CHAPTER VI.THE LOCKET.
“Where is Mr. Pym?” asked Hugh, meeting James in the hall.
“Captain Pym is gone, sir. Rode off in a hurry about half-an-hour since. If you mean the old gentleman, he’s in the library with Mr. Mervyn.”
Sir Roderick’s brother was evidently unknown to and of little account in Sir Roderick’s household. Hugh felt that his first duty was to show every deference to a man who had been, whether justifiably or not, cruelly insulted by the dying man. He knocked at the library door. It was Mr. Mervyn who called out, “Come in.”
The fitful sunshine and the leaping flames on the old-fashioned hearth were brightening the room. Mr. Pym had unwittingly seated himself in Sir Roderick’s own particular arm-chair. Mr. Mervyn stood on the hearthrug.
“That’s right, Paull,” he said, evidently relieved. “She is better? Had a good cry? She’ll do, then. Mr. Pym and I have had a talk, and I am glad you should understand each other before he returns home. I have assured him, in your behalf, that Sir Roderick’s wishes on the subject of yourself and Lilia were more of a surprise to you than to myself.”
“I am not a thief, Mr. Mervyn,” said Hugh, warmly.“If coming here as Sir Roderick’s medical attendant I had even thought of Miss Pym as a possible future wife, I should have been as much a thief as a common burglar—aye, more so.”
Mr. Pym’s long upper lip curved a little with more a sneer than a smile.
“These young men now-a-days are so strangely romantic,” he said, turning to Mr. Mervyn. “It has, I assure you, been a great difficulty in my way in the matter of my clerks. My partner, Mr. Clithero, invariably defers to me in the affair of our staff. This tendency has been a great stumbling-block to me. I will not have a person in my employ who uses tall talk.”
Hugh bit his lip, but remembered that this man who wished to show him that he classed him with his bank clerks, with the despised majority, the bread-winning non-capitalists, was not only Lilia’s uncle, but possibly his sister Daisy’s father-in-law.
“I have assured Mr. Pym that Lilia, also, was more surprised than I was,” said Mr. Mervyn, admiring Hugh’s self-control; for Mr. Pym’s cold, measured tones were far more subtly insulting than his words. “This I have learnt from Mrs. Mervyn, who at the same time assured me that the child had a great regard for you, Paull—quite sufficient to render her obedient to her father’s wishes, when called upon.”
“That is all very well, Mr. Mervyn,” said Mr. Pym, dictatorially. “But, as you are aware, until quite lately, my unfortunate brother’s pet whim was to leave his fortune to Roderick, on the condition that he and my niece would marry.”
“Of that, sir, I know nothing,” said Mr. Mervyn, deferentially.
“But you were always in the house, I understand?” said Mr. Pym, haughtily. “My brother’s almost adoption of my son cannot have escaped your notice.”
Mr. Mervyn cleared his throat; and looking down at his boots, brushed some invisible dust from the skirt of his coat.
“I have known Sir Roderick change his mind before now; that is all I can say, Mr. Pym,” he said.
“Yes—when he had a mind to change,” said the banker. “The question is, if the accident which brought about concussion of the brain did not so seriously affect his mind as to invalidate his opinions from that moment.”
Hugh was about to speak, but Mr. Mervyn silenced him with a warning glance.
“It may be treason to my dead friend; I don’t know; I certainly hope not,” he said, “but, if there is to be discussion or law-making on the subject of his fortune, I must tell the truth—he had no particular fortune to leave.”
Hugh felt as if a heavy weight were uplifted from his heart. “Thank God for that!” he said.
The exclamation was so undoubtedly genuine, that Mr. Mervyn smiled—almost laughed—but recollecting the dread presence in the house, checked himself. Mr. Pym settled his eyeglasses on his nose, looked curiously at Hugh as at some new specimen of unclassed animal, then dropped his glasses.
“Excuse me, if I think you are mistaken, Mr. Mervyn,” he said, politely. “My brother can scarcely have dissipated so large a capital as that which he withdrew from us when we dissolved partnership.”
Mr. Mervyn shrugged his shoulders.
“The reading of the Will will doubtless tend to explain matters,” he said. “At present, we are even in the dark as to Sir Roderick’s wishes in regard to his burial.”
A minute’s silence, then Mr. Pym rose.
“Understand, Mr. Mervyn,” he said, stiffly and pompously, and with evident intention turning his back upon Hugh, “until I, as her nearest male relative, have had several interviews with my niece, I cannot countenance any arrangement for her future which may have been made by my unfortunate brother when in an unsound state of mind.”
Hugh’s impulse to resent was suddenly and strongly quelled by a strange, almost occult, sensation. He seemed, as it were, suddenly to feel, personally, the emotions that old Mr. Pym was enduring. These were goodwill towards the brother who had persistently misunderstood and quarrelled with him; an almost despair at that death-bed insult; an irritable questioning of the motives and intentions of himself and Mr. Mervyn, strangers except by hearsay; a yearning tenderness towards his orphaned niece.
“Mr. Pym!” he said, impetuously, going to the old man as he was quitting the room, “excuse me for detaining you one moment, but I must tell you how much your niece’s grief is increased by her father’s treatment of you; it was harder to console her for that than for the fact that Sir Roderick is dead!”
At first, a slight redness flushing Mr. Pym’s withered cheeks encouraged Hugh to fancy that his feelings were touched. But whatever transient emotion had caused that flush, it was but transient.
“I am sure I am very much obliged to you,” hecoldly said, with a nod such as he might have given to a saluting servant; “but really I do not think that you, sir, and I need go into these questions. If you will direct me to the stables, I will find my carriage.”
Mr. Mervyn at once came to the rescue.
“You wait here for me,” he said confidentially to Hugh. “I’ll see him off, and come back.”
Hugh’s sensations when left alone were scarcely pleasant. “I am an interloper,” he thought. “Yet I love her! and if I were to wriggle out of the situation, Roderick would step in. Roderick! No. I must deal with the facts as they are, the best way I can.”
At least, he thought, as Mr. Mervyn cordially held out his hand to him as he returned to the room, Lilia’s guardian and trustee did not misunderstand him.
“It is a sad time for congratulations,” said Mr. Mervyn; “still, I cannot help congratulating you. Lilia is a sweet girl, with the making of a real woman in her. I was right when I said that Sir Roderick’s wish you two should be married took you by surprise, eh?”
“It was more than a surprise, Mr. Mervyn.”
“Not an unpleasant one? No, I thought not. Mrs. Mervyn assured me that you and Lilia liked each other weeks ago. Women are pretty reliable judges in these matters. Still, when Sir Roderick told me at the beginning of this last illness that he had invited you here, hoping that the child would take a fancy to you, I was surprised, I own.”
“What could his idea have been, Mr. Mervyn?”
“He liked you. When Sir Roderick liked anyone,he trusted that person blindly, I may say foolishly. Then he had just been disenchanted, awakened to the fact that his nephew Roderick is—what I have always thought him—a scamp.”
“How was he enlightened?” asked Hugh, drawing a long breath of relief.
“Oh! you know how curiously things get about. He was not a man to listen to gossip. But since the 45th were quartered at Aldershot rumours of Roderick’s looseness of conduct were in the air somehow.”
“Do you think he intended those two for each other?” asked Hugh.
“I cannot make out,” said the clergyman, slowly. “He made a fool of that lad; sometimes so much so that I felt uncomfortable, as if it were unreal, a cruel joke he was enjoying all to himself. You see, he hated the father.”
“I thought so,” said Hugh. Then he detailed the bitter speeches of the dying man, before Mr. Mervyn was fetched by Lilia.
“Dear, dear!” said Mr. Mervyn. “It is not to be wondered at that the old man’s back was up just now. Curious old man, that. A bit of a Pharisee, I fear. But not as guilty as his brother thought him, I believe.”
“Were you here then, Mr. Mervyn? When that affair of Lady Pym happened?”
“Who told you of the family scandal, eh, young man?”
Hugh recounted his father’s visit and its object.
“Do you know anything of this clergyman son who wants to marry my sister?” he asked.
“I met him once or twice, and thought him a prig,”said Mr. Mervyn. “But better a prig, than like his brother Roderick.”
“You knew Lady Pym?” asked Hugh.
“I did,” said Mr. Mervyn. “A lovely, winsome young creature; wretchedly unhappy. She was made for society and a lightsome life, and Sir Roderick literally imprisoned her. If she clung to her brother-in-law—if they were more affectionate to each other than in strict justice to him they should have been,—I, for one, cannot cast the first stone. It was piteous to see that poor girl. When the row came, and she disappeared, I felt inclined to give up the living. My one attempt to interfere was met with coldness; I could not try again. If it had not been for my wife, who was devoted to the poor baby, and literally went on her knees to me to stay, I should not be here talking to you now. It is this—with other things—that makes it impossible for me to regret Sir Roderick’s death, though he has been very kind to me, and to my wife too.”
“And to the poor?”
“No,” said Mr. Mervyn, energetically. “He has been their worst enemy. Your work is cut out for you, Mr. Paull, to undo his doings. But you are the man to do it.”
“But—I thought—you said—he left no fortune?”
Hugh’s ambition was certainly not to waste his energies in remedying Sir Roderick’s mistakes.
“No fortune, as Mr. Pym considers fortune. But you had better see Turner and Moffatt, the solicitors, Paull, you really had,” added Mr. Mervyn, lapsing into the familiar and confidential. “Someone must take up a position of authority; and you are the person to do it, as matters stand.”
Hugh wrote off to the hospital authorities for further leave; and next day, hearing from Mrs. Mervyn, who was acting as mistress of the housepro tem., that Lilia would not come down till after luncheon, he drove over to the quiet little town where “Messrs. Turner and Moffatt, solicitors,” was engraved large upon a brilliant brass plate on the door of an old red-brick house.
This house was in a wide, quiet street of the silent country town, where the grass sprouted about the cobbles in the roads. A parlourmaid conducted Hugh into a prim library, where he was almost immediately joined by a little man, dressed with extreme neatness, and wearing thick glass spectacles, who met him with repeated little bows.
“A friend of my late client,” he said, insisting upon Hugh’s seating himself in a huge arm-chair, like a dentist’s. “Yes, yes.” (He referred to Hugh’s card that he was holding between his finger and thumb.) “My name is Moffatt. I have always acted for Sir Roderick. Dear me! Very sad, very sad! I only heard of his death this morning.”
He sat down and looked at Hugh through his spectacles with an inquiring, owl-like gaze.
“I have good reason to suppose that my client has spoken of you to me as having treated him very successfully after his accident,” he next said, taking off his spectacles and absently polishing them with his handkerchief. “Quite in a friendly way—Sir Roderick was very friendly with us; indeed he has often honoured Mrs. Moffatt by taking a bit of luncheon with us. And how is the poor young lady?”
To Hugh’s surprise, he found that Mr. Moffatt had never seen Lilia.
“Our poor friend—my late client, I should say—was slightly eccentric, you see,” said the lawyer exculpatingly, after which Hugh found it easier to make a clean breast of affairs as they stood.
“Mr. Mervyn advised me to come to you to tell me exactly what to do,” he said.
“Certainly, certainly, Mr. Paull, anything that we can do.”
The little gentleman, who had been mentally casting up Hugh, of whose position in Sir Roderick’s will he was well aware, was so far satisfied with his new client. The reluctance Hugh showed, during their ensuing interview, to accept the situation, he thought foolish. Still, he liked the young man for it.
Hugh left him in a more uncertain mood than when he sought him.
He did not see Lilia till next morning. Mrs. Mervyn was kind, even tender in her manner to him when they dinedtête-à-tête, but they both tacitly ignored the position of affairs. Mrs. Mervyn recalled and recounted little anecdotes which showed Sir Roderick at his best, but nothing further was discussed. Even on the subject of Lilia they were equally on guard.
“This is the most uncomfortable position a man could possibly be placed in,” Hugh told himself, as he breakfasted alone in the dining-room next morning, stared at by the painted eyes of the pictured effigies of bygone Pyms. “Why will she not see me?” for by Mrs. Mervyn’s message of excuse, that she would breakfast upstairs with Lilia, he augured that Lilia would not face him.
“What am I to do?” he thought, pacing the room in gloomy discomfort. “Of course! I see it. I havebeen forced upon her. As a loving daughter, she was ready to sacrifice herself to please her dying father. If he had asked to be burnt like an Indian and she to lie down among the flames in suttee fashion, she would have carried out his whim. She shall not be made miserable for life. I must insist upon her accepting her release. Of course the Mervyns and lawyer Moffatt think it best that Sir Roderick’s ideas should be carried out. My duty plainly is, to fight forhergood, and hers only.”
While he was hotly arguing against himself Lilia was hanging despairingly about Mrs. Mervyn in her darkened room.
“My dear, I assure you he loves you, and would have wished to marry you even against your father’s wish,” Mrs. Mervyn was assuring the unhappy girl for the hundredth time. “If you only see him, you will be convinced that I am right. You will, indeed!”
Then Lilia said, brokenly, that she could not. If he would only go away, she would write to him.
“Let him take everything, and go,” she said for about the hundred-and-first time. “Life is over for me.”
Then once more Mrs. Mervyn said, this time somewhat indignantly, for she was losing patience, that such a suggestion to Mr. Paull savoured of insult.
“You are cowardly in your grief, Lilia,” she said, sharply. “At least tell the young man your ideas yourself, instead of saying them over and over again to poor me, who can do nothing.”
Perhaps it was this speech which brought about the following:—
Hugh, impatiently pacing the dining-room, did nothear the door open, and when once he suddenly turned round as he reached the hearthrug, he started back in alarm at finding himself confronted by a ghostly figure.
It was Lilia, Magdalen-like, with her hair dishevelled and hanging about over her white dressing-gown, with her head drooping, her swollen eyelids cast down, her arms crossed under her loose sleeves.
“Miss Pym!” he said. Then he placed a chair for her, and set a guard upon his emotions.
She sat down on the edge of the chair as if she were on sufferance. Indeed, she felt as if nothing in the world was her own now, except her grief.
“What can I do for you?” he said, as gently and tenderly as he could. “Anything, anything that you wish, I will try to do.”
She glanced up, at this.
“Will you—go?” she said, timidly. “And forget all about us—about him, and me? And I will write to you about everything.”
Her head drooped again. He stood looking at her in silence for a few moments, wondering what prompted that speech—what, indeed, she really felt. Then he said, very gently:
“Am I to understand that you really wish me to go?”
She murmured “Yes.”
“I will, then,” he said. “But you must give me your true reason for sending me away.”
“For your—happiness,” she said, with a sigh.
“My—happiness?” he repeated, bitterly. “Even though you may hate me because your father wished—that—I would rather stay near you, even though youwould not look at me, or speak to me—than go away—now.”
He hoped his earnestness might have some effect in eliciting the truth. But she still sat there dumbly, miserably. After a pause:
“You are—very kind—he used to say so,” she murmured, with a sob.
He felt somewhat exasperated.
“I amnotkind,” he said. “And I never say anything I do not mean and feel. Don’t you believe me?”
“Reallykind people do not know when they are kind,” she said, raising her grieved eyes and speaking more firmly. “Make no mistake, Mr. Paull. I understand your motives, which seem good to you. But they are not the best, or even good, for you or for me. I am positively certain of this.”
“My motives?” he said, scornfully. “Then, I have none! I only know—that I love you!” he added, passionately.
She fastened, as if in perversity, on the first half of his speech.
“If you have no motives, I have motives,” she said, slowly. “Therefore I am the one to see clearly. And I plainly see, that the best thing for both of us is—that you should go away.”
“But—why?” cried Hugh. (In his life, he had never felt more inclined to swear.) “That is all I ask you to tell me! Why?”
“I gave you my reason,” she said. “For your happiness!”
“My happiness! What do you know—or care—about my happiness?” he said, scornfully.
“More than you care for mine!” she said, rousing a little. “Or you would go, without asking why!”
“No, that I certainly should not,” he returned. “Oh, what waste of time this beating about the bush is! Lilia, I plainly see what all this means. You cannot love me!”
He began pacing the room again. She, poor child, worn out by sleepless nights fighting against her inclinations—as she thought, for the welfare of this man whom she passionately loved—gazed sadly at him, a pathetic gaze of renunciation, which, if he had seen, might have enlightened him.
But he did not see.
“Well?” he said, at last, almost fiercely, halting opposite to her. “Your answer?”
“I forget—what you asked,” she said, timidly.
“That is answer enough!” he retorted sadly. “Poor, poor child! You shall not be sacrificed.” (Love him, and forget his question? The two things were incompatible. He was answered, he considered, and completely.)
With a swelling heart she held out her limp, cold hand to him.
“Be my brother,” she said, with a catching at her breath. “Remember—how alone—I am!”
He stooped and lightly touched her hand with his lips.
“If I were your brother, I should stay,” he said, gravely.
“If you were my brother, you would do as you like without asking me,” she said, with an attempt at a smile. “Do as you like.”
At that moment there was a tap at the door, and the older of the two nurses peeped in.
“Might I trouble you one moment, Mr. Paull?”
He went outside. The nurse handed him a small sealed packet.
“A locket and chain from the patient’s neck,” she said. “Mrs. Mervyn would not take it.”
“I will give it to Miss Pym,” he said, wondering how much or how little Lilia knew of her father’s personal affairs.
“Nurse came to bring me this,” he said, returning to Lilia. “She says it contains a locket and chain she found around—his—neck.”
“A locket—round—his—neck? It must be a mistake,” said Lilia, confidently. “He never wore any jewellery—except, of course, his watchchain. He did not approve of men decking themselves out with ornaments.”
“Well, you can soon find out if it is a mistake,” he said, handing her the packet.
She hesitated, took the package, then laid it down on the table as if the touch of it had scorched her.
“I cannot!” she said, with a sob. “It seems—such prying, such desecration!Youopen it.”
There was something so childish in her change of voice as she pushed the packet towards him, that instinctively Hugh felt comforted. All the preceding palaver might have been partly the masquerading of a child, suddenly called upon to act the woman.
For a moment he hesitated; then he broke the seal, and handing her the locket which had been in his custody at the hospital, said:
“I have seen this before, I think.”
“You?” she asked, recoiling. “How? When?”
“In the hospital—your father wore it then. If I am not mistaken, the locket contains a portrait.”
“I have never been photographed,” she said, evidently believing that no portrait save of herself could be so honoured. “It is not—a portrait—of Roderick?”
“Look and see for yourself,” suggested Hugh.
Her fingers trembled as she opened the locket, then she stared in amazement at the miniature.
“I have never seen that person in my life!” she cried. “Have you? Did he tell you anything about it? Oh, it is impossible, impossible!”
She was roused, almost excited. She tossed the locket away from her, then clutched at it again and devoured the portrait with her eyes.
“Surely the face must recall some one to your mind—there must be some—family—likeness?” he suggested, gravely.
“I never saw any one in the least like that!” she said, with withering contempt. “It is a horrid face!”
Could she speak thus if the slightest suspicion that the portrait was that of her unhappy mother had crossed her mind? Hugh thought not.
“You once—had—a mother,” he said, not without emotion that he, a stranger, should be called upon to remind this fatherless young creature of the fact.
“I know it,” she said, coldly. “Please do not allude to that—again.”
“What is to be done with this, then?” he asked, chilled by her unwomanliness. And he picked up the locket and once more looked at the pretty, defiant little face pictured therein.
“I do not see what one thing has to do with the other,” she said.
“I feel certain that this is the portrait of yourmother,” he said. “And, that being so, what is to be done with it?”
She glanced at him with a curious light in her grey eyes that made her look more witchlike than angelic.
“I will show you,” she said; and going to the hearth she stirred the logs into a blaze, and detaching the locket from its slender chain she dropped it into the glowing heart of the fire.
“I will keep this,” she said, showing him the chain. “It touched his neck. You are answered.”
The horrified expression on Hugh’s pale features somewhat quieted her passion. He was surprised and shocked. Was her rage pure jealousy, or what? He stood there, pondering, with his face averted from her.
“Now you know me!” she said, recklessly. “No—not quite. But I will tell you. I hate the woman who dared to marry my father without loving him, and so, poisoned his life and broke his heart!”
Somehow Sir Roderick as Hugh had known him was scarcely to be recognised as a man with a poisoned life and a broken heart.
“As you have given me a brother’s privilege, I shall use it and tell you the truth,” he said, seriously, to the young creature who was, he could see, all panting and as it were aflame with long-repressed emotion. “You have no right to judge another whom you have neither seen nor known, least of all in the case of your mother, to whom you owe your life.”
“And—my misery!” she said, passionately. “If she had not spoiled his life, he would have been a happy man—he might be alive, now!”
“This is a very onesided way of arguing,” he said. “Had your parents been happy together in theordinary way, they might have had a large family of troublesome sons and daughters, who would have broken your father’s heart, as you call it, a dozen times over.”
“She was—a wretch, a wretch!” said Lilia.
In her passion she forgot her new shyness of Hugh. She had seated herself on the corner of the table—gracefully enough, she was always graceful—but she was swinging her little foot impatiently, and thrust away the breakfast things, not yet removed, with evident carelessness whether they were broken or not.
“Did it ever occur to you—that if we continue the mistakes those beloved dead of ours made here on earth, we might possibly be injuring their souls?” said Hugh, gravely. “It seems to me that real grief for the dead should show itself in continuing the good they have done—and, perhaps, in rectifying those mistakes.”
“My father never made mistakes,” said Lilia, obstinately.
“He seems to have made one, at least,” he said, somewhat bitterly—“in thinking that you and I wished—or would consent—to marry each other!”
She blushed and hung her head.
“You were speaking of souls,” she said, presently, in a somewhat defiant tone. “What do you mean by souls?”
“You ought to know,” he returned. “Do you not go to church every Sunday, and say your prayers?”
“I did so whilehewas here—but never again, never again!” she said, in tones so despairing that Hugh’s growing hardness of humour was melted.
“Why not?” he asked, gently.
“I was getting to believe that there might be a good God,” she said. “That—is crushed—now Iknowthere is not!”
“You do not know what you are saying, poor child!” said Hugh.
What was he to do? What to say? Never in his life had he felt so helpless in thought and word.
She looked up at him with a sad, but quiet little smile.
“Wouldyou, hard as you can be, have taken my father from me?” she said.
“I thought your mind was larger, stronger,” said Hugh, eagerly. “That you could distinguish between this little life and eternity; between our poor human ideas and the Eternal Must Be. I am disappointed.”
She sighed.
“I knew it,” she murmured, twisting her fingers. “I knew that when you saw me as I really am, you would despise me!”
“Pray, pray do not misunderstand me,” said Hugh, almost hopelessly. “It seems to me that all the trouble in life comes from people wilfully misunderstanding each other. Will you not believe in my devotion to you, that I am ready to do, to suffer anything for you?”
“I am not worth it,” she sighed. “And—really it seems to me that I don’t care whether I am or not, or indeed, what happens!”
She was so listlessly miserable that Hugh re-assumed his professional manner. She was suffering from the shock. She required complete rest. It never occurred to him that if he had taken her to his heart, then and there, without question or reserve, that complete restwould have been hers. Instead, he sent her upstairs to Mrs. Mervyn, devoutly kissing her hand at parting, with the kind, cool words:
“Remember, you have a brother who is ready to serve you day or night.”
So Lilia went wearily up the old staircase and scared Mrs. Mervyn, who was scribbling notes at the writing-table in her room, by looking more ghostlike than when she left her.
“Well?” said that lady, who had quite concluded that the young people would understand each other.
“Well? What?” she asked languidly. “Mr. Paull said I had better lie down. Lie down, indeed! As if I could rest!”
“But—you understand each other?” Mrs. Mervyn asked, with a shade of anxiety in her tone. She felt her position somewhat onerous.
“Perfectly,” said Lilia. “We are quite agreed—we have adopted each other as brother and sister—oh, father, father!”
And she broke down completely, sobbing hysterically for a long time.
When she was quieted, and was seemingly asleep, Mrs. Mervyn had time to reflect. What were those two about?
“They are too much in love with each other and cannot talk sense, that’s what it is,” she told herself. “Ah, well, time enough! The brother and sister business is really nicer during the first mourning, when there should be no thoughts of ‘marrying, or giving in marriage.’”