“Heaven forbid!” said Phoebe. “No, my dear, no more diamonds for us. We never had but one, and it brought us trouble.”
“Nonsense, Phoebe,” replied Falcon; “it was not the diamond's fault. You know I have often wanted to go there, but you objected. You said you were afraid some evil would befall me. But now Solomon himself is going to the mines, let us have no more of that nonsense. We will take our rifles and our pistols.”
“There—there—rifles and pistols,” cried Phoebe; “that shows.”
“And we will be there in a week; stay a month, and home with our pockets full of diamonds.”
“And find me dead of a broken heart.”
“Broken fiddlestick! We have been parted longer than that, and yet here we are all right.”
“Ay, but the pitcher that goes too often to the well gets broke at last. No, Reginald, now I have tasted three years' happiness and peace of mind, I cannot go through what I used in England. Oh, doctor! have you the heart to part man and wife, that have never been a day from each other all these years?”
“Mrs. Falcon, I would not do it for all the diamonds in Brazil. No, Mr. Falcon, I need hardly say how charmed I should be to have your company: but that is a pleasure I shall certainly deny myself, after what your good wife has said. I owe her too much to cause her a single pang.”
“Doctor,” said the charming Reginald, “you are a gentleman and side with the lady. Quite right. It adds to my esteem, if possible. Make your mind easy; I will go alone. I am not a farmer. I am dead sick of this monotonous life; and, since I am compelled to speak my mind, a little ashamed, as a gentleman, of living on my wife and her brother, and doing nothing for myself. So I shall go to the Vaal river, and see a little life; here there's nothing but vegetation—and not much of that. Not a word more, Phoebe, if you please. I am a good, easy, affectionate husband, but I am a man, and not a child to be tied to a woman's apron-strings, however much I may love and respect her.”
Dick put in his word: “Since you are so independent, you can WALK to the Vaal river. I can't spare a couple of horses.”
This hit the sybarite hard, and he cast a bitter glance of hatred at his brother-in-law, and fell into a moody silence.
But when he got Phoebe to himself, he descanted on her selfishness, Dick's rudeness, and his own wounded dignity, till he made her quite anxious he should have his own way. She came to Staines, with red eyes, and said, “Tell me, doctor, will there be any women up there—to take care of you?”
“Not a petticoat in the place, I believe. It is a very rough life; and how Falcon could think of leaving you and sweet little Tommy, and this life of health, and peace, and comfort—”
“Yet YOU do leave us, sir.”
“I am the most unfortunate man upon the earth; Falcon is one of the happiest. Would I leave wife and child to go there? Ah me! I am dead to those I love. This is my one chance of seeing my darling again for many a long year perhaps. Oh, I must not speak of HER—it unmans me. My good, kind friend, I'll tell you what to do. When we are all at supper, let a horse be saddled and left in the yard for me. I'll bid you all good-night, and I'll put fifty miles between us before morning. Even then HE need not be told I am gone; he will not follow me.”
“You are very good, sir,” said Phoebe; “but no. Too much has been said. I can't have him humbled by my brother, nor any one. He says I am selfish. Perhaps I am; though I never was called so. I can't bear he should think me selfish. He WILL go, and so let us have no ill blood about it. Since he is to go, of course I'd much liever he should go with you than by himself. You are sure there are no women up there—to take care of—you—both? You must be purse-bearer, sir, and look to every penny. He is too generous when he has got money to spend.”
In short, Reginald had played so upon her heart, that she now urged the joint expedition, only she asked a delay of a day or two to equip them, and steel herself to the separation.
Staines did not share those vague fears that overpowered the wife, whose bitter experiences were unknown to him; but he felt uncomfortable at her condition—for now she was often in tears—and he said all he could to comfort her; and he also advised her how to profit by these terrible diamonds, in her way. He pointed out to her that her farm lay right in the road to the diamonds, yet the traffic all shunned her, passing twenty miles to the westward. Said he, “You should profit by all your resources. You have wood, a great rarity in Africa; order a portable forge; run up a building where miners can sleep, another where they can feed; the grain you have so wisely refused to sell, grind it into flour.”
“Dear heart! why, there's neither wind nor water to turn a mill.”
“But there are oxen. I'll show you how to make an ox-mill. Send your Cape cart into Cape Town for iron lathes, for coffee and tea, and groceries by the hundredweight. The moment you are ready—for success depends on the order in which we act—then prepare great boards, and plant them twenty miles south. Write or paint on them, very large, 'The nearest way to the Diamond Mines, through Dale's Kloof, where is excellent accommodation for man and beast. Tea, coffee, home-made bread, fresh butter, etc., etc.' Do this, and you will soon leave off decrying diamonds. This is the sure way to coin them. I myself take the doubtful way; but I can't help it. I am a dead man, and swift good fortune will give me life. You can afford to go the slower road and the surer.”
Then he drew her a model of an ox-mill, and of a miner's dormitory, the partitions six feet six apart, so that these very partitions formed the bedstead, the bed-sacking being hooked to the uprights. He drew his model for twenty bedrooms.
The portable forge and the ox-mill pleased Dick Dale most, but the partitioned bedsteads charmed Phoebe. She said, “Oh, doctor, how can one man's head hold so many things? If there's a man on earth I can trust my husband with, 'tis you. But if things go cross up there, promise me you will come back at once and cast in your lot with us. We have got money and stock, and you have got headpiece; we might do very well together. Indeed, indeed we might. Promise me. Oh, do, please, promise me!”
“I promise you.”
And on this understanding, Staines and Falcon were equipped with rifles, pickaxe, shovels, waterproofs, and full saddle-bags, and started, with many shakings of the hand, and many tears from Phoebe, for the diamond washings.
Phoebe's tears at parting made Staines feel uncomfortable, and he said so.
“Pooh, pooh!” said Falcon, “crying for nothing does a woman good.”
Christopher stared at him.
Falcon's spirits rose as they proceeded. He was like a boy let loose from school. His fluency and charm of manner served, however, to cheer a singularly dreary journey.
The travellers soon entered on a vast and forbidding region, that wearied the eye; at their feet a dull, rusty carpet of dried grass and wild camomile, with pale-red sand peeping through the burnt and scanty herbage. On the low mounds, that looked like heaps of sifted ashes, struggled now and then into sickliness a ragged, twisted shrub. There were flowers too, but so sparse, that they sparkled vainly in the colorless waste, which stretched to the horizon. The farmhouses were twenty miles apart, and nine out of ten of them were new ones built by the Boers since they degenerated into white savages: mere huts, with domed kitchens behind them. In the dwelling-house the whole family pigged together, with raw flesh drying on the rafters, stinking skins in a corner, parasitical vermin of all sorts blackening the floor, and particularly a small, biting, and odoriferous tortoise, compared with which the insect a London washerwoman brings into your house in her basket, is a stroke with a feather—and all this without the excuse of penury; for many of these were shepherd kings, sheared four thousand fleeces a year, and owned a hundred horses and horned cattle.
These Boers are compelled, by unwritten law, to receive travellers and water their cattle; but our travellers, after one or two experiences, ceased to trouble them; for, added to the dirt, the men were sullen, the women moody, silent, brainless; the whole reception churlish. Staines detected in them an uneasy consciousness that they had descended, in more ways than one, from a civilized race; and the superior bearing of a European seemed to remind them what they had been, and might have been, and were not; so, after an attempt or two, our adventurers avoided the Boers, and tried the Kafirs. They found the savages socially superior, though their moral character does not rank high.
The Kafir cabins they entered were caves, lighted only by the door, but deliciously cool, and quite clean; the floors of puddled clay or ants' nests, and very clean. On entering these cool retreats, the flies that had tormented them shirked the cool grot, and buzzed off to the nearest farm to batten on congenial foulness. On the fat, round, glossy babies, not a speck of dirt, whereas the little Boers were cakes thereof. The Kafir would meet them at the door, his clean black face all smiles and welcome. The women and grown girls would fling a spotless handkerchief over their shoulders in a moment, and display their snowy teeth, in unaffected joy at sight of an Englishman.
At one of these huts, one evening, they met with something St. Paul ranks above cleanliness even, viz., Christianity. A neighboring lion had just eaten a Hottentot faute de mieux; and these good Kafirs wanted the Europeans not to go on at night and be eaten for dessert. But they could not speak a word of English, and pantomimic expression exists in theory alone. In vain the women held our travellers by the coat-tails, and pointed to a distant wood. In vain Kafir pere went on all-fours and growled sore. But at last a savage youth ran to the kitchen—for they never cook in the house—and came back with a brand, and sketched, on the wall of the hut, a lion with a mane down to the ground, and a saucer eye, not loving. The creature's paw rested on a hat and coat and another fragment or two of a European. The rest was fore-shortened, or else eaten.
The picture completed, the females looked, approved, and raised a dismal howl.
“A lion on the road,” said Christopher gravely.
Then the undaunted Falcon seized the charcoal, and drew an Englishman in a theatrical attitude, left foot well forward, firing a gun, and a lion rolling head over heels like a buck rabbit, and blood squirting out of a hole in his perforated carcass.
The savages saw, and exulted. They were so off their guard as to confound representation with fact; they danced round the white warrior, and launched him to victory.
“Aha!” said Falcon, “I took the shine out of their lion, didn't I?”
“You did: and once there was a sculptor who showed a lion his marble group, a man trampling a lion, extracting his tongue, and so on; but report says it DID NOT CONVINCE THE LION.”
“Why, no; a lion is not an ass. But, for your comfort, there ARE no lions in this part of the world. They are myths. There were lions in Africa. But now they are all at the Zoo. And I wish I was there too.”
“In what character—of a discontented animal—with every blessing? They would not take you in; too common in England. Hallo! this is something new. What lots of bushes! We should not have much chance with a lion here.”
“There ARE no lions: it is not the Zoo,” said Falcon; but he spurred on faster.
The country, however, did not change its feature; bushes and little acacias prevailed, and presently dark forms began to glide across at intervals.
The travellers held their breath, and pushed on; but at last their horses flagged; so they thought it best to stop and light a fire and stand upon their guard.
They did so, and Falcon sat with his rifle cocked, while Staines boiled coffee, and they drank it, and after two hours' halt, pushed on; and at last the bushes got more scattered, and they were on the dreary plain again. Falcon drew the rein, with a sigh of relief, and they walked their horses side by side.
“Well, what has become of the lions?” said Falcon jauntily. He turned in his saddle, and saw a large animal stealing behind them with its belly to the very earth, and eyes hot coals; he uttered an eldrich screech, fired both barrels, with no more aim than a baby, and spurred away, yelling like a demon. The animal fled another way, in equal trepidation at those tongues of flame and loud reports, and Christopher's horse reared and plunged, and deposited him promptly on the sward; but he held the bridle, mounted again, and rode after his companion. A stern chase is a long chase; and for that or some other reason he could never catch him again till sunrise. Being caught, he ignored the lioness, with cool hauteur: he said he had ridden on to find comfortable quarters: and craved thanks.
This was literally the only incident worth recording that the companions met with in three hundred miles.
On the sixth day out, towards afternoon, they found by inquiring they were near the diamond washings, and the short route was pointed out by an exceptionally civil Boer.
But Christopher's eye had lighted upon a sort of chain of knolls, or little round hills, devoid of vegetation, and he told Falcon he would like to inspect these, before going farther.
“Oh,” said the Boer, “they are not on my farm, thank goodness! they are on my cousin Bulteel's;” and he pointed to a large white house about four miles distant, and quite off the road. Nevertheless, Staines insisted on going to it. But first they made up to one of these knolls, and examined it; it was about thirty feet high, and not a vestige of herbage on it; the surface was composed of sand and of lumps of gray limestone very hard, diversified with lots of quartz, mica, and other old formations.
Staines got to the top of it with some difficulty, and examined the surface all over. He came down again, and said, “All these little hills mark hot volcanic action—why, they are like boiling earth-bubbles—which is the very thing, under certain conditions, to turn carbonate of lime into diamonds. Now here is plenty of limestone unnaturally hard; and being in a diamond country, I can fancy no place more likely to be the matrix than these earth-bubbles. Let us tether the horses, and use our shovels.”
They did so; and found one or two common crystals, and some jasper, and a piece of chalcedony all in little bubbles, but no diamond. Falcon said it was wasting time.
Just then the proprietor, a gigantic, pasty colonist, came up, with his pipe, and stood calmly looking on. Staines came down, and made a sort of apology. Bulteel smiled quietly, and asked what harm they could do him, raking that rubbish. “Rake it all avay, mine vriends,” said he: “ve shall thank you moch.”
He then invited them languidly to his house. They went with him, and as he volunteered no more remarks, they questioned him, and learned his father had been a Hollander, and so had his vrow's. This accounted for the size and comparative cleanliness of his place. It was stuccoed with the lime of the country outside, and was four times as large as the miserable farmhouses of the degenerate Boers. For all this, the street door opened on the principal room, and that room was kitchen and parlor, only very large and wholesome. “But, Lord,” as poor dear Pepys used to blurt out—“to see how some folk understand cleanliness!” The floor was made of powdered ants' nests, and smeared with fresh cow-dung every day. Yet these people were the cleanest Boers in the colony.
The vrow met them, with a snow-white collar and cuffs of Hamburgh linen, and the brats had pasty faces round as pumpkins, but shone with soap. The vrow was also pasty-faced, but gentle, and welcomed them with a smile, languid, but unequivocal.
The Hottentots took their horses, as a matter of course. Their guns were put in a corner. A clean cloth was spread, and they saw they were to sup and sleep there, though the words of invitation were never spoken.
At supper, sun-dried flesh, cabbage, and a savory dish the travellers returned to with gusto. Staines asked what it was: the vrow told him—locusts. They had stripped her garden, and filled her very rooms, and fallen in heaps under her walls; so she had pressed them, by the million, into cakes, had salted them lightly, and stored them, and they were excellent, baked.
After supper, the accomplished Reginald, observing a wire guitar, tuned it with some difficulty, and so twanged it, and sang ditties to it, that the flabby giant's pasty face wore a look of dreamy content over his everlasting pipe; and in the morning, after a silent breakfast, he said, “Mine vriends, stay here a year or two, and rake in mine rubbish. Ven you are tired, here are springbok and antelopes, and you can shoot mit your rifles, and ve vil cook them, and you shall zing us zongs of Vaderland.”
They thanked him heartily, and said they would stay a few days, at all events.
The placid Boer went a-farming; and the pair shouldered their pick and shovel, and worked on their heap all day, and found a number of pretty stones, but no diamond.
“Come,” said Falcon, “we must go to the river;” and Staines acquiesced. “I bow to experience,” said he.
At the threshold they found two of the little Bulteels, playing with pieces of quartz, crystal, etc., on the door-stone. One of these stones caught Staines's eye directly. It sparkled in a different way from the others: he examined it: it was the size of a white haricot bean, and one side of it polished by friction. He looked at it, and looked, and saw that it refracted the light. He felt convinced it was a diamond.
“Give the boy a penny for it,” said the ingenious Falcon, on receiving the information.
“Oh!” said Staines. “Take advantage of a child?”
He borrowed it of the boy, and laid it on the table, after supper. “Sir,” said he, “this is what we were raking in your kopjes for, and could not find it. It belongs to little Hans. Will you sell it us? We are not experts, but we think it may be a diamond. We will risk ten pounds on it.”
“Ten pounds!” said the farmer. “Nay, we rob not travellers, mine vriend.”
“But if it is a diamond, it is worth a hundred. See how it gains fire in the dusk.”
In short, they forced the ten pounds on him, and next day went to work on another kopje.
But the simple farmer's conscience smote him. It was a slack time; so he sent four Hotteatots, with shovels, to help these friendly maniacs. These worked away gayly, and the white men set up a sorting table, and sorted the stuff, and hammered the nodules, and at last found a little stone as big as a pea that refracted the light. Staines showed this to the Hottentots, and their quick eyes discovered two more that day, only smaller.
Next day, nothing but a splinter or two.
Then Staines determined to dig deeper, contrary to the general impression. He gave his reason: “Diamonds don't fall from the sky. They work up from the ground; and clearly the heat must be greater farther down.”
Acting on this, they tried the next strata, but found it entirely barren. After that, however, they came to a fresh layer of carbonate, and here, Falcon hammering a large lump of conglomerate, out leaped, all of a sudden, a diamond big as a nut, that ran along the earth, gleaming like a star. It had polished angles and natural facets, and even a novice, with an eye in his head, could see it was a diamond of the purest water. Staines and Falcon shouted with delight, and made the blacks a present on the spot.
They showed the prize, at night, and begged the farmer to take to digging. There was ten times more money beneath his soil than on it.
Not he. He was a farmer: did not believe in diamonds. Two days afterwards, another great find. Seven small diamonds.
Next day, a stone as large as a cob-nut, and with strange and beautiful streaks. They carried it home to dinner, and set it on the table, and told the family it was worth a thousand pounds. Bulteel scarcely looked at it; but the vrow trembled and all the young folk glowered at it.
In the middle of dinner, it exploded like a cracker, and went literally into diamond-dust.
“Dere goes von tousand pounds,” said Bulteel, without moving a muscle.
Falcon swore. But Staines showed fortitude. “It was laminated,” said he, “and exposure to the air was fatal.”
Owing to the invaluable assistance of the Hottentots, they had in less than a month collected four large stones of pure water, and a wineglassful of small stones, when, one fine day, going to work calmly after breakfast, they found some tents pitched, and at least a score of dirty diggers, bearded like the pard, at work on the ground. Staines sent Falcon back to tell Bulteel, and suggest that he should at once order them off, or, better still, make terms with them. The phlegmatic Boer did neither.
In twenty-four hours it was too late. The place was rushed. In other words, diggers swarmed to the spot, with no idea of law but digger's law.
A thousand tents rose like mushrooms; and poor Bulteel stood smoking, and staring amazed, at his own door, and saw a veritable procession of wagons, Cape carts, and powdered travellers file past him to take possession of his hillocks. Him, the proprietor, they simply ignored; they had a committee who were to deal with all obstructions, landlords and tenants included. They themselves measured out Bulteel's farm into thirty-foot claims, and went to work with shovel and pick. They held Staines's claim sacred—that was diggers' law; but they confined it strictly to thirty feet square.
Had the friends resisted, their brains would have been knocked out. However, they gained this, that dealers poured in, and the market not being yet glutted, the price was good. Staines sold a few of the small stones for two hundred pounds. He showed one of the larger stones. The dealer's eye glittered, but he offered only three hundred pounds, and this was so wide of the ascending scale, on which a stone of that importance is priced, that Staines reserved it for sale at Cape Town.
Nevertheless, he afterwards doubted whether he had not better have taken it; for the multitude of diggers turned out such a prodigious number of diamonds at Bulteel's pan, that a sort of panic fell on the market.
These dry diggings were a revelation to the world. Men began to think the diamond perhaps was a commoner stone than any one had dreamed it to be.
As to the discovery of stones, Staines and Falcon lost nothing by being confined to a thirty-foot claim. Compelled to dig deeper, they got into a rich strata, where they found garnets by the pint, and some small diamonds, and at last, one lucky day, their largest diamond. It weighed thirty-seven carats, and was a rich yellow. Now, when a diamond is clouded or off color, it is terribly depreciated; but a diamond with a positive color is called a fancy stone, and ranks with the purest stones.
“I wish I had this in Cape Town,” said Staines.
“Why, I'll take it to Cape Town, if you like,” said the changeable Falcon.
“You will?” said Christopher, surprised.
“Why not? I'm not much of a digger. I can serve our interest better by selling. I could get a thousand pounds for this at Cape Town.”
“We will talk of that quietly,” said Christopher.
Now, the fact is, Falcon, as a digger, was not worth a pin. He could not sort. His eyes would not bear the blinding glare of a tropical sun upon lime and dazzling bits of mica, quartz, crystal, white topaz, etc., in the midst of which the true glint of the royal stone had to be caught in a moment. He could not sort, and he had not the heart to dig. The only way to make him earn his half was to turn him into the travelling and selling partner.
Christopher was too generous to tell him this; but he acted on it, and said he thought his was an excellent proposal; indeed, he had better take all the diamonds they had got to Dale's Kloof first, and show them to his wife, for her consolation: “And perhaps,” said he, “in a matter of this importance, she will go to Cape Town with you, and try the market there.”
“All right,” said Falcon.
He sat and brooded over the matter a long time, and said, “Why make two bites of a cherry? They will only give us half the value at Cape Town; why not go by the steamer to England, before the London market is glutted, and all the world finds out that diamonds are as common as dirt?”
“Go to England! What! without your wife? I'll never be a party to that. Me part man and wife! If you knew my own story”—
“Why, who wants you?” said Reginald. “You don't understand. Phoebe is dying to visit England again; but she has got no excuse. If you like to give her one, she will be much obliged to you, I can tell you.”
“Oh, that is a very different matter. If Mrs. Falcon can leave her farm—”
“Oh, that brute of a brother of hers is a very honest fellow, for that matter. She can trust the farm to him. Besides, it is only a month's voyage by the mail steamer.”
This suggestion of Falcon's set Christopher's heart bounding, and his eyes glistening. But he restrained himself, and said, “This takes me by surprise; let me smoke a pipe over it.”
He not only did that, but he lay awake all night.
The fact is that for some time past, Christopher had felt sharp twinges of conscience, and deep misgivings as to the course he had pursued in leaving his wife a single day in the dark. Complete convalescence had cleared his moral sentiments, and perhaps, after all, the discovery of the diamonds had co-operated; since now the insurance money was no longer necessary to keep his wife from starving.
“Ah!” said he; “faith is a great quality; and how I have lacked it!”
To do him justice, he knew his wife's excitable nature, and was not without fears of some disaster, should the news be communicated to her unskilfully.
But this proposal of Falcon's made the way clearer. Mrs. Falcon, though not a lady, had all a lady's delicacy, and all a woman's tact and tenderness. He knew no one in the world more fit to be trusted with the delicate task of breaking to his Rosa that the grave, for once, was baffled, and her husband lived. He now became quite anxious for Falcon's departure, and ardently hoped that worthy had not deceived himself as to Mrs. Falcon's desire to visit England.
In short, it was settled that Falcon should start for Dale's Kloof, taking with him the diamonds, believed to be worth altogether three thousand pounds at Cape Town, and nearly as much again in England, and a long letter to Mrs. Falcon, in which Staines revealed his true story, told her where to find his wife, or hear of her, viz., at Kent Villa, Gravesend, and sketched an outline of instructions as to the way, and cunning degrees, by which the joyful news should be broken to her. With this he sent a long letter to be given to Rosa herself, but not till she should know all: and in this letter he enclosed the ruby ring she had given him. That ring had never left his finger, by sea or land, in sickness or health.
The letter to Rosa was sealed. The two letters made quite a packet; for, in the letter to his beloved Rosa, he told her everything that had befallen him. It was a romance, and a picture of love; a letter to lift a loving woman to heaven, and almost reconcile her to all her bereaved heart had suffered.
This letter, written with many tears from the heart that had so suffered, and was now softened by good fortune and bounding with joy, Staines entrusted to Falcon, together with the other diamonds, and with many warm shakings of the hand, started him on his way.
“But mind, Falcon,” said Christopher, “I shall expect an answer from Mrs. Falcon in twenty days at farthest. I do not feel so sure as you do that she wants to go to England; and, if not, I must write to Uncle Philip. Give me your solemn promise, old fellow, an answer in twenty days—if you have to send a Kafir on horseback.”
“I give you my honor,” said Falcon superbly.
“Send it to me at Bulteel's Farm.”
“All right. 'Dr. Christie, Bulteel's Farm.'”
“Well—no. Why should I conceal my real name any longer from such friends as you and your wife? Christie is short for Christopher—that IS my Christian name; but my surname is Staines. Write to 'Dr. Staines.'”
“Dr. Staines!”
“Yes. Did you ever hear of me?”
Falcon wore a strange look. “I almost think I have. Down at Gravesend, or somewhere.”
“That is curious. Yes, I married my Rosa there; poor thing! God bless her; God comfort her. She thinks me dead.”
His voice trembled, he grasped Falcon's cold hand till the latter winced again, and so they parted, and Falcon rode off muttering, “Dr. Staines! so then YOU are Dr. Staines.”
Rosa Staines had youth on her side, and it is an old saying that youth will not be denied. Youth struggled with death for her, and won the battle.
But she came out of that terrible fight weak as a child. The sweet pale face, the widow's cap, the suit of deep black—it was long ere these came down from the sickroom. And when they did, oh, the dead blank! The weary, listless life! The days spent in sighs, and tears, and desolation. Solitude! solitude! Her husband was gone, and a strange woman played the mother to her child before her eyes.
Uncle Philip was devotedly kind to her, and so was her father; but they could do nothing for her.
Months rolled on, and skinned the wound over. Months could not heal. Her boy became dearer and dearer, and it was from him came the first real drops of comfort, however feeble.
She used to read her lost one's diary every day, and worship, in deep sorrow, the mind she had scarcely respected until it was too late. She searched in his diary to find his will, and often she mourned that he had written on it so few things she could obey. Her desire to obey the dead, whom, living, she had often disobeyed, was really simple and touching. She would mourn to her father that there were so few commands to her in his diary. “But,” said she, “memory brings me back his will in many things, and to obey is now the only sad comfort I have.”
It was in this spirit she now forced herself to keep accounts. No fear of her wearing stays now; no powder; no trimmings; no waste.
After the usual delay, her father told her she should instruct a solicitor to apply to the insurance company for the six thousand pounds. She refused with a burst of agony. “The price of his life,” she screamed. “Never! I'd live on bread and water sooner than touch that vile money.”
Her father remonstrated gently. But she was immovable. “No. It would be like consenting to his death.”
Then Uncle Philip was sent for.
He set her child on her knee; and gave her a pen. “Come,” said he, sternly, “be a woman, and do your duty to little Christie.”
She kissed the boy, cried, and did her duty meekly. But when the money was brought her, she flew to Uncle Philip, and said, “There! there!” and threw it all before him, and cried as if her heart would break. He waited patiently, and asked her what he was to do with all that: invest it?
“Yes, yes; for my little Christie.”
“And pay you the interest quarterly.”
“Oh, no, no. Dribble us out a little as we want it. That is the way to be truly kind to a simpleton. I hate that word.”
“And suppose I run off with it? Such confiding geese as you corrupt a man.”
“I shall never corrupt you. Crusty people are the soul of honor.”
“Crusty people!” cried Philip, affecting amazement. “What are they?”
She bit her lip and colored a little; but answered adroitly, “They are people that pretend not to have good hearts, but have the best in the world; far better ones than your smooth ones: that's crusty people.”
“Very well,” said Philip; “and I'll tell you what simpletons are. They are little transparent-looking creatures that look shallow, but are as deep as Old Nick, and make you love them in spite of your judgment. They are the most artful of their sex; for they always achieve its great object, to be loved—the very thing that clever women sometimes fail in.”
“Well, and if we are not to be loved, why live at all—such useless things as I am?” said Rosa simply.
So Philip took charge of her money, and agreed to help her save money for her little Christopher. Poverty should never destroy him, as it had his father.
As months rolled on, she crept out into public a little; but always on foot, and a very little way from home.
Youth and sober life gradually restored her strength, but not her color, nor her buoyancy.
Yet she was perhaps more beautiful than ever; for a holy sorrow chastened and sublimed her features: it was now a sweet, angelic, pensive beauty, that interested every feeling person at a glance.
She would visit no one; but a twelvemonth after her bereavement, she received a few chosen visitors.
One day a young gentleman called, and sent up his card, “Lord Tadcaster,” with a note from Lady Cicely Treherne, full of kindly feeling. Uncle Philip had reconciled her to Lady Cicely; but they had never met.
Mrs. Staines was much agitated at the very name of Lord Tadcaster; but she would not have missed seeing him for the world.
She received him with her beautiful eyes wide open, to drink in every lineament of one who had seen the last of her Christopher.
Tadcaster was wonderfully improved: he had grown six inches out at sea, and though still short, was not diminutive; he was a small Apollo, a model of symmetry, and had an engaging, girlish beauty, redeemed from downright effeminacy by a golden mustache like silk, and a tanned cheek that became him wonderfully.
He seemed dazzled at first by Mrs. Staines, but murmured that Lady Cicely had told him to come, or he would not have ventured.
“Who can be so welcome to me as you?” said she, and the tears came thick in her eyes directly.
Soon, he hardly knew how, he found himself talking of Staines, and telling her what a favorite he was, and all the clever things he had done.
The tears streamed down her cheeks, but she begged him to go on telling her, and omit nothing.
He complied heartily, and was even so moved by the telling of his friend's virtues, and her tears and sobs, that he mingled his tears with hers. She rewarded him by giving him her hand as she turned away her tearful face to indulge the fresh burst of grief his sympathy evoked.
When he was leaving, she said, in her simple way, “Bless you”—“Come again,” she said: “you have done a poor widow good.”
Lord Tadcaster was so interested and charmed, he would gladly have come back next day to see her; but he restrained that extravagance, and waited a week.
Then he visited her again. He had observed the villa was not rich in flowers, and he took her down a magnificent bouquet, cut from his father's hot-houses. At sight of him, or at sight of it, or both, the color rose for once in her pale cheek, and her pensive face wore a sweet expression of satisfaction. She took his flowers, and thanked him for them, and for coming to see her.
Soon they got on the only topic she cared for, and, in the course of this second conversation, he took her into his confidence, and told her he owed everything to Dr. Staines. “I was on the wrong road altogether, and he put me right. To tell you the truth, I used to disobey him now and then, while he was alive, and I was always the worse for it; now he is gone, I never disobey him. I have written down a lot of wise, kind things he said to me, and I never go against any one of them. I call it my book of oracles. Dear me, I might have brought it with me.”
“Oh, yes! why didn't you?” rather reproachfully.
“I will bring it next time.”
“Pray do.”
Then she looked at him with her lovely swimming eyes, and said tenderly, “And so here is another that disobeyed him living, but obeys him dead. What will you think when I tell you that I, his wife, who now worship him when it is too late, often thwarted and vexed him when he was alive?”
“No, no. He told me you were an angel, and I believe it.”
“An angel! a good-for-nothing, foolish woman, who sees everything too late.”
“Nobody else should say so before me,” said the little gentleman grandly. “I shall take HIS word before yours on this one subject. If ever there was an angel, you are one; and oh, what would I give if I could but say or do anything in the world to comfort you!”
“You can do nothing for ME, dear, but come and see me often, and talk to me as you do—on the one sad theme my broken heart has room for.”
This invitation delighted Lord Tadcaster, and the sweet word “dear,” from her lovely lips, entered his heart, and ran through all his veins like some rapturous but dangerous elixir. He did not say to himself, “She is a widow with a child, feels old with grief, and looks on me as a boy who has been kind to her.” Such prudence and wariness were hardly to be expected from his age. He had admired her at first sight, very nearly loved her at their first interview, and now this sweet word opened a heavenly vista. The generous heart that beat in his small frame burned to console her with a life-long devotion and all the sweet offices of love.
He ordered his yacht to Gravesend—for he had become a sailor—and then he called on Mrs. Staines, and told her, with a sort of sheepish cunning, that now, as his yacht HAPPENED to be at Gravesend, he could come and see her very often. He watched her timidly, to see how she would take that proposition.
She said, with the utmost simplicity, “I'm very glad of it.”
Then he produced his oracles; and she devoured them. Such precepts to Tadcaster as she could apply to her own case she instantly noted in her memory, and they became her law from that moment.
Then, in her simplicity, she said, “And I will show you some things, in his own handwriting, that may be good for you; but I can't show you the whole book: some of it is sacred from every eye but his wife's. His wife's? Ah me! his widow's.”
Then she pointed out passages in the diary that she thought might be for his good; and he nestled to her side, and followed her white finger with loving eyes, and was in an elysium—which she would certainly have put a stop to at that time, had she divined it. But all wisdom does not come at once to an unguarded woman. Rosa Staines was wiser about her husband than she had been, but she had plenty to learn.
Lord Tadcaster anchored off Gravesend, and visited Mrs. Staines nearly every day. She received him with a pleasure that was not at all lively, but quite undisguised. He could not doubt his welcome; for once, when he came, she said to the servant, “Not at home,” a plain proof she did not wish his visit to be cut short by any one else.
And so these visits and devoted attentions of every kind went on unobserved by Lord Tadcaster's friends, because Rosa would never go out, even with him; but at last Mr. Lusignan saw plainly how this would end, unless he interfered.
Well, he did not interfere; on the contrary, he was careful to avoid putting his daughter on her guard: he said to himself, “Lord Tadcaster does her good. I'm afraid she would not marry him, if he was to ask her now; but in time she might. She likes him a great deal better than any one else.”
As for Philip, he was abroad for his own health, somewhat impaired by his long and faithful attendance on Rosa.
So now Lord Tadcaster was in constant attendance on Rosa. She was languid, but gentle and kind; and, as mourners, like invalids, are apt to be egotistical, she saw nothing but that he was a comfort to her in her affliction.
While matters were so, the Earl of Miltshire, who had long been sinking, died, and Tadcaster succeeded to his honors and estates.
Rosa heard of it, and, thinking it was a great bereavement, wrote him one of those exquisite letters of condolence a lady alone can write. He took it to Lady Cicely, and showed it her. She highly approved it.
He said, “The only thing—it makes me ashamed, I do not feel my poor father's death more; but you know it has been so long expected.” Then he was silent a long time; and then he asked her if such a woman as that would not make him happy, if he could win her.
It was on her ladyship's tongue to say, “She did not make her first happy;” but she forbore, and said coldly, that was maw than she could say.
Tadcaster seemed disappointed by that, and by and by Cicely took herself to task. She asked herself what were Tadcaster's chances in the lottery of wives. The heavy army of scheming mothers, and the light cavalry of artful daughters, rose before her cousinly and disinterested eyes, and she asked herself what chance poor little Tadcaster would have of catching a true love, with a hundred female artists manoeuvring, wheeling, ambuscading, and charging upon his wealth and titles. She returned to the subject of her own accord, and told him she saw but one objection to such a match: the lady had a son by a man of rare merit and misfortune. Could he, at his age, undertake to be a father to that son? “Othahwise,” said Lady Cicely, “mark my words, you will quall over that poor child; and you will have two to quall with, because I shall be on her side.”
Tadcaster declared to her that child should be quite the opposite of a bone of contention. “I have thought of that,” said he, “and I mean to be so kind to that boy, I shall MAKE her love me for that.”
On these terms Lady Cicely gave her consent.
Then he asked her should he write, or ask her in person.
Lady Cicely reflected. “If you write, I think she will say no.”
“But if I go?”
“Then, it will depend on how you do it. Rosa Staines is a true mourner. Whatever you may think, I don't believe the idea of a second union has ever entered her head. But then she is very unselfish: and she likes you better than any one else, I dare say. I don't think your title or your money will weigh with her now. But, if you show her your happiness depends on it, she may, perhaps, cwy and sob at the very idea of it, and then, after all, say, 'Well, why not—if I can make the poor soul happy?'”
So, on this advice, Tadcaster went down to Gravesend, and Lady Cicely felt a certain self-satisfaction; for, her well-meant interference having lost Rosa one husband, she was pleased to think she had done something to give her another.
Lord Tadcaster came to Rosa Staines; he found her seated with her head upon her white hand, thinking sadly of the past.
At sight of him in deep mourning, she started, and said, “Oh!”
Then she said tenderly, “We are of one color now,” and gave him her hand.
He sat down beside her, not knowing how to begin.
“I am not Tadcaster now. I am Earl of Miltshire.”
“Ah, yes; I forgot,” said she indifferently.
“This is my first visit to any one in that character.”
“Thank you.”
“It is an awfully important visit to me. I could not feel myself independent, and able to secure your comfort and little Christie's, without coming to the lady, the only lady I ever saw, that—oh, Mrs. Staines—Rosa—who could see you, as I have done—mingle his tears with yours, as I have done, and not love you, and long to offer you his love?”
“Love! to me, a broken-hearted woman, with nothing to live for but his memory and his child.”
She looked at him with a sort of scared amazement.
“His child shall be mine. His memory is almost as dear to me as to you.”
“Nonsense, child, nonsense!” said she, almost sternly.
“Was he not my best friend? Should I have the health I enjoy, or even be alive, but for him? Oh, Mrs. Staines—Rosa, you will not live all your life unmarried; and who will love you as I do? You are my first and only love. My happiness depends on you.”
“Your happiness depend on me! Heaven forbid—a woman of my age, that feels so old, old, old.”
“You are not old; you are young, and sad, and beautiful, and my happiness depends on you.” She began to tremble a little. Then he kneeled at her knees, and implored her, and his hot tears fell upon the hand she put out to stop him, while she turned her head away, and the tears began to run.
Oh! never can the cold dissecting pen tell what rushes over the heart that has loved and lost, when another true love first kneels and implores for love, or pity, or anything the bereaved can give.