A cab conveyed Mr. Sheldon swiftly to a dingy street in the City—a street which might have been called the pavement of wasted footsteps, so many an impecunious wretch tramped to and fro upon those dreary flags in vain.
The person whom Mr. Sheldon came to see was a distinguished bill-discounter, who had served him well in more than one crisis, and on whose service he fancied he could now rely.
Mr. Kaye, the bill-discounter, was delighted to see his worthy friend Mr. Sheldon. He had just come up from his family at Brighton, and had quite a little court awaiting him in an outer chamber, through which Mr. Sheldon had been ushered to the inner office.
"It's rather early for such a visitor as you," Mr. Kaye said, after a few commonplaces. "I have not been in town half an hour."
"My business is too important for any consideration about hours," answered Mr. Sheldon, "or I should not be here at all. I have just come from the deathbed of my wife's daughter."
"Indeed!" exclaimed the bill-discounter, looking inexpressibly shocked. Until that moment he had lived in supreme ignorance of the fact that Mr. Sheldon had a stepdaughter; but his sorrow-stricken expression of countenance might have implied that he had known and esteemed the young lady.
"Yes, it's very sad," said Mr. Sheldon; "and something more than sad for me. The poor girl had great expectations, and would have come into a very fine fortune if she had lived a year or two longer."
"Ha! dear me, how very unfortunate! Poor young lady!"
"Jedd and Doddleson—you know them by repute, of course—have been attending her for the last six weeks. There will be no end of expense for me; and it has been all of no use."
"Consumption, I suppose?"
"Well, no; not pulmonary disease. A kind of atrophy. I scarcely know what to call it. Now, look here, Kaye. This illness has thrown all my affairs into a muddle. Taken in conjunction with the depressed state of the money-market, it has been altogether an upset for me. I have been staying at home looking after this poor girl and my wife—who of course is dreadfully cut up, and that sort of thing—when I ought to have been in the City. Luckily for me, and for my wife, in whose interests I acted, I took the precaution to get her daughter's life insured eight or nine months ago; in point of fact, immediately after finding she was heir-at-law to a considerable fortune. The policy is for five thousand pounds. I want you to give me four thousand immediately upon the strength of the document and of my stepdaughter's will."
"Give you four thousand!" exclaimed Mr. Kaye, with a little unctuous laugh. "Do you suppose I keep such a balance as that at my banker's?"
"I suppose that you can give me the money if you like."
"I might be able to get it for you."
"Yes; that's a kind of humbug a hundred years old. We've heard all about little Premium and his friend in the City, and so on, from that man who wrote plays and cut a figure in Parliament. You can give me the money on the spot if you like, Kaye; and if I didn't want ready money very badly I shouldn't come to you. The insurance company will give me five thousand in a month or two. I can give you my bill at two months' date, and deposit the policy in your hands as collateral security. I might get this money from other quarters—from my bankers', for instance; but I don't want to let them know too much."
Mr. Kaye deliberated. He had assisted Mr. Sheldon's financial operations, and had profited thereby. Money advanced upon such a security must be as safe as money invested in Consols, unless there were anything doubtful in the circumstances of the policy; and that, with a man of Mr. Sheldon's respectability, was to the last degree unlikely.
"When do you want this money?" he asked at last.
"At the beginning of next week. On the twenty-fifth at latest."
"And this is the twentieth. Sharp work."
"Not at all. You could give me the money this afternoon, if you pleased."
"Well, I'll think it over. It's a matter in which I feel myself bound to take my solicitor's opinion. Suppose you meet him here to-morrow at twelve o'clock? You can bring the necessary evidence to support the claim—the doctor's and registrar's certificate, and so on?"
"Yes," Mr. Sheldon answered, thoughtfully; "I will bring the documentary evidence. To-morrow at twelve, then."
Very little more was said. Mr. Sheldon left the will and the policy in the bill-discounter's possession, and departed. Things had gone as smoothly as he could fairly expect them to go. From Mr. Kaye's office he went to the Unitas Bank, where he had a very friendly, but not altogether satisfactory, interview with the secretary. He wanted the Unitas people to advance him money on the strength of the second policy of assurance; but his balance had been very low of late, and the secretary could not promise compliance with his desires. Those Unitas shares valued at five thousand pounds, which he had transferred to his beloved stepdaughter, had been retransferred by the young lady some months before, with a view to the more profitable investment of the money.
This money, as well as all else that Philip Sheldon could command, had gone to the same bottomless pit of unlucky speculation. From the bank the stockbroker went to his office, where he saw Frederick Orcott, to whom he announced his stepdaughter's death with all due appearance of sorrow. He sat for an hour in his office, arranging his affairs for the following day, then sent for another cab, and drove back to Bayswater. The noonday press and noise of the City seemed strange to him, almost as they might have seemed to a man newly returned from lonely wanderings in distant wildernesses.
The blinds were down at the Lawn. His own handsome bedchamber and adjoining dressing-room faced the road, and it was at the windows of these two rooms he looked. He fancied his weak foolish wife wailing and lamenting behind those lowered blinds.
"And I shall have to endure her lamentations," he thought, with a shudder. "I shall have no further excuse for avoiding her. But, on the other hand, I shall have the pleasure of giving Mrs. Woolper and Miss Paget notice to quit."
He derived a grim satisfaction from this thought. Yes; insolence from those two women he would endure no longer. The time had come in which he would assert his right to be master in his own house. The game had been played against him boldly by Jedd and these people, and had been lost by them. He was the winner. He could not dismiss doctors, nurse, friend, lover. Charlotte Halliday's death made him master of the situation.
He went into his house with the determination to assert his authority at once. Within all was very quiet. He looked into the dining-room—it was quite empty; into the study—also empty. He went slowly upstairs, composing his face into the appropriate expression. At the door of that chamber which to him should have seemed of all earthly chambers the most awful, he knocked softly.
There was no answer.
He knocked a little louder, but there was still no answer. A little louder again, and with the same result.
"Is there no one there?" he asked himself. "No one, except—?"
He opened the door, and went in, with unshaken nerves, to look upon that one quiet sleeper whom his summons could not awaken, whom his presence could not disturb.
There was no nurse or watcher by the bed. Everything was arranged with extreme neatness and precision; but it seemed to him that there were objects missing in the room, objects that had been familiar to him during the dead girl's illness, and which were associated with her presence,—the clock that had stood on the table by her bed, a stand of books, a low easy-chair, with embroidered cover worked by her mother and Diana Paget. The room looked blank and empty without these things, and Mr. Sheldon wondered what officious hand had removed them.
Yonder stood the pretty little bedstead, shrouded by closely drawn white curtains. Philip Sheldon walked slowly across the room, and drew aside one of the curtains. He had looked upon the death-sleep of Charlotte Halliday's father, why not upon hers?
She was not there! Those closely drawn curtains shrouded only the bed on which she had slept in the tranquil slumbers of her careless girlhood. That cold lifeless form, whose rigid outline Philip Sheldon had steeled himself to see, had no place here.
He put his hand to his head, bewildered. "What does it mean?" he asked himself; "surely she died in this room!"
He went hurriedly to his wife's room. They had taken Charlotte there, perhaps, shortly before her death. Some feverish fancy might have possessed her with the desire to be taken thither.
He opened the door and went in; but here again all was blank and empty. The room was arranged after its usual fashion; but of his wife's presence there was no token. His sense of mystification and bewilderment grew suddenly into a sense of fear. What did it mean? What hellish fooling had he been the dupe of?
He went to Diana's room. That, too, was empty. A trunk and a portmanteau, covered and strapped as if for removal, occupied the centre of the room.
There was no other room upon this floor. Above this floor there were only the rooms of the servants.
He went downstairs to the dining-room and rang the bell The parlour-maid came in answer to his summons.
"Where is your mistress?" he asked.
"Gone out, sir; she went at eight o'clock this morning. And O, if you please, sir, Dr. Jedd called, and said I was to give you this—with the certificate."
The certificate! Yes, the certificate of Charlotte Halliday's death,—the certificate which he must produce to-morrow, with other evidence, for the satisfaction of the bill-discounter and his legal adviser. He stared at the girl, still possessed by the sense of bewilderment which had come upon him on seeing those empty rooms upstairs. He took the letter from her almost mechanically, and tore it open without looking at the address. The certificate dropped to the ground. He picked it up with a tremulous hand, and for some moments stood staring at it with dazzled, unseeing eyes. He could see that it was a document with dates and names written in a clerkly hand. For some moments he could see no more. And then words and names shone out of the confusion of letters that spun and whirled, like motes in the sunshine, before his dazzled eyes.
"Valentine Hawkehurst, bachelor, author, Carlyle Terrace, Edgware Road, son of Arthur Hawkehurst, journalist; Charlotte Halliday, spinster, of the Lawn, Bayswater, daughter of Thomas Halliday, farmer."
He read no more.
It was a copy of a certificate of marriage—not a certificate of death—that had been brought to him.
"You can go," he said to the servant hoarsely.
He had a vague consciousness that she was staring at him with curious looks, and that it was not good for him to be watched by any one just now.
"About dinner, sir, if you please?" the young woman began timidly.
"What do I know about dinner?"
"You will dine at home, sir?"
"Dine at home? Yes; Mrs. Woolper can give you your orders."
"Mrs. Woolper has gone out, sir. She has gone for good, I believe, sir; she took her boxes. And Miss Paget's luggage will be sent for, if you please, sir. There's a letter, sir, that Mrs. Woolper left for you on the mantelpiece."
"She was very good. That will do; you can go."
The girl departed, bewildered like her fellow-servants by the strangeness of the day's proceedings, still more bewildered by the strangeness of her master's manner.
When the servant was gone, Mr. Sheldon sat down and examined the document she had given him.
Yes, it was in due form. A certified copy of the certificate of a marriage performed that morning at the church of St. Matthias-in-the-fields, Paddington, and duly witnessed by the registrar of that parish. If this document were indeed genuine, as to all appearance it was, Valentine Hawkehurst and Charlotte Halliday had been married that morning; and the will and the policy of assurance deposited with Mr. Kaye the bill-discounter were so much waste-paper.
And they had fooled him, Philip Sheldon, as easily as this! The furious rage which he felt against all these people, and, more than against them, against his own besotted folly for allowing himself to be so fooled, was a sharper agony than had ever yet rent his cruel heart. He had been a scoundrel all his life, and had felt some of the pains and penalties of his position; but to be a defeated scoundrel was a new sensation to him; and a savage impotent hate and anger against himself and the universe took possession of his mind.
He walked up and down the room for some time, abandoned wholly to the ungovernable rage that consumed him, and with no thought beyond that blind useless fury. And then there came upon him the feeling that was almost a part of his mind—the consciousness that something must be done, and promptly. Whatever his position was, he must face it. His hurried pacing to and fro came to a sudden stop, and he took the crumpled document from his packet, and examined it once more.
There seemed little doubt that it was genuine; and a visit to the church where the marriage was stated to have been performed would immediately place the matter beyond all doubt. With the copy of the certificate, he had taken from his pocket the letter that had enclosed it. He saw now that the envelope was addressed in Hawkehurst's hand.
"Favoured by Dr. Jedd," he had written in a corner of the envelope.
Why should Dr. Jedd "favour" Mr. Hawkehurst's letter? Why, indeed, unless there had been a conspiracy concocted by these men against his authority and his interests?
Valentine's letter was brief and business-like.
"SIR,—With the full approbation of her mother and only near relation, my dear Charlotte has this day become my wife. The enclosed attested copy of the certificate of our marriage will afford you all particulars. I shall refrain from entering upon any explanation of my conduct; and I believe such explanation to be wholly unnecessary. You can scarcely fail to understand why I have acted in this manner, and why I congratulate myself and my dear wife on her departure from your house as on an escape from imminent peril. It will be, I fear, little satisfaction to you to hear that the doctors have pronounced your stepdaughter to be out of danger, though still in very weak health. She is now comfortably established in a temporary home, with her mother and Diana Paget; and in all probability some months must elapse before she and I can begin our new life together. To afford my darling girl the legal protection of marriage was the object of this sudden and secret union. You, of all men, will most fully comprehend how necessary such protection had become to ensure her safety.
"Should you, however, require farther enlightenment as to the motives that prompted this step, Dr. Jedd will be the fittest person to give you such information; and has expressed his willingness to answer any questions you may please to put to him.
"For the rest, I beg to assure you that the rights of Mrs. Hawkehurst in relation to the inheritance of the late John Haygarth's wealth will be as carefully protected as those of Miss Halliday; nor will the hasty marriage of this morning hinder the execution of any deed of settlement calculated to guard her interests in the future.
"With this assurance, I remain, sir,Your obedient servant,VALENTINE HAWKEHURST.Carlyle Terrace, Edgware Road."
Enclosed with this there was a second letter—from his wife.
He read it with a countenance that expressed mingled anger and contempt.
"Fool!" he muttered; "this is about the only service she could do me."
The letter was long and incoherent; blotted with tears—in places completely illegible. Mr. Sheldon cared only to master the main facts contained in it, which were these:—His wife had left him for ever. Dr. Jedd and Valentine Hawkehurst had told her of something—something that affected the safety of her darling and only child—and the knowledge of which must separate her for ever from him. Of the money which she had brought to him she claimed nothing. Even her jewels, which were in his keeping, in the iron safe where he kept his papers, she did not attempt to obtain from him. Valentine would not allow her to starve. The humblest shelter, the poorest food, would suffice her in the future; but no home of his providing could she ever inhabit again.
"What I have suffered in this last few days is only known to myself and to heaven," she wrote. "O Philip, how could you—how could you even shape the thought of such a deed as this, which you have been doing, day after day, for the last two months? I could not have believed what they have told me, if I had not seen my child fade hour by hour under your care, slowly, surely—and recover as surely directly you were excluded from any part in our care of her. If it were possible not to believe these people, I would disbelieve them, and would cling to you faithfully still; but the voices against you are too many, the proofs against you are too strong.
"Do not seek to see me. I am with my poor child, who was but just able to bear the removal from your house, and to go through the ceremony that was performed this morning. Little did I ever think my daughter would have such a wedding. What a mockery all my plans seem now!—and I had chosen the six bridesmaids, and arranged all the dresses in my own mind. To see my dear girl dressed anyhow, in her oldest bonnet, standing before the altar huddled up in a shawl, and given away by a strange doctor, who kept looking at his watch in a most disrespectful manner during the ceremony, was very bitter to me."
Mr. Sheldon flung aside the letter with an oath. He had no time to waste upon such twaddle as this. He tore open Nancy Woolper's letter. It was a poor honest scrawl, telling him how faithfully she had served him, how truly she had loved him in the past, and how she could henceforth serve him no more. It exhorted him, in humble ill-spelt phrases, to repentance. It might not yet be too late even for such a sinner as he had been.
He tore these two epistles into infinitesimal fragments, and flung them into the fireplace. Valentine Hawkehurst's letter he kept. It was a document of some legal importance.
For a moment there had flashed across his brain the thought that he might punish these people for their interference with his affairs. He might bring an action against Dr. Jedd for slander, and compel the physician to prove the charges insinuated against him, or pay the penalty attendant upon an unjustifiable accusation. He was well assured that Dr. Jedd could prove very little; and a jury, if properly worked, might award him exemplary damages.
But on the other hand, the circumstantial evidence against him was very strong; and evidence which might be insufficient to prove him guilty in a trial for his life might be a sufficient defence for his enemies against an action for slander; if, indeed, the course which Dr. Jedd and Valentine Hawkehurst had taken did in itself constitute a slanderous and malicious imputation. Nor could any such action invalidate the marriage solemnized that morning; and that one fact comprised his utter ruin. Charlotte's interests were merged in the interests of her husband. No shadow of claim upon John Haygarth's wealth remained to him.
His ruin was complete and dire. For a long time his circumstances had been desperate—no avenue of escape open to him but the one dark way which he had trodden; and now that last road was closed against him. The day was very near at hand when his fictitious bills on shadowy companies must be dishonoured; and with the dishonour of those bills came the end of all things for him,—a complete revelation of all those dishonest artifices by which he had kept his piratical bark afloat on the commercial waters.
He surveyed his position in every light, calmly and deliberately, and saw there was no hope. The whole scheme of his existence was reduced to the question of how much ready-money he could carry out of that house in his pocket, and in what direction he should betake himself after leaving it.
His first care must be to ascertain whether the marriage described in the duplicate certificate had really taken place; his next, to repossess himself of the papers left with Mr. Kaye.
Before leaving the house he went to his study, where he examined his banker's book. Yes, it was as they had told him at the bank. He was overdrawn. Among the letters lying unopened on his writing-table he found a letter from one of the officials of the Unitas, calling his attention, politely and respectfully, to that oversight upon his part. He read the letter, and crumpled it into his pocket with an angry gesture.
"I am just about as well off now as I was twelve years ago, before Tom Halliday came to Fitzgeorge Street," he said to himself; "and I have the advantage of being twelve years older."
Yes, this is what it all came to, after all. He had been travelling in a circle. The discovery was humiliating. Mr. Sheldon began to think that his line of life had not been a paying one.
He opened his iron safe, and forced the lock of the jewel-case in which his wife had kept the few handsome ornaments that he had given her in the early days of their marriage, as a reward for being good—that is to say, for allowing her second husband to dispose of her first husband's patrimony without let or hindrance. The jewels were only a few rings, a brooch, a pair of earrings, and a bracelet; but they were good of their kind, and in all worth something like two hundred pounds.
These, and the gold chronometer which he carried in his waistcoat-pocket, constituted all the worldly wealth which Mr. Sheldon could command, now that the volcanic ground upon which his commercial position had been built began to crumble beneath his feet, and the bubbling of the crater warned him of his peril. He put the trinkets into his pocket without compunction, and then went upstairs to his dressing-room, where he proceeded to pack his clothes in a capacious portmanteau, which in itself might constitute his credentials among strangers, so eminently respectable was its appearance.
In this dread crisis of his life he thought of everything that affected his own interests. To what was he going? That question was for the moment unanswerable. In every quarter of the globe there are happy hunting-grounds for the soldier of fortune. Some plan for the future would shape itself in his mind by-and-by. His wife's desertion had left him thoroughly independent. He had no tie to restrain his movements, nothing to dread except such proceedings as might be taken against him by the holders of those bills. And such proceedings are slow, while modern locomotion is swift.
What was he leaving? That was easily answered. A labyrinth of debt and difficulty. The fine house, the handsome furniture, were held in the same bondage of the law as his household goods in Fitzgeorge Street had been. He had given a bill of sale upon everything he possessed six months before, to obtain ready-money. The final terrible resource had not been resorted to until all other means had been exhausted. Let this fact at least be recorded to his credit. He was like the lady whom the poet sings, who,
"tolerably mild, To make a wash wouldhardlyboil a child:"
that is to say, she would try all other materials for her cosmetic preparation first; and if they failed, would at last resort, unwillingly, to the boiling of children.
No; he had nothing to lose by flight—of that fact it was easy for him to assure himself.
He went downstairs, and rang for the servant.
"I am going out," he said, "to join my wife and her daughter, and return with them to the sea-side. There is a portmanteau upstairs in my room, ready packed. You will give it to the messenger I shall send in the course of the next day or two. At what time did Mrs. Sheldon and Miss Halliday leave this morning?"
"At eight o'clock, sir. Mr. Hawkehurst came to fetch them in a carriage. They went out by the kitchen passage and the side gate, sir, because you were asleep, Mrs. Woolper said, and was not to be disturbed."
"At eight. Yes. And Mrs. Woolper and Miss Paget?"
"They went a'most directly after you was gone out, sir. There was two cabs to take Miss Halliday's and Mrs. Sheldon's things, and such like,—just as there was when you came from Harold's Hill."
"Yes; I understand."
He was half inclined to ask the young woman if she had heard the direction given to the drivers of these two cabs. But he refrained from doing so. What could it profit him to know where his wife and stepdaughter were to be found? Whether they were in the next street or at the antipodes could matter very little to him, except so far as the knowledge of their place of habitation might guide him in his avoidance of them. Between him and them there was a gulf wider than all the waters of the world, and to consider them was only foolish waste of time and thought. He left the house, which for the last five years of his life had been the outward and visible sign of his social status, fully conscious that he left it for ever; and he left it without a sigh. For him the word home had no tender associations, and the domestic hearth had never inspired him with any sense of comfort or pleasure with which he might not have been inspired by the luxurious fireside of a first-class coffee-room. He was a man who would have chosen to spend his existence in joint-stock hotels, if there had not been solidity of position to be acquired from the possession of a handsome house.
He went to the Paddington church. It was only five o'clock in the afternoon by the clock of that edifice. The church was closely shut, but Mr. Sheldon found the clerk, who, in consideration of a handsome donation, took him to the vestry, and there showed him the register of marriages—the last entry therein.
Yes, there was Charlotte Halliday's signature, a little uncertain and tremulous.
"I suppose you are one of the young lady's relations, sir," said the clerk. "It was rather a strange affair; but the young lady's ma was with her; and the young lady was over age, so, you see, there's nothing to be said against it."
Mr. Sheldon had nothing to say against the marriage. If any false statement of his, however base or cruel, could have invalidated the ceremonial, he would have spared no pains to devise such a falsehood. If he had been a citizen of the Southern States, he might have suborned witnesses to prove that there was black blood in the veins of Valentine Hawkehurst. If he had not been opposed to so strong an opponent as Dr. Jedd, he might have tried to get a commission of lunacy to declare Charlotte Halliday a madwoman, and thus invalidate her marriage. As it was, he knew that he could do nothing. He had failed. All was said in those three words.
He wasted no time at the church, but hurried on to the City, where he was just in time to catch Mr. Kaye leaving his office.
"Have you sent those papers to your solicitor?" he asked.
"No; I was just going to take them round to him. I have been thinking that it will be necessary to ascertain that there is no will of Miss Halliday's subsequent to this; and that will be rather difficult to find out. Women never know when to leave off making wills, if they once begin making them. They have a positive rage for multiplying documents, you know. If the testator in that great codicil case had been a woman, a jury would scarcely have refused to believe in the story of half a dozen different codicils hidden away in half a dozen different holes and corners. Women like that sort of thing. Of course, I quite understand that you bring me the will in all good faith; but I foresee difficulties in raising money upon such a security."
"You need give yourself no further trouble about the matter," said Mr. Sheldon coolly. "I find that I can do without the money, and I've come to reclaim the papers."
Mr. Kaye handed them to his client. He was not altogether pleased by this turn of affairs; for he had expected to profit considerably by Mr. Sheldon's necessities. That gentleman honoured him with no further explanations, but put the papers in his pocket, and wished the bill-discounter good day.
And this was the last time that Philip Sheldon was ever seen in his character of a solid and respectable citizen of London. He went from the bill-discounter's office to a pawnbroker in the City, with whom he pledged Georgy's trinkets and his own watch for the sum of a hundred and twenty pounds. From the pawnbroker's he went back to Bayswater for his portmanteau, and thence to the Euston Hotel, where he dined temperately in the coffee-room. After dinner he went out into the dull back streets that lurk behind Euston Square, and found an obscure little barber's shop, where he had his whiskers shaved off, and his hyacinthine locks cropped as close as the barber's big scissors could crop them.
The sacrifice of these hirsute adornments made an extraordinary change in this man. All the worst characteristics of his countenance came out with a new force; and the face of Mr. Sheldon, undisguised by the whiskers that had hidden the corners of his mouth, or the waving locks that had given height and breadth to his forehead, was a face that no one would be likely to trust.
From the Euston Station he departed by the night mail for Liverpool, under the cover of darkness. In that city he quietly awaited the departure of the Cunard steamer for New York, and was so fortunate as to leave England one day before that fatal date on which the first of his fictitious bills arrived at maturity.
Not with pomp or with splendour, with rejoicing or strewing of summer blossoms in the pathway of bride and bridegroom, had the marriage of Valentine and Charlotte been solemnized. Simple and secret had been the ceremonial, dark with clouds was the sky above them; and yet it is doubtful if happier bridegroom ever trod this earth than Valentine Hawkehurst as he went to his lonely lodging under the starry summer sky, after leaving his young wife to her mother's care in the new home that had been found for them.
He had reason to rejoice; for he had passed through the valley of the shadow of death. He had seen, very near, that dread presence before which the angels of faith and love can avail nothing. Fearless as Alcides had he gone down to the realms of darkness; triumphant and glad as the demigod he returned from the under-world, bearing his precious burden in his strong arms. The struggle had been dire, the agony of suspense a supreme torture; but from the awful contest the man came forth a better and a wiser man. Whatever strength of principle had been wanting to complete the work of reformation inaugurated by love, had been gained by Valentine Hawkehurst during the period of Charlotte's illness. His promised wife, his redeeming angel, she for whose affection he had first learned to render thanks to his God, had seemed to be slipping away from him. In the happiest hour of his prosperous courtship he had known himself unworthy of her, with no right, no claim, to so fair a prize, except the right of pure and unselfish love. When the hour of trial came to him he had said, "Behold the avenger!" and in that hour it seemed to him that a lurking anticipation of future woe had been ever present with him in the midst of his happiness,—it seemed so natural, so reasonable that this treasure should be taken away from him. What had he done, that he should go unpunished for all the errors and follies of his youth?
He looked back, and asked himself if he had been so vile a sinner as in these hours of self-reproach he was inclined to esteem himself? Could his life have been otherwise? Had he not been set in a groove, his young feet planted in the crooked ways, before he knew that life's journey might be travelled by a straighter road?
Alas, the answer given at the tribunal of conscience went against him! Other men had come into this world amidst surroundings as bad, nay, indeed, worse than the surroundings of his cradle. And of these men some had emerged from their native mire spotless and pure as from newly-fallen snow. The natural force of character which had saved these men had not been given to him. His feet had been set in the crooked ways, and he had travelled on, reckless, defiant, dimly conscious that the road was a bad one, and that his garments were bespattered with more mud-stains than would be agreeable to some travellers.
It was only when the all-powerful influence of love was brought to bear upon this plastic nature that Valentine Hawkehurst became fully awakened to the degradation of his position, and possessed with an earnest desire to emerge from the great dismal swamp of bad company. Then, and then only, began the transformation which was ultimately to become so complete a change. Some influence, even beyond that of happy love, was needed to give force to this man's character; and in the great terror of the last three months that influence had been found. The very foundations of Valentine Hawkehurst's life had been shaken, and, come what might, he could never be again what he had been.
He had almost lost her. All was said in that. She had been almost taken from him—she, who to this man was father, mother, wife, household, past, present, future, glory, ambition, happiness—everything except that God who ruled above and held her life and his peace in the hollow of His hand. He had been face to face with death; and never, in all the years to come—never in the brightest hour of future happiness, could he forget the peril that had come upon him, and might come again. He had learned to understand that he held her, not as a free gift, but as a loan—a treasure to be reclaimed at any moment by the God who lent her.
The darksome valley was past, and Valentine stood by his darling's side, safe upon the sunlit uplands.
The doctors had declared their patient safe. The hour of danger had been passed in safety, and the mischief worked by the poisoner's slow process had been well nigh counteracted by medical skill.
"In six weeks' time you may take your wife for her honeymoon tour, Mr. Hawkehurst, with her health and spirits thoroughly re-established," said Dr. Jedd.
"What is that you say about honeymoon tours?" cried Gustave Lenoble. "Hawkehurst and his wife will spend their honeymoon at Côtenoir; is it not, Diana?"
Diana replied that it was to be, and must be so.
It was impossible to imagine a happier party than that which met day after day in those pleasant lodgings at Kilburn, wherein Georgy and Diana and Charlotte had been established with much devotion and care on the parts of Valentine and Gustave. Mr. Hawkehurst had chosen the apartments, and M. Lenoble had spent the day before the wedding in rushing to and fro between the West End and Kilburn, carrying hot-house flowers, comestibles of all kinds from Fortnum and Mason's, bonbon boxes, perfumery, new books, new music, and superintending the delivery of luxurious easy-chairs, hired from expensive upholsterers, a grand piano, and a harmonium.
"We will have music in the evenings," he said to Diana, upon her expressing surprise on beholding these arrangements, "when we are assembled here, all. How thou dost open thine eyes on beholding these nothings! Do you think it has been no pleasure to me to testify my affection for one who has been so good to thee—thy friend, thine adopted sister? I wished that all things should look bright around her, when they brought her here, after that she had come to escape from the jaws of death. And thou, was it not that thou wert also coming to make thy home here for some days, until thy day of marriage? Thy father astonishes himself to hear of such sudden events. Thou wilt go to see him, soon, is it not?"
"Yes, dear Gustave. I will go to-morrow."
She went on the next day, and found Captain Paget much weaker than on her last visit.
It was evident that for him the end was very near. He was much changed and subdued by his long illness; but the spirit of worldliness had not been altogether exorcised even in this dismal period of self-communion.
"What does it all mean, Diana?" he asked. "I don't understand being kept in the dark like this. Here are you suddenly leaving Mr. Sheldon's house without rhyme or reason, to take up your quarters in lodgings with Mrs. Sheldon. Here is a mysterious marriage taking place at a time when I have been given to understand that one of the parties is at death's door; and here is Lenoble introduced to Valentine Hawkehurst, in express opposition to my particular request that my future son-in-law should be introduced to none of the Sheldon set."
"Valentine is not one of the Sheldon set, papa. I do not think it likely that he will ever see Philip Sheldon again."
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed Captain Paget. "There has been something serious going on, then, surely?"
After this he insisted on an explanation, and Diana told him the story of the last two or three weeks: Charlotte's increasing illness—so mysterious and incurable; the sudden return from Harold's Hill; Valentine's fears; Dr. Jedd's boldly-expressed opinion that the patient was the victim of foul play; the systematic exclusion of Philip Sheldon from the sick-room, followed immediately by symptoms of amelioration, leading to gradual recovery.
All this Captain Paget heard with an awe-stricken countenance. The distance that divides the shedder of blood from all other wrong-doers is so great, that the minor sinner feels himself a saint when he contemplates the guilt of the greater criminal.
"Great God! is this possible?" exclaimed the Captain, with a shudder."And I have taken that man's hand!"
Later in the evening, when Diana had left him, and he had been thinking seriously of his own career, and those many transactions of his troubled life which, in the slang denomination of the day, would be called "shady," he derived some scrap of comfort from one consideration.
"I never hurt a worm," he murmured to himself, complacently. "No, I can lay my hand upon my heart and say, I never hurt a worm."
The Captain did not pause to reflect that some of the merit involved in this amiable trait of character might have been referable to the fact, that he had never happened to fall upon a state of society in which a comfortable living was to be made by the hurting of worms. He thought only of the story he had heard about Philip Sheldon; and he told himself that not in the direst necessity of his life could his brain have fashioned the thought of such a deed as that, in the doing of which this man had persevered for nearly three months.
For Charlotte Hawkehurst the summer days which succeeded her marriage passed very quietly. She had not been told the real motive of that hasty and stolen marriage which had given her to the man she loved and trusted so completely. Valentine and Diana had between them contrived to mould Mrs. Sheldon to their will; and it was at her request that Charlotte had consented to so strange a step.
The fable invented to account for this desire on the part of Mrs. Sheldon was very innocent. The doctors had ordered a milder climate than England for the dear convalescent—Madeira, Algeria, Malta—or some other equally remote quarter of the globe. It was impossible that Mr. or Mrs. Sheldon could take so long a journey; Mr. Sheldon being bound hand and foot to the mill-wheel of City life, Mrs. Sheldon being the slave and helpmeet of her husband. Nor could dear Charlotte go to Malta alone, or attended only by faithful Diana Paget. In short, there was no course so obvious or so prudent as a hasty marriage, which would enable the invalid to seek a milder clime, accompanied and guarded by her natural protector—a husband.
"Consent, dearest, I entreat you," wrote Valentine, in the little note which supported Mrs. Sheldon's request, "however strange our wishes may seem to you. Believe that it is for the best, for your own sake, for the sake of all who love you, and ask no questions. Say only yes."
To the prayer in this letter, to the entreaties of her mother and Diana, Charlotte yielded. She wondered why Mr. Sheldon avoided her, and asked anxiously, on more than one occasion, why she did not see that gentleman.
"Is papa ill," she asked, "that he never comes to see how I am?"
"The doctors have forbidden many people in your room, dear."
"Yes, a few days ago, when I was so very ill; but now that I am better, papa might come. I want to thank him for all his anxious care of me, and to be sure thatheconsents to this marriage."
"My darling, be assured the marriage is for the best," pleaded Diana.
And the marriage took place.
Charlotte's innocent soul was thus spared the pain of a revelation which must have cast a dark shadow on the bright beginning of her wedded life. Georgy pledged herself to keep the fatal secret from her daughter; and Diana Paget rewarded her discretion by the most patient attention to her piteous and prosy lamentations upon the iniquity of mankind in general, and Philip Sheldon in particular.
Of that hideous secret of the past, lately revealed by Mr. Burkham, Mrs. Sheldon had been told nothing. No good end could have been served by such a revelation. The criminal law has its statute of limitations—unwritten, but not the less existent. A crime which would have been difficult of proof at the time of its commission must after the lapse of twelve years have travelled beyond the pale of justice. For three people to come forward and declare that at the time of Mr. Halliday's death they had suspected Mr. Sheldon of poisoning him, would be to prove nothing to the minds of a British jury, except that the three people in question were libellous and ill-disposed persons. The greater the issue, the wider the chances of escape given to the accused; and a petty offender will be condemned for picking a pocket upon much lighter grounds than will be considered sufficient to prove a man guilty of blowing up the Houses of Parliament.
The manner in which Mr. Sheldon would act in the future was a matter of considerable fear to his wife. She had a hazy idea that he would come to the pleasant Kilburn lodgings to claim her, and insist upon her sharing his dreary future.
"If I could only have a divorce," she said piteously, when she discussed the subject with her son-in-law. "There ought to be divorces for such dreadful things; but I never heard of one before Sir Creswick, or the new judge, whose name I can't remember. O Valentine, I cannot live with him; I cannot sit down to dinner day after day with such a man as that. And to think that I should have known him when I was the merest girl, and have danced my very first polka with him when it first came in, and people wore polka boots and polka jackets, and wrote their notes of invitation upon polka paper, and sang polka songs, and worked polking peasants in Berlin wool, and went on altogether in the most absurd manner. And O Valentine, whom can one trust, if not the man one has known all one's life!"
Mr. Hawkehurst pledged himself to protect his mother-in-law from any attempt at persecution upon the part of her husband. He did not know what difficulties he might have to encounter in the performance of this pledge; for, in his ignorance of the stockbroker's desperate circumstances, he imagined that Philip Sheldon would make some attempt to right himself in the eyes of the world, by compelling his wife to reassume her position in his house.
He went to George Sheldon's office within a few days after his marriage to take counsel from that astute adviser. He found the lawyer hard at work, and in very good spirits. It was by his advice the marriage had been hurried on; Charlotte's stealthy removal from the house while Philip Sheldon slumbered had been planned by him; and he was triumphant in the thought that the plot had succeeded so well, and that Philip, the coolest and deepest of schemers, had been so completely baffled.
"That Ann Woolper is a treasure," he said; "I didn't think it was in her to do what she has done. Nothing could be neater than the way she kept Phil at bay; and nothing could be better than her tact and cleverness in getting Charlotte and her mother quietly off the other morning while my precious brother was in the land of nod."
"Yes, she has been invaluable to us."
"And that girl Paget, too; she has turned out a regular trump. I used to think her a very stiff, consequential piece of goods when I saw her at the Lawn; but, egad, she has shown herself the genuine metal all through this business. Now that's a young woman I wouldn't mind making Mrs. George Sheldon any day in the week."
"You do her too much honour," said Valentine, with an internal shiver. "Unhappily, a prior engagement will prevent Miss Paget's availing herself of so excellent an opportunity."
"It mayn't be such a very bad chance as you seem to think it, my friend," George replied, with some indignation. "Whenever the Reverend John Haygarth's estate drops in, I stand to win fifty thousand pounds. And that's not so bad for a start in life. I suppose you haven't forgotten that your wife is heir-at-law to a hundred thousand pounds?"
"No, I have not forgotten her position in relation to the Haygarth estate."
"Humph! I should rather think not. People don't generally forget that kind of thing. But you are uncommonly cool about the business."
"Yes, I have passed through a fiery furnace in which all the bullion in the Bank of England will not serve a man. That kind of ordeal upsets one's old notions as to the value of money. And, again, I have never been able to contemplate Charlotte's inheritance of that fortune as anything but a remote contingency; the business is so slow."
"Yes, but it has been going on. Affidavits have been made; the whole affair is in progress."
"I am glad to hear it. Don't think that I pretend not to value the prospect of wealth; I have only learnt to know that money is not the be-all and end-all of life. I could be very happy with my dear wife if there were no prospect of this Haygarthian inheritance; but if it does come to us, we shall, no doubt, be all the happier. The millionaire sees the world from a very pleasant point of view. I should like my dear girl to be the mistress of as fair a home as money can buy for her."
"Yes, and you'd like to have your name stand high in the statistics of Government stockholders. Don't be sentimental, Hawkehurst; that kind of thing won't wash. Thank God, we managed to save poor Tom's daughter from the fangs of my brother Phil. But you can't suppose that I am going to shut my eyes to the fact that this affair has been a very good thing for you, and that you owe your chances of a great fortune entirely to me? You don't pretend to forgetthat, I suppose?" said George Sheldon, with some acrimony.
"Why should I pretend to forget that, or any circumstance of our business relations? I am perfectly aware that you started the hunt of the Haygarths, and that to your investigations is to be traced the discovery that proves my wife a claimant to the estate now held by the Crown."
"Very good; that's outspoken and honest, at any rate. And now, how about our agreement? It's only a parole agreement, but an honest man's word is as good as his bond."
"Our agreement!" repeated Valentine, with a puzzled expression of countenance. "Upon my word, I forget."
"Ah, I thought it would come to that; I thought you would manage to forget the terms agreed upon by you and me in the event of your marriage with Charlotte Halliday. My memory is not so short as yours; and I can swear to a conversation between you and me in this room, in which you consented to my taking half the Haygarthian estate as the price of my discovery and the fair reward of my labours."
"Yes," said Valentine, "I remember that conversation; and I remember saying that the demand was a stiff one, but that I, as Charlotte's future husband, would not oppose such a demand."
"You remember that?"
"I do; and if my wife is willing to consent to your terms, I will hold to my promise."
"Your wife's consent is not wanted. She married you without a settlement, and her rights are merged in yours. To all intents and purposes,youare heir-at-law to John Haygarth's estate."
Valentine laughed aloud; the whole affair seemed a tremendous joke. He, the homeless, penniless, friendless reprobate of but one year ago—he, the son and heir of a man who had been always on the verge of social shipwreck for want of five pounds—he, of all other men upon this earth, claimant against the Crown for an estate worth one hundred thousand pounds!
"The whole affair seems ridiculously improbable," he said.
"My brother wouldn't have done what he did if the whole thing had seemed improbable to him. However, we needn't estimate the chances for or against; all I want is a legal agreement between you and me, securing my share of the plunder."
"I am ready to execute any reasonable agreement; but I am bound to protect my wife's interests, and I must have a solicitor to act for me in this affair. Greek must meet Greek, you know."
"Very good. I could have conducted the business myself without the interference of strangers; but if you are going in for extreme caution, you'd better leave your wife's affairs in the hands of Messrs. Greenwood and Greenwood, who have acted for her hitherto, and have all papers relating to the case in their possession."
"Greenwood and Greenwood? My dear girl told me she had signed some document, and had seen some lawyers; but she did not tell me the nature of the document, or the name of the lawyers. I have forborne to speak to her on business matters. The treatment that she has undergone has left her very nervous, and we try to keep all unpleasant subjects out of her mind."
"Yes, that's all very well; but business is business, you know. You'd better see Messrs. Greenwood and Greenwood at once. Tell them of your marriage. You'll have to keep Phil's conduct dark, of course; that is understood between us. You must say the marriage was a love-match against my brother's wish, romantic, sentimental, and so on. They'll raise no objections when they find you are willing to leave the case in their hands."
"You have heard nothing of your brother?"
"Well, no—nothing, or next to nothing. I called at his office yesterday. He has not been there since the beginning of Charlotte's illness, and there has been no letter or message for Orcott since your wedding-day. Things look rather piscatorial, altogether. Orcott hints that Phil's affairs are in queer street; but he's a shallow-headed fool, and knows very little. It seems, by his account, that Phil was a Bull, and that the fall in every species of stock has been ruin to him. You see, when a man once goes in for the Bull business, he never by any chance turns Bear—andvice versa. There's a kind of infatuation in the thing, and a man sticks to his line until he's cleaned out—at least, that's what stockbrokers have told me—and I believe it's pretty near the truth."
This was all that Valentine could ascertain about Mr. Sheldon at present. Every knock fluttered Georgy; every accidental visitor at the Kilburn villa seemed like the swooping of eagle on dovecote.
"I cannot get over the feeling that he will come and take me away with him," she said. "If Sir Wilde Creswick would only do something, so that my second husband mayn't be able to insist upon my living in that dreadful, dreadful house, where I suffered such nights and days of agony, that I am convinced the sight of chintz curtains lined with pink will make me wretched as long as I live!"
"My dear Mrs. Sheldon, he shall not come," said Valentine.
"If I could only go ever so far away from him, and feel that there was the sea, or something of that kind, between us!"
"We will take you away—across the British Channel, or further still, if you like. Diana and M. Lenoble are to be married soon; and directly Lotta is strong enough for the journey we are to go over to Normandy, to their chateau."
"Chateau, indeed!" Mrs. Sheldon exclaimed peevishly. "The idea of Diana Paget, without a sixpence, and with a regular scamp of a father, marrying a man with a chateau, while my poor Charlotte—! I don't wish to wound your feelings, Mr. Hawkehurst, but it really does seem hard."
"It is hard that Lotta should not have married a prince—all the grandeurs of a prince in a fairy tale would only be her due; but it happens fortunately, you see, dear Mrs. Sheldon, that our sweet girl has simple tastes, and does not languish for jewels or palaces. If she should ever become rich—"
"Ah," sighed, Georgy despondently, "I don't expect that. I can't understand anything about this idea of a fine fortune that Mr. Sheldon had got into his head. I know that my husband's mother was a Miss Meynell, the daughter of a carpet-warehouseman in the city, and I can't see how any grand fortune is to come to Charlotte through her. And as for the Hallidays—Hyley and Newhall farms were all the property they ever owned within the memory of man."
"The fortune for which Charlotte is a claimant comes from the maternal ancestor of Christian Meynell. I do not count upon her possession of it as a certain good in the future. If it comes we will be thankful."
"Is it a very large sum of money?"
"Well, yes; I believe it is a considerable sum."
"Twenty thousand pounds, perhaps?"
"I have been told that it is as much."
He did not want Georgy's weak mind to become possessed of the idea of shadowy wealth. He remembered what Philip Sheldon had said to him on the Christmas night in which they had paced the little Bayswater garden together, and he felt that there was a substratum of common sense in that scoundrel's artful warning.
Valentine Hawkehurst called upon Mr. Greenwood, of the firm of Greenwood and Greenwood, within a week of his marriage, and exhibited the certificate to that gentleman. Mr. Greenwood received the information with much solemnity, and even severity, of manner.
"Are you aware that this is a very serious step which you have taken, Mr. Hawkehurst?" he demanded, sternly. "You entrap—that is to say, you persuade a lady into a hasty marriage—without consultation with her legal advisers, without settlements of any kind whatever—while at the same time you are aware that the lady in question is heir-at-law to a very large fortune, proceedings for the recovery of which are now pending. Pardon me if I observe that there is a want of delicacy—of—a—hem—right-mindedness in the transaction."
"The imputation contained in your remarks is not a pleasant one, Mr. Greenwood," Valentine remarked quietly; "but I am quite willing to pardon any injustice which you may inflict upon me by your desire to protect the interests of your client. I think you will speedily discover that those interests are in no way endangered by the lady's marriage with me. There are social complications which are not to be settled by either law or equity. Miss Halliday's surroundings of the last few months were of a very painful nature; so painful, that the legal protection of marriage became the only means of saving her from imminent peril. I cannot enter more fully into those painful circumstances. I can only assure you that I married your client with the consent and approval of her only near relation, and uninfluenced in the smallest degree by mercenary considerations. Whatever post-nuptial settlement you please to make for my wife's protection I shall promptly execute."
"You express yourself in a very honourable and highly creditable manner, Mr. Hawkehurst," exclaimed the lawyer, with sudden cordiality; "and I beg distinctly to withdraw any offensive observations I may have made just now. Your own affairs are, I conclude, in a sufficiently solvent state?"
"I do not owe a sixpence."
"Good; and Mr. Sheldon, the lady's stepfather and my client—had you his approval for this hasty marriage?"
"The marriage took place without Mr. Sheldon's knowledge or consent."
"May I ask your reason for this secrecy?"
"No, Mr. Greenwood; it is just that one reason that I cannot tell you.Accept my assurance that it was an all-powerful reason."
"I am compelled to do so, if you decline to confide in my discretion; but as Mr. Sheldon is my client, I am bound to think of his interests as well as those of Miss Halliday—er—Mrs. Hawkehurst. I am somewhat surprised that he has not called upon me since the marriage. He has been made aware of that circumstance, I suppose?"
"Yes; I wrote to him immediately after the ceremony, enclosing him a copy of the certificate."
"The marriage will make a considerable difference to him."
"In what manner?"
"Well, in the event of his stepdaughter's death. If she had died unmarried and intestate, this fortune would have gone to her mother; besides which, there was the insurance on Miss Halliday's life."
"An insurance!"
"Yes. Were you not apprised of that fact? Mr. Sheldon, with very natural precaution, insured his stepdaughter's life for a considerable sum—in point of fact, as I believe, five thousand pounds; so that, in case of her death prior to the recovery of the Haygarth estate, her mother might receive some solatium."
"He had insured her life!" said Valentine, under his breath.
This, then, was the key to the mystery. The Haygarthian inheritance was but a remote contingency, a shadowy prize, which could scarcely have tempted the secret assassin; but the insurance had offered the prospect of immediate gain. The one link wanting to complete the chain of evidence against Philip Sheldon was found. There was no longer a question as to his motive.
"This man knows of one insurance on her life," Valentine thought to himself; "there may have been more than one."
After a brief silence, in which Mr. Hawkehurst had been lost in thought, the lawyer proceeded to discuss the terms of the post-nuptial settlement necessary for the protection of his client's interests. In the course of this discussion Valentine explained his position in relation to George Sheldon, and stated the demands of that sharp practitioner.
Mr. Greenwood was utterly aghast upon hearing Mr. Hawkehurst's views on this subject.
"You mean to tell me that this man claims a clear half of the Haygarth estate—fifty thousand pounds—in consideration of his paltry discoveries!"
"Such is the demand he has made, and which I have pledged myself not to oppose. He certainly does open his mouth very wide; but we are bound to consider that but for these discoveries of his, my wife and my wife's relatives would in all probability have gone down to their graves in ignorance of their claim to this estate."
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Hawkehurst. If Mr. George Sheldon had not made the discovery, some one else would have made it sooner or later, depend upon it. There would have been a little loss of time, that is all. There are plenty of men of George Sheldon's class always on the look-out for such chances as this—and for very small chances in comparison to this. Why, I know a fellow, a Frenchman, called Fleurus, who will take as much trouble about a few hundred pounds' worth of unclaimed stock as this man, George Sheldon, has taken about the Haygarth succession. And he has really the impudence to claim fifty thousand pounds from you?"
"A claim which I have pledged myself not to oppose."
"But which you have not pledged yourself to support. My dear Mr. Hawkehurst, this is a business which you must allow me to settle for you, as your wife's legal adviser. We will consider you quite out of the question, if you please; you will thus come out of your relations to Mr. George Sheldon with perfectly clean hands. You will not oppose his claim; but I shall oppose him in my character of legal adviser to your wife. Why, are you aware that this man executed an agreement with his brother, consenting to receive a fifth share of the estate, and costs out of pocket, in complete acquittance of all claims? I have an abstract of the agreement, amongst Miss Halliday's—Mrs. Hawkehurst's papers."
After some further discussion, Valentine agreed to leave the whole matter in Mr. Greenwood's hands. Greek must meet Greek. Gray's Inn and the Fields must settle this business between themselves.
"I am only prince consort," he said, with a smile. "I pretend to no actual interest in my wife's estate. I doubt, indeed, whether I should not have felt more complete happiness in our marriage if she had not been heiress to so large a fortune."
At this Mr. Greenwood laughed outright.
"Come, come, Mr. Hawkehurst," he exclaimed, "that really won't do. I am an old stager, you know—a man of the world;—and you mustn't ask me to believe that the idea of your wife's expectations can afford you anything but unqualified satisfaction."
"You cannot believe? No, perhaps not," Valentine answered, thoughtfully. "But you do not know how nearly these expectations have lost me my wife. And even now, when she is mine by virtue of a bond that only death can loosen, it seems to me as if her wealth would make a kind of division between us. There are people who will always consider me a lucky adventurer, and look at my marriage as the result of clever scheming. I cannot advertise to the world the fact that I loved Charlotte Halliday from the first hour in which I saw her, and asked her to be my wife three days before I discovered her claim to John Haygarth's estate. A man can't go through the world with his justification pinned upon his breast. I think it will be my fate to be misjudged all my life. A twelvemonth ago I cared very little about the opinions of my fellow-men; but I want to be worthy of my wife in the esteem of mankind, as well as in the depths of my own moral consciousness."
"Go and finish your honeymoon," said the lawyer, digging his client in the ribs with elephantine playfulness; "the moon must be in her first quarter, I should think. Go along with you, and leave me to tackle Mr. George Sheldon."
"I say, Lenoble," Captain Paget began abruptly one afternoon when his daughter and his future son-in-law were in attendance upon his sofa, "when are you and Diana to be married? There is nothing to hinder your marriage now, you know."
Diana looked at the speaker with a grave countenance.
"Dear papa, there can be no marriage while you are so ill," she said gently.
"And afterwards, when I'm gone, you won't like to marry within six months of your father's funeral; and you will be left alone in the world. You can't hang on to Hawkehurst and his wife. The best thing you can do, Lenoble, is to marry her out of hand, and let me see her by my bedside as Madame Lenoble of Côtenoir. It will be some consolation for me to see that day. I thought to have shared your home, with a run to Paris occasionally just to freshen myself up a little; but that's all over now. It does seem rather hard to me sometimes; and I think of Moses, and his forty years in the Desert with those ill-conditioned Israelites, who were always getting into some scrape or other—setting up golden calves, and that kind of thing—if he turned his back on them for twenty-four hours. A pack of ungrateful beggars too, always ready for mutiny—regular radicals, begad! And he went through it all: the sand, and thetoujoursquails, and the ingratitude; and after forty years of it, when he saw the Promised Land stretched before him green and fertile on the other side of the river—he died! I've been through my desert, the dreary wanderings over the barren sand, and the ingratitude of men I've served. Yes, I've gone through it all; and just as I catch a glimpse of Canaan, the curtain drops."
On this they comforted him; and sustained him with the promise of a brighter Canaan than Côtenoir.
"Yes," he said in a dreamy voice, "I read about it very often. A city with foundations of jasper and chalcedony, emerald and sardonyx; gates of pearl, pavements of gold. That's what St. John the Evangelist saw in his vision; and we've only his word for it. But there's something that I can believe and can understand: 'In my Father's house there are many mansions.' There's more hope for a sinful man of the world in that promise than in all St. John's dreams about gates of pearl and foundations of emerald."
The Captain was failing fast. He had exchanged his easy-chair for a sofa now; and the time seemed near at hand when he must exchange the sofa for his bed. After that there would remain but one last change, to the contemplation whereof the sick man was becoming daily more reconciled.
He had read his Gospel more diligently of late, and had taken comfort from those sublime pages. Do they not contain consolation, hope, promise for all—for the weary man of the world as well as for the saint? There is to be found the only creed that can adapt itself to every condition of life, and has a margin wide enough for every weakness of erring humanity. Buddhism may contain a scheme of morality almost as perfect; Mahomet may have expounded hopes that seem well-nigh as divine; but in the Gospel is the only system that will adapt itself at once to the culture of the spiritual man, and the active life of the practical worker in this lower world.
Gustave Lenoble was only too glad to claim his promised wife a little sooner than he had hoped to claim her. "Thou hast put me off long enough, cruel," he said; "and now it is thy father's wish that our marriage should be soon. It shall be this week; I will take no longer thine excuses. We shall be the sooner ready to receive thy friends, thy Charlotte and her Hawkehurst."
Diana smiled.
"Dear Gustave, you are always kind," she said.
It was very sweet to her to think that her new home would afford a pleasant haven for that dear friend who had sheltered her. And with Charlotte, the dear adopted sister, would come the man she had once loved, to share whose cares had once been the brightest dream.
She wondered at her own inconstancy on perceiving how completely the dream had flown. Before the stern realities of life—before sickness and sorrow and the dread shadow of death—that schoolgirl's vision had utterly melted away. It is just possible that Gustave's manly outspoken love may have helped to blot from the tablet of her mind the fantastic picture of the life that might have been. She scarcely knew whether this was so; but she did know that a new and happier existence began for her from the hour in which she gave her heart in all truth and loyalty to Gustave Lenoble.