‘O HEAVEN! THAT ONE MIGHT READ THE BOOK OF FATE!’
Churchill Penwyn looked something the worse for that half-hour’s excitement overnight when the Manor House party assembled at breakfast, between eight and nine next morning. The days began early at Penwyn, and only Lady Cheshunt was guilty of that social malingering involved in a chronic headache, which prevented her appearing on the dewy side of noon. Perhaps Mr. Penwyn’s duties as host during the previous evening might have fatigued him a little. He had a weary look in that bright morning sunshine—a look of unrest, as of one who had slept but little in the night hours. Madge glanced at him every now and then with half-concealed anxiety. Every change, were it ever so slight, in that one beloved face was visible to her.
‘I hope last night’s business has not worried you, love,’ she said tenderly, making some excuse for carrying him his breakfast-cup with her own hands. ‘The diamonds are safe, and no doubt the man will be properly punished for his audacity.’
Churchill had told her all about the attempted robbery, in his clear, passionless way, but not a word of that interview in the study, between gentleman and vagabond. Madge, merciful to all innocent sufferers, had no sentimental compassion for this frustrated burglar, but desired that he should be duly punished for his crime.
‘I am not particularly worried, dear. It was rather an unpleasant ending to a pleasant evening, that is all.’
They were still seated at the breakfast-table, and Sir Lewis Dallas was still listening with rapt attention to Viola’s account of her feelings at the sight of the thief, when the butler, who had left the room a few minutes before, in compliance with a whispered request from his subordinate, re-entered, solemn of aspect, and full of that self-importance common to the craft.
‘The man has been taken again, sir, and is in the village lock-up,’ he announced to his master.
Churchill rose hastily.
‘Taken again! What do you mean? I left him locked up in my study at two o’clock this morning.’
‘Yes, sir, but he unfastened the shutters and got out of the window, and would have got clean off, I dare say, if Tyrrel, the gamekeeper, and his son hadn’t been about with a couple of dogs, on the look-out for poachers. The dogs smelt him out just as he was getting over the fence in the pine wood, and the Tyrrels collared him, and took him off to the lock-up then and there. He fought hard, Tyrrel says, and would have been almost a match for the two of ’em if it hadn’t been for the dogs. They turned the scale,’ concluded the butler, grandly.
‘Imagine the fellow so nearly getting off!’ exclaimed Sir Lewis. ‘I wonder it didn’t strike you that he would get out at the window, Penwyn. You locked the door, and thought you had him safe. Something like the painter fellow, who went in for the feline species, and cut two holes in his studio door, a big one for his cat, and a little one for her kitten, forgetting that the little cat could have got through the big cat’s door. That’s the way with you clever men, you’re seldom up to trap in trifles.’
‘Rather stupid of me, I confess,’ said Churchill, ‘but I suppose I was a little obfuscated by the whole business. One hasn’t a burglar on one’s hands every night in the week. However,’ he added, slowly, ‘he’s safe in the lock-up; that’s the grand point, and I shall have the pleasure of assisting at his official examination at twelve o’clock.’
‘Are the petty sessions on to-day?’ asked Sir Lewis, warmly interested. ‘How jolly!’
‘You don’t mean to say that you take any interest in that sort of twaddle?’ said Churchill.
‘Anything in the way of crime is interesting to me,’ replied the young man; ‘and to assist at the examination of the ruffian who frightened Miss Bellingham will be rapture. I only regret that the old hanging laws are repealed.’
‘I don’t feel quite so unmerciful as that,’ said Madge, ‘but I should like the man to be punished, if it were only as an example. It isn’t nice to lose the sense of security in one’s own house, to be afraid to open one’s window after dark, and to feel that there may be a burglar lurking in every corner.’
‘And to know that your burglar is your undeveloped assassin,’ added Sir Lewis. ‘I’ve no doubt that scoundrel would have tried to murder us both last night if it hadn’t been for my biceps and Churchill’s revolver.’
The breakfast party slowly dispersed, some to the grounds, some to the billiard-room. Every one had letters to write, or some duty to perform, but no one felt in the cue for performance. Nor could anybody talk of anything except the burglar, Viola’s courage, Churchill’s coolness in the hour of peril, and carelessness in the matter of the shutters. Lady Cheshunt required to have bulletins carried to her periodically, while she sipped orange Pekoe in the luxurious retirement of an Arabian bed.
Thus the morning wore on till half-past eleven, at which time the carriage was ordered to convey Mrs. Penwyn, Miss Bellingham, and Sir Lewis Dallas to the village inn, attached whereto was the justices’ room, where Mr. Penwyn and his brother magistrate, or magistrates, were to meet in solemn assembly.
Viola and Sir Lewis were wanted as witnesses. Mrs. Penwyn went, ostensibly to take care of her sister, but really because she was acutely anxious to see the result of the morning’s work. That look of secret care in her husband’s face had disturbed her. Looks which for the world at large meant nothing had their language for her. She had studied every line of that face, knew its lights and shadows by heart.
The day was lovely, another perfect August day. The shining faces of the reapers turned towards them as they drove past the golden fields, broad peasant faces, sun-browned, and dewy with labour’s honourable sweat. All earth was gay and glad. Madge Penwyn looked at this fair world sadly, heavy with a vague sense of secret care. The skylark sang his thrilling joy-notes high up in the blue vault that arched these golden lands, and the note of rapture jarred upon the wife’s ear.
‘I’m afraid we have been too happy, Churchill and I,’ she thought, and then recalled two lines of Hood’s, full of deepest pathos,—
‘For there is e’en a happiness
That makes the heart afraid.’
They had been utterly happy only a little while ago, but since that confession of Churchill’s, the wife’s heart had been burdened with a secret grief. And to-day she felt that hidden care keenly. Something in her husband’s manner had suggested concealed anxieties, fears, cares which he could not or would not share with her. ‘If he did but know how loyal I could be to him,’ she thought, ‘he would hardly shrink from trusting me.’
Viola was full of excitement, and quite ferociously disposed towards the burglar.
‘I suppose to-day’s business is only a kind of rehearsal,’ she said, gaily, ‘and that we shall have to give our evidence again at Bodmin assizes. And some pert young barrister on the Western Circuit will browbeat me and try to make me contradict myself, and make fun of me, and ask if I had put my hair in papers, or had unplaited my chignon when I ran downstairs after the burglar.’
‘I should like to see him do it,’ muttered Sir Lewis, in a vengeful tone.
They were in Penwyn village by this time, the old-fashioned straggling village, two rows of cottages scattered apart on the wide high road, a tiny Methodist chapel in a field, the pound, the lock-up, big enough for one culprit, and the village inn, attached to which there was the justice-room, a long narrow upper chamber, with a low ceiling.
All the inhabitants of Penwyn had turned out to see the great folks. It was like an Irish crowd, children, old women, and young matrons with infants in their arms. The children had just turned out from the pretty Gothic school-house, which Mr. Penwyn had built for them. They bobbed deferentially as their patroness descended from her carriage, and a murmur of praise and love ran through the little crowd—sweetest chorus to a woman’s ear.
‘We ought to be happy in this fair land,’ thought Madge, as her heart thrilled at the sight of her people. ‘It is like ingratitude to God to keep one secret care when He has blessed us so richly.’
‘QUI PEUT SOUS LE SOLEIL TROMPER SA DESTINEE?’
Churchill was waiting at the inn door to receive his wife. He had ridden across on his favourite horse Tarpan—a long-necked, raking bay, over sixteen hands, and a great jumper—a horse with a tremendous stride, just such a brute as Lenore’s lover might have bestridden in that awful nightride.
‘Is the man here, Churchill?’ Madge asked, anxiously.
‘Yes, love. There is nothing to be uneasy about,’ answered her husband, replying to her looks rather than to her words.
‘Yet you seem anxious, Churchill.’
‘Only in my magisterial capacity. Tresillian is here. We shall commit this fellow in no time. It will only need a few words from Viola and Sir Lewis.’
Not a syllable about the diamond necklace had Mr. Penwyn said to his wife. He had replaced the gems in her dressing-case while she slept peacefully in the adjoining room, and no one but himself and the burglar knew how far the attempted robbery had gone.
They all went up the narrow little staircase, Mr. Penwyn leading his wife up the steep stairs, Viola and Sir Lewis following. The justice-room was full of people—or at least that end of it devoted to the public. The other end of it was fenced off, and here at a table sat Mr. Tresillian, J. P., and his clerk—ready for action.
‘Look, Churchill,’ whispered Madge, as her husband put her hand through his arm and led her towards this end of the room, ‘there is the woman at the lodge. What can have brought her here?’
Mr. Penwyn’s glance followed his wife’s for a moment. Yes, there stood Rebecca, of the North Lodge, sullen, even threatening of aspect, or seeming so to the eye that looked at her now. What a horrible likeness she bore to that ruffian he had dealt with last night!
Mr. Tresillian shook hands with the two ladies. He was a tall, stout man, with a florid countenance, who rode to hounds all the season, and devoted himself to the pleasures of the table for the rest of the year. It was something awful to the crowd to see him shake hands, and smile, and talk about the weather, just like a common mortal; to see him pretend to be so good-natured too, when it was his function—the very rule of his being—to inflict summary punishment upon his fellow-men, to have no compassion for pleasant social vices, and to be as hard on a drunkard as upon a thief.
There was only one case to be heard this morning, and the thrilling interest of that one case held the spectators breathless. Women stood on tiptoe peering over the shoulders of the men—women who ought to have been at their washtubs, or baking homely satisfying pasties for the family supper.
The ruffian was brought in closely guarded by a couple of rural policemen, and looking considerably the worse for last night’s recapture. He had fought like a wild cat for his freedom, had given and taken a couple of black eyes, had furthermore received a formidable cut across his forehead, and had had his clothes torn in the scuffle.
The two Tyrrels, father and son, also in a damaged condition, were there to relate proudly how they had pounced upon the offender just as he was clambering over a fence. They had told their story already so many times, in an informal manner, to curious friends and acquaintances, that they were prepared to give it with effect presently when they should be put upon oath.
Mr. Tresillian, who went to work in a very slow and ponderous way, was still conferring with his clerk in a bass undertone, which sounded like distant organ music, when Rebecca Mason pushed her way through the crowd, and came to that privileged portion of the room where Mr. Penwyn and his wife were sitting.
‘I want to know if you’re going to press this charge, Mr. Penwyn,’ she asked, quietly enough, but hardily.
‘Of course he is,’ answered Madge, with a flash of anger. ‘Do you suppose we are going to overlook such an attempt—a man breaking into our house after midnight, and frightening my sister nearly out of her wits? We should never feel secure at the Manor if this man were not made an example of. Pray what interest have you in pleading for him?’
‘I’ll tell you that by and by, ma’am. I did not ask the question of you, but of my master.’
‘Your master and I have but one thought in the matter.’
‘Do you mean to prosecute that man, Mr. Penwyn,’ asked Rebecca, looking steadfastly at the Squire. Even while addressing Madge she had kept her eyes on Churchill’s face. The brief dialogue had been carried on in an undertone, while Mr. Tresillian and the clerk were still muttering to each other.
‘The case is out of my hands. I have no power to prevent the man’s committal.’
‘Yes, you have,’ answered Rebecca, doggedly. ‘You have power to do anything here. What is law or justice against a great landowner, in a place like this? You are lord and master here.’
‘Why do you bother me about this burglar?’
‘He is my son.’
‘I am sorry any servant of mine should be related to such a scoundrel.’
‘I am not proud of the relationship,’ answered the lodge-keeper, coolly. ‘Yet there are men capable of worse crimes than entering another man’s house—criminals who wear smooth faces and fine broadcloth—and stand high in the world. I’d rather have that vagabond for my son than some of them.’
Churchill glanced at his wife, as if to consult her feelings. But Madge, so tender and pitying to the destitute and afflicted, had an inflexible look just now. Rebecca was her particular antipathy, a blot upon the fair face of Penwyn manor, which she was most anxious to see removed; and now this Rebecca appeared in a new and still more disagreeable light as the mother of a burglar. It was hardly strange, therefore, that Mrs. Penwyn should be indisposed to see the law outraged in the cause of mercy.
‘I regret that my wish to serve you will not allow me to condone a felony on behalf of your son, said Churchill, with slow distinctness, and meeting that piercing gaze of the gipsy’s with as steady a look in his own grey eyes. ‘The attempt was too daring to be overlooked. A man breaks into my house at midnight, naturally with some evil intent.’
Still not a word about the diamonds which he had recovered from the burglar’s person.
‘He did not break into your house,’ argued Rebecca, ‘you left your windows open, and he walked in. He had been drinking, I know, and hardly knew where he was going, or what he was doing. If he had had his wits about him, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be caught by a girl,’ she added, contemptuously.
‘He may have been drunk,’ said Churchill, with a thoughtful look, ‘but that hardly mends the matter. It isn’t pleasant to have a drunken vagabond prowling about one’s house. What do you say, my queen?’ he asked, turning to Madge, with a smile, but not quite the smile which was wont to brighten his face when he looked at her. ‘Will you exercise your prerogative of mercy? Shall I try what I can do to get this vagabond off with a few days in Penwyn lock-up, instead of having him committed for trial?’
‘I have no compassion for a man who lifted his hand against my sister,’ answered Madge, warmly. ‘Sir Lewis told me all about it, Churchill. He saw that villain raise his clenched fist to strike Viola’s face. He would have disfigured her for life, or killed her perhaps, if Sir Lewis had not caught his arm. So you suppose I am going to plead for such a scoundrel as that?’
‘Come, Mrs. Penwyn, you are a woman and a mother,’ pleaded Rebecca, ‘you ought to be merciful.’
‘Not at the expense of society. Justice and order would, indeed, be outraged if the law were stretched in favour of such a ruffian as your son.’
‘You’re hard, lady,’ said the gipsy, ‘but I think I can say a word that will soften you. Let me speak to you in the next room,’ looking towards a half-open door that communicated with a small parlour adjoining. ‘Let me speak with you alone for five minutes—you’d better not say no, for his sake,’ she urged, with a glance at Churchill.
Mr. Penwyn rose suddenly with darkening brow, and seized Madge by the arm, as if he would hold her away from the woman.
‘I will not suffer any communication between you and my wife,’ he exclaimed. ‘You have said your say and have been answered. I will do anything I can for you, grant anything you choose to ask for yourself,’ with emphasis, ‘but your son must take his chance.—Tresillian, we are ready.’
‘Lady, you’d better hear me,’ pleaded the gipsy.
That plea weighed lightly enough with Madge Penwyn. She was watching her husband’s face, and it was a look in that which alone influenced her decision.
‘I will hear you,’ she said to the gipsy. ‘Ask Mr. Tresillian to wait for a few minutes, Churchill.’
‘Madge, what are you thinking of?’ cried her husband. ‘She can have nothing to say that has not been said already. She has had her answer.’
‘I will hear her, Churchill, and alone.’
That ‘I will’ was accompanied by an imperious look not often seen in Madge Penwyn’s face—never before seen by him she looked at now.
‘As you will, love,’ he answered, very quietly, and made way for her to pass into the adjoining room.
Rebecca followed, and shut the door between the two rooms. There was a faint stir, and then the low hum of the little crowd sank into silence. Every eye turned to that closed door; every mind was curious to know what those two women were saying on the other side of it.
There was a pause of about ten minutes. Churchill sat by the official table, silent and thoughtful. Mr. Tresillian fidgeted with the stationery, and yawned once or twice. The ruffian stood in his place, dogged and imperturbable, looking as if he were the individual least concerned in the day’s proceedings.
At last the door opened, and Madge appeared. She came slowly into the room,—slowly, and like a person who only walked steadily by an effort. So white and wan was the face turned appealingly towards Churchill, that she looked like one newly risen from some sickness unto death. Churchill rose to go to her, but hesitatingly, as if he were doubtful whether to approach her—almost as if they had been strangers.
‘Churchill,’ she said faintly, looking at him with pathetic eyes—a gaze in which deepest love and despair were mingled. At that look and word he went to her, put his arm round her, and led her gently back to her seat.
‘You must get this man off, Churchill,’ she whispered faintly. ‘You must.’
He bent his head, but spoke not a word, only pressed her hand with a grip strong as pain or death. And then he went to Mr. Tresillian, who was growing tired of the whole business, and was at all times plastic as wax in the hands of his brother magistrate, not being troubled with ideas of his own in a general way. Indeed, he had expended so much brain-power in the endeavour to out-man?uvre the manifold artifices of certain veteran dog foxes in the district, that he could hardly be supposed to have much intellectual force left for the Bench.
‘I find there has been a good deal of muddle in this business,’ said Churchill to him confidentially. ‘The man is the son of my lodge-keeper, and a decent hard-working fellow enough, it seems. He had been drinking, and strayed into the Manor House in an obfuscated condition last night—my servants are most to blame for leaving doors open—and Viola saw him, and was frightened, and made a good deal of unnecessary fuss. And then my keepers knocked the fellow about more than they need have done. So I really think if you were to let him off with a day or two in the lock-up, or even a severe reprimand——’
‘Yes—yes—yes—yes—yes,’ said Mr. Tresillian, keeping up a running fire of muttered affirmatives throughout Churchill’s speech. ‘Certainly. Let the fellow off, by all means, if he had no felonious intention, and Mrs. Penwyn wishes it. Ladies are so compassionate. Yes, yes, yes, yes.’
Mr. Tresillian was thinking rather more about a certain fifteen-acre wheat-field now ready for the sickle than of the business in hand. Reapers were scarce in the land just now, and he was not clear in his mind about getting in that corn.
So, instead of swearing in witnesses and holding a ceremonious examination, Mr. Tresillian disappointed the assembled audience by merely addressing a few sharpish words to the delinquent, and sending him about his business, with a warning never more to create trouble in that particular neighbourhood, lest it should be worse for him. The offender was further enjoined to be grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Penwyn for their kindness in not pressing the charge. And thus the business was over, and the court rose. The crowd dispersed slowly, grumbling not a little about Justice’s justice, and deeply disappointed at not having seen the strange offender committed for trial.
‘If it had been one of us,’ a man remarked to a neighbour, ‘we shouldn’t have got off so easy.’
‘No,’ growled another. ‘If it had been some poor devil had up for licking his wife, he’d have got it hot.’
All was over. Viola and Sir Lewis Dallas, who had been indulging in a little quiet flirtation by an open window, and not attending to the progress of events, were beyond measure surprised at the abrupt close of the proceedings, and not a little disappointed, for Viola had quite looked forward to appearing in the witness-box at Bodmin Assize Court, and being cross-examined by an impertinent barrister, and then complimented upon her heroism by the judge, and perhaps cheered by the multitude. Nothing could be flatter than this ending.
‘It’s just like Madge,’ exclaimed Viola. ‘She may make believe to be angry for half an hour or so, but that soft heart of hers is melted at the first piteous appeal. That horrid woman at the lodge has begged off her horrid son.’
Madge, whiter than summer lilies, did not look in a condition to be questioned just now.
‘See how ill she looks,’ said Viola to Sir Lewis. ‘They have worried her into a nervous state with their goings on. Let us get her away.’
There was no need for Sir Lewis’s intervention. Churchill led his wife out of the room. Erect, and facing the crowd firmly enough both of them, but one pale as death.
‘Are you going to ride home, Churchill?’ asked Madge, as her husband handed her into the carriage.
‘Yes, love, I may as well go back as I came on Tarpan.’
‘I had rather you came with us,’ she said, with an appealing look.
‘As you like, dear. Lewis, will you ride Tarpan?’
Sir Lewis looked at Viola and then at his boots. It was an honour to ride Tarpan, but hardly a pleasant thing to ride him without straps; and then Sir Lewis would have liked that homeward drive, with Viola for his vis-à-vis.
‘By all means, if Mrs. Penwyn would rather you went back in the carriage,’ he said good-naturedly, but with a look at Viola which meant ‘You know what a sacrifice I am making.’
That drive home was a very silent one. Viola was suffering from reaction after excitement, and leaned back with a listless air. Madge looked straight before her, with grave fixed eyes, gazing into space. And still there was not a cloud in the blue bright sky, and the reapers standing amongst the tawny corn turned their swart faces towards the Squire’s carriage, and pulled their moistened forelocks, and thought what a fine thing it was for the gentry to be driving swiftly through the clear warm air, lolling back upon soft cushions, and with no more exertion than was involved in holding a silk umbrella.
‘But how white Madam Penwyn looks!’ said one of the men, a native of the place, to his mate. ‘She doant look as if the good things of this life agreed with her. She looks paler and more tired like than you nor me.’
‘THIS IS MORE STRANGE THAN SUCH A MURDER IS.’
They were in Madge’s dressing-room, that spacious, many-windowed chamber, with its closed venetians, which was cool and shadowy even on a blazing August day like this. They were alone together, husband and wife, face to face, two white faces turned towards each other, blanched by passions stronger and deeper than it is man’s common lot to suffer.
They had come here straight from the carriage that brought them back to the Manor House, and they were alone for the first moment since Madge had heard Rebecca Mason’s petition.
‘Churchill,’ she said slowly, with agonized eyes lifted to his face, ‘I know all—all that woman could tell; and she showed me——’
She stopped, shuddering, and clasped her hands before her face. Her husband stood like a rock, and made no attempt to draw nearer to her. He stood aloof and waited.
‘I know all,’ she repeated, with a passionate sob, ‘and I remember what I said when you asked me to be your wife. You were too poor—we were too poor. I could not marry you because of your poverty. It was my worldliness, my mercenary decision that influenced you, that urged you to——Oh, Churchill, half the fault was mine. God give me leave to bear half the burden of His anger.’
She flung herself upon her husband’s shoulder, and sobbed there, clinging to him more fondly than in their happiest hour, her arms clasping him round the neck, her face hidden upon his breast, with such love as only such a woman can feel—love which, supreme in itself, rises above every lesser influence.
‘What! you touch me, Madge! You come to my arms still; you shed compassionate tears upon my breast. Then I am not wholly lost. Vile as I am, there is comfort still. My love, my fond one, fortune gave me nothing so sweet as you.’
‘Oh, Churchill, why, why—?’ she sobbed.
He understood the question involved in that one broken word, hardly audible for the sobs that shook his wife’s frame.
‘Dearest, Fate was hard upon me, and I wanted you!’ he said, with a calmness that chilled her soul. ‘A good man would have trusted in Providence, no doubt, and waited unrepiningly for life’s blessings until he was grey and old, and went down to his grave without ever having known earthly bliss, taking with him some vague notion that he was to come into his estate somewhere else. I am not a good man. My passionate love and my scorn of poverty would not let me wait. I knew that, by one swift bold act—a wicked deed if you will, but not a cruel one, since every man must die once—I could win all I desired. Fortune had made two men’s lots flagitiously unequal. I balanced them.’
‘Oh, Churchill, it is awful to hear you speak like that. Surely you have repented—surely all your life must be poisoned with regret.’
‘Yes, I have felt the canker called remorse. I could surrender all good things that earth can give—yes, let you go from these fond arms, beloved, if that which was done could be undone. And now you will loathe me, and we must part.’
‘Part, Churchill! What, leave you because you are the most miserable of men? No, dearest, I will cling to you, and hold by you to the end of life, come what will. If it was I who tempted you to sin, you shall not bear your burden alone. Loathe you!’ she cried, passionately, looking up at him with streaming eyes, ‘no, Churchill! I cannot think of that hideous secret without horror; I cannot think of the sinner without pity. There is a love that is stronger than the world’s favour, stronger than right, or peace, or honour, and such a love I have given you.’
‘My angel—my comforter! Would to God I had kept my soul spotless for your sake!’
‘And for our child, Churchill, for our darling. Oh, dearest, if there can be pardon for such a sin as yours—and Christ spoke words of mercy and promise to the thief on the cross—let us strive for it, strive with tears and prayers, and deepest penitence. Oh, my love, believe in a God of mercy, the God who sent His Son to preach repentance to sinners. Love, let us kneel together to that offended God, let us sue for mercy, side by side.’
Her husband drew her closer to his breast, kissed the pale lips with unspeakable tenderness, looked into the true brave eyes which did not shrink from his gaze.
‘Even I, who have had you for my wife, did not know the divinity of a woman’s love—until this miserable hour. My dearest, even to comfort you, I cannot add deliberate blasphemy to my sins. I cannot kneel, or pray to a Power in which my faith is of the weakest. Keep your gentle creed, dearest, adore your God of mercy—but I have hardened my heart against these things too long to find comfort in them now. My one glory, my one consolation, is the thought that, lost as I am, I have not fallen too low for your love. You will love me and hold by me, knowing my sin; and let my one merit be that in this dark hour I have not lied to you. I have not striven to outweigh that woman’s accusation by some fable which your love might accept.’
‘No, Churchill, you have trusted me, and you shall find me worthy of your trust,’ she answered, bravely. ‘No act of mine shall ever betray you. And if you cannot pray—if God withholds the light of truth from you for a little while, my prayers shall ascend to Him like ever-burning incense. My intercession shall never cease. My faith shall never falter.’
He kissed her again without a word—too deeply moved for speech,—and then turned away from her and paced the room to and fro, while she went to her dressing-table, and looked wonderingly at the white wan face, which had beamed so brightly on her guests last night. She looked at herself thoughtfully, remembering that henceforward she had a part to act, and a fatal secret to keep. No wan looks, no tell-tale pallor must betray the horrid truth.
‘Madge,’ said her husband, presently, after two or three thoughtful turns up and down the room, ‘I have not one word to say to you in self-justification. I stand before you confessed, a sinner of the blackest dye. Yet you must not imagine that my whole life is of a colour with that one hideous act. It is not so. Till that hour my life had been blameless enough—more blameless perhaps than the career of one young man in twenty, in our modern civilization. Temptation to vulgar sins never assailed me. I was guiltless till that fatal hour in which my evil genius whispered the suggestion of a prize worth the price of crime. Macbeth was a brave and honourable soldier, you know, when the fatal sisters met him on the heath, and hissed their promise into his ear. And in that moment guilty hope seized upon his soul, and already in thought he was a murderer. Dearest, I have never been a profligate, or cheat, or liar, or coward. I have concentrated the wickedness which other men spread over a lifetime of petty sins in one great offence.’
‘And that shall be forgiven,’ cried Madge, with a sublime air of conviction. ‘It shall, if you will but repent.’
‘If to wish an act undone is repentance, I have repented for more than two years,’ he answered. ‘Hark, love! that is the luncheon-bell. We must not alarm our friends by our absence. Or stay, I will go down to the dining-room. You had better remain here and rest. Poor agonized head, tender faithful heart, what bitter need of rest for both!’
‘No, dear, I will go down with you,’ Madge answered, firmly. ‘But let me ask one question first, Churchill, and then I will never speak to you more of our secret. That hateful woman—you have pacified her for to-day, but how long will she be satisfied? Is there any fear of new danger?’
‘I can see none, dearest. The woman was satisfied with her lot, and would never have given me any trouble but for this unlucky accident of her son’s attempt last night. I will get the man provided for and sent out of the country, where you shall never hear of him again. The woman is harmless enough, and cares little enough for her son; but that brute instinct of kindred, which even savages feel, made her fight for her cub.’
‘Why did you bring her here, Churchill? Was that wise?’
‘I thought it best so. I thought it wise to have her at hand under my eye, where she could only assail me at close quarters, and where she was not likely to find confederates—where she could have all her desires gratified, and could have no motive for tormenting me.’
‘It is best, perhaps,’ assented Madge. ‘But it is horrible to have her here.’
‘The Egyptians had a skeleton at their feasts, lest they should forget to make the most of their brief span of carnal pleasures. It is as well to be reminded of the poison in one’s cup of life.’
‘And now go to our guests, Churchill. Your face tells no tale. Say that I am coming almost immediately.’
‘My darling, I fear you are exacting too much from your fortitude.’
‘No, Churchill; I shall begin as I mean to go on. If I were to shut myself up—if I were to give myself time for thought to-day—just at first—I should go mad.’
He went, half unwillingly. She stood for a few moments, fixed to the spot where he had left her, as if lost in some awful dream, and then walked dizzily to the adjoining room, where she tried to wash the ashy pallor from her cheeks with cold spring water. She rearranged her hair, with hands that trembled despite her endeavour to be calm; changed her dress—fastened a scarlet coque in her dark hair, and went down to the dining-room, looking a little wan and fatigued, but not less lovely than she was wont to look. What a mad world it seemed to her when she saw her guests assembled at the oval table, talking and laughing in that easy unreserved way which seems natural at the mid-day meal, when servants are banished, and gentlemen perform the onerous office of carver at the loaded sideboard; when hungry people, just returned from long rambles over hills and banks where the wild thyme grows, or from a desperate croquet match, or a gallop across the moorland, devour a heterogeneous meal of sirloin, perigord pie, clotted cream, fruit, cutlets, and pastry, and drink deeper draughts of that sparkling Devonian cider, better a hundred times than champagne, than they would quite care to acknowledge, if a reckoning were demanded of them.
Everybody seemed especially noisy to-day—talk, flirtation, laughter, made a Babel-like hubbub—and at the end of the table sat the Squire of Penwyn, calm, inscrutable, and no line upon the expansive forehead, with its scanty border of crisp, brown hair, showed the brand of Cain.
‘AH, LOVE, THERE IS NO BETTER LIFE THAN THIS.’
Justina had made a success at the Royal Albert Theatre. The newspapers were tolerably unanimous in their verdict. The more ?sthetic and critical journals even gave her their approval, which was a kind of cachet. The public, always straightforward and single-minded in their expression of satisfaction, had no doubt about her. She was accepted at once as one of the most popular and promising young actresses of the day—natural yet artistic—free from all trick, unaffected, modest, yet with the impulsive boldness of a true artist, who forgets alike herself and her audience in the unalloyed delight of her art.
A success so unqualified gave the girl extreme pleasure, and elevated Matthew Elgood to a region of bliss which he had never before attained. For the first time in his life he found himself supplied with ample means for the gratification of desires which, at their widest, came within a narrow limit. The manager of the Royal Albert Theatre had made haste to be liberal, lest other managers, ever on the watch for rising talent, should attempt to lure Justina to their boards by offers of larger reward. He sprang his terms at once from the weekly three guineas, which Matthew had gladly accepted at the outset, to double that amount, and promised further increase if Miss Elgood’s second part were as successful as the first.
‘With a very young actress one can never be sure of one’s ground,’ he said, diplomatically. ‘The part in “No Cards” just fits your daughter. I’ve no idea what she may be in the general run of business. I’ve seen so many promising first appearances lead to nothing.’
‘My daughter has had experience, and tuition from an experienced actor, sir,’ replied Matthew, with dignity. ‘She has a perfect knowledge of her art, and the more you call upon her the better stuff you will get from her. Such a part as that in “No Cards” is a mere bagatelle for her. Fits her, indeed! It fits her too well, sir. Her genius has no room to expand in it!’
Six guineas—by no means a large income in the eyes of a paterfamilias with a wife, and a servant or two, and a nest-full of small children to provide for, to say nothing of the rent of the nest to pay—seemed wealth to Mr. Elgood, whose ideas of luxury were bounded by a Bloomsbury lodging, a hot dinner every day, and his glass of gin and water mixed with a liberal hand. He expanded himself in this new sunshine, passed his leisure in spelling through the daily papers, escorting his daughter to and from the theatre, and hanging about the green-room, where he told anecdotes of Macready, bragged of Justina’s talents when she was out of the room, and made himself generally agreeable.
That Bloomsbury lodging of Mr. Elgood’s, though located in the shabbier quarter of the parish, seemed curiously near that highly respectable street where Maurice Clissold had his handsome first-floor chambers, so little account did Mr. Clissold make of the distance between the two domiciles. He was always dropping in at Mr. Elgood’s, bringing Justina fresh flowers from the glades of Covent Garden, or a new book, or some new music. She had improved her knowledge of that delightful art during the last two years, and now played and sang sweetly, with taste and expression that charmed the poet.
Before Justina had been many weeks at the Albert Theatre, it became an established fact that Mr. Clissold was to drink tea with Miss Elgood every afternoon. The gentle temptations of the kettledrum, which he had resisted so bravely in Eton Square, beguiled him here in Bloomsbury, though the simple feast was held on a second floor, with a French mechanic working sedulously at his trade below. Many an hour did Maurice Clissold waste in careless happy talk in that second-floor sitting-room, with its odour of stale tobacco, its shabby old-fashioned furniture, its all-pervading air of poverty and commonness. The room was glorified for him somehow, as he sat by the sunny window sipping an infusion of congou and pekoe out of a blue delft teacup.
One day it struck him suddenly that Justina ought to have prettier teacups, and a few days afterwards there arrived a set of curious old dragon-china cups and saucers. He had not gone to a china-shop, like a rich man, and ordered the newest and choicest ware that Minton’s factory had produced. But he had walked half over London, and peered into all manner of obscure dens in the broker’s shop line, till he found something to please him. Old red and blue sprawling monsters of the crocodile species, on thinnest opalescent porcelain, cups and saucers that had been hoarded and cherished by ancient housekeepers, only surrendered when all that life can cling to slipped from death’s dull hand. The old fragile pottery pleased him beyond measure, and he carried the cups and saucers off to a cab, packed in a basket of paper shavings, and took them himself to Justina.
‘I don’t suppose they are worth very much now-a-days when Oriental china is at a discount,’ he said, ‘and they cost me the merest trifle. But I thought you’d like them.’
Justina was enraptured. Those old cups and saucers were the first present she had ever received—the first actual gift bestowed out of regard for her pleasure which she could count in all her life; except the same donor’s offerings of books and music.
‘How good of you!’ she said, more than once, and with a look worth three times as many words. Maurice laughed at her delight.
‘It was worth my perambulation of London to see you so pleased,’ he said.
‘What, did you take so much trouble to get them?’
‘I walked a good long way. The only merit my offering has is that I took some pains to find it. I am not a rich man, you know, Justina.’
He called her by her Christian name always, with a certain brotherly freedom that was not unpleasant to either.
‘I am so glad of that,’ she exclaimed, na?vely.
‘Glad I’m not rich? Why, that’s scarcely friendly, Justina.’
‘Isn’t it? But if you were rich you wouldn’t come to see us so often, perhaps. Rich people have such hosts of friends.’
‘Yes, Cr?sus has generally a wideish circle—not the best people, possibly, but plenty of them. But I don’t think all the wealth of the Indies—the peacock throne of the great Mogul, and so on—would make any difference in my desire to come here. No, Justina, were the chief of the Rothschilds to transfer his balance to my account to-morrow I should drop in all the same for my afternoon refresher, as regularly as five o’clock struck.’
They had talked of literature and poetry, and fully discussed that new poet whose book Justina had wept over, but by no word had Maurice hinted at his identity with the writer. He liked to hear her speculate upon that unknown poet—wondering what he was like—setting up her ideal image of him. One day he made her describe what manner of man she imagined the author of ‘A Life Picture;’ but she found it difficult to reduce her fancies to words.
‘I cannot compliment you on the clearness of your delineation,’ he said. ‘I haven’t yet arrived at the faintest notion of your ideal poet. If you could compare him to any one we know, it might help me out. Is he like Mr. Flittergilt, the dramatist?’
‘Mr. Flittergilt,’ she cried, contemptuously. ‘Mr. Flittergilt, who is always making bad puns, and talking of his own successes, and telling us that clever remark he made yesterday!’
‘Not like Flittergilt? Has he any resemblance to me, for instance?’
Justina laughed, and shook her head—a very positive shake.
‘No, you are too light-hearted for a poet. You take life too easily. You seem too happy.’
‘In your presence, Justina. You never see me in my normal condition,’ remonstrated Maurice, laughing.
‘No, I cannot fancy the author of that poem at all like you. He is a man who has suffered.’
Maurice sighed.
‘And you think I have never suffered?’
‘He must be a man who has loved a false and foolish woman, and who has been stung to the quick by remorse for his own weakness.’
‘Ah, we are all of us weak once in our lives, and apt to be deceived, Justina. Happy the man who knows no second weakness, and is not twice deceived.’
He said this gravely enough for poet and thinker. Justina looked at him with a puzzled expression.
‘Now you seem quite a different person,’ she said. ‘I could almost fancy you capable of being a poet. I know there are glimpses of poetry in your talk sometimes.’
‘When I talk to you, Justina. Some people have an influence that is almost inspiration. All manner of bright thoughts come to me when you and I are together.’
‘That cannot be true,’ she said. ‘It is you who bring the bright thoughts to me. Consider how ignorant I am, and how much you know—all the great world of poetry, of which so many doors are barred against me. You read Goethe and Schiller. You go into that solemn temple where the Greek poets live in their strange old world. When you took me to the museum the other day, you pointed out all the statues, and talked of them as familiarly as if they had been the statues of your own friends. While I, who have hardly a schoolgirl’s knowledge of French, cannot even read that Alfred de Musset of whom you talk so much.’
‘You know the language in which Shakespeare wrote. You have all that is noblest and grandest in human literature in your hand when you take up that calf-bound, closely printed, double-columned volume yonder, from the old Chiswick press. I think an English writer who never read anything beyond his Bible and his Shakespeare would have a nobler style than the man of widest reading, who had not those two books in his heart of hearts. Other poets are poets. That one man was the god of poetry. But we will read some of De Musset’s poems together, Justina, and I will teach you something more than a schoolgirl’s French.’
After this it became an established thing for Maurice and Justina to read together for an hour or so, just as it was an established thing for Maurice to drop in at tea-time. He made his selections from De Musset discreetly, and then passed on to Victor Hugo; and thus that more valuable part of education which begins when a schoolgirl has been ‘finished’ was not wanting to Justina. Never was a pupil brighter or more intelligent. Never master more interested in his work.
Matthew Elgood looked on, not unapprovingly. In the first place, he was a man who took life lightly, and always held to the gospel text about the day and the evil thereof. He had ascertained from good-natured Mr. Flittergilt that Maurice Clissold had an income of some hundreds per annum, and was moreover the scion of a good old family. About the good old family Matthew cared very little; but the income was an important consideration, and assured of that main fact, he saw no harm in the growing intimacy between Justina and Maurice.
‘It’s on the cards for her to do better, of course,’ reflected Mr. Elgood; ‘actresses have married into the peerage before to-day, and no end of them have married bankers and heavy mercantile swells. But, after all, Justina isn’t the kind of beauty to take the world by storm; and this success of hers may be only a flash in the pan. I haven’t much confidence in the duration of this blessed new school of acting, these drawing-room comedies, with their how-d’ye-do, and won’t-you-take-a-chair dialogue. The good old heavy five-act drama will have its turn by and by, when the public is tired of this milk and water. And Justina has hardly physique enough for the five-act drama. It might be a good thing to get her comfortably married if I was quite clear about my own position.’
That was an all-important question. Justina single and on the stage meant, at a minimum, six guineas a week at Mr. Elgood’s disposal. The girl handed her salary over to the paternal exchequer without a question, and was grateful for an occasional pound or two towards the replenishment of her scanty wardrobe.
Mr. Elgood lost no time in trying to arrive at Maurice’s ideas upon this subject.
‘It’s a hard thing for a man when he outlives his generation,’ he remarked, plaintively, one Sunday evening when Maurice had dropped in and found the comedian alone, Justina not having yet returned from evening service at St. Pancras. ‘Here am I, in the prime of life, with all my faculties in their full vigour, laid up in port, as useless a creature as if I were a sheer hulk, like poor Tom Bowling—actually dependent upon the industry of a girl! There’s something degrading in the idea. If it were not for Justina, I’d accept an engagement for the heavies at the lowest slum in London, roar my vitals out in three pieces a night, rather than eat the bread of dependence. But Justina won’t have it. “I want you to bring me home from the theatre of a night, father,” she says. And that’s an argument I can’t resist. The streets of London are no place for unprotected innocence after dark, and cabs are an expensive luxury. Yet it’s a bitter thing to consider that if Justina were to marry I should have to go to the workhouse.’
‘Hardly, if she married an honest man, Mr. Elgood,’ replied Maurice. ‘No honest man would take your daughter away from you without making some provision for your future.’
‘Well, I have looked at it in that light,’ said Matthew, reflectively, as if the question had thus dimly presented itself before him. ‘I think an honest man wouldn’t feel it quite the right thing to take away my bread-winner, and leave me to spend my declining days in want and misery. Yet, as Shakespeare has it, “Age is unnecessary.” “Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage.” “To have done is to hang—
“Quite out of fashion, like a rusty nail,
In monumental mockery.”’
‘Be assured, Mr. Elgood, that if your daughter marries a man who really loves her, your age will not be uncared for.’
‘I do not wish to be a burden upon my child,’ pursued the actor, tearfully.
His second tumbler of gin and water was nearly emptied by this time.
‘A hundred and four pounds per annum—two pounds a week—secured to me, would give me all I ask of luxury; my lowly lodging, say in May’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane, or somewhere between Blackfriars Bridge and the Temple; my rasher or my bloater for breakfast, my beefsteak for dinner; and my modest glass of gin and water hot, to soothe the tired nerves of age. These, and an occasional ounce of tobacco, are all the old man craves.’
‘Your desires are very modest, Mr. Elgood.’
‘They are, my dear boy. I would bear the pang of severance from my sweet girl, if I saw her ascend to a loftier sphere, and keep my lowly place without repining. But I should like the two pounds a week made as certain as the law of the land could make it.’
This was a pretty clear declaration of his views, and having thus expressed himself, Mr. Elgood allowed life to slip on pleasantly, enjoying his comfortable little two o’clock dinners, and his afternoon glass of gin and water, and dozing in his easy chair, while Maurice and Justina read or talked, only waking at five o’clock when the dragon teacups made a cheerful clatter, and Justina was prettily busy with the task of tea-making.
Even the old common lodging-house sitting-room began by and by to assume a brighter and more homelike air. A vase of choice flowers, a row of books neatly arranged on the old-fashioned sideboard, a Bohemian glass inkstand, clean muslin covers tacked over the faded chintz chair-backs—small embellishments by which a woman makes the best of the humblest materials. The dragon china tea-service was set out on the chiffonier top when not in use, and made the chief ornament of the room. Composition statuettes of Shakespeare and Dante, which Maurice had bought from an itinerant image-seller, adorned the chimney-piece, whence the landlady’s shepherd and shepherdess were banished.
In a scene so humble, in a circle so narrow, Maurice spent some of the happiest hours of his life. He remembered Cavendish Square sometimes with a pang, the shadowy drawing-room at twilight, the flower-screened balcony, so pleasant a spot to linger in when the lamps were lighted in the square below, and the long vista of Wigmore Street converged to a glittering point, and the moon rose above the gloomy roof of Cavendish House—hours of happiness as unalloyed—dreams that were over, days that were gone. And he asked himself whether this second birth of joy was a delusion and a snare like the first.
‘LOVE IS A THING TO WHICH WE SOON CONSENT.’
Maurice Clissold had not forgotten that entry in the register at Seacomb Church, and one afternoon, when Matthew, Justina, and he were cosily seated at the clumsy old lodging-house table drinking tea, he took occasion to refer to his rambles in Cornwall, and his exploration of the little out-of-the-way market town.
‘I should fancy you children of Thespis must have found life rather difficult at such a place as Seacomb,’ he said. ‘Dramatic art must be rather out of the line of those Nonconformist miners. I saw three Dissenting chapels in the small town, one of them being the very building which was once the theatre.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Elgood, with a thoughtful look, ‘we had a bad time of it at Seacomb. My poor wife was ill, and if it hadn’t been for the kindness of the people we lodged with—well, we might have had a closer acquaintance with starvation than any man cares to make. There’s no such touchstone for the human heart as distress, and no man knows the goodness of his fellow-men till he has sounded the lowest deep of misery.’
‘You had a child christened at Seacomb, had you not, Mr. Elgood?’ asked Maurice.
The comedian looked up with a startled expression.
‘How did you know that?’ he asked.
‘I was turning over the parish register, looking for another entry, when I stumbled across the baptism of a child of yours, whose name was not Justina. I thought perhaps Justina was an assumed name, and that the infant christened at Seacomb was Miss Elgood, as the age seemed to correspond.’
‘No,’ replied Matthew, hurriedly. ‘That infant was an elder sister of Justina’s. She died at six weeks old.’
‘Why, father,’ exclaimed Justina, ‘you never told me that you lost a child at Seacomb. I did not even know I ever had a brother or sister. I thought I was your only child.’
‘The only one to live beyond infancy, my dear. Why should I trouble you with the remembrance of past sorrows? We have had cares enough without raking up dead-and-gone griefs.’
‘Was your wife a Cornish woman, Mr. Elgood?’ asked Maurice.
‘No; she was born within the sound of Bow bells, poor soul. Her father was a bookbinder in Clerkenwell. She had a pretty voice, and a wonderful ear for music; and some one told her she would do very well on the stage. Her home was dull and poor, and she felt she ought to earn her living somehow. So she began to act at a little amateur theatre near Coldbath Fields, and having a bright pretty way with her, she got a good deal of notice, and was offered an engagement to play small singing parts at Sadler’s Wells. I was a member of the stock company there at the time, and her pretty little face and her pretty little ways turned my stupid head somehow, and I told myself that two salaries thrown into one would go further than they would divided; never considering that managers would want to strike a bargain with us—lump us together on the cheap—when we were married; or that when two people are earning no salary it’s harder for two to live than one. Well, we married, and lived a hard life afterwards; but I was true to my poor girl, and fond of her to the last; and when hunger was staring us in the face we were not all unhappy.’
‘Justina is like her mother, I suppose,’ said Maurice, ‘as she doesn’t at all resemble you?’
‘No,’ replied Matthew, ‘my wife was a pretty woman, but not in Justina’s style.’
‘What made you hit upon such an out-of-the-way name as Justina? Mind, I like the name very much, but it is a very uncommon one.’
Mr. Elgood looked puzzled.
‘I dare say it was a fancy of my wife’s,’ he said. ‘But I really don’t recollect anything about it.’
‘I’ll tell you why I ask the question,’ pursued Maurice. ‘While I was in Cornwall, staying at a farm called Borcel End, I came across the name.’
The comedian almost dropped his teacup.
‘Borcel End!’ he exclaimed, ‘you were at Borcel End?’
‘Yes. You know the place, it seems. But that’s hardly strange, since you lived so long at Seacomb. Did you know the Trevanards?’
‘No, I only knew the farm from having it pointed out to me once when a friend gave me a drive across the moor in his dog-cart. A queer, out-of-the-way place. What could have taken you there?’
‘It was something in the way of an adventure,’ replied Maurice, and then proceeded to relate his experience on that midsummer afternoon among the Cornish hills.
He touched lightly upon his visit to Penwyn Manor House, knowing that this might be a painful subject for Justina. But she showed a warm interest in his story.
‘You saw his house,’ she said, ‘the old Manor House he told me about that night at Eborsham. Oh, how like the memory of a dream it seems when I think of it! I should like so much to see that place.’
‘You shall see it some day, Justina, if—if you will let me show it you,’ said Maurice, stumbling a little over the last part of the sentence. ‘It is strange that you should be twice associated with that remote corner of the land, once in your birth, a second time in poor James Penwyn’s devotion to you.’
‘It is very strange, sir,’ said the comedian, solemnly, and then with his grand Shakespearean manner continued,—
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’
‘It was at Borcel End I heard the name of Justina,’ said Maurice, going back to the subject most interesting to him. ‘There is an old picture there, a portrait of the present proprietor’s grandmother, whose name was Justina.’
‘Is the old grandmother living still?’ asked Matthew, suddenly.
‘What, blind old Mrs. Trevanard? Yes, she is still living. But you said you did not know the Trevanards.’
‘Only by repute. I heard people talk about them. Rather a curious family, I fancy.’
‘In some respects,’ answered Maurice, puzzled by the comedian’s manner. It seemed as if he were affecting to know less about the family at Borcel End than he really knew. Yet why should he conceal so simple a circumstance as his acquaintance with the Trevanards?
When Maurice and Justina were alone together for a short time next day, the girl questioned her companion about his visit to Penwyn Manor.
‘I want you to describe the old place,’ she said. ‘I cannot think of it without pain. Yet I like to hear of it. Please tell me all about it.’
Maurice obeyed, and gave a detailed description of the grave old mansion, as he had seen it that summer afternoon.
‘How happy he would have been there!’ said Justina. ‘How bright and fair that young life would have been! I am not thinking of my own loss,’ she said, as if in answer to an unspoken question of Maurice’s. ‘I never forgot what you said about unequal marriages that evening at Eborsham, when you came in and found me in my grief, and spoke some hard truths to me. I felt afterwards that you were wiser than I; that all you said was just and true. I should have been a basely selfish woman if I had taken advantage of his foolish impulsive offer—if I had let the caprice of a moment give colour to a life. But believe me, when I let myself love him, I had no thought of his worldly wealth. It was his bright kind nature that drew me to him. No one had ever spoken to me as he spoke. No one had ever praised me before. It was a childish love I gave him, perhaps, but it was true love, all the same.’
‘I believe that, Justina. I believed it then when I saw you, little more than a child, so faithfully sorry for my poor friend’s fate. If I had known you better in those days I should not have called his love foolish. I should never have opposed his boyish fancy. I look back now at my self-assertive wisdom, and it seems to me a greater folly than James Penwyn’s unreasoning love.’
‘You must not say that,’ remonstrated Justina gently, ‘all that you said was spoken well and wisely; and if Providence had spared him, and if he had married me, he would have been ashamed of his actress-wife.’
‘I doubt it, Justina. A man must be hard to please who could be ashamed of you.’
‘I suppose it is very wicked of me,’ said Justina, after a brief silence, ‘but I cannot help grudging those people their happiness in his house. It makes me angry when I think of that cousin—Mr. Churchill Penwyn—who gained so much by James’s death. I remember his cold calm face as I saw it at the inquest. There was no sorrow in it.’
‘He could hardly be supposed to be sorry. He and James had seen very little of each other; and James’s death lifted him at a bound from poverty to wealth.’
‘Yes, I can never think of him without remembering that. He gains so much. The murderer with his brutal greed of gain little thought that he was helping another man to fortune—a man who in the evil wish may have shared his guilt.’
‘You have no right to say that, Justina.’
‘It is unjust, perhaps, but I cannot be temperate when I think of James Penwyn’s murder. Nobody thought of interrogating the man who profited so much by his death. You were suspected because you were not at your inn that night; but no one asked where Mr. Churchill Penwyn spent the night of the murder.’
‘There was no ground for suspecting him.’
‘There was the one fact that he was the only gainer by the crime. He should have been made to prove himself innocent. And now he is happy, proud of his usurped position.’
‘So far as one man can judge another man’s life, Churchill Penwyn seems to me completely happy. His wife is a woman in a thousand, and devoted to him; but I shall have the pleasure of introducing you to her some day, perhaps, Justina.’
‘Do not think of such a thing. I could never regard Churchill Penwyn as a friend. I hope never to see him again.’
Maurice Clissold saw that this feeling about James Penwyn’s successor was deeply rooted, and he argued the question no further. He was too happy in Justina’s society to dwell long upon discordant notes. They had so much to talk about, small as was the actual world in which they had mutual interest. Maurice had undertaken to show all the glories of London to the girl whose life hitherto had been spent in small provincial towns. Justina had ample leisure for sight-seeing, for Mr. Flittergilt’s original comedy proved an honest success, and there was no new piece yet in rehearsal at the Royal Albert Theatre. Nor had Mr. Elgood, comedian, any prudish notions about the proprieties, which might have hindered his daughter’s enjoyment of picture galleries and museums, abbeys and parks. He did not care for sight-seeing himself; for his love of art, he confessed honestly, was not strong enough to counterbalance certain gouty symptoms in his feet, which made prolonged standing a fatigue to him.
‘Let me enjoy my pipe and my newspaper, and let Justina see the pictures and crockery,’ he said, with reference to the South Kensington Museum. So the two young people went about together as freely as if they had been brother and sister, and spent many a happy hour among the national art treasures, or in Hyde Park, in whose deserted alleys autumn’s first leaves were falling.
Mr. Clissold went less and less to his clubs, and became, as it were, a dead letter in the minds of his friends.
One man suggested that Clissold must be writing a novel. Another opined that Clissold had fallen in love.
In the meanwhile Clissold was perfectly happy after his own fashion. Never had his mind been more serene—never had his verse flowed clearer in those quiet night hours which he gave to the Muses; never had the notes of his lyre rung out with a fuller melody. He was writing a poem to succeed the ‘Life Picture,’ a romance in verse, calculated to be as popular with Mudie’s subscribers as his first venture had been. He soared to no empyrean heights of metaphysical speculation, but in strong melodious verse, with honest force and passion, told his story of human joys and human sorrows, human loves and human losses.
It pleased him to hear Justina praise the ‘Life Picture,’ pleased him to think that he would be exalted in her eyes were she to know him as its author. But it pleased him still better to keep his secret, to hear her frank expression of opinion, and leave her free to form her ideal fancy of the poet.
‘The prize I seek to win must be won by myself alone,’ he thought. ‘My literary work is something outside myself. I will not be valued for that.’
One Sunday, that being Justina’s only disengaged evening, Maurice persuaded Mr. Elgood to bring his daughter to dine with him in his bachelor quarters.
‘I want to show you my books,’ he said to Justina. ‘Collecting them has been my favourite amusement for the last five years, and I think it may interest you to see them.’
Justina was delighted at the idea. Mr. Elgood foresaw something special in the way of dinner, perhaps a bottle or two of champagne, so the invitation was accepted with pleasure.
The September evenings were shortening by this time. They dined by lamplight, and the bachelor’s room, with its dark crimson curtains and paper, its heterogeneous collection of pictures, prints, bronzes, and china, looked its best in the mellow light of a pair of Carcel lamps. The inner room was lined from floor to ceiling with books, handsomely bound most of them; for Mr. Clissold devoted all his superfluous cash to books and bookbinding. To this study and sanctum the party adjourned for coffee and dessert, and while Mr. Elgood did ample justice to a bottle of old port, Maurice showed Justina his favourite authors, and expatiated on the beauty of wide margins. Innocent, happy hours; yes, every whit as happy as those days of delusion in Cavendish Square. And all this time there were all manner of distinguished people anxious to be introduced to Miss Elgood; Richmond and Greenwich dinners without number which she might have eaten had she been so minded; diamonds, broughams, sealskin jackets, pug-dogs, all the glories of existence ready to be laid at her feet.
SORROW AUGMENTETH THE MALADY.
This happy easy-going life of Maurice Clissold’s was suddenly disturbed by a letter from Martin Trevanard. Some time had elapsed without any communication from the young man when this letter arrived, but Maurice, in his new happiness, had been somewhat forgetful of his Cornish friend. He felt a touch of remorse as he read the letter.
‘Things have been going altogether wrong here,’ wrote Martin. ‘I don’t mean in the way of worldly prosperity. We have had a first-rate harvest, and a good year in all respects. But I am sorry to say my mother’s health has been declining for some time. She has been unable to attend to the house, and things get out of gear without her. My father has grown moody and unhappy, and, I’m afraid, puts a dash of brandy into his cider oftener than is good for him. Muriel is much the same as usual, and the good old grandmother holds out bravely. It is my mother gives me most uneasiness. I feel convinced that she has something on her mind. I have sometimes thought that her trouble is in some way connected with poor Muriel. I only wish you were here. Your clearer mind might understand much that is dark to me. If it were not asking too much from your friendship, I would willingly beg you to come down here for a week or two. It would do me more good than I can express to see you.’
Maurice’s answer to this appeal was prompt and brief.
‘Dear Martin,—I shall be at Borcel End, all things going well, to-morrow night.
‘Yours always,
‘M. C.’
It was a hard thing for him to leave town just now. There was his new poem, which had all the charm and freshness of a composition recently begun. Little chance for him to continue his work at Borcel, with Martin always at his elbow, and the family troubles and family secrets on his shoulders. And then there was Justina—his afternoon cup of tea in the second-floor parlour—all his new hopes and fancies, which had grouped themselves around the young actress, like the Loves and Graces round Venus, in an allegorical ceiling by Lely or Kneller. But friendship with Maurice Clissold being something more than a name, he felt that he could do no otherwise than hasten to his friend’s relief. So he took his farewell cup of tea out of the dragon china, and departed by an early express next morning, after promising Justina to be away as brief a span as possible.
Borcel End looked very much as when he had first seen it, save that the warm glow of summer had faded from the landscape, and that the old farmhouse had a gloomy look in the autumn dusk. Maurice had chartered a vehicle at Seacomb station, and driven five miles across country, a wild moorland district, made awful by a yawning open shaft here and there, marking the place of an abandoned mine.
The glow of the great hall fire shining through the latticed windows was the only cheerful thing at Borcel. All the rest of the long rambling house was dark.
Martin received his friend at the gate.
‘This is good of you, Clissold,’ he said, as Maurice alighted. ‘I feel ashamed of my selfishness in asking you to come to such a dismal place as this; but it will do me a world of good to have you here. I’ve told my mother you were coming for a fortnight’s ramble among the moors. It wouldn’t do for her to know the truth.’
‘Of course not. But as to Borcel being a dismal place, you know that I never found it so.’
‘Ah, you have never lived here,’ said Martin, with a sigh; ‘and then you’ve the family up at the Manor to enliven the neighbourhood for you. There’s always plenty of cheerfulness there.’
‘And how is Mr. Penwyn going on? Is he getting popular?’
‘He ought to be, for he has done a great deal for the neighbourhood. You’ll hardly recognise the road between here and the Manor when you drive there. But I don’t believe the Squire will ever be as popular as Mrs. Penwyn. The people idolize her. But they seem to have a notion that whatever the Squire does is done more for his own advantage than the welfare of his tenants. And yet, take him for all in all, there never was a more liberal landlord.’
Martin was carrying his friend’s small portmanteau to the porch as he talked. Having deposited that burden, he ran back and told the driver to take his horse round to the stables, and to go round to the kitchen afterwards for his own supper. This hospitable duty performed, Martin opened the door, and ushered Maurice into the family sitting-room.
There sat the old grandmother in her accustomed corner, knitting the inevitable grey stocking which was always in progress under those swift fingers. There, in an arm-chair by the fire, propped up with pillows, sat the mistress of the homestead, sorely changed since Maurice had last seen her. The keen dark eyes had all their old brightness; nay, looked brighter from the pallor of the shrunken visage; the high cheek-bones, the square jaw, were more sharply outlined than of old; and the hand which the invalid extended to Maurice—that honest hard-working hand, which had once been coarse and brown—was now white and thin.
Michael Trevanard sat at the opposite side of the hearth, with a pewter tankard, a newspaper, and a long clay pipe on the square oak table at his elbow. These idle autumn evenings were trying to the somewhat mindless farmer, to whom all the world of letters afforded no further solace than the county paper, or an occasional number of the Field.
‘I am sorry to see you looking so ill, Mrs. Trevanard,’ Maurice said kindly.
‘I’ve had a bad time of it this year, Mr. Clissold,’ she answered. ‘I had an attack of ague and low fever in the spring, and it left a cough that has stuck to me ever since.’
‘I hope my coming here while you are an invalid, will not be troublesome to you.’
‘No,’ answered Mrs. Trevanard, with a sigh, ‘I’ve got used to the notion of things being in a muddle; and neither Michael nor Martin seem to mind; so it doesn’t much matter that the house is neglected. I’ve been obliged to take a second girl, and the two between them make more dirt than ever they clean up. Your old room’s been got ready for you, Mr. Clissold; at least I told Martha to clean it thoroughly, early this morning, and light a good fire this afternoon; so I suppose it’s all right. But you might as well make up your mind that the wind was always to blow from one quarter, as that a girl would do her duty when your eyes are off her. If I had a daughter, now, a handy young woman to look after the house——’
She turned her head upon her pillow with a shuddering sigh. That thought was too bitter.
‘My dear Mrs. Trevanard,’ cried Maurice, cheerfully, ‘I feel assured that the room will be—well not so nice as you would have made it perhaps, but quite clean and comfortable.’
He took his seat by the hearth, and entered into conversation with the master of the house, who seemed cheered by the visitor’s arrival.
‘And pray what’s doing up in London, Mr. Clissold?’ Michael Trevanard asked, as if he took the keenest interest in metropolitan affairs.
Maurice told him the latest stirring events—wars and rumours of wars, reviews, royal marriages in contemplation—to which the farmer listened with respectful attention, feeling these facts as remote from his life as if they had occurred in the East Indies.
He, on his part, told Maurice all that had been stirring at Penwyn; amongst other matters that curious circumstance of the attempted burglary, and Mr. Penwyn’s lenity towards the offender.
‘I’m rather surprised to hear that,’ said Maurice. ‘I should not have thought the Squire a particularly easy-going person.’
‘No, he can be stern enough at times,’ answered the farmer. ‘That business up at the justice-room caused a good bit of talk. If it had been one of us, folks said, Squire Penwyn wouldn’t have let go his grip like that. They couldn’t understand why he should be so lenient just because the man was the son of his lodge-keeper. It would have seemed more natural for him to get rid of the whole lot altogether, for they’re a set of vagabonds to be about a gentleman’s place. That girl Elspeth, who brought you here, is always robbing the orchards and hen-roosts about the neighbourhood. She’s a regular pest to the farmers’ wives.’
‘That curious-looking woman is still at the lodge, then?’ asked Maurice.
‘Yes, she’s still there.’
‘Perhaps it was Mrs. Penwyn who interceded for the son.’
‘Well, it was a curious business altogether,’ answered the farmer. ‘Mrs. Penwyn and the woman has a talk together in a room to themselves, and then Mrs. Penwyn comes back to the justice-room looking as white as a corpse, and says a few words to her husband, and on that he talks over Mr. Tresillian, and then Mr. Tresillian lets the vagabond off with a reprimand. Now why Mrs. Penwyn should intercede for the woman’s son I can’t understand, for it’s well known, through Mrs. Penwyn’s own maid having talked about it, that the Squire’s lady can’t endure the woman, and is vexed with her husband for keeping such trash on his premises.’
‘I dare say there’s something more in it than any of us Cornish folks are likely to find out,’ said Mrs. Trevanard. ‘The Penwyns were always a secret underhanded lot; smooth on the outside; as fair as whitened sepulchres, and as foul within.’
‘Come, Bridget, you’re prejudiced against them. You always have been, I think. It isn’t fair to speak ill of those that have been good landlords to us.’
‘Haven’t we been good tenants? We’re even there, I think.’
The maid-servant came in to lay the supper-table, Mrs. Trevanard’s watchful eyes following the girl’s every movement. A good substantial supper had been prepared for the traveller, but the old air of comfort seemed to have deserted the homestead, Maurice thought. The sick wife, with that unmistakable prophetic look in her face, the forecast shadow of coming death, gave a melancholy air to the scene. The blind old grandmother, sitting apart in her corner, looked like a monument of age and affliction. The farmer himself had the heavy dulness of manner which betokens a too frequent indulgence in alcohol. Martin was spasmodically gay, as if determined to enjoy the society of his friend; but care had set its mark on the bright young face, and he was in no wise the Martin of two years ago.
Maurice retired to his bedroom soon after supper, conducted by Martin. The apartment was unchanged in its dismal aspect; the dingy old furniture loomed darkly through the dusk, Martin’s one candle making only an oasis of light in the desert of gloom.
The memory of his first night at Borcel End was very present to Maurice Clissold as he seated himself by the hearth, where the fire had burned black and dull.
‘Poor Muriel,’ he thought, ‘what a dreary chamber for youth and beauty to inhabit! And in a fatal hour the girl’s first love dream came to illumine the gloom—sweet delusive dream, bringing pain along with it, and inextinguishable regret.’
Martin set down the candle on the dressing-table, and poked the fire vehemently.
‘Poor mother’s right,’ he said. ‘Those girls never do anything properly now she isn’t able to follow them about. I told Ph?be to be sure to have a bright fire to light up this cheerless old den, and she has left nothing but a mass of smouldering coal.’
‘Never mind the fire, Martin. Sit down like a good fellow, and tell me all your troubles. Your poor mother looks very ill.’
‘So ill that the doctor gives us no hope of her ever getting better. Poor soul, she’s going to leave us. Heaven only knows how soon. She’s been a good faithful wife to father, and a tender mother to me, and a good mistress and a faithful servant in all things, so far as I can tell. Yet I’m afraid there’s something on her mind—something that weighs heavy. I’ve seen many a token of secret care, since she’s been ill and sitting quietly by the fire, thinking over her past life.’
‘And you imagine that her trouble is in some way connected with your sister?’
‘I don’t see what else it can be. That’s the only unhappiness we’ve ever had in our lives. All the rest has been plain sailing enough.’
‘Have you questioned your mother about her anxieties?’ asked Maurice.
‘Many times. But she has always put me off with some impatient answer. She has never denied that she has secret cares, but when I have begged her to trust me or my father, she has turned from me peevishly. “Neither of you could help me,” she has told me. “What is the use of talking of old sores when there’s no healing them?”’
‘An unanswerable question,’ said Maurice.
‘You remember what you said to me about poor Muriel the day you left Borcel? Well, those words of yours made a deep impression upon me, not so much at the time as afterwards. I thought over all you had said, and it seemed to grow clear to me that there was something sadder about my poor sister’s story than had ever come to my knowledge. She had not been quite fairly used, perhaps. Things had been hushed up and hidden for the honour of her family, and she had been the victim of the family respectability. My mother’s one fault is pride—pride in the respectability of the Trevanards. She doesn’t want to be on a level with her superiors, or to be thought anything better than a yeoman’s wife, but her strong point has been the family credit. “There are no people in Cornwall more looked up to than the Trevanards.” I can remember hearing her say that, as soon as I can remember anything; and I believe she would make any sacrifice of her own happiness to maintain that position. It is just possible that she may have sacrificed the peace of others.’
‘I agree with you there, Martin. Whatever wrong has been done, great or small, has been done for the sake of the good old name.’
‘Now it struck me,’ continued Martin, earnestly, ‘that although my mother cannot be persuaded to confide in me, or in my father, who has been a little dull of late, poor soul, she might bring herself to trust you. I know that she respects you, as a clever man, and a man of the world. You live remote from this little corner of the earth where the Trevanards are of importance. She would feel less pain perhaps in trusting you with a family secret than in telling it to her own kith and kin. You would go away carrying the secret with you, and if there were any wrong to be righted, as I fear there must be, you might right it without giving rise to scandal. This is what I have thought—foolishly, perhaps.’
‘Indeed, no, Martin, I see no folly in your idea; and if I can persuade your mother to trust me, depend upon it I will.’
‘She knows you are a gentleman, and might be willing to trust in your honour, where she would doubt any commoner person.’
‘We’ll see what can be done,’ answered Maurice, hopefully. ‘Your poor sister lives apart from you all, I suppose, in the old way?’
‘Yes,’ replied the young man, ‘and I fear it’s a bad way. Her wits seem further astray than ever. When I meet her now in the hazel copse, where she is so fond of wandering, she looks scared and runs away from me. She sings to herself sometimes of an evening, as she sits by the fire in grandmother’s room. I hear her, now and then, as I pass the window, singing some old song in her sad, sweet voice, just as she used to sing me to sleep years ago. But I think she hardly ever opens her lips to speak.’
‘Does she ever see her mother?’
‘That’s the saddest part of all. For the last year my mother hasn’t dared go near her. Muriel took to screaming at the sight of her, as if she was going into a fit; so, since then, mother and she have hardly ever met. It’s hard to think of the dying mother, so near her only daughter, and yet completely separated from her.’
‘It’s a sad story altogether, Martin,’ said Maurice, ‘and a heavy burden for your young life. If I can do anything to lighten it, be sure of my uttermost help. I am very glad you sent for me. I am very glad you trust me.’
On this the two young men shook hands and parted for the night, Martin much cheered by his friend’s coming.
No intrusion disturbed the traveller’s rest. He slept soundly after his long journey, and awoke to hear farmyard cocks crowing in the sunshine, and to remember that he was more than two hundred miles away from Justina.