But ladies, you know, do sometimes mistake their own feelings. Miss Wyndham must have been attached to my friend, or she would not have received him as her lover. Will you, my lord, allow me to see Miss Wyndham? If she still expresses indifference to Lord Ballindine, I will assure her that she shall be no further persecuted by his suit. If such be not the case, surely prudence need not further interfere to prevent a marriage desired by both the persons most concerned. Lord Ballindine is not now a spendthrift, whatever he may formerly have been; and Miss Wyndham's princely fortune, though it alone would never have induced my friend to seek her hand, will make the match all that it should be. You will not object, my lord, to my seeing Miss Wyndham?"
"Mr Armstrong--really--you must be aware such a request is rather unusual."
"So are the circumstances," replied the parson. "They also are unusual. I do not doubt Miss Wyndham's wisdom in rejecting Lord Ballindine, when, as you say, he appeared to be wedded to a life of extravagance. I have no doubt she put a violent restraint on her own feelings; exercised, in fact, a self-denial which shows a very high tone of character, and should elicit nothing but admiration; but circumstances are much altered."
Lord Cashel continued to raise objections to the parson's request, though it was, throughout the interview, his intention to accede to it. At last, he gave up the point, with much grace, and in such a manner as he thought should entitle him to the eternal gratitude of his ward, Lord Ballindine, and the parson. He consequently rang the bell, and desired the servant to give his compliments to Miss Wyndham and tell her that the Rev. Mr Armstrong wished to see her, alone, upon business of importance.
Mr Armstrong felt that his success was much greater than he had had any reason to expect, from Lord Ballindine's description of his last visit at Grey Abbey. He had, in fact, overcome the only difficulty. If Miss Wyndham really disliked his friend, and objected to the marriage, Mr Armstrong was well aware that he had only to return, and tell his friend so in the best way he could. If, however, she still had a true regard for him, if she were the Fanny Wyndham Ballindine had described her to be, if she had ever really been devoted to him, if she had at all a wish in her heart to see him again at her feet, the parson felt that he would have good news to send back to Kelly's Court; and that he would have done the lovers a service which they never could forget.
"At any rate, Mr Armstrong," said Lord Cashel, as the parson was bowing himself backwards out of the room, "you will join our family circle while you are in the neighbourhood. Whatever may be the success of your mission--and I assure you I hope it may be such as will be gratifying to you, I am happy to make the acquaintance of any friend of Lord Ballindine's, when Lord Ballindine chooses his friends so well." (This was meant as a slap at Dot Blake.) "You will give me leave to send down to the town for your luggage." Mr Armstrong made no objection to this proposal, and the luggage was sent for.
The powder-haired servant again took him in tow, and ushered him out of the book-room, across the hall through the billiard-room, and into the library; gave him a chair, and then brought him a newspaper, giving him to understand that Miss Wyndham would soon be with him.
The parson took the paper in his hands, but he did not trouble himself much with the contents of it. What was he to say to Miss Wyndham? --how was he to commence? He had never gone love-making for another in his life; and now, at his advanced age, it really did come rather strange to him. And then he began to think whether she were short or tall, dark or fair, stout or slender. It certainly was very odd, but, in all their conversations on the subject, Lord Ballindine had never given him any description of his inamorata. Mr Armstrong, however, had not much time to make up his mind on any of these points, for the door opened, and Miss Wyndham entered.
She was dressed in black, for she was, of course, still in mourning for her brother; but, in spite of her sable habiliments, she startled the parson by the brilliance of her beauty. There was a quiet dignity of demeanour natural to Fanny Wyndham; a well-balanced pose, and a grace of motion, which saved her from ever looking awkward or confused. She never appeared to lose her self-possession. Though never arrogant, she seemed always to know what was due to herself. No insignificant puppy could ever have attempted to flirt with her.
When summoned by the servant to meet a strange clergyman alone in the library, at the request of Lord Cashel, she felt that his visit must have some reference to her lover; indeed, her thoughts for the last few days had run on little else. She had made up her mind to talk to her cousin about him; then, her cousin had matured that determination by making love to her himself: then, she had talked to him of Lord Ballindine, and he had promised to talk to his father on the same subject; and she had since been endeavouring to bring herself to make one other last appeal to her uncle's feelings. Her mind was therefore, full of Lord Ballindine, when she walked into the library. But her face was no tell-tale; her gait and demeanour were as dignified as though she had no anxious love within her heart--no one grand desire, to disturb the even current of her blood. She bowed her beautiful head to Mr Armstrong as she walked into the room, and, sitting down herself, begged him to take a chair.
The parson had by no means made up his mind as to what he was to say to the young lady, so he shut his eyes, and rushed at once into the middle of his subject. "Miss Wyndham," he said, "I have come a long way to call on you, at the request of a friend of yours--a very dear and old friend of mine--at the request of Lord Ballindine."
Fanny's countenance became deeply suffused at her lover's name, but the parson did not observe it; indeed he hardly ventured to look in her face. She merely said, in a voice which seemed to him to be anything but promising, "Well, sir?" The truth was, she did not know what to say. Had she dared, she would have fallen on her knees before her lover's friend, and sworn to him how well she loved him.
"When Lord Ballindine was last at Grey Abbey, Miss Wyndham, he had not the honour of an interview with you."
"No, sir," said Fanny. Her voice, look, and manner were still sedate and courtly; her heart, however, was beating so violently that she hardly knew what she said.
"Circumstances, I believe, prevented it," said the parson. "My friend, however, received, through Lord Cashel, a message from you, which--which--which has been very fatal to his happiness."
Fanny tried to say something, but she was not able.
"The very decided tone in which your uncle then spoke to him, has made Lord Ballindine feel that any further visit to Grey Abbey on his own part would be an intrusion."
"I never--" said Fanny, "I never--" "You never authorised so harsh a message, you would say. It is not the harshness of the language, but the certainty of the fact, that has destroyed my friend's happiness. If such were to be the case--if it were absolutely necessary that the engagement between you and Lord Ballindine should be broken off, the more decided the manner in which it were done, the better. Lord Ballindine now wishes--I am a bad messenger in such a case as this, Miss Wyndham: it is, perhaps, better to tell you at once a plain tale. Frank has desired me to tell you that he loves you well and truly; that he cannot believe you are indifferent to him; that your vows, to him so precious, are still ringing in his ears; that he is, as far as his heart is concerned, unchanged; and he has commissioned me to ascertain from yourself, whether you--have really changed your mind since he last had the pleasure of seeing you." The parson waited a moment for an answer, and then added, "Lord Ballindine by no means wishes to persecute you on the subject; nor would I do so, if he did wish it. You have only to tell me that you do not intend to renew your acquaintance with Lord Ballindine, and I will leave Grey Abbey." Fanny still remained silent. "Say the one word 'go', Miss Wyndham, and you need not pain yourself by any further speech. I will at once be gone."
Fanny strove hard to keep her composure, and to make some fitting reply to Mr Armstrong, but she was unable. Her heart was too full; she was too happy. She had, openly, and in spite of rebuke, avowed her love to her uncle, her aunt, to Lady Selina, and her cousin. But she could not bring herself to confess it to Mr Armstrong. At last she said: "I am much obliged to you for your kindness, Mr Armstrong. Perhaps I owe it to Lord Ballindine to--to . . . I will ask my uncle, sir, to write to him."
"I shall write to Lord Ballindine this evening, Miss Wyndham; will you intrust me with no message? I came from him, to see you, with no other purpose. I must give him some news: I must tell him I have seen you. May I tell him not to despair?"
"Tell him--tell him--" said Fanny,--and she paused to make up her mind as to the words of her message,--"tell him to come himself." And, hurrying from the room, she left the parson alone, to meditate on the singular success of his mission. He stood for about half an hour, thinking over what had occurred, and rejoicing greatly in his mind that he had undertaken the business. "What fools men are about women!" he said at last, to himself. "They know their nature so well when they are thinking and speaking of them with reference to others; but as soon as a man is in love with one himself, he is cowed! He thinks the nature of one woman is different from that of all others, and he is afraid to act on his general knowledge. Well; I might as well write to him! for, thank God, I can send him good news"--and he rang the bell, and asked if his bag had come. It had, and was in his bed-room. "Could the servant get him pen, ink, and paper?" The servant did so; and, within two hours of his entering the doors of Grey Abbey, he was informing his friend of the success of his mission.
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{
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37
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VENI; VIDI; VICI [51]
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[FOOTNOTE 51: Veni; vidi; vici--(Latin) Julius Caesar's terse message to the Senate announcing his victory over King Pharnaces II of Pontus in 47 B.C.: "I came, I saw, I conquered."]
The two following letters for Lord Ballindine were sent off, in the Grey Abbey post-bag, on the evening of the day on which Mr Armstrong had arrived there. They were from Mr Armstrong and Lord Cashel. That from the former was first opened.
Grey Abbey, April, 1844 Dear Frank, You will own I have not lost much time. I left Kelly's Court the day before yesterday and I am already able to send you good news. I have seen Lord Cashel, and have found him anything but uncourteous. I have also seen Miss Wyndham, and though she said but little to me, that little was just what you would have wished her to say. She bade me tell you to come yourself. In obedience to her commands, I do hereby require you to pack yourself up, and proceed forthwith to Grey Abbey. His lordship has signified to me that it is his intention, in his own and Lady Cashel's name, to request the renewed pleasure of an immediate, and, he hopes, a prolonged visit from your lordship. You will not, my dear Frank, I am sure, be such a fool as to allow your dislike to such an empty butter-firkin as this earl, to stand in the way of your love or your fortune. You can't expect Miss Wyndham to go to you, so pocket your resentment like a sensible fellow, and accept Lord Cashel's invitation as though there had been no difference between you.
I have also received an invite, and intend staying here a day or two. I can't say that, judging from the master of the house, I think that a prolonged sojourn would be very agreeable. I have, as yet, seen none of the ladies, except my embryo Lady Ballindine.
I think I have done my business a little in the _veni vidi vici_ style. What has effected the change in Lord Cashel's views, I need not trouble myself to guess. You will soon learn all about it from Miss Wyndham.
I will not, in a letter, express my admiration, &c., &c., &c. But I will proclaim in Connaught, on my return, that so worthy a bride was never yet brought down to the far west. Lord Cashel will, of course, have some pet bishop or dean to marry you; but, after what has passed, I shall certainly demand the privilege of christening the heir.
Believe me, dear Frank, Your affectionate friend, GEORGE ARMSTRONG.
Lord Cashel's letter was as follows. It cost his lordship three hours to compose, and was twice copied. I trust, therefore, it is a fair specimen of what a nobleman ought to write on such an occasion.
Grey Abbey, April, 1844.
My dear lord, Circumstances, to which I rejoice that I need not now more particularly allude, made your last visit at my house a disagreeable one to both of us. The necessity under which I then laboured, of communicating to your lordship a decision which was likely to be inimical to your happiness, but to form which my duty imperatively directed me, was a source of most serious inquietude to my mind. I now rejoice that that decision was so painful to you--has been so lastingly painful; as I trust I may measure your gratification at a renewal of your connection with my family, by the acuteness of the sufferings which an interruption of that connexion has occasioned you.
I have, I can assure you, my lord, received much pleasure from the visit of your very estimable friend, the Reverend Mr Armstrong; and it is no slight addition to my gratification on this occasion, to find your most intimate friendship so well bestowed. I have had much unreserved conversation to-day with Mr Armstrong, and I am led by him to believe that I may be able to induce you to give Lady Cashel and myself the pleasure of your company at Grey Abbey. We shall be truly delighted to see your lordship, and we sincerely hope that the attractions of Grey Abbey may be such as to induce you to prolong your visit for some time.
Perhaps it might be unnecessary for me now more explicitly to allude to my ward; but still, I cannot but think that a short but candid explanation of the line of conduct I have thought it my duty to adopt, may prevent any disagreeable feeling between us, should you, as I sincerely trust you will, do us the pleasure of joining our family circle. I must own, my dear lord, that, a few months since, I feared you were wedded to the expensive pleasures of the turf. --Your acceptance of the office of Steward at the Curragh meetings confirmed the reports which reached me from various quarters. My ward's fortune was then not very considerable; and, actuated by an uncle's affection for his niece as well as a guardian's caution for his ward, I conceived it my duty to ascertain whether a withdrawal from the engagement in contemplation between Miss Wyndham and yourself would be detrimental to her happiness. I found that my ward's views agreed with my own. She thought her own fortune insufficient, seeing that your habits were then expensive: and, perhaps, not truly knowing the intensity of her own affection, she coincided in my views. You are acquainted with the result. These causes have operated in inducing me to hope that I may still welcome you by the hand as my dear niece's husband. Her fortune is very greatly increased; your character is--I will not say altered--is now fixed and established. And, lastly and chiefly, I find--I blush, my lord, to tell a lady's secret--that my ward's happiness still depends on you.
I am sure, my dear lord, I need not say more. We shall be delighted to see you at your earliest convenience. We wish that you could have come to us before your friend left, but I regret to learn from him that his parochial duties preclude the possibility of his staying with us beyond Thursday.
I shall anxiously wait for your reply. In the meantime I beg to assure you, with the joint kind remembrances of all our party, that I am, Most faithfully yours, CASHEL.
Mr Armstrong descended to the drawing-room, before dinner, looking most respectable, with a stiff white tie and the new suit expressly prepared for the occasion. He was introduced to Lady Cashel and Lady Selina as a valued friend of Lord Ballindine, and was received, by the former at least, in a most flattering manner. Lady Selina had hardly reconciled herself to the return of Lord Ballindine. It was from no envy at her cousin's happiness; she was really too high-minded, and too falsely proud, also, to envy anyone. But it was the harsh conviction of her mind, that no duties should be disregarded, and that all duties were disagreeable: she was always opposed to the doing of anything which appeared to be the especial wish of the person consulting her; because it would be agreeable, she judged that it would be wrong. She was most sincerely anxious for her poor dependents, but she tormented them most cruelly. When Biddy Finn wished to marry, Lady Selina told her it was her duty to put a restraint on her inclinations; and ultimately prevented her, though there was no objection on earth to Tony Mara; and when the widow Cullen wanted to open a little shop for soap and candles, having eight pounds ten shillings left to stock it, after the wake and funeral were over, Lady Selina told the widow it was her duty to restrain her inclination, and she did so; and the eight pounds ten shillings drifted away in quarters of tea, and most probably, half noggins of whiskey.
In the same way, she could not bring herself to think that Fanny was doing right, in following the bent of her dearest wishes--in marrying this man she loved so truly. She was weak; she was giving way to temptation; she was going back from her word; she was, she said, giving up her claim to that high standard of feminine character, which it should be the proudest boast of a woman to maintain.
It was in vain that her mother argued the point with her in her own way. "But why shouldn't she marry him, my dear," said the countess, "when they love each other--and now there's plenty of money and all that; and your papa thinks it's all right? I declare I can't see the harm of it."
"I don't say there's harm, mother," said Lady Selina; "not absolute harm; but there's weakness. She had ceased to esteem Lord Ballindine."
"Ah, but, my dear, she very soon began to esteem him again. Poor dear! she didn't know how well she loved him."
"She ought to have known, mamma--to have known well, before she rejected him; but, having rejected him, no power on earth should have induced her to name him, or even to think of him again. She should have been dead to him; and he should have been the same as dead to her."
"Well, I don't know," said the countess; "but I'm sure I shall be delighted to see anybody happy in the house again, and I always liked Lord Ballindine myself. There was never any trouble about his dinners or anything."
And Lady Cashel was delighted. The grief she had felt at the abrupt termination of all her hopes with regard to her son had been too much for her; she had been unable even to mind her worsted-work, and Griffiths had failed to comfort her; but from the moment that her husband had told her, with many hems and haws, that Mr Armstrong had arrived to repeat Lord Ballindine's proposal, and that he had come to consult her about again asking his lordship to Grey Abbey, she became happy and light-hearted; and, before Griffiths had left her for the night, she had commenced her consultations as to the preparations for the wedding.
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WAIT TILL I TELL YOU
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There was no one at dinner that first evening, but Mr Armstrong, and the family circle; and the parson certainly felt it dull enough. Fanny, naturally, was rather silent; Lady Selina did not talk a great deal; the countess reiterated, twenty times, the pleasure she had in seeing him at Grey Abbey, and asked one or two questions as to the quantity of flannel it took to make petticoats for the old women in his parish; but, to make up the rest, Lord Cashel talked incessantly. He wished to show every attention to his guest, and he crammed him with ecclesiastical conversation, till Mr Armstrong felt that, poor as he was, and much as his family wanted the sun of lordly favour, he would not give up his little living down in Connaught, where, at any rate, he could do as he pleased, to be domestic chaplain to Lord Cashel, with a salary of a thousand a-year.
The next morning was worse, and the whole of the long day was insufferable. He endeavoured to escape from his noble friend into the demesne, where he might have explored the fox coverts, and ascertained something of the sporting capabilities of the country; but Lord Cashel would not leave him alone for an instant; and he had not only to endure the earl's tediousness, but also had to assume a demeanour which was not at all congenial to his feelings. Lord Cashel would talk Church and ultra-Protestantism to him, and descanted on the abominations of the National system, and the glories of Sunday-schools. Now, Mr Armstrong had no leaning to popery, and had nothing to say against Sunday schools; but he had not one in his own parish, in which, by the bye, he was the father of all the Protestant children to be found there--without the slightest slur upon his reputation be it said. Lord Cashel totally mistook his character, and Mr Armstrong did not know how to set him right; and at five o'clock he went to dress, more tired than he ever had been after hunting all day, and then riding home twelve miles on a wet, dark night, with a lame horse.
To do honour to her guest Lady Cashel asked Mr O'Joscelyn, the rector, together with his wife and daughters, to dine there on the second day; and Mr Armstrong, though somewhat afraid of brother clergymen, was delighted to hear that they were coming. Anything was better than another _tête-à-tête_ with the ponderous earl. There were no other neighbours near enough to Grey Abbey to be asked on so short a notice; but the rector, his wife, and their daughters, entered the dining-room punctually at half-past six.
The character and feelings of Mr O'Joscelyn were exactly those which the earl had attributed to Mr Armstrong. He had been an Orangeman [52], and was a most ultra and even furious Protestant. He was, by principle, a charitable man to his neighbours; but he hated popery, and he carried the feeling to such a length, that he almost hated Papists. He had not, generally speaking, a bad opinion of human nature; but he would not have considered his life or property safe in the hands of any Roman Catholic. He pitied the ignorance of the heathen, the credulity of the Mahommedan, the desolateness of the Jew, even the infidelity of the atheist; but he execrated, abhorred, and abominated the Church of Rome. "Anathema Maranatha [53]; get thee from me, thou child of Satan--go out into utter darkness, thou worker of iniquity--into everlasting lakes of fiery brimstone, thou doer of the devil's work--thou false prophet--thou ravenous wolf!" Such was the language of his soul, at the sight of a priest; such would have been the language of his tongue, had not, as he thought, evil legislators given a licence to falsehood in his unhappy country, and rendered it impossible for a true Churchman openly to declare the whole truth.
[FOOTNOTE 52: Orangeman--a member of the Orange Order, a militant Irish protestant organization founded in 1746 and named after William of Orange, who in 1688 deposed his father-in-law, Catholic King James II, became King William III, and helped establish protestant faith as a prerequisite for succession to the English throne. The Orange Order is still exists and remains rabidly anti-Catholic.]
[FOOTNOTE 53: Anathema Maranatha--an extreme form of excommunication from the Catholic church formulated by the Fathers of the Fourth Council of Toledo. The person so excommunicated is also condemned to damnation at the second coming.]
But though Mr O'Joscelyn did not absolutely give utterance to such imprecations as these against the wolves who, as he thought, destroyed the lambs of his flock,--or rather, turned his sheep into foxes,--yet he by no means concealed his opinion, or hid his light under a bushel. He spent his life--an eager, anxious, hard-working life, in denouncing the scarlet woman of Babylon and all her abominations; and he did so in season and out of season: in town and in country; in public and in private; from his own pulpit, and at other people's tables; in highways and byways; both to friends--who only partly agreed with him, and to strangers, who did not agree with him at all. He totally disregarded the feelings of his auditors; he would make use of the same language to persons who might in all probability be Romanists, as he did to those whom he knew to be Protestants. He was a most zealous and conscientious, but a most indiscreet servant of his Master. He made many enemies, but few converts. He rarely convinced his opponents, but often disgusted his own party. He had been a constant speaker at public meetings; an orator at the Rotunda, and, on one occasion, at Exeter Hall. But even his own friends, the ultra Protestants, found that he did the cause more harm than good, and his public exhibitions had been as much as possible discouraged. Apart from his fanatical enthusiasm, he was a good man, of pure life, and simple habits; and rejoiced exceedingly, that, in the midst of the laxity in religious opinions which so generally disfigured the age, his wife and his children were equally eager and equally zealous with himself in the service of their Great Master.
A beneficed clergyman from the most benighted, that is, most Papistical portion of Connaught, would be sure, thought Mr O'Joscelyn, to have a fellow-feeling with him; to sympathise with his wailings, and to have similar woes to communicate.
"How many Protestants have you?" said he to Mr Armstrong, in the drawing-room, a few minutes after they had been introduced to each other. "I had two hundred and seventy in the parish on New Year's day; and since that we've had two births, and a very proper Church of England police-serjeant has been sent here, in place of a horrid Papist. We've a great gain in Serjeant Woody, my lord."
"In one way we certainly have, Mr O'Joscelyn," said the earl. "I wish all the police force were Protestants; I think they would be much more effective. But Serjeant Carroll was a very good man; you know he was removed from hence on his promotion."
"I know he was, my lord--just to please the priests just because he was a Papist. Do you think there was a single thing done, or a word said at Petty Sessions, but what Father Flannery knew all about it? --Yes, every word. When did the police ever take any of Father Flannery's own people?"
"Didn't Serjeant Carroll take that horrible man Leary, that robbed the old widow that lived under the bridge?" said the countess.
"True, my lady, he did," said Mr O'Joscelyn; "but you'll find, if you inquire, that Leary hadn't paid the priest his dues, nor yet his brother. How a Protestant government can reconcile it to their conscience--how they can sleep at night, after pandering to the priests as they daily do, I cannot conceive. How many Protestants did you say you have, Mr Armstrong?"
"We're not very strong down in the West, Mr O'Joscelyn," said the other parson. "There are usually two or three in the Kelly's Court pew. The vicarage pew musters pretty well, for Mrs Armstrong and five of the children are always there. Then there are usually two policemen, and the clerk; though, by the bye, he doesn't belong to the parish. I borrowed him from Claremorris."
Mr O'Joscelyn gave a look of horror and astonishment.
"I can, however, make a boast, which perhaps you cannot, Mr Joscelyn: all my parishioners are usually to be seen in church, and if one is absent I'm able to miss him."
"It must paralyse your efforts, preaching to such a congregation," said the other.
"Do not disparage my congregation," said Mr Armstrong, laughing; "they are friendly and neighbourly, if not important in point of numbers; and, if I wanted to fill my church, the Roman Catholics think so well of me, that they'd flock in crowds there if I asked them; and the priest would show them the way--for any special occasion, I mean; if the bishop came to see me, or anything of that kind."
Mr O'Joscelyn was struck dumb; and, indeed, he would have had no time to answer if the power of speech had been left to him, for the servant announced dinner.
The conversation was a little more general during dinner-time, but after dinner the parish clergyman returned to another branch of his favourite subject. Perhaps, he thought that Mr Armstrong was himself not very orthodox; or, perhaps, that it was useless to enlarge on the abominations of Babylon to a Protestant peer and a Protestant parson; but, on this occasion, he occupied himself with the temporal iniquities of the Roman Catholics. The trial of O'Connell and his fellow-prisoners had come to an end, and he and they, with one exception, had just. commenced their period of imprisonment. The one exception was a clergyman, who had been acquitted. He had in some way been connected with Mr O'Joscelyn's parish; and, as the parish priest and most of his flock were hot Repealers, there was a good deal of excitement on the occasion,--rejoicings at the priest's acquittal, and howlings, yellings, and murmurings at the condemnation of the others.
"We've fallen on frightful days, Mr Armstrong," said Mr O'Joscelyn: "frightful, lawless, dangerous days."
"We must take them as we find them, Mr O'Joscelyn."
"Doubtless, Mr Armstrong, doubtless; and I acknowledge His infinite wisdom, who, for His own purposes, now allows sedition to rear her head unchecked, and falsehood to sit in the high places. They are indeed dangerous days, when the sympathy of government is always with the evil doers, and the religion of the state is deserted by the crown."
"Why, God bless me! Mr O'Joscelyn! --the queen hasn't turned Papist, and the Repealers are all in prison, or soon will be there."
"I don't mean the queen. I believe she is very good. I believe she is a sincere Protestant, God bless her;" and Mr O'Joscelyn, in his loyalty, drank a glass of port wine; "but I mean her advisers. They do not dare protect the Protestant faith: they do not dare secure the tranquillity of the country."
"Are not O'Connell and the whole set under conviction at this moment? I'm no politician myself, but the only question seems to be, whether they haven't gone a step too far?"
"Why did they let that priest escape them?" said Mr O'Joscelyn.
"I suppose he was not guilty;" said Mr Armstrong; "at any rate, you had a staunch Protestant jury."
"I tell you the priests are at the head of it all. O'Connell would be nothing without them; he is only their creature. The truth is, the government did not dare to frame an indictment that would really lead to the punishment of a priest. The government is truckling to the false hierarchy of Rome. Look at Oxford,--a Jesuitical seminary, devoted to the secret propagation of Romish falsehood. --Go into the churches of England, and watch their bowings, their genuflexions, their crosses and their candles; see the demeanour of their apostate clergy; look into their private oratories; see their red-lettered prayer-books, their crucifixes, and images; and then, can you doubt that the most dreadful of all prophecies is about to be accomplished?"
"But I have not been into their closets, Mr O'Joscelyn, nor yet into their churches lately, and therefore I have not seen these things; nor have I seen anybody who has. Have you seen crucifixes in the rooms of Church of England clergymen? or candles on the altar-steps of English churches?"
"God forbid that I should willingly go where such things are to be seen; but of the fearful fact there is, unfortunately, no doubt. And then, as to the state of the country, we have nothing round us but anarchy and misrule: my life, Mr Armstrong, has not been safe any day this week past."
"Good Heaven, Mr O'Joscelyn--your life not safe! I thought you were as quiet here, in Kildare, as we are in Mayo."
"Wait till I tell you, Mr Armstrong: you know this priest, whom they have let loose to utter more sedition? --He was coadjutor to the priest in this parish."
"Was he? The people are not attacking you, I suppose, because he's let loose?"
"Wait till I tell you. No; the people are mad because O'Connell and his myrmidons are to be locked up; and, mingled with their fury on this head are their insane rejoicings at the escape of this priest. They are, therefore,--or were, till Saturday last, howling for joy and for grief at the same time. Oh! such horrid howls, Mr Armstrong. I declare, Mr Armstrong, I have trembled for my children this week past."
The earl, who well knew Mr O'Joscelyn, and the nature of his grievances, had heard all these atrocities before; and, not being very excited by their interest, had continued sipping his claret in silence till he began to doze; and, by the time the worthy parson had got to the climax of his misery, the nobleman was fast asleep.
"You don't mean that the people made any attack on the parsonage?" said Mr Armstrong.
"Wait till I tell you, Mr Armstrong," replied the other. "On Thursday morning last they all heard that O'Connell was a convicted felon."
"Conspirator, I believe? Mr O'Joscelyn."
"Conspiracy is felony, Mr Armstrong--and that their priest had been let loose. It was soon evident that no work was to be done that day. They assembled about the roads in groups; at the chapel-door; at Priest Flannery's house; at the teetotal reading-room as they call it, where the people drink cordial made of whiskey, and disturb the neighbourhood with cracked horns; and we heard that a public demonstration was to be made."
"Was it a demonstration of joy or of grief?"
"Both, Mr Armstrong! it was mixed. They were to shout and dance for joy about Father Tyrrel; and howl and curse for grief about O'Connell; and they did shout and howl with a vengeance. All Thursday, you would have thought that a legion of devils had been let loose into Kilcullen."
"But did they commit any personal outrages, Mr O'Joscelyn?"
"Wait till I tell you. I soon saw how the case was going to be, and I determined to be prepared. I armed myself, Mr Armstrong; and so did Mrs O'Joscelyn. Mrs O'Joscelyn is a most determined woman--a woman of great spirit; we were resolved to protect our daughters and our infants from ill-usage, as long as God should leave us the power to do so. We both armed ourselves with pistols, and I can assure you that, as far as ammunition goes, we were prepared to give them a hot reception."
"Dear me! This must have been very unpleasant to Mrs O'Joscelyn."
"Oh, she's a woman of great nerve, Mr Armstrong. Mary is a woman of very great nerve. I can assure you we shall never forget that Thursday night. About seven in the evening it got darkish, but the horrid yells of the wild creatures had never ceased for one half-hour; and, a little after seven, twenty different bonfires illuminated the parish. There were bonfires on every side of us: huge masses of blazing turf were to be seen scattered through the whole country."
"Did they burn any thing except the turf, Mr O'Joscelyn?"
"Wait till I tell you, Mr Armstrong. I shall never forget that night; we neither of us once lay down; no, not for a moment. About eight, the children were put to bed; but with their clothes and shoes on, for there was no knowing at what moment and in how sudden a way the poor innocents might be called up. My daughters behaved admirably; they remained quite quiet in the drawing-room till about eleven, when we had evening worship, and then they retired to rest. Their mother, however, insisted that they should not take off their petticoats or stockings. At about one, we went to the hall-door: it was then bright moonlight--but the flames of the surrounding turf overpowered the moon. The whole horizon was one glare of light."
"But were not the police about, Mr O'Joscelyn?"
"Oh, they were about, to be sure, poor men; but what could they do? The government now licenses every outrage."
"But what _did_ the people do?" said Mr Armstrong.
"Wait till I tell you. They remained up all night; and so did we, you may be sure. Mary did not rise from her chair once that night without a pistol in her hand. We heard the sounds of their voices continually, close to the parsonage gate; we could see them in the road, from the windows--crowds of them--men, women and children; and still they continued shouting. The next morning they were a little more quiet, but still the parish was disturbed: nobody was at work, and men and women stood collected together in the roads. But as soon as it was dusk, the shoutings and the bonfires began again; and again did I and Mrs O'Joscelyn prepare for a night of anxious watching. We sat up all Friday night, Mr Armstrong."
"With the pistols again?"
"Indeed we did; and lucky for us that we did so. Had they not known that we were prepared, I am convinced the house would have been attacked. Our daughters sat with us this night, and we were so far used to the state of disturbance, that we were able to have a little supper."
"You must have wanted that, I think."
"Indeed we did. About four in the morning, I dropped asleep on the sofa; but Mary never closed her eyes."
"Did they come into the garden at all, or near the house?"
"No, they did not. And I am very thankful they refrained from doing so, for I determined to act promptly, Mr Armstrong, and so was Mary--that is, Mrs O'Joscelyn. We were both determined to fire, if we found our premises invaded. Thank God the miscreants did not come within the gate."
"You did not suffer much, then, except the anxiety, Mr O'Joscelyn?"
"God was very merciful, and protected us; but who can feel safe, living in such times, and among such a people? And it all springs from Rome; the scarlet woman is now in her full power, and in her full deformity. She was smitten down for a while, but has now risen again. For a while the right foot of truth was on her neck; for a while she lay prostrated before the strength of those, who by God's grace, had prevailed against her. But the latter prophecies which had been revealed to us, are now about to be accomplished. It is well for those who comprehend the signs of the coming time."
"Suppose we join the ladies," said the earl, awakened by the sudden lull in Mr O'Joscelyn's voice. "But won't you take a glass of Madeira first, Mr Armstrong?"
Mr Armstrong took his glass of Madeira, and then went to the ladies; and the next morning, left Grey Abbey, for his own parish. Well; thought he to himself, as he was driven through the park, in the earl's gig, I'm very glad I came here, for Frank's sake. I've smoothed his way to matrimony and a fortune. But I don't know anything which would induce me to stay a week at Grey Abbey. The earl is bad--nearly unbearable; but the parson! --I'd sooner by half be a Roman myself, than think so badly of my neighbours as he does. Many a time since has he told in Connaught, how Mr O'Joscelyn. and Mary, his wife, sat up two nights running, armed to the teeth, to protect themselves from the noisy Repealers of Kilcullen.
Mr Armstrong arrived safely at his parsonage, and the next morning he rode over to Kelly's Court. But Lord Ballindine was not there. He had started for Grey Abbey almost immediately on receiving the two letters which we have given, and he and his friend had passed each other on the road.
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IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS
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When Frank had read his two letters from Grey Abbey, he was in such a state of excitement as to be unable properly to decide what he would immediately do. His first idea was to gallop to Tuam, as fast as his best horse would carry him; to take four horses there, and not to stop one moment till he found himself at Grey Abbey: but a little consideration showed him that this would not do. He would not find horses ready for him on the road; he must take some clothes with him; and it would be only becoming in him to give the earl some notice of his approach. So he at last made up his mind to postpone his departure for a few hours.
He was, however, too much overcome with joy to be able to do anything rationally. His anger against the earl totally evaporated; indeed, he only thought of him now as a man who had a house in which he could meet his love. He rushed into the drawing-room, where his mother and sisters were sitting, and, with the two letters open in his hand, proclaimed his intention of leaving home that day.
"Goodness gracious, Frank! and where are you going?" said Mrs O'Kelly.
"To Grey Abbey."
"No!" said Augusta, jumping up from her chair.
"I am so glad!" shouted Sophy, throwing down her portion of the worsted-work sofa.
"You have made up your difference, then, with Miss Wyndham?" said the anxious mother. "I am so glad! My own dear, good, sensible Frank!"
"I never had any difference with Fanny," said he. "I was not able to explain all about it, nor can I now: it was a crotchet of the earl's--only some nonsense; however, I'm off now--I can't wait a day, for I mean to write to say I shall be at Grey Abbey the day after to-morrow, and I must go by Dublin. I shall be off in a couple of hours; so, for Heaven's sake, Sophy, look sharp and put up my things."
The girls both bustled out of the room, and Frank was following them, but his mother called him back. "When is it to be, Frank? Come tell me something about it. I never asked any questions when I thought the subject was a painful one."
"God bless you, mother, you never did. But I can tell you nothing--only the stupid old earl has begged me to go there at once. Fanny must settle the time herself: there'll be settlements, and lawyer's work."
"That's true, my love. A hundred thousand pounds in ready cash does want looking after. But look here, my dear; Fanny is of age, isn't she?"
"She is, mother."
"Well now, Frank, take my advice; they'll want to tie up her money in all manner of ways, so as to make it of the least possible use to you, or to her either. They always do; they're never contented unless they lock up a girl's money, so that neither she nor her husband can spend the principal or the interest. Don't let them do it, Frank. Of course she will be led by you, let them settle whatever is fair on her; but don't let them bother the money so that you can't pay off the debts. It'll be a grand thing, Frank, to redeem the property."
Frank hemmed and hawed, and said he'd consult his lawyer in Dublin before the settlements were signed; but declared that he was not going to marry Fanny Wyndham for her money.
"That's all very well, Frank," said the mother; "but you know you could not marry her without the money, and mind, it's now or never. Think what a thing it would be to have the property unencumbered!"
The son hurried away to throw himself at the feet of his mistress, and the mother remained in her drawing-room, thinking with delight on the renovated grandeur of the family, and of the decided lead which the O'Kellys would again be able to take in Connaught.
Fanny's joy was quite equal to that of her lover, but it was not shown quite so openly. Her aunt congratulated her most warmly; kissed her twenty times; called her her own dear, darling niece, and promised her to love her husband, and to make him a purse if she could get Griffiths to teach her that new stitch; it looked so easy she was sure she could learn it, and it wouldn't tease her eyes. Lady Selina also wished her joy; but she did it very coldly, though very sensibly.
"Believe me, my dear Fanny, I am glad you should have the wish of your heart. There were obstacles to your union with Lord Ballindine, which appeared to be insurmountable, and I therefore attempted to wean you from your love. I hope he will prove worthy of that love, and that you may never have cause to repent of your devotion to him. You are going greatly to increase your cares and troubles; may God give you strength to bear them, and wisdom to turn them to advantage!"
The earl made a very long speech to her, in which there were but few pauses, and not one full stop. Fanny was not now inclined to quarrel with him; and he quite satisfied himself that his conduct, throughout, towards his ward, had been dignified, prudent, consistent, and disinterested.
These speeches and congratulations all occurred during the period of Mr Armstrong's visit, and Fanny heard nothing more about her lover, till the third morning after that gentleman's departure; the earl announced then, on entering the breakfast-room, that he had that morning received a communication from Lord Ballindine, and that his lordship intended reaching Grey Abbey that day in time for dinner.
Fanny felt herself blush, but she said nothing; Lady Selina regretted that he had had a very wet day yesterday, and hoped he would have a fine day to-day; and Lady Cashel was overcome at the reflection that she had no one to meet him at dinner, and that she had not yet suited herself with a cook.
"Dear me," exclaimed her ladyship; "I wish we'd got this letter yesterday; no one knows now, beforehand, when people are coming. I'm sure it usen't to be so. I shall be so glad to see Lord Ballindine; you know, Fanny, he was always a great favourite of mine. Do you think, Selina, the O'Joscelyns would mind coming again without any notice? I'm sure I don't know--I would not for the world treat Lord Ballindine shabbily; but what can I do, my dear?"
"I think, my lady, we may dispense with any ceremony now, with Lord Ballindine," said the earl. "He will, I am sure, be delighted to be received merely as one of the family. You need not mind asking the O'Joscelyns to-day."
"Do you think not? Well, that's a great comfort: besides, Lord Ballindine never was particular. But still, Fanny, had I known he was coming so soon, I would have had Murray down from Dublin again at once, for Mrs Richards is not a good cook."
During the remainder of the morning, Fanny was certainly very happy; but she was very uneasy. She hardly knew how to meet Lord Ballindine. She felt that she had treated him badly, though she had never ceased to love him dearly; and she also thought she owed him much for his constancy. It was so good of him to send his friend to her--and one to whom her uncle could not refuse admission; and then she thought she had treated Mr Armstrong haughtily and unkindly. She had never thanked him for all the trouble he had taken; she had never told him how very happy he had made her; but she would do so at some future time, when he should be an honoured and a valued guest in her own and her husband's house.
But how should she receive her lover? Would they allow her to be alone with him, if only for a moment, at their first meeting? Oh! How she longed for a confidante! but she could not make a confidante of her cousin. Twice she went down to the drawing-room, with the intention of talking of her love; but Lady Selina looked so rigid, and spoke so rigidly, that she could not do it. She said such common-place things, and spoke of Lord Ballindine exactly as she would of any other visitor who might have been coming to the house. She did not confine herself to his eating and drinking, as her mother did; but she said, he'd find the house very dull, she was afraid--especially as the shooting was all over, and the hunting very nearly so; that he would, however, probably be a good deal at the Curragh races.
Fanny knew that her cousin did not mean to be unkind; but there was no sympathy in her: she could not talk to her of the only subject which occupied her thoughts; so she retreated to her own room, and endeavoured to compose herself. As the afternoon drew on, she began to wish that he was not coming till to-morrow. She became very anxious; she must see him, somewhere, before she dressed for dinner; and she would not, could not, bring herself to go down into the drawing-room, and shake hands with him, when he came, before her uncle, her aunt, and her cousin.
She was still pondering on the subject, when, about four o'clock in the afternoon, she got a message from her aunt, desiring her to go to her in her boudoir.
"That'll do, Griffiths," said the countess, as Fanny entered her room; "you can come up when I ring. Sit down, Fanny; sit down, my dear. I was thinking Lord Ballindine will soon be here."
"I suppose he will, aunt. In his letter to Lord Cashel, he said he'd be here before dinner."
"I'm sure he'll be here soon. Dear me; I'm so glad it's all made up between you. I'm sure, Fanny, I hope, and think, and believe, you'll be very, very happy."
"Dear aunt"--and Fanny kissed Lady Cashel. A word of kindness to her then seemed invaluable.
"It was so very proper in Lord Ballindine to give up his horses, and all that sort of thing," said the countess; "I'm sure I always said he'd turn out just what he should be; and he is so good-tempered. I suppose, dear, you'll go abroad the first thing?"
"I haven't thought of that yet, aunt," said Fanny, trying to smile.
"Oh, of course you will; you'll go to the Rhine, and Switzerland, and Como, and Rome, and those sort of places. It'll be very nice: we went there--your uncle and I--and it was delightful; only I used to be very tired. It wasn't then we went to Rome though. I remember now it was after Adolphus was born. Poor Adolphus!" and her ladyship sighed, as her thoughts went back to the miseries of her eldest born. "But I'll tell you why I sent for you, my dear: you know, I must go downstairs to receive Lord Ballindine, and tell him how glad I am that he's come back; and I'm sure I am very glad that he's coming; and your uncle will be there. But I was thinking you'd perhaps sooner see him first alone. You'll be a little flurried, my dear,--that's natural; so, if you like, you can remain up here, my dear, in my room, quiet and comfortable, by yourself; and Griffiths shall show Lord Ballindine upstairs, as soon as he leaves the drawing-room."
"How very, very kind of you, dear aunt!" said Fanny, relieved from her most dreadful difficulty. And so it was arranged. Lady Cashel went down into the drawing-room to await her guest, and Fanny brought her book into her aunt's boudoir, and pretended she would read till Lord Ballindine disturbed her.
I need hardly say that she did not read much. She sat there over her aunt's fire, waiting to catch the sound of the wheels on the gravel at the front door. At one moment she would think that he was never coming--the time appeared to be so long; and then again, when she heard any sound which might be that of his approach, she would again wish to have a few minutes more to herself.
At length, however, she certainly did hear him. There was the quick rattle of the chaise over the gravel, becoming quicker and quicker, till the vehicle stopped with that kind of plunge which is made by no other animal than a post-horse, and by him only at his arrival at the end of a stage. Then the steps were let down with a crash--she would not go to the window, or she might have seen him; she longed to do so, but it appeared so undignified. She sat quite still in her chair; but she heard his quick step at the hail door; she was sure--she could have sworn to his step--and then she heard the untying of cords, and pulling down of luggage. Lord Ballindine was again in the house, and the dearest wish of her heart was accomplished.
She felt that she was trembling. She had not yet made up her mind how she would receive him--what she would first say to him--and certainly she had no time to do so now. She got up, and looked in her aunt's pier-glass. It was more a movement of instinct than one of premeditation; but she thought she had never seen herself look so wretchedly. She had, however, but little time, either for regret or improvement on that score, for there were footsteps in the corridor. He couldn't have stayed a moment to speak to anyone downstairs--however, there he certainly was; she heard Griffiths' voice in the passage, "This way, my lord--in my lady's boudoir;" and then the door opened, and in a moment she was in her lover's arms.
"My own Fanny! --once more my own!"
"Oh, Frank! dear Frank!"
Lord Ballindine was only ten minutes late in coming down to dinner, and Miss Wyndham not about half an hour, which should be considered as showing great moderation on her part. For, of course, Frank kept her talking a great deal longer than he should have done; and then she not only had to dress, but to go through many processes with her eyes, to obliterate the trace of tears. She was, however, successful, for she looked very beautiful when she came down, and so dignified, so composed, so quiet in her happiness, and yet so very happy in her quietness. Fanny was anything but a hypocrite; she had hardly a taint of hypocrisy in her composition, but her looks seldom betrayed her feelings. There was a majesty of beauty about her, a look of serenity in her demeanour, which in public made her appear superior to all emotion.
Frank seemed to be much less at his ease. He attempted to chat easily with the countess, and to listen pleasantly to the would-be witticisms of the earl; but he was not comfortable, he did not amalgamate well with the family; had there been a larger party, he could have talked all dinner-time to his love; but, as it was, he hardly spoke a word to her during the ceremony, and indeed, but few during the evening. He did sit next to her on the sofa, to be sure, and watched the lace she was working; but he could not talk unreservedly to her, when old Lady Cashel was sitting close to him on the other side, and Lady Selina on a chair immediately opposite. And then, it is impossible to talk to one's mistress, in an ordinary voice, on ordinary subjects, when one has not seen her for some months. A lover is never so badly off as in a family party: a _tête-à-tête_, or a large assembly, are what suit him best: he is equally at his ease in either; but he is completely out of his element in a family party. After all, Lady Cashel was right; it would have been much better to have asked the O'Joscelyns.
The next morning, Frank underwent a desperate interview in the book-room. His head was dizzy before Lord Cashel had finished half of what he had to say. He commenced by pointing out with what perfect uprightness and wisdom he had himself acted with regard to his ward; and Lord Ballindine did not care to be at the trouble of contradicting him. He then went to the subject of settlements, and money matters: professed that he had most unbounded confidence in his young friend's liberality, integrity, and good feeling; that he would be glad to listen, and, he had no doubt, to accede to any proposals made by him: that he was quite sure Lord Ballindine would make no proposal which was not liberal, fair, and most proper; and he said a great deal more of the kind, and then himself proposed to arrange his ward's fortune in such a way as to put it quite beyond her future husband's control. On this subject, however, Frank rather nonplussed the earl by proposing nothing, and agreeing to nothing; but simply saying that he would leave the whole matter in the hands of the lawyers.
"Quite right, my lord, quite right," said Lord Cashel, "my men of business, Green and Grogram, will manage all that. They know all about Fanny's property; they can draw out the settlements, and Grogram can bring them here, and we can execute them: that'll be the simplest way."
"I'll write to Mr Cummings, then, and tell him to wait on Messrs. Green and Grogram. Cummings is a very proper man: he was recommended to me by Guinness."
"Oh, ah--yes; your attorney, you mean?" said the earl. "Why, yes, that will be quite proper, too. Of course Mr Cummings will see the necessity of absolutely securing Miss Wyndham's fortune."
Nothing further, however, was said between them on the subject; and the settlements, whatever was their purport, were drawn out without any visible interference on the part of Lord Ballindine. But Mr Grogram, the attorney, on his first visit to Grey Abbey on the subject, had no difficulty in learning that Miss Wyndham was determined to have a will of her own in the disposition of her own money.
Fanny told her lover the whole episode of Lord Kilcullen's offer to her; but she told it in such a way as to redound rather to her cousin's credit than otherwise. She had learned to love him as a cousin and a friend, and his ill-timed proposal to her had not destroyed the feeling. A woman can rarely be really offended at the expression of love, unless it be from some one unfitted to match with her, either in rank or age. Besides, Fanny thought that Lord Kilcullen had behaved generously to her when she so violently repudiated his love: she believed that it had been sincere; she had not even to herself accused him of meanness or treachery; and she spoke of him as one to be pitied, liked, and regarded; not as one to be execrated and avoided.
And then she confessed to Frank all her fears respecting himself; how her heart would have broken, had he taken her own rash word as final, and so deserted her. She told him that she had never ceased to love him, for a day; not even on that day when, in her foolish spleen, she had told her uncle she was willing to break off the match; she owned to him all her troubles, all her doubts; how she had made up her mind to write to him, but had not dared to do so, lest his answer should be such as would kill her at once. And then she prayed to be forgiven for her falseness; for having consented, even for a moment, to forget the solemn vows she had so often repeated to him.
Frank stopped her again and again in her sweet confessions, and swore the blame was only his. He anathematised himself, his horses, and his friends, for having caused a moment's uneasiness to her; but she insisted on receiving his forgiveness, and he was obliged to say that he forgave her. With all his follies, and all his weakness, Lord Ballindine was not of an unforgiving temperament: he was too happy to be angry with any one, now. He forgave even Lord Cashel; and, had he seen Lord Kilcullen, he would have been willing to give him his hand as to a brother.
Frank spent two or three delightful weeks, basking in the sunshine of Fanny's love, and Lord Cashel's favour. Nothing could be more obsequiously civil than the earl's demeanour, now that the matter was decided. Every thing was to be done just as Lord Ballindine liked; his taste was to be consulted in every thing; the earl even proposed different visits to the Curragh; asked after the whereabouts of Fin M'Coul and Brien Boru; and condescended pleasantly to inquire whether Dot Blake was prospering as usual with his favourite amusement.
At length, the day was fixed for the marriage. It was to be in the pleasant, sweet-smelling, grateful month of May,--the end of May; and Lord and Lady Ballindine were then to start for a summer tour, as the countess had proposed, to see the Rhine, and Switzerland, and Rome, and those sort of places. And now, invitations were sent, far and wide, to relatives and friends. Lord Cashel had determined that the wedding should be a great concern. The ruin of his son was to be forgotten in the marriage of his niece. The bishop of Maryborough was to come and marry them; the Ellisons were to come again, and the Fitzgeralds: a Duchess was secured, though duchesses are scarce in Ireland; and great exertions were made to get at a royal Prince, who was commanding the forces in the west. But the royal Prince did not see why he should put himself to so much trouble, and he therefore sent to say that he was very sorry, but the peculiar features of the time made it quite impossible for him to leave his command, even on so great a temptation; and a paragraph consequently found its way into the papers, very laudatory of his Royal Highness's military energy and attention. Mrs O'Kelly and her daughters received a very warm invitation, which they were delighted to accept. Sophy and Augusta were in the seventh heaven of happiness, for they were to form a portion of the fair bevy of bridesmaids appointed to attend Fanny Wyndham to the altar. Frank rather pished and poohed at all these preparations of grandeur; he felt that when the ceremony took place he would look like the ornamental calf in the middle of it; but, on the whole, he bore his martyrdom patiently. Four spanking bays, and a new chariot ordered from Hutton's, on the occasion, would soon carry him away from the worst part of it.
Lord Cashel was in the midst of his glory: he had got an occupation and he delighted in it. Lady Selina performed her portion of the work with exemplary patience and attention. She wrote all the orders to the tradesmen, and all the invitations; she even condescended to give advice to Fanny about her dress; and to Griffiths, about the arrangement of the rooms and tables. But poor Lady Cashel worked the hardest of all,--her troubles had no end. Had she known what she was about to encounter, when she undertook the task of superintending the arrangements for her niece's wedding, she would never have attempted it: she would never have entered into negotiations with that treacherous Murray--that man cook in Dublin--but have allowed Mrs Richards to have done her best,--or her worst,--in her own simple way, in spite of the Duchess and the Bishop, and the hopes of a royal Prince indulged in by Lord Cashel. She did not dare to say as much to her husband, but she confessed to Griffiths that she was delighted when she heard His Royal Highness would not come. She was sure his coming would not make dear Fanny a bit happier, and she really would not have known what to do with him after the married people were gone.
Frank received two letters from Dot Blake during his stay at Grey Abbey. In the former he warmly congratulated him on his approaching nuptials, and strongly commended him on his success in having arranged matters. "You never could have forgiven yourself," he said, "had you allowed Miss Wyndham's splendid fortune to slip through your hands. I knew you were not the man to make a vain boast of a girl's love, and I was therefore sure that you might rely on her affection. I only feared you might let the matter go too far. You know I strongly advised you not to marry twenty thousand pounds. I am as strongly of opinion that you would be a fool to neglect to marry six times as much. You see I still confine myself to the money part of the business, as though the lady herself were of no value. I don't think so, however; only I know you never would have lived happily without an easy fortune." And then he spoke of Brien Boru, and informed Lord Ballindine that that now celebrated nag was at the head of the list of the Derby horses; that it was all but impossible to get any odds against him at all;--that the whole betting world were talking of nothing else; that three conspiracies had been detected, the object of which was to make him safe--that is, to make him very unsafe to his friends; that Scott's foreman had been offered two thousand to dose him; and that Scott himself slept in the stable with him every night, to prevent anything like false play.
The second letter was written by Dot, at Epsom, on the 4th of May, thirty minutes after the great race had been run. It was very short; and shall therefore be given entire.
Epsom, Derby Day, Race just over.
God bless you, my dear boy--Brien has done the trick, and done it well! Butler rode him beautifully, but he did not want any riding; he's the kindest beast ever had a saddle on. The stakes are close on four thousand pounds: your share will do well to pay the posters, &c., for yourself and my lady, on your wedding trip. I win well--very well; but I doubt the settling. We shall have awful faces at the corner next week. You'll probably have heard all about it by express before you get this.
In greatest haste, yours, W. BLAKE.
The next week, the following paragraph appeared in "Bell's Life in London."
It never rains but it pours. It appears pretty certain, now, that Brien Boru is not the property of the gentleman in whose name he has run; but that he is owned by a certain noble lord, well known on the Irish turf, who has lately, however, been devoting his time to pursuits more pleasant and more profitable than the cares of the stable--pleasant and profitable as it doubtless must be to win the best race of the year. The pick-up on the Derby is about four thousand pounds, and Brien Boru is certainly the best horse of his year. But Lord Ballindine's matrimonial pick-up is, we are told, a clear quarter of a million; and those who are good judges declare that no more beautiful woman than the future Lady Ballindine will have graced the English Court for many a long year. His lordship, on the whole, is not doing badly.
Lord Cashel, also, congratulated Frank on his success on the turf, in spite of the very decided opinion he had expressed on the subject, when he was endeavouring to throw him on one side.
"My dear Ballindine," he said, "I wish you joy with all my heart: a most magnificent animal, I'm told, is Brien, and still partly your own property, you say. Well; it's a great triumph to beat those English lads on their own ground, isn't it? And thorough Irish blood, too! --thorough Irish blood! He has the 'Paddy Whack' strain in him, through the dam--the very best blood in Ireland. You know, my mare 'Dignity', that won the Oaks in '29, was by 'Chanticleer', out of 'Floribel', by 'Paddy Whack.' You say you mean to give up the turf, and you know I've done so, too. But, if you ever do change your mind--should you ever run horses again--take my advice, and stick to the 'Paddy Whack' strain. There's no beating the real 'Paddy Whack' blood."
On the 21st of May, 1844, Lord Ballindine and Fanny Wyndham were married. The bishop "turned 'em off iligant," as a wag said in the servants' hall. There was a long account of the affair in the "Morning Post" of the day; there were eight bridesmaids, all of whom, it was afterwards remarked, were themselves married within two years of the time; an omen which was presumed to promise much continued happiness to Lord and Lady Ballindine, and all belonging to them.
Murray, the man cook, did come down from Dublin, just in time; but he behaved very badly. He got quite drunk on the morning of the wedding. He, however, gave Richards an opportunity of immortalising herself. She behaved, on the trying occasion, so well, that she is now confirmed in her situation; and Lady Cashel has solemnly declared that she will never again, on any account, be persuaded to allow a man cook to enter the house.
Lady Selina--she would not officiate as one of the bridesmaids--is still unmarried; but her temper is not thereby soured, nor her life embittered. She is active, energetic, and good as ever: and, as ever, cold, hard, harsh, and dignified. Lord Kilcullen has hardly been heard of since his departure from Grey Abbey. It is known that he is living at Baden, but no one knows on what. His father never mentions his name; his mother sometimes talks of "poor Adolphus;" but if he were dead and buried he could not give less trouble to the people of Grey Abbey.
No change has occurred, or is likely to take place, in the earl himself--nor is any desirable. How could he change for the better? How could he bear his honours with more dignity, or grace his high position with more decorum? Every year since the marriage of his niece, he has sent Lord and Lady Ballindine an invitation to Grey Abbey; but there has always been some insuperable impediment to the visit. A child had just been born, or was just going to be born; or Mrs O'Kelly was ill; or one of the Miss O'Kellys was going to be married. It was very unfortunate, but Lord and Lady Ballindine were never able to get as far as Grey Abbey.
Great improvements have been effected at Kelly's Court. Old buildings have been pulled down, and additions built up; a great many thousand young trees have been planted, and some miles of new roads and walks constructed. The place has quite an altered appearance; and, though Connaught is still Connaught, and County Mayo is the poorest part of it, Lady Ballindine does not find Kelly's Court unbearable. She has three children already, and doubtless will have many more. Her nursery, therefore, prevents her from being tormented by the weariness of the far west.
Lord Ballindine himself is very happy. He still has the hounds, and maintains, in the three counties round him, the sporting pre-eminence, which has for so many years belonged to his family. But he has no race-horses. His friend, Dot, purchased the lot of them out and out, soon after the famous Derby; and a very good bargain, for himself, he is said to have made. He is still intimate with Lord Ballindine, and always spends a fortnight with him at Kelly's Court during the hunting-season.
Sophy O'Kelly married a Blake, and Augusta married a Dillon; and, as they both live within ten miles of Kelly's Court. and their husbands are related to all the Blakes and all the Dillons; and as Ballindine himself is the head of all the Kellys, there is a rather strong clan of them. About five-and-twenty cousins muster together in red coats and top-boots, every Tuesday and Friday during the hunting-season. It would hardly be wise, in that country, to quarrel with a Kelly, a Dillon, or a Blake.
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{
"id": "4917"
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40
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CONCLUSION
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We must now return to Dunmore, and say a few parting words of the Kellys and Anty Lynch; and then our task will be finished.
It will be remembered that that demon of Dunmore, Barry Lynch, has been made to vanish: like Lord Kilcullen, he has gone abroad; he has settled himself at an hotel at Boulogne, and is determined to enjoy himself. Arrangements have been made about the property, certainly not very satisfactory to Barry, because they are such as make it necessary for him to pay his own debts; but they still leave him sufficient to allow of his indulging in every vice congenial to his taste; and, if he doesn't get fleeced by cleverer rogues than himself--which, however, will probably be the case--he will have quite enough to last him till he has drunk himself to death.
After his departure, there was nothing to delay Anty's marriage, but her own rather slow recovery. She has no other relatives to ask, no other friends to consult. Now that Barry was gone she was entirely her own mistress, and was quite willing to give up her dominion over herself to Martin Kelly. She had, however, been greatly shaken; not by illness only, but by fear also--her fears of Barry and for Barry. She still dreamed while asleep, and thought while awake, of that horrid night when he crept up to her room and swore that he would murder her. This, and what she had suffered since, had greatly weakened her, and it was some time before Doctor Colligan would pronounce her convalescent. At last, however, the difficulties were overcome; all arrangements were completed. Anty was well; the property was settled; Martin was impatient; and the day was fixed.
There was no bishop, no duchess, no man-cook, at the wedding-party given on the occasion by Mrs Kelly; nevertheless, it was, in its way, quite as grand an affair as that given by the countess. The widow opened her heart, and opened her house. Her great enemy, Barry Lynch, was gone--clean beaten out of the field--thoroughly vanquished; as far as Ireland was concerned, annihilated; and therefore, any one else in the three counties was welcome to share her hospitality. Oh, the excess of delight the widow experienced in speaking of Barry to one of her gossips, as the "poor misfortunate crature!" Daly, the attorney, was especially invited, and he came. Moylan also was asked, but he stayed away. Doctor Colligan was there, in great feather; had it not been for him, there would probably have been no wedding at all. It would have been a great thing if Lord Ballindine could have been got to grace the party, though only for ten minutes; but he was at that time in Switzerland with his own bride, so he could not possibly do so.
"Well, ma'am," said Mrs Costelloe, the grocer's wife, from Tuam, an old friend of the widow, who had got into a corner with her to have a little chat, and drink half-a-pint of porter before the ceremony,--"and I'm shure I wish you joy of the marriage. Faux, I'm tould it's nigh to five hundred a-year, Miss Anty has, may God bless and incrase it! Well, Martin has his own luck; but he desarves it, he desarves it."
"I don't know so much about luck thin, Mrs Costelloe," said the widow, who still professed to think that her son gave quite as much as he got, in marrying Anty Lynch; "I don't know so much about luck: Martin was very well as he was; his poor father didn't lave him that way that he need be looking to a wife for mains, the Lord be praised."
"And that's thrue, too, Mrs Kelly," said the other; "but Miss Anty's fortune ain't a bad step to a young man, neither. Why, there won't be a young gintleman within tin--no, not within forty miles, more respectable than Martin Kelly; that is, regarding mains."
"And you needn't stop there, Ma'am, neither; you may say the very same regarding characther, too--and family, too, glory be to the Virgin. I'd like to know where some of their ancesthers wor, when the Kellys of ould wor ruling the whole counthry?"
"Thrue for you, my dear; I'd like to know, indeed: there's nothing, afther all, like blood, and a good characther. But is it thrue, Mrs Kelly, that Martin will live up in the big house yonder?"
"Where should a man live thin, Mrs Costelloe, when he gets married, but jist in his own house? Why for should he not live there?"
"That's thrue agin, to be shure: but yet, only to think Martin--living in ould Sim Lynch's big house! I wondther what ould Sim would say, hisself, av he could only come back and see it!"
"I'll tell you what he'd say thin, av he tould the thruth; he'd say there was an honest man living there, which wor niver the case as long as any of his own breed was in it--barring Anty, I main; she's honest and thrue, the Lord be good to her, the poor thing. But the porter's not to your liking, Mrs Costelloe--you're not tasting it at all this morning."
No one could have been more humble and meek than was Anty herself, in the midst of her happiness. She had no idea of taking on herself the airs of a fine lady, or the importance of an heiress; she had no wish to be thought a lady; she had no wish for other friends than those of her husband, and his family. She had never heard of her brother's last horrible proposal to Doctor Colligan, and of the manner in which his consent to her marriage had been obtained; nor did Martin intend that she should hear it. She had merely been told that her brother had found that it was for his advantage to leave the neighbourhood altogether; that he had given up all claim to the house; and that his income was to be sent to him by a person appointed in the neighbourhood to receive it. Anty, however, before signing her own settlement, was particularly careful that nothing should be done, injurious to her brother's interest, and that no unfair advantage should be taken of his absence.
Martin, too, was quiet enough on the occasion. It was arranged that he and his wife, and at any rate one of his sisters, should live at Dunmore House; and that he should keep in his own hands the farm near Dunmore, which old Sim had held, as well as his own farm at Toneroe. But, to tell the truth, Martin felt rather ashamed of his grandeur. He would much have preferred building a nice snug little house of his own, on the land he held under Lord Ballindine; but he was told that he would be a fool to build a house on another man's ground, when he had a very good one ready built on his own. He gave way to such good advice, but he did not feel at all happy at the idea; and, when going up to the house, always felt an inclination to shirk in at the back-way.
But, though neither the widow nor Martin triumphed aloud at their worldly prosperity, the two girls made up for their quiescence. They were full of nothing else; their brother's fine house--Anty's great fortune; their wealth, prosperity, and future station and happiness, gave them subjects of delightful conversation among their friends. Meg. moreover, boasted that it was all her own doing; that it was she who had made up the match; that Martin would never have thought of it but for her,--nor Anty either, for the matter of that.
"And will your mother be staying down at the shop always, the same as iver?" said Matilda Nolan, the daughter of the innkeeper at Tuam. " 'Deed she says so, then," said Jane, in a tone of disappointment; for her mother's pertinacity in adhering to the counter was, at present, the one misery of her life.
"And which of you will be staying here along with her, dears?" said Matilda. "She'll be wanting one of you to be with her, any ways."
"Oh, turn about, I suppose," said Jane.
"She'll not get much of my company, any way," said Meg. "I've had enough of the nasty place, and now Martin has a dacent house to put over our heads, and mainly through my mains I may say, I don't see why I'm to be mewing myself up in such a hole as this. There's room for her up in Dunmore House, and wilcome, too; let her come up there. Av she mains to demain herself by sticking down here, she may stay by herself for me."
"But you'll take your turn, Meg?" said Jane.
"It'll be a very little turn, then," said Meg; "I'm sick of the nasty ould place; fancy coming down here, Matilda, to the tobacco and sugar, after living up there a month or so, with everything nice and comfortable! And it's only mother's whims, for she don't want the shop. Anty begged and prayed of her for to come and live at Dunmore House for good and all; but no; she says she'll never live in any one's house that isn't her own."
"I'm not so, any way," said Jane; "I'd be glad enough to live in another person's house av I liked it."
"I'll go bail you would, my dear," said Matilda; "willing enough--especially John Dolan's."
"Oh! av I iver live in that it'll be partly my own, you know; and may-be a girl might do worse."
"That's thrue, dear," said Matilda; "but John Dolan's not so soft as to take any girl just as she stands. What does your mother say about the money part of the business?"
And so the two friends put their heads together, to arrange another wedding, if possible.
Martin and Anty did not go to visit Switzerland, or Rome, as soon as they were married; but they took a bathing-lodge at Renvill, near Galway, and with much difficulty, persuaded Mrs Kelly to allow both her daughters to accompany them. And very merry they all were. Anty soon became a different creature from what she ever had been: she learned to be happy and gay; to laugh and enjoy the sunshine of the world. She had always been kind to others, and now she had round her those who were kind and affectionate to her. Her manner of life was completely changed: indeed, life itself was an altered thing to her. It was so new to her to have friends; to be loved; to be one of a family who regarded and looked up to her. She hardly knew herself in her new happiness.
They returned to Dunmore in the early autumn, and took up their residence at Sim Lynch's big house, as had been arranged. Martin was very shy about it: it was long before he talked about it as his house, or his ground, or his farm; and it was long before he could find himself quite at home in his own parlour.
Many attempts were made to induce the widow to give up the inn, and shift her quarters to the big house, but in vain. She declared that, ould as she was, she wouldn't think of making herself throublesome to young folks; who, may-be, afther a bit, would a dail sooner have her room than her company: that she had always been misthress, and mostly masther too, in her own house, glory be to God; and that she meant to be so still; and that, poor as the place was, she meant to call it her own. She didn't think herself at all fit company for people who lived in grand houses, and had their own demesnes, and gardens, and the rest of it; she had always lived where money was to be made, and she didn't see the sense of going, in her old age, to a place where the only work would be how to spend it. Some folks would find it was a dail asier to scatther it than it wor to put it together. All this she said and a great deal more, which had her character not been known, would have led people to believe that her son was a spendthrift, and that he and Anty were commencing life in an expensive way, and without means. But then, the widow Kelly _was_ known, and her speeches were only taken at their value.
She so far relaxed, however, that she spent every Sunday at the house; on which occasions she invariably dressed herself with all the grandeur she was able to display, and passed the whole afternoon sitting on a sofa, with her hands before her, trying to look as became a lady enjoying herself in a fine drawing-room. Her Sundays were certainly not the comfort to her, which they had been when spent at the inn; but they made her enjoy, with a keener relish, the feeling of perfect sovereignty when she returned to her own domains.
I have nothing further to tell of Mr and Mrs Kelly. I believe Doctor Colligan has been once called in on an interesting occasion, if not twice; so it is likely that Dunmore House will not be left without an heir.
I have also learned, on inquiry, that Margaret and Jane Kelly have both arranged their own affairs to their own satisfaction.
|
{
"id": "4917"
}
|
1
|
MR. CRAIG ARRAYS HIMSELF
|
It was one of the top-floor-rear flats in the Wyandotte, not merely biggest of Washington's apartment hotels, but also "most exclusive"--which is the elegant way of saying most expensive. The Wyandotte had gone up before landlords grasped the obvious truth that in a fire-proof structure locations farthest from noise and dust should and could command highest prices; so Joshua Craig's flat was the cheapest in the house. The ninety dollars a month loomed large in his eyes, focused to little-town ideas of values; it was, in fact, small for shelter in "the DE LUXE district of the de luxe quarter," to quote Mrs. Senator Mulvey, that simple, far-Western soul, who, finding snobbishness to be the chief distinguishing mark of the Eastern upper classes, assumed it was a virtue, acquired it laboriously, and practiced it as openly and proudly as a preacher does piety. Craig's chief splendor was a sitting-room, called a parlor and bedecked in the red plush and Nottingham that represent hotel men's probably shrewd guess at the traveling public's notion of interior opulence. Next the sitting-room, and with the same dreary outlook, or, rather, downlook, upon disheveled and squalid back yards, was a dingy box of a bedroom. Like the parlor, it was outfitted with furniture that had degenerated upward, floor by floor, from the spacious and luxurious first-floor suites. Between the two rooms, in dark mustiness, lay a bathroom with suspicious-looking, wood-inclosed plumbing; the rusted iron of the tub peered through scuffs and seams in the age-grayed porcelain.
Arkwright glanced from the parlor where he was sitting into the gloom of the open bathroom and back again. His cynical brown-green eyes paused upon a scatter of clothing, half-hiding the badly-rubbed red plush of the sofa--a mussy flannel nightshirt with mothholes here and there; kneed trousers, uncannily reminiscent of a rough and strenuous wearer; a smoking-jacket that, after a youth of cheap gayety, was now a frayed and tattered wreck, like an old tramp, whose "better days" were none too good. On the radiator stood a pair of wrinkled shoes that had never known trees; their soles were curved like rockers. An old pipe clamored at his nostrils, though it was on the table near the window, the full length of the room from him. Papers and books were strewn about everywhere. It was difficult to believe these unkempt and uncouth surroundings, and the personality that had created them, were actually being harbored behind the walls of the Wyandotte.
"What a hole!" grumbled Arkwright. He was in evening clothes, so correct in their care and in their carelessness that even a woman would have noted and admired. "What a mess! What a hole!"
"How's that?" came from the bedroom in an aggressive voice, so penetrating that it seemed loud, though it was not, and much roughened by open-air speaking. "What are you growling about?"
Arkwright raised his tone: "Filthy hole!" said he. "Filthy mess!"
Now appeared in the bedroom door a tall young man of unusual strength and nearly perfect proportions. The fine head was carried commandingly; with its crop of dark, matted hair it suggested the rude, fierce figure-head of a Viking galley; the huge, aggressively-masculine features proclaimed ambition, energy, intelligence. To see Josh Craig was to have instant sense of the presence of a personality. The contrast between him standing half-dressed in the doorway and the man seated in fashionable and cynically-critical superciliousness was more than a matter of exteriors. Arkwright, with features carved, not hewn as were Craig's, handsome in civilization's over-trained, overbred extreme, had an intelligent, superior look also. But it was the look of expertness in things hardly worth the trouble of learning; it was aristocracy's highly-prized air of the dog that leads in the bench show and tails in the field. He was like a firearm polished and incrusted with gems and hanging in a connoisseur's wall-case; Josh was like a battle-tested rifle in the sinewy hands of an Indian in full war-paint. Arkwright showed that he had physical strength, too; but it was of the kind got at the gymnasium and at gentlemanly sport--the kind that wins only where the rules are carefully refined and amateurized. Craig's figure had the solidity, the tough fiber of things grown in the open air, in the cold, wet hardship of the wilderness.
Arkwright's first glance of admiration for this figure of the forest and the teepee changed to a mingling of amusement and irritation. The barbarian was not clad in the skins of wild beasts, which would have set him off superbly, but was trying to get himself arrayed for a fashionable ball. He had on evening trousers, pumps, black cotton socks with just enough silk woven in to give them the shabby, shamed air of having been caught in a snobbish pretense at being silk. He was buttoning a shirt torn straight down the left side of the bosom from collar-band to end of tail; and the bosom had the stiff, glassy glaze that advertises the cheap laundry.
"Didn't you write me I must get an apartment in this house?" demanded he.
"Not in the attic," rejoined Arkwright.
"I can't afford anything better."
"You can't afford anything so bad."
"Bad!"
Craig looked round as pleased as a Hottentot with a string of colored glass beads. "Why, I've got a private sitting-room AND a private bath! I never was so well-off before in my life. I tell you, Grant, I'm not surprised any more that you Easterners get effete and worthless. I begin to like this lolling in luxury, and I keep the bell-boys on the jump. Won't you have something to drink?"
Arkwright pointed his slim cane at the rent in the shirt. "What are you going to do with that?" said he.
"This? Oh!" --Josh thrust his thick backwoods-man's hand in the tear--"Very simple. A safety-pin or so from the lining of the vest--excuse me, waistcoat--into the edge of the bosom."
"Splendid!" ejaculated Arkwright. "Superb!"
Craig, with no scent for sarcasm so delicate, pushed on with enthusiasm: "The safety-pin's the mainstay of bachelor life," said he rhetorically. "It's his badge of freedom. Why, I can even repair socks with it!"
"Throw that shirt away," said Arkwright, with a contemptuous switch of his cane. "Put on another. You're not dressing for a shindy in a shack."
"But it's the only one of my half-dozen that has a bang-up bosom."
"Bang-up? That sheet of mottled mica?"
Craig surveyed the shiny surface ruefully. "What's the matter with this?" he demanded.
"Oh, nothing," replied Arkwright, in disgust. "Only, it looks more like something to roof a house with than like linen for a civilized man."
Craig reared. "But, damn it, Grant, I'm not civilized. I'm a wild man, and I'm going to stay wild. I belong to the common people, and it's my game--and my preference, too--to stick to them. I'm willing to make concessions; I'm not a fool. I know there was a certain amount of truth in those letters you took the trouble to write me from Europe. I know that to play the game here in Washington I've got to do something in society. But"--here Josh's eyes flashed, and he bent on his friend a look that was impressive--"I'm still going to be myself. I'll make 'em accept me as I am. Dealing with men as individuals, I make them do what _I_ want, make 'em like me as I am."
"Every game has its own rules," said Arkwright. "You'll get on better--quicker--go further--here if you'll learn a few elementary things. I don't see that wearing a whole shirt decently done up is going to compromise any principles. Surely you can do that and still be as common as you like. The people look up to the fellow that's just a little better dressed than they."
Josh eyed Arkwright in the way that always made him wonder whether he was in full possession of the secret of this strenuous young Westerner. "But," said he, "they love and trust the man who will have nothing which all may not have. The shirt will do for this evening." And he turned back into the bedroom.
Arkwright reflected somewhat uncomfortably. He felt that he himself was right; yet he could not deny that "Josh's cheap demagoguery" sounded fine and true. He soon forgot the argument in the study of his surroundings. "You're living like a wild beast here, Josh," he presently called out. "You must get a valet."
A loud laugh was the reply.
"Or a wife," continued Arkwright. Then, in the voice of one announcing an inspiration, "Yes--that's it! A wife!"
Craig reappeared. He had on his waistcoat and coat now, and his hair was brushed. Arkwright could not but admit that the personality took the edge off the clothes; even the "mottled mica"--the rent was completely hid--seemed to have lost the worst of its glaze and stiffness. "You'll do, Josh," said he. "I spoke too quickly. If I hadn't accidentally been thrust into the innermost secrets of your toilet I'd never have suspected." He looked the Westerner over with gentle, friendly patronage. "Yes, you'll do. You look fairly well at a glance--and a man's clothes rarely get more than that."
Craig released his laugh upon his fastidious friend's judicial seriousness. "The trouble with you, Grant, is you've never lived a human life. You've always been sheltered and pampered, lifted in and out of bed by valets, had a suit of clothes for every hour in the day. I don't see how it is I happen to like you." And in Craig's face and voice there was frankly the condescension of superior to undoubted inferior.
Arkwright seemed to be wavering between resentment and amused disdain. Then he remembered the circumstances of their first acquaintance--those frightful days in the Arizona desert, without food, with almost no water, and how this man had been absolute ruler of the party of lost and dying men; how he had forced them to march on and on, with entreaties, with curses, with blows finally; how he had brought them to safety--all as a matter of course, without any vanity or boasting--had been leader by divine right of strength of body and soul. Grant turned his eyes from Craig, for there were tears in them. "I don't see why you like me, either, Josh," said he. "But you do--and--damn it all, I'd die for you."
"I guess you'll come pretty near dying of shame before this evening's over," laughed Craig. "This is the first time in my life I ever was in a fashionable company."
"There's nothing to be frightened about," Grant assured him.
"Frightened!" Josh laughed boisterously--Arkwright could have wished he would temper that laugh. "I--frightened by a bunch of popinjays? You see, it's not really in the least important whether they like me or not--at least, not to me. I'll get there, anyhow. And when I do, I'll deal with them according to their deserts. So they'd better hustle to get solid with me."
In the two years since he had seen Craig, Arkwright had almost forgotten his habit of bragging and blowing about himself--what he had done, what he was going to do. The newspapers, the clippings Josh sent him, had kept him informed of the young Minnesotan's steady, rapid rise in politics; and whenever he recalled the absurd boasting that had made him feel Craig would never come to anything, he assumed it was a weakness of youth and inexperience which had, no doubt, been conquered. But, no; here was the same old, conceited Josh, as crudely and vulgarly self-confident as when he was twenty-five and just starting at the law in a country town. Yet Arkwright could not but admit there had been more than a grain of truth in Craig's former self-laudations, that there was in victories won a certain excuse for his confidence about the future. This young man, not much beyond thirty, with a personality so positive and so rough that he made enemies right and left, rousing the envy of men to fear that here was an ambition which must be downed or it would become a tyranny over them--this young man, by skill at politics and by sympathetic power with people in the mass, had already compelled a President who didn't like him to appoint him to the chief post under an Attorney-General who detested him.
"How are you getting on with the Attorney-General?" asked Arkwright, as they set out in his electric brougham.
"He's getting on with me much better," replied Craig, "now that he has learned not to trifle with me."
"Stillwater is said to be a pretty big man," said Arkwright warningly.
"The bigger the man, the easier to frighten," replied Josh carelessly, "because the more he's got to lose. But it's a waste of time to talk politics to you. Grant, old man, I'm sick and worn out, and how lonesome! I'm successful. But what of that, since I'm miserable? If it wasn't for my sense of duty, by Heaven, I sometimes think I'd drop it all and go back to Wayne."
"Don't do that, Josh!" exclaimed Arkwright. "Don't let the country go rolling off to ruin!"
"Like all small creatures," said Craig, "you take serious matters lightly, and light matters seriously. You were right a moment ago when you said I needed a wife."
"That's all settled," said Grant. "I'm going to get you one."
"A woman doesn't need a man--if she isn't too lazy to earn a living," pursued Craig. "But what's a man without a woman about?"
"You want a wife, and you want her quick," said Arkwright.
"You saw what a condition my clothes are in. Then, I need somebody to talk with."
"To talk to," corrected Grant.
"I can't have you round all the time to talk to."
"Heaven forbid!" cried Arkwright. "You never talk about anything but yourself."
"Some day, my boy," said Josh, with his grave good humor of the great man tolerating the antics of a mountebank, "you'll appreciate it wasn't the subject that was dull, but the ears. For the day'll come when everybody'll be thinking and talking about me most of the time."
Arkwright grinned. "It's lucky you don't let go before everybody like that."
"Yes, but I do," rejoined Craig. "And why not? They can't stop my going ahead. Besides, it's not a bad idea"--he nodded, with that shrewdness which was the great, deep-lying vein in his nature--"not at all a bad idea, to have people think you a frank, loose-mouthed, damn fool--IF you ain't. Ambition's a war. And it's a tremendous advantage to lead your enemies to underestimate you. That's one reason why I ALWAYS win ... So you're going TO TRY to get me a wife?"
"I'm going to get you one--one of the sort you need. You need a woman who'll tame you down and lick you into shape."
Craig smiled scornfully.
"One who'll know how to smooth the enemies you make with your rough-and-tumble manners; one who'll win friends for you socially--" Josh made a vehement gesture of dissent. "Not on your life!" cried he. "Of course, my wife must be a lady, and interested in my career. But none of your meddling politicians in petticoats for me! I'll do my own political maneuvering. I want a woman, not a bad imitation of a man."
"Well, let that go," said Arkwright. "Also, she ought to be able to supply you with funds for your political machinery."
Josh sat up as if this were what he had been listening for.
"That's right!" cried he. "Politics is hell for a poor man, nowadays. The people are such thoughtless, short-sighted fools--" He checked himself, and in a different tone went on: "However, I don't mean exactly that--" "You needn't hedge, Josh, with me."
"I don't want you to be thinking I'm looking for a rich woman."
"Not at all--not at all," laughed his friend.
"If she had too much money it'd be worse for my career than if she had none at all."
"I understand," said Arkwright.
"Enough money to make me independent--if I should get in a tight place," continued Josh. "Yes, I must marry. The people are suspicious of a bachelor. The married men resent his freedom--even the happily married ones. And all the women, married and single, resent his not surrendering."
"I never suspected you of cynicism."
"Yes," continued Craig, in an instantly and radically changed tone, "the people like a married man, a man with children. It looks respectable, settled. It makes 'em feel he's got a stake in the country--a home and property to defend. Yes, I want a wife."
"I don't see why you've neglected it so long."
"Too busy."
"And too--ambitious," suggested Arkwright.
"What do you mean?" demanded Josh, bristling.
"You thought you'd wait to marry until you were nearer your final place in the world. Being cut out for a king, you know--why, you thought you'd like a queen--one of those fine, delicate ladies you'd read about."
Craig's laugh might have been confession, it might have been mere amusement. "I want a wife that suits me," said he. "And I'll get her."
It was Arkwright's turn to be amused. "There's one game you don't in the least understand," said he.
"What game is that?"
"The woman game."
Craig shrugged contemptuously. "Marbles! Jacks!" Then he added: "Now that I'm about ready to marry, I'll look the offerings over." He clapped his friend on the shoulder. "And you can bet your last cent I'll take what I want."
"Don't be too sure," jeered Arkwright.
The brougham was passing a street lamp that for an instant illuminated Craig's face. Again Arkwright saw the expression that made him feel extremely uncertain of the accuracy of his estimates of the "wild man's" character.
"Yes, I'll get her," said Josh, "and for a reason that never occurs to you shallow people. I get what I want because what I want wants me--for the same reason that the magnet gets the steel."
Arkwright looked admiringly at his friend's strong, aggressive face.
"You're a queer one, Josh," said he. "Nothing ordinary about you."
"I should hope not!" exclaimed Craig. "Now for the plunge."
|
{
"id": "4929"
}
|
2
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IN THE BEST SOCIETY
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Grant's electric had swung in at the end of the long line of carriages of all kinds, from coach of ambassador and costly limousine of multi-millionaire to humble herdic wherein poor, official grandee's wife and daughter were feeling almost as common as if they had come in a street car or afoot. Josh Craig, leaning from the open window, could see the grand entrance under the wide and lofty porte-cochère--the women, swathed in silk and fur, descending from the carriages and entering the wide-flung doors of the vestibule; liveries, flowers, lights, sounds of stringed instruments, intoxicating glimpses of magnificence at windows, high and low. And now the electric was at the door. He and Arkwright sprang out, hastened up the broad steps. His expression amused Arkwright; it was intensely self-conscious, resolutely indifferent--the kind of look that betrays tempestuous inward perturbations and misgivings. "Josh is a good deal of a snob, for all his brave talk," thought he. "But," he went on to reflect, "that's only human. We're all impressed by externals, no matter what we may pretend to ourselves and to others. I've been used to this sort of thing all my life and I know how little there is in it, yet I'm in much the same state of bedazzlement as Josh."
Josh had a way of answering people's thoughts direct which Arkwright sometimes suspected was not altogether accidental. He now said: "But there's a difference between your point of view and mine. You take this seriously through and through. I laugh at it in the bottom of my heart, and size it up at its true value. I'm like a child that don't really believe in goblins, yet likes the shivery effects of goblin stories."
"I don't believe in goblins, either," said Arkwright.
"You don't believe in anything else," said Josh.
Arkwright steered him through the throng, and up to the hostess--Mrs. Burke, stout, honest, with sympathy in her eyes and humor in the lines round her sweet mouth. "Well, Josh," she said in a slow, pleasant monotone, "you HAVE done a lot of growing since I saw you. I always knew you'd come to some bad end. And here you are--in politics and in society. Gus!"
A tall, haughty-looking young woman, standing next her, turned and fixed upon Craig a pair of deep, deep eyes that somehow flustered him. Mrs. Burke presented him, and he discovered that it was her daughter-in-law. While she was talking with Arkwright, he examined her toilette. He thought it startling--audacious in its display of shoulders and back--until he got over his dazed, dazzled feeling, and noted the other women about. Wild horses could not have dragged it from him, but he felt that this physical display was extremely immodest; and at the same time that he eagerly looked his face burned. "If I do pick one of these," said he to himself, "I'm jiggered if I let her appear in public dressed this way. Why, out home women have been white-capped for less."
Arkwright had drifted away from him; he let the crowd gently push him toward the wall, into the shelter of a clump of palms and ferns. There, with his hands in his pockets, and upon his face what he thought an excellent imitation of Arkwright's easy, bored expression of thinly-veiled cynicism, he surveyed the scene and tried to judge it from the standpoint of the "common people." His verdict was that it was vain, frivolous, unworthy, beneath the serious consideration of a man of affairs such as he. But he felt that he was not quite frank, in fact was dishonest, with himself in this lofty disdain. It represented what he ought to feel, not what he actually was feeling. "At least," said he to himself, "I'll never confess to any one that I'm weak enough to be impressed by this sort of thing. Anyhow, to confess a weakness is to encourage it ... No wonder society is able to suck in and destroy so many fellows of my sort! If _I_ am tempted what must it mean to the ordinary man?" He noted with angry shame that he felt a swelling of pride because he, of so lowly an origin, born no better than the machine-like lackeys, had been able to push himself in upon--yes, up among--these people on terms of equality. And it was, for the moment, in vain that he reminded himself that most of them were of full as lowly origin as he; that few indeed could claim to be more than one generation removed from jack-boots and jeans; that the most elegant had more relations among the "vulgar herd" than they had among the "high folks."
"What are you looking so glum and sour about?" asked Arkwright.
He startled guiltily. So, his mean and vulgar thoughts had been reflected in his face. "I was thinking of the case I have to try before the Supreme Court next week," said he.
"Well, I'll introduce you to one of the Justices--old Towler. He comes of the 'common people,' like you. But he dearly loves fashionable society--makes himself ridiculous going to balls and trying to flirt. It'll do you no end of good to meet these people socially. You'll be surprised to see how respectful and eager they'll all be if you become a recognized social favorite. For real snobbishness give me your friends, the common people, when they get up where they can afford to put on airs. Why, even the President has a sneaking hankering after fashionable people. I tell you, in Washington EVERYTHING goes by social favor, just as it does in London--and would in Paris if fashionable society would deign to notice the Republic."
"Introduce me to old Towler," said Craig, curt and bitter. He was beginning to feel that Arkwright was at least in part right; and it angered him for the sake of the people from whom he had sprung, and to whom he had pledged his public career. "Then," he went on, "I'm going home. And you'll see me among these butterflies and hoptoads no more."
"Can't trust yourself, eh?" suggested Arkwright.
Craig flashed exaggerated scorn that was confession.
"I'll do better than introduce you to Towler," proceeded Arkwright. "I'll present you to his daughter--a dyed and padded old horror, but very influential with her father and all the older crowd. Sit up to her, Josh. You can lay the flattery on as thick as her paint and as high as her topknot of false hair. If she takes to you your fortune's made."
"I tell you, my fortune is not dependent on--" began Craig vehemently.
"Cut it out, old man," interrupted Arkwright. "No stump speeches here. They don't go. They bore people and create an impression that you're both ridiculous and hypocritical."
Arkwright left Josh with Towler's daughter, Mrs. Raymond, who was by no means the horror Arkwright's language of fashionable exaggeration had pictured, and who endured Craig's sophomoric eulogies of "your great and revered father," because the eulogist was young and handsome, and obviously anxious to please her. As Arkwright passed along the edge of the dancers a fan reached out and touched him on the arm. He halted, faced the double line of women, mostly elderly, seated on the palm-roofed dais extending the length of that end of the ballroom.
"Hel-LO!" called he. "Just the person I was looking for. How is Margaret this evening?"
"As you see," replied the girl, unfurling the long fan of eagle plumes with which she had tapped him. "Sit down.... Jackie"--this to a rosy, eager-faced youth beside her--"run away and amuse yourself. I want to talk seriously to this elderly person."
"I'm only seven years older than you," said Arkwright, as he seated himself where Jackie had been vainly endeavoring to induce Miss Severence to take him seriously.
"And I am twenty-eight, and have to admit to twenty-four," said Margaret.
"Don't frown that way. It makes wrinkles; and what's more unsightly than a wrinkled brow in a woman?"
"I don't in the least care," replied the girl. "I've made up my mind to stop fooling and marry."
"Jackie?"
"If I can't do better." She laughed a low, sweet laugh, like her voice; and her voice suggested a leisurely brook flitting among mossy stones. "You see, I've lost that first bloom of youth the wife-pickers prize so highly. I'm not unsophisticated enough to please them. And I haven't money enough to make them overlook such defects as maturity and intelligence--in fact, I've no money at all."
"You were never so good-looking in your life," said Grant. "I recall you were rather homely as a child and merely nice and fresh-looking when you came out. You're one of those that improve with time."
"Thanks," said the girl dryly. She was in no mood for the barren blossom of non-marrying men's compliments.
"The trouble with you is the same as with me," pursued he. "We've both spent our time with the young married set, where marriage is regarded as a rather stupid joke. You ought to have stuck to the market-place until your business was settled."
She nodded a thoughtful assent. "Yes, that was my sad mistake," said she. "However, I'm going to do my best to repair it."
He reflected. "You must marry money," he declared, as if it were a verdict.
"Either some one who's got it or some one who can get it."
"Some one who's got it, I'd advise."
"Bad advice," commented the girl, her hazel eyes gazing dreamily, languorously into the distance. She looked a woman on romance bent, a woman without a mercenary thought in her head. "Very bad advice," she went on. "Men who've got money may lose it and be unable to make any more. What a helpless thing YOU'D be but for what you have inherited and will inherit. Yet you're above the average of our sort."
"Humph!" said Arkwright, with an irritated laugh. Humor at his expense was a severe strain upon him. It always is to those whose sense of humor is keen; for they best appreciate the sting that lies in the pleasantest jest.
"It would be wiser--if one dared be wise," pursued the girl, "to marry a man who could get money. That kind of man is safest. Only death or insanity can make him a disappointment."
Arkwright eyed her curiously. "What a good head you've got on you, Rita," said he. "Like your grandmother."
The girl shivered slightly. "Don't SPEAK of her!" she exclaimed with an uneasy glance around. And Grant knew he was correct in his suspicion as to who was goading and lashing her to hasten into matrimony.
"Well--have you selected your--" As Arkwright hesitated she supplied, "Victim." They laughed, she less enthusiastically than he. "Though," she added, "I assure you, I'll make him happy. It takes intelligence to make a man happy, even if he wants the most unintelligent kind of happiness. And you've just admitted I'm not stupid."
Arkwright was studying her. He had a sly instinct that there was a reason deeper than their old and intimate friendship for her reposing this extreme of confidence in him. No doubt she was not without a vague hope that possibly this talk might set him to thinking of her as a wife for himself. Well, why not? He ought to marry, and he could afford it. Where would he find a more ladylike person--or where one who was at the same time so attractive? He studied, with a certain personal interest, her delicate face, her figure, slim and gracefully curved, as her evening dress fully revealed it. Yes, a charming, most ladylike figure. And the skin of her face, of neck and shoulders, was beautifully white, and of the texture suggesting that it will rub if too impetuously caressed. Yes, a man would hesitate to kiss her unless he were well shaved. At the very thought of kissing her Grant felt a thrill and a glow she had never before roused in him. She had an abundance of blue-black hair, and it and her slender black brows and long lashes gave her hazel eyes a peculiar charm of mingled passion and languor. She had a thin nose, well shaped, its nostrils very sensitive; slightly, charmingly-puckered lips; a small, strong chin. Certainly she had improved greatly in the two years since he had seen her in evening dress. "Though, perhaps," reflected he, "I only think so because I used to see her too much, really to appreciate her."
"Well, why didn't you?" she was saying, idly waving her fan and gazing vaguely around the room.
"Why didn't I--what?"
"You were trying to decide why you never fell in love with me."
"So I was," admitted Arkwright.
"Now if I had had lots of cash," mocked she.
He reddened, winced. She had hit the exact reason. Having a great deal of money, he wanted more--enough to make the grandest kind of splurge in a puddle where splurge was everything. "Rather, because you are too intelligent," drawled he. "I want somebody who'd fit into my melting moods, not a woman who'd make me ashamed by seeming to sit in judgment on my folly."
"A man mustn't have too much respect for a woman if he's to fall utterly in love with her--must he?"
Arkwright smiled constrainedly. He liked cynical candor in men, but only pretended to like it in women because bald frankness in women was now the fashion. "See," said he, "how ridiculous I'd feel trying to say sentimental things to you. Besides, it's not easy to fall in love with a girl one has known since she was born, and with whom he's always been on terms of brotherly, quite unsentimental intimacy."
Rita gave him a look that put this suggestion out of countenance by setting him to thrilling again. He felt that her look was artful, was deliberate, but he could not help responding to it. He began to be a little afraid of her, a little nervous about her; but he managed to say indifferently, "And why haven't YOU fallen in love with ME?"
She smiled. "It isn't proper for a well-brought-up girl to love until she is loved, is it?" Her expression gave Grant a faint suggestion of a chill of apprehension lest she should be about to take advantage of their friendship by making a dead set for him. But she speedily tranquilized him by saying: "No, my reason was that I didn't want to spoil my one friendship. Even a business person craves the luxury of a friend--and marrying has been my business," this with a slight curl of her pretty, somewhat cruel mouth. "To be quite frank, I gave you up as a possibility years ago. I saw I wasn't your style. Your tastes in women are rather--coarse."
Arkwright flushed. "I do like 'em a bit noisy and silly," he admitted. "That sort is so--so GEMUTHLICH, as the Germans say."
"Who's the man you delivered over to old Patsy Raymond? I see he's still fast to her."
"Handsome, isn't he?"
"Of a sort."
"It's Craig--the Honorable Joshua Craig--Assistant TO the Attorney-General. He's from Minnesota. He's the real thing. But you'd not like him."
"He looks quite--tame, compared to what he was two years or so ago," said Rita, her voice as indolent as her slowly-moving eagle feathers.
"Oh, you've met him?"
"No--only saw him. When I went West with the Burkes, Gus and the husband took me to a political meeting--one of those silly, stuffy gatherings where some blatant politician bellows out a lot of lies, and a crowd of badly-dressed people listen and swallow and yelp. Your friend was one of the speakers. What he said sounded--" Rita paused for a word.
"Sounded true," suggested Grant.
"Not at all. Nobody really cares anything about the people, not even themselves. No, it sounded as if he had at least half-convinced himself, while the others showed they were lying outright. We rather liked him--at the safe distance of half the hall. He's the kind of man that suggests--menageries--lions--danger if the bars break."
"How women do like that in a man!"
"Do you know him?"
"Through and through. He's a fraud, of course, like all politicians. But beneath the fraud there's a man--I think--a great, big man, strong and sure of himself--which is what can't be said of many of us who wear trousers and pose as lords of creation."
The girl seemed to have ceased to listen, was apparently watching the dancers, Arkwright continued to gaze at his friend, to admire the impressive, if obviously posed, effect of his handsome head and shoulders. He smiled with a tender expression, as one smiles at the weakness of those one loves. Suddenly he said: "By Jove, Rita--just the thing!"
"What?" asked the girl, resuming the languid waving of her eagle fan.
"Marry him--marry Josh Craig. He'll not make much money out of politics. I doubt if even a woman could corrupt him that far. But you could take him out of politics and put him in the law. He could roll it up there. The good lawyers sell themselves dear nowadays, and he'd make a killing."
"This sounds interesting."
"It's a wonder I hadn't thought of it before."
The girl gave a curious, quiet smile. "I had," said she.
"YOU had!" exclaimed Arkwright.
"A woman always keeps a careful list of eligibles," explained she. "As Lucy Burke told me he was headed for Washington, I put him on my list that very night--well down toward the bottom, but, still, on it. I had quite forgotten him until to-night."
Arkwright was staring at her. Her perfect frankness, absolute naturalness with him, unreserved trust of him, gave him a guilty feeling for the bitter judgment on her character which he had secretly formed as the result of her confidences. "Yet, really," thought he, "she's quite the nicest girl I know, and the cleverest. If she had hid herself from me, as the rest do, I'd never for one instant have suspected her of having so much--so much--calm, good sense--for that's all it amounts to." He decided it was a mistake for any human being in any circumstances to be absolutely natural and unconcealingly candid. "We're such shallow fakers," reflected he, "that if any one confesses to us things not a tenth part as bad as what we privately think and do, why, we set him--or her--especially her--down as a living, breathing atrocity in pants or petticoats."
Margaret was of the women who seem never to think of what they are really absorbed in, and never to look at what they are really scrutinizing. She disconcerted him by interrupting his reflections with: "Your private opinion of me is of small consequence to me, Grant, beside the relief and the joy of being able to say my secret self aloud. Also"--here she grew dizzy at her own audacity in the frankness that fools--"Also, if I wished to get you, Grant, or any man, I'd not be silly enough to fancy my character or lack of it would affect him. That isn't what wins men--is it?"
"You and Josh Craig have a most uncomfortable way of answering people's thoughts," said Arkwright. "Now, how did you guess I was thinking mean things about you?"
"For the same reason that Mr. Craig is able to guess what's going on in your head."
"And that reason is--" She laughed mockingly. "Because I know you, Grant Arkwright--you, the meanest-generous man, and the most generous-mean man the Lord ever permitted. The way to make you generous is to give you a mean impulse; the way to make you mean is to set you to fearing you're in danger of being generous."
"There's a bouquet with an asp coiled in it," said Arkwright, pleased; for with truly human vanity he had accepted the compliment and had thrown away the criticism. "I'll go bring Josh Craig."
"No, not to-night," said Miss Severence, with a sudden compression of the lips and a stern, almost stormy contraction of the brows.
"Please don't do that, Rita," cried Arkwright. "It reminds me of your grandmother."
The girl's face cleared instantly, and all overt signs of strength of character vanished in her usual expression of sweet, reserved femininity. "Bring him to-morrow," said she. "A little late, please. I want others to be there, so that I can study him unobserved." She laughed. "This is a serious matter for me. My time is short, and my list of possible eligibles less extended than I could wish." And with a satiric smile and a long, languorous, coquettish glance, she waved him away and waved the waiting Jackie into his place.
Arkwright found Craig clear of "Patsy" Raymond and against the wall near the door. He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed. His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz. It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his passive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam--like Blucher, when he looked out over London and said: "God! What a city to sack!"
Arkwright thought Josh was too absorbed to be aware of his approach; but as soon as he was beside him Josh said: "You were right about that apartment of mine. It's a squalid hole. Six months ago, when I got my seventy-five hundred a year, I thought I was rich. Rich? Why, that woman there has ten years' salary on her hair. All the money I and my whole family ever saw wouldn't pay for the rings on any one of a hundred hands here. It makes me mad and it makes me greedy." " 'I warned you," said Arkwright.
Craig wheeled on him. "You don't--can't--understand. You're like all these people. Money is your god. But I don't want money, I want power--to make all these snobs with their wealth, these millionaires, these women with fine skins and beautiful bodies, bow down before me--that's what I want!"
Arkwright laughed. "Well, it's up to you, Joshua."
Craig tossed his Viking head. "Yes, it's up to me, and I'll get what I want--the people and I.... Who's THAT frightful person?"
Into the room, only a few feet from them, advanced an old woman--very old, but straight as a projectile. She carried her head high, and her masses of gray-white hair, coiled like a crown, gave her the seeming of royalty in full panoply. There was white lace over her black velvet at the shoulders; her train swept yards behind her. She was bearing a cane, or rather a staff, of ebony; but it suggested, not decrepitude, but power--perhaps even a weapon that might be used to enforce authority should occasion demand. In her face, in her eyes, however, there was that which forbade the supposition of any revolt being never so remotely possible.
As she advanced across the ballroom, dancing ceased before her and around her, and but for the noise of the orchestra there would have been an awed and painful silence. Mrs. Burke's haughty daughter-in-law, with an expression of eager desire to conciliate and to please, hastened forward and conducted the old lady to a gilt armchair in the center of the dais, across the end of the ballroom. It was several minutes before the gayety was resumed, and then it seemed to have lost the abandon which the freely-flowing champagne had put into it.
"WHO is that frightful person?" repeated Craig. He was scowling like a king angered and insulted by the advent of an eclipsing rival.
"Grandma,"' replied Arkwright, his flippancy carefully keyed low.
"I've never seen a more dreadful person!" exclaimed Craig angrily. "And a woman, too! She's the exact reverse of everything a woman should be--no sweetness, no gentleness. I can't believe she ever brought a child into the world."
"She probably doubts it herself," said Arkwright.
"Why does everybody cringe before her?"
"That's what everybody asks. She hasn't any huge wealth--or birth, either, for that matter. It's just the custom. We defer to her here precisely as we wear claw-hammer coats and low-neck dresses. Nobody thinks of changing the custom."
Josh's lip curled. "Introduce me to her," he said commandingly.
Arkwright looked amused and alarmed. "Not to-night. All in good time. She's the grandmother of a young woman I want you to meet. She's Madam Bowker, and the girl's name is Severence."
"I want to meet that old woman," persisted Josh. Never before had he seen a human being who gave him a sense of doubt as to the superiority of his own will.
"Don't be in too big a hurry for Waterloo," jested Arkwright. "It's coming toward you fast enough. That old lady will put you in your place. After ten minutes of her, you'll feel like a schoolboy who has 'got his' for sassing the teacher."
"I want to meet her," repeated Craig. And he watched her every movement; watched the men and women bowing deferentially about her chair; watched her truly royal dignity, as she was graciously pleased to relax now and then.
"Every society has its mumbo-jumbo to keep it in order," said Arkwright. "She's ours.... I'm dead tired. You've done enough for one night. It's a bad idea to stay too long; it creates an impression of frivolity. Come along!"
Craig went, reluctantly, with several halts and backward glances at the old lady of the ebon staff.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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3
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A DESPERATE YOUNG WOMAN
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The house where the Severances lived, and had lived for half a century, was built by Lucius Quintus Severence, Alabama planter, suddenly and, for the antebellum days, notably rich through a cotton speculation. When he built, Washington had no distinctly fashionable quarter; the neighborhood was then as now small, cheap wooden structures where dwelt in genteel discomfort the families of junior Department clerks. Lucius Quintus chose the site partly for the view, partly because spacious grounds could be had at a nominal figure, chiefly because part of his conception of aristocracy was to dwell in grandeur among the humble. The Severence place, enclosed by a high English-like wall of masonry, filled the whole huge square. On each of its four sides it put in sheepish and chop-fallen countenance a row of boarding houses. In any other city the neighborhood would have been intolerable because of the noise of the rowdy children. But in Washington the boarding house class cannot afford children; so, few indeed were the small forms that paused before the big iron Severence gates to gaze into the mysterious maze of green as far as might be--which was not far, because the walk and the branching drives turn abruptly soon after leaving the gates.
From earliest spring until almost Christmas that mass of green was sweet with perfume and with the songs of appreciative colonies of bright birds. In the midst of the grounds, and ingeniously shut in on all sides from any view that could spoil the illusion of a forest, stood the house, Colonial, creeper-clad, brightened in all its verandas and lawns by gay flowers, pink and white predominating. The rooms were large and lofty of ceiling, and not too uncomfortable in winter, as the family was accustomed to temperatures below the average American indoors. In spring and summer and autumn the rooms were delightful, with their old-fashioned solid furniture, their subdued colors and tints, their elaborate arrangements for regulating the inpour of light. All this suggested wealth. But the Severances were not rich. They had about the same amount of money that old Lucius Quintus had left; but, just as the neighborhood seemed to have degenerated when in fact it had remained all but unchanged, so the Severence fortune seemed to have declined, altogether through changes of standard elsewhere. The Severances were no poorer; simply, other people of their class had grown richer, enormously richer. The Severence homestead, taken by itself and apart from its accidental setting of luxurious grounds, was a third-rate American dwelling-house, fine for a small town, but plain for a city. And the Severence fortune by contrast with the fortunes so lavishly displayed in the fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity. Thus, the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk into "quiet people," were saved from downright obscurity and social neglect only by the indomitable will and tireless energy of old Cornelia Bowker.
Cornelia Bowker was not a Severence; in fact she was by birth indisputably a nobody. Her maiden name was Lard, and the Lards were "poor white trash." By one of those queer freaks wherewith nature loves to make mockery of the struttings of men, she was endowed with ambition and with the intelligence and will to make it effective. Her first ambition was education; by performing labors and sacrifices incredible, she got herself a thorough education. Her next ambition was to be rich; without the beauty that appeals to the senses, she married herself to a rich New Englander, Henry Bowker. Her final and fiercest ambition was social power. She married her daughter to the only son and namesake of Lucius Quintus Severence. The pretensions of aristocracy would soon collapse under the feeble hands of born aristocrats were it not for two things--the passion of the masses of mankind for looking up, and the frequent infusions into aristocratic veins of vigorous common blood. Cornelia Bowker, born Lard, adored "birth." In fulfilling her third ambition she had herself born again. From the moment of the announcement of her daughter's engagement to Lucius Severence, she ceased to be Lard or Bowker and became Severence, more of a Severence than any of the veritable Severences. Soon after her son-in-law and his father died, she became so much THE Severence that fashionable people forgot her origin, regarded her as the true embodiment of the pride and rank of Severence--and Severence became, thanks wholly to her, a synonym for pride and rank, though really the Severences were not especially blue-blooded.
She did not live with her widowed daughter, as two establishments were more impressive; also, she knew that she was not a livable person--and thought none the worse of herself for that characteristic of strong personalities. In the Severence family, at the homestead, there were, besides five servants, but three persons--the widowed Roxana and her two daughters, Margaret and Lucia--Lucia so named by Madam Bowker because with her birth ended the Severence hopes of a son to perpetuate in the direct line the family Christian name for its chief heir. From the side entrance to the house extended an alley of trees, with white flowering bushes from trunk to trunk like a hedge. At one end of the alley was a pretty, arched veranda of the house, with steps descending; at the other end, a graceful fountain in a circle, round which extended a stone bench. Here Margaret was in the habit of walking every good day, and even in rainy weather, immediately after lunch; and here, on the day after the Burke dance, at the usual time, she was walking, as usual--up and down, up and down, a slow even stride, her arms folded upon her chest, the muscles of her mouth moving as she chewed a wooden tooth-pick toward a pulp. As she walked, her eyes held steady like a soldier's, as if upon the small of the back of an invisible walker in front of her. Lucia, stout, rosy, lazy, sprawling upon the bench, her eyes opening and closing drowsily, watched her sister like a sleepy, comfortable cat. The sunbeams, filtering through the leafy arch, coquetted with Margaret's raven hair, and alternately brightened and shadowed her features. There was little of feminine softness in those unguarded features, much of intense and apparently far from agreeable thought. It was one of her bad days, mentally as well as physically--probably mentally because physically. She had not slept more than two hours at most, and her eyes and skin showed it.
"However do you stand it, Rita!" said Lucia, as Margaret approached the fountain for the thirty-seventh time. "It's so dull and tiring, to walk that way."
"I've got to keep my figure," replied Margaret, dropping her hands to her slender hips, and lifting her shoulders in a movement that drew down her corsets and showed the fine length of her waist.
"That's nonsense," said Lucia. "All we Severences get stout as we grow old. You can't hope to escape."
"Grow old!" Margaret's brow lowered. Then she smiled satirically. "Yes, I AM growing old. I don't dare think how many seasons out, and not married, or even engaged. If we were rich, I'd be a young girl still. As it is, I'm getting on.'"
"Don't you worry about that, Rita," said Lucia. "Don't you let them hurry you into anything desperate. I'm sure _I_ don't want to come out. I hate society and I don't care about men. It's much pleasanter lounging about the house and reading. No dressing--no fussing with clothes and people you hate."
"It isn't fair to you, Lucy," said Margaret. "I don't mind their nagging, but I do mind standing in your way. And they'll keep you back as long as I'm still on the market."
"But I want to be kept back." Lucia spoke almost energetically, half lifting her form whose efflorescence had a certain charm because it was the over-luxuriance of healthy youth. "I shan't marry till I find the right man. I'm a fatalist. I believe there's a man for me somewhere, and that he'll find me, though I was hid--was hid--even here." And she gazed romantically round at the enclosing walls of foliage.
The resolute lines, the "unfeminine" expression disappeared from her sister's face. She laughed softly and tenderly. "What a dear you are!" she cried.
"You can scoff all you please," retorted Lucia, stoutly. "I believe it. We'll see if I'm not right.... How lovely you did look last night! ... You wait for your 'right man.' Don't let them hurry you. The most dreadful things happen as the result of girls' hurrying, and then meeting him when it's too late."
"Not to women who have the right sort of pride." Margaret drew herself up, and once more her far-away but decided resemblance to Grandmother Bowker showed itself. "I'd never be weak enough to fall in love unless I wished."
"That's not weakness; it's strength," declared Lucia, out of the fulness of experience gleaned from a hundred novels or more.
Margaret shook her head uncompromisingly. "It'd be weakness for me." She dropped upon the bench beside her sister. "I'm going to marry, and I'm going to superintend your future myself. I'm not going to let them kill all the fine feeling in you, as they've killed it in me."
"Killed it!" said Lucia, reaching out for her sister's hand. "You can't say it's dead, so long as you cry like you did last night, when you came home from the ball."
Margaret reddened angrily, snatched her hand away. "Shame on you!" she cried. "I thought you were above spying."
"The door was open between your bedroom and mine," pleaded Lucia. "I couldn't help hearing."
"You ought to have called out--or closed it. In this family I can't claim even my soul as my own!"
"Please, dear," begged Lucia, sitting up now and struggling to put her arms round her sister, "you don't look on ME as an outsider, do you? Why, I'm the only one in all the world who knows you as you are--how sweet and gentle and noble you are. All the rest think you're cold and cynical, and--" "So I am," said Margaret reflectively, "except toward only you. I'm grandmother over again, with what she'd call a rotten spot."
"That rotten spot's the real you," protested Lucia.
Margaret broke away from her and resumed her walk. "You'll see," said she, her face stern and bitter once more.
A maidservant descended the steps. "Madam Bowker has come," announced she, "and is asking for you, Miss Rita."
A look that could come only from a devil temper flashed into Margaret's hazel eyes. "Tell her I'm out."
"She saw you from the window."
Margaret debated. Said Lucia, "When she comes so soon after lunch she's always in a frightful mood. She comes then to make a row because, without her after-lunch nap, she's hardly human and can be more--more fiendish."
"I'll not see her," declared Margaret.
"Oh, yes, you will," said Lucia. "Grandmother always has her way."
Margaret turned to the maid. "Tell her I had just gone to my room with a raging headache."
The maid departed. Margaret made a detour, entered the house by the kitchen door and went up to her room. She wrenched off blouse and skirt, got into a dressing sacque and let down her thick black hair. The headache was now real, so upsetting to digestion had been the advent of Madam Bowker, obviously on mischief bent. "She transforms me into a raging devil," thought Margaret, staring at her fiercely sullen countenance in the mirror of the dressing table. "I wish I'd gone in to see her. I'm in just the right humor."
The door opened and Margaret whisked round to blast the intruder who had dared adventure her privacy without knocking. There stood her grandmother--ebon staff in gloved hand--erect, spare body in rustling silk--gray-white hair massed before a sort of turban--steel-blue eyes flashing, delicate nostrils dilating with the breath of battle.
"Ah--Margaret!" said she, and her sharp, quarrel-seeking voice tortured the girl's nerves like the point of a lancet. "They tell me you have a headache." She lifted her lorgnon and scrutinized the pale, angry face of her granddaughter. "I see they were telling me the truth. You are haggard and drawn and distressingly yellow."
The old lady dropped her lorgnon, seated herself. She held her staff out at an angle, as if she were Majesty enthroned to pass judgment of life and death. "You took too much champagne at those vulgar Burkes last night," she proceeded. "It's a vicious thing for a girl to do--vicious in every way. It gives her a reputation, for moral laxity which an unmarried woman can ill-afford to have--unless she has the wealth that makes men indifferent to character.... Why don't you answer?"
Margaret shrugged her shoulders. "You know I detest champagne and never drink it," said she. "And I don't purpose to begin, even to oblige you."
"To oblige me!"
"To give you pretext for contention and nagging and quarreling."
Madam Bowker was now in the element she had been seeking--the stormy sea of domestic wrangling. She struck out boldly, with angry joy. "I've long since learned not to expect gratitude from you. I can't understand my own weakness, my folly, in continuing to labor with you."
"That's very simple," said Margaret. "I'm the one human being you can't compel by hook or crook to bow to your will. You regard me as unfinished business."
Madam Bowker smiled grimly at this shrewd analysis. "I want to see you married and properly settled in life. I want to end this disgrace. I want to save you from becoming ridiculous and contemptible--an object of laughter and of pity."
"You want to see me married to some man I dislike and should soon hate."
"I want to see you married," retorted the old lady. "I can't be held responsible for your electing to hate whatever is good for you. And I came to tell you that my patience is about exhausted. If you are not engaged by the end of this season, I wash my hands of you. I have been spending a great deal of money in the effort to establish you. You are a miserable failure socially. You attach only worthless men. You drive away the serious men."
"Stupid, you mean."
"I mean serious--the men looking for wives. Men who have something and have a right to aspire to the hand of MY grandchild. The only men who have a right to take the time of an unmarried woman. You either cannot, or will not, exert yourself to please. You avoid young girls and young men. You waste your life with people already settled. You have taken on the full airs and speech of a married woman, in advance of having a husband--and that is folly bordering on insanity. You have discarded everything that men--marrying men--the right sort of men--demand in maidenhood. I repeat, you are a miserable failure."
"A miserable failure," echoed Margaret, staring dismally into the glass.
"And I repeat," continued the old lady, somewhat less harshly, though not less resolutely, "this season ends it. You must marry or I'll stop your allowance. You'll have to look to your mother for your dresses and hats and gee-gaws. When I think of the thousands of dollars I've wasted on you--It's cheating--it's cheating! You have been stealing from me!" Madam Bowker's tone was almost unladylike; her ebon staff was flourishing threateningly.
Margaret started up. "I warned you at the outset!" she cried. "I took nothing from you that you didn't force on me. And now, when you've made dress, and all that, a necessity for me, you are going to snatch it away!"
"Giving you money for dress is wasting it," cried the old lady. "What is dress for? Pray why, do you imagine, have I provided you with three and four dozen expensive dresses a year and hats and lingerie and everything in proportion? Just to gratify your vanity? No, indeed! To enable you to get a husband, one able to provide for you as befits your station. And because I have been generous with you, because I have spared no expense in keeping you up to your station, in giving you opportunity, you turn on me and revile me!"
"You HAVE been generous, Grandmother," said Margaret, humbly. There had risen up before her a hundred extravagances in which the old lady had indulged her--things quite unnecessary for show, the intimate luxuries that contribute only indirectly to show by aiding in giving the feeling and air of refinement. It was of these luxuries that Margaret was especially fond; and her grandmother, with an instinct that those tastes of Margaret's proved her indeed a lady--and made it impossible that she should marry, or even think of marrying, "foolishly"--had been most graciously generous in gratifying them. Now, these luxuries were to be withdrawn, these pampered tastes were to be starved. Margaret collapsed despairingly upon her table. "I wish to marry, Heaven knows! Only--only--" She raised herself; her lip quivered--"Good God, Grandmother, I CAN'T give myself to a man who repels me! You make me hate men--marriage--everything of that kind. Sometimes I long to hide in a convent!"
"You can indulge that longing after the end of this season," said her grandmother. "You'll certainly hardly dare show yourself in Washington, where you have become noted for your dress.... That's what exasperates me against you! No girl appreciates refinement and luxury more than you do. No woman has better taste, could use a large income to better advantage. And you have intelligence. You know you must have a competent husband. Yet you fritter away your opportunities. A very short time, and you'll be a worn, faded old maid, and the settled people who profess to be so fond of you will be laughing at you, and deriding you, and pitying you."
Deriding! Pitying!
"I've no patience with the women of that clique you're so fond of," the old lady went on. "If the ideas they profess--the shallow frauds that they are! --were to prevail, what would become of women of our station? Women should hold themselves dear, should encourage men in that old-time reverence for the sex and its right to be sheltered and worshiped and showered with luxury. As for you--a poor girl--countenancing such low and ruinous views--Is it strange I am disgusted with you? Have you no pride--no self-respect?"
Margaret sat motionless, gazing into vacancy. She could not but endorse every word her grandmother was saying. She had heard practically those same words often, but they had had no effect; now, toward the end of this her least successful season, with most of her acquaintances married off, and enjoying and flaunting the luxury she might have had--for, they had married men, of "the right sort"--"capable husbands"--men who had been more or less attentive to her--now, these grim and terrible axioms of worldly wisdom, of upper class honor, from her grandmother sounded in her ears like the boom of surf on reefs in the ears of the sailor.
A long miserable silence; then, her grandmother: "What do you purpose to do, Margaret?"
"To hustle," said the girl with a short, bitter laugh. "I must rope in somebody. Oh, I've been realizing, these past two months. I'm awake at last."
Madam Bowker studied the girl's face, gave a sigh of relief. "I feel greatly eased," said she. "I see you are coming to your senses before it's too late. I knew you would. You have inherited too much of my nature, of my brain and my character."
Margaret faced the old woman in sudden anger. "If you had made allowances for that, if you had reasoned with me quietly, instead of nagging and bullying and trying to compel, all this might have been settled long ago." She shrugged her shoulders. "But that's past and done. I'm going to do my best. Only--I warn you, don't try to drive me! I'll not be driven!"
"What do you think of Grant Arkwright?" asked her grandmother.
"I intend to marry him," replied Margaret.
The old lady's stern eyes gleamed delight.
"But," Margaret hastened to add, "you mustn't interfere. He doesn't like you. He's afraid of you. If you give the slightest sign, he'll sheer off. You must let me handle him."
"The insolent puppy," muttered Madam Bowker. "I've always detested him."
"You don't want me to marry him?"
"On the contrary," the old lady replied. "He would make the best possible husband for you." She smiled like a grand inquisitor at prospect of a pleasant day with rack and screw. "He needs a firm hand," said she.
Margaret burst out laughing at this implied compliment to herself; then she colored as with shame and turned away. "What frauds we women are!" she exclaimed. "If I had any sense of decency left, I'd be ashamed to do it!"
"There you go again!" cried her grandmother. "You can't be practical five minutes in succession. Why should a woman be ashamed to do a man a service in spite of himself? Men are fools where women are concerned. I never knew one that was not. And the more sensible they are in other respects, the bigger fools they are about us! Left to themselves, they always make a mess of marriage. They think they know what they want, but they don't. We have to teach them. A man needs a firm hand during courtship, and a firmer hand after marriage. So many wives forget their duty and relax. If you don't take hold of that young Arkwright, he'll no doubt fall a victim to some unscrupulous hussy."
Unscrupulous hussy! Margaret looked at herself in the mirror, met her own eyes with a cynical laugh. "Well, I'm no worse than the others," she added, half to herself. Presently she said, "Grant is coming this afternoon. I look a fright. I must take a headache powder and get some sleep." Her grandmother rose instantly. "Yes, you do look badly--for you. And Arkwright has very keen eyes--thanks to those silly women of your set who teach men things they have no business to know." She advanced and kissed her granddaughter graciously on top of the head. "I am glad to see my confidence in you was not misplaced, Margaret," said she. "I could not believe I was so utterly mistaken in judgment of character. I'll go to your mother and take her for a drive."
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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4
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"HE ISN'T LIKE US"
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Margaret continued to sit there, her elbows on the dressing-table, her knuckles pressing into her cheeks, the hazel eyes gazing at their reflection in the mirror. "What is it in me," she said to her image, "that makes me less successful at drawing men to the point than so many girls who are no better looking than I?" And she made an inventory of her charms that was creditably free from vanity. "And men certainly like to talk to me," she pursued. "The fish bite, but the hook doesn't hold. Perhaps--probably--I'm not sentimental enough. I don't simper and pretend innocence and talk tommy rot--and listen to it as if I were eating honey."
This explanation was not altogether satisfactory, however. She felt that, if she had a certain physical something, which she must lack, nothing else would matter--nothing she said or did. It was baffling; for, there, before her eyes were precisely the charms of feature and figure that in other women, in far less degree, had set men, many men, quite beside themselves. Her lip curled, and her eyes laughed satirically as she thought of the follies of those men--how they had let women lead them up and down in public places, drooling and sighing and seeming to enjoy their own pitiful plight. If that expression of satire had not disappeared so quickly, she might have got at the secret of her "miserable failure." For, it was her habit of facing men with only lightly veiled amusement, or often frank ridicule, in her eyes, in the curve of her lips, that frightened them off, that gave them the uneasy sense that their assumptions of superiority to the female were being judged and derided.
But time was flying. It was after three; the headache was still pounding in her temples, and her eyes did look almost as haggard and her skin almost as sallow as her grandmother had said. She took an anti-pyrene powder from a box in her dressing-table, threw off all her clothes, swathed herself in a long robe of pale-blue silk. She locked the door into the hall, and went into her bedroom, closed the door between. She put the powder in water, drank it, dropped down upon a lounge at the foot of her bed and covered herself. The satin pillow against her cheek, the coolness and softness of the silk all along and around her body, were deliciously soothing. Her blood beat less fiercely, and somber thoughts drew slowly away into a vague cloud at the horizon of her mind. Lying there, with senses soothed by luxury and deadened to pain by the drug, she felt so safe, so shut-in against all intrusion. In a few hours the struggle, the bitterness would begin again; but at least here was this interval of repose, of freedom. Only when she was thus alone did she ever get that most voluptuous of all sensations--freedom. Freedom and luxury! "I'm afraid I can't eat my cake and have it, too," she mused drowsily. "Well--whether or not I can have freedom, at least I MUST have luxury. I'm afraid Grant can't give me nearly all I want--who could? ... If I had the courage--Craig could make more than Grant has, if he were put to it. I'm sure he could. I'm sure he could do almost anything--but be attractive to a woman. No, Craig is too strong a dose--besides, there's the risk. Grant is safest. Better a small loaf than--than no Paris dresses."
Arkwright, entering Mrs. Severence's drawing-room with Craig at half-past five, found a dozen people there. Most of them were of that young married set which Margaret preferred, to the anger and disgust of her grandmother and against the entreaties of her own common sense. "The last place in the world to look for a husband," Madam Bowker had said again and again, to both her daughter and her granddaughter. "Their talk is all in ridicule of marriage, and of every sacred thing. And if there are any bachelors, they have come--well, certainly not in search of honorable wedlock."
The room was noisily gay; but Margaret, at the tea-table in a rather somber brown dress with a big brown hat, whose great plumes shadowed her pale, somewhat haggard face, was evidently not in one of her sparkling moods. The headache powder and the nap had not been successful. She greeted Arkwright with a slight, absent smile, seemed hardly to note Craig, as Arkwright presented him.
"Sit down here beside Miss Severence," Grant said.
"Yes, do," acquiesced Margaret; and Joshua thought her cold and haughty, an aristocrat of the unapproachable type, never natural and never permitting others to be natural.
"And tell her all about yourself," continued Grant.
"My friend Josh, here," he explained to Margaret, "is one of those serious, absorbed men who concentrate entirely upon themselves. It isn't egotism; it's genius."
Craig was ruffled and showed it. He did not like persiflage; it seemed an assault upon dignity, and in those early days in Washington he was full of dignity and of determination to create a dignified impression. He reared haughtily and looked about with arrogant, disdainful eyes.
"Will you have tea?" said Miss Severence, as Arkwright moved away.
"No, thanks," replied Craig. "Tea's for the women and the children."
Miss Severence's expression made him still more uncomfortable. "Well," said she, "if you should feel dry as you tell me about yourself, there's whiskey over on that other table. A cigarette? No? I'm afraid I can't ask you to have a cigar--" "And take off my coat, and put my feet up, and be at home!" said Craig. "I see you think I'm a boor."
"Don't you want people to think you a boor?" inquired she with ironic seriousness.
He looked at her sharply. "You're laughing at me," he said, calmly. "Now, wouldn't it be more ladylike for you to try to put me at my ease? I'm in your house, you know."
Miss Severence flushed. "I beg your pardon," she said. "I did not mean to offend."
"No," replied Craig. "You simply meant to amuse yourself with me. And because I don't know what to do with my hands and because my coat fits badly, you thought I wouldn't realize what you were doing. You are very narrow--you fashionable people. You don't even know that everybody ought to be judged on his own ground. To size up a race-horse, you don't take him into a drawing room. And it wouldn't be quite fair, would it, for me to judge these drawing-room dolls by what they could do out among real men and women? You--for instance. How would you show up, if you had to face life with no husband and no money and five small children, as my mother did? Well, SHE won out."
Miss Severence was not attracted; but she was interested. She saw beyond the ill-fitting frock-coat, and the absurd manner, thoroughly ill at ease, trying to assume easy, nonchalant man-of-the-world airs. "I'd never have thought of judging you except on your own ground," said she, "if you hadn't invited the comparison."
"You mean, by getting myself up in these clothes and coming here?"
"Yes."
"You're right, young lady," said Craig, clapping her on the arm, and waving an energetic forefinger almost in her face. "And as soon as I can decently get away, I'll go. I told Arkwright I had no business to come here."
Miss Severance colored, drew her arm away, froze. She detested all forms of familiarity; physical familiarity she abhorred. "You have known Grant Arkwright long?" she said, icily.
"NOW, what have I done?" demanded Joshua.
She eyed him with a lady's insolent tranquillity. "Nothing," replied she. "We are all so glad Grant has come back."
Craig bit his lip and his tawny, weather-beaten skin reddened. He stared with angry envy at Arkwright, so evidently at ease and at home in the midst of a group on the other side of the room. In company, practically all human beings are acutely self-conscious. But self-consciousness is of two kinds. Arkwright, assured that his manners were correct and engaging, that his dress was all it should be, or could be, that his position was secure and admired, had the self-consciousness of self-complacence. Joshua's consciousness of himself was the extreme of the other kind--like a rat's in a trap.
"You met Mr. Arkwright out West--out where you live?"
"Yes," said Craig curtly, almost surlily.
"I was out there once," pursued the young woman, feeling that in her own house she must do her best with the unfortunate young man. "And, curiously enough, I heard you speak. We all admired you very much."
Craig cheered up instantly; he was on his own ground now. "How long ago?" he asked.
"Three years; two years last September."
"Oh, I was a mere boy then. You ought to hear me now."
And Joshua launched forth into a description of his oratory, then related how he had won over juries in several important cases. His arms, his hands were going, his eyes were glistening, his voice had that rich, sympathetic tone which characterizes the egotist when the subject is himself. Miss Severence listened without comment; indeed, he was not sure that she was listening, so conventional was her expression. But, though she was careful to keep her face a blank, her mind was busy. Surely not since the gay women of Barras's court laughed at the megalomaniac ravings of a noisy, badly dressed, dirty young lieutenant named Buonaparte, had there been a vanity so candid, so voluble, so obstreperous. Nor did he talk of himself in a detached way, as if he were relating the performances and predicting the glory of a human being who happened to have the same name as himself. No, he thrust upon her in every sentence that he, he himself and none other, had said and done all these splendid startling things, would do more, and more splendid. She listened, astounded; she wondered why she did not burst out laughing in his very face, why, on the contrary, she seemed to accept to a surprising extent his own estimate of himself.
"He's a fool," thought she, "one of the most tedious fools I ever met. But I was right; he's evidently very much of a somebody. However does he get time to DO anything, when he's so busy admiring himself? How does he ever contrive to take his mind off himself long enough to think of anything else?"
Nearly an hour later Arkwright came for him, cut him off in the middle of an enthusiastic description of how he had enchained and enthralled a vast audience in the biggest hall in St. Paul. "We must go, this instant," said Arkwright. "I had no idea it was so late."
"I'll see you soon again, no doubt, Mr. Craig," said Miss Severence, polite but not cordial, as she extended her hand.
"Yes," replied Craig, holding the hand, and rudely not looking at her but at Arkwright. "You've interrupted us in a very interesting talk, Grant."
Grant and Margaret exchanged smiles, Margaret disengaged her hand, and the two men went. As they were strolling down the drive, Grant said: "Well, what did you think of her?"
"A nobody--a nothing," was Craig's wholly unexpected response. "Homely--at least insignificant. Bad color. Dull eyes. Bad manners. A poor specimen, even of this poor fashionable society of yours. An empty-head."
"Well--well--WELL!" exclaimed Arkwright in derision. "Yet you and she seemed to be getting on beautifully together."
"I did all the talking."
"You always do."
"But it was the way she listened. I felt as if I were rehearsing in a vacant room."
"Humph," grunted Arkwright.
He changed the subject. The situation was one that required thought, plan. "She's just the girl for Josh," said he to himself. "And he must take her. Of course, he's not the man for her. She couldn't care for him, not in a thousand years. What woman with a sense of humor could? But she's got to marry somebody that can give her what she must have.... It's very important whom a man marries, but it's not at all important whom a woman marries. The world wasn't made for them, but for US!"
At Vanderman's that night he took Mrs. Tate in to dinner, but Margaret was on his left. "When does your Craig make his speech before the Supreme Court?" asked she.
He inspected her with some surprise. "Tuesday, I think. Why?"
"I promised him I'd go."
"And will you?"
"Certainly. Why not?"
This would never do. Josh would get the impression she was running after him, and would be more contemptuous than ever. "I shouldn't, if I were you."
"Why not?"
"Well, he's very vain, as you perhaps discovered. He might misunderstand."
"And why should that disturb me?" asked she, tranquilly. "I do as I please. I don't concern myself about what others think. Your friend interests me. I've a curiosity to see whether he has improved in the last two or three years as much as he says he has."
"He told you all about himself?"
"Everything--and nothing."
"That's just it!" exclaimed Arkwright, misunderstanding her. "After he has talked me into a state of collapse, every word about himself and his career, I think it all over, and wonder whether there's anything to the man or not. Sometimes I think there's a real person beneath that flow of vanity. Then, again, I think not."
"Whether he's an accident or a plan," mused the young woman; but she saw that Arkwright did not appreciate the cleverness and the penetration of her remark. Indeed, she knew in advance that he would not, for she knew his limitations. "Now," thought she, "Craig would have appreciated it--and clapped me on the arm--or knee."
"Did you like Josh?" Grant was inquiring.
"Very much, indeed."
"Of course," said Arkwright satirically.
"He has ability to do things. He has strength.... He isn't like us."
Arkwright winced. "I'm afraid you exaggerate him, merely because he's different."
"He makes me feel an added contempt for myself, somehow. Doesn't he you?"
"I can't say he does," replied Arkwright, irritated. "I appreciate his good qualities, but I can't help being offended and disturbed for him by his crudities. He has an idea that to be polite and well-dressed is to be weak and worthless. And I can't get it out of his head."
Margaret's smile irritated him still further. "All great men are more or less rude and crude, aren't they?" said she. "They are impatient of the trifles we lay so much stress on."
"So, you think Josh is a great man?"
"I don't know," replied Margaret, with exasperating deliberateness. "I want to find out."
"And if you decide that he is, you'll marry him?"
"Perhaps. You suggested it the other day."
"In jest," said Arkwright, unaccountably angry with her, with himself, with Joshua. "As soon as I saw him in your presence, I knew it wouldn't do. It'd be giving a piece of rare, delicate porcelain to a grizzly as a plaything."
He was surprised at himself. Now that he was face to face with a possibility of her adopting his own proposition, he disliked it intensely. He looked at her; never had she seemed so alluring, so representative of what he called distinction. At the very idea of such refinement at the mercy of the coarse and boisterous Craig, his blood boiled. "Josh is a fine, splendid chap, as a man among men," said he to himself. "But to marry this dainty aristocrat to him--it'd be a damned disgraceful outrage. He's not fit to marry among OUR women.... What a pity such a stunning girl shouldn't have the accessories to make her eligible." And he hastily turned his longing eyes away, lest she should see and attach too much importance to a mere longing--for, he felt it would be a pitiful weakness, a betrayal of opportunity, for him to marry, in a mood of passion that passes, a woman who was merely well born, when he had the right to demand both birth and wealth in his wife.
"I've often thought," pursued Margaret, "that to be loved by a man of the Craig sort would be--interesting."
"While being loved by one of your own sort would be dull?" suggested Arkwright with a strained smile.
Margaret shrugged her bare white shoulders in an inflammatory assent. "Will you go with me to the Supreme Court on Tuesday?"
"Delighted," said Arkwright. And he did not realize that the deep-hidden source of his enthusiasm was a belief that Josh Craig would make an ass of himself.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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5
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ALMOST HOOKED
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In human affairs, great and small, there are always many reasons for every action; then, snugly tucked away underneath all these reasons that might be and ought to be and pretend to be but aren't, hides the real reason, the real moving cause of action. By tacit agreement among human beings there is an unwritten law against the exposing of this real reason, whose naked and ugly face would put in sorry countenance professions of patriotism or philanthropy or altruism or virtue of whatever kind. Stillwater, the Attorney-General and Craig's chief, had a dozen reasons for letting him appear alone for the Administration--that is, for the people--in that important case. Each of these reasons--except one--shed a pure, white light upon Stillwater's public spirit and private generosity. That one was the reason supposed by Mrs. Stillwater to be real. "Since you don't seem able to get rid of Josh Craig, Pa," said she, in the seclusion of the marital couch, "we might as well marry him to Jessie"--Jessie being their homeliest daughter.
"Very well," said "Pa" Stillwater. "I'll give him a chance."
Still, we have not got the real reason for Josh's getting what Stillwater had publicly called "the opportunity of a lifetime." The really real reason was that Stillwater wished, and calculated, to kill a whole flock of birds with one stone.
Whenever the people begin to clamor for justice upon their exploiters, the politicians, who make themselves valuable to the exploiters by cozening the people into giving them office, begin by denying that the people want anything; when the clamor grows so loud that this pretense is no longer tenable, they hasten to say, "The people are right, and something must be done. Unfortunately, there is no way of legally doing anything at present, and we must be patient until a way is discovered." Way after way is suggested, only to be dismissed as "dangerous" or "impractical" or "unconstitutional." The years pass; the clamor persists, becomes imperious. The politicians pass a law that has been carefully made unconstitutional. This gives the exploiters several years more of license. Finally, public sentiment compels the right kind of law; it is passed. Then come the obstacles to enforcement. More years of delay; louder clamor. A Stillwater is put in charge of the enforcement of the law; a case is made, a trial is had, and the evidence is so incomplete or the people's lawyers so poorly matched against the lawyers of the exploiters that the case fails, and the administration is able to say, "You see, WE'VE done our best, but the rascals have escaped!" The case against certain Western railway thieves had reached the stage at which the only way the exploiters could be protected from justice was by having a mock trial; and Stillwater had put Craig forward as the conductor of this furious sham battle, had armed him with a poor gun, loaded with blanks. "We'll lose the case," calculated Stillwater; "we'll save our friends, and get rid of Craig, whom everybody will blame--the damned, bumptious, sophomoric blow-hard!"
What excuse did Stillwater make to himself for himself in this course of seeming treachery and assassination? For, being a man of the highest principles, he would not deliberately plan an assassination as an assassination. Why, his excuse was that the popular clamor against the men "who had built up the Western country" was wicked, that he was serving his country in denying the mob "the blood of our best citizens," that Josh Craig was a demagogue who richly deserved to be hoist by his own petar. He laughed with patriotic glee as he thought how "Josh, the joke" would make a fool of himself with silly, sophomoric arguments, would with his rude tactlessness get upon the nerves of the finicky old Justices of the Supreme Court!
As Craig had boasted right and left of the "tear" he was going to make, and had urged everybody he talked with to come and hear him, the small courtroom was uncomfortably full, and not a few of the smiling, whispering spectators confidently expected that they were about to enjoy that rare, delicious treat--a conceited braggart publicly exposed and overwhelmed by himself. Among these spectators was Josh's best friend, Arkwright, seated beside Margaret Severence, and masking his satisfaction over the impending catastrophe with an expression of funereal somberness. He could not quite conceal from himself all these hopes that had such an uncomfortable aspect of ungenerousness. So he reasoned with himself that they really sprang from a sincere desire for his friend's ultimate good. "Josh needs to have his comb cut," thought he. "It's sure to be done, and he can bear it better now than later. The lesson will teach him a few things he must learn. I only hope he'll be able to profit by it."
When Josh appeared, Grant and the others with firmly-fixed opinions of the character of the impending entertainment were not a little disquieted. Joshua Craig, who stepped into the arena, looked absolutely different from the Josh they knew. How had he divested himself of that familiar swaggering, bustling braggadocio? Where had he got this look of the strong man about to run a race, this handsome face on which sat real dignity and real power? Never was there a better court manner; the Justices, who had been anticipating an opportunity to demonstrate, at his expense, the exceeding dignity of the Supreme Court, could only admire and approve. As for his speech, it was a straightway argument; not a superfluous or a sophomoric word, not an attempt at rhetoric. His argument--There is the logic that is potent but answerable; there is the logic that is unanswerable, that gives no opportunity to any sane mind, however prejudiced by association with dispensers of luxurious hospitality, of vintage wines and dollar cigars, however enamored of fog-fighting and hair-splitting, to refuse the unqualified assent of conviction absolute. That was the kind of argument Josh Craig made. And the faces of the opposing lawyers, the questions the Justices asked him plainly showed that he had won.
After the first ten minutes, when the idea that Craig could be or ever had been laughable became itself absurd, Arkwright glanced uneasily, jealously at Margaret. The face beneath the brim of her beautiful white and pale pink hat was cold, conventional, was the face of a mere listener. Grant, reassured, resumed his absorbed attention, was soon completely swept away by his friend's exhibition of power, could hardly wait until he and Margaret were out of the courtroom before exploding in enthusiasm. "Isn't he a wonder?" he cried. "Why, I shouldn't have believed it possible for a man of his age to make such a speech. He's a great lawyer as well as a great orator. It was a dull subject, yet I was fascinated. Weren't you?"
"It was interesting--at times," said Margaret.
"At times! Oh, you women!"
At this scorn Margaret eyed his elegant attire, his face with its expression of an intelligence concentrated upon the petty and the paltry. Her eyes suggested a secret amusement so genuine that she could not venture to reveal it in a gibe. She merely said: "I confess I was more interested in him than in what he said."
"Of course! Of course!" said Grant, all unconscious of her derision. "Women have no interest in serious things and no mind for logic."
She decided that it not only was prudent but also was more enjoyable to keep to herself her amusement at his airs of masculine superiority. Said she, her manner ingenuous: "It doesn't strike me as astonishing that a man should make a sensible speech."
Grant laughed as if she had said something much cleverer than she could possibly realize. "That's a fact," admitted he. "It was simply supreme common-sense. What a world for twaddle it is when common-sense makes us sit up and stare.... But it's none the less true that you're prejudiced against him."
"Why do you say that?"
"If you appreciated him you'd be as enthusiastic as I." There was in his tone a faint hint of his unconscious satisfaction in her failure to appreciate Craig.
"You can go very far astray," said she, "you, with your masculine logic."
But Grant had guessed aright. Margaret had not listened attentively to the speech because it interested her less than the man himself. She had concentrated wholly upon him. Thus, alone of all the audience, she had seen that Craig was playing a carefully-rehearsed part, and, himself quite unmoved, was watching and profiting by every hint in the countenance of his audience, the old Justices. It was an admirable piece of acting; it was the performance of a genius at the mummer's art. But the power of the mummer lies in the illusion he creates; if he does not create illusion, as Craig did not for Margaret, he becomes mere pantomimist and mouther. She had never given a moment's thought to public life as a career; she made no allowances for the fact that a man's public appearances, no matter how sincere he is, must always be carefully rehearsed if he is to use his powers with unerring effect; she was simply like a child for the first time at the theater, and, chancing to get a glimpse behind the scenes, disgusted and angry with the players because their performance is not spontaneous. If she had stopped to reason about the matter she would have been less uncompromising. But in the shock of disillusionment she felt only that the man was working upon his audience like a sleight-of-hand performer; and the longer she observed, and the stronger his spell over the others, the deeper became her contempt for the "charlatan." He seemed to her like one telling a lie--as that one seems, while telling it, to the hearer who is not deceived. "I've been thinking him rough but genuine," said she to herself. "He's merely rough." She had forgiven, had disregarded his rude almost coarse manners, setting them down to indifference, the impatience of the large with the little, a revolt from the (on the whole preferable) extreme opposite of the mincing, patterned manners of which Margaret herself was a-weary. "But he isn't indifferent at all," she now felt. "He's simply posing. His rudenesses are deliberate where they are not sheer ignorance. His manner in court showed that he knows how, in the main."
A rather superior specimen of the professional politician, but distinctly of that hypocritical, slippery class. And Margaret's conviction was strengthened later in the day when she came upon him at tea at Mrs. Houghton's. He was holding forth noisily against "society," was denouncing it as a debaucher of manhood and womanhood, a waster of precious time, and on and on in that trite and tedious strain. Margaret's lip curled as she listened. What did this fakir know about manhood and womanhood? And could there be any more pitiful, more paltry wasting of time than in studying out and performing such insincerities as his life was made up of? True, Mrs. Houghton, of those funny, fashionable New Yorkers who act as if they had only just arrived at the estate of servants and carriages, and are always trying to impress even passing strangers with their money and their grandeur--true, Mrs. Houghton was most provocative to anger or amused disdain at the fashionable life. But not even Mrs. Houghton seemed to Margaret so cheap and pitiful as this badly-dressed, mussy politician, as much an actor as Mrs. Houghton and as poor at the trade, but choosing low comedy for his unworthy attempts where Mrs. Houghton was at least trying to be something refined.
With that instinct for hostility which is part of the equipment of every sensitively-nerved man of action, Craig soon turned toward her, addressed himself to her; and the others, glad to be free, fell away. Margaret was looking her best. White was extremely becoming to her; pink--pale pink--being next in order. Her dress was of white, with facings of delicate pale pink, and the white plumes in her hat were based in pale pink, which also lined the inside of the brim. She watched him, and, now that it was once more his personality pitted directly and wholly against hers, she, in spite of herself, began to yield to him again her respect--the respect every intelligent person must feel for an individuality that is erect and strong. But as she was watching, her expression was that of simply listening, without comment or intention to reply--an expression of which she was perfect mistress. Her hazel eyes, set in dark lashes, her sensuous mouth, her pallid skin, smooth and healthy, seemed the climax of allurement to which all the lines of her delightful figure pointed. To another woman it would have been obvious that she was amusing herself by trying to draw him under the spell of physical attraction; a man would have thought her a mere passive listener, perhaps one concealing boredom, would have thought her movements to bring now this charm and now that to his attention were simply movements of restlessness, indications of an impatience difficult to control. He broke off abruptly. "What are you thinking?" he demanded.
She gave no sign of triumph at having accomplished her purpose--at having forced his thoughts to leave his pet subject, himself, and center upon her. "I was thinking," said she reflectively, "what a brave whistler you are."
"Whistler?"
"Whistling to keep up your courage. No, rather, whistling FOR courage. You are on your knees before wealth and social position, and you wish to convince yourself--and the world--that you despise them." " _I_? Wealth? Social position?" Craig exclaimed, or rather, blustered. And, red and confused, he was at a loss for words.
"Yes--you," asserted she, in her quiet, tranquil way. "Don't bluster at me. You didn't bluster at the Court this morning." She laughed softly, eyeing him with friendly sarcasm. "You see, I'm 'on to' you, Mr. Craig."
Their eyes met--a resolute encounter. He frowned fiercely, and as his eyes were keen and blue-green, and, backed by a tremendous will, the odds seemed in his favor. But soon his frown relaxed; a smile replaced it--a handsome acknowledgment of defeat, a humorous confession that she was indeed "on to" him. "I like you," he said graciously.
"I don't know that I can say the same of you," replied she, no answering smile in her eyes or upon her lips, but a seriousness far more flattering.
"That's right!" exclaimed he. "Frankness--absolute frankness. You are the only intelligent woman I have met here who seems to have any sweetness left in her."
"Sweetness? This is a strange place to look for sweetness. One might as well expect to find it in a crowd of boys scrapping for pennies, or in a pack of hounds chasing a fox."
"But that isn't all of life," protested Craig.
"It's all of life among our sort of people--the ambitious socially and otherwise."
Josh beamed upon her admiringly. "You'll do," approved he. "We shall be friends. We ARE friends."
The gently satiric smile her face had borne as she was talking became personal to him. "You are confident," said she.
He nodded emphatically. "I am. I always get what I want."
"I'm sorry to say I don't. But I can say that at least I never take what I don't want."
"That means," said he, "you may not want my friendship."
"Obviously," replied she. And she rose and put out her hand.
"Don't go yet," cried he. "We are just beginning to get acquainted. The other day I misjudged you. I thought you insignificant, not worth while."
She slid her hand into her ermine muff. She gave him an icy look, not contemptuous but oblivious, and turned away. He stared after her. "By Jove!" thought he, "THERE'S the real thing. There's a true aristocrat." And he frankly paid aristocracy in thought the tribute he would with any amount of fuming and spluttering have denied it in word. "Aristocracy does mean something," reflected he. "There must be substance to what can make ME feel quite put down."
When he saw Arkwright he said patronizingly: "I like that little friend of yours--that Miss What's-her-name."
Grant suspected from his tone that this forgetfulness was an affectation. "You know very well what her name is," said he irritably. "What a cheap affectation."
Josh countered and returned magnificently: "I remember her face perfectly," said he. "One shares one's name with a great many people, so it's unimportant. But one's face is one's own. I remember her face very well indeed--and that gorgeous figure of hers."
Grant was furious, thought Craig's words the limit of impertinent free-spokenness. "Well, what of it?" said he savagely.
"I like her," replied Josh condescendingly. "But she's been badly brought up, and is full of foolish ideas, like all your women here. But she's a thoroughbred."
"Then you like her?" observed Arkwright without enthusiasm.
"So-so. Of course, she isn't fit to be a wife, but for her type and as a type she's splendid."
Arkwright felt like kicking him and showed it. "What a bounder you are at times, Josh," he snapped.
Craig laughed and slapped him on the back. "There you go again, with your absurd notions of delicacy. Believe me, Grant, you don't understand women. They don't like you delicate fellows. They like a man--like me--a pawer of the ground--a snorter--a warhorse that cries ha-ha among the trumpets."
"The worst thing about what you say," replied Arkwright sourly, "is that it's the truth. I don't say the women aren't worthy of us, but I do say they're not worthy of our opinion of them.... Well, I suppose you're going to try to marry her"--this with a vicious gleam which he felt safe in indulging openly before one so self-absorbed and so insensible to subtleties of feeling and manner.
"I think not," said Craig judicially. "She'd play hell with my politics. It's bad enough to have fights on every hand and all the time abroad. It'd be intolerable to have one at home--and I've got no time to train her to my uses and purposes."
Usually Craig's placid conviction that the universe existed for his special benefit and that anything therein was his for the mere formality of claiming it moved Arkwright to tolerant amusement at his lack of the sense of proportion and humor. Occasionally it moved him to reluctant admiration--this when some apparently absurd claim of his proved more or less valid. Just now, in the matter of Margaret Severence, this universal overlordship filled him with rage, the more furious that he realized he could no more shake Josh's conviction than he could make the Washington monument topple over into the Potomac by saying, "Be thou removed." He might explain all the obvious reasons why Margaret would never deign to condescend to him; Josh would dismiss them with a laugh at Arkwright's folly.
He hid his rage as best he could, and said with some semblance of genial sarcasm: "So all you've got to do is to ask her and she's yours?"
Craig gave him a long, sharp, searching look. "Old man," he said earnestly, "do you want her?" " _I_!" exclaimed Arkwright angrily, but with shifting eyes and with upper lip twitching guiltily. Then, satirically: "Oh, no; I'd not dare aspire to any woman YOU had condescended to smile upon."
"If you do I'll get her for you," pursued Craig, his hand seeking Arkwright's arm to grip it.
Arkwright drew away, laughed outright. "You ARE a joke!" he cried, wholly cured of his temper by the preposterous offer. It would be absurd enough for any one to imagine he would need help in courting any woman he might fancy--he, one of the most eligible of American bachelors. It passed the uttermost bounds of the absurd, this notion that he would need help with a comparatively poor girl, many seasons out and eager to marry. And then, climax of climaxes, that Josh Craig could help him! "Yes, a joke," he repeated.
"Oh, no doubt I do seem so to you," replied Josh unruffled. "People are either awed or amused by what they're incapable of understanding. At this stage of my career I'm not surprised to find they're amused. But wait, my boy. Meanwhile, if you want that lady, all you've got to do is to say the word. I'll get her for you."
"Thanks; no," said Arkwright. "I'm rather shy of matrimony. I don't hanker after the stupid joys of family life, as you do."
"That's because of your ruinous, rotten training," Craig assured him. "It has destroyed your power to appreciate the great fundamentals of life. You think you're superior. If you only knew how shallow you are!"
"I've a competent valet," said Arkwright. "And your idea of a wife seems to be a sort of sublimated valet--and nurse."
"I can conceive of no greater dignity than to take care of a real man and his children," replied Craig. "However, the dignity of the service depends upon the dignity of the person to whom it is rendered--and upon the dignity of the person who renders it."
Arkwright examined Craig's face for signs that this was the biting sarcasm it would have seemed, coming from another. But Craig was apparently merely making one of his familiar bumptious speeches. The idea of a man of his humble origin proclaiming himself superior to an Arkwright of the Massachusetts Arkwrights!
"No, I'd not marry your Miss Severence," Craig continued. "I want a wife, not a social ornament. I want a woman, not a toilette. I want a home, not a fashionable hotel. I want love and sympathy and children. I want substance, not shadow; sanity, not silliness."
"And your socks darned and your shirts mended."
"That, of course." Josh accepted these amendments with serene seriousness. "And Miss Severence isn't fit for the job. She has some brains--the woman kind of brains. She has a great deal of rudimentary character. If I had the time, and it were worth while, I could develop her into a real woman. But I haven't, and it wouldn't be worth while when there are so many real women, ready made, out where I come from. This girl would be exactly the wife for you, though. Just as she is, she'd help you mince about from parlor to parlor, and smirk and jabber and waste time. She's been educating for the job ever since she was born." He laid his hand in gracious, kindly fashion on his friend's shoulder. "Think it over. And if you want my help it's yours. I can show her what a fine fellow you are, what a good husband you'd make. For you are a fine person, old man; when you were born fashionable and rich it spoiled a--" "A superb pram-trundler," suggested Arkwright.
"Precisely. Be off now; I must work. Be off, and exhibit that wonderful suit and those spotless white spats where they'll be appreciated." And he dismissed the elegantly-dressed idler as a king might rid himself of a favorite who threatened to presume upon his master's good humor and outstay his welcome. But Arkwright didn't greatly mind. He was used to Josh's airs. Also, though he would not have confessed it to his inmost self, Josh's preposterous assumptions, by sheer force of frequent and energetic reiteration, had made upon him an impression of possible validity--not probable, but possible; and the possible was quite enough to stir deep down in Arkwright's soul the all but universal deference before power. It never occurred to him to suspect there might be design in Craig's sweeping assertions and assumptions of superiority, that he might be shrewdly calculating that, underneath the ridicule those obstreperous vanities would create, there would gradually form and steadily grow a conviction of solid truth, a conviction that Joshua Craig was indeed the personage he professed to be--mighty, inevitably prevailing, Napoleonic.
This latent feeling of Arkwright's was, however, not strong enough to suppress his irritation when, a few days later, he went to the Severences for tea, and found Margaret and Josh alone in the garden, walking up and down, engaged in a conversation that was obviously intimate and absorbing. When he appeared on the veranda Joshua greeted him with an eloquent smile of loving friendship.
"Ah, there you are now!" he cried. "Well, little ones, I'll leave you together. I've wasted as much time as I can spare to-day to frivolity."
"Yes, hurry back to work," said Arkwright. "The ship of state's wobbling badly through your neglect."
Craig laughed, looking at Margaret. "Grant thinks that's a jest," said he. "Instead, it's the sober truth. I am engaged in keeping my Chief in order, and in preventing the President from skulking from the policies he has the shrewdness to advocate but lacks the nerve to put into action."
Margaret stood looking after him as he strode away.
"You mustn't mind his insane vanity," said Arkwright, vaguely uneasy at the expression of her hazel eyes, at once so dark, mysterious, melancholy, so light and frank and amused.
"I don't," said she in a tone that seemed to mean a great deal.
He, still more uneasy, went on: "A little more experience of the world and Josh'll come round all right--get a sense of proportion."
"But isn't it true?" asked Margaret somewhat absently.
"What?"
"Why, what he said as he was leaving. Before you came he'd been here quite a while, and most of the time he talked of himself--" Arkwright laughed, but Margaret only smiled, and that rather reluctantly.
"And he was telling how hard a time he was having; what with Stillwater's corruption and the President's timidity about really acting against rich, people--something about criminal suits against what he calls the big thieves--I didn't understand it, or care much about it, but it gave me an impression of Mr. Craig's power."
"There IS some truth in what he says," Arkwright admitted, with a reluctance of which his pride, and his heart as well, were ashamed. "He's become a burr, a thorn, in the Administration, and they're really afraid of him in a way--though, of course, they have to laugh at him as every one else does."
"Of course," said Margaret absently.
Arkwright watched her nervously. "You seem to be getting round to the state of mind," said he, "where you'll be in danger of marrying our friend Craig."
Margaret, her eyes carefully away from him, laughed softly--a disturbingly noncommittal laugh.
"Of course, I'm only joking," continued Arkwright. "I know YOU couldn't marry HIM."
"Why not?"
"Because you don't think he's sincere."
Her silence made him feel that she thought this as weak as he did.
"Because you don't love him."
"No, I certainly don't love him," said Margaret.
"Because you don't even like him."
"What a strange way of advocating your friend you have."
Arkwright flushed scarlet. "I thought you'd quite dismissed him as a possibility," he stammered.
"With a woman every man's a possibility so long as no man's a certainty."
"Margaret, you couldn't marry a man you didn't like?"
She seemed to reflect. "Not if I were in love with another at the time," she said finally. "That's as far as my womanly delicacy--what's left of it after my years in society--can influence me. And it's stronger, I believe, than the delicacy of most women of our sort."
They were sitting now on the bench round the circle where the fountain was tossing high its jets in play with the sunshine. She was looking very much the woman of the fashionable world, and the soft grays, shading into blues, that dominated her costume gave her an exceeding and entrancing seeming of fragility. Arkwright thought her eyes wonderful; the sweet, powerful yet delicate odor of the lilac sachet powder with which her every garment was saturated set upon his senses like a love-philter.
"Yes, you are finer and nobler than most women," he said giddily. "And that's why it distresses me to hear you talk even in jest, as if you could marry Josh."
"And a few weeks ago you were suggesting him as just the husband for me."
Arkwright was silent. How could he go on? How tell her why he had changed without committing himself to her by a proposal? She was fascinating--would be an ideal wife. With what style and taste she'd entertain--how she'd shine at the head of his table! What a satisfaction it would be to feel that his money was being so competently spent. But--well, he did not wish to marry, not just yet; perhaps, somewhere in the world, he would find, in the next few years, a woman even better suited to him than Margaret. Marrying was a serious business. True, now that divorce had pushed its way up and had become recognized by fashionable society, had become an established social favorite, marriage had been robbed of one of its terrors. But the other remained--divorce still meant alimony. The woman who trapped an eligible never endangered her hard-earned position; a man must be extremely careful or he would find himself forced to hard choice between keeping on with a woman he wished to be rid of and paying out a large part of his income in alimony. It seemed far-fetched to think of these things in connection with such a woman as Margaret. He certainly never could grow tired of her, and her looks were of the sort that had staying power. Nor was she in the least likely to be so ungrateful as to wish to be rid of him and hold him up for alimony. Still--wouldn't it have been seemingly just as absurd to consider in advance such sordid matters in connection with any one of a dozen couples among his friends whose matrimonial enterprises had gone smash? It was said that nowadays girls went to the altar thinking that if the husbands they were taking proved unsatisfactory they would soon be free again, the better off by the title of Mrs. and a good stiff alimony and some invaluable experience. "I must keep my head," thought he. "I must consider how I'd feel after the fatal cards were out."
"Yes, you were quite eager for me to marry him," persisted she. She was watching his face out of the corner of her eye.
"I admit it," said he huskily. "But we've both changed since then."
"Changed?" said she, perhaps a shade too encouragingly.
He felt the hook tickling his gills and darted off warily. "Changed toward him, I mean. Changed in our estimate of his availability as a husband for you." He rose; the situation was becoming highly perilous. "I must speak to your mother and fly. I'm late for an appointment now."
As he drove away ten minutes later he drew a long breath. "Gad!" said he half aloud, "Rita'll never realize how close I was to proposing to-day. She ALMOST had me.... Though why I should think of it that way I don't know. It's damned low and indelicate of me. She ought to be my wife. I love her as much as a man of experience can love a woman in advance of trying her out thoroughly. If she had money I'd not be hesitating, I'm afraid. Then, too, I don't think the moral tone of that set she and I travel with is what it ought to be. It's all very well for me, but--Well, a man ought to be ready for almost anything that might happen if his wife went with that crowd--or had gone with it before he married her. Not that I suspect Margaret, though I must say--What a pup this sort of life does make of a man in some ways! ... Yes, I almost leaped. She'll never know how near I came to it.... Perhaps Josh's more than half-right and I'm oversophisticated. My doubts and delays may cost me a kind of happiness I'd rather have than anything on earth--IF it really exists." There he laughed comfortably. "Poor Rita! If she only knew, how cut up she'd be!"
He might not have been so absolutely certain of her ignorance could he have looked into the Severances' drawing-room just then. For Margaret, after a burst of hysterical gayety, had gone to the far end of the room on the pretext of arranging some flowers. And there, with her face securely hid from the half-dozen round the distant tea-table, she was choking back the sobs, was muttering: "I'll have to do it! I'm a desperate woman--desperate!"
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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6
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MR. CRAIG IN SWEET DANGER
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It is a rash enterprise to open wide to the world the private doors of the family, to expose intimate interiors all unconscious of outside observation, and all unprepared for it. Such frankness tends to destroy "sympathetic interest," to make delusion and illusion impossible; it gives cynicism and his brother, pharisaism, their opportunity to simper and to sneer. Still rasher is it to fling wide the doors of a human heart, and, without any clever arrangement of lights and shades, reveal in the full face of the sun exactly what goes on there. We lie to others unconsciously; we lie to ourselves both consciously and unconsciously. We admit and entertain dark thoughts, and at the first alarm of exposure deny that we ever saw them before; we cover up our motives, forget where we have hidden them, and wax justly indignant when they are dug out and confronted with us. We are scandalized, quite honestly, when others are caught doing what we ourselves have done. We are horrified and cry "Monster!" when others do what we ourselves refrain from doing only through lack of the bad courage.
No man is a hero who is not a hero to his valet; and no woman a lady unless her maid thinks so. Margaret Severence's new maid Selina was engaged to be married; the lover had gone on a spree, had started a free fight in the streets, and had got himself into jail for a fortnight. It was the first week of his imprisonment, and Selina had committed a series of faults intolerable in a maid. She sent Margaret to a ball with a long tear in her skirt; she let her go out, open in the back, both in blouse and in placket; she upset a cup of hot CAFÉ AU LAIT on her arm; finally she tore a strap off a shoe as she was fastening it on Margaret's foot. Though no one has been able to fathom it, there must be a reason for the perversity whereby our outbursts of anger against any seriously-offending fellow-being always break on some trivial offense, never on one of the real and deep causes of wrath. Margaret, though ignorant of her maid's secret grief and shame, had borne patiently the sins of omission and commission, only a few of which are catalogued above; this, though the maid, absorbed in her woe, had not even apologized for a single one of them. On the seventh day of discomforts and disasters Margaret lost her temper at the triviality of the ripping off of the shoe-strap, and poured out upon Selina not only all her resentment against her but also all that she had been storing up since the beginning of the season against life and destiny. Selina sat on the floor stupefied; Margaret, a very incarnation of fury, raged up and down the room, venting every and any insult a naturally caustic wit suggested. "And," she wound up, "I want you to clear out at once. I'll send you your month's wages. I can't give you a character--except for honesty. I'll admit, you are too stupid to steal. Clear out, and never let me see you again."
She swept from the room, drove away to lunch at Mrs. Baker's. She acted much as usual, seemed to be enjoying herself, for the luncheon was very good indeed, Mrs. Baker's chef being new from France and not yet grown careless, and the company was amusing. At the third course she rose. "I've forgotten something," said she. "I must go at once. No, no one must be disturbed on my account. I'll drive straight home." And she was gone before Mrs. Baker could rise from her chair.
At home Margaret went up to her own room, through her bedroom to Selina's--almost as large and quite as comfortable as her own and hardly plainer. She knocked. As there was no answer, she opened the door. On the bed, sobbing heart-brokenly, lay Selina, crushed by the hideous injustice of being condemned capitally merely for tearing off a bit of leather which the shoemaker had neglected to make secure.
"Selina," said Margaret.
The maid turned her big, homely, swollen face on the pillow, ceased sobbing, gasped in astonishment.
"I've come to beg your pardon," said Margaret, not as superior to inferior, nor yet with the much-vaunted "just as if they were equals," but simply as one human being to another. The maid sat up. One of her braids had come undone and was hanging ludicrously down across her cheek.
"I insulted you, and I'm horribly ashamed." Wistfully: "Will you forgive me?"
"Oh, law!" cried the maid despairingly, "I'm dreaming." And she threw herself down once more and sobbed afresh.
Margaret knelt beside the bed, put her hand appealingly on the girl's shoulder. "Can you forgive me, Selina?" said she. "There's no excuse for me except that I've had so much hard luck, and everything seems to be going to pieces under me."
Selina stopped sobbing. "I told a story when I came to you and said I'd had three years' experience," moaned she, not to be outdone in honorable generosity. "It was only three months as lady's maid, and not much of a lady, neither."
"I don't in the least care," Margaret assured her. "I'm not strictly truthful myself at times, and I do all sorts of horrid things."
"But that's natural in a lady," objected Selina, "where there ain't no excuse for me that have only my character."
Margaret was careful not to let Selina see her smile in appreciation of this unconsciously profound observation upon life and morals. "Never mind," said she; "you're going to be a good maid soon. You're learning quickly."
"No, no," wailed Selina. "I'm a regular block-head, and my hands is too coarse."
"But you have a good heart and I like you," said Margaret. "And I want you to forgive me and like me. I'm so lonely and unhappy. And I need the love of one so close to me all the time as you are. It'd be a real help."
Selina began to cry again, and then Margaret gave way to tears; and, presently, out came the dreadful story of the lover's fight and jailing; and Margaret, of course, promised to see that he was released at once. When she went to her own room, the maid following to help her efface the very disfiguring evidence of their humble, emotional drama, Margaret had recovered her self-esteem and had won a friend, who, if too stupid to be very useful, was also too stupid to be unfaithful.
As it was on the same day, and scarcely one brief hour later, it must have been the very same Margaret who paced the alley of trimmed elms, her eyes so stern and somber, her mouth and chin so hard that her worshipful sister Lucia watched in silent, fascinated dread. At length Margaret noted Lucia, halted and: "Why don't you read your book?" she cried fiercely. "Why do you sit staring at me?"
"What a temper you have got--what a NASTY temper!" Lucia was goaded into retorting.
"Haven't I, though!" exclaimed Margaret, as if she gloried in it. "Stop that staring!"
"I could see you were thinking something--something--TERRIBLE!" explained Lucia.
Margaret's face cleared before a satirical smile. "What a romancer you are, Lucia." Then, with a laugh: "I'm taking myself ridiculously seriously to-day. Temper--giving way to temper--is a sure sign of defective intelligence or of defective digestion."
"Is it about--about Mr. Craig?"
Margaret reddened, dropped to the bench near her sister--evidence that she was willing to talk, to confide--so far as she ever confided her inmost self--to the one person she could trust.
"Has he asked you to marry him?"
"No; not yet."
"But he's going to?"
Margaret gave a queer smile. "He doesn't think so."
"He wouldn't dare!" exclaimed Lucia. "Why, he's not in the same class with you."
"So! The little romancer is not so romantic that she forgets her snobbishness."
"I mean, he's so rude and noisy. I DETEST him!"
"So do I--at times."
Lucia looked greatly relieved. "I thought you were encouraging him. It seemed sort of--of--cheap, unworthy of you, to care to flirt with a man like that."
Margaret's expression became strange indeed. "I am not flirting with him," she said gravely. "I'm going to marry him."
Lucia was too amazed to speak, was so profoundly shocked that her usually rosy cheeks grew almost pale.
"Yes, I shall marry him," repeated Margaret slowly.
"But you don't love him!" cried Lucia.
"I dislike him," replied Margaret. After a pause she added: "When a woman makes up her mind to marry a man, willy-nilly, she begins to hate him. It's a case of hunter and hunted. Perhaps, after she's got him, she may change. But not till the trap springs--not till the game's bagged."
Lucia shuddered. "Oh, Rita!" she cried. And she turned away to bury her face in her arms.
"I suppose I oughtn't to tell you these things," pursued Margaret; "I ought to leave you your illusions as long as possible. But--why shouldn't you know the truth? Perhaps, if we all faced the truth about things, instead of sheltering ourselves in lies, the world would begin to improve."
"But I don't see why you chose him," persisted Lucia.
"I didn't. Fate did the choosing."
"But why not somebody like--like Grant Arkwright? Rita, I'm sure he's fond of you."
"So am I," said Rita. "But he's got the idea he would be doing me a favor in marrying me; and when a man gets that notion it's fatal. Also--He doesn't realize it himself, but I'm not prim enough to suit him. He imagines he's liberal--that's a common failing among men. But a woman who is natural shocks them, and they are taken in and pleased by one who poses as more innocent and impossible than any human being not perfectly imbecile could remain in a world that conceals nothing.... I despise Grant--I like him, but despise him."
"He IS small," admitted Lucia.
"Small? He's infinitesimal. He'd be mean with his wife about money. He'd run the house himself. He should have been a butler."
"But, at least, he's a gentleman."
"Oh, yes," said Margaret. "Yes, I suppose so. I despise him, while, in a way, I respect Craig."
"He has such a tough-looking skin," said Lucia.
"I don't mind that in a man," replied Margaret.
"His hands are like--like a coachman's," said Lucia. "Whenever I look at them I think of Thomas."
"No, they're more like the parrot's--they're claws.... That's why I'm marrying him."
"Because he has ugly hands?"
"Because they're ugly in just that way. They're the hands of the man who gets things and holds on to things. I'm taking him because he can get for me what I need." Margaret patted her sister on the shoulder. "Cheer up, Lucia! I'm lucky, I tell you. I'm getting, merely at the price of a little lying and a little shuddering, what most people can't get at any price."
"But he hasn't any money," objected Lucia.
"If he had, no doubt you'd find him quite tolerable. Even you--a young innocent."
"It does make a difference," admitted Lucia. "You see, people have to have money or they can't live like gentlemen and ladies."
"That's it," laughed Margaret. "What's a little thing like self-respect beside ease and comfort and luxury? As grandmother said, a lady who'd put anything before luxury has lost her self-respect."
"Everybody that's nice ought to have money," declared Lucia. "Then the world would be beautiful, full of love and romance, with everybody clean and well-dressed and never in a hurry."
But Margaret seemed not to hear. She was gazing at the fountain, her unseeing eyes gloomily reflecting her thoughts.
"If Mr. Craig hasn't got money why marry him?" asked her sister.
"He can get it," replied Margaret tersely. "He's the man to trample and crowd and clutch, and make everybody so uncomfortable that they'll gladly give him what he's snatching for." She laughed mockingly. "Yes, I shall get what I want"--then soberly--"if I can get him."
"Get HIM! Why, he'll be delighted! And he ought to be."
"No, he oughtn't to be; but he will be."
"A man like him--marrying a lady! And marrying YOU!" Lucia threw her arms round her sister's neck and dissolved in tears. "Oh, Rita, Rita!" she sobbed. "You are the dearest, loveliest girl on earth. I'm sure you're not doing it for yourself, at all. I'm sure you're doing it for my sake."
"You're quite wrong," said Rita, who was sitting unmoved and was looking like her grandmother. "I'm doing it for myself. I'm fond, of luxury--of fine dresses and servants and all that.... Think of the thousands, millions of women who marry just for a home and a bare living! ... No doubt, there's something wrong about the whole thing, but I don't see just what. If woman is made to lead a sheltered life, to be supported by a man, to be a man's plaything, why, she can't often get the man she'd most like to be the plaything of, can she?"
"Isn't there any such thing as love?" Lucia ventured wistfully. "Marrying for love, I mean."
"Not among OUR sort of people, except by accident," Margaret assured her. "The money's the main thing. We don't say so. We try not to think so. We denounce as low and coarse anybody that does say so. But it's the truth, just the same.... Those who marry for money regret it, but not so much as those who marry only for love--when poverty begins to pinch and to drag everything fine and beautiful down into the mud. Besides, I don't love anybody--thank God! If I did, Lucia, I'm afraid I'd not have the courage!"
"I'm sure you couldn't!" cried Lucia, eager to save all possible illusion about her sister. Then, remorseful for disloyal thoughts: "And, if it wasn't right, I'm sure you'd not do it. You MAY fall in love with him afterward."
"Yes," assented Margaret, kissing Lucia on an impulse of gratitude. "Yes, I may. I probably shall. Surely, I'm not to go through life never doing anything I ought to do."
"He's really handsome, in that bold, common way. And you can teach him."
Margaret laughed with genuine mirth. "How surprised he'd be," she exclaimed, "if he could know what's going on in my head!"
"He'll be on his knees to you," pursued Lucia, wonderfully cheered up by her confidence in the miracles Margaret's teaching would work. "And he'll do whatever you say."
"Yes, I'll teach him," said Margaret, herself more hopeful; for must always improves with acquaintance. "I'll make him over completely. Oh, he's not so bad as they think--not by any means."
Lucia made an exaggerated gesture of shivering.
"He gets on my nerves," said she. "He's so horribly abrupt and ill-mannered."
"Yes, I'll train him," said Margaret, musing aloud. "He doesn't especially fret my nerves. A woman gets a good, strong nervous system--and a good, strong stomach--after she has been out a few years." She laughed. "And he thinks I'm as fine and delicate as--as--" "As you look," suggested Lucia.
"As I look," accepted Margaret. "How we do deceive men by our looks! Really, Lucia, HE'S far more sensitive than I--far more."
"That's too silly!"
"If I were a millionth part as coarse as he is he'd fly from me. Yet I'm not flying from him."
This was unanswerable. Lucia rejoined: "When are you going to--to do it?"
"Right away.... I want to get it over with. I can't stand the suspense.... I can't stand it!" And Lucia was awed and silenced by the sudden, strained look of anguish almost that made Margaret's face haggard and her eyes wild.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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7
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MRS. SEVERENCE IS ROUSED
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Craig swooped upon the Severences the next afternoon. His arrivals were always swoopings--a swift descent on a day when he was not expected; or, if the day was forearranged, then the hour would be a surprise. It was a habit with him, a habit deliberately formed. He liked to take people unawares, to create a flurry, reasoning that he, quick of eye and determined of purpose, could not but profit by any confusion. He was always in a hurry--that is, he seemed to be. In this also there was deliberation. It does not follow because a man is in a hurry that he is an important and busy person; no more does it follow that a man is an inconsequential procrastinator if he is leisurely and dilatory. The significance of action lies in intent. Some men can best gain their ends by creating an impression that they are extremely lazy, others by creating the impression that they are exceedingly energetic. The important point is to be on the spot at the moment most favorable for gaining the desired advantage; and it will be found that of the men who get what they want in this world, both those who seem to hasten and those who seem to lounge are always at the right place at the right time.
It best fitted Craig, by nature impatient, noisily aggressive, to adopt the policy of rush. He arrived before time usually, fumed until he had got everybody into that nervous state in which men, and women, too, will yield more than they ever would in the kindly, melting mood. Though he might stay hours, he, each moment, gave the impression that everybody must speak quickly or he would be gone, might quickly be rid of him by speaking quickly. Obviously, intercourse with him was socially unsatisfactory; but this did not trouble him, as his theory of life was, get what you want, never mind the way or the feelings of others. And as he got by giving, attached his friends by self-interest, made people do for him what it was just as well that they should do, the net result, after the confusion and irritation had calmed, was that everybody felt, on the whole, well content with having been compelled. It was said of him that he made even his enemies work for him; and this was undoubtedly true--in the sense in which it was meant as well as in the deeper sense that a man's enemies, if he be strong, are his most assiduous allies and advocates. It was also true that he did a great deal for people. Where most men do favors only when the prospect of return is immediate, he busied himself as energetically if returns seemed remote, even improbable, as he did when his right hand was taking in with interest as his left hand gave. It was his nature to be generous, to like to give; it was also his nature to see that a reputation for real generosity and kindness of heart was an invaluable asset, and that the only way to win such a reputation was by deserving it.
Craig arrived at the Severences at half-past four, when no one was expected until five. "Margaret is dressing," explained Mrs. Severence, as she entered the drawing-room. "She'll be down presently--if you care to wait." This, partly because she hoped he would go, chiefly because he seemed in such a hurry.
"I'll wait a few minutes," said Craig in his sharp, irritating voice.
And he began to tour the room, glancing at pictures, at articles on the tables, mussing the lighter pieces of furniture about. Mrs. Severence, pink-and-white, middle-aged, fattish and obviously futile, watched him with increasing nervousness. He would surely break something; or, being by a window when the impulse to depart seized him, would leap through, taking sash, curtains and all with him.
"Perhaps we'd better go outdoors," suggested she. She felt very helpless, as usual. It was from her that Lucia inherited her laziness and her taste for that most indolent of all the dissipations, the reading of love stories.
"Outdoors?" exploded Craig, wheeling on her, as if he had previously been unconscious of her presence. "No. We'll sit here. I want to talk to you."
And he plumped himself into a chair near by, his claw-like hands upon his knees, his keen eyes and beak-like nose bent toward her. Mrs. Severence visibly shrank. She felt as if that handsome, predatory face were pressed against the very window of her inmost soul.
"You wish to talk to me," she echoed, with a feeble conciliatory smile.
"About your daughter," said Craig, still more curt and aggressive. "Mrs. Severence, your daughter ought to get married."
Roxana Severence was so amazed that her mouth dropped open. "Married?" she echoed, as if her ears had deceived her.
The colossal impudence of it! This young man, this extremely common young man, daring to talk to her about such a private matter! And she had not yet known him a month; and only within the last fortnight had he been making frequent visits--entirely on his own invitation, for she certainly would not overtly provoke such a visitation as his coming meant. Mrs. Severence would have been angry had she dared. But Craig's manner was most alarming; what would--what would not a person so indifferent to the decencies of life do if he were crossed?
"She must get married," pursued Craig firmly. "Do you know why I've been coming here these past two or three weeks?"
Mrs. Severence was astounded anew. The man was actually about to propose for her daughter! This common man, with nothing!
"It's not my habit to make purposeless visits," continued he, "especially among frivolous, idle people like you. I've been coming here to make a study of your daughter."
He paused. Mrs. Severence gave a feeble, frightened smile, made a sound that might have been mirth and again might have been the beginnings of a hastily-suppressed call for help.
"And," Craig went on energetically, "I find that she is a very superior sort of person. In another environment she might have been a big, strong woman. She's amazing, considering the sickly, sycophantic atmosphere she's been brought up in. Now, I want to see her married. She's thoroughly discontented and unhappy. She's becoming sour and cynical. WE must get her married. It's your duty to rouse yourself."
Mrs. Severence did rouse herself just at this moment. Cheeks aflame and voice trembling, she stood and said: "You are very kind, Mr. Craig, to offer to assist me in bringing up my family. Surely--such--such interest is unusual on brief and very slight acquaintance." She rang the bell. "I can show my appreciation in only one way." The old butler, Williams, appeared. "Williams, show this gentlemen out." And she left the room.
Williams, all frigid dignity and politeness, stood at the large entrance doors, significantly holding aside one curtain. Craig rose, his face red. "Mrs. Severence isn't very well," said he noisily to the servant, as if he were on terms of closest intimacy with the family. "Tell Margaret I'll wait for her in the garden." And he rushed out by the window that opened on the veranda, leaving the amazed butler at the door, uncertain what to do.
Mrs. Severence, ascending the stairs in high good humor with herself at having handled a sudden and difficult situation as well as she had ever read of its being handled in a novel, met her daughter descending.
"Sh-h!" said she in a whisper, for she had not heard the front door close. "He may not be gone. Come with me."
Margaret followed her mother into the library at the head of the stairs.
"It was that Craig man," explained Mrs. Severence, when she had the door closed. "What DO you think he had the impudence to do?"
"I'm sure I can't imagine," said Margaret, impatient.
"He proposed for you!"
Margaret reflected a brief instant. "Nonsense!" she said decisively. "He's not that kind. You misunderstood him."
"I tell you he did!" cried her mother. "And I ordered him out of the house."
"What?" screamed Margaret, clutching her mother's arm. "WHAT?"
"I ordered him out of the house," stammered her mother.
"I wish you'd stick to your novels and let me attend to my own affairs," cried Margaret, pale with fury. "Is he gone?"
"I left Williams attending to it. Surely, Rita--" But Margaret had flung the door open and was darting down the stairs. "Where is he?" she demanded fiercely of Williams, still in the drawing-room doorway.
"In the garden, ma'am," said Williams. "He didn't pay no attention."
But Margaret was rushing through the drawing-room. At the French windows she caught sight of him, walking up and down in his usual quick, alert manner, now smelling flowers, now staring up into the trees, now scrutinizing the upper windows of the house. She drew back, waited until she had got her breath and had composed her features. Then, with the long skirts of her graceful pale-blue dress trailing behind her, and a big white sunshade open and resting upon her shoulder, she went down the veranda steps and across the lawn toward him. He paused, gazed at her in frank--vulgarly frank--admiration; just then, it seemed to her, he never said or did or looked anything except in the vulgarest way.
"You certainly are a costly-looking luxury," said he loudly, when there were still a dozen yards between them. "Oh, there's your mother at the window, upstairs--her bedroom window."
"How did you know it was her bedroom?" asked Margaret.
"While I was waiting for you to come down one day I sent for one of the servants and had him explain the lay of the house."
"Really!" said Margaret, satirical and amused. "I suppose there was no mail on the table or you'd have read that while you waited?"
"There you go, trying to say clever, insulting things. Why not be frank? Why not be direct?"
"Why should I, simply because YOU wish it? You don't half realize how amusing you are."
"Oh, yes, I do," retorted he, with a shrewd, quick glance from those all-seeing eyes of his.
"Half, I said. You do half realize. I told you once before that I knew what a fraud you were."
"I play my game in my own way," evaded he; "and it seems to be doing nicely, thank you."
"But the further you go, the harder it'll be for you to progress."
"Then the harder for those opposing me. I don't make it easy for those who are making it hard for me. I get 'em so busy nursing their own wounds that they've no longer time to bother me. I've told you before, and I tell you again, I shall go where I please."
"Let me see," laughed Margaret; "it was Napoleon--wasn't it? --who used to talk that way?"
"And you think I'm imitating him, eh?"
"You do suggest it very often."
"I despise him. A wicked, little, dago charlatan who was put out of business as soon as he was really opposed. No! --no Waterloo for me! ... How's your mother? She got sick while I was talking to her and had to leave the room."
"Yes, I know," said Margaret.
"You ought to make her take more exercise. Don't let her set foot in a carriage. We are animals, and nature has provided that animals shall walk to keep in health. Walking and things like that are the only sane modes of getting about. Everything aristocratic is silly. As soon as we begin to rear and strut we stumble into our graves--But it's no use to talk to you about that. I came on another matter."
Margaret's lips tightened; she hastily veiled her eyes.
"I've taken a great fancy to you," Craig went on. "That's why I've wasted so much time on you. What you need is a husband--a good husband. Am I not right?"
Margaret, pale, said faintly: "Go on."
"You know I'm right. Every man and every woman ought to marry. A home--children--THAT'S life. The rest is all incidental--trivial. Do you suppose I could work as I do if it wasn't that I'm getting ready to be a family man? I need love--sympathy--tenderness. People think I'm hard and ambitious. But they don't know. I've got a heart, overflowing with tenderness, as some woman'll find out some day. But I didn't come to talk about myself."
Margaret made a movement of surprise--involuntary, startled.
"No, I don't always talk about myself," Craig went on; "and I'll let you into a secret. I don't THINK about myself nearly so much as many of these chaps who never speak of themselves. However, as I was saying, I'm going to get you a husband. Now, don't you get sick, as your mother did. Be sensible. Trust me. I'll see you through--and that's more than any of these cheap, shallow people round you would do."
"Well?" said Margaret.
"You and Grant Arkwright are going to marry. Now don't pretend--don't protest. It's the proper thing and it must be done. You like him?"
As Craig was looking sharply at her she felt she must answer. She made a vague gesture of assent.
"Of course!" said Craig. "If you and he led a natural life you'd have been married long ago. Now, I'm going to dine with him to-night. I'll lay the case before him. He'll be out here after you to-morrow."
Margaret trembled with anger. Two bright spots burned in her cheeks. "You wouldn't dare!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "No, not even you!"
"And why not?" demanded Craig calmly. "Do you suppose I'm going to stand idly by, and let two friends of mine, two people I'm as fond of as I am of you two creatures, make fools of yourselves? No. I shall bring you together."
Margaret rose. "If you say a word to Grant I'll never speak to you again. And I assure you I shouldn't marry HIM if he were the last man on earth."
"If you only knew men better!" exclaimed Craig earnestly. His eyes fascinated her, and his sharp, penetrating voice somehow seemed to reach to her very soul and seize it and hold it enthralled. "My dear child, Grant Arkwright is one man in a million. I've been with him in times that show men's qualities. Don't judge men by what they are ordinarily. They don't reveal their real selves. Wait till a crisis comes--then you see manhood or lack of it. Life is bearable, at the worst, for any of us in the routine. But when the crisis comes we need, not only all our own strength, but all we can rally to our support. I tell you, Miss Severence, Grant is one of the men that can be relied on. I despise his surface--as I do yours. But it's because I see the man--the manhood--beneath that surface, that I love him. And I want him to have a woman worthy of him. That means YOU. You, too, have the soul that makes a human being--a real aristocrat--of the aristocracy, of strong and honest hearts."
Craig's face was splendid, was ethereal in its beauty, yet flashing with manliness. He looked as she had seen him that night two years before, when he had held even her and her worldly friends spellbound, had made them thrill with ideas of nobility and human helpfulness foreign to their everyday selves. She sat silent when he had finished, presently drew a long breath.
"Why aren't you always like that?" she exclaimed half to herself.
"You'll marry Grant?"
She shook her head positively. "Impossible."
"Why not?"
"Impossible," she repeated. "And you mustn't speak of it to me--or to him. I appreciate your motive. I thank you--really, I do. It makes me feel better, somehow, to have had any one think so well of me as you do. And Grant ought to be proud of your friendship."
Their eyes met. She flushed to the line of her hair and her glance fell, for she felt utterly ashamed of herself for the design upon him which she had been harboring. "Let us go in and join the others," said she confusedly. And her color fled, returned in a flood.
"No, I'm off," replied he, in his ordinary, sharp, bustling way. "I'm not defeated. I've done well--very well, for a beginning." And he gave her hand his usual firm, uncomfortable clasp, and rushed away.
She walked up and down full fifteen minutes before she went toward the house. At the veranda Lucia intercepted her. "Did he?" she asked anxiously.
Margaret looked at her vaguely, then smiled. "No, he did not."
"He didn't?" exclaimed Lucia, at once disappointed and relieved.
"Not yet," said Margaret. She laughed, patted Lucia's full-blown cheek. "Not quite yet." And she went on in to tea, humming to herself gayly; she did not understand her own sudden exceeding high spirits.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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8
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MR. CRAIG CONFIDES
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Craig did not leave Margaret more precipitately than he had intended; that would have been impossible, as he always strove to make his departures seem as startling and mysterious as a dematerialization. But he did leave much sooner than he had intended, and with only a small part of what he had planned to say said. He withdrew to think it over; and in the long walk from the Severences to his lodgings in the Wyandotte he did think it over with his usual exhaustive thoroughness.
He had been entirely sincere in his talk with Margaret. He was a shrewd judge both of human nature and of situations, and he saw that a marriage between Margaret and Grant would be in every way admirable. He appreciated the fine qualities of both, and realized that they would have an uncommonly good chance of hitting it off tranquilly together. Of all their qualities of mutual adaptability the one that impressed him most deeply was the one at which he was always scoffing--what he called their breeding. Theoretically, and so far as his personal practice went, he genuinely despised "breeding"; but he could not uproot a most worshipful reverence for it, a reverence of which he was ashamed. He had no "breeding" himself; he was experiencing in Washington a phase of life which was entirely new to him, and it had developed in him the snobbish instincts that are the rankest weeds in the garden of civilization. Their seeds fly everywhere, are sown broadcast, threaten the useful plants and the flowers incessantly, contrive to grow, to flourish even, in the desert places. Craig had an instinct against this plague; but he was far too self-confident to suspect that it could enter his own gates and attack his own fields. He did not dream that the chief reason why he thought Grant and Margaret so well suited to each other was the reason of snobbishness; that he was confusing their virtues with their vices; and was admiring them for qualities which were blighting their usefulness and even threatening to make sane happiness impossible for either. It was not their real refinement that he admired, and, at times, envied; it was their showy affectations of refinement, those gaudy pretenses that appeal to the crude human imagination, like uniforms and titles.
It had not occurred to him that Margaret might possibly be willing to become his wife. He would have denied it as fiercely to himself as to others, but at bottom he could not have thought of himself as at ease in any intimate relation with her. He found her beautiful physically, but much too fine and delicate to be comfortable with. He could be brave, bold, insolent with her, in an impersonal way; but personally he could not have ventured the slightest familiarity, now that he really appreciated "what a refined, delicate woman is."
But the easiest impression for a woman to create upon a man--or a man upon a woman--is the impression of being in love. We are so conscious of our own merits, we are so eager to have them appreciated, that we will exaggerate or misinterpret any word or look, especially from a person of the opposite sex, into a tribute to them. When Craig pleaded for Grant and Margaret, moved by his eloquent sincerity, dropped her eyes and colored in shame for her plans about him, in such black contrast with his frank generosity, he noted her change of expression, and instantly his vanity flashed into his mind: "Can it be that she loves me?"
The more he reflected upon it the clearer it became to him that she did. Yes, here was being repeated the old story of the attraction of extremes. "She isn't so refined that appreciation of real manhood has been refined out of her," thought he. "And why shouldn't she love me? What does all this nonsense of family and breeding amount to, anyway?" His mind was in great confusion. At one moment he was dismissing the idea of such delicateness, such super-refined super-sensitiveness being taken with a man of his imperfect bringing-up and humble origin. The next moment his self-esteem was bobbing again, was jauntily assuring him that he was "a born king" and, therefore, would naturally be discovered and loved by a truly princess--"And, by Heaven, she IS a princess of the blood royal! Those eyes, those hands, those slender feet!" Having no great sense of humor he did not remind himself here how malicious nature usually deprives royalty of the outward marks of aristocracy to bestow them upon peasant.
At last he convinced himself that she was actually burning with love for him, that she had lifted the veil for an instant--had lifted it deliberately to encourage him to speak for himself. And he was not repelled by this forwardness, was, on the contrary, immensely flattered. It is the custom for those of high station to reassure those of lower, to make them feel that they may draw near without fear. A queen seeking a consort among princes always begins the courting. A rich girl willing to marry a poor man lets him see she will not be offended if he offers to add himself to her possessions. Yes, it would be quite consistent with sex-custom, with maidenly modesty, for a Severence to make the first open move toward a Josh Craig.
"But do I want her?"
That was another question. He admired her, he would be proud to have such a wife. "She's just the sort I need, to adorn the station I'm going to have." But what of his dreams of family life, of easy, domestic undress, which she would undoubtedly find coarse and vulgar? "It would be like being on parade all the time--she's been used to that sort of thing her whole life, but it'd make me miserable." Could he afford a complete, a lifelong sacrifice of comfort to gratify a vanity?
He had devoted much thought to the question of marriage. On the one hand he wanted money; for in politics, with the people so stupid and so fickle, a man without an independence, at least, would surely find himself, sooner or later, in a position where he must choose between retiring and submitting himself to some powerful interest--either a complete sale, or a mortgage hardly less galling to pride, no less degrading to self-respect. On the other hand he wanted a home--a wife like his mother, domestic, attentive, looking out for his comfort and his health, herself taking care of the children. And he had arrived at a compromise. He would marry a girl out West somewhere, a girl of some small town, brought up somewhat as he had been brought up, not shocked by what Margaret Severance would regard as his vulgarities--a woman with whom he felt equal and at ease. He would select such a woman, provided, in addition, with some fortune--several hundred thousands, at least, enough to make him independent. Such had been his plan. But now that he had seen Margaret, had come to appreciate her through studying her as a possible wife for his unattached friend Arkwright, now that he had discovered her secret, her love for him--how could he fit her into his career? Was it possible? Was it wise?
"The best is none too good for me," said he to himself swaggeringly. No doubt about it--no, indeed, not the slightest. But--well, everybody wouldn't realize this, as yet. And it must be admitted that those mere foppish, inane nothings did produce a seeming of difference. Indeed, it must even be admitted that the way Margaret had been brought up would make it hard for her, with her sensitive, delicate nerves, to bear with him if she really knew him. A hot wave passed over his body at the thought. "How ashamed I'd be to have her see my wardrobe. I really must brace up in the matter of shirts, and in the quality of underclothes and socks." No, she probably would be shocked into aversion if she really knew him--she, who had been surrounded by servants in livery all her life; who had always had a maid to dress her, to arrange a delicious bath for her every morning and every evening, to lay out, from a vast and thrilling store of delicate clothing, the fresh, clean, fine, amazingly costly garments that were to have the honor and the pleasure of draping that aristocratic body of hers. "Why, her maid," thought he, "is of about the same appearance and education as my aunts. Old Williams is a far more cultured person than my uncles or brothers-in-law." Of course, Selina and Williams were menials, while his male kin were men and his female relatives women, "and all of them miles ahead of anything in this gang when it comes to the real thing--character." Still, so far as appearances went--"I'm getting to be a damned, cheap snob!" cried he aloud. "To hell with the whole crowd! I want nothing to do with them!"
But Margaret, in her beautiful garments, diffusing perfume just as her look and manner diffused the aroma of gentle breeding--The image of her was most insidiously alluring; he could not banish it. "And, damn it all, isn't she just a human being? What's become of my common-sense that I treat these foolish trifles as if they were important?"
Grant Arkwright came while the debate was still on. He soon noted that something was at work in Josh's mind to make him so silent and glum, so different from his usual voluble, flamboyant self. "What's up, Josh? What deviltry are you plotting now to add to poor old Stillwater's nervous indigestion?"
"I'm thinking about marriage," said Craig, lighting a cigarette and dropping into the faded magnificence of an ex-salon chair.
"Good business!" exclaimed Arkwright.
"It's far more important that you get married than that I do," explained Craig. "At present you don't amount to a damn. You're like one of those twittering swallows out there. As a married man you'd at least have the validity that attaches to every husband and father."
"If I could find the right girl," said Grant.
"I thought I had found her for you," continued Craig. "But, on second thoughts, I've about decided to take her for myself."
"Oh, you have?" said Arkwright, trying to be facetious of look and tone.
"Yes," said Josh, in his abrupt, decisive way. He threw the cigarette into the empty fireplace and stood up. "I think I'll take your advice and marry Miss Severance."
"Really!" mocked Grant; but he was red with anger, was muttering under his breath, "Insolent puppy!"
"Yes, I think she'll do." Craig spoke as if his verdict were probably overpartial to her. "It's queer about families and the kind of children they have. Every once in a while you'll find a dumb ass of a man whose brain will get to boiling with liquor or some other ferment, and it'll incubate an idea, a real idea. It's that way about paternity--or, rather, maternity. Now who'd think that inane, silly mother of Margaret's could have brought such a person as she is into the world?"
"Mrs. Severence is a very sweet and amiable LADY," said Grant coldly.
"Pooh!" scoffed Craig. "She's a nothing--a puff of wind--a nit. Such as she, by the great gross, wouldn't count one."
"I doubt if it would be--wise--politically, I mean--for you to marry a woman of--of the fashionable set." Grant spoke judicially, with constraint in his voice.
"You're quite right there," answered Craig promptly. "Still, it's a temptation.... I've been reconsidering the idea since I discovered that she loves me."
Grant leaped to his feet. "Loves you!" he shouted. Josh smiled calmly. "Loves me," said he. "Why not, pray?"
"I--I--I--don't know," answered Grant weakly.
"Oh, yes, you do. You think I'm not good enough for her--as if this were not America, but Europe." And he went on loftily: "You ought to consider what such thoughts mean, as revelations of your own character, Grant."
"You misunderstood me entirely," protested Grant, red and guilty. "Didn't I originally suggest her to you?"
"But you didn't really mean it," retorted Craig with a laugh which Grant thought the quintessence of impertinence. "You never dreamed she'd fall in love with me."
"Josh," said Grant, "I wish you wouldn't say that sort of thing. It's not considered proper in this part of the country for a gentleman to speak out that way about women."
"What's there to be ashamed of in being in love? Besides, aren't you my best friend, the one I confide everything to?"
"You confide everything to everybody."
Craig looked amused. "There are only two that can keep a secret," said he, "nobody and everybody. I trust either the one or the other, and neither has ever betrayed me."
"To go back to the original subject: I'd prefer you didn't talk to me in that way about that particular young lady."
"Why? ... Because you're in love with her, yourself?"
Grant silently stared at the floor.
"Poor old chap," said Craig sympathetically.
Arkwright winced, started to protest, decided it was just as well to let Craig think what he pleased at that juncture.
"Poor old chap!" repeated Josh. "Well, you needn't despair. It's true she isn't in love with you and is in love with me. But if I keep away from her and discourage her it'll soon die out. Women of that sort of bringing up aren't capable of any enduring emotion--unless they have outside aid in keeping it alive."
"No, thank you," said Arkwright bitterly. "I decline to be put in the position of victim of your generosity. Josh, let me tell you, your notion that she's in love with you is absurd. I'd advise you not to go round confiding it to people, in your usual fashion. You'll make yourself a laughing stock."
"I've told no one but you," protested Craig.
"Have you seen any one else since you got the idea?"
"No, I haven't," he admitted with a laugh. "Now that you've told me the state of your heart I'll not speak of her feeling for me. I give you my word of honor on that. I understand how a chap like you, full of false pride, would be irritated at having people know he'd married a woman who was once in love with some one else. For of course you'll marry her."
"I'm not sure of that. I haven't your sublime self-confidence, you know."
"Oh, I'll arrange it," replied Craig, full of enthusiasm. "In fact, I had already begun, this very afternoon, when she let me see that she loved me and, so, brought me up standing."
"Damn it, man, DON'T say that!" cried Grant, all afire. "I tell you it's crazy, conceited nonsense."
"All right, all right, old chap," soothed Josh.
And it frenzied Arkwright to see that he said this merely to spare the feelings of an unrequited lover, not at all because he had begun to doubt Margaret's love. "Come down to dinner and let's talk no more about it," said Grant, with a great effort restraining himself. "I tell you, Josh, you make it mighty hard sometimes for me to remember what I owe you."
Craig wheeled on him with eyes that flashed and pierced. "My young friend," said he, "you owe me nothing. And let me say to you, once for all, you are free to break with me at any instant--you or any other man. Whenever I find I'm beginning to look on a man as necessary to me I drop him--break with him. I am necessary to my friends, not they to me. I like you, but be careful how you get impertinent with me."
Craig eyed him fiercely and steadily until Arkwright's gaze dropped. Then he laughed friendly. "Come along, Grant," said he. "You're a good fellow, and I'll get you the girl." And he linked his arm in Arkwright's and took up another phase of himself as the topic of his monologue.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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9
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SOMEWHAT CYCLONIC
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Margaret, on the way home afoot from the White House, where she had been lunching with the President's niece, happened upon Craig standing with his hands behind his back before the statue of Jackson. He was gazing up at the fierce old face with an expression so animated that passers-by were smiling broadly. She thought he was wholly absorbed; but when she was about half-way across his range of vision he hailed her. "I say, Miss Severence!" he cried loudly.
She flushed with annoyance. But she halted, for she knew that if she did not he would only shout at her and make a scene.
"I'll walk with you," said he, joining her when he saw she had no intention of moving toward him.
"Don't let me draw you from your devotions," protested she. "I'm just taking a car, anyhow."
"Then I'll ride home with you and walk back. I want to talk with a woman--a sensible woman--not easy to find in this town."
Margaret was disliking him, his manner was so offensively familiar and patronizing--and her plans concerning him made her contemptuous of herself, and therefore resentful against him. "I'm greatly flattered," said she.
"No, you're not. But you ought to be. I suppose if you had met that old chap on the pedestal there when he was my age you'd have felt toward him much as you do toward me."
"And I suppose he'd have been just about as much affected by it as you are."
"Just about. It was a good idea, planting his statue there to warn the fellow that happens to be in the White House not to get too cultured. You know it was because the gang that was in got too refined and forgot whom this country belonged to that old Jackson was put in office. The same thing will happen again."
"And you'll be the person?" suggested Margaret with a smile of raillery.
"If I show I'm fit for the job," replied Craig soberly. It was the first time she had ever heard him admit a doubt about himself. "The question is," he went on, "have I got the strength of character and the courage? ... What do you think?"
"I don't know anything about it," said Margaret with polite indifference. "There comes my car. I'll not trouble you to accompany me." She put out her hand. "Goodby." She did not realize it, or intend it, but she had appealed to one of his powerful instincts, a powerful instinct in all predatory natures--the instinct to pursue whatever seems to be flying.
He shook his head at the motorman, who was bringing the car to a halt; the car went on. He stood in front of her. Her color was high, but she could not resist the steady compulsion of his eyes. "I told you I wanted to talk with you," said he. "Do you know why I was standing before that statue?"
"I do not," Margaret answered coldly.
"I was trying to get the courage to ask you to be my wife."
She gave a queer laugh. "Well, you seem to have got what you sought," said she. He had, as usual, taken her wholly unawares.
"Not so fast," replied Craig. "I haven't asked you yet."
Margaret did not know whether she most wished to laugh or to burst out in anger. "I'm sure I don't care anything about it, one way or the other," said she.
"Why say those insincere things--to ME?" he urged. She had begun to walk, and he was keeping pace with her. "Jackson," he proceeded, "was a man of absolute courage. He took the woman he wanted--defied public opinion to do it--and it only made him the more popular. I had always intended to strengthen myself by marrying. If I married you I'd weaken myself politically, while if I married some Western girl, some daughter of the people, I'd make a great popular stroke."
"Well--do it, then," said Margaret. "By all means do it."
"Oh, but there's you," exclaimed Craig. "What'd I do about you?"
"That's true," said Margaret mockingly. "But what am I to stand between a man and ambition?"
"I say that to myself," replied Craig. "But it's no use." His eyes thrilled her, his voice seemed to melt her dislike, her resolve, as he said: "There you are, and there you stay, Margaret. And you're not at all fit to be my wife. You haven't been brought up right. You ought to marry some man like Grant. He's just the man for you. Why did you ever fall in love with me?"
She stopped short, stared at him in sheer amazement. "I!" exclaimed she. "I--in love with YOU!"
He halted before her. "Margaret," he said tenderly, "can you deny it?"
She flushed; hung her head. The indignant denial died upon her lips.
He sighed. "You see, it is fate," said he. "But I'll manage it somehow. I'll win out in spite of any, of every handicap."
She eyed him furtively. Yes, if she wished to make a marriage of ambition she could not do better. All Washington was laughing at him; but she felt she had penetrated beneath the surface that excited their mirth--had seen qualities that would carry him wherever he wished to go--wherever she, with her grandmother's own will, wished him to go.
"And," pursued he, "I'm far too rough and coarse for you--you, the quintessence of aristocracy."
She flushed with double delight--delight at this flattery and the deeper delight a woman feels when a man shows her the weakness in himself by which she can reach and rule him.
"I'm always afraid of offending your delicacy," he went fatuously on. "You're the only person I ever felt that way about. Absolutely the only one. But you've got to expect that sort of thing in a man who prevails in such a world as this. When men get too high-toned and aristocratic, too fussy about manners and dress, along come real men to ride them down and under. But I'll try to be everything you wish--to you. Not to the others. That would defeat our object; for I'm going to take my wife high--very high."
Yes, he would indeed take her high--very high. Now that what she wanted, what she must have, was offering, how could she refuse? They were crossing another square of green. He drew--almost dragged--her into one of the by-paths, seized her in his arms, kissed her passionately. "I can't resist you--I can't!" he cried.
"Don't--don't!" she murmured, violently agitated. "Some one might see!"
"Some one is seeing, no doubt," he said, his breath coming quickly, a look that was primeval, ferocious almost, in his eyes as they devoured her. And, despite her protests and struggles, she was again in those savage arms of his, was again shrinking and burning and trembling under his caresses. She flung herself away, sank upon a bench, burst out crying.
"What is it, Margaret?" he begged, alarmed, yet still looking as if he would seize her again.
"I don't know--I don't know," she replied.
Once more she tried to tell him that she did not love him, but the words would not come. She felt that he would not believe her; indeed, she was not sure of her own heart, of the meaning of those unprecedented emotions that had risen under his caresses, and that stirred at the memory of them. "Perhaps I am trying to love him," she said to herself. "Anyhow, I must marry him. I can trifle with my future no longer. I must be free of this slavery to grandmother. I must be free. He can free me, and I can manage him, for he is afraid of me."
"Did I hurt you?" Craig was asking.
She nodded.
"I am so sorry," he exclaimed. "But when I touched you I forgot--everything!"
She smiled gently at him. "I didn't dream you cared for me," she said.
He laughed with a boisterousness that irritated her. "I'd never have dared tell you," replied he, "if I hadn't seen that you cared for me."
Her nerves winced, but she contrived to make her tone passable as she inquired: "Why do you say that?"
"Oh--the day in the garden--the day I came pleading for Grant. I saw it in your eyes--You remember."
Margaret could not imagine what he had misinterpreted so flatteringly to himself. But what did it matter? How like ironic fate, to pierce him with a chance shaft when all the shafts she had aimed had gone astray!
She was startled by his seizing her again. At his touch she flamed. "Don't!" she cried imperiously. "I don't like it!"
He laughed, held her the more tightly, kissed her half a dozen times squarely upon the lips. "Not that tone to me," said he. "I shall kiss you when I please."
She was furiously angry; but again her nerves were trembling, were responding to those caresses, and even as she hated him for violating her lips, she longed for him to continue to violate them. She started up. "Let us go," she cried.
He glanced at his watch. "I'll have to put you in a car," said he. "I forgot all about my appointment." And he fumed with impatience while she was adjusting her hat and veil pushed awry by his boisterous love-making. "It's the same old story," he went on. "Woman weakens man. You are a weakness with me--one that will cost me dear."
She burned with a sense of insult. She hated him, longed to pour out denunciations, to tell him just what she thought of him. She felt a contempt for herself deeper than her revulsion against him. In silence she let him hurry her along to a car; she scarcely heard what he was saying--his tactless, angry outburst against himself and her for his tardiness at that important appointment. She dropped into the seat with a gasp of relief. She felt she must--for form's sake--merely for form's sake--glance out of the window for the farewell he would be certain to expect; she must do her part, now that she had committed herself. She glanced; he was rushing away, with never a backward look--or thought. It was her crowning humiliation. "I'll make him pay for all this, some day!" she said to herself, shaking with anger, her grandmother's own temper raging cyclonically within her.
|
{
"id": "4929"
}
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10
|
A BELATED PROPOSAL
|
Her mood--outraged against Craig, sullenly determined to marry him, angry with her relatives, her mother no less than her grandmother, because they were driving her to these desperate measures--this mood persisted, became intenser, more imperious in its demand for a sacrifice as the afternoon wore on. When Grant Arkwright came, toward six o'clock, she welcomed him, the first-comer bringing her the longed-for chance to discharge the vials of her wrath. And she noted with pleasure that he, too, was in a black humor. Before she could begin he burst forth: "What's this that Josh Craig has been telling me? He seems to have gone stark mad!"
Margaret eyed him with icy disdain. "If there is any quality that can be called the most repulsive," said she, "it is treachery. You've fallen into a way of talking of your friend Craig behind his back that's unworthy--perhaps not of you, but certainly of the person you pose as being."
"Did you propose to him this afternoon?" demanded Grant.
Margaret grew cold from head to foot. "Does he say I did?" she succeeded in articulating.
"He does. He was so excited that he jumped off a car and held me an hour telling me, though he was late for one of those important conferences he's always talking about."
Margaret had chosen her course. "Did he ask you to run and tell me he had told you?" inquired she, with the vicious gleam of a vicious temper in her fine hazel eyes.
"No," admitted Grant. "I suppose I've no right to tell you. But it was such an INFERNAL lie."
"Did you tell him so?"
Arkwright grew red.
"I see you did not," said Margaret. "I knew you did not. Now, let me tell you, I don't believe Craig said anything of the kind. A man who'd betray a friend is quite capable of lying about him."
"Margaret! Rita Severence!" Grant started up, set down his teacup, stood looking down at her, his face white to the lips. "Your tone is not jest; it is insult."
"It was so intended." Margaret's eyes were upon him, her grandmother's own favorite expression in them. Now that she was no longer a matrimonial offering she felt profoundly indifferent to eligible men, rejoiced in her freedom to act toward them as she wished. "I do not permit any one to lie to me about the man I have engaged to marry."
"What!" shouted Grant. "It was TRUE?"
"Go out into the garden and try to calm yourself, Grant," said the girl haughtily. "And if you can't, why--take yourself off home. And don't come back until you are ready to apologize."
"Rita, why didn't you give me a hint? I'd have married you myself. I'm willing to do it.... Rita, will you marry me?"
Margaret leaned back upon the sofa and laughed until his blood began to run alternately hot and cold.
"I beg your pardon," he stammered. "I did not realize how it sounded. Only--you know how things are with our sort of people. And, as men go, I can't help knowing I'm what's called a catch, and that you're looking for a suitable husband.... As it's apparently a question of him or me, and as you've admitted you got him by practically proposing--...Damn it all, Rita, I want you, and I'm not going to let such a man as he is have you. I never dreamed you'd bother with him seriously or I'd not have been so slow."
Margaret was leaning back, looking up at him. "I've sunk even lower than I thought," she said, bringing to an end the painful silence which followed this speech.
"What do you mean, Rita?"
She laughed cynically, shrugged her shoulders. First, Craig's impudent assumption that she loved him, and his rude violation of her lips; now, this frank insolence of insult, the more savage that it was unconscious--and from the oldest and closest of her men friends. If one did not die under such outrages, but continued to live and let live, one could save the situation only by laughing. So, Margaret laughed--and Arkwright shivered.
"For God's sake, Rita!" he cried. "I'd not have believed that lips so young and fresh as yours could utter such a cynical sound."
She looked at him with disdainful, derisive eyes. "It's fortunate for me that I have a sense of humor," said she. "And for you," she added.
"But I am in earnest, I mean it--every word I said."
"That's just it," replied she. "You meant it--every word."
"You will marry me?"
"I will not."
"Why?"
"For several reasons. For instance, I happen to be engaged to another man."
"That is--nothing." He snapped his fingers.
She elevated her brows. "Nothing?"
"He'd not keep his promise to you if--In fact, he was debating with me whether or not he'd back down."
"Either what you say is false," said she evenly, "or you are betraying the confidence of a friend who trusted in your honor."
"Oh, he said it, all right. You know how he is about confidences."
"No matter."
Margaret rose slowly, a gradual lifting of her long, supple figure. Grant watching, wondered why he had never before realized that the sensuous charm of her beauty was irresistible. "Where were my eyes?" he asked himself. "She's beyond any of the women I've wasted so much time on."
She was saying with quiet deliberateness: "A few days ago, Grant, I'd have jumped at your offer--to be perfectly frank. Why shouldn't I be frank! I'm sick of cowardly pretenses and lies. I purpose henceforth to be myself--almost." A look within and a slightly derisive smile. "Almost. I shall hesitate and trifle no longer. I shall marry your friend Craig."
"You'll do nothing of the kind," raged Arkwright. "If you make it necessary I'll tell him why you're marrying him."
"You may do as you like about that," replied she. "He'll probably understand why you are trying to break off our engagement."
"You're very confident of your power over him," taunted he.
She saw again Craig's face as he was kissing her. "Very," replied she.
"You'll see. It's a mere physical attraction."
She smiled tantalizingly, her long body displayed against the window-casing, her long, round arms bare below the elbows, her hazel eyes and sensuous lips alluring. "You, yourself, never thought of proposing to me until I had made myself physically attractive to you," said she. "Now--have I power over you, or not?"
She laughed as his color mounted, and the look she had seen in Craig's eyes blazed out in his.
"How little physical charm you have for me," she went on. "Beside Craig you're like an electric fan in competition with a storm-wind. Now, Craig--" She closed her eyes and drew a long breath.
Arkwright gnawed his lip. "What a--a DEVIL you ARE!" he exclaimed.
"I wonder why it is a woman never becomes desirable to some men until they find she's desired elsewhere," she went on reflectively. "What a lack of initiative. What timidity. What an absence of originality. If I had nothing else against you, Grant, I'd never forgive you for having been so long blind to my charms--you and these other men of our set who'll doubtless be clamorous now."
"If you'd been less anxious to please," suggested he bitterly, "and more courageous about being your own real self, you'd not have got yourself into this mess."
"Ah--but that wasn't my fault," replied she absently. "It was the fault of my training. Ever since I can remember I've been taught to be on my guard, lest the men shouldn't like me." In her new freedom she looked back tranquilly upon the struggle she was at last emancipated from, and philosophized about it. "What a mistake mothers make in putting worry about getting a husband into their daughters' heads. Believe me, Grant, that dread makes wretched what ought to be the happiest time of a girl's life."
"Rita," he pleaded, "stop this nonsense, and say you'll marry me."
"No, thanks," said she. "I've chosen. And I'm well content."
She gave him a last tantalizing look and went out on the veranda, to go along it to the outdoor stairway. Arkwright gazed after her through a fierce conflict of emotions. Was she really in earnest? Could it be possible that Josh Craig had somehow got a hold over her? "Or, is it that she doesn't trust me, thinks I'd back down if she were to throw him over and rely on me?" No, there was something positively for Craig in her tone and expression. She was really intending to marry him. Grant shuddered. "If she only realized what marrying a man of that sort means!" he exclaimed, half aloud. "But she doesn't. Only a woman who has been married can appreciate what sort of a hell for sensitive nerves and refined tastes marriage can be made."
"Ah--Mr. Arkwright!"
At this interruption in a woman's voice--the voice he disliked and dreaded above all others--he startled and turned to face old Madam Bowker in rustling black silk, with haughty casque of gray-white hair and ebon staff carried firmly, well forward. Grant bowed. "How d'ye do, Mrs. Bowker?" said he with respectful deference. What he would have thought was the impossible had come to pass. He was glad to see her. "She'll put an end to this nonsense--this nightmare," said he to himself.
Madam Bowker had Williams, the butler, and a maid-servant in her train. She halted, gazed round the room; she pointed with the staff to the floor a few feet from the window and a little back. "Place my chair there," commanded she.
The butler and the maid hastened to move a large carved and gilded chair to the indicated spot. Madam Bowker seated herself with much ceremony.
"Now!" said she. "We will rearrange the room. Bring that sofa from the far corner to the other side of this window, and put the tea-table in front of it. Put two chairs where the sofa was; arrange the other chairs--" And she indicated the places with her staff.
While the room was still in confusion Mrs. Severence entered. "What is it, Mamma?" she asked.
"Simply trying to make this frightful room a little less frightful."
"Don't you think the pictures should be rehung to suit the new arrangement, ma'am?" suggested Arkwright.
Madam Bowker, suspicious of jest, looked sharply at him. He seemed serious. "You are right," said she.
"But people will be coming in a few minutes," pleaded Roxana.
"Then to-morrow," said Madam Bowker reluctantly. "That will do, Williams--that will do, Betty. And, Betty, you must go at once and make yourself neat. You've had on that cap two days."
"No, indeed, ma'am!" protested Betty.
"Then it was badly done up. Roxana, how can you bear to live in such a slovenly way?"
"Will you have tea now, Mamma?" was Roxana's diplomatic reply.
"Yes," answered the old lady.
"Tea, Mr. Arkwright?"
"Thanks, no, Mrs. Severence. I'm just going. I merely looked in to--to congratulate Rita."
Madam Bowker clutched her staff. "To congratulate my granddaughter? Upon what, pray?"
Arkwright simulated a look of surprise. "Upon her engagement."
"Her WHAT?" demanded the old lady, while Roxana sat holding a lump of sugar suspended between bowl and cup.
"Her engagement to Josh Craig."
"No such thing!" declared the old lady instantly. "Really, sir, it is disgraceful that MY granddaughter's name should be associated in ANY connection with such a person."
Here Margaret entered the room by the French windows by which she had left. She advanced slowly and gracefully, amid a profound silence. Just as she reached the tea-table her grandmother said in a terrible voice: "Margaret!"
"Yes, Grandmother," responded Margaret smoothly, without looking at her.
"Mr. Arkwright here has brought in a scandalous story about your being engaged to that--that Josh person--the clerk in one of the departments. Do you know him?"
"Yes, Grandma. But not very well."
Madam Bowker glanced triumphantly at Arkwright; he was gazing amazedly at Margaret.
"You see, Grant," said Roxana, with her foolish, pleasant laugh, "there is nothing in it."
"In what?" asked Margaret innocently, emptying the hot water from her cup.
"In the story of your engagement, dear," said her mother.
"Oh, yes, there is," replied Margaret with a smiling lift of her brows. "It's quite true." Then, suddenly drawing herself up, she wheeled on Grant with a frown as terrible as her grandmother's own. "Be off!" she said imperiously.
Arkwright literally shrank from the room. As he reached the door he saw her shiver and heard her mutter, "Reptile!"
|
{
"id": "4929"
}
|
11
|
MADAM BOWKER HEARS THE NEWS
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In the midst of profound hush Madam Bowker was charging her heavy artillery, to train it upon and demolish the engagement certainly, and probably Margaret, too. Just as she was about to open fire callers were ushered in. As luck had it they were the three Stillwater girls, hastily made-over Westerners, dressed with great show of fashion in what purported to be imported French hats and gowns. An expert eye, however, would instantly have pierced the secret of this formidable array of plumes and furbelows. The Stillwaters fancied they had exquisite taste and real genius in the art of dress. Those hats were made at home, were adaptations of the imported hats--adaptations of the kind that "see" the original and "go it a few better." As for the dresses, the Stillwaters had found one of those treasures dear to a certain kind of woman, had found a "woman just round the corner, and not established yet"--"I assure you, my dear, she takes a mental picture of the most difficult dress to copy, and you'd never know hers from the original--and SO reasonable!"
In advance came Molly Stillwater, the youngest and prettiest and the most aggressively dressed because her position as family beauty made it incumbent upon her to lead the way in fashion. As soon as the greetings were over--cold, indeed, from Madam Bowker, hysterical from Roxana--Molly gushed out: "Just as we left home, Josh Craig came tearing in. If possible, madder than a hatter--yes--really--" Molly was still too young to have learned to control the mechanism of her mouth; thus, her confused syntax seemed the result of the alarming and fascinating contortions of her lips and tongue--"and, when we told him where we were going he shouted out, 'Give Rita my love.'"
Margaret penetrated to the purpose to anger her against Craig. Was not Craig intended by Mrs. Stillwater for Jessie, the eldest and only serious one of the three? And was not his conduct, his hanging about Margaret and his shying off from Jessie, thoroughly up on public questions and competent to discuss them with anybody--was not his conduct most menacing to her plans? Mrs. Stillwater, arranging for matrimony for all her daughters, had decided that Jess was hopeless except as a "serious woman," since she had neither figure nor face, nor even abundant hair, which alone is enough to entangle some men. So, Jess had been set to work at political economy, finance, at studying up the political situations; and, if started right and not interfered with, she could give as good account of her teaching as any phonograph.
Margaret welcomed Molly's message from Craig with a sweet smile. An amused glance at the thunderous face of her grandmother, and she said, "Perhaps it would interest you, dear, to know that he and I are engaged."
What could Madam Bowker say? What could she do? Obviously, nothing. The three Stillwaters became hysterical. Their comments and congratulations were scraps of disjointed nonsense, and they got away under cover of more arrivals, in as great disorder as if the heavy guns Madam Bowker had stacked to the brim for Margaret had accidentally discharged into them. Madam Bowker could wait no longer. "Margaret," said she, "help me to my carriage."
Mrs. Severence gave her difficult daughter an appealing glance, as if she feared the girl would cap the climax of rebellion by flatly refusing; but Margaret said sweetly: "Yes, Grandma."
The two left the room, the old lady leaning heavily on her granddaughter and wielding her ebony staff as if getting her arm limbered to use it. In the hall, she said fiercely, "To your room," and waved her staff toward the stairway.
Margaret hesitated, shrugged her shoulders. She preceding, and Madam Bowker ascending statelily afterward, they went up and were presently alone in Margaret's pretty rose and gold boudoir, with the outer door closed.
"Now!" exclaimed Madam Bowker.
"Not so loud, please," suggested the tranquil Margaret, "unless you wish Selina to hear." She pointed to the door ajar. "She's sewing in there."
"Send the woman away," commanded the old lady.
But Margaret merely closed the door. "Well, Grandmother?"
"Sit at this desk," ordered the old lady, pointing with the ebony staff, "and write a note to that man Craig, breaking the engagement. Say you have thought it over and have decided it is quite impossible. And to-morrow morning you go to New York with me."
Margaret seated herself on the lounge instead. "I'll do neither," said she.
The old lady waved the end of her staff in a gesture of lofty disdain. "As you please. But, if you do not, your allowance is withdrawn."
"Certainly," said Margaret. "I assumed that."
Madam Bowker gazed at her with eyes like tongues of flame. "And how do you expect to live?" she inquired.
"That is OUR affair," replied the girl. "You say you are done with me. Well, so am I done with you."
It was, as Margaret had said, because she was not afraid of her grandmother that that formidable old lady respected her; and as she was one of those who can give affection only where they give respect, she loved Margaret--loved her with jealous and carping tenacity. The girl's words of finality made her erect and unyielding soul shiver in a sudden dreary blast of loneliness, that most tragic of all the storms that sweep the ways of life. It was in the tone of the anger of love with the beloved that she cried, "How DARE you engage yourself to such a person!"
"You served notice on me that I must marry," replied the girl, her own tone much modified. "He was the chance that offered."
"The chance!" Madam Bowker smiled with caustic scorn, "He's not a chance."
"You ordered me to marry. I am marrying. And you are violating your promise. But I expected it."
"My promise? What do you mean?"
"You told me if I'd marry you'd continue my allowance after marriage. You even hinted you'd increase it."
"But this is no marriage. I should consider a connection between such a man and a Severence as a mere vulgar intrigue. You might as well run away with a coachman. I have known few coachmen so ill-bred--so repellent--as this Craig."
Margaret laughed cheerfully. "He isn't what you'd call polished, is he?"
Her grandmother studied her keenly. "Margaret," she finally said, "this is some scheme of yours. You are using this engagement to help you to something else."
"I refused Grant Arkwright just before you came."
"You--refused--Arkwright?"
"My original plan was to trap Grant by making him jealous of Craig. But I abandoned it."
"And why?"
"A remnant of decency."
"I doubt it," said the old lady.
"So should I in the circumstances. We're a pretty queer lot, aren't we? You, for instance--on the verge of the grave, and breaking your promise to me as if a promise were nothing."
Mrs. Bowker's ebon staff twitched convulsively and her terrible eyes were like the vent-holes of internal fires; but she managed her rage with a skill that was high tribute to her will-power. "You are right in selecting this clown--this tag-rag," said she. "You and he, I see, are peculiarly suited to each other.... My only regret is that in my blind affection I have wasted all these years and all those thousands of dollars on you." Madam Bowker affected publicly a fine scorn of money and all that thereto appertained; but privately she was a true aristocrat in her reverence and consideration for that which is the bone and blood of aristocracy.
"Nothing so stupid and silly as regret," said Margaret, with placid philosophy of manner. "I, too, could think of things I regret. But I'm putting my whole mind on the future."
"Future!" Madam Bowker laughed. "Why, my child, you have no future. Within two years you'll either be disgracefully divorced, or the wife of a little lawyer in a little Western town."
"But I'll have my husband and my children. What more can a woman ask?"
The old lady scrutinized her granddaughter's tranquil, delicate face in utter amazement. She could find nothing on which to base a hope that the girl was either jesting or posing. "Margaret," she cried, "are you CRAZY?"
"Do you think a desire for a home, and a husband who adores one, and children whom one adores is evidence of insanity?"
"Yes, you are mad--quite mad!"
"I suppose you think that fretting about all my seasons without an offer worth accepting has driven me out of my senses. Sometimes I think so, too." And Margaret lapsed into abstracted, dreamy silence.
"Do you pretend that you--you--care for--this person?" inquired the old lady.
"I can't discuss him with you, Grandmother," replied the girl. "You know you have washed your hands of me."
"I shall never give up," cried the old lady vehemently, "until I rescue you. I'll not permit this disgrace. I'll have him driven out of Washington."
"Yes, you might try that," said Margaret. "I don't want him to stay here. I am sick--sick to death--of all this. I loathe everything I ever liked. It almost seems to me I'd prefer living in a cabin in the back-woods. I've just wakened to what it really means--no love, no friendship, only pretense and show, rivalry in silly extravagance, aimless running to and fro among people that care nothing for one, and that one cares nothing for. If you could see it as I see it you'd understand."
But Madam Bowker had thought all her life in terms of fashion and society. She was not in the least impressed. "Balderdash!" said she with a jab at the floor with the ebony staff. "Don't pose before me. You know very well you're marrying this man because you believe he will amount to a great deal."
Margaret beamed upon her grandmother triumphantly, as if she had stepped into a trap that had been set for her. "And your only reason for being angry," cried she, "is that you don't believe he will."
"I know he won't. He can't. Stillwater has kept him solely because that unspeakable wife of his hopes to foist their dull, ugly eldest girl on him."
"You think a man as shrewd as Stillwater would marry his daughter to a nobody?"
"It's useless for you to argue, Margaret," snapped the old lady. "The man's impossible--for a Severence. I shall stop the engagement."
"You can't," rejoined Margaret calmly. "My mind is made up. And along with several other qualities, Grandmother, dear, I've inherited your will."
"Will without wit--is there anything worse? But I know you are not serious. It is merely a mood--the result of a profound discouragement. My dear child, let me assure you it is no unusual thing for a girl of your position, yet without money, to have no offers at all. You should not believe the silly lies your girlfriends tell about having bushels of offers. No girl has bushels of offers unless she makes herself common and familiar with all kinds of men--and takes their loose talk seriously. Most men wouldn't dare offer themselves to you. The impudence of this Craig! You should have ordered him out of your presence."
Margaret, remembering how Craig had seized her, smiled.
"I admit I have been inconsiderate in urging you so vigorously," continued her grandmother. "I thought I had observed a tendency to fritter. I wished you to stop trifling with Grant Arkwright--or, rather, to stop his trifling with you. Come, now, my dear, let me put an end to this engagement. And you will marry Grant, and your future will be bright and assured."
Margaret shook her head. "I have promised," said she, and her expression would have thrilled Lucia.
Madam Bowker was singularly patient with this evidence of sentimentalism. "That's fine and noble of you. But you didn't realize what a grave step you were taking, and you--" "Yes, but I did. If ever anything was deliberate on a woman's part, that engagement was." A bright spot burned in each of the girl's cheeks. "He didn't really propose. I pretended to misunderstand him."
Her grandmother stared.
"You needn't look at me like that," exclaimed Margaret. "You know very well that Grandfather Bowker never would have married you if you hadn't fairly compelled him. I heard him tease you about it once when I was a little girl."
It was Madam Bowker's turn to redden. She deigned to smile. "Men are so foolish," observed she, "that women often have to guide them. There would be few marriages of the right sort if the men were not managed."
Margaret nodded assent. "I realize that now," said she. Earnestly: "Grandmother, try to make the best of this engagement of mine. When a woman, a woman as experienced and sensible as I am, makes up her mind a certain man is the man for her, is it wise to interfere?"
Madam Bowker, struck by the searching wisdom of this remark, was silenced for the moment. In the interval of thought she reflected that she would do well to take counsel of herself alone in proceeding to break this engagement. "You are on the verge of making a terrible misstep, child," said she with a gentleness she had rarely shown even to her favorite grandchild. "I shall think it over, and you will think it over. At least, promise me you will not see Craig for a few days."
Margaret hesitated. Her grandmother, partly by this unusual gentleness, partly by inducing the calmer reflection of the second thought, had shaken her purpose more than she would have believed possible. "If I've made a mistake," said she, "isn't seeing him the best way to realize it?"
"Yes," instantly and emphatically admitted the acute old lady. "See him, by all means. See as much of him as possible. And in a few days you will be laughing at yourself--and very much ashamed."
"I wonder," said Margaret aloud, but chiefly to herself.
And Madam Bowker, seeing the doubt in her face, only a faint reflection of the doubt that must be within, went away content.
|
{
"id": "4929"
}
|
12
|
PUTTING DOWN A MUTINY
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Margaret made it an all but inflexible rule not to go out, but to rest and repair one evening in each week; that was the evening, under the rule, but she would have broken the rule had any opportunity offered. Of course, for the first time since the season began, no one sent or telephoned to ask her to fill in at the last moment. She half-expected Craig, though she knew he was to be busy; he neither came nor called up. She dined moodily with the family, sat surlily in a corner of the veranda until ten o'clock, hid herself in bed. She feared she would have a sleepless night. But she had eaten no dinner; and, as indigestion is about the only thing that will keep a healthy human being awake, she slept dreamlessly, soundly, not waking until Selina slowly and softly opened the inner blinds of her bedroom at eight the next morning.
There are people who are wholly indifferent about their surroundings, and lead the life dictated by civilized custom only because they are slaves of custom, Margaret was not one of these. She not only adopted all the comforts and luxuries that were current, she also spent much tune in thinking out new luxuries, new refinements upon those she already had. She was through, and through the luxurious idler; she made of idling a career--pursued it with intelligent purpose where others simply drifted, yawning when pastimes were not provided for them. She was as industrious and ingenious at her career as a Craig at furthering himself and his ideas in a public career.
Like the others of her class she left the care of her mind to chance. As she had a naturally good mind and a bird-like instinct for flitting everywhere, picking out the food from the chaff, she made an excellent showing even in the company of serious people. But that was accident. Her person was her real care. To her luxurious, sensuous nature every kind of pleasurable physical sensation made keen appeal, and she strove in every way to make it keener. She took the greatest care of her health, because health meant beauty and every nerve and organ in condition to enjoy to its uttermost capacity.
Because of this care it was often full three hours and half between the entrance of Selina and her own exit, dressed and ready for the day. And those three hours and a half were the happiest of her day usually, because they were full of those physical sensations in which she most delighted. Her first move, after Selina had awakened her, was to spend half an hour in "getting the yawns out." She had learned this interesting, pleasant and amusing trick from a baby in a house where she had once spent a week. She would extend herself at full length in the bed, and then slowly stretch each separate muscle of arm and leg, of foot and hand, of neck and shoulders and waist. This stretching process was accompanied by a series of prolonged, profound, luxurious yawns.
The yawning exercise completed, she rose and took before a long mirror a series of other exercises, some to strengthen her waist, others to keep her back straight and supple, others to make firm the contour of her face and throat. A half-hour of this, then came her bath. This was no hurried plunge, drying and away, but a long and elaborate function at which Selina assisted. There had to be water of three temperatures; a dozen different kinds of brushes, soaps, towels and other apparatus participated. When it was finished Margaret's skin glowed and shone, was soft and smooth and exhaled a delicious odor of lilacs. During the exercises Selina had been getting ready the clothes for the day--everything fresh throughout, and everything delicately redolent of the same essence of lilacs with which Selina had rubbed her from hair to tips of fingers and feet. The clothes were put on slowly, for Margaret delighted in the feeling of soft silks and laces being drawn over her skin. She let Selina do every possible bit of work, and gave herself up wholly to the joy of being cared for.
"There isn't any real reason why I shouldn't be doing this for you, instead of your doing it for me--is there, Selina?" mused she aloud.
"Goodness gracious, Miss Rita!" exclaimed Selina, horrified. "I wouldn't have it done for anything. I was brought up to be retiring about dressing. It was my mother's dying boast that no man, nor no woman, had ever seen her, a grown woman, except fully dressed."
"Really?" said Margaret absently. She stood up, surveyed herself in the triple mirror--back, front, sides. "So many women never look at themselves in the back," observed she, "or know how their skirts hang about the feet. I believe in dressing for all points of view."
"You certainly are just perfect," said the adoring Selina, not the least part of her admiring satisfaction due to the fact that the toilette was largely the creation of her own hands. "And you smell like a real lady--not noisy, like some that comes here. I hate to touch their wraps or to lay 'em down in the house. But you--It's one of them smells that you ain't sure whether you smelt it or dreamed it."
"Pretty good, Selina!" said Margaret. She could not but be pleased with such a compliment, one that could have been suggested only by the truth. "The hair went up well this morning, didn't it?"
"Lovely--especially in the back. It looks as if it had been marcelled, without that common, barbery stiffness-like."
"Yes, the back is good. And I like this blouse. I must wear it oftener."
"You can't afford to favor it too much, Miss Rita. You know you've got over thirty, all of them beauties."
"Some day, when I get time, we must look through my clothes. I want to give you a lot of them.... What DOES become of the time? Here it is, nearly eleven. See if breakfast has come up. I'll finish dressing afterward if it has."
It had. It was upon a small table in the rose and gold boudoir. And the sun, shining softly in at the creeper-shaded window, rejoiced in the surpassing brightness and cleanness of the dishes of silver and thinnest porcelain and cut glass. Margaret thought eating in bed a "filthy, foreign fad," and never indulged in it. She seated herself lazily, drank her coffee, and ate her roll and her egg slowly, deliberately, reading her letters and glancing at the paper. A charming picture she made--the soft, white Valenciennes of her matinee falling away from her throat and setting off the clean, smooth healthiness of her skin, the blackness of her vital hair; from the white lace of her petticoat's plaited flounces peered one of her slim feet, a satin slipper upon the end of it. At the top of the heap of letters lay one she would have recognized, she thought, had she never seen the handwriting before.
"Sure to be upsetting," reflected she; and she laid it aside, glancing now and then at the bold, nervous, irregular hand and speculating about the contents and about the writer.
She had gone to bed greatly disturbed in mind as to whether she was doing well to marry the obstreperous Westerner. "He fascinates me in a wild, weird sort of a way when I'm with him," she had said to herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him--like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough for--for marriage? Wouldn't I get horribly tired? Wouldn't Grant and humdrum be better? less wearying?" And when she awakened she found her problem all but solved. "I'll send him packing and take Grant," she found herself saying, "unless some excellent reason for doing otherwise appears. Grandmother was right. Engaging myself to him was a mood." Once more she was all for luxury and ease and calmness, for the pleasant, soothing, cut-and-dried thing. "A cold bath or a rough rub-down now and then, once in a long while, is all very well. It makes one appreciate comfort and luxury more. But that sort of thing every day--many times each day--" Margaret felt her nerves rebelling as at the stroking of velvet the wrong way.
She read all her other letters, finished her toilette, had on her hat, and was having Selina put on her boots when she opened Craig's letter and read: "I must have been out of my mind this afternoon. You are wildly fascinating, but you are not for me. If I led you to believe that I wished to marry you, pray forget it. We should make each other unhappy and, worse still, uncomfortable.
"Do I make myself clear? We are not engaged. I hope you will marry Arkwright; a fine fellow, in every way suited to you, and, I happen to know, madly in love with you. Please try to forgive me. If you have any feeling for me stronger than friendship you will surely get over it.
"Anyhow, we couldn't marry. That is settled.
"Let me have an answer to this. I shall be upset until I hear." No beginning. No end. Just a bald, brutal casting-off. A hint--more than a hint--of a fear that she would try to hold him in spite of himself. She smiled--small, even teeth clenched and eyelids contracted cruelly--as she read a second time, with this unflattering suggestion obtruding. The humiliation of being jilted! And by such a man! --the private shame--the public disgrace--She sprang up, crunching her foot hard down upon one of Selina's hands. "What is it?" said she angrily, at her maid's cry of pain.
"Nothing, Miss," replied Selina, quickly hiding the wounded hand. "You moved so quick I hadn't time to draw away. That was all."
"Then finish that boot!"
Selina had to expose the hand, Margaret looked down at it indifferently, though her heel had torn the skin away from the edge of the palm and had cut into the flesh.
"Hurry!" she ordered fiercely, as Selina fumbled and bungled.
She twitched and frowned with impatience while Selina finished buttoning the boot, then descended and called Williams. "Get me Mr. Craig on the telephone," she said.
"He's been calling you up several times to-day, ma'am,--" "Ah!" exclaimed Margaret, eyes flashing with sudden delight.
"But we wouldn't disturb you."
"That was right," said Margaret. She was beaming now, was all sunny good humor. Even her black hair seemed to glisten in her simile. So! He had been calling up! Poor fool, not to realize that she would draw the correct inference from this anxiety.
"Shall I call him?" "No. I'll wait. Probably he'll call again soon. I'll be in the library."
She had not been roaming restlessly about there many minutes before Williams appeared "He's come, himself, ma'am," said he. "I told him I didn't know whether you'd be able to see him or not."
"Thank you, Williams," said Margaret sweetly. "Order the carriage to come round at once. Leave Mr. Craig in the drawing-room. I'll speak to him on the way out."
She dashed upstairs. "Selina! Selina!" she called. And when Selina came: "Let me see that hand. I hurt you because I got news that went through me like a knife. You understand, don't you?"
"It was nothing, Miss Rita," protested Selina. "I'd forgot it myself already."
But Margaret insisted on assuring herself with her own eyes, got blood on her white gloves, had to change them. As she descended she was putting on the fresh pair--a new pair. How vastly more than even the normal is a man's disadvantage in a "serious" interview with a woman if she is putting on new gloves! She is perfectly free to seem occupied or not, as suits her convenience; and she can, by wrestling with the gloves, interrupt him without speech, distract his attention, fiddle his thoughts, give him a sense of imbecile futility, and all the time offer him no cause for resentment against her. He himself seems in the wrong; she is merely putting On her gloves.
She was wrong in her guess that Arkwright had been at him. He had simply succumbed to his own fears and forebodings, gathered in force as soon as he was not protected from them by the spell of her presence. The mystery of the feminine is bred into men from earliest infancy, is intensified when passion comes and excites the imagination into fantastic activity about women. No man, not the most experienced, not the most depraved, is ever able wholly to divest himself of this awe, except, occasionally, in the case of some particular woman. Awe makes one ill at ease; the woman who, by whatever means, is able to cure a man of his awe of her, to make him feel free to be himself, is often able to hold him, even though he despises her or is indifferent to her; on the other hand, the woman who remains an object of awe to a man is certain to lose him. He may be proud to have her as his wife, as the mother of his children, but he will seek some other woman to give her the place of intimacy in his life.
At the outset on an acquaintance between a man and a woman his awe for her as the embodiment of the mystery feminine is of great advantage to her; it often gets him for her as a husband. In this particular case of Margaret Severence and Joshua Craig, while his awe of her was an advantage, it was also a disadvantage. It attracted him; it perilously repelled him. He liked to release his robust imagination upon those charms of hers--those delicate, refined beauties that filled him with longings, delicious in their intensity, longings as primeval in kind as well as in force as those that set delirious the savage hordes from the German forests when they first poured down over the Alps and beheld the jewels and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient civilization. But at the same time he had the unmistakable, the terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries? Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a freak of courage, a drunken man's deed, wholly beyond the nerve of sobriety.
Then, on top of all this awe was his reverence for her as an aristocrat, a representative of people who had for generations been far removed above the coarse realities of the only life he knew. And it was this adoration of caste that determined him. He might overcome his awe of her person and dress, of her tangible trappings; but how could he ever hope to bridge the gulf between himself and her intangible superiorities? He was ashamed of himself, enraged against himself for this feeling of worm gazing up at star. It made a mockery of all his arrogant, noisy protestations of equality and democracy.
"The fault is not in my ideas," thought he; "THEY'RE all right. The fault's in me--damned snob that I am!"
Clearly, if he was to be what he wished, if he was to become what he had thought he was, he must get away from this sinister influence, from this temptation that had made him, at first onset, not merely stumble, but fall flat and begin to grovel. "She is a superior woman--that is no snob notion of mine," reflected he. "But from the way I falter and get weak in the knees, she ought to be superhuman--which she isn't, by any means. No, there's only one thing to do--keep away from her. Besides, I'd feel miserable with her about as my wife." My wife! The very words threw him into a cold sweat.
So the note was written, was feverishly dispatched.
No sooner was it sent than it was repented. "What's the matter with me?" demanded he of himself, as his courage came swaggering back, once the danger had been banished. "Why, the best is not too good for me. She is the best, and mighty proud she ought to be of a man who, by sheer force of character, has lifted himself to where I am and who, is going to be what I shall be. Mighty proud! There are only two realities--money and brains. I've certainly got more brains than she or any of her set; as for money, she hasn't got that. The superiority is all on my side. I'm the one that ought to feel condescending."
What had he said in his note? Recalling it as well as he could--for it was one, the last, of more than a dozen notes he had written in two hours of that evening--recalling phrases he was pretty sure he had put into the one he had finally sent, in despair of a better, it seemed to him he had given her a wholly false impression--an impression of her superiority and of his fear and awe. That would never do. He must set her right, must show her he was breaking the engagement only because she was not up to his standard. Besides, he wished to see her again to make sure he had been victimized into an engagement by a purely physical, swiftly-evanescent imagining. Yes, he must see her, must have a look at her, must have a talk with her.
"It's the only decent, courageous thing to do in the circumstances. Sending that note looked like cowardice--would be cowardice if I didn't follow it up with a visit. And whatever else I am, surely I'm not a coward!"
Margaret had indulged in no masculine ingenuities of logic. Woman-like, she had gone straight to the practical point: Craig had written instead of coming--he was, therefore, afraid of her. Having written he had not fled, but had come--he was, therefore, attracted by her still. Obviously the game lay in her own hands, for what more could woman ask than that a man be both afraid and attracted? A little management and she not only would save herself from the threatened humiliation of being jilted--jilted by an uncouth nobody of a Josh Craig! --but also would have him in durance, to punish his presumption at her own good pleasure as to time and manner. If Joshua Craig, hardy plodder in the arduous pathway from plowboy to President, could have seen what was in the mind so delicately and so aristocratically entempled in that graceful, slender, ultra-feminine body of Margaret Severence's, as she descended the stairs, putting fresh gloves upon her beautiful, idle hands, he would have borrowed wings of the wind and would have fled as from a gorgon.
But as she entered the room nothing could have seemed less formidable except to the heart. Her spring dress--she was wearing it for the first time--was of a pale green, suggesting the draperies of islands of enchantment. Its lines coincided with the lines of her figure. Her hat, trimmed to match, formed a magic halo for her hair; and it, in turn, was the entrancing frame in which her small, quiet, pallid face was set--that delicate, sensitive face, from which shone, now softly and now brilliantly, those hazel eyes a painter could have borrowed for a wood nymph. In the doorway, before greeting him, she paused.
"Williams," she called, and Craig was thrilled by her "high-bred" accent, that seemed to him to make of the English language a medium different from the one he used and heard out home.
"Yes, ma'am," came the answer in the subtly-deferential tone of the aristocracy of menialdom, conjuring for Craig, with the aid of the woman herself and that aristocratic old room, a complete picture of the life of upper-class splendor.
"Did you order the carriage, as I asked?"
"Yes, ma'am; it's at the door."
"Thank you." And Margaret turned upon an overwhelmed and dazzled Craig. He did not dream that she had calculated it all with a view to impressing him--and, if he had, the effect would hardly have been lessened. Whether planned or not, were not toilette and accent, and butler and carriage, all realities? Nor did he suspect shrewd calculations upon snobbishness when she said: "I was in such haste to dress that I hurt my poor maid's hand as she was lacing my boot"--she thrust out one slender, elegantly-clad foot--"no, buttoning it, I mean." Oh, these ladies, these ladies of the new world--and the old--that are so used to maids and carriages and being waited upon that they no more think of display in connection with them than one would think of boasting two legs or two eyes!
The advantage from being in the act of putting on gloves began at the very outset. It helped to save her from deciding a mode of salutation. She did not salute him at all. It made the meeting a continuation, without break, of their previous meeting.
"How do you like my new dress?" she asked, as she drew the long part of her glove up her round, white arm.
"Beautiful," he stammered.
From the hazel eyes shot a shy-bold glance straight into his; it was as if those slim, taper fingers of hers had twanged the strings of the lyre of his nerves. "You despise all this sort of trumpery, don't you?"
"Sometimes a man says things he don't mean," he found tongue to utter.
"I understand," said she sympathetically, and he knew she meant his note. But he was too overwhelmed by his surroundings, by her envelope of aristocracy, too fascinated by her physical charm, too flattered by being on such terms with such a personage, to venture to set her right. Also, she gave him little chance; for in almost the same breath she went on: "I've been in such moods! --since yesterday afternoon--like the devils in Milton, isn't it? --that are swept from lands of ice to lands of fire? --or is it in Dante? I never can remember. We must go straight off, for I'm late. You can come, too--it's only a little meeting about some charity or other. All rich people, of course--except poor me. I'm sure I don't know why they asked me. I can give little besides advice. How handsome you are to-day, Joshua!"
It was the first time she had called him by his first name. She repeated it--"Joshua--Joshua"--as when one hits upon some particularly sweet and penetrating chord at the piano, and strikes it again, and yet again.
They were in the carriage, being whirled toward the great palace of Mrs. Whitson, the latest and grandest of plutocratic monuments that have arisen upon the ruins of the old, old-fashioned American Washington. And she talked incessantly--a limpid, sparkling, joyous strain. And either her hand sought his or his hers; at any rate, he found himself holding her hand. They were almost there before he contrived to say, very falteringly: "You got my note?"
She laughed gayly. "Oh, yes--and your own answer to it, Joshua--my love"--the "my love" in a much lower, softer tone, with suggestion of sudden tears trembling to fall.
"But I meant it," he said, though in tones little like any he was used to hearing from his own lips. But he would not dare look himself in the face again if he did not make at least a wriggle before surrendering.
"We mean many things in as many moods," said she. "I knew it was only a mood. I knew you'd come. I've such a sense of implicit reliance on you. You are to me like the burr that shields the nut from all harm. How secure and cozy and happy the nut must feel in its burr. As I've walked through the woods in the autumn I've often thought of that, and how, if I ever married--" A wild impulse to seize her and crush her, as one crushes the ripe berry for its perfume and taste, flared in his eyes. She drew away to check it. "Not now," she murmured, and her quick breath and flush were not art, but nature. "Not just now--Joshua."
"You make me--insane," he muttered between his teeth. "God! --I DO love you!"
They were arrived; were descending. And she led him, abject and in chains, into the presence of Mrs. Whitson and the most fashionable of the fashionable set. "So you've brought him along?" cried Mrs. Whitson. "Well, I congratulate you, Mr. Craig. It's very evident you have a shrewd eye for the prizes of life, and a strong, long reach to grasp them."
Craig, red and awkward, laughed hysterically, flung out a few meaningless phrases. Margaret murmured: "Perhaps you'd rather go?" She wished him to go, now that she had exhibited him.
"Yes--for Heaven's sake!" he exclaimed. He was clutching for his braggart pretense of ease in "high society" like a drowning man scooping armsful of elusive water.
She steered her captive in her quiet, easeful manner toward the door, sent him forth with a farewell glance and an affectionate interrogative, "This afternoon, at half-past four?" that could not be disobeyed.
The mutiny was quelled. The mutineer was in irons. She had told him she felt quite sure about him; and it was true, in a sense rather different from what the words had conveyed to him. But it was of the kind of security that takes care to keep the eye wakeful and the powder dry. She felt she did not have him yet where she could trust him out of her sight and could herself decide whether the engagement was to be kept or broken.
"Why, my dear," said Mrs. Whitson, "he positively feeds out of your hand! And such a wild man he seemed!"
Margaret, in the highest of high spirits, laughed with pleasure.
"A good many," pursued Mrs. Whitson, "think you are throwing yourself away for love. But as I size men up--and my husband says I'm a wonder at it--I think he'll be biggest figure of all at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue or the other. Perhaps, first one end, then at the other."
"I'm glad to hear you say that," cried Margaret, with the keen enthusiasm with which, in time of doubt, we welcome an ally to our own private judgment. "But," she hastened to add, with veiled eye and slightly tremulous lip, "I'm ready to take whatever comes."
"That's right! That's right!" exclaimed Mrs. Whitson, a tender and dreamy sentimentalist except in her own affairs. "Love is best!"
"Love is best," echoed Margaret.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
|
13
|
A MEMORABLE MEETING
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In that administration the man "next" the President was his Secretary of the Treasury, John Branch, cold and smooth and able, secreting, in his pale-gray soul, an icy passion for power more relentless than heat ever bred. To speak of him as unscrupulous would be like attributing moral quality to a reptile. For him principle did not exist, except as an eccentricity of some strangely-constructed men which might be used to keep them down. Life presented itself to him as a series of mathematical problems, as an examination in mathematics. To pass it meant a diploma as a success; to fail to pass meant the abysmal disgrace of obscurity. Cheating was permissible, but not to get caught at it. Otherwise Branch was the most amiable of men; and why should he not have been, his digestion being good, his income sufficient, his domestic relations admirable, and his reputation for ability growing apace? No one respected him, no one liked him; but every one admired him as an intellect moving quite unhampered of the restraints of conscience. In person he was rather handsome, the weasel type of his face being well concealed by fat and by judicious arrangements of mustache and side-whiskers. By profession he was a lawyer, and had been most successful as adviser to wholesale thieves on depredations bent or in search of immunity for depredations done. It was incomprehensible to him why he was unpopular with the masses. It irritated him that they could not appreciate his purely abstract point of view on life; it irritated him because his unpopularity with them meant that there were limits, and very narrow ones, to his ambition.
It was to John Branch that Madam Bowker applied when she decided that Joshua Craig must be driven from Washington. She sent for him, and he came promptly. He liked to talk to her because she was one of the few who thoroughly appreciated and sympathized with his ideas of success in life. Also, he respected her as a personage in Washington, and had it in mind to marry his daughter, as soon as she should be old enough, to one of her grandnephews.
"Branch," said the old lady, with an emphatic wave of the ebony staff, "I want that Craig man sent away from Washington."
"Josh, the joke?" said Branch with a slow, sneering smile that had an acidity in it interesting in one so even as he.
"That's the man. I want you to rid us of him. He has been paying attention to Margaret, and she is encouraging him."
"Impossible!" declared Branch. "Margaret is a sensible girl and Josh has nothing--never will have anything."
"A mere politician!" declared Madam Bowker. "Like hundreds of others that wink in with each administration and wink out with it. He will not succeed even at his own miserable political game--and, if he did, he would still be poor as poverty."
"I don't think you need worry about him and Margaret. I repeat, she is sensible--an admirable girl--admirably brought up. She has distinction. She has the right instincts."
Madam Bowker punctuated each of these compliments with a nod of her haughty head. "But," said she, "Craig has convinced her that he will amount to something."
"Ridiculous!" scoffed Branch, with an airy wave of the hand. But there was in his tone a concealment that set the shrewd old lady furtively to watching him.
"What do they think of him among the public men?" inquired she.
"He's laughed at there as everywhere."
Her vigilance was rewarded; as Branch said that, malignance hissed, ever so softly, in his suave voice, and the snake peered furtively from his calm, cold eyes. Old Madam Bowker had not lived at Washington's great green tables for the gamblers of ambition all those years without learning the significance of eyes and tone. For one politician to speak thus venomously of another was sure sign that that other was of consequence; for John Branch, a very Machiavelli at self-concealment and usually too egotistic to be jealous, thus to speak, and that, without being able to conceal his venom--"Can it be possible," thought the old lady, "that this Craig is about to be a somebody?" Aloud she said: "He is a preposterous creature. The vilest manners I've seen in three generations of Washington life. And what vanity, what assumptions! The first time I met him he lectured me as if I were a schoolgirl--lectured me about the idle, worthless life he said I lead. I decided not to recognize him next time I saw him. Up he came, and without noticing that I did not speak he poured out such insults that I was answering him before I realized it."
"He certainly is a most exasperating person."
"So Western! The very worst the West ever sent us. I don't understand how he happened to get about among decent people. Oh, I remember, it was Grant Arkwright who did it. Grant picked him up on one of his shooting trips."
"He is insufferable," said Branch.
"You must see that the President gets rid of him. I want it done at once. I assure you, John, my alarm is not imaginary. Margaret is very young, has a streak of sentimentality in her. Besides, you know how weak the strongest women are before a determined assault. If the other sex wasn't brought up to have a purely imaginary fear of them I don't know what would become of the world."
Branch smiled appreciatively but absently. "The same is true of men," said he. "The few who amount to anything--at least in active life--base their calculations on the timidity and folly of their fellows rather than upon their own abilities. About Craig--I'd like to oblige you, but--well, you see, there is--there are certain political exigencies--" "Nonsense!" interrupted the old lady. "I know the relative importance of officials. A mere understrapper like Craig is of no importance."
"The fact is," said Branch with great reluctance, "the President has taken a fancy to Craig."
Branch said it as if he hardly expected to be believed--and he wasn't. "To be perfectly frank," he went on, "you know the President, how easily alarmed he is. He's afraid Craig may, by some crazy turn of this crazy game of politics, develop into a Presidential possibility. Of course, it's quite absurd, but--" "The more reason for getting rid of him."
"The contrary. The President probably reasons that, if Craig has any element of danger in him the nearer he keeps him to himself the better. Craig, back in the West, would be free to grow. Here the President can keep him down if necessary. And I think our friend Stillwater will succeed in entangling him disastrously in some case sooner or later." There Branch laughed pleasantly, as at the finding of the correct solution to a puzzling problem in analytics or calculus.
"What a cowardly, shadow-fighting, shadow-dodging set you men are!" commented Madam Bowker. Though she did not show it, as a man certainly would, her brain was busy with a wholly different phase of the matter they were discussing.
"Isn't Stillwater going to retire?" she asked presently.
Branch startled. "Where did you hear that?" he demanded.
The old lady smiled. "There are no secrets in Washington," said she. "Who will be his successor?"
Branch's cold face showed annoyance. "You mustn't speak of it," replied he, "but the President is actually thinking of appointing Craig--in case the vacancy should occur. Of course, I am trying to make him see the folly of such a proceeding, but--You are right. Men are cowards. That insufferable upstart is actually bullying the President into a state of terror. Already he has compelled him to prosecute some of our best friends out in the Western country, and if the Courts weren't with us--" Branch checked himself abruptly. It was not the first time he had caught himself yielding to Washington's insidious custom of rank gossip about everything and everybody; but it was about his worst offense in that direction. "I'm getting to be as leaky as Josh Craig is--as he SEEMS to be," he muttered, so low, however, that not even her sharp ears caught it.
"So it is to be Attorney-General Craig," said the old lady, apparently abstracted but in reality catlike in watchfulness, and noting with secret pleasure Branch's anger at this explicit statement of the triumph of his hated rival.
"Isn't it frightful?" said Branch. "What is the country coming to?"
But she had lost interest in the conversation. She rid herself of Branch as speedily as the circumstances permitted. She wished to be alone, to revolve the situation slowly from the new viewpoint which Branch, half-unconsciously and wholly reluctantly, had opened up. She had lived a long time, had occupied a front bench overlooking one of the world's chief arenas of action. And, as she had an acute if narrow mind, she had learned to judge intelligently and to note those little signs that are, to the intelligent, the essentials, full of significance. She had concealed her amazement from Branch, but amazed she was, less at his news of Craig as a personage full of potentiality than at her own failure, through the inexcusable, manlike stupidity of personal pique, to discern the real man behind his mannerisms. "No wonder he has pushed so far, so fast," reflected she; for she appreciated that in a man of action manners should always be a cloak behind which his real campaign forms. It must be a fitting cloak, it should be a becoming one; But always a cloak. "He fools everybody, apparently," thought she. "The results of his secret work alarm them; then, along he comes, with his braggart, offensive manners, his childish posings, his peacock vanity, and they are lulled into false security. They think what he did was an accident that will not happen again. Why, he fooled even ME!"
That is always, with every human being, the supreme test, necessarily. Usually it means nothing. In this case of Cornelia Bowker it meant a great deal; for Cornelia Bowker was not easily fooled. The few who appear in the arena of ambition with no game to play, with only sentiment and principle to further, the few who could easily have fooled her cynical, worldly wisdom could safely be disregarded. She felt it was the part of good sense to look the young man over again, to make sure that the new light upon him was not false light. "He may be a mere accident in spite of his remarkable successes," thought she. "The same number sometimes comes a dozen times in succession at roulette." She sent her handy man, secretary, social manager and organizer, MAÎTRE D'HOTEL, companion, scout, gossip, purveyor of comfort, J. Worthington Whitesides, to seek out Craig and to bring him before her forthwith.
As Mr. Whitesides was a tremendous swell, in dress, in manner and in accent, Craig was much impressed when he came into his office in the Department of Justice. Whitesides' manner, the result of Madam Bowker's personal teaching, was one of his chief assets in maintaining and extending her social power. It gave the greatest solemnity and dignity to a summons from her, filled the recipient with pleasure and with awe, prepared him or her to be duly impressed and in a frame of mind suitable to Madam Bowker's purposes.
"I come from Madam Bowker," he explained to Craig, humbly conscious of his own disarray and toiler's unkemptness. "She would be greatly obliged if you will give her a few minutes of your time. She begs you to excuse the informality. She has sent me in her carriage, and it will be a great satisfaction to her if you will accompany me."
Craig's first impulse of snobbish satisfaction was immediately followed by misgivings. Perhaps this was not the formal acceptance of the situation by the terrible old woman as he had, on the spur, fancied. Perhaps she had sent for him to read him the riot act. Then he remembered that he was himself in doubt as to whether he wished to marry the young woman. All his doubts came flooding back, and his terrors--for, in some of its aspects, the idea of being married to this delicate flower of conventionality and gentle breeding was literally a terror to him. If he went he would be still further committing himself; all Washington would soon know of the journey in the carriage of Madam Bowker, the most imposing car of state that appeared in the streets of the Capital, a vast, lofty affair, drawn by magnificent horses, the coachman and footman in costly, quiet livery, high ensconced.
"No, thanks," said Josh, in his most bustlingly-bounderish manner. "Tell the old lady I'm up to my neck in work."
Mr. Whitesides was taken aback, but he was far too polished a gentleman to show it. "Perhaps later?" he suggested.
"I've promised Margaret to go out there later. If I get through here in time I'll look in on Mrs. Bowker on the way. But tell her not to wait at home for me."
Mr. Whitesides bowed, and was glad when the outer air was blowing off him the odor of this vulgar incident. "For," said he to himself, "there are some manners so bad that they have a distinct bad smell. He is 'the limit!' The little Severence must be infernally hard-pressed to think of taking him on. Poor child! She's devilish interesting. A really handsome bit, and smart, too--excellent ideas about dress. Yet somehow she's been marooned, overlooked, while far worse have been married well. Strange, that sort of thing. Somewhat my own case. I ought to have been able to get some girl with a bunch, yet I somehow always just failed to connect--until I got beyond the marrying age. Devilish lucky for me, too. I'm no end better off." And Mr. Whitesides, sitting correctly upon Madam Bowlder's gray silk cushions, reflected complacently upon his ample salary, his carefully built-up and most lucrative commissions, his prospects for a "smashing-good legacy when her majesty deigns to pass away."
At four Madam Bowker, angry yet compelled to a certain respect, heard with satisfaction that Craig had come. "Leave me, Whitesides," said she. "I wish to be quite alone with him throughout."
Thus Craig, entering the great, dim drawing-room, with its panel paintings and its lofty, beautifully-frescoed ceiling, found himself alone with her. She was throned upon a large, antique gold chair, ebony scepter in one hand, the other hand white and young-looking and in fine relief against the black silk of her skirt; she bent upon him a keen, gracious look. Her hazel eyes were bright as a bird's; they had the advantage over a bird's that they saw--saw everything in addition to seeming to see.
Looking at him she saw a figure whose surfaces were, indeed, not extraordinarily impressive. Craig's frame was good; that was apparent despite his clothes. He had powerful shoulders, not narrow, yet neither were they of the broad kind that suggest power to the inexpert and weakness and a tendency to lung trouble to the expert. His body was a trifle long for his arms and legs, which were thick and strong, like a lion's or a tiger's. He had a fine head, haughtily set; his eyes emphasized the impression of arrogance and force. He had the leader's beaklike nose, a handsome form of it, like Alexander's, not like Attila's. The mouth was the orator's--wide, full and flexible of lips, fluent. It was distinctly not an aristocratic mouth. It suggested common speech and common tastes--ruddy tastes--tastes for quantity rather than for quality. His skin, his flesh were also plainly not aristocratic; they lacked that fineness of grain, that finish of surface which are got only by eating the costly, rare, best and best-prepared food. His hair, a partially disordered mop over-hanging his brow at the middle, gave him fierceness of aspect. The old lady had more than a suspicion that the ferocity of that lock of hair and somewhat exaggerated forward thrust of the jaw were pose--in part, at least, an effort to look the valiant and relentless master of men--perhaps concealing a certain amount of irresolution. Certainly those eyes met hers boldly rather than fearlessly.
She extended her hand. He took it, and with an effort gave it the politician's squeeze--the squeeze that makes Hiram Hanks and Bill Butts grin delightedly and say to each other: "B'gosh, he ain't lost his axe-handle grip yet, by a durn sight, has he? --dog-gone him!"
Madam Bowker did not wince, though she felt like it. Instead she smiled--a faint, derisive smile that made Craig color uncomfortably.
"You young man," said she in her cool, high-bred tones, "you wish to marry my granddaughter."
Craig was never more afraid nor so impressed in his life. But there was no upflaming of physical passion here to betray him into yielding before her as he had before her granddaughter. "I do not," replied he arrogantly. "Your granddaughter wants to marry me."
Madam Bowker winced in spite of herself. A very sturdy-appearing specimen of manhood was this before her; she could understand how her granddaughter might be physically attracted. But that rude accent, that common mouth, those uncouth clothes, hand-me-downs or near it, that cheap look about the collar, about the wrists, about the ankles-- "We are absolutely unsuited to each other--in every way," continued Craig. "I tell her so. But she won't listen to me. The only reason I've come here is to ask you to take a hand at trying to bring her to her senses."
The old lady, recovered from her first shock, gazed at him admiringly. He had completely turned her flank, and by a movement as swift as it was unexpected. If she opposed the engagement he could hail her as an ally, could compel her to contribute to her own granddaughter's public humiliation. On the other hand, if she accepted the engagement he would have her and Margaret and all the proud Severence family in the position of humbly seeking alliance with him. Admirable! No wonder Branch was jealous and the President alarmed. "Your game," said she pleasantly, "is extremely unkempt, but effective. I congratulate you. I owe you an apology for having misjudged you."
He gave her a shrewd look. "I know little Latin and less Greek," said he, "but, 'timeo Danaos dona ferentes.' And I've got no game. I'm telling you the straight truth, and I want you to help save me from Margaret and from myself. I love the girl. I honestly don't want to make her wretched. I need a sock-darner, a wash-counter, a pram-pusher, for a wife, as Grant would say, not a dainty piece of lace embroidery. It would soon be covered with spots and full of holes from the rough wear I'd give it."
Madam Bowker laughed heartily. "You are--delicious," said she. "You state the exact situation. Only I don't think Rita is quite so fragile as you fancy. Like all persons of common origin, Mr. Craig, you exaggerate human differences. They are not differences of kind, but of degree."
Craig quivered and reddened at "common origin," as Madam Bowker expected and hoped. She had not felt that she was taking a risk in thus hardily ignoring her own origin; Lard had become to her, as to all Washington, an unreality like a shadowy reminiscence of a possible former sojourn on earth. "I see," pursued she, "that I hurt your vanity by my frankness--" "Not at all! Not at all!" blustered Joshua, still angrier--as Madam Bowker had calculated.
"Don't misunderstand me," pursued she tranquilly. "I was simply stating a fact without aspersion. It is the more to your credit that you have been able to raise yourself up among us--and so very young! You are not more than forty, are you?"
"Thirty-four," said Craig surlily. He began to feel like a cur that is getting a beating from a hand beyond the reach of its fangs. "I've had a hard life--" "So I should judge," thrust the old lady with gentle sympathy. It is not necessary to jab violently with a red-hot iron in order to make a deep burn.
"But I am the better for it," continued Craig, eyes flashing and orator lips in action. "And you and your kind--your granddaughter Margaret--would be the better for having faced--for having to face--the realities of life instead of being pampered in luxury and uselessness."
"Then why be resentful?" inquired she. "Why not merely pity us? Why this heat and seeming jealousy?"
"Because I love your granddaughter," replied Craig, the adroit at debate. "It pains, it angers me to see a girl who might have been a useful wife, a good mother, trained and set to such base uses."
The old lady admired his skillful parry. "Let us not discuss that," said she. "We look at life from different points of view. No human being can see beyond his own point of view. Only God sees life as a whole, sees how its seeming inconsistencies and injustices blend into a harmony. Your mistake--pardon an old woman's criticism of experience upon inexperience--your mistake is that you arrogate to yourself divine wisdom and set up a personal opinion as eternal truth."
"That is very well said, admirably said," cried Craig. Madam Bowker would have been better pleased with the compliment had the tone been less gracious and less condescending.
"To return to the main subject," continued she. "Your hesitation about my granddaughter does credit to your manliness and to your sense. I have known marriages between people of different station and rank to turn out well--again--" "That's the second or third time you've made that insinuation," burst out Craig. "I must protest against it, in the name of my father and mother, in the name of my country, Mrs. Bowker. It is too ridiculous! Who are you that you talk about rank and station? What is Margaret but the daughter of a plain human being of a father, a little richer than mine and so a little nearer opportunities for education? The claims to superiority of some of the titled people on the other side are silly enough when one examines them--the records of knavery and thievery and illegitimacy and insanity. But similar claims over here are laughable at a glance. The reason I hesitate to marry your daughter is not to her credit, or to her parents' credit--or to yours."
Madam Bowker was beside herself with rage at these candid insults, flung at her with all Craig's young energy and in his most effective manner; for his crudeness disappeared when he spoke thus, as the blackness and roughness of the coal vanish in the furnace heat, transforming it into beauty and grace of flames.
"Do I make myself clear?" demanded Craig, his eyes flashing superbly upon her.
"You certainly do," snapped the old lady, her dignity tottering and a very vulgar kind of human wrath showing uglily in her blazing eyes and twitching nose and mouth and fingers.
"Then let us have no more of this caste nonsense," said the young man. "Forbid your granddaughter to marry or to see me. Send or take her away. She will thank you a year from now. My thanks will begin from the moment of release."
"Yes, you have made yourself extremely clear," said Madam Bowker in a suffocating voice. To be thus defied, insulted, outraged, in her own magnificent salon, in her own magnificent presence! "You may be sure you will have no further opportunity to exploit your upstart insolence in my family. Any chance you may have had for the alliance you have so cunningly sought is at an end." And she waved her ebony scepter in dismissal, ringing the bell at the same time.
Craig drew himself up, bowed coldly and haughtily, made his exit in excellent style; no prince of the blood, bred to throne rooms, no teacher of etiquette in a fashionable boarding-school could have done better.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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14
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MAGGIE AND JOSH
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Wrath is a baseless flame in the intelligent aged; also, Margaret's grandmother was something more than a mere expert in social craft, would have been woman of the world had not circumstances compressed her to its petty department of fashionable society. Before Craig had cleared the front door she was respecting him, even as she raged against him. Insolent, impudent, coarsely insulting--yes, all these. But very much a man, a masculine force; with weaknesses, it was true, and his full measure of the low-sprung's obsequious snobbishness; but, for all that, strong, persistent, concentrated, one who knew the master-art of making his weaknesses serve as pitfalls into which his enemies were lured, to fall victim to his strength.
"Yes, he will arrive," reflected Madam Bowker. "Branch will yet have to serve him. Poor Branch! What a misery for a man to be born with a master's mind but with the lack of will and courage that keeps a man a servant. Yes, Craig will arrive! ... What a pity he has no money."
But, on second thought, that seemed less a disadvantage. If she should let him marry Margaret they would be dependent upon her; she could control them--him--through holding the purse strings. And when that remote time came at which it would please God to call her from her earthly labors to their eternal reward, she could transfer the control to Margaret. "Men of his origin are always weak on the social side," she reflected. "And it wouldn't be in nature for a person as grasping of power as he is not to be eager about money also."
With the advent of plutocratic fashion respect for official position had dwindled at Washington. In Rome in the days when the imperators became mere creatures of the army, the seat of fashion and of power was transferred to the old and rich families aloof from the government and buying peace and privilege from it. So Washington's fashionable society has come to realize, even more clearly than does the rest of the country, that, despite spasmodic struggles and apparent spurts of reaction, power has passed to the plutocracy, and that officialdom is, as a rule, servant verging toward slave. Still, form is a delusion of tenacious hold upon the human mind. The old lady's discoveries of Craig's political prospects did not warm her toward him as would news that he was in the way of being vastly rich; but she retained enough of the fading respect for high-titled office to feel that he was not the quite impossibility she had fancied, but was fit to be an aspirant for an aristocratic alliance.
"If Margaret doesn't fall in love with him after she marries him," reflected she, "all may be well. Of course, if she does she'll probably ruin him and herself, too. But I think she'll have enough sense of her position, of how to maintain it for herself, and for him and her children, not to be a fool."
Meanwhile Craig was also cooling down. He had meant every word he said--while he was saying it. Only one self-convinced could have been so effective. But, sobering off from his rhetorical debauch in the quiet streets of that majestic quarter, he began to feel that he had gone farther, much farther, than he intended.
"I don't see how, in self-respect, I could have said less," thought he. "And surely the old woman isn't so lost to decency that she can't appreciate and admire self-respect."
Still he might have spoken less harshly; might have been a little considerate of the fact that he was not making a stump speech, but was in the drawing-room of a high-born, high-bred lady. "And gad, she IS a patrician!"
His eyes were surveying the splendid mansions round about--the beautiful window-gardens--the curtains at the windows, which he had learned were real lace, whatever that might be, and most expensive. Very fine, that way of living! Very comfortable, to have servants at beck and call, and most satisfactory to the craving for power--trifles, it is true, but still the substantial and tangible evidence of power. "And it impresses the people, too. We're all snobs at bottom. We're not yet developed enough to appreciate such a lofty abstraction as democracy."
True, Margaret was not rich; but the old grandmother was. Doubtless, if he managed her right, she would see to it that he and Margaret had some such luxury as these grandly-housed people--"but not too much, for that would interfere with my political program." He did not protest this positively; the program seemed, for the moment, rather vague and not very attractive. The main point seemed to be money and the right sort of position among the right sort of people. He shook himself, scowled, muttered: "I am a damn fool! What do _I_ amount to except as I rise in politics and stay risen? I must be mighty careful or I'll lose my point of view and become a wretched hanger-on at the skirts of these fakers. For they are fakers--frauds of the first water! Take their accidental money away from them and they'd sink to be day laborers, most of them--and not of much account there."
He was sorely perplexed; he did not know what to do--what he ought to do--even what he wanted to do. One thing seemed clear--that he had gone further than was necessary in antagonizing the old woman. Whether he wanted to marry the girl or not, he certainly did not wish, at this stage of the game, to make it impossible. The wise plan was to leave the situation open in every direction, so that he could freely advance or freely retreat as unfolding events might dictate. So he turned in the direction of the Severence house, walked at his usual tearing pace, arrived there somewhat wilted of collar and exceedingly dusty of shoe and trouser-leg.
Greater physical contrast could hardly have been than that between him and Margaret, descending to him in the cool garden where he was mopping himself and dusting his shoes, all with the same handkerchief. She was in a graceful walking costume of pale blue, scrupulously neat, perfect to the smallest detail. As she advanced she observed him with eyes that nothing escaped; and being in one of her exquisite moods, when the senses are equally quick to welcome the agreeable or to shrink from the disagreeable, she had a sense of physical repugnance. He saw her the instant she came out of the house. Her dress, its harmony with her delicateness of feature and coloring, the gliding motion of her form combined to throw him instantly into a state of intoxication. He rushed toward her; she halted, shivered, shrank. "Don't--look at me like that!" she exclaimed half under her breath.
"And why not? Aren't you mine?" And he seized her, enwrapped her in his arms, pressed his lips firmly upon her hair, her cheek--upon her lips. There he lingered; her eyes closed, her form, he felt, was yielding within his embrace as though she were about to faint.
"Don't--please," she murmured, when he let her catch her breath. "I--I--can't bear it."
"Do you love me?" he cried passionately.
"Let me go!" She struggled futilely in his plowman arms.
"Say you love me!"
"If you don't let me go I shall hate you!"
"I see I shall have to kiss you until you do love me."
"Yes--yes--whatever you wish me to say," she cried, suddenly freeing herself by dodging most undignifiedly out of his arms.
She stood a little way from him, panting, as was he. She frowned fiercely, then her eyes softened, became tender--just why she could not have explained. "What a dirty boy it is!" she said softly. "Go into the house and ask Williams to take you where you can make yourself presentable."
"Not I," said he, dropping into a seat. "Come, sit here beside me."
She laughed; obeyed. She even made several light passes at his wet mop of hair. She wondered why it was that she liked to touch him, where a few minutes before she had shrunk from it.
"I've just been down telling that old grandmother of yours what I thought of her," said he.
She startled. "How did you happen to go there?" she exclaimed. She forgot herself so completely that she added imperiously: "I wanted you to keep away from her until I was ready for you to go."
"She sent for me," apologized he. "I went. We came together with a bang. She told me I wanted to marry you; I told her YOU wanted to marry ME. She told me I was low; I told her she was a fraud. She said I was insolent; I said good-afternoon. If I hadn't marched out rather quickly I guess she'd have had me thrown out."
Margaret was sitting stone-still, her hands limp in her lap.
"So you see it's all up," continued he, with a curious air of bravado, patently insincere. "And it's just as well. You oughtn't to marry me. It's a crime for me to have permitted things to go this far."
"Perhaps you are right," replied she slowly and thoughtfully. "Perhaps you are right."
He made one of his exclamatory gestures, a swift jerk around of the head toward her. He had all he could do to restrain himself from protesting, without regard to his pretenses to himself and to her. "Do you mean that, Maggie?" he asked with more appeal in his voice than he was conscious of.
"Never call me that again!" she cried. "It's detestable--so common!"
He drew back as if she had struck him. "I beg your pardon," he said with gentle dignity. "I shall not do it again. Maggie was my mother's name--what she was always called at home."
She turned her eyes toward him with a kind of horror in them. "Oh, forgive me!" she begged, her clasped hands upon his arm. "I didn't mean it at all--not at all. It is I that am detestable and common. I spoke that way because I was irritated about something else." She laid one hand caressingly against his cheek. "You must always call me Maggie--when--when "--very softly--"you love me very, very much. I like you to have a name for me that nobody else has."
He seized her hands. "You DO care for me, don't you?" he cried.
She hesitated. "I don't quite know," said she. Then, less seriously: "Not at all, I'm sure, when you talk of breaking the engagement. I WISH you hadn't seen grandmother!"
"I wish so, too," confessed he. "I made an ass of myself."
She glanced at him quickly. "Why do you say that?"
"I don't know," he stammered confusedly. How could he tell her?
"A moment ago you seemed well pleased with what you'd done."
"Well, I guess I went too far. I wasn't very polite."
"You never are."
"I'm going to try to do better.... No, I don't think it would be wise for me to go and apologize to her."
She was looking at him strangely. "Why are you so anxious to conciliate her?"
He saw what a break he had made, became all at once red and inarticulate.
"What is she to you?" persisted the girl.
"Nothing at all," he blustered. "I don't care--THAT"--he snapped his fingers--"for her opinion. I don't care if everybody in the world is against our marrying. I want just you--only you."
"Obviously," said she with a dry laugh that was highly disconcerting to him. "I certainly have no fortune--or hope of one, so far as I know."
This so astounded, so disconcerted him that he forgot to conceal it. "Why, I thought--your grandmother--that is--" He was remembering, was stammering, was unable to finish.
"Go on," she urged, obviously enjoying his hot confusion.
He became suddenly angry. "Look here, Margaret," he cried, "you don't suspect me of--" She put her fingers on his lips and laughed quietly at him. "You'd better run along now. I'm going to hurry away to grandmother, to try to repair the damage you did." She rose and called, "Lucia! Lucia!" The round, rosy, rather slovenly Miss Severence appeared in the little balcony--the only part of the house in view from where they sat.
"Telephone the stables for the small victoria," called Margaret.
"Mother's out in it," replied Lucia.
"Then the small brougham."
"I want that. Why don't you take the electric?"
"All right."
Lucia disappeared. Margaret turned upon the deeply-impressed Craig. "What's the matter?" asked she, though she knew.
"I can't get used to this carriage business," said he. "I don't like it. Where the private carriage begins just there democracy ends. It is the parting of the ways. People who are driving have to look down; people who aren't have to look up."
"Nonsense!" said Margaret, though it seemed to her to be the truth.
"Nonsense, of course," retorted Craig. "But nonsense rules the world." He caught her roughly by the arm. "I warn you now, when we--" "Run along, Josh," cried she, extricating herself and laughing, and with a wave of the hand she vanished into the shrubbery. As soon as she was beyond the danger of having to continue that curious conversation she walked less rapidly. "I wonder what he really thinks," she said to herself. "I wonder what I really think. I suspect we'd both be amazed at ourselves and at each other if we knew."
Arrived at her grandmother's she had one more and huger cause for wonder. There were a dozen people in the big salon, the old lady presiding at the tea-table in high good humor. "Ah--here you are, Margaret," cried she. "Why didn't you bring your young man?"
"He's too busy for frivolity," replied Margaret.
"I saw him this afternoon," continued Madam Bowker, talking aside to her alone when the ripples from the new stone in the pond had died away. "He's what they call a pretty rough customer. But he has his good points."
"You liked him better?" said the astonished Margaret.
"I disliked him less," corrected the old lady. "He's not a man any one"--this with emphasis and a sharp glance at her granddaughter--"likes. He neither likes nor is liked. He's too much of an ambition for such petty things. People of purpose divide their fellows into two classes, the useful and the useless. They seek allies among the useful, they avoid the useless."
Margaret laughed.
"Why do you laugh, child? Because you don't believe it?"
Margaret sighed. "No, because I don't want to believe it."
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{
"id": "4929"
}
|
15
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THE EMBASSY GARDEN PARTY
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Craig dined at the Secretary of State's that night, and reveled in the marked consideration every one showed him. He knew it was not because of his political successes, present and impending; in the esteem of that fashionable company his success with Margaret overtopped them. And while he was there, drinking more than was good for him and sharing in the general self-complacence, he thought so himself. But waking up about three in the morning, with an aching head and in the depths of the blues, the whole business took on again its grimmest complexion. "I'll talk it over again with Grant," he decided, and was at the Arkwright house a few minutes after eight.
It so happened that Grant himself was wakeful that morning and had got up about half-past seven. When Craig came he was letting his valet dress him. He sent for Craig to come up to his dressing-room. "You can talk to me while Walter shaves me," said Grant from the armchair before his dressing table. He was spread out luxuriously and Josh watched the process of shaving as if he had never seen it before. Indeed, he never had seen a shave in such pomp and circumstance of silver and gold, of ivory and cut glass, of essence and powder.
"That's a very ladylike performance for two men to be engaged in," said he.
"It's damn comfortable," answered Grant lazily.
"Where did you get that thing you've got on?"
"This gown? Oh, Paris. I get all my things of that sort there. Latterly I get my clothes there, too."
"I like that thing," said Craig, giving it a patronizing jerk of his head. "It looks cool and clean. Linen and silk, isn't it? Only I'd choose a more serviceable color than white. And I'd not have a pink silk lining and collar in any circumstances."
He wandered about the room.
"Goshalimity!" he exclaimed, peering into a drawer. "You must have a million neckties. And"--he was at the partly open door of a huge closet--"here's a whole roomful of shirts--and another of clothes." He wheeled abruptly upon the smiling, highly-flattered tenant of the armchair. "Grant, how many suits have you got?"
"Blest if I know. How many, Walter?"
"I really cannot say, sir. I know 'em all, but I never counted 'em. About seventy or eighty, I should say, not counting extra trousers."
Craig looked astounded. "And how many shirts, Walter?"
"Oh, several hundred of them, sir. Mr. Grant's most particular about his linen."
"And here are boots and shoes and pumps and gaiters and Lord knows what and what not--enough to stock a shoe-store. And umbrellas and canes--Good God, man! How do you carry all that stuff round on your mind?"
Grant laughed like a tickled infant. All this was as gratifying to his vanity as applause to Craig's. "Walter looks after it," said he.
Craig lapsed into silence, stared moodily out of the window. The idea of his thinking of marrying a girl of Grant's class! What a ridiculous, loutish figure he would cut in her eyes! Why, not only did he not have the articles necessary to a gentleman's wardrobe, he did not even know the names of them, nor their uses! It was all very well to pretend that these matters were petty. In a sense they were. But that sort of trifles played a most important part in life as it was led by Margaret Severence. She'd not think them trifles. She was probably assuming that, while he was not quite up to the fashionable standard, still he had a gentleman's equipment of knowledge and of toilet articles. "She'd think me no better than a savage--and, damn it! I'm not much above the savage state, as far as this side of life is concerned."
Grant interrupted his mournful musings with: "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll have my bath."
And, Walter following, he went in at a door to the right, through which Craig had a glimpse of marble walls and floor, of various articles of more than Roman luxury. The moments dragged away until half an hour had passed.
"What the devil!" Josh called out. "What are you doing all this time?"
"Massage," responded Grant. "You can come in."
Craig entered the marble chamber, seated himself on a corner of the warmed marble couch on which Grant lay luxuriating in Walter's powerful massage. "Do you go through this thing often?" demanded he.
"Every morning--except when I'm roughing it. You ought to take massage, Josh. It's great for the skin."
Craig saw that it was. His own skin, aside from his hands and face, was fairly smooth and white; but it was like sandpaper, he thought, beside this firm, rosy covering of the elegant Arkwright's elegant body. "Get through here and send Walter away," he said harshly. "I want to talk to you. If you don't I'll burst out before him. I can't hold in any longer."
"Very well. That'll do, Walter," acquiesced Grant. "And please go and bring us some breakfast. I'll finish dressing afterward."
As soon as the door closed on the valet, Craig said, "Grant, I've got myself into a frightful mess. I want you to help me out of it."
Grant's eyes shifted. He put on his white silk pajamas, thrust his feet into slippers, tossed the silk-lined linen robe about his broad, too square shoulders, and led the way into the other room. Then he said: "Do you mean Margaret Severence?"
"That's it!" exclaimed Craig, pacing the floor. "I've gone and got myself engaged--" "One minute," interrupted Arkwright in a voice so strange that Joshua paused and stared at him. "I can't talk to you about that."
"Why not?"
"For many reasons. The chief one--Fact is, Josh, I've acted like a howling skunk about you with her. I ran you down to her; tried to get her myself."
Craig waved his hand impatiently. "You didn't succeed, did you? And you're ashamed of it, aren't you? Well, if I wasted time going round apologizing for all the things I'd done that I'm ashamed of I'd have no time left to do decently. So that's out of the way. Now, help me."
"What a generous fellow you are!"
"Generous? Stuff! I need you. We're going to stay friends. You can do what you damn please--I'll like you just the same. I may swat you if you get in my way; but as soon as you were out of it--and that'd be mighty soon and sudden, Grant, old boy--why, I'd be friends again. Come, tell me how I'm to get clear of this engagement."
"I can't talk about it to you."
"Why not?"
"Because I love her."
Craig gasped: "Do you mean that?"
"I love her--as much as I'm capable of loving anybody. Didn't I tell you so?"
"I believe you did say something of the kind," admitted Craig. "But I was so full of my own affairs that I didn't pay much attention to it. Why don't you jump in and marry her?"
"She happens to prefer you."
"Yes, she does," said Craig with a complacence that roiled Arkwright. "I don't know what the poor girl sees in me, but she's just crazy about me."
"Don't be an ass, Josh!" cried Grant in a jealous fury.
Craig laughed pleasantly. "I'm stating simple facts." Then, with abrupt change to earnestness, "Do you suppose, if I were to break the engagement, she'd take it seriously to heart?"
"I fancy she could live through it if you could. She probably cares no more than you do."
"There's the worst of it. I want her, Grant. When I'm with her I can't tolerate the idea of giving her up. But how in the mischief can I marry HER? I'm too strong a dose for a frail, delicate little thing like her."
"She's as tall as you are. I've seen her play athletes to a standstill at tennis."
"But she's so refined, so--" "Oh, fudge!" muttered Arkwright. Then louder: "Didn't I tell you not to talk to me about this business?"
"But I've got to do it," protested Craig. "You're the only one I can talk to--without being a cad."
Arkwright looked disgusted. "You love the girl," he said bitterly, "and she wants you. Marry her."
"But I haven't got the money."
Craig was out with the truth at last. "What would we live on? My salary is only seventy-five hundred dollars. If I get the Attorney-Generalship it'll be only eight thousand, and I've not got twenty thousand dollars besides. As long as I'm in politics I can't do anything at the law. All the clients that pay well are clients I'd not dare have anything to do with--I may have to prosecute them. Grant, I used to think Government salaries were too big, and I used to rave against office-holders fattening on the people. I was crazy. How's a man to marry a LADY and live like a GENTLEMAN on seven or eight thousand a year? It can't be done."
"And you used to rave against living like a gentleman," thrust Grant maliciously.
Craig reddened. "There it is!" he fairly shouted. "I'm going to the devil. I'm sacrificing all my principles. That's what this mixing with swell people and trying to marry a fashionable lady is doing for me!"
"You're broadening out, you mean. You're losing your taste for tommy-rot."
"Not at all," said Craig surlily and stubbornly. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to see the girl to-day and put the whole case before her. And I want you to back me up."
"I'll do nothing of the sort," cried Grant. "How can you ask such a thing of ME?"
"Yes, you must go with me to-day."
"I've got an engagement--garden-party at the British Embassy."
"Going there, are you? ... Um! ... Well, we'll see."
The breakfast came and Craig ate like a ditch-digger--his own breakfast and most of Grant's. Grant barely touched the food, lit a cigarette, sat regarding the full-mouthed Westerner gloomily. "What DID Margaret see in this man?" thought Grant. "True, she doesn't know him as well as I do; but she knows him well enough. Talk about women being refined! Why, they've got ostrich stomachs."
"Do you know, Grant," said Craig thickly, so stuffed was his mouth, "I think your refined women like men of my sort. I know I can't bear anything but refined women. Now, you--you've got an ostrich stomach. I've seen you quite pleased with women I'd not lay my finger on. Yet most people'd say you were more sensitive than I. Instead, you're much coarser--except about piffling, piddling, paltry non-essentials. You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. I shouldn't be a bit surprised if Margaret had penetrated the fact that your coarseness is in-bred while mine is near surface. Women have a surprising way of getting at the bottom of things. I'm a good deal like a woman in that respect myself."
Grant thrust a cigar upon him, got him out of the room and on the way out of the house as quickly as possible. "Insufferable egotist!" he mumbled, by way of a parting kick. "Why do I like him? Damned if I believe I do!"
He did not dress until late that afternoon, but lay in his rooms, very low and miserable. When he issued forth it was to the garden-party--and immediately he ran into Margaret and Craig, apparently lying in wait for him. "Here he is!" exclaimed Josh, slapping him enthusiastically on the back. "Grant, Margaret wants to talk with you. I must run along." And before either could speak he had darted away, plowing his way rudely through the crowd.
Margaret and Grant watched his progress--she smiling, he surly and sneering. "Yet you like him," said Margaret.
"In a way, yes," conceded Arkwright. "He has a certain sort of magnetism." He pulled himself up short. "This morning," said he, "I apologized to him for my treachery; and here I am at it again."
"I don't mind," said Margaret. "It's quite harmless."
"That's it!" exclaimed Grant in gloomy triumph. "You can't care for me because you think me harmless."
"Well, aren't you?"
"Yes," he admitted, "I couldn't give anybody--at least, not a blase Washington society girl--anything approaching a sensation. I understand the mystery at last."
"Do you?" said Margaret, with a queer expression in her eyes. "I wish I did."
Grant reflected upon this, could make nothing of it. "I don't believe you're really in love with him," he finally said.
"Was that what you told him you wished to talk to me about?"
"I didn't tell him I wanted to talk with you," protested Grant. "He asked me to try to persuade you not to marry him."
"Well--persuade!"
"To explain how coarse he is."
"How coarse is he?"
"To dilate on the folly of your marrying a poor man with no money prospects."
"I'm content with his prospects--and with mine through him."
"Seven or eight thousand a year? Your dresses cost much more than that."
"No matter."
"You must be in love with him!"
"Women take strange fancies."
"What's the matter, Rita? What have you in the back of your mind?"
She looked straight at him. "Nothing about YOU. Not the faintest, little shadow of a regret." And her hazel eyes smiled mirth of the kind that is cruelest from woman to man.
"How exasperating you are!"
"Perhaps I've caught the habit from my man."
"Rita, you don't even like me any more."
"No--candidly--I don't."
"I deserve it."
"You do. I can never trust you again."
He shrugged his shoulders; but he could not pretend that he was indifferent. "It seems to me, if Josh forgave me you might."
"I do--forgive."
"But not even friendship?"
"Not EVEN friendship."
"You are hard."
"I am hard."
"Rita! For God's sake, don't marry that man! You don't love him--you know you don't. At times you feel you can hardly endure him. You'll be miserable--in every way. And I--At least I can give you material happiness."
She smiled--a cold, enigmatic smile that made her face seem her grandmother's own peering through a radiant mask of youth. She glanced away, around--"Ah! there are mamma and Augusta Burke." And she left him to join them.
He wandered out of the garden, through the thronged corridors, into the street, knocking against people, seeing no one, not heeding the frequent salutations. He went to the Wyandotte, to Craig's tawdry, dingy sitting-room, its disorder now apparently beyond possibility of righting. Craig, his coat and waistcoat off, his detachable cuffs on the floor, was burrowing into masses of huge law-books.
"Clear out," said he curtly; "I'm busy."
Grant plumped himself into a chair. "Josh," cried he desperately, "you must marry that girl. She's just the one for you. I love her, and her happiness is dear to me."
Craig gave him an amused look. "However did she persuade you to come here and say that?" he inquired.
"She didn't persuade me. She didn't mention it. All she said was that she had wiped me off the slate even as a friend."
Craig laughed uproariously. "THAT was how she did it--eh? She's a deep one."
"Josh," said Arkwright, "you need a wife, and she's it."
"Right you are," exclaimed Craig heartily. "I'm one of those surplus-steam persons--have to make an ass of myself constantly, indulging in the futility of blowing off steam. Oughtn't to do it publicly--creates false impression. Got to have a wife--no one else but a wife always available and bound to be discreet. Out with you. I'm too busy to talk--even about myself."
"You will marry her?"
"Like to see anybody try to stop me!"
He pulled Arkwright from the chair, thrust him into the hall, slammed the door. And Arkwright, in a more hopeful frame of mind, went home. "I'll do my best to get back her respect--and my own," said he. "I've been a dog, and she's giving me the whipping I deserve."
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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16
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A FIGHT AND A FINISH
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In his shrewd guess at Margaret's reason for dealing so summarily with Arkwright, Craig was mistaken, as the acutest of us usually are in attributing motives. He had slowly awakened to the fact that she was not a mere surface, but had also the third dimension--depth, which distinguishes persons from people. Whenever he tried to get at what she meant by studying what she did, he fell into the common error of judging her by himself, and of making no allowance for the sweeter and brighter side of human nature, which was so strong in her that, in happier circumstances, the other side would have been mere rudiment.
Her real reason for breaking with Grant was a desire to be wholly honorable with Craig. She resolved to burn her bridges toward Arkwright, to put him entirely out of her mind--as she had not done theretofore; for whenever she had grown weary of Craig's harping on her being the aggressor in the engagement and not himself, or whenever she had become irritated against him through his rasping mannerisms she had straightway begun to revolve Arkwright as a possible alternative. Craig's personality had such a strong effect on her, caused so many moods and reactions, that she was absolutely unable to tell what she really thought of him. Also, when she was so harassed by doubt as to whether the engagement would end in marriage or in a humiliation of jilting, when her whole mind was busy with the problem of angling him within the swoop of the matrimonial net, how was she to find leisure to examine her heart? Whether she wanted him or simply wanted a husband she could not have said.
She felt that his eccentric way of treating the engagement would justify her in keeping Arkwright in reserve. But she was finding that there were limits to her ability to endure her own self-contempt, and she sacrificed Grant to her outraged self-respect. Possibly she might have been less conscientious had she not come to look on Grant as an exceedingly pale and shadowy personality, a mere vague expression of well-bred amiability, male because trousered, identifiable chiefly by the dollar mark.
Her reward seemed immediate. There came a day when Craig was all devotion, was talking incessantly of their future, was never once doubtful or even low-spirited. It was simply a question of when they would marry--whether as soon as Stillwater fixed his date for retiring, or after Craig was installed. She had to listen patiently to hours on hours of discussion as to which would be the better time. She had to seem interested, though from the viewpoint of her private purposes nothing could have been less important. She had no intention of permitting him to waste his life and hers in the poverty and uncertainty of public office, struggling for the applause of mobs one despised as individuals and would not permit to cross one's threshold. But she had to let him talk on and on, and yet on. In due season, when she was ready to speak and he to hear, she would disclose to him the future she had mapped out for him, not before. He discoursed; she listened. At intervals he made love in his violent, terrifying way; she endured, now half-liking it, now half-hating it and him, but always enduring, passive, as became a modest, inexperienced maiden, and with never a suggestion of her real thoughts upon her surface.
It was the morning after one of these outbursts of his, one of unusual intensity, one that had so worn upon her nerves that, all but revolted by the sense of sick satiety, she had come perilously near to indulging herself in the too costly luxury of telling him precisely what she thought of him and his conduct. She was in bed, with the blinds just up, and the fair, early-summer world visioning itself to her sick heart like Paradise to the excluded Peri at its barred gate. "And if he had given me half a chance I'd have loved him," she was thinking. "I do believe in him, and admire his strength and his way of never accepting defeat. But how can I--how CAN I--when he makes me the victim of these ruffian moods of his? I almost think the Frenchman was right who said that every man ought to have two wives.... Not that at times he doesn't attract me that way. But because one likes champagne one does not wish it by the cask. A glass now and then, or a bottle--perhaps--" Aloud: "What is it, Selina?"
"A note for you, ma'am, from HIM. It's marked important and immediate. You told me not to disturb you with those marked important, nor with those marked immediate. But you didn't say what to do about those marked both."
"The same," said Margaret, stretching herself out at full length, and snuggling her head into the softness of her perfumed hair. "But now that you've brought it thus far, let me have it."
Selina laid it on the silk and swansdown quilt and departed. Margaret forgot that it was there in thinking about a new dress she was planning, an adaptation of a French model. As she turned herself it fell to the floor. She reached down, picked it up, opened it, read: "It's no use. Fate's against us. I find the President is making my marriage the excuse for not appointing me. How lucky we did not announce the engagement. This is a final good-by. I shall keep out of your way. It's useless for you to protest. I am doing what is best for us both. Thank me, and forget me."
She leaped from the bed with one bound, and, bare of foot and in her nightgown only, rushed to the telephone. She called up the Arkwrights, asked for Grant. "Wake him," she said. "If he is still in bed tell him Miss Severence wishes to speak to him at once."
Within a moment Grant's agitated voice was coming over the wire: "Is that you, Rita? What is the matter?"
"Come out here as soon as you can. How long will it be?"
"An hour. I really must shave."
"In an hour, then. Good-by."
Before the end of the hour she was pacing her favorite walk in the garden, impatiently watching the point where he would appear. At sight of her face he almost broke into a run. "What is it, Margaret?" he cried.
"What have you been saying to Josh Craig?" she demanded.
"Nothing, I swear. I've been keeping out of his way. He came to see me this morning--called me a dozen times on the telephone, too. But I refused him."
She reflected. "I want you to go and bring him here," she said presently. "No matter what he says, bring him."
"When?"
"Right away."
"If I have to use force." And Grant hastened away.
Hardly had he gone when Williams appeared, carrying a huge basket of orchids. "They just came, ma'am. I thought you'd like to see them."
"From Mr. Arkwright?"
"No, ma'am; Mr. Craig."
"Craig?" ejaculated Margaret.
"Yes, Miss Rita."
"Craig," repeated Margaret, but in a very different tone--a tone of immense satisfaction and relief. She waved her hand with a smile of amused disdain. "Take them into the house, but not to my room. Put them in Miss Lucia's sitting-room."
Williams had just gone when into the walk rushed Grant and Craig. Their faces were so flurried, so full of tragic anxiety that Margaret, stopping short, laughed out loud. "You two look as if you had come to view the corpse."
"I passed Craig on his way here," explained Grant, "and took him into my machine."
"I was not on my way here," replied Josh loftily. "I was merely taking a walk. He asked me to get in and brought me here in spite of my protests."
"You were on the road that leads here," insisted Arkwright with much heat.
"I repeat I was simply taking a walk," insisted Craig. He had not once looked at Margaret.
"No matter," said Margaret in her calm, distant way. "You may take him away, Grant. And"--here she suddenly looked at Craig, a cold, haughty glance that seemed to tear open an abysmal gulf between them--"I do not wish to see you again. I am done with you. I have been on the verge of telling you so many times of late."
"Is THAT what you sent Grant after me to tell me?"
"No," answered she. "I sent him on an impulse to save the engagement. But while he was gone it suddenly came over me that you were right--entirely right. I accept your decision. You're afraid to marry me because of your political future. I'm afraid to marry you because of my stomach. You--nauseate me. I've been under some kind of hideous spell. I'm free of it now. I see you as you are. I am ashamed of myself."
"I thought so! I knew it would come!" exclaimed Arkwright triumphantly.
Craig, who had been standing like a stock, suddenly sprang into action. He seized Arkwright by the throat and bore him to the ground. "I've got to kill something," he yelled. "Why not you?"
This unexpected and vulgar happening completely upset Margaret's pride and demolished her dignified pose. She gazed in horror at the two men struggling, brute-like, upon the grass. Her refined education had made no provision for such an emergency. She rushed forward, seized Craig by the shoulders. "Get up!" she cried contemptuously, and she dragged him to his feet. She shook him fiercely. "Now get out of here; and don't you dare come back!"
Craig laughed loudly. A shrewd onlooker might have suspected from his expression that he had deliberately created a diversion of confusion, and was congratulating himself upon its success. "Get out?" cried he. "Not I. I go where I please and stay as long as I please."
Arkwright was seated upon the grass, readjusting his collar and tie. "What a rotten coward you are!" he said to Craig, "to take me off guard like that."
"It WAS a low trick," admitted Josh, looking down at him genially. "But I'm so crazy I don't know what I'm doing."
"Oh, yes, you do; you wanted to show off," answered Grant.
But Craig had turned to Margaret again. "Read that," he commanded, and thrust a newspaper clipping into her hand. It was from one of the newspapers of his home town--a paper of his own party, but unfriendly to him. It read: "Josh Craig's many friends here will be glad to hear that he is catching on down East. With his Government job as a stepping-stone he has sprung into what he used to call plutocratic society in Washington, and is about to marry a young lady who is in the very front of the push. He will retire from politics, from head-hunting among the plutocrats, and will soon be a plutocrat and a palace-dweller himself. Success to you, Joshua. The 'pee-pul' have lost a friend--in the usual way. As for us, we've got the right to say, 'I told you so,' but we'll be good and refrain."
"The President handed me that last night," said Craig, when he saw that her glance was on the last line. "And he told me he had decided to ask Stillwater to stay on."
Margaret gave the clipping to Grant. "Give it to him," she said and started toward the house.
Craig sprang before her. "Margaret," he cried, "can you blame me?"
"No," said she, and there was no pose in her manner now; it was sincerely human. "I pity you." She waved him out of her path and, with head bent, he obeyed her.
The two men gazed after her. Arkwright was first to speak: "Well, you've got what you wanted."
Craig slowly lifted his circled, bloodshot eyes to Arkwright. "Yes," said he hoarsely, "I've got what I wanted."
"Not exactly in the way a gentleman would like to get it," pursued Grant. "But YOU don't mind a trifle of that sort."
"No," said Craig, "I don't mind a trifle of that sort. 'Bounder Josh'--that's what they call me, isn't it?"
"When they're frank they do."
Craig drew a long breath, shook himself like a man gathering himself together after a stunning blow. He reflected a moment. "Come along, Grant. I'm going back in your machine."
"The driver'll take you," replied Arkwright stiffly. "I prefer to walk."
"Then we'll walk back together."
"We will not!" said Arkwright violently. "And after this morning the less you say to me the better pleased I'll be, and the less you'll impose upon the obligation I'm under to you for having saved my life once."
"You treacherous hound," said Craig pleasantly. "Where did you get the nerve to put on airs with me? What would you have done to her in the same circumstances? Why, you'd have sneaked and lied out of it. And you dare to scorn me because I've been frank and direct! Come! I'll give you another chance. Will you take me back to town in your machine?"
A pause, Craig's fierce gaze upon Grant, Grant's upon the ground. Then Grant mumbled surlily: "Come on."
When they were passing the front windows of the house Craig assumed that Margaret was hiding somewhere there, peering out at them. But he was wrong. She was in her room, was face down upon her bed, sobbing as if her first illusion had fallen, had dashed to pieces, crushing her heart under it.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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17
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A NIGHT MARCH
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Arkwright saw no one but his valet-masseur for several days; on the left side of his throat the marks of Craig's fingers showed even above the tallest of his extremely tall collars. From the newspapers he gathered that Margaret had gone to New York on a shopping trip--had gone for a stay of two or three weeks. When the adventure in the garden was more than a week into the past, as he was coming home from a dinner toward midnight he jumped from his electric brougham into Craig's arms.
"At last!" exclaimed Josh, leading the way up the Arkwright steps and ringing the bell. Grant muttered a curse under his breath. When the man had opened the door, "Come in," continued Josh loudly and cheerily, leading the way into the house.
"You'd think it was his house, by gad!" muttered Grant.
"I've been walking up and down before the entrance for an hour. The butler asked me in, but I hate walls and roof. The open for me--the wide, wide open!"
"Not so loud," growled Arkwright. "The family's in bed. Wait till we get to my part of the house."
When they were there, with doors closed and the lights on, Craig exhaled his breath as noisily as a blown swimmer. "What a day! What a day!" he half-shouted, dropping on the divan and thrusting his feet into the rich and rather light upholstery of a near-by chair.
Grant eyed the feet gloomily. He was proud of his furniture and as careful of it as any old maid.
"Go ahead, change your clothes," cried Josh. "I told your motorman not to go away."
"What do you mean?" Arkwright demanded, his temper boiling at the rim of the pot.
"I told him before you got out. You see, we're going to New York to-night--or rather this morning. Train starts at one o'clock. I met old Roebuck at the White House to-night--found he was going by special train--asked him to take us."
"Not I," said Arkwright. "No New York for me. I'm busy to-morrow. Besides, I don't want to go."
"Of course you don't," laughed Craig, and Arkwright now noted that he was in the kind of dizzy spirits that most men can get only by drinking a very great deal indeed. "Of course you don't. No more do I. But I've got to go--and so have you."
"What for?"
"To help me get married."
Grant could only gape at him.
"Don't you know Margaret has gone to New York?"
"I saw it in the paper, but--" "Now, don't go back a week to ancient history."
"I don't believe it," foamed Grant, so distracted that he sprang up and paced the floor, making wild gestures with his arms and head.
Craig watched, seemed hugely amused. "You'll see, about noon to-morrow. You've got to put in the morning shopping for me. I haven't got--You know what sort of a wardrobe mine is. Wardrobe? Hand satchel! Carpet-bag! Rag-bag! If I took off my shoes you'd see half the toes of one foot and all the heel of the other. And only my necktie holds this collar in place. Both buttonholes are gone. As for my underclothes--but I'll spare you these."
"Yes, do," said Grant with a vicious sneer.
"Now, you've got to buy me a complete outfit." Craig drew a roll of bills from his pocket, counted off several, threw them on the table. "There's four hundred dollars, all I can afford to waste at present. Make it go as far as you can. Get a few first-class things, the rest decent and substantial, but not showy. I'll pay for the suits I've got to get. They'll have to be ready-made--and very good ready-made ones a man can buy nowadays. We'll go to the tailor's first thing--about seven o'clock in the morning, which'll give him plenty of time for alterations."
"I won't!" exploded Grant, stopping his restless pacing and slamming himself on to a chair.
"Oh, yes, you will," asserted Craig, with absolute confidence. "You're not going back on me."
"There's nothing in this--nothing! I've known Rita Severence nearly twenty years, and I know she's done with you."
Craig sprang to his feet, went over and laid his heavy hand heavily upon Arkwright's shoulder. "And," said he, "you know me. Did I ever say a thing that didn't prove to be true, no matter how improbable it seemed to you?"
Arkwright was silent.
"Grant," Craig went on, and his voice was gentle and moving, "I need you. I must have you. You won't fail me, will you, old pal?"
"Oh, hell! --I'll go," said Grant in a much-softened growl. "But I know it's a wild-goose chase. Still, you do need the clothes. You're a perfect disgrace."
Craig took away his hand and burst into his noisy, boyish laughter, so reminiscent of things rural and boorish, of the coarse, strong spirits of the happy-go-lucky, irresponsibles that work as field hands and wood-haulers. "By cracky, Grant, I just got sight of the remnants of that dig I gave you. It was a beauty, wasn't it?"
Arkwright moved uneasily, fumbled at his collar, tried to smile carelessly.
"I certainly am the luckiest devil," Craig went on. "Now, what a stroke pushing you over and throttling you was!" And he again laughed loudly.
"I don't follow you," said Grant sourly.
"What a vanity box you are! You can't take a joke. Now, they're always poking fun at me--pretty damn nasty! some of it--but don't I always look cheerful?"
"Oh--YOU!" exclaimed Grant in disgust.
"And do you know why?" demanded Craig, giving him a rousing slap on the knee. "When I find it hard to laugh I begin to think of the greatest joke of all--the joke I'll have on these merry boys when the cards are all played and I sweep the tables. I think of that, and, by gosh, I fairly roar!"
"Do you talk that way to convince yourself?"
Craig's eyes were suddenly shrewd. "Yes," said he, "and to convince you, and a lot of other weak-minded people who believe all they hear. You'll find out some day that the world thinks with its ears and its mouth, my boy. But, as I say, who but I could have tumbled into such luck as came quite accidentally out of that little 'rough-house' of mine at your expense?"
"Don't see it," said Grant.
"Why, can't you see that it puts you out of business with Margaret? She's not the sort of woman to take to the fellow that shows he's the weaker."
"Well, I'll be--damned!" gasped Arkwright. "You HAVE got your nerve! To say such a thing to a man you've just asked a favor of."
"Not at all," cried Craig airily. "Facts are facts. Why deny them?"
Arkwright shrugged his shoulders. "Well, let it pass.... Whether it's settled me with her or not, it somehow--curiously enough--settled her with me. Do you know, Josh, I've had no use for her since. I can't explain it."
"Vanity," said Craig. "You are vain, like all people who don't talk about themselves. The whole human race is vain--individually and collectively. Now, if a man talks about himself as I do, why, his vanity froths away harmlessly. But you and your kind suffer from ingrowing vanity. You think of nothing but yourselves--how you look--how you feel--how you are impressing others--what you can get for yourself--self--self--self, day and night. You don't like Margaret any more because she saw you humiliated. Where would I be if I were like that? Why, I'd be dead or hiding in the brush; for I've had nothing but insults, humiliations, sneers, snubs, all my life. Crow's my steady diet, old pal. And I fatten and flourish on it."
Grant was laughing, with a choke in his throat. "Josh," said he, "you're either more or less than human."
"Both," said Craig. "Grant, we're wasting time. Walter!" That last in a stentorian shout.
The valet appeared. "Yes, Mr. Craig."
"Pack your friend Grant, here, for two days in New York. He's going to-night and--I guess you'd better come along."
Arkwright threw up his hands in a gesture of mock despair. "Do as he says, Walter. He's the boss."
"Now you're talking sense," said Craig. "Some day you'll stand before kings for this--or sit, as you please."
On their way out Josh fished from the darkness under the front stairs a tattered and battered suitcase and handed it to Walter. "It's my little all," he explained to Grant. "I've given up my rooms at the Wyandotte. They stored an old trunkful or so for me, and I've sent my books to the office."
"Look here, Josh," said Grant, when they were under way; "does Margaret know you're coming?"
"Does Margaret know I'm coming?" repeated Joshua mockingly. "Does Margaret know her own mind and me? ... Before I forget it here's a list I wrote out against a lamp-post while I was waiting for you to come home. It's the things I must have, so far as I know. The frills and froth you know about--I don't."
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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18
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PEACE AT ANY PRICE
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Miss Severance, stepping out of a Waldorf elevator at the main floor, shrank back wide-eyed. "You?" she gasped.
Before her, serene and smiling and inflexible, was Craig. None of the suits he had bought at seven that morning was quite right for immediate use; so there he was in his old lounge suit, baggy at knees and elbows and liberally bestrewn with lint. Her glance fell from his mussy collar to his backwoodsman's hands, to his feet, so cheaply and shabbily shod; the shoes looked the worse for the elaborate gloss the ferry bootblack had put upon them. She advanced because she could not retreat; but never had she been so repelled.
She had come to New York to get away from him. When she entered the train she had flung him out of the window. "I WILL NOT think of him again," she had said to herself. But--Joshua Craig's was not the sort of personality that can be banished by an edict of will. She could think angrily of him, or disdainfully, or coldly, or pityingly--but think she must. And think she did. She told herself she despised him; and there came no echoing protest or denial from anywhere within her. She said she was done with him forever, and well done; her own answer to herself there was, that while she was probably the better off for having got out of the engagement, still it must be conceded that socially the manner of her getting out meant scandal, gossip, laughter at her. Her cheeks burned as her soul flamed.
"The vulgar boor!" she muttered.
Was ever woman so disgraced, and so unjustly? What had the gods against her, that they had thus abased her? How Washington would jeer! How her friends would sneer! What hope was there now of her ever getting a husband? She would be an object of pity and of scorn. It would take more courage than any of the men of her set had, to marry a woman rejected by such a creature--and in such circumstances!
"He has made everybody think I sought him. Now, he'll tell everybody that he had to break it off--that HE broke it off!"
She ground her teeth; she clenched her hands; she wept and moaned in the loneliness of her bed. She hated Craig; she hated the whole world; she loathed herself. And all the time she had to keep up appearances--for she had not dared tell her grandmother--had to listen while the old lady discussed the marriage as an event of the not remote future.
Why had she not told her grandmother? Lack of courage; hope that something would happen to reveal the truth without her telling. HOPE that something would happen? No, fear. She did not dare look at the newspapers. But, whatever her reason, it was not any idea that possibly the engagement might be resumed. No, not that. "Horrible as I feel," thought she, "I am better off than in those weeks when that man was whirling me from one nightmare to another. The peace of desolation is better than that torture of doubt and repulsion. Whatever was I thinking of to engage myself to such a man? to think seriously of passing my life with him? Poor fool that I was, to rail against monotony, to sigh for sensations! Well, I have got them."
Day and night, almost without ceasing, her thoughts had boiled and bubbled on and on, like a geyser ever struggling for outlet and ever falling vainly back upon itself.
Now--here he was, greeting her at the elevator car, smiling and confident, as if nothing had happened. She did not deign even to stare at him, but, with eyes that seemed to be simply looking without seeing any especial object, she walked straight on. "I'm in luck," cried he, beside her. "I had only been walking up and down there by the elevators about twenty minutes."
She made no reply. At the door she said to the carriage-caller: "A cab, please--no, a hansom."
The hansom drove up; its doors opened. Craig pushed aside the carriage man, lifted her in with a powerful upward swing of his arm against her elbow and side--so powerful that she fell into the seat, knocking her hat awry and loosening her veil from the brim so that it hung down distressfully across her eyes and nose. "Drive up Fifth Avenue to the Park," said Craig, seating himself beside her. "Now, please don't cry," he said to her.
"Cry?" she exclaimed. Her dry, burning eyes blazed at him.
"Your eyes were so bright," laughed he, "that I thought they were full of tears."
"If you are a gentleman you will leave this hansom at once."
"Don't talk nonsense," said he. "You know perfectly well I'll not leave. You know perfectly well I'll say what I've got to say to you, and that no power on earth can prevent me. That's why you didn't give way to your impulse to make a scene when I followed you into this trap."
She was busy with her hat and veil.
"Can I help you?" said he with a great show of politeness that was ridiculously out of harmony with him in every way. That, and the absurdity of Josh Craig, of all men, helping a woman in the delicate task of adjusting a hat and veil, struck her as so ludicrous that she laughed hysterically; her effort to make the laughter appear an outburst of derisive, withering scorn was not exactly a triumph.
"Well," she presently said, "what is it you wish to say? I have very little time."
He eyed her sharply. "You think you dislike me, don't you?" said he.
"I do," replied she, her tone as cutting as her words were curt.
"How little that amounts to! All human beings--Grant, you, I, all of us, everybody--are brimful of vanity. It slops over a little one way and we call it like. It slops over the other way and we call it dislike--hate--loathing--according to the size of the slop. Now, I'm not here to deal with vanity, but with good sense. Has it occurred to you in the last few days that you and I have got to get married, whether we will or no?"
"It has not," she cried with frantic fury of human being cornered by an ugly truth.
"Oh, yes, it has. For you are a sensible woman--entirely too sensible for a woman, unless she marries an unusual man like me."
"Is that a jest?" she inquired in feeble attempt at sarcasm.
"Don't you know I have no sense of humor? Would I do the things I do and carry them through if I had?"
In spite of herself she admired this penetration of self-analysis. In spite of herself the personality beneath his surface, the personality that had a certain uncanny charm for her, was subtly reasserting its inexplicable fascination.
"Yes, we've got to marry," proceeded he. "I have to marry you because I can't afford to let you say you jilted me. That would make me the laughing-stock of my State; and I can't afford to tell the truth that I jilted you because the people would despise me as no gentleman. And, while I don't in the least mind being despised as no gentleman by fashionable noddle-heads or by those I trample on to rise, I do mind it when it would ruin me with the people."
Her eyes gleamed. So! She had him at her mercy!
"Not so fast, young lady," continued he in answer to that gleam. "It is equally true that you've got to marry me."
"But I shall not!" she cried. "Besides, it isn't true."
"It IS true," replied he. "You may refuse to marry me, just as a man may refuse to run when the dynamite blast is going off. Yes, you can refuse, but--you'd not be your grandmother's granddaughter if you did."
"Really!" She was so surcharged with rage that she was shaking with it, was tearing up her handkerchief in her lap.
"Yes, indeed," he assured her, tranquil as a lawyer arguing a commercial case before a logic-machine of a judge. "If you do not marry me all your friends will say I jilted you. I needn't tell you what it would mean in your set, what it would mean as to your matrimonial prospects, for you to have the reputation of having been turned down by me--need I?"
She was silent; her head down, her lips compressed, her fingers fiercely interlaced with the ruins of her handkerchief.
"It is necessary that you marry," said he summing up. "It is wisest and easiest to marry me, since I am willing. To refuse would be to inflict an irreparable injury upon yourself in order to justify a paltry whim for injuring me."
She laughed harshly. "You are frank," said she.
"I am paying you the compliment of frankness. I am appealing to your intelligence, where a less intelligent man and one that knew you less would try to gain his point by chicane, flattery, deception."
"Yes--it is a compliment," she answered. "It was stupid of me to sneer at your frankness."
A long silence. He lighted a cigarette, smoked it with deliberation foreign to his usual self but characteristic of him when he was closely and intensely engaged; for he was like a thoroughbred that is all fret and champ and pawing and caper until the race is on, when he at once settles down into a calm, steady stride, with all the surplus nervous energy applied directly and intelligently to the work in hand. She was not looking at him, but she was feeling him in every atom of her body, was feeling the power, the inevitableness of the man. He angered her, made her feel weak, a helpless thing, at his mercy. True, it was his logic that was convincing her, not his magnetic and masterful will; but somehow the two seemed one. Never had he been so repellent, never had she felt so hostile to him.
"I will marry you," she finally said. "But I must tell you that I do not love you--or even like you. The reverse."
His face, of the large, hewn features, with their somehow pathetic traces of the struggles and sorrows of his rise, grew strange, almost terrible. "Do you mean that?" he said, turning slowly toward her.
She quickly shifted her eyes, in which her dislike was showing, shifted them before he could possibly have seen. And she tried in vain to force past her lips the words which she believed to be the truth, the words his pathetic, powerful face told her would end everything. Yes, she knew he would not marry her if she told him the truth about her feelings.
"Do you mean that?" he repeated, stern and sharp, yet sad, wistfully sad, too.
"I don't know what I mean," she cried, desperately afraid of him, afraid of the visions the idea of not marrying him conjured. "I don't know what I mean," she repeated. "You fill me with a kind of--of--horror. You draw me into your grasp in spite of myself--like a whirlpool--and rouse all my instinct to try and save myself. Sometimes that desire becomes a positive frenzy."
He laughed complacently. "That is love," said he.
She did not resent his tone or dispute his verdict externally. "If it is love," replied she evenly, "then never did love wear so strange, so dreadful a disguise."
He laid his talon-hand, hardened and misshapen by manual labor, but if ugly, then ugly with the majesty of the twisted, tempest-defying oak, over hers. "Believe me, Margaret, you love me. You have loved me all along.... And I you."
"Don't deceive yourself," she felt bound to say, "I certainly do not love you if love has any of its generally accepted meanings."
"I am not the general sort of person," said he. "It is not strange that I should arouse extraordinary feelings, is it? Driver"--he had the trap in the roof up and was thrusting through it a slip of paper--"take us to that street and number."
She gasped with a tightening at the heart. "I must return to the hotel at once," she said hurriedly.
He fixed his gaze upon her. "We are going to the preacher's," said he.
"The preacher's?" she murmured, shrinking in terror.
"Grant is waiting for us there"--he glanced at his watch--"or, rather, will be there in about ten minutes. We are a little earlier than I anticipated."
She flushed crimson, paled, felt she would certainly suffocate with rage.
"Before you speak," continued he, "listen to me. You don't want to go back into that torment of doubt in which we've both been hopping about for a month, like a pair of damned souls being used as tennis balls by fiends. Let's settle the business now, and for good and all. Let us have peace--for God's sake, peace! I know you've been miserable. I know I've been on the rack. And it's got to stop. Am I not right?"
She leaned back in her corner of the cab, shut her eyes, said no more--and all but ceased to think. What was there to say? What was there to think? When Fate ceases to tolerate our pleasant delusion of free will, when it openly and firmly seizes us and hurries us along, we do not discuss or comment. We close our minds, relax and submit.
At the parsonage he sprang out, stood by to help her descend, half-dragged her from the cab when she hesitated. He shouted at the driver: "How much do I owe you, friend?"
"Six dollars, sir."
"Not on your life!" shouted Craig furiously. He turned to Margaret, standing beside him in a daze. "What do you think of THAT! This fellow imagines because I've got a well-dressed woman along I'll submit. But I'm not that big a snob." He was looking up at the cabman again. "You miserable thief!" he exclaimed. "I'll give you three dollars, and that's too much by a dollar."
"Don't you call me names!" yelled the cabman, shaking his fist with the whip in it.
"The man's drunk," cried Josh to the little crowd of people that had assembled. Margaret, overwhelmed with mortification, tugged at his sleeve. "The man's not overcharging much--if any," she said in an undertone.
"You're saying that because you hate scenes," replied Josh loudly. "You go on into the house. I'll take care of this hound."
Margaret retreated within the parsonage gate; her very soul was sick. She longed for the ground to open and swallow her forever. It would be bad enough for a man to make such an exhibition at any time; but to make it when he was about to be married! --and in such circumstances! --to squabble and scream over a paltry dollar or so!
"Here's a policeman!" cried Craig. "Now, you thief, we'll see!"
The cabman sprang down from his seat. "You damn jay!" he bellowed. "You don't know New York cabfares. Was you ever to town before--eh?"
Craig beckoned the policeman with vast, excited gestures. Margaret fled up the walk toward the parsonage door, but not before she heard Craig say to the policeman: "I am Joshua Craig, assistant to the Attorney-General of the United States. This thief here--" And so on until he had told the whole story. Margaret kept her back to the street, but she could hear the two fiercely-angry voices, the laughter of the crowd. At last Craig joined her--panting, flushed, triumphant. "I knew he was a thief. Four dollars was the right amount, but I gave him five, as the policeman said it was best to quiet him."
He gave a jerk at the knob of parsonage street bell as if he were determined to pull it out; the bell within rang loudly, angrily, like the infuriate voice of a sleeper who has been roused with a thundering kick. "This affair of ours," continued Craig, "is going to cost money. And I've been spending it to-day like a drunken sailor. The more careful I am, the less careful I will have to be, my dear."
The door opened--a maid, scowling, appeared.
"Come on," cried Joshua to Margaret. And he led the way, brushing the maid aside as she stood her ground, attitude belligerent, but expression perplexed. To her, as he passed, Craig said: "Tell Doctor Scones that Mr. Craig and the lady are here. Has Mr. Arkwright come?"
By this time he was in the parlor; a glance around and he burst out: "Late, by jiminy! And I told him to be here ahead of time."
He darted to the window. "Ah! There he comes!" He wheeled upon Margaret just as she dropped, half-fainting, into a chair. "What's the matter, dear?" He leaped to her side. "No false emotions, please. If you could weather the real ones what's the use of getting up ladylike excitement over--" "For God's sake!" exclaimed Margaret, "sit down and shut up! If you don't I shall scream--scream--SCREAM!"
The maid gaped first at one, then at the other, left them reluctantly to admit Arkwright. As she opened the door she had to draw back a little. There was Craig immediately behind her. He swept her aside, flung the door wide. "Come on! Hurry!" he cried to Grant. "We're waiting." And he seized him by the arm and thrust him into the parlor. At the same instant the preacher entered by another door. Craig's excitement, far from diminishing, grew wilder and wilder. The preacher thought him insane or drunk. Grant and Margaret tried in vain to calm him. Nothing would do but the ceremony instantly--and he had his way. Never was there a more undignified wedding. When the responses were all said and the marriage was a fact accomplished, so far as preacher could accomplish it, Craig seemed suddenly to subside.
"I should like to go into the next room for a moment," said the pallid and trembling Margaret.
"Certainly," said Doctor Scones sympathetically, and, with a fierce scowl at the groom, he accompanied the bride from the room.
"What a mess you have made!" exclaimed Arkwright indignantly. "You've been acting like a lunatic."
"It wasn't acting--altogether," laughed Josh, giving Grant one of those tremendous slaps on the back. "You see, it was wise to give her something else to think about so she couldn't possibly hesitate or bolt. So I just gave way to my natural feelings. It's a way I have in difficult situations."
Grant's expression as he looked at him was a mingling of admiration, fear and scorn. "You are full of those petty tricks," said he.
"Why petty? Is it petty to meet the requirements of a situation? The situation was petty--the trick had to be. Besides, I tell you, it wasn't a trick. If I hadn't given my nerves an outlet I might have balked or bolted myself. I didn't want to have to think any more than she."
"You mustn't say those things to me," objected his friend.
"Why not? What do I care what you or any one else thinks of ME? And what could you do except simply think? Old pal, you ought to learn not to judge me by the rules of your little puddle. It's a ridiculous habit." He leaped at the door where Margaret had disappeared and rapped on it fiercely.
"Yes--yes--I'm coming," responded a nervous, pleading, agitated voice; and the door opened and Margaret appeared.
"What shall we do now?" she said to Craig. Grant saw, with an amazement he could scarcely conceal, that for the time, at least, she was quite subdued, would meekly submit to anything.
"Go to your grandmother," said Craig promptly. "You attend to the preacher, Grant. Twenty-five's enough to give him."
Margaret's cheeks flamed, her head bowed. Grant flushed in sympathy with her agony before this vulgarity. And a moment later he saw Margaret standing, drooping and resigned, at the curb, while Craig excitedly hailed a cab. "Poor girl!" he muttered, "living with that nightmare-in-breeches will surely kill her--so delicate, so refined, so sensitive!"
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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19
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MADAM BOWKER'S BLESSING
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"If you like I'll go up and tell your grandmother," said Craig, breaking the silence as they neared the hotel. But Margaret's brain had resumed its normal function, was making up for the time it had lost. With the shaking off of the daze had come amazement at finding herself married. In the same circumstances a man would have been incapacitated for action; Craig, who had been so reckless, so headlong a few minutes before, was now timid, irresolute, prey to alarms. But women, beneath the pose which man's resolute apotheosis of woman as the embodiment of unreasoning imagination has enforced upon them, are rarely so imaginative that the practical is wholly obscured. Margaret was accepting the situation, was planning soberly to turn it to the best advantage. Obviously, much hung upon this unconventional, this vulgarly-sensational marriage being diplomatically announced to the person from whom she expected to get an income of her own. "No," said she to Joshua, in response to his nervously-made offer. "You must wait down in the office while I tell her. At the proper time I'll send for you."
She spoke friendlily enough, with an inviting suggestion of their common interests. But Craig found it uncomfortable even to look at her. Now that the crisis was over his weaknesses were returning; he could not believe he had dared bear off this "delicate, refined creature," this woman whom "any one can see at a glance is a patrician of patricians." That kind of nervousness as quickly spreads through every part, moral, mental and physical, of a man not sure of himself as a fire through a haystack. He could not conceal his awe of her. She saw that something was wrong with him; being herself in no "patrician" mood, but, on the contrary, in a mood that was most humanly plebeian, she quite missed the cause of his clumsy embarrassment and constraint; she suspected a sudden physical ailment. "It'll be some time, I expect," said she. "Don't bother to hang around. I'll send a note to the desk, and you can inquire--say, in half an hour or so."
"Half an hour!" he cried in dismay. Whatever should he do with himself, alone with these returned terrors, and with no Margaret there to make him ashamed not to give braver battle to them.
"An hour, then."
She nodded, shook hands with a blush and a smile, not without its gleam of appreciation of the queerness of the situation. He lifted his hat, made a nervous, formal bow and turned away, though no car was there. As the elevator was starting up with her he came hurrying back.
"One moment," he said. "I quite forgot."
She joined him and they stood aside, in the shelter of a great wrap-rack. "You can tell your grandmother--it may help to smooth things over--that my appointment as Attorney-General will be announced day after to-morrow."
"Oh!" exclaimed she, her eyes lighting up.
He went on to explain. "As you know, the President didn't want to give it to me. But I succeeded in drawing him into a position where he either had to give it to me or seem to be retiring me because I had so vigorously attacked the big rascals he's suspected of being privately more than half in sympathy with."
"She'll be delighted!" exclaimed Margaret.
"And you?" he asked with awkward wistfulness.
"I?" said she blushing and dropping her glance. "Is it necessary for you to ask?"
She went back to the elevator still more out of humor with herself. She had begun their married life with what was very nearly a--well, it certainly was an evasion; for she cared nothing about his political career, so soon to end. However, she was glad of the appointment, because the news of it would be useful in calming and reconciling her grandmother. Just as her spirits began to rise it flashed into her mind: "Why, that's how it happens I'm married! If he hadn't been successful in getting the office he wouldn't have come.... He maneuvered the President into a position where he had to give him what he wanted. Then he came here and maneuvered me into a position where _I_ had to give him what he wanted. Always his 'game!' No sincerity or directness anywhere in him, and very little real courage." Here she stopped short in the full swing of pharisaism, smiled at herself in dismal self-mockery. "And what am _I_ doing? Playing MY 'game.' I'm on my way now to maneuver my grandmother. We are well suited--he and I. In another walk of life we might have been a pair of swindlers, playing into each other's hands.... And yet I don't believe we're worse than most people. Why, most people do these things without a thought of their being--unprincipled. And, after all, I'm not harming anybody, am I? That is, anybody but myself."
She had her campaign carefully laid out; she had mapped it in the cab between the parsonage and the hotel. "Grandmother," she began as the old lady looked up with a frown because of her long, unexpected absence, "I must tell you that just before we left Washington Craig broke the engagement."
Madam Bowker half-started from her chair. "Broke the engagement!" she cried in dismay.
"Abruptly and, apparently, finally. I--I didn't dare tell you before."
She so longed for sympathy that she half-hoped the old lady would show signs of being touched by the plight which that situation meant. But no sign came. Instead, Madam Bowker pierced her with wrathful eyes and said in a furious voice: "This is frightful! And you have done nothing?" She struck the floor violently with her staff. "He must be brought to a sense of honor--of decency! He must! Do you hear? It was your fault, I am sure. If he does not marry you are ruined!"
"He came over this morning," pursued Margaret. "He wanted to marry me at once."
"You should have given him no chance to change his mind again," cried Madam Bowker. "What a trifler you are! No seriousness! Your intelligence all in the abstract; only folly and fritter for your own affairs. You should have given him no chance to change!"
Margaret closed in and struck home. "I didn't," said she tersely. "I married him."
The old lady stared. Then, as she realized how cleverly Margaret had trapped her, she smiled a grim smile of appreciation and forgiveness. "Come and kiss me," said she. "You will do something, now that you have a chance. No woman has a chance--no LADY--until she is a Mrs. It's the struggle to round that point that wrecks so many of them."
Margaret kissed her. "And," she went on, "he has been made Attorney-General."
Never, never had Margaret seen such unconcealed satisfaction in her grandmother's face. The stern, piercing eyes softened and beamed affection upon the girl; all the affection she had deemed it wise to show theretofore always was tempered with sternness. "What a pity he hasn't money," said she. "Still, it can be managed, after a fashion."
"We MUST have money," pursued the girl. "Life with him, without it, would be intolerable. Poor people are thrown so closely together. He is too much for my nerves--often."
"He's your property now," Madam Bowker reminded her. "You must not disparage your own property. Always remember that your husband is your property. Then your silly nerves will soon quiet down."
"We must have money," repeated Margaret. "A great deal of money."
"You know I can't give you a great deal," said the old lady apologetically. "I'll do my best.... Would you like to live with me?"
There was something so fantastic in the idea of Joshua Craig and Madam Bowker living under the same roof, and herself trying to live with them, that Margaret burst out laughing. The old lady frowned; then, appreciating the joke, she joined in. "You'll have to make up your mind to live very quietly. Politics doesn't pay well--not Craig's branch of it, except in honor. He will be very famous."
"Where?" retorted Margaret disdainfully. "Why, with a lot of people who aren't worth considering. No, I am going to take Joshua out of politics."
The old lady looked interest and inquiry.
"He has had several flattering offers to be counsel to big corporations. The things he has done against them have made them respect and want him. I'm going to get him to leave politics and practice law in New York. Lawyers there--the shrewd ones, like him--make fortunes. He can still speak occasionally and get all the applause he wants. Joshua loves applause."
The old lady was watching her narrowly.
"Don't you think I'm right, Grandma? I'm telling you because I want your opinion."
"Will he do it?"
Margaret laughed easily. "He's afraid of me. If I manage him well he'll do whatever I wish. I can make him realize he has no right to deprive myself and him of the advantages of my station."
"Um--um," said the old lady, half to herself. "Yes--yes--perhaps. Um--um--" "He will be much more content once he's settled in the new line. Politics as an end is silly--what becomes of the men who stick to it? But politics as a means is sensible, and Joshua has got out of it about all he can get--about all he needs."
"He hopes to be President."
"So do thousands of other men. And even if he should get it how would we live--how would _I_ live--while we were waiting--and after it was over? I detest politics--all those vulgar people." Margaret made a disdainful mouth. "It isn't for our sort of people--except, perhaps, the diplomatic posts, and they, of course, go by 'pull' or purchase. I like the life I've led--the life you've led. You've made me luxurious and lazy, Grandma.... Rather than President I'd prefer him to be ambassador to England, after a while, when we could afford it. We could have a great social career."
"You think you can manage him?" repeated Madam Bowker.
She had been simply listening, her thoughts not showing at the surface. Her tone was neither discouraging nor encouraging, merely interrogative. But Margaret scented a doubt. "Don't you think so?" she said a little less confidently.
"I don't know.... I don't know.... It will do no harm to try."
Margaret's expression was suddenly like a real face from which a mask has dropped. "I must do it, Grandma. If I don't I shall--I shall HATE him! I will not be his servant! When I think of the humiliations he has put upon me I--I almost hate him now!"
Madam Bowker was alarmed, but was too wise to show it. She laughed. "How seriously you take yourself, child," said she. "All that is very young and very theatrical. What do birth and breeding mean if not that one has the high courage to bear what is, after all, the lot of most women, and the high intelligence to use one's circumstances, whatever they may be, to accomplish one's ambitions? A lady cannot afford to despise her husband. A lady is, first of all, serene. You talk like a Craig rather than like a Severance. If he can taint you this soon how long will it be before you are at his level? How can you hope to bring him up to yours?"
Margaret's head was hanging.
"Never again let me hear you speak disrespectfully of your husband, my child," the old lady went on impressively. "And if you are wise you will no more permit yourself to harbor a disrespectful thought of him than you would permit yourself to wear unclean underclothes."
Margaret dropped down at her grandmother's knee, buried her face in her lap. "I don't believe I can ever love him," she murmured.
"So long as you believe that, you never can," said Madam Bowker; "and your married life will be a failure--as great a failure as mine was--as your mother's was. If I had only known what I know now--what I am telling you--" Madam Bowker paused, and there was a long silence in the room. "Your married life, my dear," she went on, "will be what you choose to make of it. You have a husband. Never let yourself indulge in silly repinings or ruinous longings. Make the best of what you have. Study your husband, not ungenerously and superciliously, but with eyes determined to see the virtues that can be developed, the faults that can be cured, and with eyes that will not linger on the faults that can't be cured. Make him your constant thought and care. Never forget that you belong to the superior sex."
"I don't feel that I do," said Margaret. "I can't help feeling women are inferior and wishing I'd been a man."
"That is because you do not think," replied Madam Bowker indulgently. "Children are the center of life--its purpose, its fulfillment. All normal men and women want children above everything else. Our only title to be here is as ancestors--to replace ourselves with wiser and better than we. That makes woman the superior of man; she alone has the power to give birth. Man instinctively knows this, and it is his fear of subjection to woman that makes him sneer at and fight against every effort to develop her intelligence and her independence. If you are a true woman, worthy of your race and of your breeding, you will never forget your superiority--or the duties it imposes on you--what you owe to your husband and to your children. You are a married woman now. Therefore you are free. Show that you deserve freedom and know how to use it."
Margaret listened to the old woman with a new respect for her--and for herself. "I'll try, Grandmother," she said soberly. "But--it won't be easy." A reflective silence, and she repeated, "No, not easy."
"Easier than to resist and repine and rage and hunt another man who, on close acquaintance, would prove even less satisfactory," replied her grandmother. "Easy--if you honestly try." She looked down at the girl with the sympathy that goes out to inexperience from those who have lived long and thoughtfully and have seen many a vast and fearful bogy loom and, on nearer view, fade into a mist of fancy. "Above all, child, don't waste your strength on imaginary griefs and woes--you'll have none left for the real trials."
Margaret had listened attentively; she would remember what the old lady had said--indeed, it would have been hard to forget words so direct and so impressively uttered. But at the moment they made small impression upon her. She thought her grandmother kindly but cold. In fact, the old lady was giving her as deep commiseration as her broader experience permitted in the circumstances, some such commiseration as one gives a child who sees measureless calamity in a rainy sky on a long-anticipated picnic morning.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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20
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MR. CRAIG KISSES THE IDOL'S FOOT
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Grant Arkwright reached the Waldorf a little less than an hour after he had seen the bride and groom drive away from Doctor Scones'. He found Craig pacing up and down before the desk, his agitation so obvious that the people about were all intensely and frankly interested. "You look as if you were going to draw a couple of guns in a minute or so and shoot up the house," said he, putting himself squarely before Josh and halting him.
"For God's sake, Grant," cried Joshua, "see how I'm sweating! Go upstairs--up to their suite, and find out what's the matter."
"Go yourself," retorted Grant.
Craig shook his head. He couldn't confess to Arkwright what was really agitating him, why he did not disregard Margaret's injunction.
"What're you afraid of?"
Josh scowled as Grant thus unconsciously scuffed the sore spot. "I'm not afraid!" he cried aggressively. "It's better that you should go. Don't haggle--go!"
As Grant could think of no reason why he shouldn't, and as he had the keenest curiosity to see how the "old tartar" was taking it, he went. Margaret's voice came in response to his knock. "Oh, it's you," said she in a tone of relief.
Her face was swollen and her eyes red. She looked anything but lovely. Grant, however, was instantly so moved that he did not notice her homeliness. Also, he was one of those unobservant people who, having once formed an impression of a person, do not revise it except under compulsion; his last observation of Margaret had resulted in an impression of good looks, exceptional charm. He bent upon her a look in which understanding sympathy was heavily alloyed with the longing of the covetous man in presence of his neighbor's desirable possessions. But he discreetly decided that he would not put into words--at least, not just yet--his sympathy with her for her dreadful, her tragic mistake. No, it would be more tactful as well as more discreet to pretend belief that her tears had been caused by her grandmother. He glanced round.
"Where's Madam Bowker?" inquired he. "Did she blow up and bolt?"
"Oh, no," answered Margaret, seating herself with a dreary sigh. "She's gone to her sitting-room to write with her own hand the announcement that's to be given out. She says the exact wording is very important."
"So it is," said Grant. "All that's said will take its color from the first news."
"No doubt." Margaret's tone was indifferent, absent.
Arkwright hesitated to introduce the painful subject, the husband; yet he had a certain malicious pleasure in doing it, too. "Josh wants to come up," said he. "He's down at the desk, champing and tramping and pawing holes in the floor." And he looked at her, to note the impression of this vivid, adroitly-reminiscent picture.
"Not yet," said Margaret curtly and coldly. All of a sudden she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.
"Rita--dear Rita!" exclaimed Grant, his own eyes wet, "I know just how you feel. Am I not suffering, too? I thought I didn't care, but I did--I do. Rita, it isn't too late yet--" She straightened; dried her eyes. "Stop that, Grant!" she said peremptorily. "Stop it!"
His eyes sank. "I can't bear to see you suffer."
"You don't mean a word of what you've just said," she went on. "You are all upset, as I am. You are his friend and mine." Defiantly: "And I love him, and you know I do."
It was the tone of one giving another something that must be repeated by rote. "That's it," said he, somewhat sullenly, but with no hint of protest. "I'm all unstrung, like you, and like him."
"And you will forget that you saw me crying."
"I'll never think of it again."
"Now go and bring him, please."
He went quickly toward the door.
"Grant!" she cried. As he turned she rose, advanced with a friendly smile and put out her hand for his. "Thank you," she said. "You have shown yourself OUR best friend."
"I meant to be," he answered earnestly, as he pressed her hand. "When I pull myself together I think you'll realize I'm some decenter than I've seemed of late."
Madam Bowker came just as he returned with Craig. So all attention was concentrated upon the meeting of the two impossibilities. The old lady took her new relative's hand with a gracious, queenly smile--a smile that had the effect both of making him grateful and of keeping him "in his place." Said she, "I have been writing out the announcement."
"Thank you," was Joshua's eager, respectful reply.
She gave him the sheet of notepaper she was carrying in her left hand. It was her own private paper, heavy, quiet, rich, engraved with aristocratic simplicity, most elegant; and most elegant was the handwriting. "This," said she, "is to be given out in addition to the formal notice which Grant will send to the newspapers."
Craig read: "Mrs. Bowker announces the marriage of her granddaughter, Margaret Severence, and Joshua Craig, of Wayne, Minnesota, and Washington, by the Reverend Doctor Scones, at the Waldorf, this morning. Only a few relatives and Mr. Craig's friend, Mr. Grant Arkwright, were present. The marriage occurred sooner than was expected, out of consideration for Mrs. Bowker, as she is very old, and wished it to take place before she left for her summer abroad."
Craig lifted to the old lady the admiring glance of a satisfied expert in public opinion. Their eyes met on an equality; for an instant he forgot that she figured in his imagination as anything more than a human being. "Splendid!" cried he, with hearty enthusiasm. "You have covered the case exactly. Grant, telephone for an Associated Press reporter and give him this."
"I'll copy it off for him," said Grant.
Madam Bowker and Craig exchanged amused glances. "You'll give it to him in Madam Bowker's handwriting," ordered Craig. "You told Scones to keep his mouth shut, when you paid him?"
The other three looked conscious, and Margaret reddened slightly at this coarse brusqueness of phrase. "Yes," said Grant. "He'll refuse to be interviewed. I'll go and attend to this."
"We're having a gala lunch, at once--in the apartment," said the old lady. "So, come back quickly."
When he was gone she said to the two: "And now what are your plans?"
"We have none," said Craig.
"I had thought--" began Margaret. She hesitated, colored, went on: "Grandmother, couldn't you get the Millicans' camp in the Adirondacks? I heard Mrs. Millican say yesterday they had got it all ready and had suddenly decided to go abroad instead."
"Certainly," said the old lady. "I'll telephone about it at once, and I'll ask the Millicans to lunch with us to-day."
She left them alone. Craig, eyeing his bride covertly, had a sense of her remoteness, her unattainability. He was like a man who, in an hour of rashness and vanity, has boasted that he can attain a certain mountain peak, and finds himself stalled at its very base. He decided that he must assert himself; he tried to nerve himself to seize her in his old precipitate, boisterous fashion. He found that he had neither the desire to do so nor the ability. He had never thought her so full of the lady's charm. That was just the trouble--the lady's charm, not the human being's; not the charm feminine for the male.
"I hope you'll be very patient with me," said she, with a wan smile. "I am far from well. I've been debating for several days whether or not to give up and send for the doctor."
He did not see her real motive in thus paving the way for the formation of the habit of separate lives; he eagerly believed her, was grateful to her, was glad she was ill. So quaint is the interweaving of thought, there flashed into his mind at that moment: "After all, I needn't have blown in so much money on trousseau. Maybe I can get 'em to take back those two suits of twenty-dollar pajamas. Grant went in too deep." This, because the money question was bothering him greatly, the situation that would arise when his savings should be gone; for now it seemed to him he would never have the courage to discuss money with her. If she could have looked in upon his thoughts she would have been well content; there was every indication of easy sailing for her scheme to reconstruct his career.
"When do you think of starting for the Adirondacks?" he asked, with a timidity of preliminary swallowing and blushing that made her turn away her face to hide her smile. How completely hers was the situation! She felt the first triumphant thrill of her new estate.
"To-night," she replied. "We can't put it off."
"No, we can't put it off," assented he, hesitation in his voice, gloom upon his brow. "Though," he added, "you don't look at all well." With an effort: "Margaret, are you glad--or sorry?"
"Glad," she answered in a firm, resolute tone. It became a little hard in its practicality as she added: "You were quite right. We took the only course."
"You asked me to be a little patient with you," he went on.
She trembled; her glance fluttered down.
"Well--I--I--you'll have to be a little patient with me, too." He was red with embarrassment. She looked so still and cold and repelling that he could hardly muster voice to go on: "You can't but know, in a general sort of way, that I'm uncouth, unaccustomed to the sort of thing you've had all your life. I'm going to do my best, Margaret. And if you'll help me, and be a little forbearing, I think--I hope--you'll soon find I'm--I'm--oh, you understand."
She had given a stealthy sigh of relief when she discovered that he was not making the protest she had feared. "Yes, I understand," replied she, her manner a gentle graciousness, which in some moods would have sent his pride flaring against the very heavens in angry scorn. But he thought her most sweet and considerate, and she softened toward him with pity. It was very, pleasant thus to be looked up to, and, being human, she felt anything but a lessened esteem for her qualities of delicateness and refinement, of patrician breeding, when she saw him thus on his knees before them. He had invited her to look down on him, and she was accepting an invitation which it is not in human nature to decline.
There was one subject she had always avoided with him--the subject of his family. He had not exactly avoided it, indeed, had spoken occasionally of his brothers and sisters, their wives and husbands, their children. But his reference to these humble persons, so far removed from the station to which he had ascended, had impressed her as being dragged in by the ears, as if he were forcing himself to pretend to himself and to her that he was not ashamed of them, when in reality he could not but be ashamed. She felt that now was the time to bring up this subject and dispose of it.
Said she graciously: "I'm sorry your father and mother aren't living. I'd like to have known them."
He grew red. He was seeing a tiny, unkempt cottage in the outskirts of Wayne, poor, even for that modest little town. He was seeing a bent, gaunt old laborer in jeans, smoking a pipe on the doorsill; he was seeing, in the kitchen-dining-room-sitting-room-parlor, disclosed by the open door, a stout, aggressive-looking laborer's wife in faded calico, doing the few thick china dishes in dented dishpan on rickety old table. "Yes," said he, with not a trace of sincerity in his ashamed, constrained voice, "I wish so, too."
She understood; she felt sorry for him, proud of herself. Was it not fine and noble of her thus to condescend? "But there are your brothers and sisters," she went graciously on. "I must meet them some time." "Yes, some time," said he, laboriously pumping a thin, watery pretense of enthusiasm into his voice.
She had done her duty by his dreadful, impossible family. She passed glibly to other subjects. He was glad she had had the ladylike tact not to look at him during the episode; he wouldn't have liked any human being to see the look he knew his face was wearing.
In the press of agitating events, both forgot the incident--for the time.
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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21
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A SWOOP AND A SCRATCH
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When Molly Stillwater heard that Margaret and her "wild man" had gone into the woods for their honeymoon she said: "Rita's got to tame him and train him for human society. So she's taken him where there are no neighbors to hear him scream as--as--" Molly cast about in her stock of slang for a phrase that was vigorous enough--"as she 'puts the boots' to him."
It was a shrewd guess; Margaret had decided that she could do more toward "civilizing" him in those few first weeks and in solitude than in years of teaching at odd times. In China, at the marriage feast, the bride and the groom each struggle to be first to sit on the robe of the other; the idea is that the winner will thenceforth rule. As the Chinese have been many ages at the business of living, the custom should not be dismissed too summarily as mere vain and heathenish superstition. At any rate, Margaret had reasoned it out that she must get the advantage in the impending initial grapple and tussle of their individualities, or choose between slavery and divorce. With him handicapped by awe of her, by almost groveling respect for her ideas and feelings in all man and woman matters, domestic and social, it seemed to her that she could be worsted only by a miracle of stupidity on her part.
Never had he been so nearly "like an ordinary man--like a gentleman"--as when they set out for the Adirondacks. She could scarcely believe her own eyes, and she warmed to him and felt that she had been greatly overestimating her task. He had on one of the suits he had bought ready made that morning. It was of rough blue cloth--dark blue--most becoming and well draped to show to advantage his lithe, powerful frame, its sinews so much more manly-looking than the muscularity of artificially got protuberances usually seen in the prosperous classes in our Eastern cities. Grant had selected the suit, had selected all the suits, and had superintended the fittings. Grant had also selected the negligee shirt and the fashionable collar, and the bright, yet not gaudy, tie, and Grant had selected the shoes that made his feet look like feet; and Grant had conducted him to a proper barber, who had reduced the mop of hair to proportion and order, and had restored its natural color and look of vitality by a thorough shampooing. In brief, Grant had taken a gloomy pleasure in putting his successful rival through the machine of civilization and bringing him out a city man, agreeable to sight, smell and touch.
"Now," said he, when the process was finished, "for Heaven's sake try to keep yourself up to the mark. Take a cold bath every morning and a warm bath before dinner."
"I have been taking a cold bath every day since I got my private bathroom," said Joshua, with honest pride.
"Then you're just as dirty as the average Englishman. He takes a cold bath and fancies he's clean, when in fact he's only clean-looking. Cold water merely stimulates. It takes warm water and soap to keep a man clean."
"I'll bear that in mind," said Craig, with a docility that flattered Grant as kindly attentions from a fierce-looking dog flatter the timid stranger.
"And you must take care of your clothes, too," proceeded the arbiter elegantiarum. "Fold your trousers when you take them off, and have them pressed. Get your hair cut once a week--have a regular day for it. Trim your nails twice a week. I've got you a safety razor. Shave at least once a day--first thing after you get out of bed is the best time. And change your linen every day. Don't think because a shirt isn't downright dirty that you can pass it off for fresh."
"Just write those things down," said Josh. "And any others of the same kind you happen to think of. I hate to think what a state I'd be in if I hadn't you. Don't imagine I'm not appreciating the self-sacrifice."
Grant looked sheepish. But he felt that his shame was unwarranted, that he really deserved Craig's tactless praise. So he observed virtuously: "That's where we men are beyond the women. Now, if it were one woman fixing up another, the chances are a thousand to one she'd play the cat, and get clothes and give suggestions that'd mean ruin."
It may not speak well for Arkwright's capacity for emotion, but it certainly speaks well for his amiability and philanthropy that doing these things for Craig had so far enlisted him that he was almost as anxious as the fluttered and flustered bridegroom himself for the success of the adventure. He wished he could go along, in disguise, as a sort of valet and prime minister--to be ever near Josh to coach and advise and guide him. For it seemed to him that success or failure in this honeymooning hung upon the success or failure of Craig in practising the precepts that for Grant and his kind take precedence of the moral code. He spent an earnest and exhausting hour in neatly and carefully writing out the instructions, as Craig had requested. He performed this service with a gravity that would move some people to the same sort of laughter and wonder that is excited by the human doings of a trained chimpanzee. But Craig--the wild man, the arch foe of effeteness, the apostle of the simple life of yarn sock and tallowed boot and homespun pants and hairy jaw--Craig accepted the service with heartfelt thanks in his shaking voice and moist eye.
Thus the opening of the honeymoon was most auspicious. Craig, too much in awe of Margaret to bother her, and busy about matters that concerned himself alone, was a model of caution, restraint and civility. Margaret, apparently calm, aloof and ladylike, was really watching his discreet conduct as a hawk watches a sheltered hen; she began to indulge in pleasant hopes that Joshua's wild days had come to an abrupt end. Why, he was even restrained in conversation; he did not interrupt her often, instantly apologized and forebore when he did; he poured out none of his wonted sophomoric diatribes, sometimes sensible, more often inane, as the prattle of a great man in his hour of relaxation is apt to be. She had to do most of the talking--and you may be sure that she directed her conversation to conveying under an appearance of lightness many valuable lessons in the true wisdom of life as it is revealed only to the fashionable idle. She was careful not to overdo, not to provoke, above all not to put him at his ease.
Her fiction of ill health, of threatened nervous prostration, also served to free her from an overdose of his society during the long and difficult days in that eventless solitude. He was all for arduous tramps through the woods, for excursions in canoe under the fierce sun. She insisted on his enjoying himself--"but I don't feel equal to any such exertion. I simply must rest and take care of myself." She was somewhat surprised at his simplicity in believing her health was anything but robust, when her appearance gave the lie direct to her hints and regrets. While he was off with one of the guides she stayed at camp, reading, working at herself with the aid of Selina, revolving and maturing her plans.
When she saw him she saw him at his best. He showed up especially well at swimming. She was a notable figure herself in bathing suit, and could swim in a nice, ladylike way; but he was a water creature--indeed, seemed more at home in the water than on land. She liked to watch his long, strong, narrow body cut the surface of the transparent lake with no loss of energy in splashing or display--as easy and swift as a fish. She began to fear she had made a mistake in selecting a place for her school for a husband, "He's in his element--this wilderness," thought she, "not mine. I'll take him back with everything still to be done."
And, worst of all, she found herself losing her sense of proportion, her respect for her fashionable idols. Those vast woods, that infinite summer sky--they were giving her a new and far from practical point of view--especially upon the petty trickeries and posturings of the ludicrously self-important human specks that crawl about upon the earth and hastily begin to act queer and absurd as soon as they come in sight of each other. She found herself rapidly developing that latent "sentimentality" which her grandmother had so often rebuked and warned her against--which Lucia had insisted was her real self. Her imagination beat the bars of the cage of convention in which she had imprisoned it, and cried out for free, large, natural emotions--those that make the blood leap and the flesh tingle, that put music in the voice and softness in the glance and the intense joy of life in the heart. And she began to revolve him before eyes that searched hopefully for possibilities of his giving her precisely what her nerves craved.
"It would be queer, wouldn't it," she mused--she was watching him swim--"if it should turn out that I had come up here to learn, instead of to teach?"
And he--In large presences he was always at his best--in the large situations of affairs, in these large, tranquillizing horizons of nature. He, too, began to forget that she was a refined, delicate, sensitive lady, with nerves that writhed under breaks in manners and could in no wise endure a slip in grammar, unless, of course, it was one of those indorsed by fashionable usage. His health came flooding and roaring back in its fullness; and day by day the difficulty of restraining himself from loud laughter and strong, plebeian action became more appalling to him. He would leave the camp, set off at a run as soon as he got safely out of sight; and, when he was sure of seclusion in distance, he would "cut loose"--yell and laugh and caper like a true madman; tear off his superfluous clothes, splash and thresh in some lonely lake like a baby whale that has not yet had the primary lessons in how to behave. When he returned to camp, subdued in manner, like a bad boy after recess, he was, in fact, not one bit subdued beneath the surface, but the more fractious for his outburst. Each day his animal spirits surged higher; each day her sway of awe and respect grew more precarious. She thought his increasing silence, his really ridiculous formality of politeness, his stammering and red-cheeked dread of intrusion meant a deepening of the sense of the social gulf that rolled between them. She recalled their conversation about his relatives. "Poor fellow!" thought she. "I suppose it's quite impossible for people of my sort to realize what a man of his birth and bringing up feels in circumstances like these." Little did she dream, in her exaltation of self-complacence and superiority, that the "poor fellow's" clumsy formalities were the thin cover for a tempest of wild-man's wild emotion.
Curiously, she "got on" his nerves before he on hers. It was through her habit of rising late and taking hours to dress. Part of his code of conduct--an interpolation of his own into the Arkwright manual for a honeymooning gentleman--was that he ought to wait until she was ready to breakfast, before breakfasting himself. Several mornings she heard tempestuous sounds round the camp for two hours before she emerged from her room. She knew these sounds came from him, though all was quiet as soon as she appeared; and she very soon thought out the reason for his uproar. Next, his anger could not subdue itself beyond surliness on her appearing, and the surliness lasted through the first part of breakfast. Finally, one morning she heard him calling her when she was about half-way through her leisurely toilette: "Margaret! MARGARET!"
"Yes--what is it?"
"Do come out. You're missing the best part of the day."
"All right--in a minute."
She continued with, if anything, a slackening of her exertions; she appeared about an hour after she had said "in a minute." He was ready to speak, and speak sharply. But one glance at her, at the exquisite toilette--of the woods, yet of the civilization that dwells in palaces and reposes languidly upon the exertions of menials--at her cooling, subduing eyes, so graciously haughty--and he shut his lips together and subsided.
The next morning it was a knock at her door just as she was waking--or had it waked her? "Yes--what is it?"
"Do come out! I'm half starved."
The voice was pleading, not at all commanding, not at all the aggressive, dictatorial voice of the Josh Craig of less than a month before. But it was distinctly reminiscent of that Craig; it was plainly the first faint murmur, not of rebellion, but of the spirit of rebellion. Margaret retorted with an icily polite, "Please don't wait for me."
"Yes, I'll wait. But be as quick as you can."
Margaret neither hastened nor dallied. She came forth at the end of an hour and a half. Josh, to her surprise, greeted her as if she had not kept him waiting an instant; not a glance of sullenness, no suppressed irritation in his voice. Next morning the knock was a summons.
"Margaret! I say, Margaret!" came in tones made bold and fierce by hunger. "I've been waiting nearly two hours."
"For what?" inquired she frigidly from the other side of the door.
"For breakfast."
"Oh! Go ahead with it. I'm not even up yet."
"You've been shut in there ten hours."
"What of it?" retorted she sharply. "Go away, and don't bother me."
He had put her into such an ill humor that when she came out, two hours later, her stormy brow, her gleaming hazel eyes showed she was "looking for trouble." He was still breakfastless--he well knew how to manipulate his weaknesses so that his purposes could cow them, could even use them. He answered her lowering glance with a flash of his blue-green eyes like lightning from the dark head of a thunder-cloud. "Do you know it is nine o'clock?" demanded he.
"So early? I try to get up late so that the days won't seem so long."
He abandoned the field to her, and she thought him permanently beaten. She had yet to learn the depths of his sagacity that never gave battle until the time was auspicious.
Two mornings later he returned to the attack.
"I see your light burning every night until midnight," said he--at breakfast with her, after the usual wait.
"I read myself to sleep," explained she.
"Do you think that's good for you?"
"I don't notice any ill effects."
"You say your health doesn't improve as rapidly as you hoped."
Check! She reddened with guilt and exasperation. "What a sly trick!" thought she. She answered him with a cold: "I always have read myself to sleep, and I fancy I always shall."
"If you went to sleep earlier," observed he, his air unmistakably that of the victor conscious of victory, "you'd not keep me raging round two or three hours for breakfast."
"How often I've asked you not to wait for me! I prefer to breakfast alone, anyhow. It's the dreadful habit of breakfasting together that causes people to get on together so badly."
"I'd not feel right," said he, moderately, but firmly, "if I didn't see you at breakfast."
She sat silent--thinking. He felt what she was thinking--how common this was, how "middle class," how "bourgeois," she was calling it. "Bourgeois" was her favorite word for all that she objected to in him, for all she was trying to train out of him by what she regarded as most artistically indirect lessons. He felt that their talk about his family, what he had said, had shown he felt, was recurring to her. He grew red, burned with shame from head to foot.
"What a fool, what a pup I was!" he said to himself. "If she had been a real lady--no, by gad--a real WOMAN--she'd have shown that she despised me."
Again and again that incident had come back to him. It had been, perhaps, the most powerful factor in his patience with her airs and condescensions. He felt that it, the lowest dip of his degradation in snobism, had given her the right to keep him in his place. It seemed to him one of those frightful crimes against self-respect which can never be atoned, and, bad as he thought it from the standpoint of good sense as to the way to get on with her, he suffered far more because it was such a stinging, scoffing denial of all his pretenses of personal pride. "Her sensibilities have been too blunted by association with those Washington vulgarians," he reasoned, "for her to realize the enormity of my offense, but she realizes enough to look down at me more contemptuously every time she recalls it." However, the greater the blunder the greater the necessity of repairing. He resolutely thrust his self-abasing thoughts to the background of his mind, and began afresh.
"I'm sure," said he, "you'd not mind, once you got used to it."
She was startled out of her abstraction. "Used to--what?" she inquired.
"To getting up early."
"Oh!" She gave a relieved laugh. "Still harping on that. How persistent you are!"
"You could accomplish twice as much if you got up early and made a right start."
She frowned slightly. "Couldn't think of it," said she, in the tone of one whose forbearance is about at an end. "I hate the early morning."
"We usually hate what's best for us. But, if we're sensible, we do it until it becomes a habit that we don't mind--or positively like."
This philosophy of the indisputable and the sensible brimmed the measure. "What would you think of me," said she, in her pleasantest, most deliberately irritating way in the world, "if I were to insist that you get up late and breakfast late? You should learn to let live as well as to live. You are too fond of trying to compel everybody to do as you wish."
"I make 'em see that what I wish is what they ought. That's not compelling."
"It's even more unpopular."
"I'm not looking for popularity, but for success."
"Well, please don't annoy me in the mornings hereafter."
"You don't seem to realize you've renounced your foolish idlers and all their ways, and have joined the working classes." His good humor had come back with breakfast; he had finished two large trout, much bread and marmalade and coffee--and it had given her a pleasure that somehow seemed vulgar and forbidden to see him eat so vastly, with such obvious delight. As he made his jest about her entry into the working classes--she who suggested a queen bee, to employ the labors of a whole army of willing toilers, while she herself toiled not--he was tilted back at his ease, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunbeams sparkle in the waves of her black hair like jewels showered there. "You're surely quite well again," he went on, the trend of his thought so hidden that he did not see it himself.
"I don't feel especially well," said she, instantly on guard.
He laughed. "You'd not dare say that to yourself in the mirror. You have wonderful color. Your eyes--there never was anything so clear. You were always straight--that was one of the things I admired about you. But now, you seem to be straight without the slightest effort--the natural straightness of a sapling."
This was most agreeable, for she loved compliments, liked to discover that the charms which she herself saw in herself were really there. But encouraging such talk was not compatible with the course she had laid out for herself with him. She continued silent and cold.
"If you'd only go to sleep early, and get up early, and drop all that the railway train carried us away from, you'd be as happy as the birds and the deer and the fish."
"I shall not change my habits," said she tartly. "I hope you'll drop the subject."
He leaned across the table toward her, the same charm now in his face and in his voice that had drawn her when she first heard him in public speech. "Let's suppose I'm a woodchopper, and you are my wife. We've never been anywhere but just here. We're going to live here all our lives--just you and I--and no one else--and we don't want any one else. And we love each other--" It was very alluring, but there was duty frowning upon her yielding senses. "Please don't let that smoke drift into my face," said she crossly. "It's choking me."
He flung away the cigarette. "Beg pardon," he muttered, between anger and humility. "Thought you didn't mind smoking."
She was ashamed of herself, and grew still angrier. "If you'd only think about some one beside yourself once in a while," said she. "You quite wear people out, with your everlasting thinking and talking about yourself."
"You'd better stop that midnight reading," flared he. "Your temper is going to the devil."
She rose with great dignity; with an expression that seemed to send him tumbling and her soaring she went into the house.
In some moods he would have lain where he fell for quite a while. But his mood of delight in her charms as a woman had completely eclipsed his deference for her charms as a lady. He hesitated only a second, then followed her, overtook her at the entrance to her room. She, hearing him coming, did not face about and put him back in his place with one haughty look. Instead, she in impulsive, most ill-timed panic, quickened her step. When the woman flees, the man, if there be any manhood in him, pursues. He caught her, held her fast.
"Let me go!" she cried, not with the compelling force of offended dignity, but with the hysterical ineffectiveness of terror. "You are rough. You hurt."
He laughed, turned her about in his arms until she was facing him. "The odor of those pines, out there," he said, "makes me drunk, and the odor of your hair makes me insane." And he was kissing her--those fierce, strong caresses that at once repelled and compelled her.
"I hate you!" she panted. "I hate you!"
"Oh, no, you don't," retorted he. "That isn't what's in your eyes." And he held her so tightly that she was almost crying out with pain.
"Please--please!" she gasped. And she wrenched to free herself. One of his hands slipped, his nail tore a long gash in her neck; the blood spurted out, she gave a loud cry, an exaggerated cry--for the pain, somehow, had a certain pleasure in it. He released her, stared vacantly at the wound he had made. She rushed into her room, slammed the door and locked it.
"Margaret!" he implored.
She did not answer; he knew she would not. He sat miserably at her door for an hour, then wandered out into the woods, and stayed there until dinner-time.
When he came in she was sitting by the lake, reading a French novel. To him, who knew only his own language, there was something peculiarly refined and elegant about her ability at French; he thought, as did she, that she spoke French like a native, though, in fact, her accent was almost British, and her understanding of it was just about what can be expected in a person who has never made a thorough study of any language. As he advanced toward her she seemed unconscious of his presence. But she was seeing him distinctly, and so ludicrous a figure of shy and sheepish contrition was he making that she with difficulty restrained her laughter. He glanced guiltily at the long, red scratch on the pallid whiteness of her throat.
"I'm ashamed of myself," said he humbly. "I'm not fit to touch a person like you. I--I--" She was not so mean as she had thought she would be. "It was nothing," said she pleasantly, if distantly. "Is dinner ready?"
Once more she had him where she wished--abject, apologetic, conscious of the high honor of merely being permitted to associate with her. She could relax and unbend again; she was safe from his cyclones.
|
{
"id": "4929"
}
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22
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GETTING ACQUAINTED
|
Her opportunity definitely to begin her campaign to lift him up out of politics finally came. She had been doing something in that direction almost every day. She must be careful not to alarm his vanity of being absolute master of his own destiny. The idea of leaving politics and practising law in New York, must seem to originate and to grow in his own brain; she would seem to be merely assenting. Also, it was a delicate matter because the basic reason for the change was money; and it was her cue as a lady, refined and sensitive and wholly free from sordidness, so to act that he would think her loftily indifferent to money. She had learned from dealing with her grandmother that the way to get the most money was by seeming ignorant of money values, a cover behind which she could shame Madam Bowker into giving a great deal more than she would have given on direct and specific demand. For instance, she could get more from the old lady than could her mother, who explained just what she wanted the money for and acted as if the giving were a great favor. No, she must never get with him on a footing where he could discuss money matters frankly with her; she must simply make him realize how attractive luxury was, how necessary it was to her, how confidently she looked to him to provide it, how blindly, in her ignorance of money and all sordid matters, she trusted to him to maintain her as a wife such as she must be maintained. She knew she did not understand him thoroughly--"we've been so differently brought up." But she felt that the kind of life that pleased her and dazzled him must be the kind he really wished to lead--and would see he wished to lead, once he extricated himself, with her adroit assistance, from the kind of life to which his vociferous pretenses had committed him.
Whether her subtleties in furtherance of creating a sane state of mind in him had penetrated to him, she could not tell. In the earliest step of their acquaintance she had studied him as a matrimonial possibility, after the habit of young women with each unattached man they add to their list of acquaintances. And she had then discovered that whenever he was seriously revolving any matter he never spoke of it; he would be voluble about everything and anything else under the sun, would seem to be unbosoming himself of his bottommost secret of thought and action, but would not let escape so much as the smallest hint of what was really engaging his whole mind. It was this discovery that had set her to disregarding his seeming of colossal, of fatuous egotism, and had started her toward an estimate of him wholly different from the current estimate. Now, was he thinking of their future, or was it some other matter that occupied his real mind while he talked on and on, usually of himself? She could not tell; she hoped it was, but she dared not try to find out.
They were at their mail, which one of the guides had just brought. He interrupted his reading to burst out: "How they do tempt a man! Now, there's"--and he struck the open letter in his hand with a flourishing, egotistic gesture--"an offer from the General Steel Company. They want me as their chief counsel at fifty thousand a year and the privilege of doing other work that doesn't conflict."
Fifty thousand a year! Margaret discreetly veiled her glistening eyes.
"It's the fourth offer of the same sort," he went on, "since we've been up here--since it was given out that I'd be Attorney-General as soon as old Stillwater retires. The people pay me seventy-five hundred a year. They take all my time. They make it impossible for me to do anything outside. They watch and suspect and grumble. And I could be making my two hundred thousand a year or more."
He was rattling on complacently, patting himself on the back, and, in his effort to pose as a marvel of patriotic self-sacrifice, carefully avoiding any suggestion that mere money seemed to him a very poor thing beside the honor of high office, the direction of great affairs, the flattering columns of newspaper praise and censure, the general agitation of eighty millions over him. "Sometimes I'm almost tempted to drop politics," he went on, "and go in for the spoils. What do you think?"
She was taken completely off guard. She hadn't the faintest notion that this was his way of getting at her real mind. But she was too feminine to walk straight into the trap. "I don't know," said she, with well-simulated indifference, as if her mind were more than half on her own letter. "I haven't given the matter any thought." Carelessly: "Where would we live if you accepted this offer?"
"New York, of course. You prefer Washington, don't you?"
"No, I believe I'd like New York better. I've a great many friends there. While there isn't such a variety of people, the really nice New Yorkers are the most attractive people in America. And one can live so well in New York."
"I'd sink into a forgotten obscurity," pursued the crafty Joshua. "I'd be nothing but a corporation lawyer, a well-paid fetch-and-carry for the rich thieves that huddle together there."
"Oh, you'd be famous wherever you are, I'm sure," replied she with judicious enthusiasm. "Besides, you'd have fame with the real people."
His head reared significantly. But, to draw her on, he said: "That's true. That's true," as if reflecting favorably.
"Yes, I think I'd like New York," continued she, all unsuspicious. "I don't care much for politics. I hate to think of a man of your abilities at the mercy of the mob. In New York you could make a really great career."
"Get rich--be right in the social swim--and you too," suggested he.
"It certainly is very satisfactory to feel one is of the best people. And I'm sure you'd not care to have me mix up with all sorts, as politicians' wives have to do."
He laughed at her--the loud, coarse Josh Craig outburst. "You're stark mad on the subject of class distinctions, aren't you?" said he. "You'll learn some day to look on that sort of thing as you would on an attempt to shovel highways and set up sign-posts in the open sea. Your kind of people are like the children that build forts out of sand at the seashore. Along comes a wave and washes it all away.... You'd be willing for me to abandon my career and become a rich nonentity in New York?"
His tone was distinctly offensive. "I don't look at it in that way," said she coldly. "Really, I care nothing about it." And she resumed the reading of her letter.
"Do you expect me to believe," demanded he, excited and angry--"do you expect me to believe you've not given the subject of our future a thought?"
She continued reading. Such a question in such a tone called for the rebuke of an ignoring silence. Also, deep down in her nature, down where the rock foundations of courage should have been but were not, there had begun an ominous trembling.
"You know what my salary is?"
"You just mentioned it."
"You know it's to be only five hundred dollars a year more after January?"
"I knew the Cabinet people got eight thousand." She was gazing dreamily out toward the purple horizon, seemed as far as its mountains from worldliness.
"Hadn't you thought out how we were to live on that sum? You are aware I've practically nothing but my salary."
"I suppose I ought to think of those things--ought to have thought of them," replied she with a vague, faint smile. "But really--well, we've been brought up rather carelessly--I suppose some people would call it badly--and--" "You take me for a fool, don't you?" he interrupted roughly.
She elevated her eyebrows.
"I wish I had a quarter for every row between your people and your grandmother on the subject of money. I wish I had a dollar for every row you and she have had about it."
He again vented his boisterous laugh; her nerves had not been so rasped since her wedding day. "Come, Margaret," he went on, "I know you've been brought up differently from me. I know I seem vulgar to you in many ways. But because I show you I appreciate those differences, don't imagine I'm an utter ass. And I certainly should be if I didn't know that your people are human beings."
She looked guilty as well as angry now. She felt she had gone just the one short step too far in her aristocratic assumptions.
He went on in the tone of one who confidently expects that there will be no more nonsense: "When you married me you had some sort of idea how we'd live."
"I assumed you had thought out those things or you'd not have married me," cried she hotly. In spite of her warnings to herself she couldn't keep cool. His manner, his words were so inflammatory that she could not hold herself from jumping into the mud to do battle with him. She abandoned her one advantage--high ground; she descended to his level. "You knew the sort of woman I was," she pursued. "You undertook the responsibility. I assume you are man enough to fulfill it."
He felt quite at home with her now. "And you?" rasped he. "What responsibility did YOU undertake?"
She caught her breath, flamed scarlet.
"Now let us hear what wife means in the dictionary of a lady. Come, let's hear it!"
She was silent.
"I'm not criticising," he went on; "I'm simply inquiring. What do you think it means to be a wife?"
Still she could think of no answer.
"It must mean something," urged he. "Tell me. I've got to learn some time, haven't I?"
"I think," said she, with a tranquil haughtiness which she hoped would carry off the weakness of the only reply she could get together on such short notice, "among our sort of people the wife is expected to attend to the social part of the life."
He waited for more--waited with an expression that suggested thirst. But no more came. "Is that all?" he inquired, and waited again--in vain. "Yes? ... Well, tell me, where in thunder does the husband come in? He puts up the cash for the wife to spend in dressing and amusing herself--is that all?"
"It is generally assumed," said she, since she had to say something or let the case go against her by default, "that the social side of life can be very useful in furthering a man."
He vented a scornful sound that was like a hoot. "In furthering a lick-spittle--yes. But not a MAN!"
"Our ideas on some subjects are hopelessly apart."
She suddenly realized that this whole conversation had been deliberately planned by him; that he had, indeed, been debating within himself their future life, and that he had decided that the time was ripe for a frank talk with her. It angered her that she had not realized this sooner, that she had been drawn from her position, had been forced to discuss with him on his own terms and at his own time and in his own manner. She felt all the fiery indignation of the schemer who has been outwitted.
"Your tone," said she, all ice, "makes it impossible for a well-bred person to discuss with you. Let us talk of something else, or of nothing at all."
"No. Let's thresh it out now that we've begun. And do try to keep your temper. There's no reason for anger. We've got to go back to civilization. We've got to live after we get there. We want to live comfortably, as satisfactorily for both as our income permits. Now, what shall we do? How shall we invest our eight thousand a year--and whatever your grandmother allows you? I don't need much. I'll turn the salary over to you. You're entirely welcome to all there is above my board and clothes."
This sounded generous and, so, irritated Margaret the more. "You know very well we can't live like decent people on twelve or fifteen thousand a year in Washington."
"You knew that before you married me. What did you have in mind?"
Silence.
"Why do you find it difficult to be frank with me?"
His courteous, appealing tone and manner made it impossible to indulge in the lie direct or the lie evasive. She continued silent, raging inwardly against him for being so ungenerous, so ungentlemanly as to put her in such a pitiful posture, one vastly different from that she had prearranged for herself when "the proper time" came.
"You had something in mind," he persisted. "What is it?"
"Grandmother wishes us to live with her," she said with intent to flank.
"Would you like that?" he inquired; and her very heart seemed to stand still in horror at his tone. It was a tone that suggested that the idea was attractive!
She debated. He must be "bluffing"--he surely must. She rallied her courage and pushed on: "It's probably the best we can do in the circumstances. We'd have almost nothing left after we'd paid our rent if we set up for ourselves. Even if I were content to pinch and look a frump and never go out, you'd not tolerate it."
"Nothing could be more galling," said he, after reflecting, "than what people would say if we lived off your grandmother. No, going there is unthinkable. I like her, and we'd get on well together--" Margaret laughed. "Like two cats drowning in a bag."
"Not at all," protested he sincerely. "Your grandmother and I understand each other--better than you and I--at least, better than you understand me. However, I'll not permit our being dependents of hers."
Margaret had a queer look. Was not her taking enough money from the old lady to pay all her personal expenses--was not that dependence?
"We'll return to that later," continued he, and she had an uncomfortable sense that he was answering her thought. "To go back to your idea in marrying me. You expected me to leave politics."
"Why do you think that?" exclaimed she.
"You told me." " _I_!"
"You, yourself. Have you not said you could not live on what I get as a public man, and that if I were a gentleman I'd not expect you to?"
Margaret stared foolishly at this unescapable inference from her own statements and admissions during his cross-examination. She began to feel helpless in his hands--and began to respect him whom she could not fool.
"I know," he went on, "you're too intelligent not to have appreciated that either we must live on my salary or I must leave public life."
He laughed--a quiet, amused laugh, different from any she had ever heard from him. Evidently, Joshua Craig in intimacy was still another person from the several Joshua Craigs she already knew. "And," said he, in explanation of his laughter, "I thought you married me because I had political prospects. I fancied you had real ambition.... I might have known! According to the people of your set, to be in that set is to have achieved the summit of earthly ambition--to dress, to roll about in carriages, to go from one fussy house to another, from one showy entertainment to another, to eat stupid dinners, and caper or match picture cards afterward, to grin and chatter, to do nothing useful or even interesting--" He laughed again, one of his old-time, boisterous outbursts. But it seemed to her to fit in, to be the laughter of mountain and forest and infinity of space at her and her silly friends. "And you picture ME taking permanent part in that show, or toiling to find you the money to do it with. ME! ... Merely because I've been, for a moment, somewhat bedazzled by its cheap glitter."
Margaret felt that he had torn off the mask and had revealed his true self. But greater than her interest in this new personality was her anger at having been deceived--self-deceived. "You asked me how I'd like to live," cried she, color high and eyes filled with tears of rage. "I answered your question, and you grow insulting."
"I'm doing the best I know how," said he.
After a moment she got herself under control. "Then," asked she, "what have you to propose?"
"I can't tell you just now," replied he, and his manner was most disquieting. "To-morrow--or next day."
"Don't you think I'm right about it being humiliating for us to go back to Washington and live poorly?"
"Undoubtedly. I've felt that from the beginning."
"Then you agree with me?"
"Not altogether," said he. And there was a quiet sternness in his smile, in his gentle tone, that increased her alarms. "I've been hoping, rather," continued he, "that you'd take an interest in my career."
"I do," cried she.
"Not in MY career," replied he, those powerful, hewn features of his sad and bitter. "In your own--in a career in which I'd become as contemptible as the rest of the men you know--a poor thing like Grant Arkwright. Worse, for I'd do very badly what he has learned to do well."
"To be a well-bred, well-mannered gentleman is no small achievement," said she with a sweetness that was designed to turn to gall after it reached him.
He surveyed her tranquilly. She remembered that look; it was the same he had had the morning he met her at the Waldorf elevator and took her away and married her. She knew that the crisis had come and that he was ready. And she? Never had she felt less capable, less resolute.
"I've been doing a good deal of thinking--thinking about us--these last few days--since I inflicted that scratch on you," said he. "Among other things, I've concluded you know as little about what constitutes a real gentleman as I do; also, that you have no idea what it is in you that makes you a lady--so far as you are one."
She glanced at him in fright, and that expression of hers betrayed the fundamental weakness in her--the weakness that underlies all character based upon the achievements of others, not upon one's own. Margaret was three generations away from self-reliance. Craig's speech sounded like a deliberate insult, deliberate attempt to precipitate a quarrel, an estrangement. There had been nothing in her training to prepare her for such a rude, courage-testing event as that.
"Do you remember--it was the day we married--the talk we had about my relatives?"
She colored, was painfully embarrassed, strove in vain to conceal it. "About your relatives?" she said inquiringly.
He made an impatient gesture. "I know you remember. Well, if I had been a gentleman, or had known what gentleman meant, I'd never have said--or, rather, looked what I did then. If you had known what a gentleman is, if you had been a lady, you'd have been unable to go on with a man who had shown himself such a blackguard."
"You are unjust to us both," she eagerly interrupted. "Joshua--you--" "Don't try to excuse me--or yourself," said he peremptorily. "Now, you thought what I showed that day--my being ashamed of honester, straighter--more American--people than you or I will ever be--you thought that was the real me. Thank God, it wasn't. But"--he pointed a fascinating forefinger at her--"it was the me I'd be if you had your way."
She could not meet his eyes.
"I see you understand," said he earnestly. "That's a good sign."
"Yes, I do understand," said she. Her voice was low and her head was still hanging. "I'm glad you've said this. I--I respect you for it."
"Don't fret about me," said he curtly. "Fret about your own melancholy case. What do your impulses of decent feeling amount to, anyway? An inch below the surface you're all for the other sort of thing--the cheap and nasty. If you could choose this minute you'd take the poorest of those drawing-room marionettes before the finest real man, if he didn't know how to wear his clothes or had trouble with his grammar."
She felt that there was more than a grain of truth in this; at any rate, denial would be useless, as his tone was the tone of settled conviction.
"We've made a false start," proceeded he. He rose, lighted a cigarette. "We're going to start all over again. I'll tell you what I'm going to do about it in a day or two."
And he strolled away to the landing. She saw him presently enter a canoe; under his powerful, easy stroke it shot away, to disappear behind the headland. She felt horribly lonely and oppressed--as if she would never see him again. "He's quite capable of leaving me here to find my way back to Washington alone--quite capable!" And her lip curled.
But the scorn was all upon the surface. Beneath there was fear and respect--the fear and respect which those demoralized by unearned luxury and by the purposeless life always feel when faced by strength and self-reliance in the crises where externals avail no more than its paint and its bunting a warship in battle. She knew she had been treating him as no self-respecting man who knew the world would permit any woman to treat him. She knew her self-respect should have kept her from treating him thus, even if he, in his ignorance of her world and awe of it, would permit. But more than from shame at vain self-abasement her chagrin came from the sense of having played her game so confidently, so carelessly, so stupidly that he had seen it. She winced as she recalled how shrewdly and swiftly he had got to the very bottom of her, especially of her selfishness in planning to use him with no thought for his good. Yet so many women thus used their husbands; why not she? "I suppose I began too soon.... No, not too soon, but too frigidly." The word seemed to her to illuminate the whole situation. "That's it!" she cried. "How stupid of me!"
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{
"id": "4929"
}
|
23
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WHAT THE MOON SAW AND DID
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Physical condition is no doubt the dominant factor in human thought and action. State of soul is, as Doctor Schulze has observed, simply the egotistic human vanity for state of body. If the health of the human race were better, if sickness, the latent and the revealed together, were not all but universal, human relations would be wonderfully softened, sweetened and simplified. Indigestion, with its various ramifications, is alone responsible for most of the crimes, catastrophes and cruelties, public and private discord; for it tinges human thought and vision with pessimistic black or bloody red or envious green or degenerate yellow instead of the normal, serene and invigorating white. All the world's great public disturbers have been diseased. As for private life, its bad of all degrees could, as to its deep-lying, originating causes, be better diagnosed by physician than by psychologist.
Margaret, being in perfect physical condition, was deeply depressed for only a short time after the immediate cause of her mood ceased to be active. An hour after Joshua had revealed himself in thunder and lightning, and had gone, she was almost serene again, her hopefulness of healthy youth and her sense of humor in the ascendent. Their stay in the woods was drawing to an end. Soon they would be off for Lenox, for her Uncle Dan's, where there would be many people about and small, perhaps no, opportunity for direct and quick action and result. She reviewed her conduct and felt that she had no reason to reproach herself for not having made an earlier beginning in what she now saw should have been her tactics with her "wild man." How could she, inexpert, foresee what was mockingly obvious to hindsight? Only by experiment and failure is the art of success learned. Her original plan had been the best possible, taking into account her lack of knowledge of male nature and the very misleading indications of his real character she had got from him. In her position would not almost any one have decided that the right way to move him was by holding him at respectful distance and by indirect talk, with the inevitable drift of events doing the principal work--gradually awakening him to the responsibilities and privileges which his entry into a higher social station implied?
But no time must now be lost; the new way, which experience had revealed, must be taken forthwith and traveled by forced marches. Before they left the woods she must have led him through all the gradations of domestic climate between their present frosty if kindly winter, and summer, or, at least, a very balmy spring. From what she knew of his temperament she guessed that once she began to thaw he would forthwith whirl her into July. She must be prepared to accept that, however--repellent though the thought was--she assured herself it was most repellent. She prided herself on her skill at catching and checking herself in self-deception; but it somehow did not occur to her to contrast her rather listless previous planning with the energy and interest she at once put into this project for supreme martyrdom, as she regarded it.
When he came back that evening she was ready. But not he; he stalked in, sulking and blustering, tired, ignoring her, doing all the talking himself, and departing for bed as soon as dinner was over. She felt as if he had repulsed her, though, in fact, her overtures were wholly internal and could not, by any chance, have impressed him. Bitter against him and dreading the open humiliation she would have to endure before she could make one so self-absorbed see what she was about, she put out her light early, with intent to rise when he did and be at breakfast before he could finish. She lay awake until nearly dawn, then fell into a deep sleep. When she woke it was noon; she felt so greatly refreshed that her high good humor would not suffer her to be deeply resentful against him for this second failure. "No matter," reflected she. "He might have suspected me if I'd done anything so revolutionary as appear at breakfast. I'll make my beginning at lunch."
She was now striving, with some success, to think of him as a tyrant whom she, luckless martyr, must cajole. "I'm going the way of all the married women," thought she. "They soon find there's no honorable way to get their rights from their masters, find they simply have to degrade themselves." Yes, he was forcing her to degrade herself, to simulate affection when the reverse was in her heart. Well, she would make him pay dearly for it--some day. Meanwhile she must gain her point. "If I don't, I'd better not have married. To be Mrs. is something, but not much if I'm the creature of his whims."
She put off lunch nearly an hour; but he did not come, did not reappear until dinner was waiting. "I've been over to town," he explained, "doing a lot of telegraphing that was necessary." He was in vast spirits, delighted with himself, volubly boastful, so full of animal health and life and of joy in the prospect of food and sleep that mental worries were as foreign to him as to the wild geese flying overhead.
He snuffed the air in which the odor of cooking was mingled deliciously with the odor of the pines. "If they don't hurry up dinner," said he, "I'll rush in and eat off the stove. We used to at home sometimes. It's great fun."
She smiled tolerantly. "I've missed you," said she, and she was telling herself that this statement of a literal truth was the quintessence of hypocritical cajolery. "You might have taken me along."
He gave her a puzzled look. "Oh," said he finally, "you've been thinking over what I said."
This was disconcerting; but she contrived to smile with winning frankness. "Yes," replied she. "I've been very wrong, I see." She felt proud of the adroitness of this--an exact truth, yet wholly misleading.
His expression told her that he was congratulating himself on his wisdom and success in having given her a sharp talking to; that he was thinking it had brought her to her senses, had restored her respect for him, had opened the way for her love for him to begin to show itself--that love which he so firmly believed in, egotist that he was! Could anything be more infuriating? Yet--after all, what difference did it make, so long as he yielded? And once she had him enthralled, then--ah, yes--THEN! Meanwhile she must remember that the first principle of successful deception is self-deception, and must try to convince herself that she was what she was pretending to be.
Dinner was served, and he fell to like a harvest hand. As he had the habit, when he was very hungry, of stuffing his mouth far too full for speech, she was free to carry out her little program of encouraging talk and action. As she advanced from hesitating compliment to flattery, to admiring glances, to lingering look, she marveled at her facility. "I suppose ages and ages of dreadful necessity have made it second nature to every woman, even the best of us," reflected she. If he weren't a handsome, superior man she might be finding it more difficult; also, no doubt the surroundings, so romantic, so fitting as background for his ruggedness, were helping her to dexterity and even enthusiasm.
It was amusing, how she deceived herself--for the harmless self-deceptions of us chronic mummers are always amusing. The fact was, this melting and inviting mood had far more of nature and sincerity in it than there had been in her icy aloofness. Icy aloofness, except in the heroines of aristocratic novels, is a state of mind compatible only with extreme stupidity or with some one of those organic diseases that sour the disposition. Never had she been in such health as in that camp, never so buoyant, never had merely being alive been so deliciously intoxicating; the scratch he had made on her throat had healed in twenty-four hours, had all but disappeared in seventy-two. Never had she known to such a degree what a delight a body can be, the sense of its eagerness to bring to the mind all the glorious pleasures of the senses. Whatever disinclination she had toward him was altogether a prompting of class education; now that she had let down the bars and released feeling she was in heart glad he was there with her, glad he was "such a MAN of a man."
The guides made a huge fire down by the shore, and left them alone. They sat by it until nearly ten o'clock, he talking incessantly; her overtures had roused in him the desire to please, and, instead of the usual monologue of egotism and rant, he poured out poetry, eloquence, sense and humorous shrewdness. Had he been far less the unusual, the great man, she would still have listened with a sense of delight, for in her mood that night his penetrating voice, which, in other moods, she found as insupportable as a needle-pointed goad, harmonized with the great, starry sky and the mysterious, eerie shadows of forest and mountain and lake close round their huge, bright fire. As they rose to go in, up came the moon. A broad, benevolent, encouraging face, the face of a matchmaker. Craig put his arm round Margaret. She trembled and thrilled.
"Do you know what that moon's saying?" asked he. In his voice was that exquisite tone that enabled him to make even commonplaces lift great audiences to their feet to cheer him wildly.
She lifted soft, shining eyes to his. "What?" she inquired under her breath. She had forgotten her schemes, her resentments, her make-believe of every kind. "What--Joshua?" she repeated.
"It's saying: 'Hurry up, you silly children, down there! Don't you know that life is a minute and youth a second?'" And now both his arms were round her and one of her hands lay upon his shoulder.
"Life a minute--youth a second," she murmured.
"Do you think I'd scratch you horribly if I kissed you--Rita?"
She lowered her eyes but not her face. "You might try--Josh."
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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24
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"OUR HOUSE IS AFIRE"
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Next morning she was up and in her dressing-room and had almost finished her toilette before he awakened. For the first time in years--perhaps the first time since the end of her happy girlhood and the beginning of her first season in Washington society--she felt like singing. Was there ever such a dawn? Did ever song of birds sound so like the voice of eternal youth? Whence had come this air like the fumes from the winepresses of the gods? And the light! What colors, what tints, upon mountain and valley and halcyon lake! And the man asleep in the next room--yes, there WAS a Joshua Craig whom she found extremely trying at times; but that Joshua Craig had somehow resigned the tenancy of the strong, straight form there, had resigned it to a man who was the living expression of all that bewitched her in these wilds.
She laughed softly at her own ecstasy of exaggeration. "The other Josh will come back," she reminded herself, "and I must not forget to be practical. THIS is episodic." These happy, superhuman episodes would come, would pass, would recur at intervals; but the routine of her life must be lived. And if these episodes were to recur the practical must not be neglected. "It's by neglecting the practical that so many wives come to grief," reflected she. And the first mandate of the practical was that he must be rescued from that vulgar political game, which meant poverty and low associations and tormenting uncertainties. He must be got where his talents would have their due, their reward. But subtly guiding him into the way that would be best for him was a far different matter from what she had been planning up to last night's moonrise--was as abysmally separated from its selfish hypocrisy as love from hate. She would persist in her purpose, but how changed the motive!
She heard him stirring in her--no, THEIR room. Her face lighted up, her eyes sparkled. She ran to the mirror for a final primp before he should see her. She was more than pleased with the image she saw reflected there. "I never looked better in my life--never so well. I'm glad I kept back this particular dress. He's sure to like it, and it certainly is becoming to me--the best-fitting skirt I ever had--what good lines it has about the hips." She startled at a knock upon the door. She rushed away from the mirror. He had small physical vanity himself--she had never known any one with so little. He had shown that he thought she had no vanity of that kind, either, and he would doubtless misunderstand her solicitude about her personal appearance. Anyhow, of all mornings this would be the worst for him to catch her at the glass.
"Yes?" she called.
"Margaret," came in his voice. And, oh, the difference in it! --the note of tenderness--no, it was not imagination, it was really there! Her eyes filled and her bosom heaved.
"Are you joining me at breakfast?"
"Come in," cried she.
When the door did not open she went and opened it. There stood HE! If he had greeted her with a triumphant, proprietorial expression she would have been--well, it would have given her a lowered opinion of his sensibility. But his look was just right--dazzled, shy, happy. Nor did he make one of his impetuous rushes. He almost timidly took her hand, kissed it; and it was she who sought his shoulder--gladly, eagerly, with a sudden, real shyness. "Margaret," he said. "Mine--aren't you?"
Here was the Joshua she was to know thenceforth, she felt. This Joshua would enable her to understand, or, rather, to disregard, so far as she personally was concerned, the Josh, tempestuous, abrupt, often absurd, whom the world knew. But--As soon as they went where the guides were, the familiar Josh returned--boyish, boisterous, rather foolish in trying to be frivolous and light. Still--what did it matter? As soon as they should be alone again-- When they set out after breakfast her Joshua still did not return, as she had confidently expected. The obstreperous one remained, the one that was the shrewdly-developed cover for his everlasting scheming mind. "What an unending ass I've been making of myself," he burst out, "with my silly notions." He drew a paper from his pocket and handed it to her. "And this infernal thing of Grant's has been encouraging me in idiocy."
She read the Arkwright gentleman's gazette and complete guide to dress and conduct in the society of a refined gentlewoman. Her impulse was to laugh, an impulse hard indeed to restrain when she came to the last line of the document and read in Grant's neat, careful-man's handwriting with heavy underscorings: "Above all, never forget that you are a mighty stiff dose for anybody, and could easily become an overdose for a refined, sensitive lady." But prudent foresight made her keep her countenance. "This is all very sensible," said she.
"Sensible enough," assented he. "I've learned a lot from it.... Did you read that last sentence?"
She turned her face away. "Yes," she said.
"That, taken with everything else, all but got me down," said he somberly. "God, what I've been through! It came near preventing us from discovering that you're not a grand lady but a human being." His mood veered, and it was he that was gay and she glum; for he suddenly seized her and subjected her to one of those tumultuous ordeals so disastrous to toilette and to dignity and to her sense of personal rights. Not that she altogether disliked; she never had altogether disliked, had found a certain thrill in his rude riotousness. Still, she preferred the other Joshua Craig, HER Joshua, who wished to receive as well as to give. And she wished that Joshua, her Joshua, would return. She herself had thought that, so far as she was concerned, those periods of tender and gentle sentiment would be episodic; but it was another thing for him to think so--and to show it frankly. "I feel as if I'd had an adventure with a bear," said she, half-laughing, half-resentful.
"So you did," declared he; "I'm a bear--and every other sort of animal--except rabbit. There's no rabbit in me. Now, your men--the Grant Arkwrights--are all rabbit."
"At least," said she, "do refrain from tearing my hair down. A woman who does her hair well hates to have it mussed."
"I'll try to remember," was his careless answer. "As I was about to say, our discovery that you are not a lady out of a story-book, but a human being and a very sweet one--it came just in the nick of time. We're leaving here to-night."
Now she saw the reason for the persistence of the Craig of noise and bluster--and craft. "To-night?" she exclaimed. "It's impossible."
"Yes--we go at five o'clock. Tickets are bought--sleeper section engaged--everything arranged."
"But Uncle Dan doesn't expect us for four days yet."
"I've sent him a telegram."
"But I can't pack."
"Selina can."
"Impossible in such a little time."
"Then I'll do it," said Craig jovially. "I can pack a trunk twice as quick as any man you ever saw. I pack with my feet as well as with my hands."
"It's impossible," repeated she angrily. "I detest being hurried."
"Hurried? Why, you've got nine hours to get used to the idea. Nine hours' warning for anything isn't haste."
"Why didn't you tell me this yesterday?" demanded she, coming to a full stop and expecting thus to compel him to face her. But he marched on.
"It has been my lifelong habit," declared he over his shoulder, "to arrange everything before disclosing my plans. You'll find, as we get on, that it will save you a lot of fretting and debating."
Reluctantly and with the humiliating sense of helpless second fiddle she followed him along the rough path. "I loathe surprises," she said.
"Then adjust your mind to not being surprised at anything from me."
He laughed noisily at his own humor. She was almost hating him again. He seemed to have eyes in the back of his head; for as she shot a fiery glance at him he whirled round, shook his forefinger maddeningly at her: "Now listen to me, my dear," said he, in his very worst manner, most aggressive, most dictatorial; "if you had wanted an ordinary sort of man you should have married one and not me."
"Don't you think common courtesy required you at least to consult me about such a matter?"
"I do not. If I had I should have done so. I found it was necessary that we go. I went ahead and arranged it. If you saw the house on fire would you wait till you had consulted me before putting it out?"
"But this is entirely different."
"Not at all. Entirely the same, on the contrary. The talk we had day before yesterday convinced me that our house is afire. I'm going to put it out." He shut his teeth together with a snap, compressed his lips, gave her one of those quick, positive nods of his Viking head. Then he caught her by the arm. "Now," said he jocosely, "let's go back to camp. You want to do your packing. I've got to go over to the station and telegraph some more."
She wrenched her arm away pettishly and, with sullen face, accompanied him to the camp. It was all she could do to hide her anger when, in full sight of the guides, he swept her up into his arms and kissed her several times. Possibly she would have been really angered, deeply angered, had she realized that these cyclones were due, as a rule, not so much to appreciation of her as to the necessity of a strong counter-irritant to a sudden attack of awe of her as a fine lady and doubt of his own ability to cope with her. "Good-by, Rita," cried he, releasing her as suddenly as he had seized her and rushing toward the landing. "If I don't get back till the last minute be sure you're ready. Anything that isn't ready will be left behind--anything or anybody!"
The idea of revolt, of refusing to go, appealed to her first anger strongly. But, on consideration, she saw that merely asserting her rights would not be enough--that she must train him to respect them. If she refused to go he would simply leave her; yes, he was just the man, the wild man, to do precisely that disgraceful thing. And she would be horribly afraid to spend the night alone in those woods with only the guides and Selina, not to speak of facing the morrow--for he might refuse to take her back! Where would she turn in that case? What would her grandmother say? Who would support her in making such a scandal and giving up a husband for reasons that could not be made impressive in words though they were the best of all reasons in terms of feeling? No, if she gave him up she would be absolutely alone, condemned on every hand, in the worst possible position. Then, too, the break was unattractive for another reason. Though she despised herself for her weakness, she did not wish to give up the man who had given her that brief glimpse of happiness she had dreamed as one dreams an impossibility. Did not wish? Could not--would not--give him up. "I belong to him!" she thought with a thrill of ecstasy and of despair.
"But he'd better be careful!" she grumbled. "If I should begin to dislike him there'd be no going back." And then it recurred to her that this would be as great a calamity of loss for her as for him--and she went at her packing in a better humor. "I'll explain to him that I yield this once, but--" There she stopped herself with a laugh. Of what use to explain to him? --him who never listened to explanations, who did not care a fig why people did as he wished, but was content that they did. As for warning him about "next time"--how ridiculous! She could hear his penetrating, rousing voice saying: "We'll deal with 'next time' when it comes."
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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25
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MRS. JOSHUA CRAIG
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"We change at Albany," said he when they were on the train, after a last hour of mad scramble, due in part to her tardiness, in the main to the atmosphere of hysteric hustle and bustle he created as a precaution.
"At Albany!" she exclaimed. "Why, when do we get there?"
"At midnight."
"At midnight!" It was the last drop in the cup of gall, she thought. "Why, we'd get to Lenox, or to some place where we'd have to change again, long before morning! Josh, you must be out of your senses. It's a perfect outrage!"
"Best I could do," said he, laughing uproariously and patting her on the back. "Cheer up. You can sleep on my shoulder until we get to Albany."
"We will go on to New York," said she stiffly, "and leave from there in the morning."
"Can't do it," said he. "Must change at Albany. You ought to learn to control your temper over these little inconveniences of life. I've brought a volume of Emerson's essays along and I'll read to you if you don't want to sleep."
"I hate to be read aloud to. Joshua, let's go on to New York. Such a night of horror as you've planned will wear me out."
"I tell you it's impossible. I've done the best thing in the circumstances. You'll see."
Suddenly she sprang up, looked wildly round. "Where's Selina?" she gasped.
"Coming to-morrow or next day," replied he. "I sent her to the camp for some things I forgot."
She sank back and said no more. Again she was tempted to revolt against such imbecile tyranny; and again, as she debated the situation, the wisdom, the necessity of submitting became apparent. How would it sound to have to explain to her grandmother that she had left him because he took an inconvenient train? "I'd like to see him try this sort of thing if we'd been married six months instead of six weeks," she muttered.
She refused to talk with him, answered him in cold monosyllables. And after dinner, when he produced the volume of Emerson and began to read aloud, she curtly asked him to be quiet. "I wish to sleep!" snapped she.
"Do, dear," urged he. And he put his arm around her.
"That's very uncomfortable," said she, trying to draw away.
He drew her back, held her--and she knew she must either submit or make a scene. There was small attraction to scene-making with such a master of disgraceful and humiliating scenes as he. "He wouldn't care a rap," she muttered. "He simply revels in scenes, knowing he's sure to win out at them as a mongrel in a fight with a"--even in that trying moment her sense of humor did not leave her--"with a lapdog."
She found herself comfortable and amazingly content, leaning against his shoulder; and presently she went to sleep, he holding the book in his free hand and reading calmly. The next thing she knew he was shaking her gently. "Albany," he said. "We've got to change here."
She rose sleepily and followed him from the car, adjusting her hat as she went. She had thought she would be wretched; instead, she felt fine as the sharp, night air roused her nerves and freshened her skin. He led the way into the empty waiting-room; the porter piled the bags on the bench; she seated herself. "I must send a telegram," said he, and he went over to the window marked "Telegraph Office." It was closed. He knocked and rattled, and finally pounded on the glass with his umbrella handle.
Her nerves went all to pieces. "Can't you see," she called impatiently, "that there's no one there?"
"There will be some one!" he shouted in reply, and fell to pounding so vigorously that she thought the glass would surely break. But it did not; after a while the window flew up and an angry face just escaped a blow from the vibrating umbrella handle. A violent altercation followed, the operator raging, but Craig more uproarious than he and having the further advantage of a more extensive and more picturesque vocabulary. Finally the operator said: "I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself. Don't you see there's a lady present?"
"It's my wife," said Craig. "Now take this message and get it off at once. You should thank me for not having you dismissed."
The operator read the message. His face changed and he said in a surlily apologetic manner: "I'll send it off right away, Mr. Craig. Anything else?"
"That's all, my friend," said Josh. He returned to his wife's side. She was all confusion and doubt again. Here they were back in civilization, and her man of the woods was straightway running amuck. What should she do? What COULD she do? WHAT had she got herself into by marrying?
But he was speaking. "My dear," he was saying in his sharp, insistent voice, that at once aroused and enfeebled the nerves, "I must talk fast, as the train comes in fifteen or twenty minutes--the train for Chicago--for Minneapolis--for Wayne--for home--OUR home."
She started up from the seat, pale, quivering, her hands clinched against her bosom.
"For home," he repeated, fixing her with his resolute, green-blue eyes. "Please, sit down."
She sank to the seat. "Do you mean--" she began, but her faltering voice could not go on.
"I've resigned from office," said he, swift and calm. "I've told the President I'll not take the Attorney-Generalship. I've telegraphed your people at Lenox that we're not coming. And I'm going home to run for Governor. My telegrams assure me the nomination, and, with the hold I've got on the people, that means election, sure pop. I make my first speech day after to-morrow afternoon--with you on the platform beside me."
"You are mistaken," she said in a cold, hard voice. "You--" "Now don't speak till you've thought, and don't think till I finish. As you yourself said, Washington's no place for us--at present. Anyhow, the way to get there right is to be sent there from the people--by the people. You are the wife of a public man, but you've had no training."
"I--" she began.
"Hear me first," he said, between entreaty and command. "You think I'm the one that's got it all to learn. Think again. The little tiddledywinks business that I've got to learn--all the value there is in the mass of balderdash about manners and dress--I can learn it in a few lessons. You can teach it to me in no time. But what you've got to learn--how to be a wife, how to live on a modest income, how to take care of me, and help me in my career, how to be a woman instead of, largely, a dressmaker's or a dancing-master's expression for lady-likeness--to learn all that is going to take time. And we must begin at once; for, as I told you, the house is afire."
She opened her lips to speak.
"No--not yet," said he. "One thing more. You've been thinking things about me. Well, do you imagine this busy brain of mine hasn't been thinking a few things about you? Why, Margaret, you need me even more than I need you, though I need you more than I'd dare try to tell you. You need just such a man as me to give you direction and purpose--REAL backbone. Primping and preening in carriages and parlors--THAT isn't life. It's the frosting on the cake. Now, you and I, we're going to have the cake itself. Maybe with, maybe without the frosting. BUT NOT THE FROSTING WITHOUT THE CAKE, MARGARET!"
"So!" she exclaimed, drawing a long breath when he had ended. "So! THIS is why you chose that five o'clock train and sent Selina back. You thought to--" He laughed as if echoing delight from her; he patted her enthusiastically on the knee. "You've guessed it! Go up head! I didn't want you to have time to say and do foolish things."
She bit her lip till the blood came. Ringing in her ears and defying her efforts to silence them were those words of his about the cake and the frosting--"the cake, maybe with, maybe without frosting; BUT NOT THE FROSTING WITHOUT THE CAKE!" She started to speak; but it was no interruption from him that checked her, for he sat silent, looking at her with all his fiery strength of soul in his magnetic eyes. Again she started to speak; and a third time; and each time checked herself. This impossible man, this creator of impossible situations! She did not know how to begin, or how to go on after she should have begun. She felt that even if she had known what to say she would probably lack the courage to say it--that final-test courage which only the trained in self-reliance have. The door opened. A station attendant came in out of the frosty night and shouted: "Chicago Express! Express for--Buffalo! Chicago! Minneapolis! St. Paul! --the Northwest! --the Far West! All--a--BOARD!"
Craig seized the handbags. "Come on, my dear!" he cried, getting into rapid motion.
She sat still.
He was at the door. "Come on," he said.
She looked appealingly, helplessly round that empty, lonely, strange station, its lights dim, its suggestions all inhospitable. "He has me at his mercy," she said to herself, between anger and despair. "How can I refuse to go without becoming the laughing-stock of the whole world?"
"Come on--Rita!" he cried. The voice was aggressive, but his face was deathly pale and the look out of his eyes was the call of a great loneliness. And she saw it and felt it. She braced herself against it; but a sob surged up in her throat--the answer of her heart to his heart's cry of loneliness and love.
"Chicago Express!" came in the train-caller's warning roar from behind her, as if the room were crowded instead of tenanted by those two only. "All aboard! ... Hurry up, lady, or you'll get left!"
Get left! ... Left! --the explosion of that hoarse, ominous voice seemed to blow Mrs. Joshua Craig from the seat, to sweep her out through the door her husband was holding open, and into the train for their home.
THE END
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{
"id": "4929"
}
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1
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THE ACCIDENT.
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THE soft twilight of the tropics, that loves to linger over the low latitudes, after the departure of the long summer's day, was breathing in zephyrs of aromatic sweetness over the shores and plains of the beautiful Queen of the Antilles. The noise and bustle of the day had given place to the quiet and gentle influences of the hour; the slave had laid by his implements of labor, and now stood at ease, while the sunburnt overseers had put off the air of vigilance that they had worn all day, and sat or lounged lazily with their cigars.
Here and there strolled a Montaro from the country, who, having disposed of his load of fruit, of produce and fowls, was now preparing to return once more inland, looking, with his long Toledo blade and heavy spurs, more like a bandit than an honest husbandman. The evening gun had long since boomed over the waters of the land-locked harbor from the grim, walls of Moro Castle, the guard had been relieved at the governor's palace and the city walls, and now the steady martial tread to the tap of the drum rang along the streets of Havana, as the guard once more sought their barracks in the Plaza des Armes.
The pretty senoritas sat at their grated windows, nearly on a level with the street, and chatted through the bars, not unlike prisoners, to those gallants who paused to address them. And now a steady line of pedestrians turned their way to the garden that fronts the governor's palace, where they might listen to the music of the band, nightly poured forth here to rich and poor.
At this peculiar hour there was a small party walking in the broad and very private walk that skirts the seaward side of the city, nearly opposite the Moro, and known as the Plato. It is the only hour in which a lady can appear outside the walls of her dwelling on foot in this queer and picturesque capital, and then only in the Plaza, opposite to the palace, or in some secluded and private walk like the Plato. Such is Creole and Spanish etiquette.
The party referred to consisted of a fine looking old Spanish don, a lady who seemed to be his daughter, a little boy of some twelve or thirteen years, who might perhaps be the lady's brother, and a couple of gentlemen in undress military attire, yet bearing sufficient tokens of rank to show them to be high in command. The party was a gay though small one, and the lady seemed to be as lively and talkative as the two gentlemen could desire, while they, on their part, appeared most devoted to every syllable and gesture.
There was a slight air of hauteur in the lady's bearing; she seemed to half disdain the homage that was so freely tendered to her, and though she laughed loud and clear, there was a careless, not to say heartless, accent in her tones, that betrayed her indifference to the devoted attentions of her companions. Apparently too much accustomed to this treatment to be disheartened by it, the two gentlemen bore themselves most courteously, and continued as devoted as ever to the fair creature by their side.
The boy of whom we have spoken was a noble child, frank and manly in his bearing, and evidently deeply interested in the maritime scene before him. Now he paused to watch the throng of craft of every nation that lay at anchor in the harbor, or which were moored; after the fashion here, with their stems to the quay, and now his fine blue eye wandered off over the swift running waters of the Gulf Stream, watching for a moment the long, heavy swoop of some distant seafowl, or the white sail of some clipper craft bound up the Gulf to New Orleans, or down the narrow channel through the Caribbean Sea to some South American port. The old don seemed in the meantime to regard the boy with an earnest pride, and scarcely heeded at all the bright sallies of wit that his daughter was so freely and merrily bestowing upon her two assiduous admirers.
"Yonder brigantine must be a slaver," said the boy, pointing to a rakish craft that seemed to be struggling against the current to the southward.
"Most like, most like; but what does she on this side? the southern shore is her ground, and the Isle of Pines is a hundred leagues from here," said the old don.
"She has lost her reckoning, probably," said the boy, "and made the first land to the north. Lucky she didn't fall in with those Florida wreckers, for though the Americans don't carry on the African trade nowadays, they know what to do with a cargo if it gets once hard and fast on the reefs."
"What know you of these matters?" asked the old don, turning a curious eye on the boy.
"O, I hear them talk of these things, and you know I saw a cargo 'run' on the south side only last month," continued the boy. "There were three hundred or more filed off from that felucca, two by two, to the shore."
"It is a slaver," said one of the officers, "a little out of her latitude, that's all."
"A beautiful craft," said the lady, earnestly; "can it be a slaver, and so beautiful."
"They are clipper-built, all of them," said the old don. "Launched in Baltimore, United States."
Senorita Gonzales was the daughter of the proud old don of the same name, who was of the party on the Plato at the time we describe. The father was one of the richest as well as noblest in rank of all the residents of the island, being of the old Castilian stock, who had come from Spain many years before, and after holding high office, both civil and military, under the crown, had at last retired with a princely fortune, and devoted himself to the education of his daughter and son, both of whom we have already introduced to the reader.
The daughter, beautiful, intelligent, and witty to a most extraordinary degree, had absolutely broken the hearts of half the men of rank on the island; for though yet scarcely twenty years of age, Senorita Isabella was a confirmed coquette. It was her passion to command and enjoy a devotion, but as to ever having in the least degree cherished or known what it was to love, the lady was entirely void of the charge; she had never known the tenderness of reciprocal affection, nor did it seem to those who knew her best, that the man was born who could win her confidence.
Men's hearts had been Isabella Gonzales's toys and playthings ever since the hour that she first had realized her power over them. And yet she was far from being heartless in reality. She was most sensitive, and at times thoughtful and serious; but this was in her closet, and when alone. Those who thought that the sunshine of that face was never clouded, were mistaken. She hardly received the respect that was due to her better understanding and naturally strong points of character, because she hid them mainly behind an exterior of captivating mirthfulness and never ceasing smiles.
The cool refreshing sea breeze that swept in from the water was most delicious, after the scorching heat of a summer's day in the West Indies, and the party paused as they breathed in of its freshness, leaning upon the parapet of the walk, over which they looked down upon the glancing waves of the bay far beneath them. The moon was stealing slowly but steadily up from behind the lofty tower of Moro Castle, casting a dash of silvery light athwart its dark batteries and grim walls, and silvering a long wake across the now silent harbor, making its rippling waters of golden and silver hues, and casting, where the Moro tower was between it and the water, a long, deep shadow to seaward.
Even the gay and apparently thoughtless Senorita Isabella was struck with delight at the view now presented to her gaze, and for a moment she paused in silence to drink in of the spirit-stirring beauty of the scene.
"How beautiful it is," whispered the boy, who was close by her side.
"Beautiful, very beautiful," echoed Isabella, again becoming silent.
No one who has not breathed the soft air of the south at an hour such as we have described, can well realize the tender influence that it exercises upon a susceptible disposition. The whole party gazed for some minutes in silence, apparently charmed by the scene. There was a hallowing and chastening influence in the very air, and the gay coquette was softened into the tender woman. A tear even glistened in Ruez's, her brother's eyes; but he was a thoughtful and delicate-souled child, and would be affected thus much more quickly than his sister.
The eldest of the two gentlemen who were in attendance upon Don Gonzales and his family, was Count Anguera, lieutenant-governor of the island; and his companion, a fine military figure, apparently some years the count's junior, was General Harero of the royal infantry, quartered at the governor's palace. Such was the party that promenaded on the parapet of the Plato.
As we have intimated, the two gentlemen were evidently striving to please Isabella, and to win from her some encouraging smile or other token that might indicate a preference for their attentions. Admiration even from the high source that now tendered it was no new thing to her, and with just sufficient archness to puzzle them, she waived and replied to their conversation with most provoking indifference, lavishing a vast deal more kindness and attention upon a noble wolf-hound that crouched close to her feet, his big clear eye bent ever upon his mistress's face with a degree of intelligence that would have formed a theme for a painter. It was a noble creature, and no wonder the lady evinced so much regard for the hound, who ever and anon walked close to her.
"You love the hound?" suggested General Harero, stooping to smooth its glossy coat.
"Yes."
"He is to be envied, then, upon my soul, lady. How could he, with no powers of utterance, have done that for himself, which we poor gallants so fail in doing?"
"And what may that be?" asked Isabella, archly tossing her head.
"Win thy love," half whispered the officer, drawing closer to her side.
The answer was lost, if indeed Isabella intended one, by the father's calling the attention of the party to some object on the Regla shore, opposite the city, looming up in the dim light.
Ruez had mounted the parapet, and with his feet carelessly dangling on the other side, sat gazing off upon the sea, now straining his eye to make out the rig of some dark hull in the distance, and now following back the moon's glittering wake until it met the shore. At this moment the hound, leaving his mistress's side, put his fore paws upon the top of the parapet and his nose into one of the boy's hands, causing him to turn round suddenly to see what it was that touched him; in doing which he lost his balance, and with a faint cry fell from the parapet far down to the water below. Each of the gentlemen at once sprang upon the stone work and looked over where the boy had fallen, but it would have been madness for any one, however good a swimmer; and as they realized this and their helpless situation, they stood for a moment dumb with consternation.
At that moment a plunge was heard in the water from the edge of the quay far below the parapet, and a dark form was traced making its way through the water with that strong bold stroke that shows the effort of a confident and powerful swimmer.
"Thank God some one has seen his fall from below, and they will rescue him," said Don Gonzales, springing swiftly down the Plato steps, followed by Isabella and the officers, and seeking the street that led to the quay below.
"O hasten, father, hasten!" exclaimed Isabella, impatiently.
"Nay, Isabella, my old limbs totter with fear for dear Ruez," was the hasty reply of the old don, as he hurried forward with his daughter.
"Dear, dear Ruez," exclaimed Isabella, hysterically.
Dashing by the guard stationed on the quay, who presented arms as his superiors passed, they reached its end in time to see, through the now dim twilight, the efforts of some one in the water supporting the half insensible boy with one arm, while with the other he was struggling with almost superhuman effort against the steady set of the tide to seaward. Already were a couple of seamen lowering a quarter-boat from an American barque, near by, but the rope had fouled in the blocks, and they could not loose it. A couple of infantry soldiers had also come up to the spot, and having secured a rope were about to attempt some assistance to the swimmer.
"Heave the line," shouted one of the seamen. "Give me the bight of it, and I'll swim out to him."
"Stand by for it," said the soldier, coiling it in his hand and then throwing it towards the barque. But the coil fell short of the mark, and another minute's delay occurred.
In the meantime he who held the boy, though evidently a man of cool judgment, powerful frame, and steady purpose, yet now breathed so heavily in his earnest struggle with the swift tide, that his panting might be distinctly heard on the quay. He was evidently conscious of the efforts now making for his succor and that of the boy, but he uttered no words, still bending every nerve and faculty towards the stemming of the current tint sets into the harbor from the Gulf Stream.
The hound had been running back and forth on the top of the parapet, half preparing every moment for a spring, and then deterred by the immense distance which presented itself between the animal and the water, it would run back and forth again with a most piteous howling cry; but at this moment it came bounding down the street to the quay, as though it at last realized the proper spot from which to make the attempt, and with a leap that seemed to carry it nearly a rod into the waters, it swam easily to the boy's side.
An exclamation of joy escaped from both Don Gonzales and Isabella, for they knew the hound to have saved a life before, and now prized his sagacity highly.
As the hound swung round easily beside the struggling forms, the swimmer placed the boy's arm about the animal's neck, while the noble creature, with almost human reason, instead of struggling fiercely at being thus entirely buried in the water, save the mere point of his nose, worked as steadily and as calmly as though he was merely following his young master on shore. The momentary relief was of the utmost importance to the swimmer, who being thus partially relieved of Ruez's weight, once more struck out boldly for the quay. But the boy had now lost all consciousness, and his arm slipped away from the hound's neck, and he rolled heavily over, carrying down the swimmer and himself for a moment, below the surface of the water.
"Holy mother! they are both drowned!" almost screamed Isabella.
"Lost! lost!" groaned Don Gonzales, with uplifted hands and tottering form.
"No! no!" exclaimed General Harero, "not yet, not yet." He had jumped on board the barque, and had cut the davit ropes with his sword, and thus succeeded in launching the boat with himself and the two seamen in it.
At this moment the swimmer rose once more slowly with his burthen to the surface; but his efforts were so faintly made now, that he barely floated, and yet with a nervous vigor he kept the boy still far above himself. And now it was that the noble instinct of the hound stood his young master in such importance, and led him to seize with his teeth the boy's clothes, while the swimmer once more fairly gained his self-possession, and the boat with General Harero and the seamen came alongside. In a moment more the boy with his preserver and the dog were safe in the boat, which was rowed at once to the quay.
A shout of satisfaction rang out from twenty voices that had witnessed the scene.
Isabella, the moment they were safely in the boat, fainted, while Count Anguera ran for a volante for conveyance home. The swimmer soon regained his strength, and when the boat reached the quay, he lifted the boy from it himself. It was a most striking picture that presented itself to the eye at that moment on the quay, in the dim twilight that was so struggling with the moon's brighter rays.
The father, embracing the reviving boy, looked the gratitude he could not find words to express, while a calm, satisfied smile ornamented the handsome features of the soldier who had saved Ruez's life at such imminent risk. The coat which he had hastily thrown upon the quay when he leaped into the water, showed him to bear the rank of lieutenant of infantry, and by the number, he belonged to General Harero's own division.
The child was placed with his sister and father in a volante, and borne away from the spot with all speed, that the necessary care and attention might be afforded to him which they could only expect in their own home.
In the meantime a peculiar satisfaction mantled the brow and features of the young officer who had thus signally served Don Gonzales and his child. His fine military figure stood erect and commanding in style while he gazed after the volante that contained the party named, nor did he move for some moments, seeming to be exercised by some peculiar spell; still gazing in the direction in which the volante had disappeared, until General Harero, his superior, having at length arranged his own attire, after the hasty efforts which he had made, came by, and touching him lightly on the arm, said: "Lieutenant, you seem to be dreaming; has the bath affected your brain?"
"Not at all, general," replied the young officer, hastening to put on his coat once more; "I have indeed forgotten myself for a single moment."
"Know you the family whom you have thus served?" asked the general.
"I do; that is, I know their name, general, but nothing further."
"He's a clever man, and will remember your services," said the general, carelessly, as he walked up the quay and received the salute of the sentinel on duty.
Some strange feeling appeared to be working in the breast of the young officer who had just performed the gallant deed we have recorded, for he seemed even now to be quite lost to all outward realization, and was evidently engaged in most agreeable communion with himself mentally. He too now walked up the quay, also, receiving the salute of the sentinel, and not forgetting either, as did the superior officer, to touch his cap in acknowledgement, a sign that an observant man would have marked in the character of both; and one, too, which was not lost on the humble private, whose duty it was to stand at his post until the middle watch of the night. A long and weary duty is that of a sentinel on the quay at night.
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{
"id": "4957"
}
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2
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THE BELLE AND THE SOLDIER.
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WHOEVER has been in Havana, that strange and peculiar city, whose every association and belonging seem to bring to mind the period of centuries gone by, whose time-worn and moss-covered cathedrals appear to stand as grim records of the past, whose noble palaces and residences of the rich give token of the fact of its great wealth and extraordinary resources--whoever, we say, has been in this capital of Cuba, has of course visited its well-known and far-famed Tacon Paseo. It is here, just outside the city walls, in a beautiful tract of land, laid out in tempting walks, ornamented with the fragrant flowers of the tropics, and with statues and fountains innumerable, that the beauty and fashion of the town resort each afternoon to drive in their volantes, and to meet and greet each other.
It was on the afternoon subsequent to that of the accident recorded in the preceding chapter, that a young officer, off duty, might be seen partially reclining upon one of the broad seats that here and there line the foot-path of the circular drive in the Paseo. He possessed a fine manly figure, and was perhaps of twenty-four or five years of age, and clothed in the plain undress uniform of the Spanish army. His features were of that national and handsome cast that is peculiar to the full-blooded Castilian, and the pure olive of his complexion contrasted finely with a moustache and imperial as black as the dark flowing hair that fell from beneath his foraging cap. At the moment when we introduce him he was playing with a small, light walking-stick, with which he thrashed his boots most immoderately; but his thoughts were busy enough in another quarter, as any one might conjecture even at a single glance.
Suddenly his whole manner changed; he rose quickly to his feet, and lifting his cap gracefully, he saluted and acknowledged the particular notice of a lady who bent partially forward from a richly mounted volante drawn by as richly it caparisoned horse, and driven by as richly dressed a calesaro. The manner of the young officer from that moment was the very antipodes of what it had been a few moments before. A change seemed to have come over the spirit of his dream. His fine military figure became erect and dignified, and a slight indication of satisfied pride was just visible in the fine lines of his expressive lips. As he passed on his way, after a momentary pause, he met General Harero, who stiffly acknowledged his military salute, with anything but kindness expressed in the stern lines of his forbidding countenance. He even took some pains to scowl upon the young soldier as they passed each other.
But what cared Lieutenant Bezan for his frowns? Had not the belle of the city, the beautiful, the peerless, the famed Senorita Isabella Gonzales just publicly saluted him? -that glorious being whose transcendent beauty had been the theme of every tongue, and whose loveliness had enslaved him from the first moment he had looked upon her-just two years previous, when he first came from Spain. Had not this high-born and proud lady publicly saluted him? Him, a poor lieutenant of infantry, who had never dared to lift his eyes to meet her own before, however deep and ardently he might have worshipped her in secret. What cared the young officer that his commander had seen fit thus to frown upon him? True, he realized the power of military discipline, and particularly of the Spanish army; but he forgot all else now, in the fact that Isabella Gonzales had publicly saluted him in the paths of the Paseo.
Possessed of a highly chivalrous disposition, Lieutenant Bezan had few confidants among his regiment, who, notwithstanding this, loved him as well as brothers might love. He seemed decidedly to prefer solitude and his books to the social gatherings, or the clubs formed by his brother officers, or indeed to join them in any of their ordinary sports or pastimes.
Of a very good family at home, he had the misfortune to have been born a younger brother, and after being thoroughly educated at the best schools of Madrid, he was frankly told by his father that he must seek his fortune, and for the future rely solely upon himself. There was but one field open to him, at least so it seemed to him, and that was the army. Two years before the opening of our story he had enlisted as a third lieutenant of infantry, and had been at once ordered to the West Indies with his entire regiment. Here promotion for more than one gallant act closely followed him, until at the time we introduce him to the reader as first lieutenant. Being of a naturally cheerful and exceedingly happy disposition, he took life like a philosopher, and knew little of care or sorrow until the time when he first saw Senorita Isabella Gonzales-an occasion that planted a hopeless passion in his breast.
From the moment of their first meeting, though entirely unnoticed by her, he felt that he loved her, deeply, tenderly loved her; and yet at the same time he fully realized how immeasurably she was beyond his sphere, and consequently hopes. He saw the first officials of the island at her very feet, watching for one glance of encouragement or kindness from those dark and lustrous eyes of jet; in short, he saw her ever the centre of an admiring circle of the rich and proud. It is perhaps strange, but nevertheless true, that with all these discouraging and disheartening circumstances, Lieutenant Bezan did not lose all hope. He loved her, lowly and obscure though he was, with all his heart, and used to whisper to himself that love like his need not despair, for he felt how truly and honestly his heart warmed and his pulses beat for her.
Nearly two entire years had his devoted heart lived on thus, if not once gratified by a glance from her eye, still hoping that devotion like his would one day be rewarded. What prophets of the future are youth and love! Distant as the star of his destiny appeared from him, he yet still toiled on, hoped on, in his often weary round of duty, sustained by the one sentiment of tender love and devotedness to one who knew him not.
At the time of the fearful accident when Ruez Gonzales came so near losing his life from the fall he suffered off the parapet of the Plato, Lieutenant Bezan was officer of the night, his rounds having fortunately brought him to the quay at the most opportune moment. He knew not who it was that had fallen into the water, but guided by a native spirit of daring and humanity, he had thrown off his coat and cap and leaped in after him.
The feelings of pleasure and secret joy experienced by the young officer, when after landing from the boat he learned by a single glance who it was he had so fortunately saved, may be better imagined than described, when his love for the boy's sister is remembered. And when, as we have related, the proud Senorita Isabella publicly saluted him before a hundred eyes in the Paseo, he felt a joy of mind, a brightness of heart, that words could not express.
His figure and face were such that once seen their manly beauty and noble outline could not be easily forgotten; and there were few ladies in the city, whose station and rank would permit them to associate with one bearing only a lieutenant's commission, who would not have been proud of his notice and homage. He could not be ignorant of his personal recommendations, and yet the young officer sought no female society-his heart it knew but one idol, and he could bow to but one throne of love.
Whether by accident or purposely, the lady herself only knew, but when the volante, in the circular drive of the Paseo, again came opposite to the spot where Lieutenant Bezan was, the Senorita Isabella dropped her fan upon the carriage-road. As the young officer sprang to pick it up and return it, she bade the calesaro to halt. Her father, Don Gonzales, was by her side, and the lieutenant presented the fan in the most respectful manner, being rewarded by a glance from the lady that thrilled to his very soul. Don Gonzales exclaimed: "By our lady, but this is the young officer, Isabella, who yesternight so promptly and gallantly saved the life of our dear Ruez."
"It is indeed he, father," said the beauty, with much interest.
"Lieutenant Bezan, the general told us, I believe," continued the father.
"That was the name, father."
"And is this Lieutenant Bezan?" asked Don Gonzales, addressing the officer.
"At your service," replied he, bowing respectfully.
"Senor," continued the father, most earnestly, and extending at the same time his hand to the blushing soldier, "permit me and my daughter to thank you sincerely for the extraordinary service you rendered to us and our dear Ruez last evening."
"Senor, the pleasure of having served you richly compensated for any personal inconvenience or risk I may have experienced," answered Lieutenant Bezan; saying which, he bowed low and looked once into the lovely eyes of the beautiful Senorita Isabella, when at a word to the calesaro, the volante again passed on in the circular drive.
But the young officer had not been unwatched during the brief moments of conversation that had passed between him and the occupants of the vehicle. Scarcely had he left the side of the volante, when he once more met General Harero, who seemed this time to take some pains to confront him, as he remarked: "What business may Lieutenant Bezan have with Don Gonzales and his fair daughter, that he stops their volante in the public walks of the Paseo?"
"The lady dropped her fan, general, and I picked it up and returned it to her," was the gentlemanly and submissive reply of the young officer.
"Dropped her fan," repeated the general, sneeringly, as he gazed at the lieutenant.
"Yes, general, and I returned it."
"Indeed," said the commanding officers, with a decided emphasis.
"Could I have done less, general?" asked Lieutenant Bezan.
"It matters not, though you seem to be ever on hand to do the lady and her father some service, sir. Perhaps you would relish another cold bath," he continued, with most cutting sarcasm. "Who introduced you, sir, to these people?"
"No one, sir. It was chance that brought us together. You will remember the scene on the quay."
"I do."
"Before that time I had never exchanged one word with them."
"And on this you presume to establish an acquaintance?"
"By no means, sir. The lady recognized me, and I was proud to return the polite salute with which she greeted me."
"Doubtless."
"Would you have me do otherwise, sir?"
"I would have you avoid this family of Gonzales altogether."
"I trust, general, that I have not exceeded my duty either to the father or daughter, though by the tone of your remarks I seem to have incurred your disapprobation," replied Lieutenant Bezan, firmly but respectfully.
"It would be more becoming in an officer of your rank," continued the superior, "to be nearer his quarters, than to spend his hours off duty in so conspicuous and public a place as the Tacon Paseo. I shall see that such orders are issued for the future as shall keep those attached to my division within the city walls."
"Whatever duty is prescribed by my superiors I shall most cheerfully and promptly respond to, General Harero," replied the young officer, as he respectfully saluted his general, and turning, he sought the city gates on the way to his barracks.
"Stay, Lieutenant Bezan," said the general, somewhat nervously.
"General," repeated the officer, with the prompt military salute, as he awaited orders.
"You may go, sir," continued the superior, biting his lips with vexation. "Another time will answer my purpose quite as well, perhaps better. You may retire, I say."
"Yes, general," answered the soldier, respectfully, and once more turned away.
Lieutenant Bezan was too well aware of General Harero's intimacy at the house of Don Gonzales, not to understand the meaning of the rebuke and exhibition of bitterness on the part of his superior towards him. The general, although he possessed a fine commanding figure, yet was endowed with no such personal advantages to recommend him to a lady's eye as did the young officer who had thus provoked him, and he could not relish the idea that one who had already rendered such signal services to the Senorita Isabella and her father, even though he was so very far below himself in rank, should become too intimate with the family. It would be unfair towards Lieutenant Bezan to suppose that he did not possess sufficient judgment of human nature and discernment to see all this.
He could not but regret that he had incurred the ill will of his general, though it was unjustly entertained, for he knew only too well how rigorous was the service in which he was engaged, and that a superior officer possessed almost absolute power over those placed in his command, in the Spanish army, even unto the sentence of death. He had too often been the unwilling spectator, and even at times the innocent agent of scenes that were revolting to his better feelings, which emanated solely from this arbitrary power vested in heartless and incompetent individuals by means of their military rank. Musing thus upon the singular state of his affairs, and the events of the last two days, so important to his feelings, now recalling the bewitching glances of the peerless Isabella Gonzales, and now ruminating upon the ill will of General Harero, he strolled into the city, and reaching La Dominica's, he threw himself upon a lounge near the marble fountain, and calling for a glass of agrass, he sipped the cool and grateful beverage, and wiled away the hour until the evening parade.
Though Don Gonzales duly appreciated the great service that Lieutenant Bezan had done him, at such imminent personal hazard, too, yet he would no more have introduced him into his family on terms of a visiting acquaintance in consequence thereof, than he would have boldly broken down any other strict rule and principle of his aristocratic nature; and yet he was not ungrateful; far from it, as Lieutenant Bezan had reason to know, for he applied his great influence at once to the governor-general in the young officer's behalf. The favor he demanded of Tacon, then governor and commander-in-chief, was the promotion to a captaincy of him who had so vitally served the interests of his house.
Tacon was one of the wisest and best governors that Cuba ever had, as ready to reward merit as he was to signally punish trickery or crime of any sort, and when the case was fairly laid before him, by reference to the rolls of his military secretary, he discovered that Lieutenant Bezan had already been promoted twice for distinguished merit, and replied to Don Gonzales that, as this was the case, and the young soldier was found to be so deserving, he should cheerfully comply with his request as it regarded his early promotion in his company. Thus it was, that scarcely ten days subsequent to the meeting in the Paseo, which we have described, Lieutenant Bezan was regularly gazetted as captain of infantry, by honorable promotion and approval of the governor-general.
The character of Tacon was one of a curious description. He was prompt, candid, and business-like in all things, and the manner of his promoting Lieutenant Bezan was a striking witness of these very qualities. The young officer being summoned by an orderly to his presence, was thus questioned: "You are Lieutenant Lorenzo Bezan?"
"Yes, your excellency."
"Of the sixth infantry?"
"Excellency, yes."
"Of company eight?"
"Of company eight, excellency."
"Your commander is General Harero?"
"Excellency, yes."
"You were on the quay night before last, were you not?"
"Excellency, I was."
"And leaped into the water to save a boy's life who had fallen there?"
"I did, excellency."
"You were successful."
"Excellency, I was."
"You were promoted eleven months since in compliment for duty."
"Yes, excellency."
"Captain Bezan, here is a new commission for you."
"Excellency you are only too kind to an humble soldier."
A calm, proud inclination of the head on the part of the governor-general, indicated that the audience was over, and the young officer returned, knowing well the character of the commander-in-chief. Not a little elated, Lorenzo Bezan felt that he was richly repaid for the risk he had run by this promotion alone; but there was a source of gratification to him far beyond that of having changed his title to captain. He had served and been noticed by Isabella Gonzales, and it is doubtful if he could have met with any good fortune that would have equalled this, in his eye; it was the scheme of his life-the realization of his sleeping and waking dreams.
This good fortune, as pleasant to him as it was unexpected, was attributed by the young officer to the right source, and was in reality enhanced and valued from that very fact.
"A bumper," exclaimed his brother officers, that day at the mess-table, when all were met. "A bumper to Captain Lorenzo Bezan. May he never draw his sword without cause; never sheathe it without honor!"
"But what's the secret of Bezan's good fortune?" asked one.
"His luck, to be sure-born under a lucky star."
"Not exactly luck, alone, but his own intrepidity and manliness," replied a fellow-officer. "Haven't you heard of his saving the life of young Gonzales, who fell into the bay from the parapet of the Plato?"
"Not in detail. If you know about the affair, recite it," said another.
Leaving the mess, as did Captain Bezan at this juncture, we will follow the thread of our story in another chapter, and relating to other scenes.
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{
"id": "4957"
}
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3
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A SUDDEN INTRODUCTION.
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IT was again night in the capital; the narrow streets were brilliantly lighted from the store windows, but the crowd were no longer there. The heat of the long summer day had wearied the endurance of master and slave; and thousands had already sought that early repose which is so essential to the dwellers in the tropics. Stillness reigned over the drowsy city, save that the soft music which the governor-general's hand discourses nightly in the Plaza, stole sweetly over the scene, until every air seemed heavy with its tender influence and melody. Now it swelled forth in the martial tones of a military band, and now its cadence was low and gentle as a fairy whisper, reverberating to the ear from the opposite shore of Regla, and the frowning walls of the Cabanas behind the Moro, and now swelling away inland among the coffee fields and sugar plantations.
The long twilight was gone; but still the deep streak of golden skirting in the western horizon lent a softened hue to the scene, not so bright to the eye, and yet more golden far than moonlight: "Leaving on craggy hills and running streams A softness like the atmosphere of dreams."
At this favorite hour the Senorita Isabella Gonzales and her young brother, Ruez, attended only by the wolf hound, who seemed to be almost their inseparable companion, were once again strolling in the cool and retired walk of the Plato. The lady moved with all the peculiar grace so natural to the Spanish women, and yet through all, a keen observer might have seen the lurking effects of pride and power, a consciousness of her own extraordinary beauty, and the control it gave her over the hearts of those of the other sex with whom she associated. Alas! that such a trait should have become a second nature to one with so heavenly a form and face. Perhaps it was owing to the want of the judicious management of a mother, of timely and kindly advice, that Isabella had grown up thus; certainly it seemed hard, very hard, to attribute it to her heart, her natural promptings, for at times she evinced such traits of womanly delicacy and tenderness, that those who knew her best forgot her coquetry.
Her brother was a gentle and beautiful boy. A tender spirit of melancholy seemed ever uppermost in his heart and face, and it had been thus with him since he had known his first early grief-the loss of his mother-some four or five years before the present period of our story. Isabella, though she was not wanting in natural tenderness and affection, had yet outgrown the loss of her parent; but the more sensitive spirit of the boy had not yet recovered from the shock it had thus received. The father even feared that he never would regain his happy buoyancy, as he looked upon his pale and almost transparent features, while the boy mused thoughtfully to himself sometimes for the hour together, if left alone and undisturbed.
"Ruez, dear, we've not been on the Plato since that fearful night," said Senorita Isabella, as she rested her hand gently upon the boy's shoulder.
"It was a fearful night, sister," said the boy recalling the associations with a shudder.
"And yet how clear and beautiful it seemed just before that terrible accident."
"I remember," said the boy.
"And the slaver in the distance, with her soft white sails and treacherous business."
"And the sparkling moon upon the bay."
"It was very beautiful; and we have a night now almost its equal."
"Did you notice how stoutly that Lieutenant Bezan swam with me?"
"Yes, brother. You forget, though, that he is Captain Bezan now," she added.
"Father told me so," said the boy. "How fearfully the tide ran, and the current set against us! He held me way up above the water, while he was quite under it himself," continued Ruez. "I was sure he would drown; didn't it seem so to you, sister?"
"It did, it did; the deed was most gallantly done," said Isabella, as she stooped down and kissed her brother; "and you will never be so careless again, Ruez?"
"No, sister. I shall be more. careful, but I should like to see that Captain Bezan again. I have never seen him since that night, and his barracks are within pistol shot from here."
"Hark! what was that?" asked Isabella, starting at some unusual noise.
"I heard nothing," said the boy.
"There it is again," she continued, nervously, looking around.
"Down, Carlo, down," said the boy, sharply to the hound, as it sprang at the same time from a crouching posture, and uttered a deep, angry growl, peculiar to its species.
But the animal seemed too much aroused to be so easily pacified with words, and with heavy bounds sprang towards the seaward end of the Plato, over the parapet of which, where it joined a lofty stone wall that made a portion of the stone barracks of the army, a man leaped to the ground. The hound suddenly crouched, the moment it fairly reached the figure of the new coiner, and instead of the hostile attitude, it had so lately he assumed, now placed its fore paws upon the breast of the person, and wagged its tail with evident tokens of pleasure at the meeting.
"That is a very strange way to enter the Plato," said Isabella, to her brother, drawing nearer to his side as she spoke. "I wonder who it can be?"
"Some friend of Carlo's, for he never behaves in that way to strangers," said the boy.
"So it would seem; but here he comes, be he whom he may."
"By our lady!" said the boy, earnestly, with a flash of spirit and color across his usually quiet and pale face. "Sister, it is Captain Bezan!"
"Captain Bezan, I believe," said Isabella, courtesying coolly to his respectful bow.
"The same, lady."
"You have chosen a singular mode of introduction, sir," said the Senorita Isabella Gonzales, somewhat severely, as she drew herself up with an air of cold reserve.
"It is true, lady, I have done a seemingly rash action; but if you will please to pause for one moment, you will at once realize that it was the only mode of introduction of which a poor soldier like myself could have availed himself."
"Our hall doors are always open," replied Isabella Gonzales.
"To the high born and proud, I grant you, lady, but not to such as I am."
"Then, sir," continued the lady, quickly, "if custom and propriety forbid you to meet me through the ordinary channels of society, do you not see the impropriety of such an attempt to see me as that which you have but just now made?"
"Lady, I can see nothing, hear nothing but my unconquerable love!"
"Love, sir!" repeated the lady, with a curl of her proud but beautiful lip.
"Ay, love, Isabella Gonzales. For years I have loved you in secret. Too humble to become known to you, or to attract your eye, even, I have yet nursed that love, like the better angel of my nature; have dreamed of it nightly; have prayed for the object of it nightly; have watched the starry heavens, and begged for some noble inspiration that would make me more worthy of thy affection; I have read nothing that I did not couple in some tender way with thee; have nursed no hope of ambition or fame that was not the nearer to raise me to thee, and over the midnight lamp have bent in earnestness year after year, that I might gain those jewels of the mind that in intelligence, at least, would place me by thy side. At last fortune befriended me, and I was able by a mischance to him, thy brother, to serve thee. Perhaps even then it might have ended, and my respect would still have curbed the promptings of my passion, had you not so kindly noticed me on the Paseo. O, how wildly did my heart beat at that gentle, kind and thoughtful recognition of the poor soldier, and no less quickly beats that heart, when you listen thus to me, and hear me tell how deeply I love."
"Audacity!" said Isabella Gonzales, really not a little aroused at the plainness of his speech. "How dare you, sir, to address such language to me?"
"Love dares do anything but dishonor the being that it loves. A year, lady, a month ago, how hopeless was my love-how far off in the blue ether was the star I worshipped. Little did I then think that I should now stand so near to you-should thus pour out of the fullness of my enslaved and devoted heart, ay, thus look into those glorious eyes."
"Sir, you are impertinent!" said Isabella, shrinking from the ardor of his expression.
"Nay, lady," said the young officer, profoundly humble, "it is impossible for such love as mine to lead to impertinence to one whom I little less than worship."
"Leave me, sir!"
"Yes, Isabella Gonzales, if you will repeat those words calmly; if you will deliberately bid me, who have so often prayed for, so hoped for such a moment as this, to go, I will go."
"But, sir, you will compromise me by this protracted conversation."
"Heaven forbid. But for you I would risk all things-life, reputation, all that is valuable to me in life; yet perhaps I am forgetful, perhaps a thoughtless."
"What strange power and music there is in his voice," whispered Isabella, to herself.
Completely puzzled by his deep respect, his gallant and noble bearing, the memory of his late noble conduct in saving Ruez's life, Isabella hardly knew what to say, and she stood thus half confused, trotting her pretty foot upon the path of the Plato with a vexed air. At last, as if struggling to break the spell that seemed to be hanging over them, she said: "How could one like you, sir, ever dare to entertain such feelings towards me? the audaciousness of your language almost strikes me dumb."
"Lady," said the young soldier, respectfully, "the sincerity of my passion has been its only self-sustaining power. I felt that love like mine could not be in vain. I was sure that such affection was never planted in my breast to bloom and blossom simply for disappointment. I could not think that this was so."
"I am out of all patience with his impertinence," said Isabella Gonzales, to herself, pettishly. "I don't know what to say to him."
"Sir, you must leave this place at once," she said, at last, after a brief pause.
"I shall do so, lady, at your bidding; but only to pray and hope for the next meeting between us, when you may perhaps better know the poor soldier's heart."
"Farewell, sir," said Isabella.
"Farewell, Isabella Gonzales."
"Are you going so soon?" asked Ruez, now approaching them from a short distance in the rear, where he had been playing with the hound.
"Yes, Ruez," said the soldier, kindly. "You are quite recovered, I trust, from the effects of that cold bath taken off the parapet yonder."
"O yes, I am quite recovered now."
"It was a high leap for one of your age."
"It was indeed," said the boy, with a shudder at the remembrance.
"And, O, sir, I have not thanked you for that gallant deed," said Isabella Gonzales, extending her hand incontinently to Captain Bezan, in the enthusiasm of the moment, influenced by the sincerity of her feelings, his noble and manly bearing, and the kind and touching words he had uttered to Ruez.
It would be difficult for us to describe her as she appeared at that moment in the soldier's eye. How lovely she seemed to him, when dropping all reserve for the moment, not only her tongue, but her eloquent eyes spoke from the tenderness of her woman's heart. A sacred vision would have impressed him no more than did the loveliness of her presence at that moment.
Bending instinctively at this demonstration of gentle courtesy on her part, he pressed her hand most respectfully to his lips, and, as if feeling that he had gone almost too far, with a gallant wave of the hand he suddenly disappeared from whence he had so lately come, over the seaward side of the parapet towards the army barracks.
Isabella gazed after him with a puzzled look for a while, then said half to herself and in a pettish and vexed tone of voice: "I did not mean that he should kiss my hand. I'm sure I did not; and why did I give it to him? How thoughtless. I declare I have never met so monstrously impudent a person in the entire course of my life. Very strange. Here's General Harero, Don Romonez, and Felix Gavardo, have been paying me court this half year and more, and either of them would give half his fortune for a kiss of this hand, and yet neither has dared to even tell me that they love me, though I know it so well. But here is this young soldier, this new captain of infantry, why he sees me but half a minute before he declares himself, and so boldly, too! I protest it was a real insult. I'll tell Don Gonzales, and I'll have the fellow dishonored and his commission taken from him, I will. I'm half ready to cry with vexation. Yes, I'll have Captain Bezan cashiered, and that directly, I will."
"No you wont, sister," said Ruez, looking up calmly into her face as he spoke.
"Yes I will, brother."
"Still I say no," continued the boy, gently, and caressing her hand the while.
"And why not, Ruez?" asked Isabella, stooping and kissing his handsome forehead, as the boy looked up so lovingly in her face.
"Because he saved my life, sister," replied Ruez, smiling.
"True, he did save your life, Ruez," murmured the beautiful girl, thoughtfully; an act that we can never repay; but it was most presuming for him to enter the Plato thus, and to--to--" "Kiss your hand, sister," suggested the boy, smiling in a knowing way.
"Yes, it was quite shocking for him to be so familiar, Ruez."
"But, sister, I can hardly ever help kissing you when you look kind to me, and I am sure you looked very kind at Captain Bezan."
"Did I!" half mused Isabella, biting the handle of her Creole fan.
"Yes; and how handsome this Captain Bezan is, sister," continued the boy, pretending to be engaged with the hound, whom he patted while he looked sideways at Isabella.
"Do you think him so handsome?" still half mused Isabella, in reply to her brother's remarks, while her eye rested upon the ground.
"I know it," said the boy, with spirit. "Don Miguel, General Harero, or the lieutenant-general, are none of them half so good looking," he continued, referring to some of her suitors.
"Well, he is handsome, brother, that's true enough, and brave I know, or he would never have leaped into the water to save your life. But I'll never forgive him, I'm sure of that, Ruez," she said, in a most decided tone of voice.
"Yes you will, sister."
"No, I will not, and you will vex me if you say so again," she added, pettishly.
"Come, Carlo, come," said Ruez, calling to the hound, as he followed close upon his sister's footsteps towards the entrance of Don Gonzales's house on the Plato.
The truth was, Isabella Gonzales, the proud beauty, was pleased; perhaps her vanity was partly enlisted also, while she remembered the frankness of the humble soldier who had poured out his devotions at her feet in such simple yet earnest strains as to carry conviction with every word to the lady's heart. Image, even from the most lowly, is not without its charm to beauty, and the proud girl mused over the late scene thoughtfully, ay, far more thoughtfully than she had ever done before, on the offer of the richest and proudest cavalier.
She had never loved; she knew not what the passion meant, as applied to the opposite sex. Universal homage had been her share ever since she could remember; and if Isabella Gonzales was not a confirmed coquette, she was certainly very near being one. The light in which she regarded the advances of Captain Bezan, even puzzled herself; the phase of his case and the manner of his avowal were so far without precedent, that its novelty engaged her. She still felt vexed at the young soldier's assurance, but yet all unconsciously found herself endeavoring to invent any number of excuses for the conduct he had exhibited!
"It is true, as he said," she remarked, half aloud to herself, "that it was the only way in which he could meet me on terms of sufficient equality for conversation. Perhaps I should have done the same, if I were a high-spirited youth, and really loved!"
As for Lorenzo Bezan, he quietly sought his quarters, as happy as a king. Had he not been successful beyond any reasonable hope? Had he not told his love? ay, had he not kissed the hand of her he loved, at last, almost by her own consent? Had not the clouds in the horizon of his love greatly thinned in numbers? He was no moody lover. Not one to die for love, but to live for it rather, and to pursue the object of his affection and regard with such untiring and devoted service as to deserve, if not to win, success. At least this was his resolve. Now and then the great difference between their relative stations would lead him to pause and consider the subject; but then with some pleasant sally to himself he would walk on again, firmly resolved in his own mind to overcome all things for her whom he loved, or at least to strive to do so.
This was all very well in thought, but in practice the young soldier will not perhaps find this so easy a matter. Patience and perseverance are excellent qualities, but they are not certain criteria of success. Lorenzo Bezan had aimed his arrow high, but it was that little blind fellow, Cupid, that shot the bow. He was not to blame for it-of course not.
"Ha! Bezan, whence come you with so bright a face?" asked a brother officer, as he entered his quarters in the barracks of the Plaza des Armes.
"From wooing a fair and most beautiful maid," said the soldier, most honestly; though perhaps he told the truth as being the thing least likely to be believed by the other.
"Fie, fie, Bezan. You in love, man? A soldier to marry? By our lady, what folly! Don't you remember the proverb? 'Men dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.'"
"May I wake in that state with her I love ere a twelvemonth," said Lorenzo Bezan, smiling at his comrade's sally and earnestness.
"Are you serious, captain?" asked the other, now trying to half believe him.
"Never more so in my life, I assure you," was the reply.
"And who is the lady, pray? Come, relieve your conscience, and confess."
"Ah, there I am silent; her name is not for vulgar ears," said the young soldier, smiling, and with really too much respect to refer lightly to Isabella Gonzales.
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{
"id": "4957"
}
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4
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CUBAN BANDITTI.
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IT was one of those beautiful but almost oppressively hot afternoons that so ripen the fruits, and so try the patience of the inhabitants of the tropics, that we would have the patient reader follow us on the main road between Alquezar and Guiness. It is as level as a parlor floor, and the tall foliage, mostly composed of the lofty palm, renders the route shaded and agreeable. Every vegetable and plant are so peculiarly significant of the low latitudes, that we must pause for a moment to notice them.
The tall, stately palm, the king of the tropical forest, with its tufted head, like a bunch of ostrich feathers, bending its majestic form here and there over the verdant and luxuriant undergrowth, the mahogany tree, the stout lignumvit‘, the banana, the fragrant and beautiful orange and lemon, and the long, impregnable hedge of the dagger aloe, all go to show us that we are in the sunny clime of the tropics.
The fragrance, too, of the atmosphere! How soft to the senses! This gentle zephyr that only ruffles the white blossoms of the lime hedges, is off yonder coffee plantation that lies now like a field of clear snow, in its fragrant milk-white blossoms; and what a bewitching mingling of heliotrope and wild honeysuckle is combined in the air! how the gaudy plumed parrot pauses on his perch beneath the branches of the plantain tree, to inhale the sweets of the hour; while the chirps of the pedoreva and indigo birds are mingled in vocal praise that fortune has cast their lot in so lovely a clime. O, believe us, you should see and feel the belongings of this beautiful isle, to appreciate how nearly it approaches to your early ideas of fairy land.
But, alas! how often do man's coarser disposition and baser nature belie the soft and beautiful characteristics of nature about him; how often, how very often, is the still, heavenly influence that reigns in fragrant flowers and bubbling streams, marred and desecrated by the harshness and violence engendered by human passions!
In the midst of such a scene as we have described, at the moment to which we refer, there was a fearful struggle being enacted between a small party of Montaros, or inland robbers, and the occupants and outriders of a volante, which had just been attacked on the road. The traces that attached the horse to the vehicle had been cut, and the postilion lay senseless upon the ground from a sword wound in their head, while the four outriders were contending with thrice their number of robbers, who were armed with pistols and Toledo blades. It was a sharp hand to hand fight, and their steel rang to the quick strokes.
In the volante was the person of a lady, but so closely enshrouded by a voluminous rebosa, or Spanish shawl, as hardly to leave any of her figure exposed, her face being hid from fright at the scene being enacted about her. At her side stood the figure of a tall, stately man, whose hat had been knocked over his head in the struggle, and whose white hairs gave token of his age. Two of the robbers, who had received the contents of his two pistols, lay dead by the side of the volante, and having now only his sword left, he stood thus, as if determined to protect her by his side, even at the cost of his life.
The robbers had at last quite overmatched the four outriders, and having bound the only one of them that had sufficient life left to make him dangerous to them, they turned their steps once more towards the volante. There were in all some thirteen of them, but three already lay dead in the road, and the other ten, who had some sharp wounds distributed among them, now standing together, seemed to be querying whether they should not revenge the death of their comrades by killing both the occupants of the volante, or whether they should pursue their first purpose of only robbing them of what valuables they possessed.
Fierce oaths were reiterated, and angry words exchanged between one and another of the robbers, as to the matter they were hastily discussing, while the old gentleman remained firm, grasping the hilt of his well-tempered sword, and showing to his enemies, by the stern, deep resolve they read in his eye, that they had not yet conquered him. Fortunately their pistols had all been discharged, or they might have shot the brave old man without coming to closer quarters, but now they looked with some dread upon the glittering blade he held so firmly!
That which has required some time and space for us to describe, was, however, the work of but a very few moments of time, and the robbers, having evidently made up their minds to take the lives of the two persons now in the vehicle, divided themselves into two parties and approached the volante at the same moment on opposite sides.
"Come on, ye fiends in human shape," said the old man, flourishing his sword with a skill and strength that showed he was no stranger to its use, and that there was danger in him. "Come on, ye shall find that a good blade in an old man's hands is no plaything!"
They listened for a moment: yes, that half-score of villains held back in dismay at the noble appearance of the old man, and the flashing fire of his eye.
"Ha! do you falter, ye villains? do you fear a good sword with right to back it?"
But hark! what sound is that which startles the Montaros in the midst of their villany, and makes them look into each other's faces with such consternation and fear? It is a very unfrequented spot-who can be near? Scarcely had the sound fallen on their ears, before three horsemen in the undress uniform of the Spanish infantry, dashed up to the spot at full speed, while one of them, who seemed to be the leader of the party, leaped from his horse, and before the others could follow his example, was engaged in a desperate hand to hand conflict with the robbers. Twice he discharged his pistols with fatal effect, and now he was fighting sword and sword with a stout, burly Montaro, who was approaching that side of the volante where the lady sat, still half concealed by the ample folds of her rebosa, though the approach of assistance had led her to venture so far as to partially uncover her face, and to observe the scene about her.
The headlong attack, so opportunely made by the fresh horsemen, was too much for treble their number to withstand, more especially as the leader of them had met with such signal success at the outset-having shot two, and mortally wounded a third. In this critical state of affairs, the remaining banditti concluded that discretion was the better part of valor, and made the best of their time and remaining strength to beat a hasty retreat, leaving the old gentleman and his companion with their three deliverers, quite safe in the middle of the road.
"By our lady, sir, 'twas a gallant act. There were ten of those rascals, and but three of you," said the old gentleman, stepping out of the volante and arranging his ruffled dress.
"Ten, senor? a soldier would make nothing of a score of such scapegraces as those," replied the officer (for such it was now apparent he was), as he wiped the gore from his reeking blade with a broad, green leaf from the roadside, and placed it in the scabbard.
One of the soldiers who had accompanied the officer had now cut the thongs that bound the surviving outrider, who was one of the family attaches of the old gentleman, and who now busied himself about the vehicle, at one moment attending to the lady's wants, and now to harnessing the horse once more.
Removing his cap, and wiping the reeking perspiration from his brow, the young officer now approached the volante and said to the lady: "I trust, madame, that you have received no further injury by this unfortunate encounter than must needs occur to you from fright."
As he spoke thus, the lady turned quickly from looking towards the old gentleman, who was now on the other side of the vehicle, and after a moment exclaimed: "Is it possible, Captain Bezan, that we are indebted to you for this most opportune deliverance from what seemed to be certain destruction?"
"Isabella Gonzales!" exclaimed the young officer, with unfeigned surprise.
"You did not know us, then?" she asked, quickly, in reply.
"Not I, indeed, or else I should sooner have spoken to you."
"You thus risked your life, then, for strangers?" she continued.
"You were the weakest party, were attacked by robbers; it only required a glance to realize that, and to attack them and release you was the next most natural thing in the world," replied the soldier, still wiping the perspiration from his forehead and temples.
"Father!" exclaimed Isabella, with undisguised pleasure, "this is Captain Bezan!"
"Captain Bezan?" repeated the old don, as surprised as his daughter had been.
"At your service," replied the soldier, bowing respectfully to Don Gonzales.
"Why, sir," said the old man, "what possible chance could have brought you so fortunately to our rescue here, a dozen leagues from the city?"
"I was returning with these two companions of my company from a business trip to the south side of the island, where we had been sent with despatches from Tacon to the governor of the department."
"No, matter, what chance has brought you here, at all events we owe our lives to you, sir," said Don Gonzales, extending his hand cordially to the young officer.
After some necessary delay, under the peculiar circumstances, the horses were finally arranged so as to permit of proceeding forward on the road. The bodies of the servants were disposed of, and all was ready for a start, when Isabella Gonzales turned to her father and pressing his arm said: "Father, how pale he looks!"
"Who, my child!"
"There, see how very pale!" said Isabella, rising up from her seat.
"Who do you speak of, Isabella?"
"Captain Bezan, father; see, there he stands beside his horse."
"He does look fatigued; he has worked hard with those villains," said the old man.
"Why don't he mount? The rest have done so, and we are ready," continued the old man, anxiously.
At that moment one of the horsemen, better understanding the case than either Isabella Gonzales or her father, left his well-trained animal in the road, and hastened to his officer's side. It required but a glance for him to see that his captain was too weak to mount.
Directing the outrider, who had now mounted one of the horses attached to the volante, and acted as postilion, to drive towards him whom his companion was partially supporting, Don Gonzales asked most anxiously: "Captain Bezan, you are ill, I fear; are you much hurt?"
"A mere trifle, Don Gonzales; drive on, sir, and I will follow you in a moment."
"He is bleeding from his left arm and side, father," said Isabella, anxiously.
"You are wounded-I fear severely, Captain Bezan," said the father.
"A mere scratch, sir, in the arm, from one of the unlucky thrusts of those Montaros," he replied, assuming an indifference that his pale face belied.
"Ah! father, what can be done for him?" said Isabella, quickly.
"I am unharmed," said the grateful old man, "and can sit a horse all day long, if need be. Here, captain, take my seat in the volante, and Isabella, whom you have served at such heavy cost to yourself, shall act the nurse for you until we get to town again."
Perhaps nothing, save such a proposition as this, could possibly have aroused and sustained the wounded officer; but after gently refusing for a while to rob Don Gonzales of his seat in the volante, he was forced to accept it even by the earnest request of Isabella herself, who seemed to tremble lest he was mortally wounded in their behalf.
Little did Don Gonzales know, at that time, what a flame he was feeding in the young officer's breast. He was too intently engaged in his own mind with the startling scenes through which he had just passed, and was exercised with too much gratitude towards Captain Bezan for his deliverance, to observe or realize any peculiarity of appearance in any other respect, or to question the propriety of placing him so intimately by the side of his lovely child. Isabella had never told her father, or indeed any one, of the circumstance of her having met Captain Bezan on the Plato. But the reader, who is aware of the scene referred to, can easily imagine with what feelings the soldier took his seat by her side, and secretly watched the anxious and assiduous glances that she gave his wounded arm and side, as well as the kind looks she bestowed upon his pallid face.
"I fear I annoy you," said the soldier, realizing his proximity to her on the seat.
"No, no, by no means. I pray you rest your arm here," said Isabella Gonzales, as she offered her rebosa supported in part by her own person!
"You are too kind-far too kind to me," said the wounded officer, faintly; for he was now really very weak from loss of blood and the pain of his wounds.
"Speak not, I beseech of you, but strive to keep your courage up till we can gain the aid of some experienced surgeon," she said, supporting him tenderly.
Thus the party drove on towards the city, by easy stages, where they arrived in safety, and left Captain Bezan to pursue his way to his barracks, which he did, not, however, until he had, like a faithful courier, reported to the governor-general the safe result of his mission to the south of the island.
The story of the gallant rescue was the theme of the hour for a period in Havana, but attacks from robbers on the road, under Tacon's governorship, were too common an occurrence to create any great wonder or curiosity among the inhabitants of the city. But Captain Bezan had got wounds that would make him remember the encounter for life, and now lay in a raging fever at his quarters in the infantry barracks of the Plaza des Armes.
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{
"id": "4957"
}
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