"Listened to the roarOf the breakers on the bar outside that never reach the shore,"
"Listened to the roarOf the breakers on the bar outside that never reach the shore,"
but where in the hot dull autumn, when everybody was out of town, she could remain perfectly tranquil and undisturbed, with Mrs. Lascelles to humour her like a child, and Goldthred always ready to anticipate her lightest wish.
It did not take many days, before the firmness had returned to her step, the light to her eyes, and she was once more the "belle Helen," as Mrs. Lascelles loved to call her, with a vague notion the title was extremely classical and correct.
But it was quite contrary to the principles of the elder lady that any one who possessed health and beauty should be "mewed up," as she was pleased to express herself, while the weather tempted everybody out of doors. Sitting at luncheon, with Miss Hallaton on one side, and the faithful Goldthred on the other, she exclaimed, with the glee of an idle child who has found a new plaything, looking very bright and handsome the while:
"Happy thought! Let us drive down to-morrow to Oatlands! Weep at the dogs' graves, peep at the grotto, sit by the river, dine, and come back by moonlight. Who saysdone? It's almost the next thing to a water-party."
"Done!" exclaimed both her companions at the same moment, one with careless acquiescence, the other with intense admiration.
"Carried!" said the hostess, clapping her hands. "We three in the open carriage—musthave a fourth. Who is it to be?"
Butonewas out of town, another couldn't get away early enough in the afternoon;thisperson wouldn't come without the certainty of meetingthat. Of two charming sisters both must be asked or neither. In short, the fourth seat in the carriage was wanted for half-a-dozen people, and the prospective little dinner out of town soon assumed the dimensions of a pic-nic.
Thus it fell out that Mrs. Lascelles had to write several notes after luncheon, and "dear Helen" sat down to help her, while Goldthred, lounging about and failing sadly in his efforts to make the bullfinch pipe, volunteered to post these missives on his way to the club when they were finished.
Pocketing them all in a lump, and expressing his intention of returning at tea-time, Mr. Goldthred took his departure to walk down the street, with the jaunty step and lightsome air of a happy lover.
At the nearest pillar-post, he stopped to fulfil his promise, and being (though in love) a man of business, looked carefully at their addresses before dropping the letters one by one into the slide.
The very top-most was Helen's production, and he started violently, the moment its superscription caught his eye. Hastily examining two more in the same handwriting, he replaced the whole in his pocket, hailed a Hansom and drove straight home, where he ran to his writing-table, unlocked a drawer and pulled out a certain little note that he had received one night at his club awhile ago, that had puzzled him exceedingly at the time, and that was, perhaps, the only secret he kept from Mrs. Lascelles, because he had found himself unable to explain it till to-day.
Yes, there could be no doubt, it was the same handwriting, he felt convinced, fully as ever was Malvolio. The unknown correspondent who wrote—"If you are really in earnest, come to-morrow; there is somebody to be consulted besides me," was Miss Hallaton! "There's something very queer about this," pondered Goldthred. "The girl's met with some foul play somewhere or another. It's all right now. I'll have it out with her to-night before I sleep—then I can tell my beautiful queen, and she will decide what ought to be done."
And Mr. Goldthred in his pre-occupation, forgetting to post the letters he had examined so carefully, brought them all back to No. 40 in his pocket, so that the expedition to Oatlands fell through after all.
Mrs. Lascelles was a lady who could ill-keep a secret. Such disclosures as those made in the boudoir after tea, when Helen had gone up-stairs to rest, roused alike her indignation and her sympathy; she would have cried for justice from the house-tops, rather than suffer the fraud to pass unexposed. Even Goldthred did not escape rebuke for the very negative part he had taken in the transaction.
"Why didn't you bring it here that instant?" she asked, in her pretty, imperious way, while she filled her admirer's tea-cup, and offered him the easiest chair in the room. "You shouldn't have kept such a thing frommefor half-a-second. It's not like you to be so wicked, and I'm determined to scold you well!"
"But it was one o'clock in the morning," urged Goldthred, with a comical look of deprecation. "And you must remember I thought you didn't care a bit for me then. Of course it would be differentnow."
"That's nonsense," she exclaimed. "You know I always liked you; and as for your cool suggestion of coming here at one in the morningnow, I beg you won't attempt anything of the kind. But yououghtto have told me indeed, because, after all, the note might have been from somebody who had fallen in love with you!"
"I didn't suppose such a thing possible," he answered simply, "and I'm sure I didn't wish it. I used to think happiness was never intended for me. The one I liked seemed so much too good. I'm often afraid I shall wake and find it all a dream."
"Not half good enough," she murmured, making a great clatter among the cups and saucers. "I wish I was ten times better, and I mean to be. But never mind about that. Don't you see exactly what has happened?"
"No, I don't," he answered, wondering fondly whether in Europe could be found such a pair of hands and arms as were hovering about the tea-tray under his nose. "I dare say I'm very stupid, but hang me if I can see daylight anywhere!"
"Not if you look for it in my bracelet," she said, laughing. "But it's obvious Helen has written you a note intended for somebody else. Unless"—here she threatened him with a pretty finger he longed to kiss—"unless you have reason to believe she valued the admiration you could not disguise in all your looks and actions."
"Don't say such things!" he exclaimed, in the utmost alarm. "Mrs. Lascelles, do you think I'm—I'mthatsort of fellow? Surelyyouknow me better. Surely you are only in joke!"
"You're deep, sir" she continued, still laughing at an earnestness that touched while it amused her. "Deep and sly! However, I'll believe you this time, and if you're honestly stupid I'll condescend to explain. Can you take in, that if the note wasn't written toyouit must have been intended for somebody else? I can guess who that somebody is. I'll ask Helen point-blank. She's as proud as Lucifer, but I think she has confidence in me."
Shedidask Helen point-blank, and that young lady, though as proud as Lucifer, condescended to own the truth, but accompanied her confession with a solemn declaration that everything was at an end between herself and Frank Vanguard, so that the great desire of her heart now was never to set eyes on him again. Mrs. Lascelles interpreting these sentiments in her own way, sat down forthwith, and penned the following little note, for further mystification of this bewildered young officer.
"Dear Captain Vanguard,—I have discovered something you ought to know. Such anembrouillementwas never heard of but in an improbable farce, or still more improbable novel. Come to luncheon to-morrow, and we will lay our heads together in hopes of unravelling the skein. Miss Hallaton is staying with me. You will like to meet her I am sure, only you and I must have our conferencefirst."Yours very sincerely,"Rose Lascelles."
"Dear Captain Vanguard,—I have discovered something you ought to know. Such anembrouillementwas never heard of but in an improbable farce, or still more improbable novel. Come to luncheon to-morrow, and we will lay our heads together in hopes of unravelling the skein. Miss Hallaton is staying with me. You will like to meet her I am sure, only you and I must have our conferencefirst.
"Yours very sincerely,
"Rose Lascelles."
Frank's heart leaped under his cuirass while he read this mysterious epistle, on his return from a sweltering inspection in the Long Walk. He had been trying to persuade himself he did not care for Helen, and fancied he succeeded. It was humiliating to feel that the bare mention of her name could thus affect him, yet was there a keen, strange pleasure in the sensation nevertheless.
On the barrack-room table of this fortunate dragoon there lay however another little missive, bearing to that of Mrs. Lascelles the sort of likeness a pen-wiper has to a butterfly. Its envelope was squarer and larger, its monogram gaudier and more intricate, its superscription fainter, paler, more aslant, more illegible. It exhaled a strong odour of musk, and was written on paper that glistened like satin.
"Dear Frank," it ran, "I shall be in the park to-morrow, at twelve. Look for the pony-carriage. Iwantyou—so no nonsense. Don't fail—there's a good fellow.—Yours truly,—Kate Cremorne. P.S. If I'm not under the clock, wait there till I come."
"Dear Frank," it ran, "I shall be in the park to-morrow, at twelve. Look for the pony-carriage. Iwantyou—so no nonsense. Don't fail—there's a good fellow.—Yours truly,—Kate Cremorne. P.S. If I'm not under the clock, wait there till I come."
"What canshebe up to now?" thought Frank, carefully twisting this communication into a spill with which to light his cigar. "Got into a mess of some sort, no doubt, and expects me to pull her through, like the rest of them. How odd it is, I'm always blundering into entanglements with women I don't care two straws about, and the one I reallycouldlove, the one who would make me a good man, I do believe, and certainly a happy one, seems to be drifting every day farther and farther out of my reach. I shall see her to-morrow, and what then? I suppose our greeting will be confined to a distant bow, and some conventional sentence more painful than a cut direct. Still, I shall see her. That will be something. How strange it seems to be so easily satisfied now, when I think of all I hoped and expected so short a time ago. Well, beggars mustn't be choosers. I suppose I may as well meet Kate Cremorne first, and do her a turn if I can. She's a good girl, Kate, after all. Not half a bad-looking one neither, and as honest as the day."
So twelve o'clock found Frank very nicely dressed, and with a wonderfully prosperous air, considering his many troubles, picking his way daintily across the deserted Ride, to where a solitary pony-carriage, with a solitary pony drawing, and a solitary lady driving it, stood like a pretty toy, drawn up by the footway under the clock.
Miss Cremorne received him with coldness, even displeasure. She entertained a high opinion of her own acuteness, and thought she had hit upon a discovery by no means to his credit. In her many visits to Miss Ross—visits never made empty-handed, and to which, in all probability, the latter owed her restoration to health—she gathered from Jin that a friendship had lately existed between herself and the Captain Vanguard of whom they both loved to talk. Now, Belgravia and Brompton look at most matters in life, and particularly those connected with the affections, from different points of view. Kate, though a hybrid belonging to both districts, partook largely of the sentiments and feelings affected by the latter. She imagined a touching little romance, of which Jin's dark, curly-headed boy was the sequel, and being herselfsans peur, determined to show Frank she did not hold himsans reproche.
"Jump in," said she, with extreme abruptness, as he approached the carriage. "I've got a crow to pick with you, and I mean to have it out. You're a nice young man, now! Don't you think you are?"
"Certainly," answered Frank, with imperturbablebonhomie. "I used to hope you thought so too!"
"I'll tell you what I used to think," said Kate, lashing the pony with considerable vehemence. "I used to think you were a good fellow at heart, though the nonsense had never been taken out of you; that you were only vain and affected on the surface, like lots of you guardsmen, but that there was amaninside the dandy, if one could only get at him. Oh, Captain Vanguard, I'm disappointed in you! If I cared two straws for a fellow, and he did as you've done, I'd never speak to him again! There!"
The whip was again dropped on the pony, and they shaved the wheels of an omnibus to an inch.
"Don't take it so to heart, Kate!" laughed Frank. "If Ihavedeserted you, I'll come back again. You know, Miss Cremorne, that you are the only woman I ever loved, and all that. Fate has been obdurate; but rather would I be torn with wild——"
"Willyou be serious?" demanded the fair charioteer, knitting her brows, and looking intensely austere. "Do you know where I am driving you now?"
He was incorrigible.
"To Gretna, I trust, or the Register Office. That's what I should like withyou. Let's have it out, Kate. Jump over a broomstick, and the thing's done!"
"I'll tell you where you're going," she said gravely: "I am taking you to see Miss Ross!"
His whole countenance changed; and with all his self-command, he could not disguise how deeply he was agitated.
"Miss Ross!" he stammered. "You have heard from her! You know where she is!"
"I haveseenher every day for the last fortnight," was the answer. "Seen her battle and bear up against sorrow, sickness, privation—actual want! Ay, many a day, when you've been sitting down to a dinner of four courses and dessert, that woman and her boy—her boy, Captain Vanguard—have not had enough to eat!"
"Great heavens, Kate!" he exclaimed. "This is too shocking! Why did I not know of it before?"
"Why, indeed!" repeated Kate. "You may well ask yourself the question. Whose duty was it but yours to be answerable for her, poor dear, to find her a home, to provide for her and the child? I don't want to have many words about it. I'm not one of that sort; but I tell you she would have starved—yes—starved, if I hadn't happened to run against her by good luck, just in the nick of time."
"God bless you, Kate!"
His eyes were full of tears, and she looked at him a little less hardly than before, but answered in scornful accents:
"Ought such a job as that to have been left tome?"
"Miss Cremorne! Kate!" he urged; "you think worse of me than I deserve! There is nothing I wouldn't have done, no sacrifice I wouldn't have made, to insure Miss Ross's comfort! It is not my fault, indeed! I give you my word of honour, I have left no stone unturned to discover her place of refuge from the moment she disappeared, and never obtained the slightest trace of her till to-day."
"Gammon!" replied Kate, pulling the pony short up by the kerbstone. "There's the house. It's not much to look at, but it's better inside than out, since she's found a chance friend, poor thing! Run up-stairs and see her. Say I meant to have taken her out for a drive, but I'll come again in the afternoon. I never did—I never will—believe you're a bad-hearted fellow, Frank; but you've done no end of mischief here. Go and undo it now."
So Kate drove off at high pressure, leaving Frank on the door-step, confronting a maid-of-all-work, who, seeming to expect him, yet glanced from time to time with considerable interest and approval at his general appearance and outline.
He was shown into a clean, neatly furnished apartment, from which he could distinctly hear his announcement as "The gentleman, if you please, ma'am," and the rustle of a dress that followed this information. Then the door opened, and Miss Ross stopped short on the threshold, exclaiming only—
"Frank!"
The tone denoted nothing but extreme and overwhelming astonishment.
Looking in her face, he could not but admit she was sadly altered. A few short weeks had changed the brilliant, piquante beauty to a faded invalid, with wan, wasted features, lit up only by the wonderful black eyes.
His first thought was the humiliating question—"Can this be the woman I fancied I loved so dearly?" His second brought a manly and natural resolution to stand by her all the more firmly for her distress.
"Jin," he exclaimed, "why did you leave me like that? What has been the matter? and why didn't you trust entirely tome?"
He would have taken her in his arms, but she waved him off, and the delight that had flashed across her face when she confronted him gave way to a cold, unnatural reserve.
"Did you get my letter?" she asked. "And why are you here?"
He explained how and why he had come, touching on the disappointment he experienced in the contents of her communication, trying to put into his tones that warmth of affection which he felt was completely extinguished in his heart.
"I did not mean to see you again, Captain Vanguard," she said, in a measured voice; "I did notwishto see you again. The person I expected was your friend, Mr. Picard. That man stands between us, and always must. I will have no more concealments now—no more foul play—no more crime. I have been punished enough; I pray heaven I may not be punished yet more! I deceived you, Captain Vanguard, because I—well—I believe Ididcare for you, as much as it is in my wicked, heartless nature to care for anybody; but I meant you to marry me. And all the time Picard was my husband!"
"Your husband!" He had no power to utter another word.
"It takes your breath away," she exclaimed, with a touch of her old malice. "You are so innocent! so inexperienced! Frank, I believe youdidmean honestly by me. I believe you thought you liked me; and I certainly—well—I likedyou. Horribly—shamefully! To win you, I was guilty of a fraud, a degradation,une bassesse, entendez vous? une lâcheté. I took the letter of a girl who loved you, and I sent it off to another man—a good creature,mais tant soit peu ganache, who didn't know what to make of it. Never mind. I detached you from her, and caught you for myself. But I would not make you a slave to my husband; I know him too well. None of us come out of thisimbrogliovery creditably, and, believe me, your part is not of the highest calibre; but I have injured you, and now, because my spirit is broke, I try to make reparation. Go to your Miss Hallaton; explain all to her; marry her, if you will! Oh! Frank, be happy with her, I entreat of you; and never come to see me any more!"
She looked in his face for about half a second, made a plunge at his hand, caught it eagerly to her heart, her eyes, her lips, and was in the next room, of which he heard the door locked and bolted, before he had realised the fact that she was gone.
He waited, he called, he went and tapped at that securely fortified retreat, he even rang for the servant, and begged her to ask the lady whether there were no more commands for him before he left; but without avail.
"Why the devil Kate brought me here," said Frank to himself, standing once more in the street, looking helplessly about for a Hansom cab, "is more than I can make out! One thing's clear—I'm not bound in any way to Miss Ross. Hang it! she'snotMiss Ross! What a fool I've been! I don't deserve to get out of the mess so well. Helen, my darling! I ought to have known, if they hadn't gotatyou, you'd have been as true as steel! By Jove, though, I'm bound in honour to book up to Kate! It must have cost her a goodish stake, and I don't suppose Picard will."
But when this proposal was submitted to Miss Cremorne, she repudiated it with a contempt savouring of Belgravia, and an energy of expression not unworthy of Brompton.
Miss Ross, as we may still continue to call her, had indeed expected a visit from a gentleman, and warned the maid-of-all-work she would be at home; but it was with a heavy heart, nevertheless, she heard the street-door close on Frank's retreating steps, while, smoothing her hair and drying her eyes, she prepared to meet her husband. Picard, at his wits' end for money, hunted from place to place by writ and summons, with debts unpaid and bills coming due, could yet find time to answer in person a written request for an interview, made by the woman whose evil genius he seemed to have been through life. She asked to see him once more, for reasons to be explained in person, and was actually waiting his arrival, when Kate drove to the door with Frank Vanguard. The latter had hardly been gone five minutes, ere Picard made his appearance, and this ill-assorted couple met once more, with less surprise indeed, but scarcely more cordiality than they had shown during their strange ill-omened companionship on the river at Windsor.
Each thought the other looking faded, worn, altered; each wondered where had lain the attraction, once so fatally powerful; each, I think, was resolved at heart this interview should be the last.
"How's the boy?" said Picard, glancing round the room in search of his child.
For answer, she opened a door into the adjoining apartment, signing to him, wearily and sadly, to go in.
On a neat, snowy little bed, drawn near the open window, lay the child, wan, wasted, scarcely conscious; his large eyes wandering vaguely here and there, his small, fragile hands limp and helpless on the counterpane. He gave his mother a feeble glance of recognition; but of the other visitor he took no notice whatever.
Picard's mouth was dry, and a knot seemed to rise in his throat.
"How's this?" he muttered, in a fierce, husky voice, trying to keep down his tears by making himself angry. "The child is fearfully ill! It is too bad! I ought never to have trusted you with him! I should have thought his mother would have taken better care!"
The taunt was unfelt, unheeded. She showed no displeasure; but turned her large eyes on him with a plaintive, solemn sadness that spoke volumes, that told of dreary, waking nights, of anxious, sorrowing days, of cruel alternations between hope and despair, of piteous, calm resignation, that comes only when the last chance has faded gradually away. Picard went to the window, and looked out. A harder-hearted man probably did not walk the streets of London that day; but the one thing on earth he cared for was his child, and he saw the humble, dirty little street through a mist of tears.
"It is the only link between usnow," said Jin, in a measured, mournful voice. "If it should part, God help us both! I do believe you care for that poor, pale, suffering darling. Forhissake, let us forgive one another!"
He was touched, penitent, and for the moment a better man.
"Virginie," he said, "I have deceived you—doubly deceived you! Our marriage was valid enough."
Her heart sank within her.
"Then I am really your wife?" she faltered; but glancing at the boy, added bravely, "I will try to be a good one from this day forth."
A man's whole nature is not to be changed by a few tears and a minute's emotion. Dashing his hand across his eyes, Picard reviewed the position, and was his own bad self again. Less than ever would it suit him now to be hampered with the incumbrance of a family. He could scarce keep his head above water. To provide for mother and child would swamp him completely. While doing ample justice to his wife's sense of duty, he resolved by no means to imitate her; and with an assumption of great frankness, thus delivered himself:
"Your resolution is most creditable, Virginie, and I know to-day that I have never done you justice. But I have met lately with reverses, misfortunes, and at present it is impossible to make any arrangement by which you and I can be together as much as I might wish."
An expression of intense relief came over her weary face, yet she drew near the child's bed, suspiciously, instinctively, like an animal protecting its young.
He observed and understood the action.
"Our poor boy cannot be moved," said he. "You will be a good mother, Virginie, if I leave him to you? Perhaps I may never see him again."
Once more he betrayed real emotion; while Jin, from an impulse she could neither resist nor explain, raised the feeble little form on its bed, and supported the wan brow to which Picard's lips clung in a long farewell kiss. He would have blessed the child had he dared; but with the half-formed prayer came a sense of shameful unworthiness and a bitter hopeless remorse that he had been so bad a man.
In true womanly unselfishness, and with a certain readiness of immediate resource peculiar to her sex, Jin made a mental calculation of her humble little store, reserving the small sum she thought would suffice till her boy's recovery, and offered the remainder ungrudgingly to her husband.
No doubt his excuses to himself were valid and unanswerable. He accepted it without hesitation, accepted, though he must have known it had been given her by another, and was all she had in the world.
To Jin, it seemed as if she had thus bought back the unquestioned possession of her child.
He wished her good-bye calmly and kindly enough, resolving, no doubt, that they should never meet on earth again; but, bad as he was, he cut a lock off that cluster of black curls tumbled on the pillow, and many a day afterwards would he take it out of his pocket-book to look on it for minutes at a time, with sad, repentant longing, that yet produced no good result. Sentiment is not affection. There may be much romance, with very little attachment; and many a man believes he is extremely fond of a woman or a child, for whom he will not sacrifice a momentary gratification or an hour's amusement.
When Picard went his way, Jin clasped the boy in her arms, as if he had just been rescued from some imminent danger; nor could all Kate Cremorne's persuasions, calling an hour afterwards in the pony-carriage, induce her to leave him during the rest of the afternoon.
It was for no want of nursing, from no lack of care and culture, that this poor little flower faded and withered away.
August waned into September, and still the child drooped with the drooping leaves. To the doctor, to the landlady, to the weeping maid-of-all-work, to every one, save only a mother, it was evident that his Christmas carols would be sung to him by the angels in heaven.
But though here a poor little violet may be trampled into earth, is that a reason why the fairest garden flowers should fail to bloom, fragrant and splendid, over yonder? Never a red rose in all the garlands of the house of Lancaster blushed so becomingly, to Goldthred's taste, as did his own affianced bride when she ordered him to ask her whether she had not better think about naming the day of their marriage.
It was fixed for the middle of the month, the lady arranging to spend her honeymoon at a farm-house of her own, far off in the West of England, where there was excellent partridge-shooting. She explained her arrangements to Helen with characteristic frankness.
"You see, my dear, I've been married before, and I know what it is. When Mr. Lascelles and I were alone together, the first week, it wasawful! I wouldn't have believed man or woman could be so bored, and live. He must have hated it, and, I'm sure, so did I. Now, I don't want my goldfinch to be bored withme, particularly at first; so I shall send him out shooting. He'll come home tired and hungry, and we shall make no fuss, but feel as if we'd been married for years. 'Pon my word, dear, he's such a good fellow, I wish we had!"
To all which wisdom, gathered from experience, Helen turned an attentive ear, because of the pleadings urged by a certain young officer, who felt and owned himself unworthy of the happiness he implored day by day, hour by hour, till she contradicted him flatly, out of the fulness of her own heart. Frank Vanguard succeeded in justifying himself before an exceedingly lenient tribunal; and although, in my opinion, the unaccountable silence of one woman is no valid excuse for transferring allegiance incontinently to another, I do not imagine ladies themselves are equally exclusive in their notions of property. They affect a very stringent law of trespass, no doubt; yet appear sufficiently merciful to habitual and hardened offenders.
The most jealous of them seem to appreciate an admirer none the less that he has offered incense at many foreign shrines. If he should have tumbled a goddess or two off her pedestal, they profess themselves shocked indeed, and are loud in reproof, but seem to like him all the better for his infidelity.
So Frank and Helen were to be married, Sir Henry giving them his blessing and the bride'strousseaux, for which tasteful and magnificent outfit the bills were eventually sent in to Frank; but this has nothing to do with our story. The cavalry officer, I venture to pronounce, had better luck than he deserved; but so exemplary a daughter as Helen had proved herself was pretty sure to make an exemplary wife. And, for my own part, I believe that a good woman, with good sense, and areallygood temper, especially if gifted also with good looks, is capable of reclaiming the whole Household Brigade, horse and foot, bands, trumpeters, drummers, officers, non-commissioned officers, and men.
Sir Henry Hallaton, however, with gross injustice, laid his ruin on that sex, to which he had devoted what he was pleased to call thebestyears of his life, majestically ignoring all such deteriorating influences as extravagant habits, dissipated company, gambling, mortgages, second-rate race-horses, and protested bills.
It needed no syren to lure the baronet on the rocks; and, indeed, the tide of fortune, whether it ebbed or flowed, seemed alike to waft this reckless, easy-going mariner to certain shipwreck. His was a sadly shattered bark now, and he had abandoned all idea of making safe anchorage at last. He came back to England, rescued from ruin by the timely aid of a friend, and thought himself ill-used because that friend was on the eve of marriage with a woman whom he had neglected while he thought she liked him, to whose heartlessness, he now told himself, he was a martyr, because she had not waited for an uncertainty, but made a wise choice in pleasing herself.
The daughter he loved so dearly was about to settle happily in life; yet he could complain that he was deserted, bewailing his loneliness, though he saw the light in her eye, the peace on her brow, that told of heart's-ease and content. In the restless, dissatisfied longings of a confirmed selfishness, he tried hard to reestablish his former intimacy with Miss Ross, whose retreat he had found means to discover; and, failing to obtain an interview with that anxious and afflicted woman, found himself driven for solace and comfort to the society of Kate Cremorne.
This young person, whose knowledge of the world was drawn from men, not books, seeing through the weary, worn-out pleasure-seeker at a glance, fooled him with considerable dexterity, and no little mischievous amusement.
Of all his reckless moods, perhaps none had been so reckless as that in which he offered to make so free-spoken a damsel his wife; of all his humiliations none, perhaps, so galling as to accept a kindly, courteous, and dignified refusal from the wild, wayward girl, who bade him understand clearly that she respected herself too much to affect an attachment it was impossible to feel for a man old enough to be her father!
Mrs. Battersea was provoked, and opined Kate would never grow wiser, but Sir Henry, while to the outward world his good humour and good spirits remained unchanged, took the rebuff sorely to heart, and though he told his doctor he had been drinking sweet champagne, which never agreed with him, my own belief is that a fit of gout, which attacked him at this juncture more sharply than usual, was the effect of love rather than wine. When we begin twinges at the extremities, it is time to have done with pains of the heart.
So his doctor ordered him to Buxton, where, soothed by the bubble of those health-restoring springs, he forgot his sorrows in the unintermittent attention to self, required by the constant ablutions and daily discipline of the cure, deriving at the same time no small comfort from the contemplation of many sufferers more crippled, more peevish, more egotistical than himself.
There is no particular season at Buxton, as there is no forgiveness or immunity from Podagra, goddess of sloth, and luxury, and excess. Its waters are drunk, its baths are heated, its lodging-houses are occupied, its parade populous, during every month of the year. Nevertheless its frequenters are necessarily migratory. Those who get better go away, those who get worse die; but disease sends in a continuous supply of fresh afflictions, and the residence of a very few weeks causes a patient to be looked on as an old inhabitant and high authority in the place. The head of thetable-d'hôte, the easiest chair on the parade, the newest books from the library, the choicest game from the poulterer, the sweetest smile from landlady, the lowest bow from landlord, are the advantages to be attained by six weeks' tenure of an obstinate case; and thus it came to pass that Sir Henry, though a far greater man in St. James's Street, found he could not hold a candle to Uncle Joseph at Buxton.
Like two veterans in Chelsea, like two old man-of-war's men in Greenwich Hospital, these campaigners of a less honourable warfare found themselves stranded in sadly shattered plight amongst the bare knolls and grey boulders of the Derbyshire Peak; but between them there was this important difference,—that whereas Sir Henry, still almost handsome, still gentleman-like, amusing, pleasant to women, had loved his love, gamed his gaming, and retired beaten from the strife; Uncle Joseph, older in years, ruder in speech, rounder of form, and stouter of heart, had refitted his shattered bark, and with favouring gales, backed by an energy that cannot be too highly commended, was prosecuting his suit with a widow almost as old, as round, and as gouty as himself.
There had been a time when Sir Henry would have laughed heartily at the confidential communications made by the respectable Mr. Groves, as the two drove out in a one-horse fly and halted to enjoy the mellow warmth of an autumn sun under a chasm, which takes from its impossible legend the name of the Lover's Leap; but he did not laugh to-day, listening with attention, interest, something akin to envy, at his heart. What would he not have given could he, too, take pleasure in a woman's smile, even though the woman were old and fat; could he, too, feel his blood course quicker at a woman's voice, even though it had a provincial accent, and an occasional confusion of the rules by which the aspirate is applied in our language?
"I congratulate you," said Sir Henry, lying languidly back in the carriage with a plaintive air of resignation, and a sad conviction that for him most pleasures were indeed over, since his doctor had even forbidden him to smoke. "You have retained the best faculties of youth, since you have still courage to hope, still energy to be vexed and disappointed. It is not so with me. Look here, my dear fellow; I have been ruined twice since I began, and twice set on my legs by a miracle. I would willingly be ruined a third time, and never be set up at all, if I could only take a real interest in any earthly thing, even in what I am going to have for dinner."
Uncle Joseph stared. "It's not so with me," he answered; "far from it. I wish I didn't care so much. I'm a desperate fidget sometimes, I know, and often I can't enjoy things just for fear of whatmighthappen. Perhaps it's because I'm an old bachelor, as they say. It's a great drawback to a man in middle-age to have passed all his youth out of the society of women."
Sir Henry smiled and shook his head.
"I haven't found theotherplan a good one," said he. "You and I have been a goodish time in the world now, and I begin to think we have both wasted our lives."
Day after day, week after week, an autumn sun glared fiercely down, baking and cracking the clean shorn stubbles, burnishing the meadows, all parched and smooth and shining, licking up with fiery thirst the shrunken threads of mountain streams, scorching the heather bloom to powder, burning to rich ripeness the strips of late-sown oats that through our wild hill-countries fringe the purple moorland with a border of gold, beating on heated wall and glowing pavement in the small close streets about the Marlborough Road, drying the outer air to the temperature of an oven, and withering without pity the humble little growth of mignionette in the sick child's window.
Morning and night Jin watered that homely box of mould in vain. The dying plants no more revived for her care, than did her darling for all the tears she shed on his behalf. They wanted for nothing now that money could supply,—Kate Cremorne would have taken care of that; but Jin's friends, directly they found out her hiding-place, had rallied round her with kindly offers of sympathy and assistance. Mrs. Lascelles, indeed, wished to bring mother and child home to No. 40 at once, but the latter was too ill to be moved; and kind-hearted Rose, in spite of her present happiness, felt sadly vexed to think that the former could refuse persistently to see her now, denying herself to every human being except Miss Cremorne.
With all her resolution it was more than Jin could endure to be reminded of the happiness she had once so nearly grasped, and in her dull, forlorn misery she told herself it was better to hide her weary head, and wait in hopeless apathy for the end.
She had gone through those cruel changes that seem so hard to bear till the one fearful certainty teaches us they were merciful preparations for that which we should not otherwise have found strength to encounter. She had watched the doctor's face day by day, and hung on his grave, sympathising accents, believing now that the "shade better" meant recovery, now that the "trifle worse" was but the necessary ebb and flow of disease; anon, lifted to unreasonable happiness from darkest despair, because when her ignorance thought all was over, the man of science still found anchorage for a new ephemeral hope.
Alas! that henceforth there must be no more vicissitude, no more uncertainty! The last strand of the cable was obviously parting—the little lamp was flickering with the gleam that so surely goes out in utter darkness—the simple flower, drooping and dying, was to bloom never more but in the gardens of God!
Even Kate, who seldom failed to find a word of comfort at the worst, to discover seeds of encouragement in the most alarming symptoms, had turned from the boy's bed to-day with a quiver over all her bonny face, that showed how hard it was for her to keep back the tears.
Jin caught her friend's hand, and pressed it to her breast.
"God bless you, dear!" she gasped. "Whatever happens, you've been an angel from heaven to me!"
The other dropped her veil till it covered brow and face.
"My poor dear!" she answered, with a strange tremor in her voice, "the angels in heaven are likehim, notme. If itmustbe—if youareto lose him—try and think of him as one of them—try and hope you and I may get to see him there at last, even if we have to sit waiting for ages on a stone outside the gate."
Both women were silent, Kate turning away to cry passionately. In a few minutes she recovered herself, pressed her lips fiercely to the child's cold hand lying helpless on the bed-clothes, again to Jin's pale, sorrowing brow, and so departed, with a promise, in a husky, choking whisper, of returning speedily, and an entreaty that she might be sent for at a moment's notice if she were wanted.
So the mother was left alone with her dying child. She had not shed a tear—no—though the other woman wept without restraint; that infection, usually so irresistible, had failed to reach her now. Her eyes were dry, her face cold and fixed like marble. Mechanically she moved about the room, arranging the furniture, straightening the sheets, smoothing the pillows, mixing a cooling drink for the poor pale lips that would never drink again. Then, as in unconscious routine she watered the mignionette at the window, she caught her breath with a great gasp, her face worked like that of a woman in convulsions, and she burst into a fit of weeping that seemed intense relief for the moment, and rendered her capable of enduring the worst, which was yet to come.
In such paroxysms memory seems, as it were, to lift us out of the present, and furnishing us with a new sense—keen, subtle, and intense—throws our whole existence back once more into the past. Again she was nursing Gustave under the poplars in Touraine; again she was impressing on a homely peasant-woman, at Lyons, the care and culture of her darling; again she mourned for his loss and rejoiced in his recovery, staring with incredulous pleasure to recognise him on the road to Ascot, thrilling with a mother's holiest instincts to fold him to her breast in the old cottage by the riverside. Her troubles, her intrigues, her love, her rivalry, Picard, Frank Vanguard, Helen herself, were forgotten; no human interest, no earthly image, came between her and her dark-eyed boy.
It seemed impossible he could be dying. Dying? Oh, no! or why had he been given back to her before? Was there no Providence? Was it only blind chance that thus juggled with her? She thought of women she had known in her earlier years—femmes croyantes, as they called themselves—their penances, duties, attendance at mass, frequent confessions, and the courage with which they boasted their religion enabled them to accept every trial—till it came.
Pain was lashing her into rebellion. She roused herself. She dashed her tears from her eyes. "Bah!" she exclaimed; "if he gets well, I will be like these. Why not for me also a miracle? What have I done that I am to be so tortured?"
A weak voice called her from the bed. "Maman," it murmured, in the dear French accents of its infancy, "embrasse-moi donc, puis ce que je ne te vois plus."
She laid her head—the two black comely heads together—on the pillow by his side. The hope that had flickered for a moment died out for evermore. Not see her! and it was broad noon of the golden summer day!
"Here is mamma, darling!" she murmured, pressing hard to her lips the little helpless hand, dull and yellow like waxwork. "Mamma will never leave Gustave! never—never!"
She tried to borrow courage from the assurance, and to fancy thathewas not leavingher, swiftly, surely, as the outward-bound bark that spreads its canvas to a wind off shore.
He nestled nearer—nearer yet. His little frame shook all over. Raising him on the pillow, his curly head sank back on her bosom, more heavily, more helplessly than in earliest infancy. He murmured a few indistinct syllables. Straining every nerve to listen, she knew they formed part of a child's prayer that Mrs. Mole had taught him in her cottage home. But he finished that prayer at the feet of his Father who is in heaven.
Minutes, hours—she never knew how long—the sorrowing mother bowed her head, and wailed in agony over her dead child. Neither stunned nor stupefied by an affliction for which her daily life had of late been but a training and a preparation, every nerve in her frame, every fibre of her heart, quivered with the sting and sharpness of the blow.
Had she not wept, she must have gone mad; but her tears flowed freely, and with tears came that lassitude of the feelings which is the first step to resignation, as lacking the rebellious energy of despair. For her, indeed, the silver cord was loosed, the golden bowl broken, the desire of her eyes taken away. The day had gone down; the night seemed very dark and cold. How should she seek for comfort in the hope of another dawn?
But when the skies are at their blackest, then morning is near at hand. It was through thickest gloom, brooding over a lowering wave, that the luminous figure of their Teacher walked the waters on the Sea of Tiberias, and the boldest of his servants had sunk to the knees ere he took refuge in his panic-stricken outcry, "Lord, save me!" and, trusting solely to the Master, found help in the very weakness of his fears.
Perhaps angels in heaven recognise and mark in golden letters the hour of conviction, the accepted time, the turning-point, it may be, of a soul's eternity. Perhaps, even, in their lustrous happiness, they rejoiced with celestial sympathy over the lonely penitent who flung herself down by her child's death-bed, and poured out her heart in prayer that, through any sacrifice, any suffering, she might follow where he was gone before. Perhaps they knew how poor, contrite, sorrowing Jin Ross had made her first step on the narrow path that leads to the Shining Gate, over which, for sinners of far deeper dye than her, stands emblazoned the eternal promise—"Knock, and it shall be opened unto you!"