“'At Wisdom's gate, Suspicion sleeps,And deems no ill where no ill seems.'
“Come, come! are you sure you are not a little to blame? Did you write home the moment you found you were not dead?”
Christopher colored high.
“Evidently not,” said the keen old man. “Ah, my fine fellow! have I found the flaw in your own armor?”
“I did wrong, but it was for her. I sinned for her. I could not bear her to be without money, and I knew the insurance—I sinned for her. She has sinned AGAINST me.”
“And she had much better have sinned against God, hadn't she? He is more forgiving than we perfect creatures that cheat insurance companies. And so, my fine fellow, you hid the truth from her for two or three months.”
No answer.
“Strike off those two or three months; would the banns have ever been cried?”
“Well, uncle,” said Christopher, hard pressed, “I am glad she has got a champion; and I hope you will always keep your eye on her.”
“I mean to.”
“Good-morning.”
“No; don't be in a hurry. I have something else to say, not so provoking. Do you know the arts by which she was made to believe you wished her to marry again?”
“I wished her to marry again! Are you mad, uncle?”
“Whose handwriting is on this envelope?”
“Mine, to be sure.”
“Now, read the letter.”
Christopher read the forged letter.
“Oh, monstrous!”
“This was given her with your ruby ring, and a tale so artful that nothing we read about the devil comes near it. This was what did it. The Earl of Tadcaster brought her title, and wealth, and love.”
“What, he too! The little cub I saved, and lost myself for—blank him! blank him!”
“Why, you stupid ninny! you forget you were dead; and he could not help loving her. How could he? Well, but you see she refused him. And why? because he came without a forged letter from YOU. Do you doubt her love for you?”
“Of course I do. She never loved me as I loved her.”
“Christopher, don't you say that before me, or you and I shall quarrel. Poor girl! she lay, in my sight, as near death for you as you were for her. I'll show you something.”
He went to a cabinet, and took out a silver paper; he unpinned it, and laid Rosa's beautiful black hair upon her husband's knees. “Look at that, you hard-hearted brute!” he roared to Christopher, who sat, anything but hard-hearted, his eyes filling fast, at the sad proof of his wife's love and suffering.
Rosa could bear no more. She came out with her boy in her hand. “O uncle, do not speak harshly to him, or you will kill me quite!”
She came across the room, a picture of timidity and penitence, with her whole eloquent body bent forward at an angle. She kneeled at his knees, with streaming eyes, and held her boy up to him: “Plead for your poor mother, my darling. She mourns her fault, and will never excuse it.”
The cause was soon decided. All Philip's logic was nothing, compared with mighty nature. Christopher gave one great sob, and took his darling to his heart, without one word; and he and Rosa clung together, and cried over each other. Philip slipped out of the room, and left the restored ones together.
I have something more to say about my hero and heroine, but must first deal with other characters, not wholly uninteresting to the reader, I hope.
Dr. Staines directed Phoebe Falcon how to treat her husband. No medicine, no stimulants; very wholesome food, in moderation, and the temperature of the body regulated by tepid water. Under these instructions, the injured but still devoted wife was the real healer. He pulled through, but was lame for life, and ridiculously lame, for he went with a spring halt,—a sort of hop-and-go-one that made the girls laugh, and vexed Adonis.
Phoebe found the diamonds, and offered them all to Staines, in expiation of his villany. “See,” she said, “he has only spent one.”
Staines said he was glad of it, for her sake, for he must be just to his own family. He sold them for three thousand two hundred pounds; but for the big diamond he got twelve thousand pounds, and I believe it was worth double the money.
Counting the two sums, and deducting six hundred for the stone Mr. Falcon had embezzled, he gave her over seven thousand pounds.
She stared at him, and changed color at so large a sum. “But I have no claim on that, sir.”
“That is a good joke,” said he. “Why, you and I are partners in the whole thing—you and I and Dick. Was it not with his horse and rifle I bought the big diamond? Poor dear, honest, manly Dick! No, the money is honestly yours, Mrs. Falcon; but don't trust a penny to your husband.”
“He will never see it, sir. I shall take him back, and give him all his heart can ask for, with this; but he will be little more than a servant in the house now, as long as Dick is single; I know that;” and she could still cry at the humiliation of her villain.
Staines made her promise to write to him; and she did write him a sweet, womanly letter, to say that they were making an enormous fortune, and hoped to end their days in England. Dick sent his kind love and thanks.
I will add, what she only said by implication, that she was happy after all. She still contrived to love the thing she could not respect. Once, when an officious friend pitied her for her husband's lameness, she said, “Find me a face like his. The lamer the better; he can't run after the girls, like SOME.”
Dr. Staines called on Lady Cicely Treherne; the footman stared. He left his card.
A week afterwards, she called on him. She had a pink tinge in her cheeks, a general animation, and her face full of brightness and archness.
“Bless me!” said he bluntly, “is this you? How you are improved!”
“Yes,” said she; “and I am come to thank you for your pwescwiption: I followed it to the lettaa.”
“Woe is me! I have forgotten it.”
“You diwected me to mawwy a nice man.”
“Never: I hate a nice man.”
“No, no—an Iwishman: and I have done it.”
“Good gracious! you don't mean that! I must be more cautious in my prescriptions. After all, it seems to agree.”
“Admiwably.”
“He loves you?”
“To distwaction.”
“He amuses you?”
“Pwodigiously. Come and see.”
Dr. and Mrs. Staines live with Uncle Philip. The insurance money is returned, but the diamond money makes them very easy. Staines follows his profession now under great advantages: a noble house, rent free; the curiosity that attaches to a man who has been canted out of a ship in mid-ocean, and lives to tell it; and then Lord Tadcaster, married into another noble house, swears by him, and talks of him; so does Lady Cicely Munster, late Treherne; and when such friends as these are warm, it makes a physician the centre of an important clientele; but his best friend of all is his unflagging industry, and his truly wonderful diagnosis, which resembles divination. He has the ball at his feet, and above all, that without which worldly success soon palls, a happy home, a fireside warm with sympathy.
Mrs. Staines is an admiring, sympathizing wife, and an admirable housekeeper. She still utters inadvertencies now and then, commits new errors at odd times, but never repeats them when exposed. Observing which docility, Uncle Philip has been heard to express a fear that, in twenty years, she will be the wisest woman in England. “But, thank heaven!” he adds, “I shall be gone before that.”
Her conduct and conversation afford this cynic constant food for observation; and he has delivered himself oracularly at various stages of the study: but I cannot say that his observations, taken as a whole, present that consistency which entitles them to be regarded as a body of philosophy. Examples: In the second month after Mrs. Staines came to live with him, he delivered himself thus: “My niece Rosa is an anomaly. She gives you the impression she is shallow. Mind your eye: in one moment she will take you out of your depth or any man's depth. She is like those country streams I used to fish for pike when I was young; you go along, seeing the bottom everywhere; but presently you come to a corner, and it is fifteen deep all in a moment, and souse you go over head and ears: that's my niece Rosa.”
In six months he had got to this—and, mind you, each successive dogma was delivered in a loud, aggressive tone, and in sublime oblivion of the preceding oracle—“My niece Rosa is the most artful woman. (You may haw! haw! haw! as much as you like. You have not found out her little game—I have.) What is the aim of all women? To be beloved by an unconscionable number of people. Well, she sets up for a simpleton, and so disarms all the brilliant people, and they love her. Everybody loves her. Just you put her down in a room with six clever women, and you will see who is the favorite. She looks as shallow as a pond, and she is as deep as the ocean.”
At the end of the year he threw off the mask altogether. “The great sweetener of a man's life,” said he, “is 'a simpleton.' I shall not go abroad any more; my house has become attractive: I've got a simpleton. When I have a headache, her eyes fill with tender concern, and she hovers about me and pesters me with pillows: when I am cross with her, she is afraid I am ill. When I die, and leave her a lot of money, she will howl for months, and say I don't want his money: 'I waw-waw-waw-waw-want my Uncle Philip, to love me, and scold me.' One day she told me, with a sigh, I hadn't lectured her for a month. 'I am afraid I have offended you,' says she, 'or else worn you out, dear.' When I am well, give me a simpleton, to make me laugh. When I am ill, give me a simpleton to soothe me with her innocent tenderness. A simpleton shall wipe the dews of death, and close my eyes: and when I cross the river of death, let me be met by a band of the heavenly host, who were all simpletons here on earth, and too good for such a hole, so now they are in heaven, and their garments always white—because there are no laundresses there.”
Arrived at this point, the Anglo-Saxon race will retire, grinning, to fresh pastures, and leave this champion of “a Simpleton,” to thunder paradoxes in a desert.