Arthur arrived in town in a melancholy condition. His was a temperament peculiarly liable to suffer from attacks of depression, and he had, with some excuse, a sufficiently severe one on him now. Do what he would he could not for a single hour free his mind from the sick longing to see or hear from Angela, that, in addition to the mental distress it occasioned him, amounted almost to a physical pain. After two or three days of lounging about his club — for he was in no mood for going out — he began to feel that this sort of thing was intolerable, and that it was absolutely necessary for him to go somewhere or do something.
It so happened that, just after he had come to this decision, he overheard two men, who were sitting at the next table to him in the club dining-room, talking of the island of Madeira, and speaking of it as a charming place. He accepted this as an omen, and determined that to Madeira he would go. And, indeed, the place would suit him as well as any other to get through a portion of his year of probation in, and, whilst affording a complete change of scene, would not be too far from England.
And so it came to pass that on the morrow Arthur found himself in the office of Messrs. Donald Currie, for the purpose of booking his berth in the vessel that was due to sail on the 14th. There he was informed by the very affable clerk, who assisted him to choose his cabin, that the vessel was unusually empty, and that, up to the present time, berths had been taken for only five ladies, and two of them Jewesses.
“However,” the clerk added, by way of consolation, “this one,” pointing to Mrs. Carr’s name on the list, “is as good as a cargo,” and he whistled expressively.
“What do you mean?” asked Arthur, his curiosity slightly excited.
“I mean — my word, here she comes.”
At that moment the swing doors of the office were pushed open, and there came through them one of the sweetest, daintiest little women Arthur had ever seen. She was no longer quite young, she might be eight and twenty or thirty, but, on the other hand, maturity had but added to the charms of youth. She had big, brown eyes that Arthur thought could probably look languishing, if they chose, and that even in repose were full of expression, a face soft and blooming as a peach, and round as a baby’s, surmounted by a quantity of nut-brown hair, the very sweetest mouth, the lips rather full, and just showing a line of pearl, and lastly, what looked rather odd on such an infantile countenance, a firm, square, and very determined, if very diminutive chin. For the rest, it was difficult to say which was the most perfect, her figure or her dress.
All of which, of course, had little interest for Arthur, but what did rather startle him was her voice, when she spoke. From such a woman one would naturally have expected a voice of a corresponding nature, namely, one of the soft and murmuring order. But hers, on the contrary, though sweet, was decided, and clear as a bell, and with a peculiar ring in it that he would have recognized amongst a thousand others.
On her entrance, Arthur stepped on one side.
“I have come to say,” she said, with a slight bow of recognition to the clerk; “that I have changed my mind about my berth, instead of the starboard deck cabin, I should like to have the port. I think that it will be cooler at this time of year, and also will you please make arrangements for three horses.”
“I am excessively sorry, Mrs. Carr,” the clerk answered; “but the port cabin is engaged — in fact, this gentleman has just taken it.”
“Oh, in that case”— with a little blush —“there is an end of the question.”
“By no means,” interrupted Arthur. “It is a matter of perfect indifference to me where I go. I beg that you will take it.”
“Oh, thank you. You are very good, but I could not think of robbing you of your cabin.”
“I must implore you to do so. Rather than there should be any difficulty, I will go below.” And then, addressing the clerk, “Be so kind as to change the cabin.”
“I owe you many thanks for your courtesy,” said Mrs. Carr, with a little curtsey.
Arthur took off his hat.
“Then we will consider that settled. Good morning, or perhaps I should say au revoir;” and, bowing again, he left the office.
“What is that gentleman’s name?” Mrs. Carr asked, when he was gone.
“Here it is, madam, on the list. ‘Arthur Preston Heigham, passenger to Madeira.’”
“Arthur Preston Heigham!” Mrs. Carr said to herself, as she made her way down to her carriage in Fenchurch Street. “Arthur is pretty, and Preston is pretty, but I don’t much like Heigham. At any rate, there is no doubt about his being a gentleman. I wonder what he is going to Madeira for? He has an interesting face. I think I am glad we are going to be fellow-passengers.”
The two days that remained to him in town, Arthur spent in making his preparations for departure; getting money, buying, after the manner of young Englishmen starting on a voyage to foreign parts, a large and fearfully sharp hunting-knife, as though Madeira were the home of wild beasts, and laying in a stock of various other articles of a useless description, such as impenetrable sun-helmets and leather coats.
The boat was to sail at noon on Friday, and on the Thursday evening he left Paddington by the mail that reaches Dartmouth about midnight. On the pier, he and one or two other fellow-passengers found a boat waiting to take them to the great vessel, that, painted a dull grey, lay still and solemn in the harbour as they were rowed up to her, very different from the active, living thing that she was destined to become within the next twenty-four hours. The tide ebbing past her iron sides, the fresh, strong smell of the sea, the tall masts pointing skywards like gigantic fingers, the chime of the bell upon the bridge, the sleepy steward, and the stuffy cabin, were all a pleasant variation from the every-day monotony of existence, and contributed towards the conclusion that life was still partially worth living, even when it could not be lived with Angela. Indeed, so much are we the creatures of circumstance, and so liable to be influenced by surroundings, that Arthur, who, a few hours before, had been plunged into the depths of depression, turned into his narrow berth, after a tremendous struggle with the sheets — which stewards arrange on a principle incomprehensible to landlubbers, and probably only partially understood by themselves — with considerable satisfaction and a pleasurable sense of excitement.
The next morning, or rather the earlier part of it, he devoted, when he was not thinking about Angela, to arranging his goods and chattels in his small domain, to examining the lovely scenery of Dartmouth harbour — the sight of which is enough to make any outward-bound individual bitterly regret his determination to quit his native land — and to inspecting the outward man of his fellow-passengers with that icy stolidity which characterizes the true-born Briton. But the great event of the morning was the arrival of the mail-train, bringing the bags destined for various African ports, loose letters for the passengers, and a motley contingent of the passengers themselves. Amongst these latter, he had no difficulty in recognizing the two Jewesses, of whom the clerk in the office had spoken, who were accompanied by individuals, presumably their husbands, and very remarkable for the splendour of their diamond studs and the dirtiness of their nails. The only other specimen of saloon-passenger womankind that he could see was a pretty, black-eyed girl of about eighteen, who was, as he afterwards discovered, going out under the captain’s care to be a governess at the Cape, and who, to judge from the intense melancholy of her countenance, did not particularly enjoy the prospect. But, with the exception of some heavy baggage that was being worked up from a cargo-boat by the donkey-engine, and a luxurious cane-chair on the deck that bore her name, no signs were there of Mrs. Carr.
Presently the purser sent round the head-steward, a gentleman whom Arthur mistook for the first mate, so smart was his uniform, to collect the letters, and it wrung him not a little to think that he alone could send none. The bell sounded to warn all not sailing to hurry to their boats, but still there was nothing to be seen of his acquaintance of the office; and, to speak the truth, he was just a little disappointed, for what he had seen of her had piqued his curiosity, and made him anxious to see more.
“I can’t wait any longer,” he heard the captain say; “she must come on by the Kinfauns.”
It was full twelve o’clock, and the last rope was being loosed from the moorings. “Ting-ting,” went the engine-room bell. “Thud-thud,” started the great screw that would not stop again for so many restless hours. The huge vessel shuddered throughout her frame like an awakening sleeper, and growing quick with life, forged an inch or two a-head. Next, a quartermaster, came with two men to hoist up the gangway, when suddenly a boat shot alongside and hooked on, amongst the occupants of which Arthur had no difficulty in recognizing Mrs. Carr, who sat laughing, like Pleasure, at the helm. The other occupants of the boat, who were not laughing, he guessed to be her servants and the lady who figured on the passenger-list as Miss Terry, a stout, solemn-looking person in spectacles.
“Now, then, Agatha,” called out Mrs. Carr from the stern-sheets, “be quick and jump up.”
“My dear Mildred, I can’t go up there; I can’t, indeed. Why, the thing’s moving.”
“But you must go up, or else be pulled up with a rope. Here, I will show the way,” and, moving down the boat, she sprang boldly, as it rose with the swell, into the stalwart arms of the sailor who was waiting on the gangway landing-stage, and thence ran up the steps to the deck.
“Very well, I am going to Madeira. I don’t know what you are going to do; but you must make up your mind quick.”
“Can’t hold on much longer, mum,” said the boatman, “she’s getting way on now.”
“Come on, mum; I won’t let you in,” said the man of the ladder, seductively.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear, what shall I do?” groaned Miss Terry, wringing the hand that was not employed in holding on.
“John,” called Mrs. Carr to a servant who was behind Miss Terry, and looking considerably alarmed, “don’t stand there like a fool; put Miss Terry on to that ladder.”
Mrs. Carr was evidently accustomed to be obeyed, for, thus admonished, John seized the struggling and shrieking Miss Terry, and bore her to the edge of the boat, where she was caught by two sailors, and, amidst the cheers of excited passengers, fairly dragged on to the deck.
“Oh! Mrs. Carr,” said the chief officer, reproachfully, when Miss Terry had been satisfactorily deposited on a bench, “you are late again; you were late last voyage.”
“Not at all, Mr. Thompson. I hate spending longer than is necessary aboard ship, so, when the train got in, I took a boat and went for a row in the harbour. I knew that you would not go without me.”
“Oh, yes, we should have, Mrs. Carr; the skipper heard about it because he waited for you before.”
“Well, here I am, and I promise that I won’t do it again.”
Mr. Thompson laughed, and passed on. At this moment Mrs. Carr perceived Arthur, and, bowing to him, they fell into conversation about the scenery through which the boat was passing on her way to the open sea. Before very long, indeed, as soon as the vessel began to rise and fall upon the swell, this talk was interrupted by a voice from the seat where Miss Terry had been placed.
“Mildred,” it said, “I do wish you would not come to sea; I am beginning to feel ill.”
“And no wonder, if you will insist upon coming up ladders head downwards. Where’s John? He will help you to your cabin; the deck one, next to mine.”
But John had vanished with a parcel.
“Mildred, send some one quick, I beg of you,” remarked Miss Terry, in the solemn tones of one who feels that a crisis is approaching.
“I can’t see anybody except a very dirty sailor.”
“Permit me,” said Arthur, stepping to the rescue.
“You are very kind; but she can’t walk. I know her ways; she has got to the stage when she must be carried. Can you manage her?”
“I think so,” replied Arthur, “if you don’t mind holding her legs, and provided that the vessel does not roll,” and, with an effort, he hoisted Miss Terry baby-fashion into his arms, and staggered off with her towards the indicated cabin, Mrs. Carr, as suggested, holding the lower limbs of the prostrate lady. Presently she began to laugh.
“If you only knew how absurd we look,” she said.
“Don’t make me laugh,” answered Arthur, puffing; for Miss Terry was by no means light, “or I shall drop her.”
“If you do, young man,” ejaculated his apparently unconscious burden with wonderful energy, “I will never forgive you.”
A remark, the suddenness of which so startled him, that he very nearly did.
“Thank you. Now lay her quite flat, please. She won’t get up again till we drop anchor at Madeira.”
“If I live so long,” murmured the invalid.
Arthur now made his bow and departed, wondering how two women so dissimilar as Mrs. Carr and Miss Terry came to be living together. As it is a piece of curiosity that the reader may share, perhaps it had better be explained.
Miss Terry was a middle-aged relative of Mrs. Carr’s late husband, who had by a series of misfortunes been left quite destitute. Her distress having come to the knowledge of Mildred Carr, she, with the kind-hearted promptitude that distinguished her, at once came to her aid, paid her debts, and brought her to her own house to stay, where she had remained ever since under the title of companion. These two women, living thus together, had nothing whatsoever in common, save that Miss Terry took some reflected interest in beetles. As for travelling, having been brought up and lived in the same house of the same county town until she reached the age of forty-five, it was, as may be imagined, altogether obnoxious to her. Indeed, it is more than doubtful if she retained any clear impression whatsoever of the places she visited. “A set of foreign holes!” as she would call them, contemptuously. Miss Terry was, in short, neither clever nor strong minded, but so long as she could be in the company of her beloved Mildred, whom she regarded with mingled reverence and affection, she was perfectly happy. Oddly enough, this affection was reciprocated, and there probably was nobody in the world for whom Mrs. Carr cared so much as her cousin by marriage, Agatha Terry. And yet it would be impossible to imagine two women more dissimilar.
Not long after they had left Dartmouth, the afternoon set in dull, and towards evening the sea freshened sufficiently to send most of the passengers below, leaving those who remained to be finally dispersed by the penetrating drizzle that is generally to be met with off the English coast. Arthur, left alone on the heaving deck, surveyed the scene, and thought it very desolate. Around was a grey waste of tossing waters, illumined here and there by the setting rays of an angry sun, above, a wild and windy sky, with not even a sea-gull in all its space, and in the far distance a white and fading line, which was the shore of England.
Faint it grew, and fainter yet, and, as it disappeared, he thought of Angela, and a yearning sorrow fell upon him. When, he wondered sadly, should he again look into her eyes, and hold that proud beauty in his arms; what fate awaited them in the future that stretched before them, dim as the darkening ocean, and more uncertain. Alas! he could not tell, he only felt that it was very bitter to be parted thus from her to whom had been given his whole heart’s love, to know that every fleeting moment widened a breach already far too wide, and not to know if it would again be narrowed, or if this farewell would be the last. Then he thought, if it should be the last, if she should die or desert him, what would his life be worth to him? A consciousness within him answered, “nothing.” And, in a degree, his conclusion was right; for, although it is, fortunately, not often in the power of any single passion to render life altogether worthless; it is certain that, when it strikes in youth, there is no sickness so sore as that of the heart; no sorrow more keen, and no evil more lasting than those connected with its disappointments and its griefs. For other sorrows, life has salves and consolations, but a noble and enduring passion is not all of this world, and to cure its sting we must look to something beyond this world’s quackeries. Other griefs can find sympathy and expression, and become absorbed little by little in the variety of love’s issues. But love, as it is, and should be understood — not the faint ghost that arrays itself in stolen robes, and says, “I am love,” but love the strong and the immortal, the passkey to the happy skies, the angel cipher we read, but cannot understand — such love as this, and there is none other true, can find no full solace here, not even in its earthly satisfaction.
For still it beats against its mortal bars and rends the heart that holds it; still strives like a meteor flaming to its central star, or a new loosed spirit seeking the presence of its God, to pass hence with that kindred soul to the inner heaven whence it came, there to be wholly mingled with its other life and clothed with a divine identity: — there to satisfy the aspirations that now vaguely throb within their fleshly walls, with the splendour and the peace and the full measure of the eternal joys it knows await its coming.
And is it not a first-fruit of this knowledge, that the thoughts of those who are plunged into the fires of a pure devotion fly upwards as surely as the sparks? Nothing but the dross, the grosser earthly part is purged away by their ever-chastening sorrow, which is, in truth, a discipline for finer souls. For did there ever yet live the man or woman who, loving truly, has suffered, and the fires burnt out, has not risen Phoenix-like from their ashes, purer and better, and holding in the heart a bright, undying hope? Never; for these have walked bare-footed upon the holy ground, it is the flames from the Altar that have purged them and left their own light within! And surely this holds also good of those who have loved and lost, of those who have been scorned or betrayed; of the suffering army that cry aloud of the empty bitterness of life and dare not hope beyond. They do not understand that having once loved truly it is not possible that they should altogether lose: that there is to their pain and the dry-rot of their hopes, as to everything else in Nature, an end object. Shall the soul be immortal, and its best essence but a thing of air? Shall the one thought by day and the one dream by night, the ethereal star which guides us across life’s mirage, and which will still shine serene at the moment of our fall from the precipice of Time: shall this alone, amidst all that makes us what we are, be chosen out to see corruption, to be cast off and forgotten in the grave? Never! There, by the workings of a Providence we cannot understand, that mighty germ awaits fruition. There, too, shall we know the wherefore of our sorrow at which, sad-eyed, we now so often wonder: there shall we kiss the rod that smote us, and learn the glorious uses and pluck the glowing fruits of an affliction, that on earth filled us with such sick longing, and such an aching pain.
Let the long-suffering reader forgive these pages of speculative writing, for the subject is a tempting one, and full of interest for us mortals. Indeed, it may chance that, if he or she is more than five-and-twenty, these lines may even have been read without impatience, for there are many who have the memory of a lost Angela hidden away somewhere in the records of their past, and who are fain, in the breathing spaces of their lives, to dream that they will find her wandering in that wide Eternity where “all human barriers fall, all human relations end, and love ceases to be a crime.”
The morning after the vessel left Dartmouth brought with it lovely weather, brisk and clear, with a fresh breeze that just topped the glittering swell with white. There was, however, a considerable roll on the ship, and those poor wretches, who for their sins are given to sea-sickness, were not yet happy. Presently Arthur observed the pretty black-eyed girl — poor thing, she did not look very pretty now — creep on to the deck and attempt to walk about, an effort which promptly resulted in a fall into the scuppers. He picked her up, and asked if she would not like to sit down, but she faintly declined, saying that she did not mind falling so long as she could walk a little — she did not feel so sick when she walked. Under these circumstances he could hardly do less than help her, which he did in the only way at all practicable with one so weak, namely, by walking her about on his arm.
In the midst of his interesting peregrinations he observed Mrs. Carr gazing out of her deck cabin window, looking, he thought, pale, but sweetly pretty, and rather cross. When that lady saw that she was observed, she pulled the curtain with a jerk and vanished. Shortly after this Arthur’s companion vanished too, circumstances over which she had no control compelling her, and Arthur himself sat down rather relieved.
But he was destined that day to play knight-errant to ladies in distress. Presently Mrs. Carr’s cabin-door opened, and that lady herself emerged therefrom, holding on to the side-rail. He had just begun to observe how charmingly she was dressed, when some qualm seized her, and she returned to re-enter the cabin. But the door had swung-to with the roll of the vessel, and she could not open it. Impelled by an agony of doubt, she flew to the side, and, to his horror, sprang with a single bound on to the broad rail that surmounted the bulwark netting, and remained seated there, holding only to a little rope that hung down from the awning-chain. The ship, which was at the moment rolling pretty heavily, had just reached the full angle of her windward roll, and was preparing for a heavy swing to leeward. Arthur, seeing that Mrs. Carr would in a few seconds certainly be flung out to sea, rushed promptly forward and lifted her from the rail. It was none too soon, for next moment down the great ship went with a lurch into a trough of the sea, hurling him, with her in his arms, up against the bulwarks, and, to say truth, hurting him considerably. But, if he expected any thanks for this exploit, he was destined to be disappointed, for no sooner had he set his lovely burden down, than she made use of her freedom to stamp upon the deck.
“How could you be so foolish?” said he. “In another moment you would have been flung out to sea!”
“And pray, Mr. Heigham,” she answered, in a cutting and sarcastic voice, “is that my business or your own? Surely it would have been time enough for you to take a liberty when I asked you to jump over after me.”
Arthur drew himself up to his full height and looked dignified — he could look dignified when he liked.
“I do not quite understand you, Mrs. Carr,” he said, with a little bow. “What I did, I did to save you from going overboard. Next time that such a little adventure comes in my way, I hope, for my own sake, that it may concern a lady possessed of less rudeness and more gratitude.”
And then, glaring defiance at each other, they separated; she marching off with all the dignity of an offended queen to the “sweet seclusion that a cabin grants,” whilst he withdrew moodily to a bench, comforted, however, not a little by the thought that he had given Mrs. Carr a Roland for her Oliver.
Mrs. Carr’s bound on to the bulwarks had been the last effort of that prince of demons, sea-sickness, rending her ere he left. When the occasion for remaining there had thus passed away, she soon tired of her cabin and of listening to the inarticulate moans of her beloved Agatha, who was a most faithful subject of the fiend, one who would never desert his manner so long as he could roll the tiniest wave, and, sallying forth, took up her position in the little society of the ship.
But between Arthur and herself there was no attempt at reconciliation. Each felt their wrongs to be as eternal as the rocks. At luncheon they looked unutterable things from different sides of the table; going in to dinner, she cut him with the sweetest grace, and on the following morning they naturally removed to situations as remote from each other as the cubic area of a mail steamer would allow.
“Pretty, very much so, but ill-mannered; not quite a lady, I should say,” reflected Arthur to himself, with a superior smile.
“I detest him,” said Mrs. Carr to herself, “at least, I think I do; but how neatly he put me down! There is no doubt about his being a gentleman, though insufferably conceited.”
These uncharitable thoughts rankled in their respective minds about 12 A.M. What then was Arthur’s disgust, on descending a little late to luncheon that day, to be informed by the resplendent chief-steward — who, for some undiscovered reason, always reminded him of Pharaoh’s butler — that the captain had altered the places at table, and that this alteration involved his being placed next to none other than Mrs. Carr. Everybody was already seated, and it was too late to protest, at any rate for that meal; so he had to choose between submission and going without his luncheon. Being extremely hungry, he decided for the first alternative, and reluctantly brought himself to a halt next his avowed enemy.
But surprises, like sorrows, come in battalions, a fact that he very distinctly realized when, having helped himself to some chicken, he heard a clear voice at his side address him by name.
“Mr. Heigham,” said the voice, “I have not yet thanked you for your kindness to Miss Terry. I am commissioned to assure you that she is very grateful, since she is prevented by circumstances from doing so herself.”
“I am much gratified,” he replied, stiffly; “but really I did nothing to deserve thanks, and if I had,” he added, with a touch of sarcasm, “I should not have expected any.”
“Oh! what a cynic you must be,” she answered with a rippling laugh, “as though women, helpless as they are, were not always thankful for the tiniest attention. Did not the pretty girl with the black eyes thank you for your attentions yesterday, for instance?”
“Did the lady with the brown eyes thank me for my attentions — my very necessary attentions — yesterday, for instance?” he answered, somewhat mollified, for the laugh and the voice would have thawed a human icicle, and, with all his faults, Arthur was not an icicle.
“No, she did not; she deferred doing so in order that she might do it better. It was very kind of you to help me, and I daresay that you saved my life, and I— I beg your pardon for being so cross, but being sea-sick always makes me cross, even to those who are kindest to me. Do you forgive me? Please forgive me; I really am quite unhappy when I think of my behaviour.” And Mrs. Carr shot a glance at him that would have cleared the North-West Passage for a man-of-war.
“Please don’t apologize,” he said, humbly. “I really have nothing to forgive. I am aware that I took a liberty, as you put it, but I thought that I was justified by the circumstances.”
“It is not generous of you, Mr. Heigham, to throw my words into my teeth. I had forgotten all about them. But I will set your want of feeling against my want of gratitude, and we kiss and be friends.”
“I can assure you, Mrs. Carr, that there is nothing in the world I should like better. When shall the ceremony come off?”
“Now you are laughing at me, and actually interpreting what I say literally, as though the English language were not full of figures of speech. By that phrase,” and she blushed a little — that is, her cheek took a deeper shade of coral —“I meant that we would not cut each other after lunch.”
“You bring me from the seventh heaven of expectation into a very prosaic world; but I accept your terms, whatever they are. I am conquered.”
“For exactly half an hour. But let us talk sense. Are you going to stop at Madeira?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know; till I get tired of it, I suppose. Is it nice, Madeira?”
“Charming. I live there half the year.”
“Ah, then I can well believe that it is charming.”
“Mr. Heigham, you are paying compliments. I thought that you looked above that sort of thing.”
“In the presence of misfortune and of beauty”— here he bowed —“all men are reduced to the same level. Talk to me from behind a curtain, or let me turn my back upon you, and you may expect to hear work-a-day prose — but face to face, I fear that you must put up with compliment.”
“A neat way of saying that you have had enough of me. Your compliments are two-edged. Good-bye for the present.” And she rose, leaving Arthur — well, rather amused.
After this they saw a good deal of each other — that is to say, they conversed together for at least thirty minutes out of every sixty during an average day of fourteen hours, and in the course of these conversations she learned nearly everything about him, except his engagement to Angela, and she shrewdly guessed at that, or, rather, at some kindred circumstance in his career. Arthur, on the other hand, learned quite everything about her, for her life was open as the day, and would have borne repeating in the Times newspaper. But nevertheless he found it extremely interesting.
“You must be a busy woman,” he said one morning, when he had been listening to one of her rattling accounts of her travels and gaieties, sprinkled over, as it was, with the shrewd remarks, and illumined by the keen insight into character that made her talk so charming.
“Busy, no; one of the idlest in the world, and a very worthless one to boot,” she answered, with a little sigh.
“Then, why don’t you change your life? it is in your own hands, if ever anybody’s was.”
“Do you think so? I doubt if anybody’s life is in their own hands. We follow an appointed course; if we did not, it would be impossible to understand why so many sensible, clever people make such a complete mess of their existence. They can’t do it from choice.”
“At any rate, you have not made a mess of yours, and your appointed course seems a very pleasant one.”
“Yes; and the sea beneath us is very smooth, but it has been rough before, and will be rough again — there is no stability in the sea. As to making a mess of my life, who knows what I may not accomplish in that way? Prosperity cannot shine down fear of the future, it only throws it into darker relief. Myself I am afraid of the future — it is unknown, and to me what is unknown is not magnificent, but terrible. The present is enough for me. I do not like speculation, and I never loved the dark.”
And, as they talked, Madeira, in all its summer glory, loomed up out of the ocean, for they had passed the “Desertas” and “Porto Santo” by night, and for a while they were lost in the contemplation of one of the most lovely and verdant scenes that the world can show. Before they had well examined it, however, the vessel had dropped her anchor, and was surrounded by boats full of custom-house officials, boats full of diving boys, of vegetables, of wicker chairs and tables, of parrots, fruit, and “other articles too numerous to mention,” as they say in the auctioneer’s catalogues, and they knew that it was time to go ashore.
“Well, it has been a pleasant voyage,” said Mrs. Carr. “I am glad you are not going on.”
“So am I.”
“You will come and see me tomorrow, will you not? Look, there is my house,” and she pointed to a large, white house opposite Leeuw Rock, that had a background of glossy foliage, and commanded a view of the sea. “If you come, I will show you my beetles. And, if you care to come next day, I will show you my mummies.”
“And, if I come the next, what will you show me?”
“So often as you may come,” she said, with a little tremor in her voice, “I shall find something to show you.”
Then they shook hands and took their respective ways, she — together with the unfortunate Miss Terry, who looked like a resuscitated corpse — on to the steam-launch that was waiting for her, and he in the boat belonging to Miles’ Hotel.
A minute or two after the boat in which Arthur was being piloted to the shore, under the guidance of the manager of Miles’ Hotel, had left the side of the vessel, Mrs. Carr’s steam-launch shot up alongside of them, its brass-work gleaming in the sunlight like polished gold. On the deck, near the little wheel, stood Mrs. Carr herself, and by her side, her martial cloak around her, lay Miss Terry, still as any log.
“Mr. Heigham,” said Mrs. Carr, in a voice that sounded across the water like a silver bell, “I forgot that you will not be able to find your way to my place by yourself tomorrow, so I will send down a bullock-car to fetch you; you have to travel about with bullocks here, you know. Good-bye,” and, before he could answer, the launch’s head was round, and she was tearing through the swell at the rate of fourteen knots.
“That’s her private launch,” said the manager of the hotel to Arthur, “it is the quickest in the island, and she always goes at full steam. She must have come some way round to tell you that, too. There’s her place, over there.”
“Mrs. Carr comes here every year, does she not?”
“Oh, yes, every year; but she is very early this year; our season does not begin yet, you know. She is a great blessing to the place, she gives so much away to the poor peasants. At first she used to come with old Mr. Carr, and a wonderful nurse they say she made to the old gentleman till he died.”
“Does she entertain much?”
“Not as a rule, but sometimes she gives great balls, splendid affairs, and a series of dinner-parties that are the talk of the island. She hardly ever goes out anywhere, which makes the ladies in the place angry, but, I believe, that they all go to her balls and dinners. Mostly, she spends her time up in the hills, collecting butterflies and beetles. She has got the most wonderful collection of Egyptian curiosities up at the house there, too, though why she keeps them here instead of in England, I am sure I don’t know. Her husband began the collection when he was a young man, and collected all his life, and she has gone on with it since.”
“I wonder that she has not married again.”
“Well, it can’t be for want of asking, if half of what they say is true; for, according to that, every single gentleman under fifty who has been at Madeira during the last five years has had a try at her, but she wouldn’t look at one of them. But of course that is gossip — and here we are at the landing-place. Sit steady, sir; those fellows will pull the boat up.”
Had it not been for the preoccupied and uncomfortable state of his mind, that took the flavour out of all that he did, and persistently thrust a skeleton amidst the flowers of every landscape, Arthur should by rights have enjoyed himself very much at Madeira.
To live in one of the lofty rooms of “Miles’ Hotel,” protected by thick walls and cool, green shutters, to feel that you are enjoying all the advantages of a warm climate without its drawbacks, and that, too, however much people in England may be shivering — which they mostly do all the year round — is in itself a luxury. And so it is, if the day is hot, to dine chiefly off fish and fruit, and such fruit! and then to exchange the dining-room for the cool portico, with the sea-breeze sweeping through it, and, pipe in hand, to sink into a slumber that even the diabolical shrieks of the parrots, tied by the leg in a line below, are powerless to disturb. Or, if you be energetic — I speak of Madeira energy — you may stroll down the little terraced walk, under the shade of your landlord’s vines, and contemplate the growing mass of greenery that in this heavenly island makes a garden. You can do more than this even; for, having penetrated through the brilliant flower-beds, and recruited exhausted nature under a fig-tree, you can engage, in true English fashion, in a game of lawn-tennis, which done, you will again seek the shade of the creeping vines or spreading bananas, and in a springy hammock take your well-earned repose.
All these things are the quintessence of luxury, so much so that he who has once enjoyed them will long to turn lotos-eater, forget the painful and laborious past, and live and die at “Miles’ Hotel.” Oh, Madeira! gem of the ocean, land of pine-clad mountains that foolish men love to climb, valleys where wise ones much prefer to rest, and of smells that both alike abhor; Madeira of the sunny sky and azure sea, land flowing with milk and honey, and overflowing with population, if only you belonged to the country on which you depend for a livelihood, what a perfect place you would be, and how poetical one could grow about you! a consummation which, fortunately for my readers, the recollection of the open drains, the ill-favoured priests, and Portuguese officials effectually prevents.
On the following morning, at twelve punctually, Arthur was informed that the conveyance had arrived to fetch him. He went down, and was quite appalled at its magnificence. It was sledge-like in form, built to hold four, and mounted on wooden runners that glided over the round pebbles with which the Madeira streets are paved, with scarcely a sound, and as smoothly as though they ran on ice. The chariot, as Arthur always called it afterwards, was built of beautiful woods, and lined and curtained throughout with satin, whilst the motive power was supplied by two splendidly harnessed white oxen. Two native servants, handsome young fellows, dressed in a kind of white uniform, accompanied the sledge, and saluted Arthur on his appearance with much reverence.
It took him, however, some time before he could make up his mind to embark in a conveyance that reminded him of the description of Cleopatra’s galley, and smelt more sweet; but finally he got in, and off he started, feeling that he was the observed of all observers, and followed by at least a score of beggars, each afflicted with some peculiar and dreadful deformity or disease. And thus, in triumphal guise, they slid down the quaint and narrow streets, squeezed in for the sake of shade between a double line of tall, green-shuttered houses; over the bridges that span the vast open drains; past the ochre-coloured cathedral; down the promenade edged with great magnolia-trees, that made the air heavy with their perfume, and where twice a week the band plays, and the Portuguese officials march up and down in all the pomp and panoply of office; onward through the dip, where the town lopes downwards to the sea; then up again through more streets, and past a stretch of dead wall, after which the chariot wheels through some iron gates, and he is in fairyland. One each side of the carriage-way there spreads a garden calculated to make English horticulturists gnash their teeth with envy, through the bowers of which he could catch peeps of green turf and of the blue sea beyond.
Here the cabbage palm shot its smooth and lofty trunk high into the air, there the bamboo waved its leafy ostrich plumes, and all about and around the soil was spread like an Indian shawl, with many a gorgeous flower and many a splendid fruit. Arthur thought of the garden of Eden and the Isles of the Blest, and whilst his eyes, accustomed to nothing better than our poor English roses, were still fixed upon the blazing masses of pomegranate flower, and his senses were filled with the sweet scent of orange and magnolia blooms, the oxen halted before the portico of a stately building, white-walled and green-shuttered like all Madeira houses.
Then the slaves of the chariot assisted him to descend, whilst other slaves of the door bowed him up the steps, and he stood in a great cool hall, dazzling dark after the brilliancy of the sunlight. And here no slave awaited him, but the princess of this fair domain, none other than Mildred Carr herself, clad all in summer white, and with a smile of welcome in her eyes.
“I am so glad that you have come. How do you like Madeira? Do you find it very hot?”
“I have not seen much of it yet; but this place is lovely, it is like fairyland, and, I believe, that you,” he added, with a bow, “are the fairy queen.”
“Compliments again, Mr. Heigham. Well, I was the sleeping beauty last time, so one may as well be a queen for a change. I wonder what you will call me next?”
“Let me see: shall we say — an angel?”
“Mr. Heigham, stop talking nonsense, and come into the drawing-room.”
He followed her, laughing, into an apartment that, from its noble proportions and beauty, might fairly be called magnificent. Its ceiling was panelled with worked timber, and its floor beautifully inlaid with woods of various hue, whilst the walls were thickly covered with pictures, chiefly sea-pieces, and all by good masters. He had, however, but little time to look about him, for a door opened at the further end of the room, and admitted the portly person of Miss Terry, arrayed in a gigantic sun hat and a pair of green spectacles. She seemed very hot, and held in her hand a piece of brown paper, inside of which something was violently scratching.
“I’ve caught him at last,” she said, “though he did avoid me all last year. I’ve caught him.”
“Good gracious! caught what?” asked Arthur, with great interest.
“What! why him that Mildred wanted,” she replied, regardless of grammar in her excitement. “Just look at him, he’s beautiful.”
Thus admonished, Arthur carefully undid the brown paper, and next moment started back with an exclamation, and began to dance about with an enormous red beetle grinding its jaws into his finger.
“Oh, keep still, do, pray,” called Miss Terry, in alarm, “don’t shake him off on any account, or we shall lose him for the want of a little patience, as I did when he bit my finger last year. If you’ll keep him quite still, he won’t leave go, and I’ll ring for John to bring the chloroform bottle.”
Arthur, feeling that the interests of science were matters of a higher importance than the well-being of his finger, obeyed her injunction to the letter, hanging his arm (and the beetle) over the back of a chair and looking the picture of silent misery.
“Quite still, if you please, Mr. Heigham, quite still; is not the animal’s tenacity interesting?”
“No doubt to you, but I hope your pet beetle is not poisonous, for he is gnashing his pincers together inside my finger.”
“Never mind, we will treat you with caustic presently. Mildred, don’t laugh so much, but come and look at him; he’s lovely. John, please be quick with that chloroform bottle.”
“If this sort of thing happens often, I don’t think that I should collect beetles from choice, at least not large ones,” groaned Arthur.
“Oh, dear,” laughed Mrs. Carr, “I never saw anything so absurd. I don’t know which looks most savage, you or the beetle.”
“Don’t make all that noise, Mildred, you will frighten him, and if once he flies we shall never catch him in this big room.”
Here, fortunately for Arthur, the servant arrived with the required bottle, into which the ferocious insect was triumphantly stoppered by Miss Terry.
“I am so much obliged to you, Mr. Heigham, you are a true collector.”
“For the first and last time,” mumbled Arthur, who was sucking his finger.
“I am infinitely obliged to you, too, Mr. Heigham,” said Mrs. Carr, as soon as she had recovered from her fit of laughing; “the beetle is really very rare; it is not even in the British Museum. But come, let us go in to luncheon.”
After that meal was over, Mrs. Carr asked her guest which he would like to see, her collection of beetles or of mummies.
“Thank you, Mrs. Carr, I have had enough of beetles for one day, so I vote for the mummies.”
“Very well. Will you come, Agatha?”
“Now, Mildred, you know very well that I won’t come. Just think, Mr. Heigham: I only saw the nasty things once, and then they gave me the creeps every night for a fortnight. As though those horrid Egyptian ‘fellahs’ weren’t ugly enough when they were alive without going and making great skin and bone dolls of them — pah!”
“Agatha persists in believing that my mummies are the bodies of people like she saw in Egypt last year.”
“And so they are, Mildred. That last one you got is just like the boy who used to drive my donkey at Cairo — the one that died, you know — I believe they just stuffed him, and said that he was an ancient king. Ancient king, indeed!” And Miss Terry departed, in search for more beetles.
“Now, Mr. Heigham, you must follow me. The museum is not in the house. Wait, I will get a hat.”
In a minute she returned, and led the way across a strip of garden to a detached building, with a broad verandah, facing the sea. Scarcely ten feet from this verandah, and on the edge of the sheer precipice, was built a low wall, leaning over which Arthur could hear the wavelets lapping against the hollow rock two hundred feet beneath him. Here they stopped for a moment to look at the vast expanse of ocean, glittering in the sunlight like a sea of molten sapphires and heaving as gently as an infant’s bosom.
“It is very lovely; the sea moves just enough to show that it is only asleep.”
“Yes; but I like it best when it is awake, when it blows a hurricane — it is magnificent. The whole cliff shakes with the shock of the waves, and sometimes the spray drives over in sheets. That is when I like to sit here; it exhilarates me, and makes me feel as though I belonged to the storm, and was strong with its strength. Come, let us go in.”
The entrance to the verandah was from the end that faced the house, and to gain it they passed under the boughs of a large magnolia-tree. Going through glass doors that opened outwards into the verandah, Mrs. Carr entered a room luxuriously furnished as a boudoir. This had apparently no other exit, and Arthur was beginning to wonder where the museum could be, when she took a tiny bramah key from her watch-chain, and with it opened a door that was papered and painted to match the wall exactly. He followed her, and found himself in a stone passage, dimly lighted from above, and sloping downwards, that led to a doorway graven in the rock, on the model of those to be seen at the entrance of Egyptian temples.
“Now, Mr. Heigham,” she said, flinging open another door, and stepping forward, “you are about the enter ‘The Hall of the Dead.’”
He went in, and a strange sight met his gaze. They were standing in the centre of one side of a vast cave, that ran right and left at right angles to the passage. The light poured into it in great rays from skylights in the roof, and by it he could see that it was hollowed out of the virgin rock, and measured some sixty feet or more in length, by about forty wide, and thirty high. Down the length of each side of the great chamber ran a line of six polished sphinxes, which had been hewn out of the surrounding granite, on the model of those at Carnac, whilst the walls were elaborately painted after the fashion of an Egyptian sepulchre. Here Osiris held his dread tribunal on the spirit of the departed; here the warrior sped onward in his charging chariot; here the harper swept his sounding chords; and here, again, crowned with lotus flowers, those whose corpses lay around held their joyous festivals.
In the respective centres of each end of the stone chamber a colossus towered in its silent and unearthly grandeur. That to the right was a statue of Osiris, judge of the souls of the dead, seated on his judgment-seat, and holding in his hand the source and the bent-headed sceptre. Facing him at the other end of the hall was the effigy of the mighty Ramses, his broad brow encircled by that kingly symbol which few in the world’s history have worn so proudly, and his noble features impressing those who gaze upon them from age to age with a sense of scornful power and melancholy calm, such as does not belong to the countenance of the men of their own time. And all around, under this solemn guardianship, each upon a polished slab of marble, and enclosed in a case of thick glass, lay the corpses of the Egyptian dead, swathed in numberless wrappings, as in their day the true religion that they held was swathed in symbols and in mummeries.
Here were to be found the high-priest of the mysteries of Isis, the astronomer whose lore could read the prophecies that are written in the stars, the dark magician, the renowned warrior, the noble, the musician with his cymbals by his side, the fair maiden who had — so said her cedar coffin-boards — died of love and sorrow, and the royal babe, all sleeping the same sleep, and waiting the same awakening. This princess must have been well known to Joseph, that may have been her who rescued Moses from the waters, whilst the babe belongs to a dynasty of which the history was already merging into tradition when the great pyramid reared its head on Egypt’s fertile plains.
Arthur stood, awed at the wonderful sight.
“Never before,” said he, in that whisper which we involuntarily use in the presence of the dead, “did I realize my own insignificance.”
The thought was abruptly put, but the words represented well what was passing in his mind, what must pass in the mind of any man of culture and sensibility when he gazes on such a sight. For in such presences the human mite of today, fluttering in the sun and walking on the earth that these have known and walked four thousand years ago, must indeed learn how infinitely small is the place that he occupies in the tale of things created; and yet, if to his culture and sensibility he adds religion, a word of living hope hovers on those dumb lips. For where are the spirits of those that lie before him in their eternal silence! Answer, withered lips, and tell us what judgment has Osiris given, and what has Thoth written in his awful book? Four thousand years! Old human husk, if thy dead carcass can last so long, what limit is there to the life of the soul it held?
“Did you collect all these?” asked Arthur, when he had made a superficial examination of the almost countless treasures of the museum.
“Oh, no; Mr. Carr spent half his long life, and more money than I can tell you, in getting this collection together. It was the passion of his life, and he had this cave hollowed at enormous cost, because he thought that the air here would be less likely to injure them than the English fogs. I have added to it, however. I got those papyri and that beautiful bust of Berenice, the one in black marble. Did you ever see such hair?”
Arthur thought to himself that he had at that moment some not far from his heart that must be quite as beautiful, but he did not say so.
“Look, there are some curious things;” and she opened an air-tight case that contained some discoloured grains and a few lumps of shrivelled substance.
“What are they?”
“This is wheat taken from the inside of a mummy, and those are supposed to be hyacinth bulbs. They came from the mummy-case of that baby prince, and I have been told that they would still grow if planted.”
“I can scarcely believe that: the principle of life must be extinct.”
“Wise people, say, you know, that the principle of life can never become extinct in anything that has once lived, though it may change its form; but I do not pretend to understand these things. However, we will settle the question, for we will plant one, and, if it grows, I will give the flower to you. Choose one.”
Arthur took the biggest lump from the case, and examined it curiously.
“I have not much faith in your hyacinth; I am sure that it is dead.”
“Ah! but many things that seem more dead than that have the strangest way of suddenly breaking into life,” she said, with a little sigh. “Give it to me; I will have it planted;” and then, with a quick glance upward, “I wonder if you will be here to see it bloom.”
“I don’t think that either of us will see it bloom in this world,” he answered, laughing, and took his leave.
Had Arthur been a little less wrapped up in thoughts of Angela, and a little more alive to the fact that, being engaged or even married to one woman, does not necessarily prevent complications arising with another, it might have occurred to him to doubt the prudence of the course of life that he was pursuing at Madeira. And, as it is, it is impossible to acquit him of showing a want of knowledge of the world amounting almost to folly, for he should have known upon general principles that, for a man in his position, a grizzly bear would have been a safer daily companion than a young and lovely widow, and the North Pole a more suitable place of residence than Madeira. But he simply did not think about the matter, and, as thin ice has a treacherous way of not cracking till it suddenly breaks, so outward appearances gave him no indication of his danger.
And yet the facts were full of evil promise, for, as time went on, Mildred Carr fell headlong in love with him. There was no particular reason why she should have done so. She might have had scores of men, handsomer, cleverer, more distinguished, for the asking, or, rather, for the waiting to be asked. Beyond a certain ability of mind, a taking manner, and a sympathetic, thoughtful face, with that tinge of melancholy upon it which women sometimes find dangerously interesting, there was nothing so remarkable about Arthur that a woman possessing her manifold attractions and opportunities, should, unsought and without inquiry, lavish her affection upon him. There is only one satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon, which, indeed, is a very common one, and that is, that he was her fate, the one man whom she was to love in the world, for no woman worth the name ever loves two, however many she may happen to marry. For this curious difference would appear to exist between the sexes. The man can attach himself, though in varying degree, to several women in the course of a lifetime, whilst the woman, the true, pure-hearted woman, cannot so adapt her best affection. Once given, like the law of the Medes and Persians, it altereth not.
Mildred felt, when her eyes first met Arthur’s in Donald Currie’s office, that this man was for her different from all other men, though she did not put the thought in words even to herself. And from that hour till she embarked on board the boat he was continually in her mind, a fact which so irritated her that she nearly missed the steamer on purpose, only changing her mind at the last moment. And then, when she had helped him to carry Miss Terry to her cabin, their hands had accidentally met, and the contact had sent a thrill through her frame such as she had never felt before. The next development that she could trace was her jealousy of the black-eyed girl whom she saw him helping about the deck, and her consequent rudeness.
Up to her present age, Mildred Carr had never known a single touch of love: she had not even felt particularly interested in her numerous admirers, but now this marble Galatea had by some freak of fate found a woman’s heart, awkwardly enough, without the semblance of a supplication on the part of him whom she destined to play Pygmalion. And, when she examined herself by the light of the flame thus newly kindled, she shrank back dismayed, like one who peeps over the crater of a volcano commencing its fiery work. She had believed her heart to be callous to all affection of this nature, it had seemed as dead as the mummied hyacinth; and now it was a living, suffering thing, and all alight with love. She had tasted of a new wine, and it burnt her, and was bitter sweet, and yet she longed for more. And thus, by slow and sad degrees, she learnt that her life, which had for thirty years flowed on its quiet way unshadowed by love’s wing, must henceforth own his dominion, and be a slave to his sorrows and caprices. No wonder that she grew afraid!
But Mildred was a woman of keen insight into character, and it did not require that her powers of observation should be sharpened by the condition of her affections, to show her that, however deeply she might be in love with Arthur Heigham, he was not one little bit in love with her. Knowing the almost irresistible strength of her own beauty and attractions, she quickly came to the conclusion — and it was one that sent a cold chill through her — that there must be some other woman blocking the path to his heart. For some reason or other, Arthur had never spoken to her of Angela, either because a man very rarely volunteers information to a woman concerning his existing relationship with another of her sex, knowing that to do so would be to depreciate his value in her eyes, or from an instinctive knowledge that the subject would not be an agreeable one, or perhaps because the whole matter was too sacred to him. But she, on her part, was determined to probe his secret to the bottom. So one sleepy afternoon, when they were sitting on the museum verandah, about six weeks after the date of their arrival in the island, she took her opportunity.
Mildred was sitting, or rather half lying, in a cane-work chair, gazing out over the peaceful sea, and Arthur, looking at her, thought what a lovely woman she was, and wondered what it was that had made her face and eyes so much softer and more attractive of late. Miss Terry was also there, complaining of the heat, but presently she moved off after an imaginary beetle, and they were alone.
“Oh, by-the-by, Mr. Heigham,” Mildred said, presently, “I was going to ask you a question, if only I can remember what it is.”
“Try to remember what it is about. ‘Shoes, sealing-wax, cabbages, or kings.’ Does it come under any of those heads?”
“Ah, I remember now. If you had added ‘queens,’ you would not have been far out. What I wanted to ask you ——” and she turned her large, brown eyes full upon him, and yawned slightly. “Dear me, Agatha is right; it is hot!”
“Well, I am waiting to give you any information in my power.”
“Oh! to be sure, the question. Well, it is a very simple one. Who are you engaged to?”
Arthur nearly sprang off his chair with astonishment.
“What makes you think that I am engaged?” he asked.
She broke into a merry peal of laughter. Ah! if he could have known what that laugh cost her.
“What makes me think that you are engaged!” she answered, in a tone of raillery. “Why, of course you would have been at my feet long ago, if it had not been so. Come, don’t be reticent. I shall not laugh at you. What is she like?” (Generally a woman’s first question about a rival.) “Is she as good-looking — well, as I am, say — for, though you may not think it, I have been thought good-looking.”
“She is quite different from you; she is very tall and fair, like an angel in a picture, you know.”
“Oh! then there is a ‘she,’ and a ‘she like an angel.’ Very different indeed from me, I should think. How nicely I caught you out;” and she laughed again.
“Why did you want to catch me out?” said Arthur, on whose ear Mrs. Carr’s tone jarred; he could not tell why.
“Feminine curiosity, and a natural anxiety to fathom the reasons of your sighs, that is all. But never mind, Mr. Heigham, you and I shall not quarrel because you are engaged to be married. You shall tell me the story when you like, for I am sure there is a story — no, not this afternoon; the sun has given me a headache, and I am going to sleep it off. Other people’s love-stories are very interesting to me, the more so because I have reached the respectable age of thirty without being the subject of one myself;” and again she laughed, this time at her own falsehood. But, when he had gone, there was no laughter in her eyes, nothing but tears, bitter, burning tears.
“Agatha,” said Mildred that evening, “I am sick of this place. I want to go to the Isle of Wight. It must be quite nice there now. We will go by the next Currie boat.”
“My dear Mildred,” replied Miss Terry, aghast, “if you were going back so soon, why did you not leave me behind you? And just as we were getting so nicely settled here too, and I shall be so sorry to say good-bye to that young Heigham, he is such a nice young man! Why don’t you marry him? I really thought you liked him. But, perhaps he is coming to the Isle of Wight too. Oh, that dreadful bay!”
Mildred winced at Miss Terry’s allusions to Arthur, of whom that lady had grown extremely fond.
“I am very sorry, dear,” she said, hastily; “but I am bored to death, and it is such a bad insect year: so really you must begin to pack up.”
Miss Terry began to pack accordingly, but, when next she alluded to the subject of their departure, Mildred affected surprise, and asked her what she meant. The astonished Agatha referred her to her own words, and was met by a laughing disclaimer.
“Why, you surely did not think that I was in earnest, did you? I was only a little cross.”
“Well, really, Mildred, you’ve got so strange lately that I never know when you are in earnest and when you are not, though, for my part, I am very glad to stay in peace and quiet.”
“Strange, grown strange, have I!” said Mrs. Carr, looking dreamily out of a window that commanded the carriage-drive, with her hands crossed behind her. “Yes, I think that you are right. I think that I have lost the old Mildred somewhere or other, and picked up a new one whom I don’t understand.”
“Ah, indeed,” remarked Miss Terry, in the most matter-of-fact way, without having the faintest idea of what her friend was driving at.
“How it rains! I suppose that he won’t come today.”
“He! Who’s he?”
“Why, how stupid you are! Mr. Heigham, of course!”
“So you always mean him, when you say ‘he!’”
“Yes, of course I do, if it isn’t ungrammatical. It is miserable this afternoon. I feel wretched. Why, actually, here he comes!” and she tore off like a school-girl into the hall, to meet him.
“Ah, indeed,” again remarked Miss Terry, solemnly, to the empty walls. “I am not such a fool as I look. I suppose that Mr. Heigham wouldn’t come to the Isle of Wight.”
It is perhaps needless to say that Mrs. Carr had never been more in earnest in her life than when she announced her intention of departing to the Isle of Wight. The discovery that her suspicions about Arthur had but too sure a foundation had been a crushing blow to her hopes, and she had formed a wise resolution to see no more of him. Happy would it have been for her, if she could have found the moral courage to act up to it, and go away, a wiser, if a sadder, woman. But this was not to be. The more she contemplated it, the more did her passion — which was now both wild and deep — take hold upon her heart, eating into it like acid into steel, and graving one name there in ineffaceable letters. She could not bear the thought of parting from him, and felt, or thought she felt, that her happiness was already too deeply pledged to allow her to throw up the cards without an effort.
Fortune favours the brave. Perhaps, after all, it would declare itself for her. She was modest in her aspirations. She did not expect that he would ever give her the love he bore this other woman; she only asked to live in the sunlight of his presence, and would be glad to take him at his own price, or indeed at any price. Man, she knew, is by nature as unstable as water, and will mostly melt beneath the eyes of more women than one, as readily as ice before a fire when the sun has hid his face. Yes, she would play the game out: she would not throw away her life’s happiness without an effort. After all, matters might have been worse: he might have been actually married.
But she knew that her hand was a difficult one to lead from, though she also knew that she held the great trumps — unusual beauty, practically unlimited wealth, and considerable fascination of manner. Her part must be to attract without repelling, charm without alarming, fascinate by slow degrees, till at length he was involved in a net from which there was no escape, and, above all, never to allow him to suspect her motives till the ripe moment came. It was a hard task for a proud woman to set herself, and, in a manner, she was proud; but, alas, with the best of us, when love comes in at the door, pride, reason, and sometimes honour, fly out the window.
And so Miss Terry heard no more talk of the Isle of Wight.
Thenceforward, under the frank and open guise of friendship, Mildred contrived to keep Arthur continually at her side. She did more. She drew from him all the history of his engagement to Angela, and listened, with words of sympathy on her lips, and wrath and bitter jealousy in her heart, to his enraptured descriptions of her rival’s beauty and perfections. So benighted was he, indeed, that once he went so far as to suggest that he should, when he and Angela were married, come to Madeira to spend their honeymoon, and dilated on the pleasant trips which they three might take together.
“Truly,” thought Mildred to herself, “that would be delightful.” Once, too, he even showed her a tress of Angela’s hair, and, strange to say, she found that there still lingered in her bosom a sufficient measure of vulgar first principles to cause her to long to snatch it from him and throw it into the sea. But, as it was, she smiled faintly, and admired openly, and then went to the glass to look at her own nut-brown tresses. Never had she been so dissatisfied with them, and yet her hair was considered lovely, and an aesthetic hair-dresser had once called it a “poem.”
“Blind fool,” she muttered, stamping her little foot upon the floor, “why does he torture me so?”
Mildred forgot that all love is blind, and that none was ever blinder or more headstrong than her own.
And so this second Calypso of a lovely isle set herself almost as unblushingly as her prototype to get our very unheroic Ulysses into her toils. And Penelope, poor Penelope, she sat at home and span, and defied her would-be lovers.
But as yet Ulysses — I mean Arthur — was conscious of none of those things. He was by nature an easy-going young gentleman, who took matters as he found them, and asked no questions. And he found them very pleasant at Madeira, or, rather, at the Quinta Carr, for he did everything except sleep there. Within its precincts he was everywhere surrounded with that atmosphere of subtle and refined flattery, flattery addressed chiefly to the intellect, that is one of the most effective weapons of a clever woman. Soon the drawing-room tables were loaded with his favourite books, and no songs but such as he approved were ordered from London.
He discovered one evening, for instance, that Mildred looked best at night in black and silver, and next morning Mr. Worth received a telegram requesting him to forward without delay a large consignment of dresses in which those colours predominated.
On another occasion he casually threw out a suggestion about the erection of a terrace in the garden, and shortly afterwards was surprised to find a small army of Portuguese labourers engaged upon the work. He had made this suggestion in total ignorance of the science of garden engineering, and its execution necessitated the removal of vast quantities of soil and the blasting of many tons of rock. The contractor employed by Mrs. Carr pointed out how the terrace could be made equally well at a fifth of the expense, but it did not happen to take exactly the direction that Arthur had indicated, so she would have none of it. His word was law, and, because he had spoken, the whole place was for a month overrun with dirty labourers, whilst, to the great detriment of Miss Terry’s remaining nerves, and even to the slight discomfort of His Royal Highness himself, the air resounded all day long with the terrific bangs of the blasting powder.
But, so long as he was pleased with the progress of the improvement, Mildred felt no discomfort, nor would she allow any one else to express any. It even aggravated her to see Miss Terry put her hands to her head and jump, whenever a particularly large piece of ordnance was discharged, and she would vow that it must be affectation, because she never even noticed it.
In short, Mildred Carr possessed to an extraordinary degree that faculty for blind, unreasoning adoration which is so characteristic of the sex, an adoration that is at once magnificent in the entirety of its own self-sacrifice, and extremely selfish. When she thought that she could please Arthur, the state of Agatha’s nerves became a matter of supreme indifference to her, and in the same way, had she been an absolute monarch, she would have spent the lives of thousands, and shaken empires till thrones came tumbling down like apples in the wind, if she had believed that she could thereby advance herself in his affections.
But, as it never occurred to Arthur that Mrs. Carr might be in love with him, he saw nothing abnormal about all this. Not that he was conceited, for nobody was ever less so, but it is wonderful what an amount of flattery and attention men will accept from women as their simple right. If the other sex possesses the faculty of admiration, we in compensation are perfectly endowed with that of receiving it with careless ease, and when we fall in with some goddess who is foolish enough to worship us, and to whom we should be on our knees, we merely label her “sympathetic,” and say that she “understands us.”
From all of which wise reflections the reader will gather that our friend Arthur was not a hundred miles off an awkward situation.
One day, some three weeks after Arthur had gone, Angela strolled down the tunnel walk, now, in the height of summer, almost dark with the shade of the lime-trees, and settled herself on one of the stone seats under Caresfoot’s staff.
She had a book in hand, but it soon became clear that she had come to this secluded spot to think rather than read, for it fell unopened from her hand, and her grey eyes were full of a far-off look as they gazed across the lake glittering in the sunlight, away towards the hazy purple outline of the distant hills. Her face was quite calm, but it was not that of a happy person; indeed, it gave a distinct idea of mental suffering. All grief, however acute, is subject to fixed gradations, and Angela was yet in the second stage. First there is the acute stage, when the heart aches with a physical pain, and the mind, filled with a wild yearning or tortured by an unceasing anxiety, well-nigh gives beneath the abnormal strain. This does not last long, or it would kill or drive us to the mad-house. Then comes that long epoch of dull misery, enduring till at last kindly nature in pity rubs off the rough extremes of our calamity, and by slow but sure degrees softens agony into sorrow.
This was what she was now passing through, and — as all highly organized natures like her own are, especially in youth, very sensitive to those more exquisite vibrations of pain and happiness that leave minds of a coarser fibre comparatively unmoved — it may be taken for granted that she was suffering sufficiently acutely.
Perhaps she had never quite realized how necessary Arthur had become to her, how deep his love had sent its fibres into her heart and inner self, until he was violently wrenched away from her and she lost all sight and knowledge of him in the darkness of the outside world. Still she had made no show of her sorrow; but once, when Pigott told her some pathetic story of the death of a little child in the village, she burst into a paroxysm of weeping. The pity for another’s pain had loosed the flood-gates of her own, but it was a performance that she did not repeat.
But Angela had her anxieties as well as her griefs, and it was over these former that she was thinking as she sat on the great stone under the oak. Love is a wonderful quickener of the perceptions, and, ignorant as she was of all the world’s ways, the more she thought over the terms imposed by her father upon her engagement, the more distrustful did she grow. Lady Bellamy, too, had been to see her twice, and on each occasion had inspired her with a lively sense of fear and repugnance. During the first of these visits she had shown a perfect acquaintance with the circumstances of her engagement, her “flirtation with Mr. Heigham,” as she was pleased to call it. During the second call, too, she had been full of strange remarks about her cousin George, talking mysteriously of “a change” that had come over him since his illness, and of his being under a “new influence.” Nor was this all; for, on the very next day when she was out walking with Pigott in the village, she had met George himself, and he had insisted upon entering into a long rambling conversation with her, and on looking at her in a way that made her feel perfectly sick.
“Oh, Aleck,” she said, aloud, to the dog that was sitting by her side with his head upon her knee, for he was now her constant companion, “I wonder where your master is, your master and mine, Aleck. Would to God that he were back here to protect me, for I am growing afraid, I don’t know of what, Aleck, and there are eleven long silent months to wait.” At this moment the dog raised his head, listened, and sprang round with an angry “woof.” Angela rose up with a flash of hope in her eyes, turned, and faced George Caresfoot.
He was still pale and shrivelled from the effects of his illness, but otherwise little changed, except that the light-blue eyes glittered with a fierce determination, and that the features had attained that fixity and strength which sometimes come to those who are bent heart and soul upon an enterprise, be it good or evil.
“So I have found you out at last, Cousin Angela. What, are you not going to shake hands with me?”
Angela touched his fingers with her own.
“My father is not here,” she said.
“Thank you, my dear cousin, but I did not come to see your father, of whom I have seen plenty in the course of my life, and shall doubtless see more; I came to see you, of whom I can never see enough.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Angela, defiantly, folding her arms across her bosom and looking him full in the face with fearless eyes, for her instinct warned her that she was in danger, and also that, whatever she might feel, she must not show that she was afraid.
“I shall hope to make you do so before long,” he replied, with a meaning glance; “but you are not very polite, you know, you do not offer me a seat.”
“I beg your pardon, I did not know that you wanted to sit down. I can only offer you a choice of those stones.”
“Then call that brute away, and I will sit down.”
“The dog is not a brute, as you mean it. But I should not speak of him like that, if I were you. He is sensible as a human being, and might resent it.”
Angela knew that George was a coward about dogs; and at that moment, as though to confirm her words, Aleck growled slightly.
“Ah, indeed; well, he is certainly a handsome dog;” and he sat down suspiciously. “Won’t you come and sit down?”
“Thank you. I prefer to stand.”
“Do you know what you look like, standing there with your arms crossed? You look like an angry goddess.”
“If you mean that seriously, I don’t understand you. If it is a compliment, I don’t like compliments.”
“You are not very friendly,” said George, whose temper was fast getting the better of him.
“I am sorry. I do not wish to be unfriendly.”
“So I hear that my ward has been staying here whilst I was ill.”
“Yes, he was staying here.”
“And I am also told that there was some boy-and-girl love affair between you. I suppose that he indulged in a flirtation to wile away the time.”
Angela turned upon him, too angry to speak.
“Well, you need not look at me like that. You surely never expect to see him again, do you?”
“If we both live, I shall certainly see him again; indeed, I shall, in any case.”
“You will never see him again.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was only flirting and playing the fool with you. He is a notorious flirt, and, to my certain knowledge, has been engaged to two women before.”
“I do not believe that that is true, or, if it is true, it is not all the truth; but, true or untrue, I am not going to discuss Mr. Heigham with you, or allow myself to be influenced by stories told behind his back.”
“Angela,” said George, rising, and seizing her hand.
She turned quite pale, and a shudder passed over her frame.
“Leave my hand alone, and never dare to touch me again. This is the second time that you have tried to insult me.”
“So!” answered George, furious with outraged pride and baffled passion, “you set up your will against mine, do you? Very well, you shall see. I will crush you to powder. Insult you, indeed! How often did that young blackguard insult you? I warrant he did more than take your hand.”
“If,” answered Angela, “you mean Mr. Heigham, I shall leave you to consider whether that term is not more applicable to the person who does his best to outrage an unprotected woman, and take advantage of the absent, than to the gentleman against whom you have used it;” and, darting on him one glance of supreme contempt, she swept away like an angry queen.
Left to his meditations, George shook his fist towards where she had vanished.
“Very well, my fine lady, very well,” he said, aloud. “You treat me as so much dirt, do you? You shall smart for this, so sure as my name is George Caresfoot. Only wait till you are in my power, and you shall learn that I was never yet defied with impunity. Oh, and you shall learn many other things also.”
From that time forward, Angela was, for a period of two months or more, subjected to an organized persecution as harassing as it was cruel. George waylaid her everywhere, and twice actually succeeded in entering into conversation with her, but on both occasions she managed to escape from him before he could proceed any further. So persistently did he hunt her, that at last the wretched girl was driven to hide herself away in odd corners of the house and woods, in order to keep out of his way. Then he took to writing her letters, and sending handsome presents, all of which she returned.
Poor Angela! It was hard both to lose her lover, and to suffer daily from the persecutions of her hateful cousin, which were now pushed forward so openly and with such pertinacity as to fill her with vague alarm. What made her position worse was, that she had no one in whom to confide, for Mr. Fraser had not yet returned. Pigott indeed knew more or less what was going on, but she could do nothing, except bewail Arthur’s absence, and tell her “not to mind.” There remained her father, but with him she had never been on sufficiently intimate terms for confidence. Indeed, as time went on, the suspicion gathered strength in her mind that he was privy to George’s advances, and that those advances had something to do with the harsh terms imposed upon Arthur and herself. But at last matters grew so bad that, having no other refuge, she determined to appeal to him for protection.
“Father,” she said, boldly, one day to Philip, as he was sitting writing in his study, “my cousin George is persecuting me every day. I have borne it as long as I can, but I can bear it no longer. I have come to ask you to protect me from him.”
“Why, Angela, I should have thought that you were perfectly capable of protecting yourself. What is he persecuting you about? What does he want?”
“To marry me, I suppose,” answered Angela, blushing to her eyes.
“Well, that is a very complimentary wish on his part, and I can tell you what it is, Angela, if only you could get that young Heigham out of your head, you might do a deal worse.”
“It is quite useless to talk to me like that,” she answered, coldly.
“Well, that is your affair; but it is very ridiculous of you to come and ask me to protect you. The woman must, indeed, be a fool who cannot protect herself.”
And so the interview ended.
Next day Lady Bellamy called again.
“My dear child,” she said to Angela, “you are not looking well; this business worries you, no doubt; it is the old struggle between duty and inclination, that we have most of us gone through. Well, there is one consolation, nobody who ever did his or her duty, regardless of inclination, ever regretted it in the end.”
“What do you mean, Lady Bellamy, when you talk about my duty?”
“I mean the plain duty that lies before you of marrying your cousin George, and of throwing up this young Heigham.”
“I recognize no such duty.”
“My dear Angela, do look at the matter from a sensible point of view, think what a good thing it would be for your father, and remember, too, that it would re-unite all the property. If ever a girl had a clear duty to perform, you have.”
“Since you insist so much upon my ‘duty,’ I must say that it seems to me that an honest girl in my position has three duties to consider, and not one, as you say, Lady Bellamy. First, there is her duty to the man she loves, for her the greatest duty of any in the world; next her duty to herself, for her happiness and self-respect are involved in her decision; and, lastly, her duty to her family. I put the family last, because, after all, it is she who gets married, not her family.”
Lady Bellamy smiled a little.
“You argue well; but there is one thing that you overlook, though I am sorry to have to pain you by saying it; young Mr. Heigham is no better than he should be. I have made inquiries about him, and think that I ought to tell you that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that his life, young as he is, has not been so creditable as it might have been. He has been the hero of one or two little affairs. I can tell you about them if you like.”
“Lady Bellamy, your stories are either true or untrue. If true, I should take no notice of them, because they must have happened before he loved me; if untrue, they would be a mere waste of breath, so I think that we may dispense with the stories — they would influence me no more than the hum of next summer’s gnats.”
Lady Bellamy smiled again.
“You are a curious woman,” she said; “but, supposing that there were to be a repetition of these little stories after he loved you, what would you say then?”
Angela looked troubled, and thought awhile.
“He could never go far from me,” she answered.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I hold the strings of his heart in my hands, and I have only to lift them to draw him back to me — so. No other woman, no living force, can keep him from me, if I choose to bid him come.”
“Supposing that to be so, how about the self-respect you spoke of just now? Could you bear to take your lover back from the hands of another woman?”
“That would entirely depend upon the circumstances, and upon what was just to the other woman.”
“You would not then throw him up without question?”
“Lady Bellamy, I may be very ignorant and simple, but I am neither mad nor a fool. What do you suppose that my life would be worth to me if I threw Arthur up? If I remained single it would be an aching void, as it is now, and if I married any other man whilst he still lived, it would become a daily and shameful humiliation such as I had rather die than endure.”
Lady Bellamy glanced up from under her heavy-lidded eyes; a thought had evidently struck her, but she did not express it.
“Then I am to tell your cousin George that you will have absolutely nothing to do with him?”
“Yes, and beg him to cease persecuting me; it is quite useless; if there were no Arthur and no other man in the world, I would not marry him. I detest him — I cannot tell you how I detest him.”
“It is amusing to hear you talk so, and to think that you will certainly be Mrs. George Caresfoot within nine months.”
“Never,” answered Angela, passionately stamping her foot upon the floor. “What makes you say such horrible things?”
“I reflect,” answered Lady Bellamy, with an ominous smile, “that George Caresfoot has made up his mind to marry you, and that I have made up mine to help him to do so, and that your will, strong as it certainly is, is, as compared with our united wills, what a straw is to a gale. The straw cannot travel against the wind, it must go with it, and you must marry George Caresfoot. You will as certainly come to the altar-rails with him as you will to your death-bed. It is written in your face. Good-bye.”
For the first time Angela’s courage really gave way as she heard these dreadful words. She remembered how she herself had called Lady Bellamy an embodiment of the “Spirit of Power,” and now she felt that the comparison was just. The woman was power incarnate, and her words, which from anybody else she would have laughed at, sent a cold chill through her.
“She is a fine creature both in mind and body,” reflected Lady Bellamy, as she stepped into her carriage. “Really, though I try to hate her, I can find it in my heart to be sorry for her. Indeed, I am not sure that I do not like her; certainly I respect her. But she has come in my path and must be crushed — my own safety demands it. At least, she is worth crushing, and the game is fair, for perhaps she will crush me. I should not be surprised; there is a judgment in those grey eyes of hers — Qui vivra verra. Home, William.”
Angela’s appeal for protection set Philip thinking.
As the reader is aware, his sole motive in consenting to become, as it were, a sleeping partner in the shameful plot, of which his innocent daughter was the object, was to obtain possession of his lost inheritance, and it now occurred to him that even should that plot succeed, which he very greatly doubted, nothing had as yet been settled as to the terms upon which it was to be reconveyed to him. The whole affair was excessively repugnant to him: indeed, he regarded the prospect of its success with little less than terror, only his greed over-mastered his fear.
But on one point he was very clear: it should not succeed except upon the very best of terms for himself, his daughter should not be sacrificed unless the price paid for the victim was positively princely, such guilt was not to be incurred for a bagatelle. If George married Angela, the Isleworth estates must pass back into his hands for a very low sum indeed. But would his cousin be willing to accept such a sum? That was the rub, and that, too, was what must be made clear without any further delay. He had no wish to see Angela put to needless suffering, suffering which would not bring an equivalent with it, and which might, on the contrary, entail consequences upon himself that he shuddered to think of.
Curiously enough, however, he had of late been signally free from his superstitious fears; indeed, since the night when he had so astonished Arthur by his outbreak about the shadows on the wall, no fit had come to trouble him, and he was beginning to look upon the whole thing as an evil dream, a nightmare that he had at last lived down. But still the nightmare might return, and he was not going to run the risk unless he was very well paid for it. And so he determined to offer a price so low for the property that no man in his senses would accept it, and then wrote a note to George asking him to come over on the following evening after dinner, as he wished to speak to him on a matter of business.
“There,” he said to himself, “that will make an end of the affair, and I will get young Heigham back and they can be married. George can never take what I mean to offer; if he should, the Egyptian will be spoiled indeed, and the game will be worth the candle. Not that I have any responsibility about it, however; I shall put no pressure on Angela, she must choose for herself.” And Philip went to bed, quite feeling as though he had done a virtuous action.
George came punctually enough on the following evening, which was that of the day of Lady Bellamy’s conversation with Angela, a conversation which had so upset the latter that she had already gone to her room, not knowing anything of her cousin’s proposed visit.
The night was one of those dreadfully oppressive ones that sometimes visit us in the course of an English summer. The day had been hot and sultry, and with the fall of the evening the little breeze that stirred in the thunder-laden air had died away, leaving the temperature at much the same point that is to be expected in a tropical valley, and rendering the heat of the house almost unbearable.
“How do you do, George?” said Philip. “Hot, isn’t it?”
“Yes, there will be a tempest soon.”
“Not before midnight, I think. Shall we go and walk down by the lake, it will be cooler there, and we shall be quite undisturbed? Walls have ears sometimes, you know.”
“Very well; but where is Angela?”
“I met her on the stairs just now, and she said that she was going to bed — got a headache, I believe. Shall we start?”
So soon as they were well away from the house, Philip broke the ice.
“Some months back, I had a conversation with Lady Bellamy on the subject of a proposal that you made to me through her for Angela’s hand. It is about that I wish to speak to you now. First, I must ask if you still wish to go on with the business?”
“Certainly, I wish it more than ever.”
“Well, as I intimated to Lady Bellamy, I do not at all approve of your suit. Angela is already, subject to my consent, very suitably engaged to your late ward, a young fellow whom, whatever you may think about him, I like very much; and I can assure you that it will require the very strongest inducements to make me even allow such a thing. In any case, I will have nothing to do with influencing Angela; she is a perfectly free agent.”
“Which means, I suppose, that you intend to screw down the price?”
“In wanting to marry Angela,” went on Philip, “you must remember that you fly high. She is a very lovely woman, and, what is more, will some day or other be exceedingly well off, whilst you — you must excuse me for being candid, but this is a mere matter of business, and I am only talking of you in the light of a possible son-inlaw — you are a middle-aged man, not prepossessing in appearance, broken in health, and, however well you may have kept up your reputation in these parts, as you and I well know, without a single shred of character left; altogether not a man to who a father would marry his daughter of his own free will, or one with whom a young girl is likely to find happiness.”
“You draw a flattering picture of me, I must say.”
“Not at all, only a true one.”
“Well, if I am all you say, how is it that you are prepared to allow your daughter to marry me at all?”
“I will tell you; because the rights of property should take precedence of the interests of a single individual. Because my father and you between you cozened me out of my lawful own, and this is the only way that I see of coming by it again.”
“What does it matter? in any case after your death the land will come back to Angela and her children.”
“No, George, it will not; if ever the Isleworth estates come into my hands, they shall not pass again to any child of yours.”
“What would you do with them, then?”
“Marry, and get children of my own.”
George whistled.
“Well, I must say that your intentions are amiable, but you have not got the estates yet, my dear cousin.”
“No, and never shall have, most likely; but let us come to the point. Although I do not approve of your advances, I am willing to waive my objections and accept you as a son-inlaw, if you can win Angela’s consent, provided that before the marriage you consent to give me clear transfer, at a price, of all the Isleworth estates, with the exception of the mansion and the pleasure-grounds.”
“Very good; but now about the price. That is the real point.”
They had taken a path that ran down through the shrubberies to the side of the lake, and then turned up towards Caresfoot’s Staff. Before answering George’s remark, Philip proposed that they should sit down, and, suiting the action to the word, placed himself upon the trunk of a fallen tree that lay by the water’s edge, just outside the spread of the branches of the great oak, and commanding a view of the area beneath them.
“The moon will come out again presently,” he said, when George had followed his example. “She has got behind that thunder-cloud. Ah!” as a bright flash of lightning passed from heaven to earth, “I thought that we should get a storm; it will be here in half an hour.”
All this Philip said to gain time; he had not quite made up his mind what price to offer.
“Never mind the lightning. What do you offer for the property, inclusive of timber, and with all improvements — just as it stands, in short.”
“One hundred thousand pounds cash,” said Philip, deliberately.
George sprang from his seat, and sat down again before he answered.
“Do you think that I am drunk, or a fool, that you come to me with such a ridiculous offer? Why, the probate valuation was two hundred thousand, and that was very low.”
“I offer one hundred thousand, and am willing to settle thirty thousand absolutely on the girl should she marry you, and twenty thousand more on my death. That is my offer — take it, or leave it.”
“Talk sense, man; your terms are preposterous.”
“I tell you that, preposterous or not, I will not go beyond them. If you don’t like them, well and good, leave them alone, and I’ll put myself in communication with young Heigham tomorrow, and tell him that he can come and marry the girl as soon as he likes. For my part, I am very glad to have the business settled.”
“You ask me to sacrifice half my property,” groaned George.
“My property, you mean, that you stole. But I don’t ask you to do anything one way or the other. I am to understand that you refuse my offer?”
“Give me a minute to think,” and George hid his face in his hand, and Philip, looking at him with hatred gleaming in his dark eyes, muttered between his teeth,
“I believe that my turn has come at last.”
When some thirty seconds had passed in silence, the attention of the pair was attracted by the cracking of dead leaves that sounded quite startling in the intense stillness of the night, and next second a tall figure in white glided up to the water’s edge, and stood still within half a dozen paces of them.
Involuntarily Philip gripped his cousin’s arm, but neither of them moved. The sky had rapidly clouded up, and the faint light that struggled from the moon only served to show that the figure appeared to be lifting its arms. In another second that was gone too, and the place was totally dark.
“Wait till the moon comes out, and we shall see what it is,” whispered George, and, as he spoke, there came from the direction of the figure a rustling sound as of falling garments.
“What can it be?” whispered Philip.
They were not left long in doubt, for at that instant a vivid flash from the thunder-cloud turned the darkness into the most brilliant day, and revealed a woman standing up to her knees in the water, with her arms lifted, knotting her long hair. It was Angela. For one moment the fierce light shone upon the stately form that gleamed whiter than ivory — white as snow against the dense background of the brushwood, and, as it passed, they heard her sink into the water softly as a swan, and strike out with steady strokes towards the centre of the lake.
“It is only Angela,” said Philip, when the sound of the strokes grew faint. “Phew! what a state she gave me.”
“Is she safe?” asked George, in a husky voice. “Hadn’t I better get a boat?”
“She needs no help from you, she is quite capable of looking after herself, especially in the water, I can tell you,” Philip answered, sharply.
Nothing more was said till they reached the house, when, on entering the lighted study, Philip noticed that his cousin’s face was flushed, and his hands shaking like aspen leaves.
“Why, what is the matter with you, man?” he asked.
“Nothing — nothing. I am only rather cold. Give me some brandy.”
“Cold on such a night as this? That’s curious,” said Philip, as he got the spirit from a cupboard.
George drank about a wine-glassful neat, and seemed to recover himself.
“I accept your offer for the land, Philip,” he said, presently.
His cousin looked at him curiously, and a brilliant idea struck him.
“You agree, then, to take fifty thousand pounds for the Isleworth estates in the event of your marrying my daughter, the sale to be completed before the marriage takes place?”
“Fifty thousand! No, a hundred thousand — you said a hundred thousand just now.”
“You must have misunderstood me, or I must have made a mistake; what I meant is fifty thousand, and you to put a thousand down as earnest money — to be forfeited whether the affair comes off or not.”
George ground his teeth and clutched at his red hair, proceedings that his cousin watched with a great deal of quiet enjoyment. When at length he spoke, it was in a low, hoarse voice; quite unlike his usual hard tones:
“Damn you!” he said, “you have me at your mercy. Take the land for the money, if you like, though it will nearly ruin me. That woman has turned my head; I must marry her, or I shall go mad.”
“Very good; that is your affair. Remember that I have no responsibility in the matter, and that I am not going to put any pressure on Angela. If you want to marry her, you must win her within the next eight months. Then that is settled. I suppose that you will pay in the thousand tomorrow. The storm is coming up fast, so I won’t keep you. Good night,” and they separated, George to drive home — with fever in his heart, and the thunderstorm, of which he heard nothing, rattling round him — and Philip to make his way to bed, with the dream of his life advanced a step nearer realization.
“That was a lucky swim of Angela’s to-night,” he thought. “Fifty thousand pounds for the estate. He is right; he must be going mad. But will he get her to marry him, I wonder. If he does, I shall cry quits with him, indeed.”
George had spoken no falsehood when he said that he felt as though he must marry Angela or go mad. Indeed, it is a striking proof of how necessary he thought that step to be to his happiness, that he had been willing to consent to his cousin’s Shylock-like terms about the sale of the property, although they would in their result degrade him from his position as a large landed proprietor, and make a comparatively poor man of him. The danger or suffering that could induce a Caresfoot to half ruin himself with his eyes open had need to be of an extraordinarily pressing nature.
Love’s empire is this globe and all mankind; the most refined and the most degraded, the cleverest and the most stupid, are all liable to become his faithful subjects. He can alike command the devotion of an archbishop and a South-Sea Islander, of the most immaculate maiden lady (whatever her age) and of the savage Zulu girl. From the pole to the equator, and from the equator to the further pole, there is no monarch like Love. Where he sets his foot, the rocks bloom with flowers, or the garden becomes a wilderness, according to his good-will and pleasure, and at his whisper all other allegiances melt away like ropes of mud. He is the real arbiter of the destinies of the world.
But to each nature of all the millions beneath his sway, Love comes in a fitting guise, to some as an angel messenger, telling of sympathy and peace, and a strange new hope; to others draped in sad robes indeed, but still divine. Thus when he visits such a one as George Caresfoot, it is as a potent fiend, whose mission is to enter through man’s lower nature, to torture and destroy; to scorch the heart with fearful heats, and then to crush it, and leave its owner’s bosom choked with bitter dust.
And, so far as George is concerned, there is no doubt but what the work was done right well, for under the influence of what is, with doubtful propriety, known as the “tender passion,” that estimable character was rapidly drifting within a measurable distance of a lunatic asylum. The checks and repulses that he had met with, instead of cooling his ardour, had only the effect of inflaming it to an extraordinary degree. Angela’s scornful dislike, as water thrown upon burning oil, did but diffuse the flames of his passion throughout the whole system of his mind, till he grew wild with its heat and violence. Her glorious beauty daily took a still stronger hold upon his imagination, till it scorched into his very soul. For whole nights he could not sleep, for whole days he would scarcely eat or do anything but walk, walk, walk, and try to devise means to win her to his side. The irritation of the mind produced its natural effects upon his conduct, and he would burst into fits of the most causeless fury. In one of these he dismissed every servant in the house, and so evil was his reputation among that class, that he had great difficulty in obtaining others to take their place. In another he hurled a heavy pot containing an azalea-bush at the head of one of the gardeners, and had to compromise an action for assault. In short, the lunatic asylum loomed very near indeed.
For a week or so after the memorable night of his interview with Philip, an interview that he, at least, would never forget, George was quite unable, try as he would, to get a single word with Angela.
At last, one day, when he was driving, by a seldom-used road, past the fields near the Abbey House on his way from Roxham, chance gave him the opportunity that he had for so long sought without success. For, far up a by-lane that led to a turnip-field, his eye caught sight of the flutter of a grey dress vanishing round a corner, something in the make of which suggested to him that Angela was its wearer. Giving the reins to the servant, and bidding him drive on home, he got out of the dog-cart and hurried up the grassy track, and on turning the corner came suddenly upon the object of his search. She was standing on the bank of the hedge-row, and struggling with a bough of honeysuckle from which she wished to pluck its last remaining autumn bloom. So engaged was she that she did not hear his step, and it was not until his hard voice grated on her ear, that she knew that she was trapped.
“Caught at last. You have given me a pretty hunt, Angela.”
The violent start she gave effectually carried out her purpose as regards the honeysuckle, which snapped in two under the strain of her backward jerk, and she turned round upon him panting with fear and exertion, the flowery bough grasped within her hand.
“Am I, then, a wild creature, that you should hunt me so?”
“Yes, you are the loveliest and the wildest of creatures, and, now I have caught you, you must listen to me.”
“I will not listen to you; you have nothing to say to me that can interest me. I will not listen to you.”
George laughed a little — a threatening, nervous laugh.
“I am accustomed to have my own way, Angela, and I am not going to give it up now. You must and you shall listen. I have got my opportunity at last, and I mean to use it. I am sorry to have to speak so roughly, but you have only yourself to thank; you have driven me to it.”
His determination frightened her, and she took refuge in an armour of calm and freezing contempt.
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
“On the contrary, you understand me very well. You always avoid me; I can never see you, try how I will. Perhaps,” he went on, still talking quite quietly, “if you knew what a hell there is in my heart and brain you would not treat me so. I tell you that I am in torture,” and the muscles of the pallid face twitched in a way that went far to confirm his words.
“I do not understand your meaning, unless, indeed, you are trying to frighten and insult me, as you have done before,” answered Angela.
Poor girl, she did not know what else to say; she was not of a nervous disposition, but there was something about George’s manner that alarmed her very much, and she glanced anxiously around to see if any one was within call, but the place was lonely as the grave.
“There is no need for you to look for help, I wish neither to frighten nor insult you; my suit is an honourable one enough. I wish you to promise to marry me, that is all; you must and shall promise it, I will take no refusal. You were made for me and I for you; it is quite useless for you to resist me, for you must marry me at last. I love you, and by that right you belong to me. I love you — I love you.”
“You — love — me — you ——”
“Yes, I do, and why should you look at me like that? I cannot help it, you are so beautiful; if you knew your loveliness, you would understand me. I love those grey eyes of yours, even when they flash and burn as they do now. Ah! they shall look softly at me yet, and those sweet lips that curl so scornfully shall shape themselves to kiss me. Listen, I loved you when I first saw you there in the drawing-room at Isleworth, I loved you more and more all the time that I was ill, and now I love you to madness. So you see, Angela, you must marry me soon.”
“I marry you!”
“Oh! don’t say you won’t, for God’s sake, don’t say you won’t,” said George, with a sudden change of manner from the confident to the supplicatory. “Look, I beg you not to, on my knees,” and he actually flung himself down on the grass roadway and grovelled before her in an abandonment of passion hideous to behold.
She turned very pale, and answered him in a cold, quiet voice, every syllable of which fell upon him like the stroke of a knife.
“Such a thing would be quite impossible for many reasons, but I need only repeat you one that you are already aware of. I am engaged to Mr. Heigham.”
“Bah, that is nothing. I know that; but you will not throw away such a love as I have to offer for the wavering affection of a boy. We can soon get rid of him. Write and tell him that you have changed your mind. Listen, Angela,” he went on, catching her by the skirt of her dress; “he is not rich, he has only got enough for a bare living. I have five times the money, and you shall help to spend it. Don’t marry a young beggar like that; you won’t get value for yourself. It will pay you ever so much better to marry me.”
George was convinced from his experience of the sex that every woman could be bought if only you bid high enough; but, as the sequel showed, he could not well have used a worse argument to a person like Angela, or one more likely to excite the indignation that fear of him, together with a certain respect for the evident genuineness of his suffering, had hitherto kept in suppression. She wrenched her dress free from him, leaving a portion of its fabric in his hand.
“Are you not ashamed?” she said, her voice trembling with indignation and her eyes filled with angry tears; “are you not ashamed to talk to me like this, you, my own father’s cousin, and yourself old enough to be my father? I tell you that my love is already given, which would have been a sufficient answer to any gentleman, and you reply by saying that you are richer than the man I love. Do you believe that a woman thinks of nothing but money? or do you suppose that I am to be bought like a beast at the market? Get up from the ground, for, since your brutality forces me to speak so plainly in my own defence, I must tell you once and for all that you will get nothing by kneeling to me. Listen: I would rather die than be your wife; rather than always see your face about me, I would pass my life in prison; I had sooner be touched by a snake than by you. You are quite hateful to me. Now you have your answer, and I beg that you will get up and let me pass!”
Drawn up the full height of her majestic stature, her face flushed with emotion, and her clear eyes flashing scornful fire, whilst in her hand she still held the bough of sweet honeysuckle; Angela formed a strange contrast to the miserable man crouched at her feet, swaying himself to and fro and moaning, his hat off and his face hidden in his trembling hands.
As he would not, or could not move, she left him there, and slipping through a neighbouring gap vanished from sight. When she was fairly gone, he stirred, and having risen and recovered his hat, which had fallen off in his excitement, his first action was to shake his fist in the direction in which she had vanished, his next to frantically kiss the fragment of her dress that he still held in her hand.
“You shall marry me yet, my fine lady,” he hissed between his teeth; “and, if I do not repay your gentle words with interest, my name is not George Caresfoot;” and then, staggering like a drunken man, he made his way home.
“Oh, Arthur,” thought Angela, as she crept quite broken in spirit to the solitude of her room, “if I only knew where you were, I think that I would follow you, promise or no promise. There is no one to help me, no one; they are all in league against me — even my own father.”
Notwithstanding his brave threats made behind Angela’s back, about forcing her to marry him in the teeth of any opposition that she could offer, George reached home that night very much disheartened about the whole business. How was he to bow the neck of this proud woman to his yoke, and break the strong cord of her allegiance to her absent lover. With many girls it might have been possible to find a way, but Angela was not an ordinary girl. He had tried, and Lady Bellamy had tried, and they had both failed, and as for Philip he would take no active part in the matter. What more could be done? Only one thing that he could think of, he could force Lady Bellamy to search her finer brains for a fresh expedient. Acting upon this idea, he at once despatched a note to her, requesting her to come and see him at Isleworth on the following morning.
That night passed very ill for the love-lorn George. Angela’s vigorous and imaginative expression of her entire loathing of him had pierced even the thick hide of his self-conceit, and left him sore as a whipped hound, altogether too sore to sleep. When Lady Bellamy arrived on the following morning, she found him marching up and down the dining-room, in the worst of his bad tempers, and that was a very shocking temper indeed. His light blue eyes were angry and bloodshot, his general appearance slovenly to the last degree, and a red spot burned upon each sallow cheek.
“Well, George, what is the matter? You don’t look quite so happy as a lover should.”
He grunted by way of answer.
“Has the lady been unkind, failed to appreciate your advances, eh?”
“Now look here, Anne,” he answered, savagely, “if I have to put up with things from that confounded girl, I am not going to stand your jeers, so stop them once and for all.”
“It is very evident that she has been unkind. Supposing that instead of abusing me you tell me the details. No doubt they are interesting,” and she settled herself in a low chair, and glanced at him keenly from under her heavy eyelids.
Thus admonished, George proceeded to giver her such a version of his melancholy tale as best suited him, needless to say not a full one, but his hearer’s imagination easily supplied the gaps, and, as he proceeded, a slow smile crept over her face as she conjured up the suppressed details of the scene in the lane.
“Curse you! what are you laughing at? You came here to listen, not laugh,” broke out George furiously, when he saw it.
She made no answer, and he continued his thrilling tale without comment on her part.
“Now,” he said, when it was finished, “what is to be done?”
“There is nothing to be done; you have failed to win her affections, and there is an end of the matter.”
“Then you mean I must give it up?”
“Yes, and a very good thing too, for the ridiculous arrangement that you have entered into with Philip would have half-ruined you, and you would be tired of the girl in a month.”
“Now, look you here, Anne,” said George, in a sort of hiss, and standing over her in a threatening attitude, “I have suspected for some time that you were playing me false in this business, and now I am sure of it. You have put the girl up to treating me like this, you treacherous snake; you have struck me from behind, you Red Indian in petticoats. But, look here, I will be square with you; you shall not have all the laugh on your side.”
“George, you must be mad.”
“You shall see whether I am mad or not. Did you see what the brigands did to a fellow they caught in Greece the other day for whom they wanted ransom? First, they sent his ear to his friends, then his nose, then his foot, and, last of all, his head — all by post, mark you. Well, dear Anne, that is just how I am going to pay you out. You shall have a week to find a fresh plan to trap the bird you have frightened, and, if you find none, first, I shall post one of those interesting letters that I have yonder to your husband — anonymously, you know — not a very compromising one, but one that will pique his curiosity and set him making inquiries; then I shall wait another week.”
Lady Bellamy could bear it no longer. She sprang up from her chair, pale with anger.
“You fiend in human form, what is it, I wonder, that has kept me so long from destroying you and myself too? Oh! you need not laugh; I have the means to do it, if I choose: I have had them for twenty years.”
George laughed again, hoarsely.
“Quite penny-dreadful, I declare. But I don’t think you will come to that; you would be afraid, and, if you do, I don’t much care — I am pretty reckless, I can tell you.”
“For your threats,” she went on, without heeding him, “I care nothing, for, as I tell you, I have their antidote at hand. You have known me for many years, tell me, did you ever see my nerve desert me? Do you suppose that I am a woman who would bear failure when I could choose death? No, George, I had rather pass into eternity on the crest of the wave of my success, such as it has been, and let it break and grind me to powder there, or else bear me to greater heights. All that should have been a woman’s better part in the world you have destroyed in me. I do not say that it was altogether your fault, for an evil destiny bound me to you, and it must seem odd to you when I say that, knowing you for what you are, I still love you. And to fill up this void, to trample down those surging memories, I have made myself a slave to my ambition, and the acquisition of another power that you cannot understand. The man you married me to is rich and a knight today. I made him so. If I live another twenty years, his wealth shall be colossal and his influence unbounded, and I will be one of the most powerful women in the kingdom. Why do you suppose that I so fear your treachery? Do you think that I should mind its being known that I had thrown aside that poor fig-leaf, virtue — the green garment that marks a coward or a fool; for, mark you, all women, or nearly all, would be vicious if they dared. Fear and poverty of spirit restrain them, not virtue. Why, it is by their vices, properly managed, that women have always risen, and always will rise. To be really great, I think that a woman must be vicious with discrimination, and I respect vice accordingly. No, it is not that I fear. I am afraid because I have a husband whose bitter resentment is justly piling up against me from year to year, who only lies in wait for an opportunity to destroy me. Nor is he my only enemy. In his skilful hands, the letters you possess can, as society is in this country, be used so as to make me powerless. Yes, George, all the good in me is dead; the mad love I have given you is hourly outraged, and yet I cannot shake it off. There alone my strength fails me, and I am weak as a child. Only the power to exercise my will, my sense of command over the dullards round me, and a yet keener pleasure you do not know of, are left to me. If these are taken away, what will my life be? A void, a waste, a howling wilderness, a place where I will not stay! I had rather tempt the unknown. Even in Hell there must be scope for abilities such as mine!”
She paused awhile, as if for an answer, and then went on —
“And as for you, poor creature that you are, words cannot tell how I despise you. You discard me and my devotion, to follow a nature, in its way, it is true, greater even than my own, representing the principle of good, as I represent the principle of evil, but one to which yours is utterly abhorrent. Can you mix light with darkness, or filthy oil with water? As well hope to merge your life, black as it is with every wickedness, with that of the splendid creature you would defile. Do you suppose that a woman such as she will ever be really faithless to her love, even though you trap her into marriage? Fool, her heart is as far above you as the stars; and without a heart a woman is a husk that none but such miserables as yourself would own. But go on — dash yourself against a white purity that will, in the end, blind and destroy you. Dree your own doom! I will find you expedients; it is my business to obey you. You shall marry her, if you will, and taste of the judgment that will follow. Be still, I will bear no more of your insolence today.” And she swept out of the room, leaving George looking somewhat scared.
When Lady Bellamy reached Rewtham House, she went straight to her husband’s study. He received her with much politeness, and asked her to sit down.
“I have come to consult you on a matter of some importance,” she said.
“That is, indeed, an unusual occurrence,” answered Sir John, rubbing his dry hands and smiling.
“It is not my own affair: listen,” and she gave him a full, accurate, and clear account of all that had taken place with reference to George’s determination to marry Angela, not omitting the most trivial detail. Sir John expressed no surprise; he was a very old bird was Sir John, one for whom every net was spread in vain, whether in or out of his sight. Nothing in this world, provided that it did not affect his own comfort or safety, could affect his bland and appreciative smile. He was never surprised. Once or twice he put a shrewd question to elucidate some point in the narrative, and that was all. When his wife was finished, he said,
“Well, Anne, you have told a very interesting and amusing little history, doubly so, if you will permit me to say it, seeing that it is told of George Caresfoot by Lady Bellamy; but it seems that your joint efforts have failed. What is it that you wish me to do?”
“I wish to ask you if you can suggest any plan that will not fail. You are very cunning in your way, and your advice may be good.”
“Let me see, young Heigham is in Madeira, is he not?”
“I am sure I do not know.”
“But I do,” and he extracted a note-book from a drawer. “Let me see, I think I have an entry somewhere here. Ah! here we are. ‘Arthur P. Heigham, Esq., passenger, per Warwick Castle, to Madeira, June 16.’ (Copied from passenger-list, Western Daily News.) His second name is Preston, is it not? Lucky I kept that. Now, the thing will be to communicate with Madeira, and see if he is still there. I can easily do that; I know a man there.”
“Have you formed any plan, then?”
“Yes,” answered Sir John, with great deliberation, “I think I see my way; but I must have time to think of it. I will speak to you about it tomorrow.”
When Lady Bellamy had gone, the little man rose, peeped round to see that nobody was within hearing, and then, rubbing his dry hands with infinite zest, said aloud, in a voice that was quite solemn in the intensity of its satisfaction,
“The Lord hath delivered mine enemies into mine hand.”
Two days after Sir John had been taken into confidence, Philip received a visit from Lady Bellamy that caused him a good deal of discomfort. After talking to him on general subjects for awhile, she rose to go.
“By the way, Mr. Caresfoot,” she said, “I really had almost forgotten the object of my visit. You may remember a conversation we had together some time ago, when I was the means of paying a debt owing to you?”
Philip nodded.
“Then you will not have forgotten that one of the articles of our little verbal convention was, that if it should be considered to the interest of all the parties concerned, your daughter’s old nurse was not to remain in your house?”
“I remember.”
“Well, do you know, I cannot help thinking that it must be a bad thing for Angela to have so much of the society of an ill-educated and not very refined person like Pigott. I really advise you to get rid of her.”
“She has been with me for twenty years, and my daughter is devoted to her. I can’t turn her off.”
“It is always painful to dismiss an old servant — almost as bad as discarding an old dress; but when a dress is worn out it must be thrown away. Surely the same applies to servants.”
“I don’t see how I am to send her away.”
“I can quite understand your feelings; but then, you see, an agreement implies obligations on both sides, doesn’t it? especially an agreement ‘for value received,’ as the lawyers say.”
Philip winced perceptibly.
“I wish I had never had anything to do with your agreements.”
“Oh! if you think it over, I don’t think that you will say so. Well, that is settled. I suppose she will go pretty soon. I am glad to see you looking so well — very different from your cousin, I assure you. I don’t think much of his state of health. Good-bye; remember me to Angela. By the way, I don’t know if you have heard that George has met with a repulse in that direction; he does not intend to press matters any more at present; but, of course, the agreement holds all the same. Nobody knows what the morrow may bring forth.”
“Where you and my amiable cousin are concerned, I shall be much surprised if it does not bring forth villany,” thought Philip, as soon as he heard the front door close. “I suppose that it must be done about Pigott. Curse that woman, with her sorceress face. I wish I had never put myself into her power; the iron hand can be felt pretty plainly through her velvet glove.”
Life is never altogether clouded over, and that morning Angela’s horizon had been brightened by two big rays of sunshine that came to shed their cheering light on the grey monotony of her surroundings. For of late, notwithstanding its occasional spasms of fierce excitement, her life had been as monotonous as it was miserable. Always the same anxious grief, the same fears, the same longing pressing hourly round her like phantoms in the mist — no, not like phantoms, like real living things peeping at her from the dark. Sometimes, indeed, the presentiments and intangible terrors that were gradually strengthening their hold upon her would get beyond her control, and arouse in her a restless desire for action — any action, it did not matter what — that would take her away out of these dull hours of unwholesome mental growth. It was this longing to be doing something that drove her, fevered physically with the stifling air of the summer night, and mentally by thoughts of her absent lover and recollections of Lady Bellamy’s ominous words, down to the borders of the lake on the evening of George’s visit to her father, and once there, prompted her to try to forget her troubles for awhile in the exercise of an art of which she had from childhood been a mistress.
The same feeling it was too, that led her to spend long hours of the day and even of the night, when by rights she should have been asleep, immersed in endless mathematical studies, and in solving, or attempting to solve, almost impossible problems. She found that the strenuous effort of the brain acted as a counter-irritant to the fretting of her troubles, and though it may seem an odd thing to say, mathematics alone, owing to the intense application they required, exercised a soothing effect upon her. But, as one cannot constantly sleep induced by chloral without paying for it in some shape or form, Angela’s relief from her cares was obtained at no small cost to her health. When the same brain, however well developed it may be, has both to study hard and suffer much, there must be a waste of tissue somewhere. In Angela’s case the outward and visible result of this state of things was to make her grow thinner, and the alternate mental effect to increasingly rarefy an intellect already too ethereal for this work-a-day world, and to plunge its owner into fits of depression which were rendered dreadful by sudden forebodings of evil that would leap to life in the recesses of her mind, and for a moment cast a lurid glare upon its gloom, such as at night the lightning gives to the blackness which surrounds it.
It was in one of the worst of these fits, her “cloudy days” as she would call them to Pigott, that good news found her. As she was dressing, Pigott brought her a letter, which, recognizing Lady Bellamy’s bold handwriting, she opened in fear and trembling. It contained a short note and another letter. The note ran as follows:
“Dear Angela,
“I enclose you a letter from your cousin George, which contains what I suppose you will consider good news. For your own sake I beg you not to send it back unopened as you did the last.
“A. B.”
For a moment Angela was tempted to mistrust this enclosure, and almost come to the determination to throw it into the fire, feeling sure that a serpent lurked in the grass and that it was a cunningly disguised love-letter. But curiosity overcame her, and she opened it as gingerly as though it were infected, unfolding the sheet with the handle of her hair-brush. Its contents were destined to give her a surprise. They ran thus:
“Isleworth Hall, September 20.
“My dear Cousin,
“After what passed between us a few days ago you will perhaps be surprised at hearing from me, but, if you have the patience to read this short letter, its contents will not, I fear, be altogether displeasing to you. They are very simple. I write to say that I accept your verdict, and that you need fear no further advances from me. Whether I quite deserved all the bitter words you poured out upon me I leave you to judge at leisure, seeing that my only crime was that I loved you. To most women that offence would not have seemed so unpardonable. But that is as it may be. After what you said there is only one course left for a man who has any pride — and that is to withdraw. So let the past be dead between us. I shall never allude to it again. Wishing you happiness in the path of life which you have chosen,
“I remain,
“Your affectionate cousin,
“George Caresfoot.”
It would have been difficult for any one to have received a more perfectly satisfactory letter than this was to Angela.
“Pigott,” she called out, feeling the absolute necessity of a confidant in her joy, and forgetting that that worthy soul had nothing but the most general knowledge of George’s advances, “he has given me up; just think, he is going to let me alone. I declare that I feel quite fond of him.”
“And who might you be talking of, miss?”
“Why, my cousin George, of course; he is going to let me alone, I tell you.”
“Which, seeing how as he isn’t fit to touch you with a pair of tongs, is about the least as he can do, miss, and, as for letting you alone, I didn’t know as he ever proposed doing anything else. But that reminds me, miss, though I am sure I don’t know why it should, how as Mrs. Hawkins, as was put in to look after the vicarage while the Reverend Fraser was away, told me last night how as she had got a telegraft the sight of which, she said, knocked her all faint like, till she turned just as yellow as the cover, to say nothing of four-and-six porterage, the which, however, she intends to recover from the Reverend — Lord, where was I?”
“I am sure I don’t know, Pigott, but I suppose you were going to tell me what was in the telegram.”
“Yes, miss, that’s right; but my head does seem to wool up somehow so at times that I fare to lose my way.”
“Well, Pigott, what was in the telegram?”
“Lord, miss, how you do hurry one, begging your pardon; only that the Reverend Fraser — not but what Mrs. Hawkins do say that it can’t be true, because the words warn’t in his writing nor nothing like, as she has good reason to know, seeing that ——”
“Yes, but what about Mr. Fraser, Pigott? Isn’t he well?”
“The telegraft didn’t say, as I remembers, miss; bless me, I forget if it was today or tomorrow.”
“Oh, Pigott,” groaned Angela, “do tell me what was in the telegram.”
“Why, miss, surely I told you that the thing said, though I fancy likely to be in error ——”
“What?” almost shouted Angela.
“Why, that the Reverend Fraser would be home by the midday train, and would like a beefsteak for lunch, not mentioning, however, anything about the onions, which is very puzzling to Mrs.——”
“Oh, I am glad; why could you not tell me before? Cousin George disposed of and Mr. Fraser coming back. Why, things are looking quite bright again; at least they would be if only Arthur were here,” and her rejoicing ended in a sigh.
As soon as she thought that he would have finished his beefsteak, with or without the onions, Angela walked down to the vicarage and broke in upon Mr. Fraser with something of her old gladsome warmth. Running up to him without waiting to be announced, she seized him by both hands.
“And so you are back at last? what a long time you have been away. Oh, I am so glad to see you.”
Mr. Fraser, who, it struck her, looked older since his absence, turned first a little red and then a little pale, and said,
“Yes, Angela, here I am back again in the old shop; it is very good of you to come so soon to see me. Now, sit down and tell me all about yourself whilst I go on with my unpacking. But, bless me, my dear, what is the matter with you, you look thin, and as though you were not happy, and — where has your smile gone to, Angela?”
“Never mind me, you must tell me all about yourself first. Where have you been and what have you been doing all these long months?”
“Oh, I have been enjoying myself over half the civilized globe,” he answered, with a somewhat forced laugh. “Switzerland, Italy, and Spain have all been benefited by my presence, but I got tired of it, so here I am back in my proper sphere, and delighted to again behold these dear familiar faces,” and he pointed to his ample collection of classics. “But let me hear about yourself, Angela. I am tired of No. 1, I can assure you.”
“Oh, mine is a long story, you will scarcely find patience to listen to it.”
“Ah, I thought that there was a story from your face; then I think that I can guess what it is about. Young ladies’ stories generally turn upon the same pivot,” and he laughed a little softly, and sat down in a corner well out of the light. “Now, my dear, I am ready to give you my best attention.”
Angela blushed very deeply, and, looking studiously out of the window, began, with many hesitations, to tell her story.
“Well, Mr. Fraser, you must understand first of all — I mean, you know, that I must tell you that —” desperately, “that I am engaged.”
“Ah!”
There was a something so sharp and sudden about this exclamation that Angela turned round quickly.
“What’s the matter, have you hurt yourself?”
“Yes; but go on, Angela.”
It was an awkward story to tell, especially the George complication part of it, and to any one else she felt that she would have found it almost impossible to tell it, but in Mr. Fraser she was, she knew, sure of a sympathetic listener. Had she known, too, that the mere mention of her lover’s name was a stab to her listener’s heart, and that every expression of her own deep and enduring love and each tone of endearment were new and ingenious tortures, she might well have been confused.
For so it was. Although he was fifty years of age, Mr. Fraser had not educated Angela with impunity. He had paid the penalty that must have resulted to any heart-whole man not absolutely a fossil, who had been brought into close contact with such a woman as Angela. Her loveliness appealed to his sense of beauty, her goodness to his heart, and her learning to his intellectual sympathies. What wonder that he learnt by imperceptible degrees to love her; the wonder would have been if he had not.
The reader need not fear, however; he shall not be troubled with any long account of Mr. Fraser’s misfortune, for it never came to light or obtruded itself upon the world or even upon its object. His was one of those earnest, secret, and self-sacrificing passions of which, if we only knew it, there exist a good many round about us, passions which to all appearance tend to nothing and are entirely without object, unless it to be make the individuals on whom they are inflicted a little less happy, or a little more miserable, as the case may be, than he or she would otherwise have been. It was to strive to conquer this passion, which in his heart he called dishonourable, that Mr. Fraser had gone abroad, right away from Angela, where he had wrestled with it, and prayed against it, and at last, as he thought, subdued it. But now, on his first sight of her, it rose again in all its former strength, and rushed through his being like a storm, and he realized that such love is of those things that cannot die. And perhaps it is a question if he really wished to lose it. It was a poor thing indeed, a very poor thing, but his own. There is something so divine about all true love that there lurks a conviction at the bottom of the hearts of most of us that it is better to love, however much we suffer, than not to love at all. Perhaps, after all, those really to be pitied are the people who are not capable of any such sensation.
But what Mr. Fraser suffered listening that autumn afternoon to Angela’s tale of another’s love and of her own deep return of that love, no man but himself ever knew. Yet still he heard and was not shaken in his loyal-heartedness, and comforted and consoled her, giving her the best advice in his power, like the noble Christian gentleman that he was; showing her too that there was little need of anxiety and every ground for hope that things would come to a happy and successful issue. The martyr’s abnegation of self is not yet dead in the world.
At last Angela came to the letter that she had that very morning received from George. Mr. Fraser read it carefully.
“At any rate,” he said, “he is behaving like a gentleman now. On the whole, that is a nice letter. You will be troubled with him no more.”
“Yes,” answered Angela, and then flushing up at the memory of George’s arguments in the lane, “but it is certainly time that he did, for he had no business, oh, he had no business to speak to me as he spoke, and he a man old enough to be my father.”
Mr. Fraser’s pale cheeks coloured a little.
“Don’t be hard upon him because he is old, Angela — which by the way he is not, he is nearly ten years my junior — for I fear that old men are just as liable to be made fools of by a pretty face as young ones.”
From that moment, not knowing the man’s real character, Mr. Fraser secretly entertained a certain sympathy for George’s sufferings, arising no doubt from a fellow-feeling. It seemed to him that he could understand a man going very far indeed when his object was to win Angela: not that he would have done it himself, but he knew the temptation and what it cost to struggle against it.
It was nearly dark when at length Angela, rising to go, warmly pressed his hand, and thanked him in her own sweet way for his goodness and kind counsel. And then, declining his offer of escort, and saying that she would come and see him again on the morrow, she departed on her homeward path.
The first thing that met her gaze on the hall-table at the Abbey House was a note addressed to herself in a handwriting that she had seen in many washing bills, but never before on an envelope. She opened it in vague alarm. It ran as follows:
“Miss,— Yore father has just dismissed me, saying that he is too pore to keep me any longer, which is a matter as I holds my own opinion on, and that I am too uneddicated to be in yore company, which is a perfect truth. But, miss, not feeling any how ekal to bid you good-bye in person after bringing you up by hand and doing for you these many years, I takes the liberty to write to you, miss, to say good-bye and God bless you, my beautiful angel, and I shall be to be found down at the old housen at the end of the drift as my pore husband left me, which is fortinately just empty, and p’raps you will come and see me at times, miss.
“Yore obedient servant, “Pigott.
“I opens this again to say how as I have tied up your things a bit afore I left leaving mine till tomorrow, when, if living, I shall send for them. If you please, miss, you will find yore clean night-shift in the left hand drawyer, and sorry am I that I can’t be there to lay it out for you. I shall take the liberty to send up for your washing, as it can’t be trusted to any one.”
Angela read the letter through, and then sank back upon a chair and burst into a storm of tears. Partially recovering herself, however, she rose and entered her father’s study.
“Is this true?” she asked, still sobbing.
“Is what true?” asked Philip, indifferently, and affecting not to see her distress.
“That you have sent Pigott away?”
“Yes, yes, you see, Angela ——”
“Do you mean that she is really to stop away?”
“Of course I do, I really must be allowed, Angela ——”
“Forgive me, father, but I do not want to listen to your reasons and excuses.” Her eyes were quite dry now. “That woman nursed my dying mother, and played a mother’s part to me. She is, as you know, my only woman friend, and yet you throw her away like a worn-out shoe. No doubt you have your reasons, and I hope that they are satisfactory to you, but I tell you, reasons or no reasons, you have acted in a way that is cowardly and cruel;” and casting one indignant glance at him she left the room.
Philip quailed before his daughter’s anger.
“Thank goodness she’s gone, and that job is done with. I am downright afraid of her, and the worst of it is she speaks the truth,” said Philip to himself, as the door closed.
Ten days after this incident, Angela heard casually from Mr. Fraser that Sir John and Lady Bellamy were going on a short trip abroad for the benefit of the former’s health. If she thought about the matter at all, it was to feel rather glad. Angela did not like Lady Bellamy, indeed she feared her. Of George she neither heard nor saw anything. He had also gone away.
Meanwhile at Madeira matters were going on much as we left them; there had indeed been little appreciable change in the situation.
For his part, our friend Arthur continued to dance or rather stroll along the edge of his flowery precipice, and found the view pleasant and the air bracing.
And no doubt things were very nicely arranged for his satisfaction, and had it not been for the ever-present thought of Angela — for he did think of her a great deal and with deep longing — he should have enjoyed himself thoroughly, for every day was beautiful, and every day brought its amusements with it. Perhaps on arriving at the Quinta Carr about eleven o’clock, he would find that the steam launch was waiting for them in a little bay where the cliff on which the house stood curved inwards. Then, a merry party of young English folks all collected together by Mrs. Carr that morning by the dint of superhuman efforts, they would scramble down the steps cut in the rock and steam off to some neighbouring islet to eat luncheon and wander about collecting shells and flowers and beetles till sunset, and then steam back again through the spicy evening air, laughing and flirting and making the night melodious with their songs. Or else the horses would be ordered out and they would wander over the lonely mountains in the interior of the island, talking of mummies and all things human, of Angela and all things divine. And sometimes, in the course of these conversations, Arthur would in a brotherly way call Mrs. Carr “Mildred,” while occasionally, in the tone of a spinster aunt, she would address him as “Arthur,” a practice that, once acquired, she soon found was, like all other bad habits, not easy to get rid of. For somehow in all these expeditions she was continually at his side, striving, and not without success, to weave herself into the substance of his life, and to make herself indispensable to him, till at last he grew to look upon her almost as a sister.
But beyond this he never went, and to her advances he was as cold as ice, simply because he never noticed them, and she was afraid of making them more obvious for fear that she would frighten him away. He thought it the most natural thing in the world that he and Mildred should live together like brother and sister, and be very fond of each other as “sich,” whilst she thought him — just what he was — the blindest of fools, and then loved him the more for his folly. The sisterly relationship did not possess the same charms for Mildred that it did for Arthur; they looked at matters from different points of view.
One morning, peeping through a big telescope that was fixed in the window of the little boudoir which formed an entrance lobby to the museum, Mrs. Carr saw a cloud of smoke upon the horizon. Presently the point of a mast poked up through the vapour as though the vessel were rising out of the ocean, then two more mastheads and a red and black funnel, and last of all a great grey hull.
“Hurrah!” called out Mrs. Carr, with one eye still fixed to the telescope and the remainder of her little face all screwed up in her efforts to keep the other closed, “it’s the mail; I can see the Donald Currie flag, a white C on a blue ground.”
“Well, I am sure, Mildred, there’s no need for you to make your face look like a monkey, if it is; you look just as though the corner of your mouth were changing places with your eyebrow.”
“Agatha, you are dreadfully rude; when the fairies took your endowments in hand, they certainly did not forget the gift of plain speech. I shall appeal to Mr. Heigham; do I look like a monkey, Mr. Heigham? No, on second thoughts, I won’t wait for the inevitable compliment. Arthur, hold your tongue and I will tell you something. That must be the new boat, the Garth Castle, and I want to see over her. Captain Smithson, who is bringing her out, has got a box of things for me. What do you say if we kill two birds with one stone, go and see the vessel and get our luncheon on board.”
“I am at your ladyship’s service,” answered Arthur, lazily, “but would you like to have the compliment apropos of the monkey? I have thought of something extremely neat now.”
“Not on any account; I hate compliments that are not meant,” and her eyes gave a little flash which put a point to her words. “Agatha, I suppose that you will come?”
“Well, yes, dear, the bay looks pretty smooth.”
“Smooth, yes, you might sail across it in a paper ship,” yawned Arthur.
“For goodness’ sake don’t look so lazy, Mr. Heigham, but ring the bell — not that one, the electric one — and let us order the launch at once. The mail will be at anchor in about an hour.”
Arthur did as he was bid, and within that time they were steaming through the throng of boats already surrounding the steamer.
“My gracious, Mildred,” suddenly exclaimed Agatha, “do you see who that is there leaning over the bulwarks? oh, he’s gone, but so sure as I am a living woman, it was Lord Minster and Lady Florence Thingumebob, his sister, you know, the pretty one.”
Mildred looked vexed, and glanced involuntarily at Arthur who was steering the launch. For a moment she hesitated about going on, and glanced again at Arthur. The look seemed to inspire her, for she said nothing, and presently he brought the boat deftly alongside the gangway ladder.
The captain of the ship had already come to the side to meet her, having recognized her from the bridge; indeed there was scarcely a man in Donald Currie’s service who did not know Mrs. Carr, at any rate, by sight.
“How do you do, Mrs. Carr; are you coming on to South Africa with us?”
“No, Captain Smithson; I, or rather we, are coming to lunch, and to see your new boat, and last, but not least, to claim my box.”
“Mrs. Carr, will you ever forgive me? I have lost it!”
“Produce my box, Captain Smithson, or I will never speak to you again. I’ll do more. I’ll go over to the Union line.”
“In which case, I am afraid Donald Currie would never speak to me again. I must certainly try to find that box,” and he whispered an order to a quartermaster. “Well, it is very kind of you to come and lunch, and I hope that you and your friends will do so with me. Till then, good-by, I must be off.”
As soon as they got on the quarter-deck, Arthur perceived a tall, well-preserved man with an eyeglass, whom he seemed to know, bearing down upon them, followed by a charming-looking girl, about three-and-twenty years of age, remarkable for her pleasant eyes and the humorous expression of her mouth.
“How do you do, Mrs. Carr?” said the tall man. “I suppose that you heard that we were coming; it is very good of you to come and meet us.”
“I had not the slightest idea that you were coming, and I did not come to meet you, Lord Minster; I came to lunch,” answered Mrs. Carr, rather coldly.
“Nasty one for James that, very,” murmured Lady Florence; “hope it will do him good.”
“I was determined to come and look you up as soon as I got time, but the House sat very late. However, I have got a fortnight here now, and shall see plenty of you.”
“A good deal too much I daresay, Lord Minster; but let me introduce you to Mr. Heigham.”
Lord Minster glanced casually at Arthur, and, lifting his hat about an eighth of an inch, was about to resume his conversation, when Arthur, who was rather nettled by this treatment, said,
“I think I have had the pleasure of meeting you before, Lord Minster; we were stopping together at the Stanley Foxes last autumn.”
“Stanley Foxes, ah, quite so, forgive my forgetfulness, but one meets so many people, you see,” and he turned round to where Mrs. Carr had been, but that lady had taken the opportunity to retreat. Lord Minster at once followed her.
“Well, if my brother has forgotten you, Mr. Heigham, I have not,” said Lady Florence, now coming forward for the first time. “Don’t you remember when we went nutting together and I tumbled into the pond?”
“Indeed I do, Lady Florence, and I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you again. Are you here for long?”
“An indefinite time: an old aunt of mine, Mrs. Velley, is coming out by next mail, and I am going to stop with her when my brother goes back. Are you staying with Mrs. Carr?”
“Oh no, only I know her very well.”
“Do you admire her?”
“Immensely.”
“Then you won’t like James — I mean my brother.”
“Why not?”
“Because he also admires her immensely.”
“We both admire the view from here very much indeed, but that is no reason why you and I should not like each other.”
“No, but then you see there is a difference between lovely scenery and lovely widows.”
“Perhaps there is,” said Arthur.
At this moment Lord Minster returned with Mrs. Carr.
“How do you do, Lady Florence?” said the latter; “let me introduce you to Mr. Heigham. What, do you already know each other?”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Carr, we are old friends.”
“Oh, indeed, that is very charming for you.”
“Yes, it is,” said Lady Florence, frankly.
“Well, we must be off now, Florence.”
“All right, James, I’m ready.”
“Will you both come and dine with me to-night sans facon, there will be nobody else except Agatha and Mr. Heigham?” asked Mrs. Carr.
“We shall be delighted,” said Lord Minster.
“Au revoir, then,” nodded Lady Florence to Arthur, and they separated.
When, after lunching and seeing round the ship, Miss Terry and Arthur found themselves in the steam launch waiting for Mrs. Carr, who was saying good-by to the captain and looking after her precious box, Arthur took the opportunity to ask his companion what she knew of Lord Minster.
“Oh, not much, that is, nothing in particular, except that he is the son of a sugar-broker or something, who was made a peer for some reason or other, and I suppose that is why he is so stuck up, because all the other peers I ever met are just like other people. He is very clever, too, is in the government now, and always hanging about after Mildred. He wants to marry her, you know, and I expect that he will at last, but I hope he won’t. I don’t like him; he always looks at one as though one were dirt.”
“The deuce he does!” ejaculated Arthur, his heart filling on the instant with envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness towards Lord Minster. He had not the slightest wish to marry Mildred himself, but he boiled at the mere thought of anybody else doing so. Lady Florence was right, there is a difference between ladies and landscapes.
At that moment Mildred herself arrived, but so disgusted was he that he would scarcely speak to her, and on arriving at the landing stage he at once departed to the hotel, and even tried to get out of coming to dinner that night, but this was overruled.
“Good,” said Mildred to herself, with a smile; “I have found out how to vex him.”
At dinner that evening Lord Minster, who had of course taken his hostess in, opened the conversation by asking her how she had been employing herself at Madeira.
“Better than you have at St. Stephen’s, Lord Minster; at any rate, I have not been forwarding schemes for highway robbery and the national disgrace,” she answered, laughing.
“I suppose that you mean the Irish Land Act and the Transvaal Convention. I have heard several ladies speak of them like that, and I am really coming to the conclusion that your sex is entirely devoid of political instinct.”
“What do you mean by political instinct, Lord Minster?” asked Arthur.
“By political instinct,” he replied, “I understand a proper appreciation of the science and object of government.”
“Goodness me, what are they?” asked Mrs. Carr.
“Well, the science of government consists, roughly speaking, in knowing how to get into office, and remain there when once in; its objects are to guess and give expression to the prevailing popular feeling or whim with the loss of as few votes as possible.”
“According to that definition,” said Arthur, “all national questions are, or should be, treated by those who understand the ‘science and objects of government’ on a semi-financial basis. I mean, they should be dealt with as an investor deals with his funds, in order to make as much out of them as possible, not to bring real benefit to the country.”
“You put the matter rather awkwardly, but I think I follow you. I will try to explain. In the first place, all the old-fashioned Jingo nonsense about patriotism and the ‘honour of the country’ has, if people only knew it, quite exploded; it only lingers in a certain section of the landed gentry and a proportion of the upper middle class, and has no serious weight with leading politicians.”
“How about Lord Beaconsfield?”
“Well, he was perhaps an exception; but then he was a man with so large a mind — I say it, though I detested him — that he could actually, by a sort of political prescience, see into the far future, and shape his course accordingly. But even in his case I do not believe that he was actuated by patriotism, but rather by a keener insight into human affairs than most men possess.”
“And yet he came terribly to grief.”
“Because he outflew his age. The will of the country — which means the will of between five hundred thousand and a million hungry fluctuating electors — could not wait for the development of his imperial schemes. They wanted plunder in the present, not honour and prosperity for the Empire in the future. The instinct of robbery is perhaps the strongest in human nature, and those who would rule humanity on its present basis must pander to it or fail. The party of progress means the party that can give most spoil, taken from those that have, to those that have not. That is why Mr. Gladstone is such a truly great man; he understands better than any one of his age how to excite the greed of hungry voters and to guide it for his own ends. What was the Midlothian campaign but a crusade of plunder? First he excited the desire, then he promised to satisfy it. Of course that is impossible, but at the time he was believed, and his promises floated us triumphantly into power. The same arguments apply to that body of electors whose motive power is sentiment — their folly must be pandered to. For instance, the Transvaal Convention that Mrs. Carr mentioned is an admirable example of how such pandering is done. No man of experience can have believed that such an agreement could be wise, or that it can result in anything but trouble and humiliation; but the trouble and humiliation will not come just yet, and in the meanwhile a sop is thrown to Cerberus. Political memories are short, and when exposure comes it will be easy to fix the blame upon the other side. It is because we appreciate these facts that in the end we must prevail. The Liberal party, or rather the Radical section, which is to the great Liberal party what the helm is to the ship, appeals to the baser instincts and more pressing appetites of the people; the Conservative only to their traditions and higher aspirations, in the same way that religion appeals to the spirit, and the worship of Mammon to the senses. The shibboleth of the one is ‘self-interest;’ of the other, ‘national honour.’ The first appeals to the many, the second to the finer few, and I must leave you to judge which will carry the day.”
“And if ever you become Prime Minister, shall you rule England upon these principles?” asked Mrs. Carr.
“Certainly; it is because I have mastered them that I am what I am. I owe everything to them, consequently in my view they are the finest of all principles.”
“Then Heaven help England!” soliloquized Arthur, rudely.
“And so say we all,” added Lady Florence, who was a strong Conservative.
“My dear young people,” answered Lord Minster, with a superior smile, “England is quite capable of looking after herself. I have to look after myself. She will, at any rate, last my time, and my motto is that one should get something out of one’s country, not attempt to do her services that would in all probability never be recognized, or, if recognized, left unrewarded.”
Arthur was about to answer, with more sharpness than discretion, but Mrs. Carr interposed.
“Well, Lord Minster, we have to thank you for a very cynical and lucid explanation of the objects of your party, if they really are its objects. Will you give me some wine?”
After dinner Mrs. Carr devoted herself almost exclusively to Lord Minster, leaving Arthur to talk to Lady Florence. Lord Minster was not slow to avail himself of the opportunity.
“I have been thinking of your remark to me in London about the crossing-sweeper,” he began.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake don’t drag that wretched man out of his grave, Lord Minster. I really have forgotten what I said about him.”
“I hope, Mrs. Carr, that you have forgotten a good deal you said that day. I may as well take this opportunity ——”
“No, please don’t, Lord Minster,” she answered, knowing very well what was coming; “I am so tired to-night.”
“Oh, in that case I can easily postpone my statement. I have a whole fortnight before me.”
Mrs. Carr secretly determined that it should remain as much as possible at his own exclusive disposal, but she did not say so.
Shortly after this, Arthur took his leave, after shaking hands very coldly with her. Nor did he come to the Quinta next day, as he had conceived too great a detestation of Lord Minster to risk meeting him, a detestation which he attributed solely to that rising member of the Government’s political principles, which jarred very much with his own.
“Better and better,” said Mrs. Carr to herself, as she took off her dress, “but Lord Minster is really odious, I cannot stand him for long.”