If it were possible to linger over the story of Margaret Hungerford's life--if other and later interests did not peremptorily claim attention--how much might be said concerning it? On the surface, it had many features in common with other lives; and the destruction of a fancy, the awaking to a truth, terrible and not to be eluded, is the least rare of mental processes. But the individual history of every mind, of every heart, has features unlike those of all others--features worthy, in even the humblest and simplest lives, of close scanning and of faithful reproduction. Margaret Hungerford was not an ordinary person; she had strongly-pronounced intellectual and moral characteristics, and her capacity, whether for good or evil time and her destiny alone could tell, was great.
The very intensity of her nature, which had made it easy for her to be deceived, easy for her to build a fair fabric of hope and love on no sounder foundation than her fancy, made it inevitable that the truth should come with terrible force to her, and be understood in its fullest extent and in its darkest meaning--that most full of terror and despair.
The external circumstances of her life subsequent to her marriage did not affect Margaret Hungerford so much as might have been anticipated, in consideration of her delicate nurture, her previous life of seclusion, and her habitual refinement. She was destined to encounter many vicissitudes, to endure poverty, hardship, uncertainty, solitude of the absolute kind, and of that kind which is still more unbearable--enforced companionship with the mean and base, not in position merely, but in soul.
She had to endure many actual privations--to do many things, to witness many scenes which, if they had been unfolded to her in the home of her girlhood, uncongenial as it had been, as probabilities lurking in the plan of the fixture, she would have merely regarded with unalarmed incredulity, would have put aside as things which never could have any existence.
But these things, when they came, she bore well--bore them with strength and patience, with quiet resolution and almost indifference, which, had there been any one to contemplate the girl's life, and study her character at that time, would have revealed the truth that worse things than privation and hardship had come to her, and had rendered them indifferent to her.
Worse things had come. Knowledge and experience, which had outraged her pride and tortured her love, crushed her faith, scattered her hopes, and left her life a desert waste, whence the flowers of youth and trust had been uprooted, and which lay bare to be trampled under foot of invading foes.
Margaret's delusion had lasted so short a time after her marriage that the first feeling her discovery of the utter worthlessness of the man into whose hands she had committed her fate produced in her mind was dread and distrust of herself.
Was this fading away of love, this dying out of all respect, of all enthusiasm, this dreary hopelessness and fast coming disbelief in good, was all this inconstancy on her part? Was she false to her own feelings, or had she mistaken them? Was she light and fickle, as men were said to be?
But this dread soon subsided: it could not long disturb Margaret's clear good sense. The fault was not hers; she was not inconstant, though she no longer loved Godfrey Hungerford. The truth was, she had never known him; there was no such person as her fancy had created and called by his name.
She had believed herself to be doing a fine heroic thing when she married a disgraced man, a man unjustly judged of his fellows, one against whom the world had set itself--why, she did not quite know, but probably from envy--and who therefore needed her love and fidelity more than a prosperous man could need them. It was a foolish, girlish, not unnatural delusive notion of grandeur and self-sacrifice, and, added to the fascination exerted over her by Godfrey Hungerford's good looks and artistic love-making, it had hurried Margaret to her doom.
The girl married, as she believed, a hero, with a few follies perhaps, all to be forsworn and forsaken when she should be his, to guide and inspire every moment of his life, and whose unjust penalties her love was to render harmless. What did she not believe him to be! Brave, true, generous, devoted, clever, energetic, unworldly, poetical, high-minded, and pure--the ideal man who was to disprove those horrid sayings of disappointed persons, that the lover and the husband are very different beings, and that "man's love is of man's life a thing apart."
Theywould prove it to be their "whole existence." Could any sacrifice be too great to make for such a prize as this? No. The sacrifice was made by him. Who would not have loved and married Godfrey Hungerford? She did not believe that any one could be so bad as to believe the accusation brought against him by a low mean clique, a set of men who could not bear to know that he was cleverer at card-playing than they were--just as he was cleverer at anything else--and who did not know how to lose their money like gentlemen. Of course, as he never could be secured against meeting persons of the sort, it was much better that Godfrey should make up his mind, as he had done, never to touch a card after their marriage.
And then how great was his love for her! How delightful was the scheme of the future, according to his casting of it! So Margaret dreamed her dream, and when the waking came she blamed herself that she could dream it no longer, and could not be lulled to sleep again.
Godfrey Hungerford has no place in this story, and there is no need to enter into details of the life he led, and condemned his wife to. He proved the exact reverse of all she had believed him. Base, mean, cowardly, in the sense of the cowardice which makes a man systematically cruel to every creature, human and brute, within his power, though ready to face danger for bravado's, and exertion for boasting's sake, or either for that of money--a liar, a gambler, and a profligate.
He laughed at her credulity when she quoted his promises to her, and ridiculed her amazement and disgust as ignorance of life, girlish folly, and squeamishness. In a fitful, "worthless" sort of way, he liked and admired her to the end; but the truthfulness that was in her prevented Margaret from taking advantage of this contemptible remnant of feeling to obtain easier terms of life. She had ceased to love him, and she never disguised the fact--she let him see it; when he questioned her, in a moment of maudlin sentiment, she told him so quite plainly; and her tyrant made the truthfulness which could not stoop to simulation a fresh cause of complaint against her.
What Margaret suffered, no words, not even her own, could tell; but the material troubles, the grinding anxieties of her life, deadened her sense of grief after a time. They were always poor. Money melted in the hands of her worthless, selfish husband. Sometimes he made a little, in some of the numerous ways in which money was to be made in colonial life, sometimes he was quite unemployed. He was always dissolute and a spendthrift.
It was hard training for Margaret, severe teaching, and not more full of actual pain, privation, and toil than of bitter humiliation. They moved about from place to place, for at each Godfrey Hungerford became known and shunned.
Villany and vice were loud and rampant indeed in the New World then, as now; but he was not so clever as the superior villains, and not so low, not so irretrievably ruffianly, as the inferior ruffians, and it fell out, somehow, that he did not find any permanent place, or take any specific rank, among them. Of necessity, suffering, both moral and material, was his wife's lot, and it was wonderful that such suffering did not degrade, that it only hardened her. It certainly did harden her, making her cold, indifferent, and difficult to be touched by, or convinced of, good, or truth, or honesty.
Of necessity, also, her life had been devoid of companionship. Too proud to tell her sorrows, and unable to endure the associations into which her husband's evil life would have led her had she been driven by loneliness to relax in her resolute isolation, she had neither sympathy nor pity in her wretchedness. But at length, and when things were going very hard and ill with her, she found a friend.
Time, suffering, and disenchantment had taught Margaret Hungerford many hard and heavy, but salutary, lessons, before the days came which brought her fate this alleviation; and she did not regret it, because it had been procured for her by the care and solicitude of James Dugdale.
Her love had died--more than died; for there is reverence and pious grief, with sweetness in its agony, and cherished recollections, to modify death and make it merciful--it had perished. So had her dislike of James Dugdale. He had been right, and she had been wrong; and though he could never be her friend, because she never could admit to him the one fact or the other, she thought gently and regretfully of him, when she thought of her old home and of the past at all, which was not often, for the present absorbed her usually in its misery and its toil.
When, in the course of their wanderings, the Hungerfords went to the then infant town, now the prosperous city, of Melbourne, Margaret sent home one of her infrequent letters to her father. Thus James Dugdale learned that the woman whose fate he had so unerringly foreseen--the woman he loved with calm, disinterested, clear-sighted affection--was at length within reach of his influence, of his indirect help.
An old friend, schoolfellow, and college chum--one Hayes Meredith, a younger man than James Dugdale by a few years--had been among the first of those tempted from the life of monotonous toil in England by the vast and exciting prospects which the young colony offered to energy, industry, ability, and courage.
Hayes Meredith possessed all these, and some capital too. He had settled at Port Phillip, and was a thriving and respected member of the motley community when Godfrey and Margaret Hungerford arrived to swell the tide of adventure and misery. To him James Dugdale wrote, on behalf of the woman whose need he divined, whose unhappiness he felt, with the instinct of sympathy.
Hayes Meredith responded nobly to his old friend's appeal. He befriended Margaret steadily, with and without her husband's knowledge; he won her affection, conquered her reserve, softened her pride, and, though her fate was beyond amelioration by human aid, he succeeded in making her actual, everyday life more endurable.
When Margaret was sought out by Hayes Meredith, release was drawing near, release from the tremendous evil of her marriage. Godfrey Hungerford, by this time utterly incapable of any steady pursuit, and seized with one of the reckless, restless fits which were becoming more and more frequent with him, joined a party of explorers bound for the unknown interior of the continent, and, regardless of Margaret's fears and necessities, left her alone in the town.
For months she heard nothing of him, or the fate of the expedition; months during which she was kept from destitution only by Hayes Meredith's generous and unfailing aid.
At length news came; a few stragglers from the party of explorers returned. Godfrey Hungerford was not among them; and the remnant related that he had been murdered, with two others, by a tribe of aborigines.
Hayes Meredith told Margaret the truth; he sustained and comforted her in the early days of her horror and grief; he counselled her return to England, and provided money for her voyage. He secured her cabin and the services of Rose Moore. It was he who bade her farewell upon the deck of the Boomerang--he of whom she thought as her only friend.
Margaret had little power of feeling, love, or gratitude in her now, as she believed, and that little was exerted for the alert, kindly-voiced, gray-haired, keen-eyed man who left her with a heavy heart, and said to himself, as the boat shot away from the ship's side, "Poor girl! she has had hard lines of it hitherto. I wonder what is before her in England!"
A bright soft day in the autumn--a day which appealed to all who dwelt in houses to come forth and taste the last lingering flavour of the summer in the sweet air--a day so still and peaceful that the sudden rustle of the leaves, as a few of their number (ennuyésleaves, tired of life sooner than their fellows) detached themselves, and came, gently wafted by the imperceptible air, to the ground, made one look round, as though at an intrusion upon its perfect repose--a day which appealed to memory, and said, "Am I not like some other day in your life, on which you have pondered many things in your heart, and looked far back into the past without the agony of regret, and on into the future undisturbed by dread--a restful day, when life has seemed not bad to have, but very, very good to leave?"--a day on which any settled, stern, inexorable occupation seemed harder, more unbearable than usual, even to the least reasonable and most moderate idler--a day on which the house which Margaret Carteret had forsaken looked particularly beautiful, tranquil, and inviting.
The orderliness of Chayleigh was delightful; it was not formal, not oppressive; it was eminently tasteful. Inside the house and outside it order reigned, without tyrannising. The lawn was always swept with extreme nicety, and the flower-beds, though not pruned down to a tantalising precision, bore evident signs of artistic care.
The house stood almost in the centre of the small grounds, and long wide French windows in front, and bow windows in the rear, opened on smooth grassy terraces, which fell away by gentle inclines towards the flower-garden in front, and at the back towards a pleasaunce, with high prim alleys, and bosquets which in the pride of summer were thickset with roses; and so, to some clumps of noble forest-trees, behind which, and hidden, was the neat wire-fence which bounded the small demesne.
On this soft autumnal day, the three bow windows which opened on the terrace at the back of the house were open, and every now and then the white curtains faintly fluttered, and the leaves of the creepers which luxuriously festooned the window-frames gently rustled. Far above the height of the central window, an aspiring passion-flower, rich in the stiff, majestic, symbolical blossom, stretched its branches, until they wreathed the window just above the centre bow, and aided an impertinent rose to look into the room. They had looked in ever since the one had blossom and the other leaves, but they had seen nothing there that lived or moved.
The middle room, above the suite of drawing-rooms--whose rosewood furniture, whose Ambusson carpets, and whose sparkling girandoles formed the chief delight and pride of Mrs. Carteret's not particularly capacious heart--had not been used since Margaret Carteret had left her home to follow the fortunes of her lover.
That such was the case was not due to any sentiment on Mr. Carteret's part, or any spite on that of his wife. If the former had happened to want additional space for any of his drying or "curing" processes, he would have invaded his daughter's forsaken room without the slightest hesitation, and, indeed, without recalling the circumstance of her former occupation, of his own accord; while it was quite safe from interference on the part of the latter for another and a different reason.
Mrs. Carteret's rooms were perfectly comfortable and sufficient, and she never had "staying company." She knew better. She was quite sufficiently hospitable without inflicting that trouble on herself, and she had no notion of it. Indeed, she never had any notion of doing anything which she did not thoroughly like, or of putting up with any kind of inconvenience for a moment if it were possible to free herself from it; and she had generally found it very possible. Life had rolled along wonderfully smoothly, on the whole, for Mrs. Carteret. She possessed one advantage which does not always fall to the lot of supremely selfish and heartless people--she had an easy temper.
It is refreshing sometimes to observe how much utterly selfish people, whose sole object in life is to secure pleasure and to banish pain, suffer by the infliction upon themselves of their own temper. But Mrs. Carteret was bucklered against fate, even on that side. She took excellent and successful care that no one else should annoy her, and she never annoyed herself. It would have afforded a philosophic observer, indeed, some congenial occupation of mind to divine from what possible quarter, save that of severe bodily pain, discomfiture could reach Mrs. Carteret. She was very well off, perfectly healthy, wholly indifferent to every existing human being except herself and her cousin, had everything her own way as regarded both objects of affection, had got rid of her stepdaughter, and had a very comfortable settlement "in case anything should happen"--according to the queer formula adopted in speaking of the only absolute certainty in human events--to Mr. Carteret.
This seemingly-invulnerable person had no need of Margaret's room then, and when James Dugdale said to her,
"If you don't want that middle room over the drawing-room for any particular purpose, I should be glad to have the use of it for mounting my drawings, and so on; the light is very good," she said at once,
"O yes; you mean Margaret's room, do you not? I don't want it in the least. I will have it put to rights for you at once; it is full of all her trumpery."
No third person listening to the two would ever have discerned that any matter of feeling, or even embarrassment, had any connection with the subject under mention, still less that the "Margaret" in question had so lately left the home of her girlhood on a desperate quest, which the woman who spoke of her complacently believed to be desperate.
"Yes, I mean that room," said James Dugdale in a careless tone; "but pray don't have anything in it touched. I will see to all that myself; in fact, presuming on your permission, I have put a lot of my things in there, and the servants would play the deuce if they meddled with them. I may keep the key, Sibylla, I suppose?"
"Of course," replied Mrs. Carteret; and from that moment she never gave the matter a thought, and James Dugdale had the key of Margaret's room, and he did put some sketch-books, some sheets of Bristol board, and other adjuncts of his favourite pursuit on a table, and thus formally constituted his possession and his pretext. But he seldom unlocked the door; he rarely entered the apartment, even at first, and more and more rarely as time stole on, and all his worst fears and forebodings about Margaret Hungerford had been realised.
Sometimes, when all the house was quiet, on moonlight nights, his pale face and bent figure might have been seen, framed in the window, between the branches of the passion-flower which he had trained. There he would stand awhile, leaning against the woodwork and gazing into the sky, in whose vastness, whose distance, whose sameness over all the world, there is surely some vague comfort for the yearnings of absence, uncertainty, even hopeless separation, or why is the relief of it so often, so uniformly sought?
Sometimes, but not often, he wrote in Margaret's room; one letter which he had written there had exerted a great influence upon her fate, how great he little knew. All the girl's little possessions were in the room, just as she had left them.
Tidy housemaids, with accurate ideas of the fitness of things, had come to and gone away from Chayleigh since the sole daughter of the house had taken her perilous way, according to her headstrong will, and had been disturbed, and even mutinous, in their minds concerning the "middle room." But on the whole they had obeyed orders; and James Dugdale, who had long ceased to be the "tutor," and was supposed to be Mrs. Carteret's stepbrother by the servants of late date in the establishment, enjoyed undisturbed possession of the trumpery water-colour sketches; the little desk with a sloping top, with "Souvenir" engraved in flourishes on a mother-o'-pearl heart inserted over the lock; the embroidery-frame, the bead-worked watch-pocket, and the little library which occupied two hanging shelves, and chiefly consisted of the "Beauties" of the poets, and a collection of "Friendship's Offerings" and "Forget-me-nots."
James Dugdale's thoughts were busy with Margaret Hungerford that sweet autumn day--more busy with her than usual, more full of apprehension. The time that had elapsed had not deadened the feelings with which he regarded the wilful girl, who had scorned his interference, scoffed at and resented his advice, but been obliged to avail herself of his aid.
He knew that she had done so, but he knew nothing more. And as he roamed about the garden, and the terrace, and the pleasaunce, and rambled away to where the forest-trees stood stately, idly treading the fallen leaves under his listless feet, so lately in their green brightness far above his head, he sickened with longing to know more definitely the fate of the absent girl.
"She hated me then," he said with a sigh, as he turned once more towards the house; "and she is just the woman to hate me more because she has found out for herself that I was right."
He little knew how fully, to how far greater an extent than he had discovered it, Margaret had learned the worthlessness of Godfrey Hungerford.
As he crossed the garden, a woman-servant came towards him, and asked him for the key of "the middle room." The request jarred upon him somehow, and he asked rather sharply what it was wanted for.
"We are getting the cleaning done, sir; master and missus is to be home on Saturday."
James Dugdale handed the key to the housemaid, and entered the drawing-room through the open window.
"I may as well write to Haldane," he muttered. "The Canadian mail leaves tomorrow."
When James Dugdale had written his letter, he went out again; but this time he took his way to the village, intending to post the packet, and then pursue his way to a "bit" in the vicinity from which he was making a water-colour drawing.
As he passed the inn which occupied the place of honour in the hilly little street, the coach which ran daily from a large town on the south coast to London was drawn up before the door, and the process of changing horses was being accomplished to the lively satisfaction of numerous bystanders, to whom this event, though of daily occurrence, never ceased to be exciting and interesting.
James Dugdale glanced carelessly at the clustering villagers and the idlers about the inn-door, of whom a few touched their hats or pulled their hair in his honour; observed casually that two female figures were standing in the floor-clothed passage, and that one of the ostlers was lifting a heavy trunk, of a seafaring exterior, down from the luggage-laden top of the coach; and then passed on, and forgot all these ordinary occurrences. He took his way to the scene of his intended sketch, and was soon busily engaged with his work.
When the autumnal day was drawing to its close, and the growing keenness of the air began to make itself felt, quickly too, by his sensitive frame, James Dugdale turned his steps homewards, and, taking the lower road, without again passing through the village, he skirted the clumps of forest-trees, and entered the little demesne by a small gate which led into the pleasaunce.
He had almost reached the grassy terrace, when, glancing upwards, as was his frequent custom,--it had been his habit in the time gone by, when Margaret's light figure and girlish face had often met the upturned glance,--he saw that the window was wide open, and some one was in the room; saw this with quick impatience, which made him step back a little, so as to get a clearer view of the intruder, and to mutter, as he did so,
"Those confounded servants! What can they be doing there up to this time?"
But, as he murmured the words, James Dugdale started violently, and then stood in fixed, motionless, incredulous amazement. The window of the middle room was wide open, and against the woodwork, framed by the blossoms and foliage of the passion-flower, leaned a slight figure, in a heavy black dress.
The slender hands were clasped together, and showed white against the sombre garb; the pale, clear-cut, severe young face, lighted by the last rays of the quickly-setting autumn sun, looked out upon the tranquil scene; but on every feature sat the deepest abstraction. The eyes were heedless of all near objects, fixed apparently upon the trees in the distance; they took no heed of the figure standing in rapt astonishment upon the terrace.
Not until James Dugdale uttered her name with a faltering, with an almost frightened voice, as one might address a spirit, did the face in the window droop, and the eyes search for the speaker. But then Margaret Hungerford leaned forward, and said, quite calmly,
"Yes, Mr. Dugdale, it is I."
"You cannot surely be serious--you do not really mean it?" said James Dugdale, in a pleading tone, to Margaret Hungerford, as, some hours after he had discovered her presence at Chayleigh, they were talking together in the drawing-room.
"I do mean it," she replied. "You never understood me, I think, and you certainly do not understand me now, if you think I shall remain here dependent on my father, having left his house as I did."
James Dugdale did not speak for some minutes. He was pondering upon what she had said. He had never understood her! If not he, who ever had? Unjust to him she had always been, and she was still unjust to him. But that did not matter: it was of her he must think, not of himself.
The first bewildering surprise of Margaret's arrival had passed away; the mingled strangeness and familiarity of seeing her again, changed as she was, in the old home so long forsaken, had taken its place, and James Dugdale was looking at her, and listening to her, like a man in a dream.
Their meeting had been very calm and emotionless. Margaret, in addition to the hardness of manner which had grown upon her in her hard life, had felt no pleasure in seeing James Dugdale again. She had not quite forgiven him, even yet, and, though she was relieved by finding that the first explanations were to be given to him, and not to her father or Mrs. Carteret, she had made them ungraciously enough, and with just sufficient formal acknowledgment of the service which James Dugdale had rendered her, in securing to her the friendship and aid of Hayes Meredith, as convinced her sensitive hearer that she would rather have been indebted to the kindness of any other person.
On certain points he found her reserve invulnerable; and he was not slow to suspect that she had made up her mind exactly as to how much of her past life she would reveal, and how much should remain concealed; and he did not doubt her power of adhering to such a resolution. She had briefly alluded to her widowhood, acknowledged the kindness she had experienced from Hayes Meredith, said a little about the poverty in which he had found her, and had then left the subject of herself and all concerning her, as if it wearied her, and with a decision of manner which prevented James Dugdale from questioning her further.
Her questions regarding her father, her brother, and all that had occurred at Chayleigh during her absence, were numerous and minute, and James answered them without reserve or hesitation. They chiefly related to facts. Margaret dealt but slightly in sentiment; but when she asked James if her father spoke of her sometimes, there was a little change in the tone of her voice, a slight accession of paleness which she could not disguise.
"At first, very seldom; in fact, hardly ever, Margaret, for I see you wish the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but more frequently of late. Only the day before he and Mrs. Carteret went to Bath, he--you remember his way--was showing me a peculiarly repulsive specimen of some singularly hideous insect, and he said, 'How pleased Margery would have been withthat.' Quite a hallucination, if I remember rightly, but still pleasant to hear him say it, and showed me that he was thinking of you. You see this as I do?"
"O yes," she answered, with a smile that was a little hard and bitter, "very pleasant; indeed, the pleasantest possible association of ideas according to papa. And--and Mrs. Carteret?"
James Dugdale hesitated for a little, and then he said,
"You remember what Sibylla is, Margaret, and you know she never cared much for you, or Haldane--"
"Particularly forme," she interrupted, in a tone whose assumed lightness did not impose on James. "Well, she need not fear any intrusion or importunity from me. I have come here because I must--I must see my father once more, before I have for ever done with the old life and begin with the new."
"Are you going away again, Margaret?" said James, astonished. "Going away, after having come home through such suffering and difficulty! Why is this?"
And then it was that Margaret asked him if he were really serious in supposing she had any other intention.
The truth was, she had very vague notions of what she should do with herself. The pride and self-will of her nature, which the suffering she had undergone in Australia had somewhat tamed, had had time for their reawakening during the long voyage; and it was not in the most amiable of moods that Margaret reached her former home.
"Whatever my fault may have been, I have fully expiated it; and I must have peace now, and forgetfulness, if it is to be had," was the form her thoughts took.
She had not been recognised at the village inn, where she had left Rose Moore and her scanty luggage, and the servant who had opened the door of her father's house to her was a stranger. He might fairly have hesitated to admit a lady whom he did not know; but Margaret's manner of announcing herself permitted no hesitation within his courage. His master and mistress were not at home, the man said, but she could see Mr. Dugdale when he came in. So she walked into the drawing-room, and James was sought for, but not found.
What agony of spirit the young widow underwent, when she found herself once more in the scene of the vanished past, none but she ever knew. The worst of it had passed away when James saw her leaning out of the window, a picture framed in the branches of the passion-flower.
The hours of the evening went rapidly by, though the talk of the strangely-assorted companions was constrained and bald. Margaret was resolute in her refusal to remain at Chayleigh. James Dugdale, she argued, might believe that her father would gladly receive her; but he could not know that he would, and she would await that welcome before she made her old home even a temporary abode. A few sentences sufficed to show James that this determination was not to be overcome.
"At least you are not alone," he said; and then she explained to him that Hayes Meredith had engaged an Irish girl, named Rose Moore, to act as her maid during the voyage, and that the girl, having become attached to her, was willing to defer her departure to Ireland for a few days, until she, Margaret, had made some definite arrangement about her own future.
"I got used to Irish people at Melbourne," said Margaret, "and I like them. I have half a mind to go to Ireland with Rose. I suppose people's children want governesses there, and people themselves want companions as well as here; and I fancy they are kind and cordial there."
"You must be very much altered, Margaret," returned James gravely, "if you are fit to be either a governess or adame de compagnie. I don't think you had much in you to fit you for either function."
"I am very much altered," she said; "and what I am fit for, or not fit for, neither you nor any one can tell. There is only one thing which would come to me that would surprise or disconcert menow."
She rose as she spoke, and drew her heavy black cloak, which she had only loosened, not laid aside, closely around her.
"And that is--" said James.
"Finding myself happy again, or being deceived into thinking myself so," she said quickly and bitterly.
This was the first thoroughly unrestrained sentence she had spoken in all their conversation, the first clear glimpse she had given James Dugdale into the depths of her heart and experience.
They went out of the house together, and she walked by his side--he did not offer his arm--to the village. The night was bright and beautiful, and some of its calm came to the heart of Margaret, and reflected itself in her pale steadfast face. The road which they took wound past the well-kept fences and ornamental palings of a handsome place, much larger than Chayleigh, which, in Margaret's time, had been in the possession of Sir Richard Davyntry, whose good graces, and those of Lady Davyntry, she remembered her stepmother to have been particularly anxious to cultivate.
Mrs. Carteret had not succeeded remarkably well in this design, and her failure was conspicuously due to her treatment of Margaret; for Lady Davyntry was a motherly kind of woman, much younger than Mrs. Carteret, and whose own childless condition was a deep and unaffectedly-avowed grief to her.
As Margaret and her companion passed the gates of Davyntry, she remembered these "childish things," as they seemed to her now, and she paused to look at the stately trees, and the fine old Elizabethan house, on whose gilded vane the moonlight was shining coldly.
She asked if Sir Richard and Lady Davyntry were staying there just now, adding, "As I remember them, they were not people who, having a country house and place combining everything any one can possibly wish for, make a point of leaving it just when all is most beautiful."
"No," said James Dugdale, "they certainly are not; and Sir Richard stuck to it, poor fellow, as long as he could; but he died nearly a year ago, and not at Davyntry either--at his brother-in-law's place in Scotland."
"Indeed!" said Margaret. "I am sorry for Sir Richard, and more sorry still for Lady Davyntry; she is a widow indeed, I am sure. Perhaps she wants a lady companion. I might offer myself: how pleased Mrs. Carteret would be!"
"Margaret!" said James Dugdale reprovingly.
He spoke in the tone which had been familiar to him in the days when he had been "the tutor" and Margaret his pupil; and she laughed for a moment with something of the same saucy laugh with which she had been used to meet a remonstrance from him in those old days. James Dugdale's heart beat rapidly at the sound; for the first time, her coming, her presence seemed real to him.
"Well, well, I won't be spiteful," said Margaret. "Is Lady Davyntry here?"
"Yes; she has been more than a month at Davyntry. Her brother is with her, and a remarkably nice fellow he is. I see a good deal of him."
"I don't remember him. I don't think I ever saw him," said Margaret absently. "What is his name?"
James Dugdale did not note the question, but replied to the first part of the sentence.
"I don't think you can have seen him. He was abroad for some years after his sister's marriage; indeed, he never was here in Sir Richard's lifetime--never saw him, I believe, until he and Lady Davyntry went to Scotland, on a visit, and he died there."
"Is he here now?" Margaret asked in an indifferent manner.
"Yes," returned James; "I told you so. He comes to Chayleigh a good deal. He is nearly as fond of natural history as your father, and nearly as fond of drawing as I am; so we are a mutual resource--Chayleigh and Davyntry I mean."
"And his name?" again asked Margaret quietly.
"Did I not tell you? Don't you remember it? Surely you must have heard the name; it is not a common one--Fitzwilliam Meriton Baldwin."
"No, it is not common, and rather nice. I never heard it before, that I remember. We have arrived, I see; and there is Rose Moore looking out for me, like an impulsive Irish girl as she is, instead of preserving the decorous indifference of the truly British domestic. You will let me know when my father arrives. No, I shall not go to Chayleigh again until his return. Good-night, Mr. Dugdale."
She had disappeared, followed by her attendant, whose frank handsome face had candidly expressed an amount of disapprobation of James Dugdale's personal appearance to which he was, fortunately, perfectly accustomed and philosophically indifferent. Fate had done its worst for him in that respect long before; and he had turned away from the inn-door, and was walking rapidly down the road again, when a cheery voice addressed him:
"Hallo, Dugdale! Where are you going at this time of night? and what are you thinking of? I shouted at you in vain, and thought I should never catch you. Are you going home? Yes?--then we shall be together as far as Davyntry."
The speaker was a young man, perhaps six-and-twenty years old, a little over middle height, and, though not remarkably handsome, he presented as strong a contrast in personal appearance to James Dugdale as could be desired. He had a fair complexion, bright-blue eyes, with an expression of candour and happiness in them as rare as it was attractive, light-brown hair, and a lithe alert figure, full of grace and activity. In the few words which he had spoken there was something winning and open, a tone of entire sincerity and gladness almost boyish; and it had its charm for the older and careworn man, who answered cheerily, as he linked his arm with his own:
"It is always pleasant to meet you, Baldwin; but to-night it's a perfect godsend."
The communication which James Dugdale made to Mr. Carteret on his arrival at Chayleigh was received by that gentleman not altogether without agitation, but with more pleasure than the ex-tutor had expected.
Mr. Carteret had missed his daughter, in his quiet way, and had occasionally experienced something which approached remorse during her absence, when he pondered on the probabilities of her fate, and found himself forced to remember how different it might have been had he "looked after" the motherless girl a little more closely, had he extended some more sympathy to her and exerted himself to understand her, instead of confining his fatherly-fondness to occasional petting and careful avoidance of being bored by her.
Mr. Carteret was easily reconciled to most things, but he had never succeeded in reconciling himself thoroughly to Margaret's marriage and her exile, and he heard of her return with equal pleasure and relief. These feelings expanded into positive joy when he learned the delightful fact of Godfrey Hungerford's death.
In the first vague apprehension of James Dugdale's news, he had imagined that Margaret had left her husband and come home, and even that he hailed with satisfaction. But to know that his son-in-law was safely dead was an element of unmitigated good fortune in the matter. And so strongly and unaffectedly did Mr. Carteret feel this, that he departed from his usual mild method of speech on the occasion, and delivered himself of some very strong language indeed.
"The infernal scoundrel!" he said; "he made her miserable, I've no doubt. She'll never tell us anything about it, James, if I am not much mistaken in her, or she is not very much changed; and so much the better. I don't want to hear anything about him; I should like to think I should never hear his name mentioned again as long as I live!"
"Most likely you never will hear it mentioned, sir," said James. "If you like, I'll tell Margaret you would rather she did not talk about him."
"Do, do," said Mr. Carteret eagerly. He hated explanations, and would never encounter anything he disliked if he could at all decently avoid doing so. "The only good or pleasant thing that could be heard in connection with the fellow, I heard when you told me he was under the sod, and there is no use in hearing bad and unpleasant things. Of course, the child knows she is welcome home; and the very best thing she can do is to forget the scoundrel ever existed."
The ignorance of human nature, and the oblivion of his wife's peculiarities, which this speech betrayed, were equally characteristic of Mr. Carteret; but James Dugdale could not smile at them when Margaret was concerned.
He determined to say nothing to the young widow's father about her expressed resolution of leaving Chayleigh again, but to abandon that issue to circumstances and the success of the mode of argument he intended to pursue with Mrs. Carteret. He would go and fetch Margaret home presently, when he had spoken to his cousin. He thought it better her father should not accompany him, and Mr. Carteret, who had some very choice beetles to unpack and prepare, thought so too.
He delightedly anticipated Margaret's pleasure in exploring the extended treasures of his collection, and was altogether in such an elated state of mind that he had consigned the whole of Margaret's married life as completely to oblivion as he had forgotten the partner of that great disaster, by the time James Dugdale passed before the windows of his study on his way to fulfil his mission of peace and reconciliation.
It never occurred to him to think about how his wife was likely to take the news of Margaret's return. Mrs. Carteret had not given him any trouble herself, or permitted other people to give him any trouble, since Margaret and Haldane had gone their own way in life, and he was not afraid of her departing now from that excellent rule of conduct.
"Margaret is not a child now, and they are sure to get on together," said the mild and inexperienced elderly gentleman, as he daintily handled some insect remains as reverently as if they had been mummies of the Rameses; "each can have her own way." He had forgotten Margaret's "own way," and he knew very little about Mrs. Carteret's.
It was rather odd that his wife did not come to talk about the news that James Dugdale had communicated to her. He wondered at that a little. He would go and find her, and they should talk it over together, presently, when he had put this splendid scarabaeus all right--a great creature!--how fortunate he had secured it, just as old Fooster was on the scent of it too!
And so Mr. Carteret went on, and the minutes went on, and he had not yet completed his arrangements for the adequate display of the scarabaeus, when two figures, one in heavy black robes, passed quickly between him and the light. A window-sash was thrown up from the outside, and Margaret Hungerford's arms were round her father's neck.
Under the roof of Chayleigh, on that bright autumn night, there was but one tranquil sleeper. That one was Mr. Carteret. He was thoroughly happy. Margaret had come home, Godfrey Hungerford was dead, and she had never mentioned his name.
He felt some tepid gratitude towards Hayes Meredith: of course he should at once repay him the sums advanced to Margaret, and it would be a good opportunity of extending his correspondence and his scientific investigations--the Australian fauna had much to disclose.
He had experienced a slight shock at observing the change in Margaret's appearance; but that had passed away, and when Mr. Carteret fell asleep that night he acknowledged that everything was for the best in the long-run.
Mrs. Carteret had behaved very well. She had met Margaret kindly, with as much composure as if she had been away from home on a week's visit; had inquired whether "her maid" would remain at Chayleigh; had added that "her things" should be placed in her "former" room; and had evinced no further consciousness of the tremendous change which had befallen her stepdaughter than was implied in the remark that "widow's caps were not made so heavy now," and that Margaret's "crape skirt needed renewal."
The evening had passed away quietly. To two of the four individuals who composed the little party it had seemed like a dream from which they expected soon to awaken. Those two were Margaret Hungerford and James Dugdale.
One slight interruption had occurred. A note had been handed to Mrs. Carteret from Lady Davyntry. She had heard of the return of her former "pet" to Chayleigh--the expression was as characteristic of Lady Davyntry as it was unsuitably applied to Margaret, who was an unpromising subject for "petting"--and hoped to see her soon. Mr. Meriton Baldwin would forego the pleasure of calling at Chayleigh that evening, as he could not think of intruding so soon after the arrival of Mrs. Hungerford.
Mrs. Carteret threw down the letter with rather an ill-tempered jerk, and her face bore an expression which Margaret remembered with painful distinctness, as she said,
"Very absurd, I think. I don't suppose that Margaret would object to our seeing our friends because she is here."
The speech was not framed as a question; but Margaret answered it, lifting up her head and her fair throat as she spoke, after a fashion which one observer, at least, thought infinitely beautiful.
"Certainly not, Mrs. Carteret. Pray do not allow me to interfere with any of your usual proceedings."
And then she went on talking to her father about the habits of the kangaroo.
The thoughts which held Mrs. Carteret's eyes waking that night were anything but agreeable. She did not exactly know how she stood with regard to her stepdaughter. If she determined on making the house too unpleasant for her to bear it, she might find herself in collision with her husband and her cousin at once, unless she could contrive that the unpleasantness should be of a kind which Margaret's pride--which she detected to be little, if at all, subdued by the experiences of her married life--would induce her to hide from the observation of both.
Margaret should not live at Chayleigh if Mrs. Carteret could prevent it; but whatever means she used to carry her purpose into effect must be such as James Dugdale could not discover or thwart. The thing would be difficult to do; but Mrs. Carteret had well-grounded confidence in her own power of carrying a point, and this was one which must be held over for the present. It was agreeable to be able to decide that, at all events, Margaret was no beauty, that she was decidedly much less handsome than she had been as what Mrs. Carteret called "a raw girl."
And this was true, to the perception of a superficial observer. Margaret looked very far from handsome as she sat in a corner of the bow-window of the drawing-room, her small thin hands folded and motionless, her head, with its hideous covering, bent down; her pale face, sharpened by the angle at which the light struck it, and her whole figure, in its deep black dress, unrelieved by the slightest ornament or grace of form, pervaded by an expression of weariness and defeat. She might have been a woman of thirty years old, and who had never been handsome, to the perception of any stranger who had then and thus seen her.
But, three hours later in the night, when Margaret Hungerford was alone in the room which had been the scene of her girlish dreams and hopes, of the fond and beautiful delusion so terribly dissipated--in the room where her dead mother had watched her in her sleep, where she had read and yielded to the lover's prayer which lured her from her home--when she was quite alone, and was permitting the waves of memory to rush over her soul;--no one would have said, who could then have seen her, that Margaret was not handsome. Her face was one capable of intensity of expression in every mood of feeling, and as mobile as it was powerful. The wakeful hours of that night passed over her while another crisis in her life was lived through--another crisis somewhat resembling, and yet differing from, that which had marked the first hours of her voyage.
She had sent Rose Moore away as soon as she could, but not before the girl had imparted to her her conviction that English people, always excepting Margaret, were "square." She could not understand the tranquillity of the widowed daughter's reception at Chayleigh. The reception awaiting her in the "ould country" would be of a very different kind, "plase God," she added internally; and the extent and importance of the business of eating and drinking among the servants had gone nigh to exasperate her.
Rose was devoted to Margaret, but she thought the sooner she and her mistress turned their back on a place where servants sat down to four regular meals a day, and did not as much as know the meaning of the "Mass," the better.
"She'll never do for these people," the girl thought, as she waited for Margaret in her room; "she's restless with sorrow, and it's not a nice nate place, like this, with the back parlour full of spiders laid out in state, as if they were wakin' them, and little boxes full of bones--nor yet the drawin'-room, all done out with bades, and a mother, by way of, sittin' in it that 'ud think more of one of her tay-cups bein' chipped than of the young crayture's heart bein' broken--that'll ever bring comfort or consolation to the likes of her."
The thoughts which had put themselves into such simple words in the Irish girl's mind had considerable affinity with Margaret's own, but in her they took more tumultuous form. The strong purpose, half remorse, half vain-longing, which had brought her home, was fulfilled. She had seen the place she had left, and thoroughly realised that her former self had been left with it.
The few hours which had passed had made her comprehend that her life, her nature, were things apart from Chayleigh; she could not, if she would, take up the story of her girlhood where she had closed the book. Between her and every former association, the dark and miserable years of her married life--unreal as they seemed now--almost as unreal as the illusion under which she had entered upon them--had placed an impassable gulf.
Wrapped in a dressing-gown, and with her dark hair loose upon her shoulders, Margaret paced her room from end to end, and strove with her thoughts. She was a puzzle to herself. What discord there was between her--a woman who had suffered such things, seen such sights, heard such words as she had seen, and heard, and suffered--and the calm, well-regulated, comfortable household here! If she had ever contemplated remaining an inmate of her father's house, this one night's commune with herself would have forced her to recognise the impossibility of her doing so. The stain and stamp of her wanderings were upon her; she could not find rest here, or yet.
Her father's dreamy ways; the selfishness, heartlessness, empty-headedness of Mrs. Carteret; the distaste she felt for James Dugdale's presence, though she persuaded herself she was striving to be grateful;--all these things, separately and collectively, she felt, but they did not present themselves to her as the true sources of her present uncontrollable feelings: she knew how utterly she was changed now only when she knew--for it was knowledge, not apprehension--that the home to which she had found her way of access so much easier than she had thought for, could never be a resting-place for her.
Was there any resting-place anywhere? Had she still to learn that life's lessons are not exhausted by one or two great shocks of experience, but are daily tasks until the day, "never so weary or long," has been "rung to evensong"? She was a puzzle to herself in another respect. No grief for the dead husband, the lover for whom she had left the home which could not be restored, had come back to her. No gentle tender chord had been touched in her heart, to give forth his name in mournful music.
In this, the truth, the intellectual strength of her nature, unknown to her, revealed themselves. No sentimentality veiled the truth from Margaret. She had said to herself that it was well for her her husband was dead, no matter what should come after, and she never unsaid it,--not even in the hours of emotional recollection and mental strife which formed her first night under her father's roof.
Standing by the window at which James Dugdale had first caught sight of her the day before, Margaret clasped her hands over her head and looked out drearily. The moon was high, the light was cold and ghastly. She thought how she had seen the same chill gleam upon the shimmering sea, and upon the grassy wastes of the distant land she had left; and the fancy came to her that it was to be always moonlight with her for evermore.
"No more sunshine; no more of the glow, and the glitter, and the warmth--that is done with for me. There's no such thing as happiness, and I must only try to find, instead, hard work."
There was another wakeful head at Chayleigh that night. James Dugdale was but too well accustomed to sleepless nights, companioned by the searching, mysterious pain which so often attends upon deformity--pain, as if unseen fingers questioned the distorted limbs and lingered among the disturbed nerves; but it was not that which kept him waking now.
It was that he, too, was face to face with his fate, questioning it of its past deeds and its intentions for the future--a little bitterly questioning it, perhaps, and yet with more resignation than rancour after all, considering what the mind of the man was, and what a prison-house it tenanted. Among the innumerable crowd of thoughts which pursued and pressed upon each other, there was one all the more distinct that he felt and strove against its unworthiness.
"I am so thankful she is at home--so glad for her sake. Nothing could be so well for her, since the past is irrevocable; but nothing could be so bad, at least nothing could be worse for me. No, nothing, nothing."
And James Dugdale, happily blind to the further resources of his destiny, felt something like a dreary sense of peace arising within him as he assured himself over and over again of the finality to which it had attained.