Early on the day following Arthur’s departure from Isleworth, Lady Bellamy received a note from George requesting her, if convenient, to come and see him that morning, as he had something rather important to talk to her about.
“John,” she said to her husband at breakfast, “do you want the brougham this morning?”
“No. Why?”
“Because I am going over to Isleworth.”
“Hadn’t you better take the luggage-cart too, and your luggage in it, and live there altogether? It would save trouble, sending backwards and forwards,” suggested her husband, with severe sarcasm.
Lady Bellamy cut the top off an egg with a single clean stroke — all her movements were decisive — before she answered.
“I thought,” she said, “that we had done with that sort of nonsense some years ago; are you going to begin it again?”
“Yes, Lady Bellamy, I am. I am not going to stand being bullied and jeered at by that damned scoundrel Caresfoot any more. I am not going to stand your eternal visits to him.”
“You have stood them for twenty years; rather late in the day to object now, isn’t it?” she remarked, coolly, beginning her egg.
“It is never too late to mend; it is not too late for you to stop quietly at home and do your duty by your husband.”
“Most men would think that I had done my duty by him pretty well. Twenty years ago you were nobody, and had, comparatively speaking, nothing. Now you have a title and between three and four thousand a year. Who have you to thank for that? Certainly not yourself.”
“Curse the title and the money! I had rather be a poor devil of an attorney with a large family, and five hundred a year to keep them on, than live the life I do between you and that vulgar beast Caresfoot. It’s a dog’s life, not a man’s;” and poor Bellamy was so overcome at his real or imaginary wrongs that the tears actually rolled down his puffy little face.
His wife surveyed him with some amusement.
“I think,” she said, “that you are a miserable creature.”
“Perhaps I am, Anne; but I tell you what it is, even a miserable creature can be driven too far. It may perhaps be worth your while to be a little careful.”
She cast one swift look at him, a look not without apprehension in it, for there was a ring about his voice that she did not like, but his appearance was so ludicrously wretched that it reassured her. She finished her egg, and then, slowly driving the spoon through the shell, she said,
“Don’t threaten, John; it is a bad habit, and shows an unChristian state of mind; besides, it might force me to cr-r-rush you, in self-defence, you know;” and John and the egg-shell having finally collapsed together, Lady Bellamy ordered the brougham.
Having thus sufficiently scourged her husband, she departed in due course to visit her own taskmaster, little guessing what awaited her at his hands. After all, there is a deal of poetic justice in the world. Little Smith, fresh from his mother’s apron-strings, is savagely beaten by the cock of the school, Jones, and to him Jones is an all-powerful, cruel devil, placed above all possibility of retribution. If, however, little Smith could see the omnipotent Jones being mentally ploughed and harrowed by his papa the clergyman, in celebration of the double event of his having missed a scholarship and taken too much sherry, it is probable that his wounded feelings would be greatly soothed. Nor does it stop there. Robinson, the squire of the parish, takes it out of the Reverend Jones, and speaks ill of him to the bishop, a Low Churchman, on the matter of vestments, and very shortly afterwards Sir Buster Brown, the Chairman of the Quarter Sessions, expresses his opinion pretty freely of Robinson in his magisterial capacity, only in his turn to receive a most unexampled wigging from Her Majesty’s judge, Baron Muddlebone, for not showing him that respect he was accustomed to receive from the High Sheriff of the county. And even over the august person of the judge himself there hangs the fear of the only thing that he cannot commit for contempt, public opinion. Justice! why, the world is full of it, only it is mostly built upon a foundation of wrong.
Lady Bellamy found George sitting in the dining-room beside the safe that had so greatly interested her husband. It was open, and he was reading a selection from the bundle of letters which the reader may remember having seen in his hands before.
“How do, Anne?” he said, without rising. “You look very handsome this morning. I never saw a woman wear better.”
She vouchsafed no reply to his greeting, but turned as pale as death.
“What!” she said, huskily, pointing with her finger to the letters in his hand, “what are you doing with those letters?”
“Bravo, Anne; quite tragic. What a Lady Macbeth you would make! Come quote, ‘All the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!’ Go on.”
“What are you doing with those letters?”
“Have you never broken a dog by showing him the whip, Anne? I have got something to ask of you, and I wish to get you into a generous frame of mind first. Listen now, I am going to read you a few extracts from a past that is so vividly recorded here.”
She sank into a chair, hid her face in her hands, and groaned. George, whose own features betrayed a certain nervousness, took a yellow sheet of paper, and began to read.
“‘Do you know how old I am today? Nineteen, and I have been married a year and a half. Ah! what a happy lass I was before I married; how they worshipped me in my old home! “Queen Anne,” they always called me. Well, they are dead now, and pray God they sleep so sound that they can neither hear nor see. Yes, a year and a half — a year of happiness, half a year of hell; happiness whilst I did not know you, hell since I saw your face. What secret spring of wickedness did you touch in my heart? I never had a thought of wrong before you came. But when I first set eyes upon your face, I felt some strange change come over me: I recognized my evil destiny. How you discovered my fascination, how you led me on to evil, you best know. I am no coward, I do not wish to excuse myself, but sometimes I think that you have much to answer for, George. Hark, I hear my baby crying, my beautiful boy with his father’s eyes. Do you know, I believe that the child has grown afraid of me: it beats at me with its tiny hands. I think that my very dog dislikes me now. They know me as I am; Nature tells them; everybody knows me except him. He will come in presently from visiting his sick and poor, and kiss me and call me his sweet wife, and I shall act the living lie. Oh! God, I cannot bear it much longer ——’
“There is more of the same sort,” remarked George, coolly. “It affords a most interesting study of mental anatomy, but I have no time to read more of it. We will pass on to another.”
Lady Bellamy did not move; she sat trembling a little, her face buried in her hands.
He took up a second letter and began to read a marked passage.
“‘The die is cast, I will come; I can no longer resist your influence; it grows stronger every day, and now it makes me a murderess, for the shock will kill him. And yet I am tired of the sameness and smallness of my life; my mind is too big to be cramped in such narrow fetters.’
“That extract is really very funny,” said George, critically. “But don’t look depressed, Anne, I am only going to trouble you with one more dated a year or so later. Listen.
“‘I have several times seen the man you sent me; he is a fool and contemptible in appearance, and, worst of all, shows signs of falling in love with me; but, if you wish it, I will go through the marriage ceremony with him, poor little dupe! You will not marry me yourself, and I would do more than that to keep near you; indeed, I have no choice, I must keep near you. I went to the Zoological Gardens the other day and saw a rattlesnake fed upon a live rabbit; the poor thing had ample room to run away in, but could not, it was fascinated, and sat still and screamed. At last the snake struck it, and I thought that its eyes looked like yours. I am as helpless as that poor animal, and you are much more cruel than the snake. And yet my mind is infinitely stronger than your own in every way. I cannot understand it. What is the source of your power over me? But I am quite reckless now, so what does it matter? I will do anything that does not put me within reach of the law. You know that my husband is dead. I knew that he would die; he expired with my name upon his lips. The child, too, I hear, died in a fit of croup; the nurse had gone out, and there was no one to look after it. Upon my word, I may well be reckless, for there is no forgiveness for such as you and I. As for little B——, as I think I told you, I will lead him on and marry him: at any rate, I will make his fortune for him: I must devote myself to something, and ambition is more absorbing than anything else — at least, I shall rise to something great. Good-night; I don’t know which aches most, my head or my heart.’
“Now that extract would be interesting reading to Bellamy, would it not?”
Here she suddenly sprang forward and snatched at the letter. But George was too quick for her; he flung it into the safe by his side, and swung the heavy lid to.
“No, no, my dear Anne, that property is too valuable to be parted with except for a consideration.”
Her attempt frustrated, she dropped back into her chair.
“What are you torturing me for?” she asked, hoarsely. “Have you any object in dragging up the ghost of that dead past, or is it merely for amusement.”
“Did I not tell you that I had a favour to ask of you, and wished to get you into a proper frame of mind first?”
“A favour. You mean that you have some wickedness in hand that you are too great a coward to execute yourself. Out with it; I know you too well to be shocked.”
“Oh, very well. You saw Angela Caresfoot, Philip’s daughter, here yesterday.”
“Yes, I saw her.”
“Very good. I mean to marry her, and you must manage it for me.”
Lady Bellamy sat quite still, and made no answer.
“You will now,” continued George, relieved to find that he had not provoked the outburst he had expected, “understand why I read you those extracts. I am thoroughly determined upon marrying that girl at whatever cost, and I see very clearly that I shall not be able to do so without your help. With your help, the matter will be easy; for no obstacle, except the death of the girl herself, can prevail against your iron determination and unbounded fertility of resource.”
“And if I refuse?”
“I must have read those extracts to very little purpose for you to talk about refusing. If you refuse, the pangs of conscience will overcome me, and I shall feel obliged to place these letters, and more especially those referring to himself, in the hands of your husband. Of course it will, for my own sake, be unpleasant to me to have to do so, but I can easily travel for a year or two till the talk has blown over. For you it will be different. Bellamy has no cause to love you now; judge what he will feel when he knows all the truth. He will scarcely keep the story to himself, and, even were he to do so, it could easily be set about in other ways, and, in either case, you will be a ruined woman, and all that you have toiled and schemed for for twenty years will be snatched from you in an instant. If, on the other hand, you do not refuse, and I cannot believe that you will, I will on my wedding-day burn these uncomfortable records before your eyes, or, if you prefer it, you shall burn them yourself.”
“You have only seen this girl once; is it possible that you are in earnest in wishing to marry her?”
“Do you think that I should go through this scene by way of a joke? I never was so much in earnest in my life before. I am in love with her, I tell you, as much in love as though I had known her for years. What happened to you with reference to me has happened to me with reference to her, or something very like it, and marry her I must and will.”
Lady Bellamy, as she heard these words, rose from her chair and flung herself on the ground before him, clasping his knees with her hands.
“Oh, George, George!” she cried, in a broken voice, “have some little pity; do not force me to do this unnatural thing. Is your heart a stone, or are you altogether a devil, that by such cruel threats you can drive me into becoming the instrument of my own shame? I know what I am, none better: but for whose sake did I become so? Surely, George, I have some claim on your compassion, if I have none on your love. Think again, George; and, if you will not give her up, choose some other means to compass this poor girl’s ruin.”
“Get up, Anne, and don’t talk sentimental rubbish. Not but what,” he added, with a sneer, “it is rather amusing to hear you pitying your successful rival.”
She sprang to her feet, all the softness and entreaty gone from her face, which was instead now spread with her darkest and most vindictive look.
“I pity her!” she said. “I hate her. Look you, if I have to do this, my only consolation will be in knowing that what I do will drag my successor down below my own level. I suffer; she shall suffer more; I know you a fiend, she shall find a whole hell with you; she is purer and better than I have ever been; soon you shall make her worse than I have dreamt of being. Her purity shall be dishonoured, her love betrayed, her life reduced to such chaos that she shall cease to believe even in her God, and in return for these things I will give her — you. Your new plaything shall pass through my mill, George Caresfoot, before ever she comes to yours; and on her I will repay with interest all that I have suffered at your hands;” and, exhausted with the fierceness of her own invective and the violence of conflicting passions, she sank back into her chair.
“Bravo, Anne! quite in your old style. I daresay that the young lady will require a little moulding, and she could not be in better hands; but mind, no tricks — I am not going to be cheated out of my bride.”
“You need not fear, George; I shall not murder her. I do not believe in violence; it is the last resort of fools. If I did, you would not be alive now.”
George laughed a little uneasily.
“Well, we are good friends again, so there is no need to talk of such things,” he said. “The campaign will not be by any means an easy one — there are many obstacles in the way, and I don’t think that my intended has taken a particular fancy to me. You will have to work for your letters, Anne; but first of all take a day or two to think it over, and make a plan of the campaign. And now good-by; I have got a bad headache, and am going to lie down.”
She rose, and went without another word; but all necessity for setting about her shameful task was soon postponed by news that reached her the next morning, to the effect that George Caresfoot was seriously ill.
Chaptear 22
The dog-cart that Arthur had hired to take him away belonged to an old-fashioned inn in the parish of Rewtham, situated about a mile from Rewtham House (which had just passed into the hands of the Bellamys), and two from Bratham Abbey, and thither Arthur had himself driven. His Jehu, known through all the country round as “Old Sam,” was an ancient ostler, who had been in the service of the Rewtham “King’s Head,” man and boy, for over fifty years, and from him Arthur collected a good deal of inaccurate information about the Caresfoot family, including a garbled version of all the death of Angela’s mother and Philip’s disinheritance.
After all, there are few more comfortable places than an inn; not a huge London hotel, where you are known as No. 48, and have to lock the door of your cell when you come out of it, and deliver up your key to the warder in the hall; but an old-fashioned country establishment where they cook your breakfast exactly as you like it, and give you sound ale and a four-poster. At least, so thought Arthur, as he sat in the private parlour smoking his pipe and reflecting on the curious vicissitudes of existence. Now, here he was, with all the hopes and interests of his life utterly changed in a single space of six-and-twenty hours. Why, six-and-twenty hours ago, he had never met his respected guardian, nor Sir John and Lady Bellamy, nor Philip and his daughter. He could hardly believe that it was only that morning that he had first seen Angela. It seemed weeks ago, and, if time could have been measured on a new principle, by events and not by minutes, it would have been weeks. The wheel of life, he thought, revolves with a strange irregularity. For months and years it turns slowly and steadily under the even pressure of monotonous events. But, on some unexpected day, a tide comes rushing down the stream of being, and spins it round at speed; and then tears onward to the ocean called the Past, leaving its plaything to creak and turn, to turn and creak, or wrecked perhaps and useless.
Thinking thus, Arthur made his way to bed. The excitement of the day had wearied him, and for a while he slept soundly, but, as the fatigue of the body wore off, the activity of his mind asserted itself, and he began to dream vague, happy dreams of Angela, that by degrees took shape and form, till they stood out clear before the vision of his mind. He dreamt that he and Angela were journeying, two such happy travellers, through the green fields in summer, till by-and-by they came to the dark entrance of a wood, into which they plunged, fearing nothing. Thicker grew the overshadowing branches, and darker grew the path, and now they journeyed lover-wise, with their arms around each other. But, as they passed along, they came to a place where the paths forked, and here he stooped to kiss her. Already he could feel the thrill of her embrace, when she was swept from him by an unseen force, and carried down the path before them, leaving him rooted where he was. But still he could trace her progress as she went, wringing her hands in sorrow; and presently he saw the form of Lady Bellamy, robed as an Egyptian sorceress, and holding a letter in her hand, which she offered to Angela, whispering in her ear. She took it, and then in a second the letter turned to a great snake, with George’s head, that threw its coils around her and struck at her with its fangs. Next, the darkness of night rushed down upon the scene, and out of the darkness came wild cries and mocking laughter, and the choking sounds of death. And his senses left him.
When sight and sense came back, he dreamt that he was still walking down a wooded lane, but the foliage of the overhanging trees was of a richer green. The air was sweet with the scent of unknown flowers, beautiful birds flitted around him, and from far-off came the murmur of the sea. And as he travelled, broken-hearted, a fair woman with a gentle voice stood by his side, and kissed and comforted him, till at length he grew weary of her kisses, and she left him, weeping, and he went on his way alone, seeking his lost Angela. And then at length the path took a sudden turn, and he stood on the shore of an illimitable ocean, over which brooded a strange light, as where
“The quiet end of evening smiles
Miles on miles.”
And there, with the soft light lingering on her hair, and tears of gladness in her eyes, stood Angela, more lovely than before, her arms outstretched to greet him. And then the night closed in, and he awoke.
His eyes opened upon the solemn and beautiful hour of the first quickening of the dawn, and the thrill and softness that comes from contact with the things we meet in sleep was still upon him. He got up and flung open his lattice window. From the garden beneath rose the sweet scent of May flowers, very different from that of his dream which yet lingered in his nostrils, whilst from a neighbouring lilac-bush streamed the rich melody of the nightingale. Presently it ceased before the broadening daylight, but in its stead, pure and clear and cold, arose the notes of the mavis, giving tuneful thanks and glory to its Maker. And, as he listened, a great calm stole upon his spirit, and kneeling down there by the open window, with the breath of spring upon his brow, and the voice of the happy birds within his ears, he prayed to the Almighty with all his heart that it might please Him in His wise mercy to verify his dream, inasmuch as he would be well content to suffer, if by suffering he might at last attain to such an unutterable joy. And rising from his knees, feeling better and stronger, he knew in some dim way that that undertaking must be blest which, in such a solemn hour of the heart, he did not fear to pray God to guide, to guard, and to consummate.
And on many an after-day, and in many another place, the book of his life would reopen at this well-conned page, and he would see the dim light in the faint, flushed sky, and hear the song of the thrush swelling upwards strong and sweet, and remember his prayer and the peace that fell upon his soul.
By ten o’clock that morning, Arthur, his dog, and his portmanteau, had all arrived together in front of the Abbey House. Before his feet had touched the moss-grown gravel, the hall-door was flung open, and Angela appeared to welcome him, looking, as old Sam the ostler forcibly put it afterwards to his helper, “just like a hangel with the wings off.” Jakes, too, emerged from the recesses of the garden, and asked Angela, in a tone of aggrieved sarcasm, as he edged his way suspiciously past Aleck, why the gentleman had not brought the “rampingest lion from the Zoologic Gardens” with him at once? Having thus expressed his feelings on the subject of bull-dogs, he shouldered the portmanteau, and made his way with it upstairs. Arthur followed him up the wide oak stairs, every one of which was squared out of a single log, stopping for a while on the landing, where the staircase turned, to gaze at the stern-faced picture that hung so that it looked through the large window facing it, right across the park and over the whole stretch of the Abbey lands, and to wonder at the deep-graved inscription of “Devil Caresfoot” set so conspicuously beneath.
His room was the largest upon the first landing, and the same in which Angela’s mother had died. It had never been used from that hour to this, and, indeed, in a little recess or open space between a cupboard and the wall, there still stood two trestles, draped with rotten black cloth, that had originally been brought there to rest her coffin on, and which Angela had overlooked in getting the room ready.
This spacious but somewhat gloomy apartment was hung round with portraits of the Caresfoots of past ages, many of which bore a marked resemblance to Philip, but amongst whom he looked in vain for one in the slightest degree like Angela, whose handiwork he recognized in two large bowls of flowers placed upon the dark oak dressing-table.
Just as Jakes had finished unbuckling his portmanteau, a task that he had undertaken with some groaning, and was departing in haste, lest he should be asked to do something else, Arthur caught sight of the trestles.
“What are those?” he asked, cheerfully.
“Coffin-stools,” was the abrupt reply.
“Coffin-stools!” ejaculated Arthur, feeling that it was unpleasant to have little details connected with one’s latter end brought thus abruptly into notice. “What the deuce are they doing here?”
“Brought to put the last as slept in that ’ere bed on, and stood ever since.”
“Don’t you think,” insinuated Arthur, gently, “that you had better take them away?”
“Can’t do so; they be part of the furniture, they be — stand there all handy for the next one, too, maybe you;” and he vanished with a sardonic grin.
Jakes did not submit to the indignities of unbuckling portmanteaus and having his legs sniffed at by bull-dogs for nothing. Not by any means pleased by suggestions so unpleasant, Arthur took his way downstairs, determined to renew the coffin-stool question with his host. He found Angela waiting for him in the hall, and making friends with Aleck.
“Will you come in and see my father for a minute before we go out?” she said.
Arthur assented, and she led the way into the study, where Philip always sat, the same room in which his father had died. He was sitting at a writing-table as usual, at work on farm accounts. Rising, he greeted Arthur civilly, taking, however, no notice of his daughter, although he had not seen her since the previous day.
“Well, Heigham, so you have made up your mind to brave these barbarous wilds, have you? I am delighted to see you, but I must warn you that, beyond a pipe and a glass of grog in the evening, I have not much time to put at your disposal. We are rather a curious household. I don’t know whether Angela has told you, but for one thing we do not take our meals together, so you will have to make your choice between the dining-room and the nursery, for my daughter is not out of the nursery yet;” and he gave a little laugh. “On the whole, perhaps you had better be relegated to the nursery; it will, at any rate, be more amusing to you that the society of a morose old fellow like myself. And, besides, I am very irregular in my habits. Angela, you are staring at me again; I should be so very much obliged if you would look the other way. I only hope, Heigham, that old Pigott won’t talk your head off; she has got a dreadful tongue. Well, don’t let me keep you any longer; it is a lovely day for the time of year. Try to amuse yourself somehow, and I hope for your sake that Angela will not occupy herself with you as she does with me, by staring as though she wished to examine your brains and backbone. Good-by for the present.”
“What does he mean?” asked Arthur, as soon as they were fairly outside the door, “about your staring at him?”
“Mean!” answered poor Angela, who looked as though she were going to cry. “I wish I could tell you; all I know is that he cannot bear me to look at him — he is always complaining of it. That is why we do not take our meals together — at least, I believe it is. He detests my being near him. I am sure I don’t know why; it makes me very unhappy. I cannot see anything different in my eyes from anybody else’s, can you?” and she turned them, swimming as they were with tears of mortification, full upon Arthur.
He scrutinized their depths very closely, so closely indeed, that presently she turned them away again with a blush.
“Well,” she said, “I am sure you have looked long enough. Are they different?”
“Very different,” replied the oracle, with enthusiasm.
“How?”
“Well, they — they are larger.”
“Is that all?”
“And they are deeper.”
“Deeper — that is nothing. I want to know if they produce any unpleasant effect upon you — different from other people’s eyes, I mean?”
“Well, if you ask me, I am afraid that your eyes do produce a strange effect upon me, but I cannot say that it is an unpleasant one. But you did not look long enough for me to form a really sound opinion. Let us try again.”
“No, I will not; and I do believe that you are laughing at me. I think that is very unkind;” and she marched on in silence.
“Don’t be angry with me, or I shall be miserable. I really was not laughing at you; only, if you knew what wonderful eyes you have got, you would not ask such ridiculous questions about them. Your father must be a strange man to get such ideas. I am sure I should be delighted if you would look at me all day long. But tell me something more about your father: he interests me very much.”
Angela felt the tell-tale blood rise to her face as he praised her eyes, and bit her lips with vexation; it seemed to her that she had suddenly caught an epidemic of blushing.
“I cannot tell you very much about my father, because I do not know much; his life is, to a great extent, a sealed book to me. But they say that once he was a very different man, when he was quite young, I mean. But all of a sudden his father — my grand-father, you know — whose picture is on the stairs, died, and within a day or two my mother died too; that was when I was born. After that he broke down, and became what he is now. For twenty years he has lived as he does now, poring all day over books of accounts, and very rarely seeing anybody, for he does all his business by letter, or nearly all of it, and he has no friends. There was some story about his being engaged to a lady who lived at Rewtham when he married my mother, which I daresay you have heard; but I don’t know much about it. But, Mr. Heigham”— and here she dropped her voice —“there is one thing that I must warn you of: my father has strange fancies at times. He is dreadfully superstitious, and thinks that he has communications with beings from another world. I believe that it is all nonsense, but I tell you so that you may not be surprised at anything he says or does. He is not a happy man, Mr. Heigham.”
“Apparently not. I cannot imagine any one being happy who is superstitious; it is the most dreadful bondage in the world.”
“Where are your ravens today?” asked Arthur, presently.
“I don’t know; I have not seen very much of them for the last week or two. They have made a nest in one of the big trees at the back of the house, and I daresay that they are there, or perhaps they are hunting for their food — they always feed themselves. But I will soon tell you,” and she whistled in a soft but penetrating note.
Next minute there was a swoop of wings, and the largest raven, after hovering over her for a minute, lit upon her shoulder, and rubbed his black head against her face.
“This is Jack, you see; I expect that Jill is busy sitting on her eggs. Fly away, Jack, and look after your wife.” She clapped her hands, and the great bird, giving a reproachful croak, spread his wings, and was gone.
“You have a strange power over animals to make those birds so fond of you.”
“Do you think so? It is only because I have, living as I do quite alone, had time to study all their ways, and make friends of them. Do you see that thrush there? I know him well; I fed him during the frost last winter. If you will stand back with the dog, you shall see.”
Arthur hid himself behind a thick bush and watched. Angela whistled again, but in another note, with a curious result. Not only the thrush in question, but quite a dozen other birds of different sorts and sizes, came flying round her, some settling at her feet, and one, a little robin, actually perching itself upon her hat. Presently she dismissed them as she had done the raven, by clapping her hands, and came back to Arthur.
“In the winter time,” she said, “I could show you more curious things than that.”
“I think that you are a witch,” said Arthur, who was astounded at the sight.
She laughed as she answered,
“The only witchery that I use is kindness.”
Pigott, Angela’s old nurse, was by no means sorry to hear of Arthur’s visit to the Abbey House, though, having in her youth been a servant in good houses, she was distressed at the nature of his reception. But, putting this aside, she thought it high time that her darling should see a young man or two, that she might “learn what the world was like.” Pigott was no believer in female celibacy, and Angela’s future was a frequent subject of meditation with her, for she knew very well that her present mode of life was scarcely suited either to her birth, her beauty, or her capabilities. Not that she ever, in her highest flights, imagined Angela as a great lady, or one of society’s shining stars; she loved to picture her in some quiet, happy home, beloved by her husband, and surrounded by children as beautiful as herself. It was but a moderate ambition for one so peerlessly endowed, but she would have been glad to see it fulfilled. For of late years there had sprung up in nurse Pigott’s mind an increasing dislike of her surroundings, which sometimes almost amounted to a feeling of horror. Philip she had always detested, with his preoccupied air and uncanny ways.
“There must,” she would say, “be something wicked about a man as is afraid to have his own bonny daughter look him in the face, to say nothing of his being that mean as to grudge her the clothes on her back, and make her live worse nor a servant-girl.”
Having, therefore, by a quiet peep through the curtains, ascertained that he was nice-looking and about the right age, Pigott confessed to herself that she was heartily glad of Arthur’s arrival, and determined that, should she take to him on further acquaintance, he should find a warm ally in her in any advances he might choose to make on the fortress of Angela’s affections.
“I do so hope that you don’t mind dining at half-past twelve, and with my old nurse,” Angela said, as they went together up the stairs to the room they used as a dining-room.
“Of course I don’t — I like it, really I do.”
Angela shook her head, and, looking but partially convinced, led the way down the passage, and into the room, where, to her astonishment, she perceived that the dinner-table was furnished with a more sumptuous meal than she had seen upon it for years, the fact being that Pigott had received orders from Philip which she did not know of, not to spare expense whilst Arthur was his guest.
“What waste,” reflected Angela, in whom the pressure of circumstances had developed an economical turn of mind, as she glanced at the unaccustomed jug of beer. “He said he was a teetotaller.”
A loud “hem!” from Pigott, arresting her attention, stopped all further consideration of the matter. That good lady, who, in honour of the occasion, was dressed in a black gown of a formidable character and a many-ribboned cap, was standing up behind her chair waiting to be introduced to the visitor. Angela proceeded to go through the ceremony which Pigott’s straight-up-and-down attitude rendered rather trying.
“Nurse, this is the gentleman that my father has asked to stay with us. Mr. Heigham, let me introduce you to my old nurse Pigott.”
Arthur bowed politely, whilst Pigott made two obligatory curtsies, requiring a step backwards after each, as though to make room for another. Her speech, too, carefully prepared for the occasion, is worthy of transcription.
“Hem!” she said, “this, sir, is a pleasure as I little expected, and I well knows that it is not what you or the likes is accustomed to, a-eating of dinners and teas with old women; which I hopes, sir, how as you will put up with it, seeing how as the habits of this house is what might, without mistake, be called peculiar, which I says without any offence to Miss Angela, ‘cause though her bringing-up has been what I call odd, she knows it as well as I do, which, indeed, is the only consolation I has to offer, being right sure, as indeed I am, how as any young gentleman as ever breathed would sit in a pool of water to dine along with Miss Angela, let alone an old nurse. I ain’t such a fool as I may look; no need for you to go a-blushing of, Miss Angela. And now, sir, if you please, we will sit down, for fear lest the gravy should begin to grease;” and, utterly exhausted by the exuberance of her own verbosity, she plunged into her chair — an example which Arthur, bowing his acknowledgements of her opening address, was not slow to follow.
One of his first acts was, at Pigott’s invitation, to help himself to a glass of beer, of which, to speak truth, he drank a good deal.
Angela watched the proceeding with interest.
“What,” she asked presently, “is a teetotaller?”
The recollection of his statement of the previous day flashed into his mind. He was, however, equal to the occasion.
“A teetotaller,” he replied, with gravity, “is a person who only drinks beer,” and Angela, the apparent discrepancy explained, retired satisfied.
That was a very pleasant dinner. What a thing it is to be young and in love! How it gilds the dull gingerbread of life; what new capacities of enjoyment it opens up to us, and, for the matter of that, of pain also; and oh! what stupendous fools it makes of us in everybody else’s eyes except our own, and, if we are lucky, those of our adored!
The afternoon and evening passed much as the morning had done. Angela took Arthur round the place, and showed him all the spots connected with her strange and lonely childhood, of which she told him many a curious story. In fact, before the day was over, he knew all the history of her innocent life, and was struck with amazement at the variety and depth of her scholastic acquirements and the extraordinary power of her mind, which, combined with her simplicity and total ignorance of the ways of the world, produced an affect as charming as it was unusual. Needless to say that every hour he knew her he fell more deeply in love with her.
At length, about eight o’clock, just as it was beginning to get dark, she suggested that he should go and sit a while with her father.
“And what are you going to do?” asked Arthur.
“Oh! I am going to read a little, and then go to bed; I always go to bed about nine;” and she held out her hand to say good-night. He took it and said,
“Good-night, then; I wish it were tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Because then I should be saying, ‘Good-morning, Angela,’ instead of ‘Good-night, Angela,’ May I call you Angela? We seem to know each other so well, you see.”
“Yes, of course,” she laughed back; “everybody I know calls me Angela, so why shouldn’t you?”
“And will you call me Arthur? Everybody I know calls me Arthur.”
Angela hesitated, and Angela blushed, though why she hesitated and why she blushed was perhaps more than she could have exactly said.
“Y-e-s, I suppose so — that is, if you like it. It is a pretty name, Arthur. Good-night, Arthur,” and she was gone.
His companion gone, Arthur turned and entered the house. The study-door was open, so he went straight in. Philip, who was sitting and staring in an abstracted way at the empty fireplace with a light behind him, turned quickly round as he heard the footstep.
“Oh! it’s you, is it, Heigham? I suppose Angela has gone upstairs; she goes to roost very early. I hope that she has not bored you, and that old Pigott hasn’t talked your head off. I told you that we were an odd lot, you know; but, if you find us odder than you bargained for, I should advise you to clear out.”
“Thank you, I have spent a very happy day.”
“Indeed, I am glad to hear it. You must be easily satisfied, have an Arcadian mind, and that sort of thing. Take some whisky, and light your pipe.”
Arthur did so, and presently Philip, in that tone of gentlemanly ease which above everything distinguished him from his cousin, led the conversation round to his guest’s prospects and affairs, more especially his money affairs. Arthur answered him frankly enough, but this money talk had not the same charms for him that it had for his host. Indeed, a marked repugnance to everything that had to do with money was one of his characteristics; and, wearied out at length with pecuniary details and endless researches into the mysteries of investment, he took advantage of a pause to attempt to change the subject.
“Well,” he said, “I am much obliged to you for your advice, for I am very ignorant myself, and hate anything to do with money. I go back to first principles, and believe that we should all be better without it.”
“I always thought,” answered Philip, with a semi-contemptuous smile, “that the desire of money, or, amongst savage races, its equivalent, shells or what not, was the first principle of human nature.”
“Perhaps it is — I really don’t know; but I heartily wish that it could be eliminated off the face of the earth.”
“Forgive me,” laughed Philip, “but that is the speech of a very young man. Why, eliminate money, and you take away the principal interest of life, and destroy the social fabric of the world. What is power but money, comfort?— money, social consideration?— money, ay, and love, and health, and happiness itself? Money, money, money. Tell me,” he went on, rising, and addressing him with a curious earnestness, “what god is there more worthy of our adoration than Plutus, seeing that, if we worship him enough, he alone of the idols we set in high places, will never fail us at need?”
“It is a worship that rarely brings lasting happiness with it. In our greed to collect the means of enjoyment, surely we lose the power to enjoy?”
“Pshaw! that is the cant of fools, of those who do not know, of those who cannot feel. But I know and I feel, and I tell you that it is not so. The collection of those means is in itself a pleasure, because it gives a consciousness of power. Don’t talk to me of Fate; that sovereign” (throwing the coin on to the table) “is Fate’s own seal. You see me, for instance, apparently poor and helpless, a social pariah, one to be avoided, and even insulted. Good; before long these will right all that for me. I shall by their help be powerful and courted yet. Ay, believe me, Heigham, money is a living moving force; leave it still, and it accumulates; expend it, and it gratifies every wish; save it, and that is best of all, and you hold in your hand a lever that will lift the world. I tell you that there is no height to which it cannot bring you, no gulf it will not bridge you.”
“Except,” soliloquized Arthur, “the cliffs of the Hereafter, and — the grave.”
His words produced a curious effect. Philip’s eloquence broke off short, and for a moment a great fear crept into his eyes.
Silence ensued which neither of them seemed to care to break. Meanwhile the wind suddenly sprang up, and began to moan and sigh amongst the half-clad boughs of the trees outside — making, Arthur thought to himself, a very melancholy music. Presently Philip laid his hand upon his guest’s arm, and he felt that it shook like an aspen-leaf.
“Tell me,” he said, in a hoarse whisper, “what do you see there?”
Arthur started, and followed the direction of his eyes to the bare wall opposite the window, at that end of the room through which the door was made.
“I see,” he said, “some moving shadows.”
“What do they resemble?”
“I don’t know; nothing in particular. What are they?”
“What are they?” hissed Philip, whose face was livid with terror, “they are the shades of the dead sent here to torture me. Look, she goes to meet him; the old man is telling her. Now she will wring her hands.”
“Nonsense, Mr. Caresfoot, nonsense,” said Arthur, shaking himself together; “I see nothing of the sort. Why, it is only the shadows flung by the moonlight through the swinging boughs of that tree. Cut it down, and you will have no more writing upon your wall.”
“Ah! of course you are right, Heigham, quite right,” ejaculated his host, faintly, wiping the cold sweat from his brow; “it is nothing but the moonlight. How ridiculous of me! I suppose I am a little out of sorts — liver wrong. Give me some whisky, there’s a good fellow, and I’ll drink damnation to all the shadows and the trees that throw them. Ha, ha, ha!”
There was something so uncanny about his host’s manner, and his evident conviction of the origin of the wavering figures on the wall (which had now disappeared), that Arthur felt, had it not been for Angela, he would not be sorry to get clear of him and his shadows as soon as possible, for superstition, he knew, is as contagious as small-pox. When at length he reached his great bare bed-chamber, not, by the way, a comfortable sort of place to sleep in after such an experience, it was only after some hours, in the excited state of his imagination, that, tired though he was, he could get the rest he needed.
Next morning, when they met at their eight o’clock breakfast, Arthur noticed that Angela was distressed about something.
“There is bad news,” she said, almost before he greeted her; “my cousin George is very ill with typhus fever.”
“Indeed!” remarked Arthur, rather coolly.
“Well, I must say it does not appear to distress you very much.”
“No, I can’t say it does. To be honest, I detest your cousin, and I don’t care if he is ill or not; there.”
As she appeared to have no reply ready, the subject then dropped.
After breakfast Angela proposed that they should walk — for the day was again fine — to the top of a hill about a mile away, whence a view of the surrounding country could be obtained. He consented, and on the way told her of his curious experiences with her father on the previous night. She listened attentively, and, when he had finished, shook her head.
“There is,” she said, “something about my father that separates him from everybody else. His life never comes out into the sunlight of the passing day, it always gropes along in the shadow of some gloomy past. What the mystery is that envelops him I neither know nor care to inquire; but I am sure that there is one.”
“How do you explain the shadows?”
“I believe your explanation is right; they are, under certain conditions of light, thrown by a tree that grows some distance off. I have seen something that looks like figures on that wall myself in full daylight. That he should interpret such a simple thing as he does shows a curious state of mind.”
“You do not think, then,” said Arthur, in order to draw her out, “that it is possible, after all, he was right, and that they were something from another place? The reality of his terror was almost enough to make one believe in them, I can tell you.”
“No, I do not,” answered Angela, after a minute’s thought. “I have no doubt that the veil between ourselves and the unseen world is thinner than we think. I believe, too, that communication, and even warnings sometimes, under favourable conditions, or when the veil is worn thin by trouble or prayer, can pass from the other world to ourselves. But the very fact of my father’s terror proves to me that his shadows are nothing of the sort, for it is hardly possible that spirits can be permitted to come to terrify us poor mortals; if they come at all, it is in love and gentleness, to comfort or to warn, and not to work upon our superstitions.”
“You speak as though you knew all about it; you should join the new Ghost Society,” he answered, irreverently, sitting himself down on a fallen tree, an example that she followed.
“I have thought about it sometimes, that is all, and, so far as I have read, I think that my belief is a common one, and what the Bible teaches us; but, if you will not think me foolish, I will tell you something that confirms me in it. You know that my mother died when I was born; well, it may seem strange to you, but I am convinced that she is sometimes very near me.”
“Do you mean that you see or hear her?”
“No, I only feel her presence; more rarely now, I am sorry to say, as I grow older.”
“How do you mean?”
“I can hardly explain what I mean, but sometimes — it may be at night, or when I am sitting alone in the daytime — a great calm comes upon me, and I am a changed woman. All my thoughts rise into a higher, purer air, and are, as it were, tinged with a reflected light; everything earthly seems to pass away from me, and I feel as though fetters had fallen from my soul, and I know that I am near my mother. Then everything passes, and I am left myself again.”
“And what are the thoughts you have at these times?”
“Ah! I wish I could tell you; they pass away with her who brought them, leaving nothing but a vague after-glow in my mind like that in the sky after the sun has set. But now look at the view; is it not beautiful in the sunlight? All the world seems to be rejoicing.”
Angela was right; the view was charming. Below lay the thatched roofs of the little village of Bratham, and to the right the waters of the lake shone like silver in the glancing sunlight, whilst the gables of the old house, peeping out from amongst the budding foliage, looked very picturesque. The spring had cast her green garment over the land; from every copse rang out the melody of birds, and the gentle breeze was heavy with the scent of the unnumbered violets that starred the mossy carpet at their feet. In the fields where grew the wheat and clover, now springing into lusty life, the busy weeders were at work, and on the warm brown fallows the sower went forth to sow. From the early pastures beneath, where purled a little brook, there came a pleasant lowing of kine, well-contented with the new grass, and a cheerful bleating of lambs, to whom as yet life was nothing but one long skip. It was a charming scene, and its influence sank deep into the gazers’ hearts.
“It is depressing to think,” said Arthur, rather sententiously, but really chiefly with the object of getting at his companion’s views, “that all this cannot last, but is, as it were, like ourselves, under sentence of death.”
“It rose and fell and fleeted
Upon earth’s troubled sea,
A wave that swells to vanish
Into eternity.
Oh! mystery and wonder
Of wings that cannot fly,
Of ears that cannot hearken,
Of life that lives — to die!”
quoth Angela, by way of comment.
“Whose lines are those?” asked Arthur. “I don’t know them.”
“My own,” she said, shyly; “that is, they are a translation of a verse of a Greek ode I wrote for Mr. Fraser. I will say you the original, if you like; I think it better than the translation, and I believe that it is fair Greek.”
“Thank you, thank you, Miss Blue-stocking; I am quite satisfied with your English version. You positively alarm me, Angela. Most people are quite content if they can put a poem written in English into Greek; you reverse the process, and, having coolly given expression to your thoughts in Greek, condescend to translate them into your native tongue. I only wish you had been at Cambridge, or — what do they call the place?— Girton. It would have been a joke to see you come out double-first.”
“Ah!” she broke in, blushing, “you are like Mr. Fraser, you overrate my acquirements. I am sorry to say I am not the perfect scholar you think me, and about most things I am shockingly ignorant. I should indeed be silly if, after ten years’ patient work under such a scholar as Mr. Fraser, I did not know some classics and mathematics. Why, do you know, for the last three years that we worked together, we used as a rule to carry on our ordinary conversations during work in Latin and Greek, month and month about, sometimes with the funniest results. One never knows how little one does know of a dead language till one tries to talk it. Just try to speak in Latin for the next five minutes, and you will see.”
“Thank you, I am not going to expose my ignorance for your amusement, Angela.”
She laughed.
“No,” she said, “it is you who wish to amuse yourself at my expense by trying to make me believe that I am a great scholar. But what I was going to say, before you attacked me about my fancied acquirements, was that, in my opinion, your remark about the whole world being under sentence of death, was rather a morbid one.”
“Why? It is obviously true.”
“Yes, in a sense; but to my mind this scene speaks more of resurrection than of death. Look at the earth pushing up her flowers, and the dead trees breaking into beauty. There is no sign of death there, but rather of a renewed and glorified life.”
“Yes, but there is still the awful fact of death to face; Nature herself has been temporarily dead before she blooms into beauty; she dies every autumn, to rise again in the same form every spring. But how do we know in what form we shall emerge from the chrysalis? As soon as a man begins to think at all, he stands face to face with this hideous problem, to the solution of which he knows himself to be drawing daily nearer. His position, I often think, is worse than that of a criminal under sentence, because the criminal is only being deprived of the employment of a term, indefinite, indeed, but absolutely limited; but man at large does not know of what he is deprived, and what he must inherit in the aeons that await him. It is the uncertainty of death that is its most dreadful part, and, with that hanging over our race, the wonder to me is not only that we, for the most part, put the subject entirely out of mind, but that we can ever think seriously of anything else.”
“I remember,” answered Angela, “once thinking very much in the same way, and I went to Mr. Fraser for advice. ‘The Bible,’ he said, ‘will satisfy your doubts and fears, if only you will read it in a right spirit.’ And indeed, more or less, it did. I cannot, of course, venture to advise you, but I pass his advice on; it is that of a very good man.”
“Have you, then, no dread of death, or, rather, of what lies beyond it?”
She turned her eyes upon him with something of wonder in them.
“And why,” she said, “should I, who am immortal, fear a change that I know has no power to harm me, that can, on the contrary, only bring me nearer to the purpose of my being? Certainly I shrink from death itself, as we all must, but of the dangers beyond I have no fear. Pleasant as this world is at times, there is something in us all that strives to rise above it, and, if I knew that I must die within this hour, I believe that I could meet my fate without a qualm. I am sure that when our trembling hands have drawn the veil from Death, we shall find His features, passionless indeed, but very beautiful.”
Arthur looked at her with astonishment, wondering what manner of woman this could be, who, in the first flush of youth and beauty, could face the great unknown without a tremor. When he spoke again, it was with something of envious bitterness.
“Ah! it is very well for you, whose life has been so pure and free from evil, but it is different for me, with all my consciousness of sins and imperfections. For me, and thousands like me, strive as we will, immortality has terrors as well as hopes. It is, and always will be, human to fear the future, for human nature never changes. You know the lines in ‘Hamlet.’ It is
“‘that the dread of something after death,—
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns,— puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’
“They are true, and, while men last, they always will be true.”
“Oh! Arthur,” she answered, earnestly, and for the first time addressing him in conversation by his Christian name, “how limited your trust must be in the mercy of a Creator, whose mercy is as wide as the ocean, that you can talk like that! You speak of me, too, as better than yourself — how am I better? I have my bad thoughts and do bad things as much as you, and, though they may not be the same, I am sure they are quite as black as yours, since everybody must be responsible according to their characters and temptations. I try, however, to trust in God to cover my sins, and believe that, if I do my best, He will forgive me, that is all. But I have no business to preach to you, who are older and wiser than I am.”
“If,” he broke in, laying his hand involuntarily upon her own, “you knew — although I have never spoken of them to any one before, and could not speak of them to anybody but yourself — how these things weigh upon my mind, you would not say that, but would try to teach me your faith.”
“How can I teach you, Arthur, when I have so much to learn myself?” she answered, simply, and from that moment, though she did not know it as yet, she loved him.
This conversation — a very curious one, Arthur thought to himself afterwards, for two young people on a spring morning — having come to an end, nothing more was said for some while, and they took their way down the hill, varying the route in order to pass through the little hamlet of Bratham. Under a chestnut-tree that stood upon the village green, Arthur noticed, not a village blacksmith, but a small crowd, mostly composed of children, gathered round somebody. On going to see who it was, he discovered a battered-looking old man with an intellectual face, and the remnants of a gentlemanlike appearance, playing on the violin. A very few touches of his bow told Arthur, who knew something of music, that he was in the presence of a performer of no mean merit. Seeing the quality of his two auditors, and that they appreciated his performance, the player changed his music, and from a village jig passed to one of the more difficult opera airs, which he executed in brilliant fashion.
“Bravo!” cried Arthur, as the last notes thrilled and died away; “I see you understand how to play the fiddle.”
“Yes, sir, and so I should, for I have played first violin at Her Majesty’s Opera before now. Name what you like, and I will play it you. Or, if you like it better, you shall hear the water running in a brook, the wind passing through the trees, or the waves falling on the beach. Only say the word.”
Arthur thought for a moment.
“It is a beautiful day, let us have a contrast — give us the music of a storm.”
The old man considered a while.
“I understand, but you set a difficult subject even for me,” and taking up his bow he made several attempts at beginning. “I can’t do it,” he said, “set something else.”
“No, no, try again, that or nothing.”
Again he started, and this time his genius took possession of him. The notes fell very softly at first, but with an ominous sound, then rose and wailed like the rising of the wind. Next the music came in gusts, the rain pattered, and the thunder roared, till at length the tempest seemed to spend its force and pass slowly away into the distance.
“There, sir, what do you say to that — have I fulfilled your expectations?”
“Write it down and it will be one of the finest pieces of violin music in the country.”
“Write it down. The divine ‘afflatus’ is not to be caged, sir, it comes and goes. I could never write that music down.”
Arthur felt in his pocket without answering, and found five shillings.
“If you will accept this?” he said.
“Thank you, sir, very much. I am gladder of five shillings now than I once was of as many pounds;” and he rose to go.
“A man of your talent should not be wandering about like this.”
“I must earn a living somehow, for all Talleyrand’s witticism to the contrary,” was the curious answer.
“Have you no friends?”
“No, sir, this is my only friend; all the rest have deserted me,” and he tapped his violin and was gone.
“Lord, sir,” said a farmer, who was standing by, “he’s gone to get drunk; he is the biggest old drunkard in the countryside, and yet they do say he was gentleman once, and the best fiddler in London; but he can’t be depended on, so no one will hire him now.”
“How sad,” said Angela, as they moved homewards.
“Yes, and what music that was; I never heard any with such imagination before. You have a turn that way, Angela; you should try to put it into words, it would make a poem.”
“I complain like the old man, that you set a difficult subject,” she said; “but I will try, if you will promise not to laugh at the result.”
“If you succeed on paper only half so well as he did on the violin, your verses will be worth listening to, and I certainly shall not laugh.”
On the following day the somewhat curious religious conversation between Arthur and Angela — a conversation which, begun on Arthur’s part out of curiosity, had ended on both sides very much in earnest — the weather broke up and the grand old English climate reasserted its treacherous supremacy. From summer weather the inhabitants of the county of Marlshire suddenly found themselves plunged into a spell of cold that was by contrast almost Arctic. Storms of sleet drove against the window-panes, and there was even a very damaging night-frost, while that dreadful scourge, which nobody in his senses except Kingsley can ever have liked, the east wind, literally pervaded the whole place, and went whistling through the surrounding trees and ruins in a way calculated to make even a Laplander shiver.
Under these cheerless circumstances our pair of companions — for as yet they were, ostensibly at any rate, nothing more — gave up their outdoor excursions and took to rambling over the disused rooms in the old house, and hunting up many a record, some of them valuable and curious enough, of long-forgotten Caresfoots, and even of the old priors before them; a splendidly illuminated missal being amongst the latter prizes. When this amusement was exhausted, they sat together over the fire in the nursery, and Angela translated to him from her favourite classical authors, especially Homer, with an ease and fluency of expression that, to Arthur, was little short of miraculous. Or, when they got tired of that, he read to her from standard writers, which, elaborate as her education had been, in certain respects, she had scarcely yet even opened, notably Shakespeare and Milton. Needless to say, herself imbued with a strong poetic feeling, these immortal writers were a source of intense delight to her.
“How is it that Mr. Fraser never gave you Shakespeare to read?” asked Arthur one day, as he shut up the volume, having come to the end of “Hamlet.”
“He said that I should be better able to appreciate it when my mind had been prepared to do so by the help of a classical and mathematical education, and that it would be ‘a mistake to cloy my mental palate with sweets before I had learnt to appreciate their flavours.’”
“There is some sense in that,” remarked Arthur. “By the way, how are the verses you promised to write me getting on? Have you done them yet?”
“I have done something,” she answered, modestly, “but I really do not think that they are worth producing. It is very tiresome of you to have remembered about them.”
Arthur, however, by this time knew enough of Angela’s abilities to be sure that her “something” would be something more or less worth hearing, and mildly insisted on their production, and then, to her confusion, on her reading them aloud. They ran as follows, and whatever Angela’s opinion of them may have been, the reader shall judge of them for himself:
A STORM ON THE STRINGS
“The minstrel sat in his lonely room,
Its walls were bare, and the twilight grey
Fell and crept and gathered to gloom;
It came like the ghost of the dying day,
And the chords fell hushed and low.
Pianissimo!
“His arm was raised, and the violin
Quivered and shook with the strain it bore,
While the swelling forth of the sounds within
Rose with a sweetness unknown before,
And the chords fell soft and low.
Piano!
“The first cold flap of the tempest’s wings
Clashed with the silence before the storm,
The raindrops pattered across the strings
As the gathering thunder-clouds took form —
Drip, drop, high and low.
Staccato!
“Heavily rolling the thunder roared,
Sudden and jagged the lightning played,
Faster and faster the raindrops poured,
Sobbing and surging the tree-crests swayed,
Cracking and crashing above, below.
Crescendo!
“The wind tore howling across the wold,
And tangled his train in the groaning trees,
Wrapped the dense clouds in his mantle cold,
Then shivered and died in a wailing breeze,
Whistling and weeping high and low,
Sostenuto!
“A pale sun broke from the driving cloud,
And flashed in the raindrops serenely cool:
At the touch of his finger the forest bowed,
As it shimmered and glanced in the ruffled pool,
While the rustling leaves soughed soft and low.
Gracioso!
“It was only a dream on the throbbing strings,
An echo of Nature in phantasy wrought,
A breath of her breath and a touch of her wings
From a kingdom outspread in the regions of thought.
Below rolled the sound of the city’s din,
And the fading day, as the night drew in,
Showed the quaint old face and the pointed chin,
And the arm that was raised o’er the violin,
As the old man whispered his hope’s dead tale,
To the friend who could comfort, though others might fail,
And the chords stole hushed and low.
Pianissimo!”
He stopped, and the sheet of paper fell from his hands.
“Well,” she said, with all the eagerness of a new-born writer, “tell me, do you think them very bad?”
“Well, Angela, you know ——”
“Ah! go on now; I am ready to be crushed. Pray don’t spare my feelings.”
“I was about to say that, thanks be to Providence, I am not a critic; but I think ——”
“Oh! yes, let me hear what you think. You are speaking so slowly, in order to get time to invent something extra cutting. Well, I deserve it.”
“Don’t interrupt; I was going to say that I think the piece above the average of second-class poetry, and that a few of the lines touch the first-class standard. You have caught something of the ‘divine afflatus’ that the drunken old fellow said he could not cage. But I do not think that you will ever be popular as a writer of verses if you keep to that style; I doubt if there is a magazine in the kingdom that would take those lines unless they were by a known writer. They would return them marked, ‘Good, but too vague for the general public.’ Magazine editors don’t like lines from ‘a kingdom outspread in the regions of thought,’ for, as they say, such poems are apt to excite vagueness in the brains of that dim entity, the ‘general public.’ What they do like are commonplace ideas, put in pretty language, and sweetened with sentimentality or emotional religious feelings, such as the thinking powers of their subscribers are competent to absorb without mental strain, and without leaving their accustomed channels. To be popular it is necessary to be commonplace, or at the least to describe the commonplace, to work in a well-worn groove, and not to startle — requirements which, unfortunately, simple as they seem, very few persons possess the art of acting up to. See what happens to the unfortunate novelist, for instance, who dares to break the unwritten law, and defraud his readers of the orthodox transformation scene of the reward of virtue and the discomfiture of vice; or to make his creation finish up in a way that, however well it may be suited to its tenor, or illustrate its more subtle meaning, is contrary to the ‘general reader’s’ idea as to how it should end — badly, as it is called. He simply collapses, to rise no more, if he is new at the trade, and, if he is a known man, that book won’t sell.”
“You talk quite feelingly,” said Angela, who was getting rather bored, and wanted, not unnaturally, to hear more about her own lines.
“Yes,” replied Arthur, grimly; “I do. Once I was fool enough to write a book, but I must tell you that it is a painful subject with me. It never came out. Nobody would have it.”
“Oh! Arthur, I am so sorry; I should like to read your book. But, as regards the verses, I am glad that you like them, and I really don’t care what a hypothetical general public would say; I wrote them to please you, not the general public.”
“Well, my dear, I am sure I am much obliged to you; I shall value them doubly, once for the giver’s sake, and once for their own.”
Angela blushed, but did not reprove the term of endearment which had slipped unawares from his lips. Poetry is a dangerous subject between two young people who at heart adore one another; it is apt to excite the brain, and bring about startling revelations.
The day following the reading of Angela’s piece of poetry was rendered remarkable by two events, of which the first was that the weather suddenly turned a somersault, and became beautifully warm; and the second that news reached the Abbey House that, thanks chiefly to Lady Bellamy’s devoted nursing — who, fearless of infection, had, to the great admiration of all her neighbours, volunteered her services when no nurse could be found to undertake the case — George was pronounced out of danger. This piece of news was peculiarly grateful to Philip, for, had his cousin died, the estates must have passed away for ever under the terms of his uncle’s will, for he knew that George had made none. Angela, too, tried, like a good girl as she was, to lash herself into enthusiasm about it, though in her heart she went as near hating her cousin, since his attempted indignity towards herself, as her gentle nature would allow. Arthur alone was cynically indifferent; he hated George without any reservation whatsoever.
And after this their came for our pair of embryo lovers some ten or twelve such happy days (for there was no talk of Arthur’s departure, Philip having on several occasions pointedly told him that the house was at his disposal for as long as he chose to remain in it). The sky was blue in those days, or only flecked with summer clouds, just as Arthur and Angela’s perfect companionship was flecked and shaded with the deeper hues of dawning passion. Alas, the sky in this terrestrial clime is never quite blue!
But as yet nothing of love had passed between them, no kiss or word of endearment; only when hand touched hand a strange thrill had moved them both, and sent the warm blood to stain Angela’s clear brow, like a wavering tint of sunlight thrown upon the marble features of some white Venus; only in each other’s eyes they found a holy mystery. The spell was not yet fully at work, but the wand of earth’s great enchanter had touched them, and they were changed. Angela is hardly the same girl she was when we met her a little more than a fortnight back. A nameless change has come over her face and manner; the merry smile, once so bright, has grown softer and more sweet, and the laughing light of her grey eyes has given place to a look of some such gratitude and wonder, as that with which the traveller in lonely deserts gazes on the oasis of his perfect rest.
Many times Arthur had almost blurted out the truth to the woman he passionately adored, and every day so added to the suppressed fire of his love that at length he felt that he could not keep his secret to himself much longer. And yet he feared to tell it; better, he thought, to live happy, if in doubt, than to risk all his fortune on a single throw, for before his eyes there lay the black dread of failure; and then, what would life be worth? Here with Angela he lived in a Garden of Eden that no forebodings, no anxieties, no fear of that partially scotched serpent George, could render wretched, so long as it was gladdened by the presence of her whom he hoped to make his Eve. But without, and around where she could not be, there was nothing but clods and thistles and a black desolation that, even in imagination, he dared not face.
And Angela, gazing on veiled mysteries with wondering eyes, was she happy during those spring-tide days? Almost; but still there was in her heart a consciousness of effort, a sense of transformation and knowledge of the growth of hidden things. The bud bursting into the glory of the rose, must, if there be feeling in a rose, undergo some such effort before it can make its beauty known; the butterfly but newly freed from the dull husk that hid its splendours, at first must feel the imperfect wings it stretches in the sun to be irksome to its unaccustomed sense. And so it was with Angela; she spread her half-grown wings in the sun of her new existence, and found them strange, not knowing as yet that they were shaped to bear her to the flower-crowned heights of love.
Hers was one of those rare natures in which the passion that we know by the generic term of love, approached as near perfection as is possible in our human hearts. For there are many sorts and divisions of love, ranging from the affection, pure, steady, and divine, that is showered upon us from above, to the degrading madness of such a one as George Caresfoot. It is surely one of the saddest evidences of our poor humanity that, even among the purest of us, there are none who can altogether rid the whiteness of the love they have to offer of its earthly stain. Indeed, if we could so far conquer the promptings of our nature as to love with perfect purity, we should become like angels. But, just as white flowers are sometimes to be found on the blackest peak, so there do bloom in the world spirits as pure as they are rare — so free from evil, so closely shadowed by the Almighty wing, that they can almost reach to this perfection. Then the love they have to give is too refined, too holy and strong, to be understood of the mass of men: often it is squandered on some unequal and unanswering nature; sometimes it is wisely offered up to Him from whom it came.
We gaze upon an ice-bound river, and there is nothing to tell us that beneath that white cloak its current rushes to the ocean. But presently the spring comes, the prisoned waters burst their fetters, and we see a glad torrent sparkling in the sunlight. And so it was with our heroine’s heart; the breath of Arthur’s passion and the light of Arthur’s eyes had beat upon it, and almost freed the river of its love. Already the listener might hear the ice-sheets crack and start; soon they will be gone, and her deep devotion will set as strong towards him as the tide of the torrent towards its receiving sea.
“Fine writing!” perhaps the reader will say; but surely none too fine to describe the most beautiful thing in this strange world, the irrevocable gift of a good woman’s love!
However that may be, it will have served its purpose if it makes it clear that a crisis is at hand in the affairs of the heart of two of the central actors on this mimic stage.
One Saturday morning, when May was three-parts gone, Philip announced his intention of going up to London till the Monday on business. He was a man who had long since become callous to appearances, and though Arthur, fearful lest spiteful things should be said of Angela, almost hinted that it would look odd, his host merely laughed, and said that he had little doubt but that his daughter was quite able to look after herself, even when such a fascinating young gentleman as himself was concerned. As a matter of fact, his object was to get rid of Angela by marrying her to this young Heigham, who had so opportunely tumbled down from the skies, and whom he rather liked than otherwise. This being the case, he rightly concluded that, the more the two were left together, the greater probability there was of his object being attained. Accordingly he left them together as much as possible.
It was on the evening of this Saturday that Arthur gathered up his courage and asked Angela to come and walk through the ruins with him. Angela hesitated a little; the shadow of something about to happen had fallen on her mind; but the extraordinary beauty of the evening, to say nothing of the prospect of his company, turned the scale in Arthur’s favour.
It was one of those nights of which, if we are lucky, we get some five or six in the course of an English summer. The moon was at her full, and, the twilight ended, she filled the heavens with her light. Every twig and blade of grass showed out as clearly as in the day, but looked like frosted silver. The silence was intense, and so still was the air that the sharp shadows of the trees were motionless upon the grass, only growing with the growing hours. It was one of those nights that fill us with an indescribable emotion, bringing us into closer companionship with the unseen than ever does the garish, busy day. In such an hour, we can sometimes feel, or think that we can feel, other presences around us, and involuntarily we listen for the whisper of the wings and the half-forgotten voices of our beloved.
On this particular evening some such feeling was stirring in Angela’s heart as with slow steps she led the way into the little village churchyard, a similar spot to that which is to be found in many a country parish, except that, the population being very small, there were but few recent graves. Most of the mounds had no head-stones to recall the names of the neglected dead, but here and there were dotted discoloured slabs, some sunk a foot or two into the soil, a few lying prone upon it, and the remainder thrown by the gradual subsidence of their supports into every variety of angle, as though they had been suddenly halted in the maddest whirl of a grotesque dance of death.
Picking her way through these, Angela stopped under an ancient yew, and, pointing to one of the two shadowed mounts to which the moonlight scarcely struggled, said, in a low voice,
“That is my mother’s grave.”
It was a modest tenement enough, a little heap of close green turf, surrounded by a railing, and planted with sweet-williams and forget-me-nots. At its head was placed a white marble cross, on which Arthur could just distinguish the words “Hilda Caresfoot,” and the date of death.
He was about to speak, but she stopped him with a gentle movement, and then, stepping forward to the head of the railing, she buried her face in her hands, and remained motionless. Arthur watched her with curiosity. What, he wondered, was passing in the mind of this strange and beautiful woman, who had grown up so sweet and pure amidst moral desolation, like a white lily blooming alone on the black African plains in winter? Suddenly she raised her head, and saw the inquiring look he bent upon her. She came towards him, and, in that sweet, half-pleading voice which was one of her greatest charms, she said,
“I fear you think me very foolish?”
“Why should I think you foolish?”
“Because I have come here at night to stand before a half-forgotten grave.”
“I do not think you foolish, indeed. I was only wondering what was passing in your mind.”
Angela hung her head and made no answer, and the clock above them boomed out the hour, raising its sullen note in insolent defiance of the silence. What is it that is so solemn about the striking of the belfry-clock when one stands in a churchyard at night? Is it that the hour softens our natures, and makes them more amenable to semi-superstitious influences? Or is it that the thousand evidences of departed mortality which surround us, appealing with dumb force to natural fears, throw open for a space the gates of our world-sealed imagination, to tenant its vast halls with prophetic echoes of our end? Perhaps it is useless to inquire. The result remains the same: few of us can hear those tones at night without a qualm, and, did we put our thoughts into words, they would run something thus:
“That sound once broke upon the living ears of those who sleep around us. We hear it now. In a little while, hour after hour, it will echo against the tombstones of our graves, and new generations, coming out of the silent future, will stand where we stand, and hearken; and muse, as we mused, over the old problems that we have gone to solve; whilst we — shall we not be deaf to hear and dumb to utter?”
Such, at any rate, were the unspoken thoughts that crept into the hearts of Arthur and Angela as the full sound from the belfry thinned itself away into silence. She grew a little pale, and glanced at him, and he gave an involuntary shiver, while even the dog Aleck sniffed and whined uncomfortably.
“It feels cold,” he said. “Shall we go?”
They turned and walked towards the gate, and, by the time they reached it, all superstitious thoughts had vanished — at any rate, from Arthur’s mind, for he recollected that he had set himself a task to do, and that now would be the time to do it. Absorbed in this reflection, he forgot his politeness, and passed first through the turnstile. On the further side he paused, and looked earnestly into his beloved’s face. Their eyes met, and there was that in his that caused her to swiftly drop her own. A silence ensued as they stood by the gate. He broke it.
“It is a lovely night. Let us walk through the ruins.”
“I shall wet my feet: the dew must be falling.”
“There is no dew falling to-night. Won’t you come?”
“Let us go tomorrow; it is later than I generally go in. Pigott will wonder what has become of me.”
“Never mind Pigott. The night is too fine to waste asleep; besides, you know, one should always look at ruins by moonlight. Please come.”
She looked at him doubtfully, hesitated, and came.
“What do you want to see?” she said presently, with as near an approach to irritation as he had ever heard her indulge in. “That is the famous window that Mr. Fraser always goes into raptures about.”
“It is beautiful. Shall we sit down here and look at it?”
They sat down on a low mass of fallen masonry some fifteen paces from the window. Around them lay a delicate tracery of shadows, whilst they themselves were seated in the eye of the moonlight, and remained for a while as silent and as still as though they had been the shades of the painted figures that had once filled the stony frame above them.
“Angela,” he said at length —“Angela, listen, and I will tell you something. My mother, a woman to whom sorrow had become almost an inspiration, when she was dying, spoke to me something thus: ‘There is,’ she said, ‘but one thing that I know of that has the power to make life happy as God meant it to be, and as the folly and weakness of men and women render it nearly impossible for it to be, and that is — love. Love has been the consolation of my own existence in the midst of many troubles; first, the great devotion I bore your father, and then that which I entertain for yourself. Without these two ties, life would indeed have been a desert. And yet, though it is a grief to me to leave you, and though I shrink from the dark passage that lies before me, so far does that first great love outweigh the love I bear you, that in my calmer moments I am glad to go, because I know I am awaited by your father. And from this I wish you to learn a lesson: look for your happiness in life from the love of your life, for there only will you find it. Do not fritter away your heart, but seek out some woman, some one good and pure and true, and in giving her your devotion, you will reap a full reward, for her happiness will reflect your own, and, if your choice is right, you will, however stormy your life may be, lay up for yourself, as I feel that I have done, an everlasting joy.’”
She listened to him in silence.
“Angela,” he went on, boldly enough, now that the ice was broken, “I have often thought about what my mother said, but until now I have never quite understood her meaning. I do understand it now. Angela, do you understand me?”
There was no answer; she sat there upon the fallen masonry, gazing at the ruins round her, motionless and white as a marble goddess, forgotten in her desecrated fane.
“Oh, Angela, listen to me — listen to me! I have found the woman of whom my mother spoke, who must be so ‘good and pure and true.’ You are she. I love you, Angela, I love you with my whole life and soul; I love you for this world and the next. Oh! do not reject me; though I am so little worthy of you, I will try to grow so. Dearest, can you love me?”
Still there was silence, but he thought that he saw her breast heave gently. Then he placed his hand, all trembling with the fierce emotion that throbbed along his veins, upon the palm that hung listless by her side, and gazed into her eyes. Still she neither spoke nor shrank, and, in the imperfect light, her face looked very pale, while her lovely eyes were dark and meaningless as those of one entranced.
Then slowly he gathered up his courage for an effort, and, raising his face to the level of her own, he kissed her full upon her lips. She stirred, she sighed. He had broken the spell; the sweet face that had withdrawn itself drew nearer to him; for a second the awakened eyes looked into his own, and filled them with reflected splendour, and then he became aware of a warm arm thrown about his neck, and next — the stars grew dim, and sense and life itself seemed to shake upon their thrones, for a joy almost too great for mortal man to bear took possession of his heart as she laid her willing lips upon his own. And then, before he knew her purpose, she slid down upon her knees beside him, and placed her head upon her breast.
“Dearest,” he said, “don’t kneel so; look at me.”
Slowly she raised her face, wreathed and lovely with many blushes, and looked upon him with tearful eyes. He tried to raise her.
“Let me be,” she said, speaking very low. “I am best so; it is the attitude of adoration, and I have found — my divinity.”
“But I cannot bear to see you kneel to me.”
“Oh! Arthur, you do not understand; a minute since I did not understand that a woman is very humble when she really loves.
“Do you — really love me, Angela?”
“I do.”
“Have you known that long?”
“I only knew it when — when you kissed me. Before then there was something in my heart, but I did not know what it was. Listen, dear,” she went on, “for one minute to me first, and I will get up” (for he was again attempting to raise her). “What I have to say is best said upon my knees, for I want to thank God who sent you to me, and to thank you too for your goodness. It is so wonderful that you should love a simple girl like me, and I am so thankful to you. Oh! I have never lived till now, and” (rising to her full stature) “I feel as though I had been crowned a queen of happy things. Dethrone me, desert me, and I will still be grateful to you for this hour of imperial happiness. But if you, after a while, when you know all my faults and imperfections better, can still care for me, I know that there is something in me that will enable me to repay you for what you have given me, by making your whole life happy. Dear, I do not know if I speak as other women do, but, believe me, it is out of the fulness of my heart. Take care, Arthur, oh! take care, lest your fate should be that of the magician you spoke of the other day, who evoked the spirit, and then fell down before it in terror. You have also called up a spirit, and I pray that it was not done in sport, lest it should trouble you hereafter.”
“Angela, do not speak so to me; it is I who should have knelt to you. Yes, you were right when you called yourself ‘a queen of happy things.’ You are a queen ——”
“Hush! Don’t overrate me; your disillusion will be the more painful. Come, Arthur, let us go home.”
He rose and went with her, in a dream of joy that for a moment precluded speech. At the door she bade him good-night, and, oh! happiness, gave him her lips to kiss. Then they parted, their hearts too full for words. One thing he asked her, however.
“What was it that took you to your mother’s grave to-night?”
She looked at him with a curiously mixed expression of shy love and conviction on her face, and answered,
“Her spirit, who led me to your heart.”
George’s recovery, when the doctors had given up all hope, was sufficiently marvellous to suggest the idea that a certain power had determined — on the hangman’s principle, perhaps — to give him the longest of ropes; but it could in reality be traced to a more terrestrial influence — namely, Lady Bellamy’s nursing. Had it not been for this nursing, it is very certain that her patient would have joined his forefathers in the Bratham churchyard. For whole days and nights she watched and tended him, scarcely closing her own eyes, and quite heedless of the danger of infection; till in the end she conquered the fever, and snatched him from the jaws of the grave. How often has not a woman’s devotion been successful in such a struggle!
On the Monday following the events narrated in the last chapter, George, now in an advanced stage of convalescence, though forbidden to go abroad for another fortnight, was sitting downstairs enjoying the warm sunshine, and the sensation of returning life and vigour that was creeping into his veins, when Lady Bellamy came into the room, bringing with her some medicine.
“Here is your tonic, George; it is the last dose that I can give you, as I am going back to my disconsolate husband at luncheon-time.”
“I can’t have you go away yet; I am not well enough.”
“I must go, George; people will begin to talk if I stop here any longer.”
“Well, if you must, I suppose you must,” he answered, sulkily. “But I must say I think that you show a great want of consideration for my comfort. Who is to look after me, I should like to know? I am far from well yet — far from well.”
“Believe me,” she said, softly, “I am very sorry to leave you, and am glad to have been of help to you, though you have never thought much about it.”
“Oh, I am sure I am much obliged, but it is not likely that you would leave me to rot of fever without coming to look after me.”
She sighed as she answered,
“You would not do as much for me.”
“Oh, bother, Anne, don’t get sentimental. Before you go, I must speak to you about that girl Angela. Have you taken any steps?”
Lady Bellamy started.
“What, are you still bent upon that project?”
“Of course I am. It seemed to me that all my illness was one long dream of her. I am more bent upon it than ever.”
“And do you still insist upon my playing the part you had marked out for me? Do you know, George, that there were times in your illness when, if I had relaxed my care for a single five minutes, it would have turned the scale against you, and that once I did not close my eyes for five nights? Look at me, how thin and worn I am: it is from nursing you. I have saved your life. Surely you will not now force me to do this unnatural thing.”
“If, my dear Anne, you had saved my life fifty times, I would still force you to do it. Ah! it is no use your looking at that safe. I have no doubt that you got my keys and searched it whilst I was ill, but I was too sharp for you. I had the letters moved when I heard that you were coming to nurse me. They are back there now, though. How disappointed you must have been!” And he chuckled.
“I should have done better to let you die, monster of wickedness and ingratitude that you are!” she said, stamping her foot upon the floor, and the tears of vexation standing in her eyes.
“The letters, my dear Anne; remember that you have got to earn your letters. I am very much obliged to you for your nursing, but business is business.”
She was silent for a moment, and then spoke in her ordinary tone.
“By the way, talking of letters, there was one came for you this morning in your cousin Philip’s handwriting, and with a London postmark. Will you read it?”
“Read it — yes; anything from the father of my inamorata will be welcome.”
She fetched the letter and gave it him. He read it aloud. After a page of congratulations on his convalescence, it ended,
“And now I want to make a proposal to you — viz., to buy back the Isleworth lands from you. I know that the place is distasteful to you, and will probably be doubly so after your severe illness; but, if you care to keep the house and grounds, I am not particularly anxious to acquire them. I am prepared to offer a good price,” &c. &c.
“I’ll see him hanged first,” was George’s comment. “How did he get the money?”
“Saved it and made it, I suppose.”
“Well, at any rate, he shall not buy me out with it. No, no, Master Philip; I am not fond enough of you to do you that turn.”
“It does not strike you,” she said, coldly, “that you hold in your hands a lever that may roll all your difficulties about this girl out of the way.”
“By Jove, you are right, Anne. Trust a woman’s brain. But I don’t want to sell the estates unless I am forced to.”
“Would you rather part with the land, or give up your project of marrying Angela Caresfoot?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you will have to choose between the two.”
“Then I had rather sell.”
“You had better give it up, George. I am not superstitious, but I have knowledge in things that you do not understand, and I foresee nothing but disaster in this plan.”
“Once and for all, Anne, I will not give it up whilst I have any breath left in my body, and I take my oath that unless you help me, and help me honestly, I will expose you.”
“Oh! I am your very humble servant; you may count on me. The galley-slave pulls well when the lash hangs over his shoulders,” and she laughed coldly.
Just then a servant announced that Mr. Caresfoot was at the door, and anxious to speak to his cousin. He was ordered to show him into the drawing-room. As soon as he had gone on his errand, George said,
“I will not see him; say I am too unwell. But do you go, and see that you make the most of your chance.”
Lady Bellamy nodded, and left the room. She found Philip in the drawing-room.
“Ah! how do you do, Mr. Caresfoot? I come from your cousin to say that he cannot see you today; he has scarcely recovered sufficiently from the illness through which I have been nursing him; but of course you know all about that.”
“Oh! yes, Lady Bellamy, I have heard all about it, including your own brave behaviour, to which, the doctor tells me, George owes his life. I am sorry that he cannot see me, though. I have just come down from town, and called in on my way from Roxham. I had some rather important business that I wanted to speak about.”
“About your offer to repurchase the Isleworth lands?” she asked.
“Ah! you know of the affair. Yes, that was it.”
“Then I am commissioned to give you a reply.”
Philip listened anxiously.
“Your cousin absolutely refuses to sell any part of the lands.”
“Will nothing chance his determination? I am ready to give a good price, and pay a separate valuation for the timber.”
“Nothing; he does not intend to sell.”
A deep depression spread itself over her hearer’s face.
“Then there go the hopes of twenty years,” he said. “For twenty long years, ever since my misfortune, I have toiled and schemed to get these lands back, and now it is all for nothing. Well, there is nothing more to be said,” and he turned to go.
“Stop a minute, Mr. Caresfoot. Do you know, you interest me very much.”
“I am proud to interest so charming a lady,” he answered, a touch of depressed gallantry.
“That is as it should be; but you interest me because you are an instance of the truth of the saying that every man has some ruling passion, if only one could discover it. Why do you want these particular lands? Your money will buy others just as good.”
“Why does a Swiss get home-sick? Why does a man defrauded of his own wish to recover it?”
Lady Bellamy mused a little.
“What would you say if I showed you an easy way to get them?”
Philip turned sharply round with a new look of hope upon his face.
“You would earn my eternal gratitude — a gratitude that I should be glad to put into a practical shape.”
She laughed.
“Oh! you must speak to Sir John about that. Now listen; I am going to surprise you. Your cousin wants to get married.”
“Get married! George wants to get married!”
“Exactly so; and now I have a further surprise in store for you — he wants to marry your daughter Angela.”
This time Philip said nothing, but he started in evident and uncomfortable astonishment. If Lady Bellamy wished to surprise him, she had certainly succeeded.
“Surely you are joking!” he said.
“I never was further from joking in my life; he is desperately in love with her, and wild to marry her.”
“Well?”
“Well, don’t you now see a way to force your cousin to sell the lands?”
“At the price of Angela’s hand?”
“Precisely.”
Philip walked up and down the room in thought. Though, as the reader may remember, he had himself, but a month before, been base enough to suggest that his daughter should use her eyes to forward his projects, he had never, in justice to him be it said, dreamt of forcing her into a marriage in every way little less than unnatural. His idea of responsibility towards his daughter was, as regards sins of omission, extremely lax, but there were some of commission that he did not care to face. Certain fears and memories oppressed him too much to allow of it.
“Lady Bellamy,” he said, presently, “you have known my cousin George intimately for many years, and are probably sufficiently acquainted with his habits of life to know that such a marriage would be an infamy.”
“Many a man who has been wild in his youth makes a good husband,” she answered, quietly.
“The more I think of it,” went on Philip, excitedly, after the fashion of one who would lash himself into a passion, “the more I see the utter impossibility of any such thing, and I must say that I wonder at your having undertaken such an errand. On the one hand, there is a young girl who, though I do not, from force of circumstances, see much of myself, is, I believe, as good as she is handsome ——”
“And on the other,” broke in Lady Bellamy, ironically, “are the Isleworth estates.”
“And on the other,” went on Philip, without paying heed to her remark —“I am going to speak plainly, Lady Bellamy — is a man utterly devoid of the foundations of moral character, whose appearance is certainly against him, who I have got reason to know is not to be trusted, and who is old enough to be her father, and her cousin to boot — and you ask me to forward such a marriage as this! I will have nothing to do with it; my responsibilities as a father forbid it. It would be the wickedest thing I have ever done to put the girl into the power of such a man.”
Lady Bellamy burst into a low peal of laughter; she never laughed aloud. She thought that it was now time to throw him a little off his balance.
“Forgive me,” she said, with her sweetest smile, “but you must admit that there is something rather ludicrous in hearing the hero of the great Maria Lee scandal talking about moral character, and the father who detests his daughter so much that he fears to look her in the face, and whose sole object is to rid himself of an encumbrance, prating of his paternal responsibilities.”
Philip started visibly at her words.
“Ah! Mr. Caresfoot,” she went on, “I surprise you by my knowledge, but we women are sad spies, and it is my little amusement to find out other people’s secrets, a very useful little amusement. I could tell you many things ——”
“I was about to say,” broke in Philip, who had naturally no desire to see more of the secrets of his life unveiled by Lady Bellamy, “that, even if I did wish to get rid of Angela, I should have little difficulty in doing so, as young Heigham, who has been stopping at the Abbey House for a fortnight or so, is head over ears in love with her; indeed, I should think it highly probable that they are at this moment engaged.”
It was Lady Bellamy’s turn to start now.
“Ah!” she said, “I did not know that; that complicates matters.” And then, with a sudden change of tone —“Mr. Caresfoot, as a friend, let me beg of you not to throw away such a chance in a hurry for the sake of a few nonsensical ideas abut a girl. What is she, after all, that she should stand in the way of such grave interests as you have in hand? I tell you that he is perfectly mad about her. You can make your own terms and fix your own price.”
“Price! ay, that is what it would be — a price for her body and soul.”
“Well, and what of it? The thing is done every day, only one does not talk of it in that way.”
“Who taught you, who were once a young girl yourself, to plead such a cause as this?”
“Nonsense, it is a very good cause — a cause that will benefit everybody, especially your daughter. George will get what he wants; you, with the recovery of the estates, will also recover your lost position and reputation, both to a great extent an affair of landed property. Mr. Heigham will gain a little experience, whilst she will bloom into a great lady, and, like any other girl in the same circumstances, learn to adore her husband in a few months.”
“And what will you get, Lady Bellamy?”
“I!” she replied, with a gay laugh. “Oh! you know, virtue is its own reward. I shall be quite satisfied in seeing everybody else made happy. Come, I do not want to press you about the matter at present. Think it over at your leisure. I only beg you not to give a decided answer to young Heigham, should he ask you for Angela, till I have seen you again — say, in a week’s time. Then, if you don’t like it, you can leave it alone, and nobody will be a penny the worse.”
“As you like; but I tell you that I can never consent;” and Philip took his leave.
“Your cousin entirely refuses his consent, and Angela is by this time probably engaged to your ex-ward, Arthur Heigham,” was Lady Bellamy’s not very promising report to the interesting invalid in the dining-room.
After relieving his feelings at this intelligence in language more forcible than polite, George remarked that, under these circumstances, matters looked very bad.
“Not at all; they look very well. I shall see your cousin again in a week’s time, when I shall have a different tale to tell.”
“Why wait a week with that young blackguard making the running on the spot?”
“Because I have put poison into Philip’s mind, and the surest poison always works slow. Besides, the mischief has been done. Good-by. I will come and see you in a day or two, when I have made my plans. You see I mean to earn my letters.”
With what degree of soundness our pair of lovers slumbered on that memorable Saturday night, let those who have been so fortunate or unfortunate as to have been placed in analogous circumstances, form their own opinion.
It is, however, certain that Arthur gazed upon the moon and sundry of the larger planets for some hours, until they unkindly set, and left him, for his candle had burnt out, to find his way to bed in the dark. With his reflections we will not trouble ourselves; or, rather, we will not intrude upon their privacy. But there was another person in the house who sat at an open window and looked upon the heavens — Angela to wit. Let us avail ourselves of our rightful privilege, and look into her thoughts.
Arthur’s love had come upon her as a surprise, but it had found a perfect home. All the days and hours that she had spent in his company, had, unknown to herself, been mysteriously employed in preparing a habitation to receive it. We all know the beautiful Bible story of the Creation, how first there was an empty void, and the Spirit brooding on the waters, then light, and then life, and last, man coming to turn all things to his uses. Surely that story, which is the type and symbol of many things, is of none more so than of the growth and birth of a perfected love in the human heart.
The soil is made ready in the dead winter, and receives the seed into its bosom. Then comes the spring, and it is clothed with verdure. Space is void till the sun shoots its sudden rays athwart it, and makes it splendid; the heart is cold and unwitting of its ends, till the spirit broods upon it, as upon the waters, and it grows quick with the purposes of life. And then what a change is there! What has the flower in common with the seed from whence it sprang, or the noonday sky with the darkness before the dawn?
Thinking in her chamber, with the night air playing on her hot brow, and her hand pressed upon her heart, as though to still the tumult of its joy, Angela grew vaguely conscious of these things.
“Was she the same in heart and mind that she had been a month ago? No, a thousand times, no. Then what was this mysterious change that seemed to shake her inmost life to its foundations? What angel had troubled the waters into which she had so newly plunged? And whence came the healing virtue that she found in them, bringing rest after the vague trouble of the last two weeks, with sight to see the only good — her love, with speed to follow, and strength to hold? Oh, happy, happy world! oh, merciful Creator, who gave her to drink of such a living spring! oh, Arthur, beloved Arthur!”
On Sunday mornings it was Pigott’s habit to relax the Draconian severity of her laws in the matter of breakfast, which, generally speaking, was not till about half-past eight o’clock. At that hour precisely, on the Sabbath in question, she appeared as usual — no, not as usual, for, it being Sunday, she had on her stiff, black gown — and, with all due solemnity, made the tea.
A few minutes elapsed, and Angela entered, dressed in white, and very lovely in her simple, tight-fitting robe, but a trifle pale, and with a shy look upon her face.
She greeted her nurse with a kiss.
“Why, what is the matter with you, dearie?” ejaculated Pigott, whose watchful eye detected a change she could not define; “you look different somehow.”
“Hush! I will tell you by-and-by.”
At that moment Arthur’s quick step was heard advancing down the passage, together with a pattering noise that announced the presence of Aleck. And, as they came, Angela, poor Angela, grew red and redder, and yet more painfully red, till Pigott, watching her face, was enabled to form a shrewd guess as to what was the cause of her unaccustomed looks.
On came the steps, and open flew the door, more and more ready to sink into the earth looked Angela, and so interested grew nurse Pigott, that she actually poured some hot tea on to her dress, a thing she could never remember having done before.
The first to enter was Aleck, who, following his custom, sprang upon Angela and licked her hand, and behind Aleck, looking somewhat confused, but handsome and happy — for his was one of those faces that become handsome when their owners are happy — came Aleck’s master. And then there ensued an infinitesimal but most awkward pause.
On such occasions as the present, namely, the first meeting after an engagement, there is always — especially when it occurs in the presence of a third person — a very considerable difficulty in the minds of the parties to know what demeanour they are to adopt towards one another. Are they to treat the little affair of the previous evening as a kind of confidential communication, not to be alluded to except in private conversation, and to drop into the Mr. and Miss of yesterday? That would certainly be the easiest, but then it would also be a decided act of mutual retreat. Or are they to rush into each other’s arms as becomes betrothed lovers? This process is so new that they feel that it still requires private rehearsal. And, meanwhile, time presses, and everybody is beginning to stare, and something must be done.
These were very much the feelings of Arthur and Angela. He hesitated before her, confused, and she kept her head down over the dog. But presently Aleck, getting bored, moved on, and, as it would have been inane to continue to stare at the floor, she had to raise herself as slowly as she might. Soon their eyes arrived in the same plane, and whether a mutual glance of intelligence was exchanged, or whether their power of attraction overcame his power of resistance, it is not easy to determine, but certain it is that, following a primary natural law, Arthur gravitated towards her, and kissed her on the face.
“My!” exclaimed Pigott, and the milk-jug rolled unheeded on the floor.
“Hum! I suppose I had better explain,” began he.
“I think you have spilt the milk,” added she.
“That we have become engaged and are ——”
“All to pieces, I declare,” broke in Angela, with her head somewhere near the carpet.
And then they both laughed.
“Well, I never, no, not in all my born days! Sir and Miss Angela, all I have got to say about this extraordinary proceeding”— they glanced at each other in alarm —“is that I am very glad to hear on it, and I hope and pray how as you may be happy, and, if you treat my Angela right, you’ll be just the happiest and luckiest man in the three kingdoms, including Ireland the Royal Family, and, if you treat her wrong, worse will come to you; and her poor mother’s last words, as I heard with my own ears, will come true to you, and serve you right — and there’s all the milk upon the floor. And God bless you both, my dears, is the prayer of an old woman.”
And here the worthy soul broke down, and began to cry, nor were Angela’s eyes free from tears.
After this little episode, breakfast proceeded in something like the usual way. Church was at 10.30, and, a while before the hour, Arthur and Angela strolled down to the spot that had already become as holy ground to them, and looked into each other’s eyes, and said again the same sweet words. Then they went on, and mingling with the little congregation — that did not number more than thirty souls — they passed into the cool quiet of the church.
“Lawks!” said a woman, as they went by, “ain’t she just a beauty. What a pretty wedding they’d make!”
Arthur overheard it, and noted the woman, and afterwards found a pretext to give her five shillings, because he said it was a lucky omen.
On the communion-table of the pretty little church there was spread the “fair white cloth” of the rubric. It was the day for the monthly celebration of the Sacrament, that met the religious requirements of the village.
“Will you stay to the Sacrament with me?” whispered Angela to her lover, in the interval between their seating themselves and the entry of the clergyman, Mr. Fraser’s locum tenens.
Arthur nodded assent.
And so, when the time came, those two went up together to the altar-rails, and, kneeling side by side, ate of the bread and drank of the cup, and, rising, departed thence with a new link between them. For, be sure, part of the prayers which they offered up at that high moment were in humble petition to the Almighty to set His solemn seal and blessing on their love. Indeed, so far as Angela was concerned, there were few acts of her simple life that she did not consecrate by prayer, how much more, then, was she bent on bringing this, the greatest of all her acts, before her Maker’s throne.
Strange indeed, and full of a holy promise, is the yearning with which we turn to Heaven to seek sanctification of our deeds, feeling our weakness and craving strength from the source of strength; a yearning of which the church, with that subtle knowledge of human nature, which is one of the mainsprings of its power, has not been slow to avail itself. And this need is more especially felt in matters connected with the noblest of all passions, perhaps because all true love and all true religion come from a common home.
Thus pledged to one another with a new and awful pledge, and knit together in the bonds of an universal love, embracing their poor affection as the wide skies embrace the earth, they rose, and went their ways, purer to worship, and stronger to endure.
That afternoon, Arthur had a conversation with his betrothed that, partaking of a business nature in the beginning, ended rather oddly.
“I must speak to your father when he comes back tomorrow, dear,” he began.
“My father! Oh yes, I had forgotten about that;” and she looked a little anxious.
“Fortunately, I am fairly well off, so I see no cause why he should object.”
“Well, I think that he will be rather glad to get rid of Pigott and myself. You know that he is not very fond of me.”
“That is strange want of taste on his part.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Everybody does not see me with your eyes, Arthur.”
“Because they have not the chance. All the world would love you, if it knew you. But, seriously, I think that he can hardly object, or he would not have allowed us to be thrown so much together; for, in nine cases out of ten, that sort of thing has only one result.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that to import a young fellow into the house, and throw him solely into a daughter’s company, is very apt to bring about — well, what has been brought about.”
“Then you mean that you think that I should have fallen in love with any gentleman who had come here?”
Arthur, not seeing the slight flash of indignation in her eyes, replied,
“Well, you know, there is always a risk, but I should imagine that it would very much depend upon the gentleman.”
“Arthur”— with a little stamp —“I am ashamed of you. How can you think such things of me? You must have a very poor opinion of me.”
“My dear, why should I suppose myself superior to anybody else, that you should only fall in love with me? You set too high a value on me.”
“And you set too low a value on me; you do not understand me. You are my fate, my other self; how would it have been possible for me to love any one but you? I feel as though I had been travelling to meet you since the beginning of the world, to stand by your side till it crumbles away, yes, for eternity itself. Oh! Arthur, do not laugh at what I say. I am, indeed, only a simple girl, but, as I told you last night, there is something stirring in me now, my real life, my eternal part, something that you have awakened, and with which you have to deal, something apart from the me you see before you. As I speak, I feel and know that when we are dead and gone, I shall love you still; when more ages have passed than there are leaves upon that tree, I shall love you still. Arthur, I am yours for ever, for the time that is, and is to be.”
She spoke with the grand freedom of one inspired, nay, he felt that she was inspired, and the same feeling of awe that had come upon him when he first saw her face, again took possession of him. Taking her hand, he kissed it.
“Dearest,” he said, “dearest Angela, who am I that you should love me so? What have I done that such a treasure should be given to me? I hope that it may be as you say!”
“It will be as I say,” she answered, as she bent to kiss him. And they went on in silence.
Philip arrived home about one o’clock on the Monday, and, after their nursery dinner, Arthur made his way to the study, and soon found himself in the dread presence — for what presence is more dread (most people would rather face a chief-justice with the gout)— of the man whose daughter he was about to ask in marriage.
Philip, whom he found seated by a tray, the contents of which he seemed in no humour to touch, received him with his customary politeness, saying, with a smile, that he hoped he had not come to tell him that he was sick of the place and its inhabitants, and was going away.
“Far from it, Mr. Caresfoot, I come to speak to you on a very different subject.”
Philip glanced up with a quick look of expectant curiosity, but said nothing.
“In short,” said Arthur, desperately, “I come to ask you to sanction my engagement to Angela.”
A pause — a very awkward pause — ensued.
“You are, then, engaged to my daughter?”
“Subject to your consent, I am.”
Then came another pause.
“You will understand me, Heigham, when I say that you take me rather by surprise in this business. Your acquaintance with her has been short.”
“That is true, but I have seen a great deal of her.”
“Perhaps; but she knows absolutely nothing of the world, and her preference for you — for, as you say you are engaged to her, I presume she has shown a preference — may be a mistake, merely a young girl’s romantic idea.”
Arthur thought of his conversation of the previous day with Angela, and could not help smiling as he answered,
“I think if you ask her that, she will tell you that is not the case.”
“Heigham, I will be frank with you. I like you, and you have, I believe, sufficient means. Of course, you know that my daughter will have nothing — at any rate, till I am dead,” he added, quickly.
“I never thought about the matter, but I shall be only too glad to marry her with nothing but herself.”
“Very good. I was going to say that, notwithstanding this, marriage is an important matter; and I must have time to think over it before I give you a decided answer, say a week. I shall not, however, expect you to leave here unless you wish to do so, nor shall I seek to place any restrictions on your intercourse with Angela, since it would appear that the mischief is already done. I am flattered by your proposal; but I must have time, and you must understand that in this instance hesitation does not necessarily mean consent.”
In affairs of this nature a man is satisfied with small mercies, and willing to put up with inconveniences that appear trifling in comparison with the disasters that might have overtaken him. Arthur was no exception to the general rule. Indeed, he was profuse in his thanks, and, buoyed up with all the confidence of youth, felt sure in his heart that he would soon find a way to extinguish any objections that might still linger in Philip’s mind.
His would-be father-inlaw contented himself with acknowledging his remarks with courtesy, and the interview came to an end.
Arthur gone, however, his host lost all his calmness of demeanour, and, rising from his untasted meal, paced up and down the room in thought. Everything had, he reflected, fallen out as he wished. Young Heigham wished to marry his daughter, and he could not wish for a better husband. Save for the fatality which had sent that woman to him on her fiend’s errand, he would have given his consent at once, and been glad to give it. Not that he meant to refuse it — he had no such idea. And then he began to think what, supposing that Lady Bellamy’s embassy had been of a nature that he could entertain, which it was not, it would mean to him. It would mean the realization of the work and aspirations of twenty years; it would mean his re-entry into the property and position from which he had, according to his own view, been unjustly ousted; it would mean, last but not least, triumph over George. And now chance, mighty chance (as fools call Providence), had at last thrown into his hands a lever with which it would be easy to topple over every stumbling-block that lay in his path to triumph; more, he might even be able to spoil that Egyptian George, giving him less than his due.
Oh, how he hungered for the broad acres of his birthright! longing for them as a lover longs for his lost bride. The opportunity would never come again; why should he throw it away? To do so would be to turn his cousin into an open and implacable foe. Why should he allow this girl, whose birth had bereft him of the only creature he had ever loved, whose sex had alienated the family estates, and for whose company he cared nothing, to come as a destruction on his plans? She would be well-off; the man loved her. As for her being engaged to this young Heigham, women soon got over those things. After all, now that he came to think of the matter calmly, what valid cause was there why the thing should not be?
And as he paced to and fro, and thought thus, an answer came into his mind. For there rose up before him a vision of his dying wife, and there sounded in his ears the murmur of her half-forgotten voice, that, for all its broken softness, had, with its last accents, called down God’s winged vengeance and His everlasting doom on him who would harm her unprotected child. And, feeling that if he did this thing, on him would be the vengeance and the doom, he thought of the shadows of the night, and grew afraid.
When Arthur and his host met, according to their custom, that evening, no allusion was made on either side to their conversation of the afternoon, nor did her father even speak a word to Angela on the subject. Life, to all appearance, went on in the old house precisely as though nothing had happened. Philip did not attempt to put the smallest restraint on Arthur and his daughter, and studiously shut his eyes to the pretty obvious signs of their mutual affection. For them, the long June days were golden, but all too short. Every morning found their mutual love more perfect, but when the flakes of crimson light faded from the skies, and night dropped her veil over the tall trees and peaceful lake, by some miracle it had grown deeper and more perfect still. Day by day, Arthur discovered new charms in Angela; here some hidden knowledge, there an unsuspected grace, and everywhere an all-embracing charity and love. Day by day he gazed deeper into the depths of her mind, and still there were more to plumb. For it was a storehouse of noble thoughts and high ambitions — ambitions, many of which could only find fulfilment in another world than this. And, the more he saw of her, the prouder he was to think that such a perfect creature should so dearly love himself; and with the greater joy did he look forward to that supreme and happy hour when he should call her his. And so day added itself to day, and found them happy.
Indeed, the aspect of their fortunes seemed as smooth and smiling as the summer surface of the lake. About Philip’s final consent to their engagement they did not trouble themselves, judging, not unnaturally, that his conduct was in itself a guarantee of approval. If he meant to raise any serious objections, he would surely have done so before, Arthur would urge, and Angela would quite agree with him, and wonder what parent could find it in his heart to object to her bonnie-eyed lover.
What a merciful provision of Providence it is that throws a veil over the future, only to be pierced by the keenest-eyed of Scotchmen! Where should we find a flavour in those unfrequent cups that the shyest of the gods, Joy, holds to our yearning lips, could we know of the bitter that lurks in the tinselled bowl? Surely we have much to be thankful for, but for nothing should we be so grateful as for this blessed impotence of foresight!
But, as it is often on the bluest days that the mercury begins to sink beneath the breath of far-off hurricane, so there is a warning spirit implanted in sensitive minds that makes them mistrustful of too great happiness. We feel that, for most of us, the wheel of our fortunes revolves too quickly to allow of a long continuance of unbroken joy.
“Arthur,” said Angela, one morning, when eight days had passed since her father’s return from town, “we are too happy. We should throw something into the lake.”
“I have not got a ring, except the one you gave me,” he answered; for his signet was on his finger. “So, unless we sacrifice Aleck or the ravens, I don’t know what it is to be.”
“Don’t joke, Arthur. I tell you we are too happy.”
Could Arthur have seen through an acre or so of undergrowth as Angela uttered these words, he would have perceived a very smart page-boy with the Bellamy crest on his buttons delivering a letter to Philip. It is true that there was nothing particularly alarming about that, but its contents might have given a point to Angela’s forebodings. It ran thus:
“Rewtham House, Monday.
“My dear Mr. Caresfoot,
“With reference to our conversation last week about your daughter and G., can you come over and have a quiet chat with me this afternoon?
“Sincerely yours,
“Anne Bellamy.”
Philip read this note, and then re-read it, knowing in his heart that now was his opportunity to act up to his convictions, and put an end to the whole transaction in a few decisive words. But a man who has for so many years given place to the devil of avarice, even though it be avarice with a legitimate object, cannot shake himself free from his clothes in a moment; even when, as in Philip’s case, honour and right, to say nothing of a still more powerful factor, superstition, speak so loudly in his ears. Surely, he thought, there would be no harm in hearing what she had to say. He could explain his reasons for having nothing to do with the matter so much better in person. Such mental struggles have only one end. Presently the smart page-boy bore back this note:
“Dear Lady Bellamy,
“I will be with you at half-past three.
“P.C.”
It was with very curious sensations that Philip was that afternoon shown into a richly furnished boudoir in Rewtham House. He had not been in that room since he had talked to Maria Lee, sitting on that very sofa now occupied by Lady Bellamy’s still beautiful form, and he could not but feel that it was a place of evil omen for him.
Lady Bellamy rose to greet him with her most fascinating smile.
“This is very kind,” she said, as she motioned him to a seat, which Philip afterwards discovered had been carefully arranged so as to put his features in the full light, whilst, sitting on the sofa, her own were concealed. “Well, Mr. Caresfoot,” she began, after a little pause, “I suppose I had better come to the point at once. First of all, I presume that, as you anticipated would be the case, there exists some sort of understanding between Mr. Heigham and your daughter.”
Philip nodded.
“Well, your cousin is as determined as ever about the matter. Indeed, he is simply infatuated or bewitched, I really don’t know which.”
“I am sorry for it, Lady Bellamy, as I cannot ——”
“One moment, Mr. Caresfoot; first let me tell you his offer, then we can talk it over. He offers, conditionally on his marriage with your daughter, to sell you the Isleworth estates at a fair valuation hereafter to be agreed upon, and to make a large settlement.”
“And what part does he wish me to play in the matter?”
“This. First, you must get rid of young Heigham, and prevent him from holding any communication, either with Angela herself, or with any other person connected with this place, for one year from the date of his departure. Secondly, you must throw no obstacle in George’s path. Thirdly, if required, you must dismiss her old nurse, Pigott.”
“It cannot be, Lady Bellamy. I came here to tell you so. I dare not force my daughter into such a marriage for all the estates in England.”
Lady Bellamy laughed.
“It is amusing,” she said, “to see a father afraid of his own daughter; but you are over-hasty, Mr. Caresfoot. Who asked you to force her? All you are asked to do is not to interfere, and leave the rest to myself and George. You will have nothing to do with it one way or the other, nor will any responsibility rest with you. Besides, it is very probable that your cousin will live down his fancy, or some other obstacle will arise to put an end to the thing, in which case Mr. Heigham will come back at the end of his year’s probation, and events will take their natural course. It is only wise and right that you should try the constancy of these young lovers, instead of letting them marry out of hand. If, on the other hand, Angela should in the course of the year declare a preference for her cousin, surely that will be no affair of yours.”
“I don’t understand what your interest is in this matter, Lady Bellamy.”
“My dear Mr. Caresfoot, what does my interest matter to you? Perhaps I have one, perhaps I have not; all women love match-making, you know; what really is important is your decision,” and she shot a glance at him from the heavy-lidded eyes, only to recognize that he was not convinced by her arguments, or, if convinced, obstinate. “By the way,” she went on, slowly, “George asked me to make a payment to you on his account, money that has, he says, been long owing, but which it has not hitherto been convenient to repay.”
“What is the sum?” asked Philip, abstractedly.
“A large one; a thousand pounds.”
It did not require the peculiar intonation she threw into her voice to make the matter clear to him. He was well aware that no such sum was owing.
“Here is the cheque,” she went on; and, taking from her purse a signed and crossed cheque upon a London banker, she unfolded it and threw it upon the table, watching him the while.
Philip gazed at the money with the eyes of a hungry wolf. A thousand pounds! That might be his for the asking, nay, for the taking. It would bind him to nothing. The miser’s greed took possession of him as he looked. Slowly he raised his hand, twitching with excitement, and stretched it out towards the cheque, but, before his fingers touched it, Lady Bellamy, as though by accident, dropped her white palm upon the precious paper.
“I suppose that Mr. Heigham will leave tomorrow on the understanding we mentioned?” she said carelessly, but in a significant tone.
Philip nodded.
The hand was withdrawn as carelessly as it had come, leaving the cheque, blushing in all its naked beauty, upon the table. Philip took it as deliberately as he could, and put it in his pocket. Then, rising, he said good-bye, adding, as he passed through the door:
“Remember, I have no responsibility in the matter. I wash my hands of it, and wish to hear nothing about it.”
“The thousand pounds has done it,” reflected Lady Bellamy. “I told George that he would rise greedily at money. I have not watched him for twenty years for nothing. Fancy selling an only daughter’s happiness in life for a thousand pounds, and such a daughter too! I wonder how much he would take to murder her, if he were certain that he would not be found out. Upon my word, my work grows quite interesting. That cur, Philip, is as good as a play,” and she laughed her own peculiar laugh.
Into Philip’s guilty thoughts, as he wended his homeward way, we will not inquire, and indeed, for all the warm glow that the thousand pound cheque in his pocket diffused through his system, they were not to be envied. Perhaps no scoundrel presents at heart such a miserable object to himself and all who know him, as the scoundrel who attempts to deceive himself and, whilst reaping its profits, tries to shoulder the responsibility of his iniquity on to the backs of others!
Unfortunately, in this prosaic world of bargains, one cannot receive cheques for one thousand pounds without, in some shape or form, giving a quid pro quo. Now Philip’s quid was to rid his house and the neighbourhood of Arthur Heigham, his guest and his daughter’s lover. It was not a task he liked, but the unearned cheque in his breeches-pocket continually reminded him of the obligation it entailed.
When Arthur came to smoke his pipe with his host that evening, the latter looked so gloomy and depressed, that he wondered to himself if he was going to be treated to a repetition of the shadow scene, little guessing that there was something much more personally unpleasant before him.
“Heigham,” Philip said, suddenly, and looking studiously in the other direction, “I want to speak to you. I have been thinking over our conversation of about a week ago on the subject of your engagement to Angela, and have now come to a final determination. I may say at once that I approve of you in every way” (here his hearer’s heart bounded with delight), “but, under all the circumstances, I don’t think that I should be right in sanctioning an immediate engagement. You are not sufficiently sure of each other for that. I may seem old-fashioned, but I am a great believer in the virtue of constancy, and I’m anxious, in your own interests, to put yours and Angela’s to the test. The terms that I can offer you are these. You must leave here tomorrow, and must give me your word of honour as a gentleman — which I know will be the most effectual guarantee that I can take from you — that you will not for the space of a year either attempt to see Angela again, or to hold any written communication with her, or anybody in any way connected with her. The year ended, you can return, and, should you both still be of the same mind, you can then marry her as soon as you like. If you decline to accede to these terms — which I believe to be to your mutual ultimate advantage — I must refuse my consent to the engagement altogether.”
A silence followed this speech. The match that Arthur had lit before Philip began, burnt itself out between his fingers without his appearing to suffer any particular inconvenience, and now his pipe fell with a crash into the grate, and broke into fragments — a fit symbol of the blow dealt to his hopes. For some moments he was so completely overwhelmed at the idea of losing Angela for a whole long year, losing her as completely as though she were dead, that he could not answer. At length he found his voice, and said, hoarsely:
“Yours are hard terms.”
“I cannot argue the point with you, Heigham; such as they are, they are my terms, founded on what I consider I owe to my daughter. Do you accept them?”
“I cannot answer you off-hand. My happiness and Angela’s are too vitally concerned to allow me to do so. I must consult her first.”
“Very good, I have no objection; but you must let me have your answer by ten tomorrow.”
Had Arthur only known his own strength and Philip’s weakness — the strength that honesty and honour ever have in the face of dishonour and dishonesty — had he known the hesitating feebleness of Philip’s avarice-tossed mind, how easy it would have been for him to tear his bald arguments to sheds, and, by the bare exhibition of unshaken purpose, to confound and disallow his determinations — had he then and there refused to agree to his ultimatum, so divided was Philip in his mind and so shaken by superstitious fears, that he would have accepted it as an omen, and have yielded to a decision of character that had no real existence in himself. But he did not know; indeed, how could he know? and he was, besides, too thorough a gentleman to allow himself to suspect foul play. And so, too sad for talk, and oppressed by the dread sense of coming separation from her whom he loved more dearly than his life, he sought his room, there to think and pace, to pace and think, until the stars had set.
When, wearied out at length, he threw himself into bed, it was only to exchange bad for worse; for on such occasions sleep is worse than wakefulness, it is so full of dreams, big with coming pain. Shortly after dawn he got up again, and went into the garden and listened to the birds singing their matin hymn. But he was in no mood for the songs of birds, however sweet, and it was a positive relief to him when old Jakes emerged, his cross face set in the gladness of the morning, like a sullen cloud in the blue sky, and began to do something to his favourite bed of cabbages. Not that Arthur was fond of old Jakes; on the contrary, ever since the coffin-stand conversation, which betrayed, he considered, a malevolent mind, he detested him personally; but still he set a fancy value on him because he was connected with the daily life of his betrothed.
And then at last out came Angela, having spied him from behind the curtains of her window, clothed in the same white gown in which he had first beheld her, and which he consequently considered the prettiest of frocks. Never did she look more lovely than when she came walking towards him that morning, with her light, proud step, which was so full of grace and womanly dignity. Never had he thought her more sweet and heart-compelling, than when, having first made sure that Jakes had retreated to feed his pigs, she shyly lifted her bright face to be greeted with his kiss. But she was quick of sympathy, and had learned to read him like an open page, and before his lips had fairly fallen on her own she knew that things had gone amiss.
“Oh, what is it, Arthur?” she said, with a little pant of fear.
“Be brave, dear, and I will tell you.” And in somewhat choky tones, he recounted word for word what had passed between her father and himself.
She listened in perfect silence, and bore the blow as a brave woman should. When he had finished, she said, with a little tremor in her voice:
“You will not forget me in a year, will you, Arthur?”
He kissed her by way of answer, and then they agreed to go together to Philip, and try to turn him from his purpose.
Breakfast was not a cheerful meal that day, and Pigott, noticing the prevailing depression, remarked, with sarcasm, that they might, for all appearance to the contrary, have been married for twenty years; but even this spirited sally did not provoke a laugh. Ten o’clock, the hour that was to decide their fate, came all too soon, and it was with very anxious hearts that they took their way to the study. Philip, who was seated in residence, appeared to view Angela’s arrival with some uneasiness.
“Of course, Angela,” he said, “I am always glad to see you, but I hardly expected ——”
“I beg your pardon for intruding, father,” she answered; “but, as this is very important to me, I thought that I had better come too, and hear what is settled.”
As it was evident that she meant to stay, Philip did not attempt to gainsay her.
“Oh, very well, very well — I suppose you have heard the terms upon which I am prepared to consent to your engagement.”
“Yes, Arthur has told me; and it is to implore you to modify them that we have come. Father, they are cruel terms — to be dead to each other for a whole long year.”
“I cannot help it, Angela. I am sorry to inflict pain upon either of you; but I have arrived at them entirely in your own interests, and after a great deal of anxious thought. Believe me, a year’s probation will be very good for both of you; it is not probable that, where my only child is concerned, I should wish to do anything except what is for her happiness!”
Arthur looked rebellion at Angela. Philip saw it, and added:
“Of course you can defy me — it is, I believe, rather the fashion for girls, nowadays, to do so — but, if you do, you must both clearly understand, first, that you cannot marry without my consent till the first of May next, or very nearly a year hence, when Angela comes of age, and that I shall equally forbid all intercourse in the interval; and secondly, that when you do so, it will be against my wish, and that I shall cut her name out of my will, for this property is only entailed in the male line. It now only remains for me to ask you if you agree to my conditions.”
Angela answered him, speaking very slowly and clearly:
“I accept them on my own behalf, not because I understand them, or think them right, or because of your threats, but because, though you do not care for me, I am your daughter, and should obey you — and believe that you wish to do what is best for me. That is why I accept, although it will make my life wretched for a year.”
“Do you hear what she says?” said Philip, turning to Arthur. “Do you also agree?”
He answered boldly, and with some temper (how would he have answered could he have seen the thousand pound cheque that was reposing upon the table in Philip’s rusty pocket-book, and known for what purpose it came there?).
“If it had not been Angela’s wish, I would never have agreed. I think your terms preposterous, and I only hope that you have some satisfactory reason for them; for you have not shown us any. But since she takes this view of the matter, and because, so far as I can see, you have completely cornered us, I suppose I must. You are her father, and cannot in nature wish to thwart her happiness; and if you have any plan of causing her to forget me — I don’t want to be conceited, but I believe that it will fail.” Here Angela smiled somewhat sadly. “So, unless one of us dies before the year is up, I shall come back to be married on the 9th of June next year.”
“Really, my dear Heigham, your way of talking is so aggressive, that some fathers might be tempted to ask you not to come back at all; but perhaps it is, under the circumstances, excusable.”
“You would probably think so, if you were in my place,” blurted out Arthur.
“You give me, then, your word of honour as a gentleman that you will attempt, either in person or by letter, no communication with Angela or with anybody about this place for one year from today?”
“On the condition that, at the end of the year, I may return and marry her as soon as I like.”
“Certainly; your marriage can take place on the 9th of June next, if you like, and care to bring a license and a proper settlement — say, of half your income — with you,” answered Philip, with a half smile.
“I take you at your word,” said Arthur, eagerly, “that is, if Angela agrees.” Angela made no signs of disagreement. “Then, on those terms, I give you my promise.”
“Very good. Then that is settled, and I will send for a dog-cart to take you to the four o’clock train. I fear you will hardly be ready for the 12.25. I shall, however, hope,” he added, “to have the pleasure of presenting this young lady to you for good and all on this day next year. Good-bye for the present. I shall see you before you go.”
It is painful to have to record that when Arthur got outside the door, and out of Angela’s hearing, he cursed Philip, in his grief and anger, for the space of some minutes.
To linger over those last hours could only be distressing to the sympathetic reader of this history, more especially if he, or she, has ever had the misfortune to pass through such a time in their own proper persons. The day of any one’s departure is always wretched, but much more is it wretched, when the person departing is a lover, whose face will not be seen and of whom no postman will bear tidings for a whole long year.
Some comfort, however, these two took in looking forward to that joyous day when the year of probation should have been gathered to its predecessors, and in making the most minute arrangements for their wedding: how Angela was to warn Mr. Fraser that his services would be required; where they should go to for their honeymoon, and even of what flowers the wedding bouquet, which Arthur was to bring down from town with him, should be composed.
And thus the hours passed away, all too quickly, and each of them strove to be merry, in order to keep up the spirits of the other. But it is not in human nature to feel cheerful with a lump of ice upon the heart! Dinner was even more dismal than breakfast, and Pigott, who had been informed of the impending misfortune, and who was distrustful of Philip’s motives, though she did not like to add to the general gloom by saying so, made, after the manner of half-educated people, a painful and infectious exhibition of her grief.
“Poor Aleck,” said Angela, when the time drew near, bending down over the dog to hide a tear, as she had once before bent down to hide a blush; “poor Aleck, I shall miss you almost as much as your master.”
“You will not miss him, Angela, because I am going to make you a present of him if you will keep him.”
“That is very good of you, dear. I shall be glad to have him for your sake.”
“Well, keep him, love, he is a good dog; he will quite have transferred his allegiance by the time I come back. I hope you won’t have done the same, Angela.”
“Oh, Arthur, why will you so often make me angry by saying such things? The sun will forget to shine before I forget you.”
“Hush, love, I did not mean it,” and he took her in his arms. And so they sat there together under the oak where first they had met, hand in hand and heart to heart, and it was at this moment that the self-reliant strength, and more beautiful serenity of Angela’s character as compared with her lover’s came into visible play. For whilst, as the moment of separation drew nigh, he could scarcely contain his grief, she on the other hand grew more and more calm, strengthening his weakness with her quiet power; and bidding him seek consolation in his trouble at the hands of Him who for His own purposes decreed it.
“Dearest,” she said, in answer to his complainings, “there are so many things in the world that we cannot understand, and yet they must be right and lead to a good end. What may happen to us before this year is out, of course we cannot say, but I feel that all love is immortal, and that there is a perfect life awaiting us, if not in this world, then in the next. Remember, dear, that these few years are, after all, but as a breath to the general air, or as that dew-drop to the waters of the lake, when compared with the future that awaits us there, and that until we attain that future we cannot really know each other, or the true meaning and purpose of our love. So look forward to it without fear, dear heart, and if it should chance that I should pass out of your life, or that other ties should spring up round you that shall forbid the outward expression of our love ——” Here Arthur started and was about to interrupt, but she stopped him. “Do not start, Arthur. Who can read the future? Stranger things have happened, and if, I say, such a thing should come about in our case, then remember, I implore you, that in that future lies the answer to the puzzles of the world, and turn your eyes to it, as to the horizon beyond which you will find me waiting for you, and not only me, but all that you have ever loved. Only, dear, try to be a good man and love me always.”
He looked at her in wonder.
“Angela,” he said, “what has made you so different from other women? With all whom I have known, love is an affair of passion or amusement, of the world and the day, but yours gazes towards Heaven, and looks to find its real utterance in the stillness of Eternity! To be loved by you, my dear, would be worth a century of sorrows.”
At last the moment came, as all moments good and bad must come. To Pigott, who was crying, he gave a hug and a five-pound note, to Aleck, a pat on the head, to Philip, who could not look him in the face, a shake of the hand, and to Angela, who bravely smiled into his eyes — a long last kiss.
But, when the cruel wheels began to crunch upon the gravel, the great tears welling to her eyes blotted him from sight. Blindly she made her way up to her room, and throwing herself upon the bed let her unrestrained sorrow loose, feeling that she was indeed desolate and alone.
When Angela was still quite a child, the permanent inhabitants of Sherborne Lane, King William Street, in the city of London, used to note a very pretty girl, of small statue and modest ways, passing out — every evening after the city gentlemen had locked up their offices and gone home — from the quiet of the lane into the roar and rush of the city. This young girl was Mildred James, the only daughter of a struggling, a very struggling, city doctor, and her daily mission was to go to the cheap markets, and buy the provisions that were to last the Sherborne Lane household (for her father lived in the same rooms that he practised in) for the ensuing twenty-four hours. The world was a hard place for poor Mildred in those days of provision hunting, when so little money had to pay for so many necessaries, and to provide also for the luxuries that were necessaries to her invalid mother. Some years later, when she was a sweet maiden of eighteen, her mother died, but medical competition was keen in Sherborne Lane, and her removal did not greatly alleviate the pressure of poverty. At last, one evening, when she was about twenty years of age, a certain Mr. Carr, an old gentleman with whom her father had some acquaintance, sent up a card with a pencilled message on it to the effect that he would be glad to see Dr. James.
“Run, Mildred,” said her father, “and tell Mr. Carr that I will be with him in a minute. It will never do to see a new patient in this coat.”
Mildred departed, and, gliding into the gloomy consulting-room like a sunbeam, delivered her message to the old gentleman, who appeared to be in some pain, and prepared to return.
“Don’t go away,” almost shouted the aged patient; “I have crushed my finger in a door, and it hurts most confoundedly. You are something to look at in this hole, and distract my attention.”
Mildred thought to herself that this was an odd way of paying a compliment, if it was meant for one; but then, old gentlemen with crushed fingers are not given to weighing their words.
“Are you Dr. James’ daughter?” he asked, presently.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ugh, I have lived most of my life in Sherborne Lane, and never saw anything half so pretty in it before. Confound this finger!”
At this moment the doctor himself arrived, and wanted to dismiss Mildred, but Mr. Carr, who was a headstrong old gentleman, vowed that no one else should hold his injured hand whilst it was dressed, and so she stayed just long enough for him to fall as completely in love with her shell-like face was though he had been twenty instead of nearly seventy.
Now, Mr. Carr was not remarkable for good looks, and in addition to having seen out so many summers, had also buried two wives. It will, therefore, be clear that he was scarcely the suitor that a lovely girl, conscious of capacities for deep affection, would have selected of her own free will; but, on the other hand, he was honest and kind-hearted, and, what was more to the point, perhaps the wealthiest wine — merchant in the city. Mildred resisted as long as she could, but want is a hard master, and a father’s arguments are difficult to answer, and in the end she married him, and, what is more, made him a good and faithful wife.
She never had any cause to regret it, for he was kindness itself towards her, and when he died, some five years afterwards, having no children of his own, he left her sole legatee of all his enormous fortune, bound up by no restrictions as to re-marriage. About this time also her father died, and she was left as much alone in the world as it is possible for a young and pretty woman, possessing in her own right between twenty and thirty thousand a year, to be.
Needless to say, Mrs. Carr was thenceforth one of the catches of her generation; but nobody could catch her, though she alone knew how many had tried. Once she made a list of all the people who had proposed to her; it included amongst others a bishop, two peers, three members of parliament, no less than five army officers, an American, and a dissenting clergyman.
“It is perfectly marvellous, my dear,” she said to her companion, Agatha Terry, “how fond people are of twenty thousand a year, and yet they all said that they loved me for myself, that is, all except the dissenter, who wanted me to help to ‘feed his flock,’ and I liked him the best of the lot, because he was the honestest.”
Mrs. Carr had a beautiful house in Grosvenor Square, a place in Leicestershire, where she hunted a little, a place in the Isle of Wight that she rarely visited, and, lastly, a place at Madeira where she lived for nearly half the year. There never had been a breath of scandal against her name, nor had she given cause for any. “As for loving,” she would say, “the only things she loved were beetles and mummies,” for she was a clever naturalist, and a faithful student of the lore of the ancient Egyptians. The beetles, she would explain, had been the connecting link between the two sciences, since beetles had led her to scarabaei, and scarabaei to the human husks with which they are to be found; but this statement, though amusing, was not strictly accurate, as she had in reality contracted the taste from her late husband, who had left her a large collection of Egyptian antiquities.
“I do adore a mummy,” she would say, “I am small enough in mind and body already, but it makes me feel inches smaller, and I like to measure my own diminutiveness.”
She was not much of a reader; life was, she declared, too short to waste in study; but, when she did take up a book, it was generally of a nature that most women of her class would have called stiff, and then she could read it without going to sleep.
In addition to these occupations, Mrs. Carr had had various crazes at different stages of her widowhood, which had now endured for some five years. She had travelled, she had “gone-in for art;” once she had speculated a little, but finding that, for a woman, it was a losing game, she was too shrewd to continue this last pastime. But she always came back to her beetles and her mummies.
Still, with all her money, her places, her offers of marriage, and her self-made occupations, Mildred Carr was essentially “a weary woman, sunk deep in ease, and sated with her life.” Within that little frame of hers, there beat a great active heart, ever urging her onwards towards an unknown end. She would describe herself as an “ill-regulated woman,” and the description was not without justice, for she did not possess that placid, even mind which is so necessary to the comfort of English ladies, and which enables many of them to bury a husband or a lover as composedly as they take him. She would have given worlds to be able to fall in love with some one, to fill up the daily emptiness of her existence with another’s joys and griefs, but she could not. Men passed before her in endless procession, all sorts and conditions of them, and for the most part were anxious to marry her, but they might as well have been a string of wax dolls for aught she could care about them. To her eyes, they were nothing more than a succession of frock-coats and tall hats, full of shine and emptiness, signifying nothing. For their opinion, too, and that of the society which they helped to form, she had a most complete and wrong-headed contempt. She cared nothing for the ordinary laws of social life, and was prepared to break through them on emergency, as a wasp breaks through a spider’s web. Perhaps she guessed that a good deal of breaking would be forgiven to the owner of such a lovely face, and more than twenty thousand a year. With all this, she was extremely observant, and possessed, unknown to herself, great powers of mind, and great, though dormant, capacities for passion. In short, this little woman, with the baby face, smiling and serene as the blue sky that hides the gathering hurricane, was rather odder than the majority of her sex, which is perhaps saying a great deal.
One day, about a week before Arthur departed from the Abbey House, Agatha Terry was sitting in the blue drawing-room in the house in Grosvenor Square, when Mrs. Carr came in, almost at a run, slammed the door behind her, and plumped herself down in a chair with a sigh of relief.
“Agatha, give orders to pack up. We will go to Madeira by the next boat.”
“Goodness gracious, Mildred! across that dreadful bay again; and just think how hot it will be, and the beginning of the season too.”
“Now, Agatha, I’m going, and there’s an end of it, so it is no use arguing. You can stay here, and give a series of balls and dinners, if you like.”
“Nonsense, dear; me give parties indeed, and you at Madeira! Why, it’s just as though you asked Ruth to entertain the reapers without Naomi. I’ll go and give the orders; but I do hope that it will be calm. Why do you want to go now?”
“I’ll tell you. Lord Minster has been proposing to me again, and announces his intention of going on doing so till I accept him. You know, he has just got into the Cabinet, so he has celebrated the event by asking me to marry him, for the third time.”
“Poor fellow! Perhaps he is very fond of you.”
“Not a bit of it. He is fond of my good looks and my money. I will tell you the substance of his speech this morning. He stood like this, with his hands in his pockets, and said, ‘I am now a cabinet minister. It is a good thing that a cabinet minister should have somebody presentable to sit at the head of his table. You are presentable. I appreciate beauty, when I have time to think about it. I observe that you are beautiful. I am not very well-off for my position. You, on the other hand, are immensely rich. With your money, I can, in time, become Prime Minister. It is, consequently, evidently to my advantage that you should marry me, and I have sacrificed a very important appointment in order to come and settle it.’”
Agatha laughed.
“And how did you answer him?”
“In his own style. ‘Lord Minster,’ I said, ‘I am, for the third time, honoured by your flattering proposal, but I have no wish to ornament your table, no desire to expose my beauty to your perpetual admiration, and no ambition to advance your political career. I do not love you, and I had rather become the wife of a crossing-sweeper that I loved, than that of a member of the government for whom I have every respect, but no affection.’
“‘As the wife of a crossing-sweeper, it is probable,’ he answered, ‘that you would be miserable. As my wife, you would certainly be admired and powerful, and consequently happy.’
“‘Lord Minster,’ I said, ‘you have studied human nature but very superficially, if you have not learnt that it is better for a woman to be miserable with the man she loves, than “admired, powerful, and consequently happy,” with one who has no attraction for her.’
“‘Your remark is interesting,’ he replied; ‘but I think that there is something paradoxical about it. I must be going now, as I have only five minutes to get to Westminster; but I will think it over, and answer it when we renew our conversation, which I propose to do very shortly,’ and he was gone before I could get in another word.”
“But why should that make you go to Madeira?”
“Because, my dear, if I don’t, so sure as I am a living woman, that man will tire me out and marry me, and I dislike him, and don’t want to marry him. I have a strong will, but his is of iron.”
And so it came to pass that the names of Mrs. Carr, Miss Terry, and three servants, appeared upon the passenger list of Messrs. Donald Currie & Co.‘s royal mail steamship Warwick Castle, due to sail for Madeira and the Cape ports on the 14th of June.