CONCLUSION.

“Distilling bitter, bitter dropsFrom sweets of former years”

formed, however, no part of the trials to which Honor Beacham was henceforth exposed.Herduty was, by undying efforts to efface the memory of past error, and to strive by every act and wordto render herself worthy of a good man’s love. The memory of the bitter past—of the past, unconnected by any lack of love on John’s part—could never, never be washed away; but to “redeem the time,” the present that was left to her, became, because of the evil of the days that were past, a still more sacred duty. Sorrow had done good service in forming while it humbled the character of our poor little impulsive heroine, for “la vertù è simile ai perfumi, che rendono più grato odore quando-riturati.” Heaviness had indeed endured for the morning, but content, if not joy, had come to her and hers with the quiet evening light.

Ifthe reader of this half-true story has followed with any portion of just indignation the tortuous ways through which an insane craving after power has lead the nominal heroine of these pages, he or she will not regret to learn that, in consequence of a high legal opinion—thehighest, indeed, in the land—having been given, at the eleventh hour, against the possibility of setting aside Earl Gillingham’s last will and testament, Lady Millicent was forced, with a reluctance comparable only to the pang of plucking out a right eye or wrenching out a wrong tooth, to abandon the unfilial as well as unmotherly intention which she had so long secretly as well as avowedly harboured.

The intense though silent wrath of Lady Millicent when she found that the great law-lords were not to be led—albeit the forceps or chain, call it what you will, was held and drawn by a lady of great estate, strong courage, and ancient name—by the nose may be better imagined thandescribed. Misfortunes never, according to the old adage, come singly, and this autocratic lady found the proof of the proverb to her cost. In her youth she had never cared to provide herself with friends, and, when it was too late, she made the unwelcome discovery that there are certain manufactures of which the art cannot be learned save in the freshness and elasticity of early womanhood. The world, too, which had interested itself a good deal in Lady Millicent’s efforts, and which was hesitating as to its decision from a laudable desire to side with the strongest, bore rather hardly in her discomfiture on the baffled and indignant woman. That she had been unmotherly, grasping, avaricious—everything that was least feminine and most odious—everyone was more than willing to allow; whereas Arthur—regarding whom heads had been ominously shaken, and of whose scampishness so many (while the great affair was in abeyance) had a word, more or less severe, to say—became once more the popular “young fellow,” the idol of fair women’s hearts, and the object of future attacks from prudent mammas and half-despairingdemoiselles à marier.

It was while smarting under the first wounds inflicted by disappointed ambition and frustrated love of power that Lady Millicent discovered the bitter truth that as we sow so we must reap, andthat there can be no harvest of affection where the seeds of tenderness have been neglected to be sown. The news—very melancholy intelligence it was to his brother and his sisters—that Arthur Vavasour had, for an indefinite period, bade farewell to home and country, child and kindred, was communicated to Lady Millicent by her son Horace. He, the younger brother, who had always been in secret very impatient of parental control, and whose strong affection for his elder brother had ever been a marked and amiable feature of his character, was roused by the departure of Arthur to the strongest feelings of displeasure against the mother whose unfeeling conduct had, in his opinion, been the cause of her son’s expatriation. Walking one morning unannounced into the dull morning-room in which Lady Millicent, now that the occupation of her life was over, sat brooding over the turpitude and cowardice of lawyers, and the general injustice and stupidity of all connected with wills and will-making, Horace Vavasour took the liberty of giving his mother a piece of his mind.

“So, ma’am,” he began, his lips pale with agitation, and his voice (Horace was a little shaken by a year’s dissipation) a trifle difficult to steady,—“so, ma’am, Arthur’s off—gone—bolted. This confounded law-business put the finishing-stroketo his affairs, poor fellow! I knew how it would be. He never had a chance of doing well—never, by G—!” and Horace, who was standing near some greenhouse plants in full flower, whirled his light riding-whip lasso-like over their heads, thereby ruthlessly severing some half-dozen from their parent stems.

Lady Millicent looked up in mute dismay. The outbreak was so unexpected, and disrespect to her person and authority an occurrence so entirely new, that for a moment she found no words either sufficiently powerful or cutting for the expression of her indignation. At last she said, drawing herself up haughtily:

“You forget yourself strangely. What have I to do with Arthur’s—with your brother’s—eccentricities? Gone, is he? And where, pray? On some self-indulgent freak or other, I suppose, to escape the sight of that poor old man’s miserable face; but what this ‘law-business,’ as you call it, has to do with the matter, is more than I either understand, or wish to have explained.”

She rose from the sofa as she spoke, but was arrested by her son’s hand laid lightly on her shoulder.

“Mother,” he said almost sternly, “for once in my life I will speak to you openly. It willbe the first time and the last; for you are not one, or I am greatly mistaken, to forgive the words that I shall use. From our childhood you never,nevertreated us as if you loved us. As a little fellow, so little, I remember, that I could scarcely reach the table with my hand—as a small boy—troublesome, I daresay, as all young children are, but notmoredepraved and wicked than others—I longed—O,howI used to long!—for love and tenderness from you. When I saw other mothers kiss and pet their children, holding them upon their knees, and looking with delight and pride upon their play and laughter, I can never describe to you the bitter envy that I felt, and with what a sore, sad heart I thought upon the difference between them and me! And it was the same with all of us. We have compared notes many times since those days, and have told each other—we four children, whom my father left a legacy to you; ah, shall I ever forget his dying words?—that we only wanted love, only the common tenderness shown by all God’s creatures to their young, and that, having it, we would return it fifty, ay, a hundredfold! But—and well you know it, mother—we had it not, that love we yearned for; and failing the boon we craved, we all went”—and he smiled bitterly—“more or less, and in different ways, according to our respective powers and sexes, to thebad. There is Arthur, poor dear Atty,” and his lip quivered painfully, “gone, without a word—excepting that he confessed some things to that poor broken-hearted old man which would make your cheek, ma’am, grow red with shame, although you love him not, to hear of. It seems, he was reduced—I and some others think that the fault was notquiteall his own—to do some ugly thing which, but for the law-business of which you speak so lightly, need never have been known, and—”

“Ah, I understand,” put in Lady Millicent, endeavouring to hide her confusion and annoyance under a mask of carelessness and sarcasm. “Difficulties in the way of raising money, eh? But that is over now,” she added bitterly, “and I suppose that your brother need not, as matters now stand, fly the country because he does not happen to be able to pay his bills.”

“No, ma’am, you are right there,” rejoined her son; “but, unfortunately, poor Arthur, almost maddened by grief and worry, and believing, as so many did, that the ‘high legal opinion’ (on which depended your continuance or otherwise in the disputing of my grandfather’s will) would be, when given, adverse to his interests, had not moral courage, or rather his pecuniary embarrassments were too great to admit of any longer delay; so he has gone, poor dear fellow.” AndHorace drew a long troubled breath, for, like many others, he believed in the reality as well as the endurance of Arthur’s grief. “He has gone away, poor old boy, for years, he says; and—and old Dub told me this morning that Arthur was—a villain!”

He was very young, that warm-hearted Horace, whose admiration of and love for his elder brother had truly grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength. For a long hour that morning he had stoutly fought Arthur’s battles with the old man, who, embittered by misfortune, and rendered thereby callous to the feelings of others, had dilated in no measured terms on his son-in-law’s utter want of principle, his selfishness, his mendacity, and his general and irretrievable unworthiness. It was in vain that Horace endeavoured to convince the obstinate and sorely-tried millionaire—the wealthy merchant-prince, whose gold had been unavailing to purchase an hour of life for the child of his old age—that Arthur’s offences were less dark than they appeared, and that excuses might, if sought forwith a will, be found even for this self-exiled sinner. To all the arguments, all the recapitulations of the affectionate brother tending to throw a light on the manifest disadvantages attendant on poor Arthur’s “raising,” “old Dub” would only shake his gray head with the mournfullest ofdismal gestures, and with a “Well, well,” which betokened alike a weariness of spirit and an absence of conviction that irritated Horace, while filling his heart with a pity beyond the reach of words.

He was very young, as I before said, or not only would these things not have taken such a strong effect upon his temper and his mind, but it may be that, after the utterance of the last terrible word, he would not—an act which he was weak enough to commit—have flung himself upon a lounging-chair near him, and, burying his face in his hands, have striven hard, yet ineffectually, to conceal his emotion.

Lady Millicent meanwhile looked on in silence; but, although apparently unmoved, she was, perhaps, nearer to giving way to a burst of sorrow than she had ever been in all her life before. It had, indeed, been a shock to her to learn that one of the ugliest of accusing words had been applied by a person on whom she looked down as the dust beneath her feet, to son of hers. The sight, also, of Horace—his face buried in his hands, and the tears trickling between his clenched fingers—acted, if not upon her heart, upon her nerves; and even as the melting of the winter’s snow tears up the stones most deeply buried in the torrent’s bed, Lady Millicent, moved by those hard-wrung dropsto pity and to grief, could, had she yielded to one of the best and purest impulses she had ever known, have fallen on her son’s neck and wept aloud.

For everything—turn which way she would, to the right hand or the left—everything at which she looked, whether in the past, the present, or the future, seemed against the unhappy woman who had so long hardened her heart and stiffened her neck against reproof. Her children—the sons and daughters whom, strange to say, she now, in the days of her defeat and in the hour of her humiliation discoveredwereof some value in her sight—became to her as instruments of punishment. It was surprising to what extent the love of power, and the dread of abdicating to another the sceptre of her rule, had blinded this woman to a sense not only of her duties, but of her affections. The hope, the aim that she had so long in view, of still retaining within her grasp the dominion that she so dearly loved, had absorbed every faculty, both of mind and heart; but when that hope had vanished, and when the purpose of her life was at an end, then—when, with the natural yearning of every woman who still retains some of the characteristics of her sex, for an object on which to expend the hopes and fears, the energies and anticipations of a still vigorous mind, sheturned with almost a passionately longing heart to the children whom God had given her—they in their turn refused the tardy boon thrownfaute de mieuxfor their acceptance.

The children of Cecil Vavasour refused—tacitly, it is true, and with the firm protest of silent apathy—the offering of a mother’s interest in their affairs, a parent’s sympathy with their sorrows. Many a year too late there sounded, for those neglected children of a good and Christian father, the cry of nature in the breast of that world-hardened and power-loving woman. They could not—couldnot love her. Like stunted trees, blighted by long exposure to cold winds and nipping frosts, the feeble sap within had ceased to rise, and no new shoots, no tender buds of love and tenderness, had opened beneath the warmth of maternal love, even as in the joyous spring the young leaves turn towards the sun their grateful tribute.

In other words, Lady Millicent’s children, albeit they did not openly either resist her authority or turn a cold shoulder to her tardy advances, were what is vulgarly called “no comfort” to her at this trying season of her life—a season when disappointment rendered still more unendurable to others a temper already none of the sweetest, and when consciousness of failuresubdued a spirit that had hitherto risen proudly above the threatened ills of life.

Perhaps, had Lady Millicent’s children been enabled to look within the heart that had at last begun to melt beneath the influence of maternal tenderness, their feelings might have been softened, moved by the knowledge that, in spite of bygone proofs to the contrary, they were nevertheless beloved; but no such fairy-gift being bestowed upon them, and it being a boasted peculiarity of Lady Millicent’s idiosyncrasy that she never betrayed to others the feelings that were making havoc in her breast, it followed that not only the son whose grief for his brother’s departure had first aroused her maternal sympathies, but that the daughters—the sickly Rhoda and the more spirited Katherine—should have remained in ignorance of their mother’s yearnings after affection, while, in a silence full of reproachful meaning, they brooded over the events of the past.

Of the three who so often met together to talk in saddened whispers of their banished brother, of poor Sophy’s death, and, when Rhoda was not present, ofherfailing health, her broken spirits, she who was the most rebellious, the least willing to submit to the gloom which death and failure had cast around their home, was Kate—Kate, the gay-hearted and theinsouciante—Katewho had expected to marry, and had hoped to be happy—Kate, to whom the idea of a return,in statu quo, to the dulness and monotony of Gillingham was as a sentence of banishment to a desert land beyond the seas. And after all they did not return, at least for thedeadseason, to Gillingham; for a medical opinion, demanded with an anxiety carefully hidden from her children, on the condition of Rhoda’s health pronounced that for thechanceof life it was absolutely necessary that before the autumn should set in Miss Vavasour must be in the sunny island where so many victims to east winds and defective lungs retire to die.

They are at Madeira now, those three sad and silent women; sad and silent, for Lady Millicent was too old to change the habits of a life, and Rhoda—depressed not only by a blighted attachment but by the sickness which is unto death—makes no effort to seem the thing she is not. Only Kate still longs and pines to be happy, but it is hard to fight against reality, and very hard to kick against the pricks. Sheknowsthat the fiat has gone forth, and that her poor pale Rhoda—the Rhoda who might, so Katie thinks, have been the contented wife of stupid George Wallingford—is to die. She foresees a dismal future with the mother whom she believes to bethe cause of all their various sorrows, and Katherine’s rosy face begins to lose its freshness, and her voice its joyous tone while dwelling on the sadness of the days to come.

Reader, there is no crime related in these volumes; no commandment has been ostensibly and boldly broken; and yet the consequences of hidden sins, of sins unwhipped of justice, have proved terribly disastrous both to the “living that now live, and to the dead that have been called to judgment.” It is not always, it is not even often, that the results of an indulgence in evil passions, in iniquitous desires, and in the hungering after the things that belong neither of our own peace nor to that of others, are brought immediately before us. It may be that while we, in a safe haven from the storms of life at the season when

“Age steals to its allotted nook,Contented and serene,”

are ignorant of the fact that the errors of others may be visited on our heads, “some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,” some poor deluded sister may be rueing the consequences (indirectly) of our shortcomings. Even of our very words—our thoughtlessness and apparently unmeaning remarks—evil may arise. The French proverb says,“Oui et non sont bien courts à dire, mais avant que de les dire il y faut penser longtemps.” Alas, how few amongst us are there who think before theyact, how fewer still before they speak! A precious life may be lost, a child may be rendered motherless, the hearth of the old may be made desolate, and all because of thoughtless words spoken to foolish ears; while the truth of the old historian’s words “Cupido dominandi cunctis affectibus flagrantior est,” is to a certain degree verified by the evils which a love of power and a mean jealousy of rule have entailed upon more than one deserving character in the foregoing pages. Truly, seeing that we are but links in the great chain of human events, it behoves us to take good heed, not only to ourwaysbut to the seeing that we offend not with the unruly member, which, according to high authority, never has and never can be brought under subjection. The characters in my story, whose future is darkened, and whose past has been made miserable by the great mischief which their busy tongues, their truant fancies, have wrought, can hardly (at least in the world’s opinion) be stigmatised as desperate and grievous sinners. They hadonlynot bridled the “little member, which boasteth great things,” had onlylistenedwhen duty should have caused them to close theirears to words which were dangerous because either too tender or too hard! Such had been amongst the sins of those whose punishment would be life-long—life-long, because for them the past is embittered by vain regrets—life-long, for neither to the mother who was false to her trust, nor to the old, the middle-aged, or the young whose faults and follies have been cited in this story, canremorsebe divorced from the sad paths of memory—life-long because, looking back upon the stream of life, they, with heavy hearts, could not fail to see, midst the soft rippling waves, the heavy stone that

“some devil threwAt their life’s mid-current, thwarting God!”

THE END.LONDON:ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:the precess=> the process {pg 10}John Beachman=> John Beacham {pg 99}Mr. Duberley=> Mr. Duberly {pg 155}suppposing them=> supposing them {pg 166}In was nearly noon=> It was nearly noon {pg 208}said Honour, answering=> said Honor, answering {pg 252}faults tribulalation=> faults tribulation {pg 260}

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

the precess=> the process {pg 10}

John Beachman=> John Beacham {pg 99}

Mr. Duberley=> Mr. Duberly {pg 155}

suppposing them=> supposing them {pg 166}

In was nearly noon=> It was nearly noon {pg 208}

said Honour, answering=> said Honor, answering {pg 252}

faults tribulalation=> faults tribulation {pg 260}

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