CHAPTER IV.
KENRICK’S RETURN.
Inthe dull dark days of November Mr. and Mrs. Dulcimer took their ward to Southampton, there to await her lover’s return. They were to spend a week at Culverhouse with Sir Kenrick, and then he was to go with them when they went back to Little Yafford. Mrs. Dulcimer had planned it all. If Kenrick was ailing still—though that was not likely, Mrs. Dulcimer said, after the sea voyage—Rebecca could nurse him. There was no beef tea like Rebecca’s, no such calves’ foot jelly.
They went to the Dolphin Hotel at Southampton, and Mr. Dulcimer at once descended upon the old book-shops in the High Street, like a vulture upon carrion—very much like a vulture, since he cared only for the dead. Mrs. Dulcimer took Beatrix for a gentle walk, which meant a contemplation of allthe shop windows. Beatrix looked pale and out of spirits.
‘I know you are anxious about Kenrick,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer.
Beatrix blushed. Her conscience smote her for not being anxious enough about her wounded lover. Had it been Cyril thus returning, what agonies of hope and fear would have rent her breast! But it was only Kenrick, the man she had promised, out of simple gratitude and esteem, to marry. Her feeling about him, as the hour of their meeting drew nigh, was an ever-increasing dread.
The day came for the arrival of the steamer. The weather had been favourable, late as it was in the year, and the boat came into the docks on the very day she was expected. Mrs. Dulcimer and Beatrix had been walking on the platform for an hour in the afternoon, when the Vicar came bustling up to them.
‘The steamer is just coming in,’ he cried, and they were all hurried off to the docks.
There were a great many people, a crowd of anxious faces all looking towards the open wateracross which the big steamer was cleaving her steady way.
Who was that on the high bridge beside the captain, looking shoreward through a glass?
‘Kenrick,’ exclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Dulcimer simultaneously.
Beatrix saw nothing. The docks and the people, the blue bright water outside, the muddy green water inside, the big gaily painted steamer, swam before her eyes. He was coming. He was coming to claim the fulfilment of her promise. That weak moment in which she had yielded to an impulse of grateful feeling now meant life-long misery.
A few minutes more and he was standing by her side, her hand clasped in his, Mr. Dulcimer giving him hearty welcome, Mrs. Dulcimer in tears, Beatrix dumb as a statue.
‘Oh, my poor dear Kenrick,’ cried the Vicar’s wife when she could find a voice. ‘How changed you are—how fearfully changed!’
‘I’ve been very ill,’ he answered, quietly. ‘I didn’t want to frighten you all, so I made rather light of it in my letter. But I’ve had a narrowescape. However, here I am, and I don’t mean to knock under now.’
The change was startling. The elegant and aristocratic-looking young man, whom they had parted from less than a year ago, was transformed into a feeble invalid, whose shoulders were bent with weakness, and across whose cadaverous cheek there appeared the deep cicatrice of a sabre wound. There was nothing absolutely repulsive in Kenrick’s aspect, but there was enough to make love itself falter.
They got him into a fly and drove off to the Dolphin, while Mr. Dulcimer stayed behind to look after the luggage.
‘Beatrix,’ said Kenrick, when they were seated opposite each other in the fly, ‘I have not heard your voice yet, and it is your voice that I have been hearing in my dreams every night on board the steamer.’
‘I am very sorry to see you looking so ill,’ she answered, gently.
‘My boot maker or my tailor would say as much as that. Tell me you are glad to see me—me—even the poor wreck I am.’
There are pardonable hypocrisies in this life. Beatrix’s eyes brimmed over with tears. She was deeply sorry for him, sorry that she could find no love for him in her heart, only infinite pity.
‘I am very glad you are safe at home,’ she said, ‘we have all been anxious about you.’
A poor welcome for a man who had lived through six months’ hard fighting with brown Buddhist soldiers, for the sake of this moment. But he could not upbraid his betrothed for unkindness just now. Mrs. Dulcimer was there, tearful but loquacious, and he could not open his heart before Mrs. Dulcimer.
After breakfast next morning Kenrick asked Beatrix to go for a walk on the platform with him. They were to drive over to Culverhouse Castle in the afternoon.
It was a dim autumnal morning, the opposite shore veiled in mist, the water a dull gray, everything placid and subdued in colour—a morning that had the calmness and grayness of advancing age—the dull repose which befits man’s closing years.
‘My dearest love, your letters have been all kindness,’ said Kenrick. ‘There has not been muchlove in them, but I suppose I have no right to complain of that. You did not promise to love me. Your letters have made me happy. But yesterday I confess I was wounded by your reception of me. You were so cold, so silent. I looked in vain for the greeting I had foreshadowed. It seemed that you had come to meet me as a duty, that you wished yourself away. And then I thought perhaps the change in me was too great, that you were horror-struck at seeing so deplorable a wreck. If this was the cause of your silence——’
‘It was not,’ cried Beatrix, eagerly. ‘Pray do not imagine anything of the kind. The change in you makes no difference in me. I am proud to think that you have done your duty, that you have been brave and noble, and have won praise and honour. Do you suppose I do not like you better for that?’
‘If I thought otherwise, Beatrix, if I fancied that you were revolted by my lantern jaws, and this ugly gash across my cheek, I would say at once let all be at an end between us. I would give you back your freedom.’
‘I could not accept it on such terms. There isnothing revolting in your appearance. If there were, if you were maimed and scarred so as to be hardly recognisable, I would remember that you had been wounded in the performance of your duty, and I would honour your wounds. No, Kenrick, believe methatcould not make any barrier between us.’
‘Yet there is a barrier.’
She had not the cruelty to answer the cold hard truth. He was ill and weak. He looked at her with eyes that seemed to implore any deception rather than a reality that would crush him. He had loved her and believed in her, when the man she loved had doubted and left her. He was at least entitled to gratitude and regard.
‘I have promised to be your wife, and I am going to keep my promise,’ she said, gravely.
‘Then I am happy. Shall it be soon, dearest?’
‘It shall be when you like after the new year.’
‘And am I to leave the army?’
‘No,’ she answered, quickly. ‘I am proud of your profession. I should be very sorry if for mysake you were to exchange the career of a soldier for the stagnation of a country gentleman’s life.’
‘There would be no stagnation for me at Culverhouse; yet I had much rather remain in the army. But is my profession to separate us? You may not like to go to India.’
‘It will be my duty to go with you.’
‘My love, I have no words to say how happy you have made me. It would have been a grief to give up my profession, but I would have done it without a word, in obedience to your wish.’
‘A wife should have no wish about serious things in opposition to her husband,’ answered Beatrix.
They were at Culverhouse Castle before dusk, and again the village gossips were bobbing to Beatrix, this time with the assurance, derived from Betty Mopson’s direct assertion, that she was to be their Lady Bountiful, the source of comfort and blessing at Christmastide, and in all time of trouble.
They spent a calm and quiet week at the castle. Beatrix liked the gray old buildings, withtheir quaint mixture of ecclesiastical and domestic uses. First a castle, then an abbey, then a good old Tudor dwelling-house. That was the history of Culverhouse. Kenrick brought out old county chronicles to prove what a big place it had been in its time. How it had belonged to a warrior of the Culverhouse breed in the days of the first crusade; how it had been afterwards surrendered to the Church by a sinning and repenting Culverhouse; and how, after sequestration and malappropriation under the tyrant Harry, it had come back by marriage to the Culverhouses, in a most miraculous way.
‘Your house seems to have always been buttressed by heiresses,’ said Mr. Dulcimer, poring over a musty parchment that Kenrick had produced for his inspection. ‘You have been a very lucky family.’
‘Luckier than we have deserved, I fear,’ answered Kenrick, with a glance at Beatrix.
They all went to Little Yafford at the end of the week, and Kenrick was established at the Vicarage, under strict charge of Rebecca. Thatworthy woman exercised an awful tyranny over him, feeding him with jellies and soups with as off-hand authority as if he had been a nest of young thrushes, or a turkey in process of fattening for Christmas. He bore it all meekly, for was not Mrs. Dulcimer the best friend he had, since it was she who had first suggested his winning Beatrix?
They were to be married early in the year. Everybody was talking about it already. It would be a much more interesting marriage than Mr. Piper’s second nuptials, though that event had kept the village gossips alive for full six weeks. The tide of popular feeling had turned, and Beatrix now stood high in the estimation of her neighbours. Even Miss Coyle was silent, contenting herself with an occasional shrug of her shoulders, or a significant elevation of her grizzled eyebrows. The slander had died a natural death, it had expired of inanition.
Beatrix and her lover saw each other daily. Madame Leonard was delighted with the wounded soldier, who had fought so well at Pegu. Everybodypraised him. Even Beatrix’s manner grew a shade warmer, and she began to feel a calm and sober pleasure in her lover’s company, such a mild regard as she might have given to an elder brother, with whom she had not been brought up.
As Kenrick grew stronger they rode together across the wild bleak moor, and the fierce winds blew health and power into the soldier’s lungs. Kenrick spent some of his evenings at the dull old Water House, in that pretty white panelled sitting-room that had been so long shut up. Madame Leonard petted and pampered him in her cordial little way. Beatrix was kind, and read or played to him according to the humour of the hour. It was a placid, happy life.