"To rule the man who rules the land,But yet a spirit still, and dampWith something from a spirit-lamp—
"To rule the man who rules the land,But yet a spirit still, and dampWith something from a spirit-lamp—
or however the thing goes. I don't always quote quite accurately, you will perceive! I generally improve."
"I'm not sure that Lady Kesterton does believe in the pedigree," and Elisabeth looked wise; "because she once went out of her way to assure me that she did."
Lord Bobby groaned. "I beseech you to be careful, Miss Farringdon; you'll never get that photograph if you keep forgetting yourself like this!"
Elisabeth continued—
"If I were a man I should belong to the Herald's Office. It would be such fun to be called a 'Red Bonnet' or a 'Green Griffin,' or some other nice fairy-tale-ish name; and to make it one's business to unite divided families, and to restore to deserving persons their long-lost great-great-grandparents. Think of the unselfish joy one would feel in saying to a worthy grocer, 'Here is your great-great-grandmother; take her and be happy!' Or to a successful milliner, 'I have found your mislaid grandfather; be a mother to him for the rest of your life!' It would give one the most delicious, fairy-godmotherly sort of satisfaction!"
"It would," Sir Wilfred agreed. "One would feel one's self a philanthropist of the finest water."
"Thinking about almonds-and-raisins has made me feel hungry," exclaimed Lady Silverhampton. "Let us have lunch! And while the servants are laying the table, we had better get out of the boat and have a stroll. It would be more amusing."
So the party wandered about for a while in couples through fields bespangled with buttercups; and it happened—not unnaturally—that Cecil and Elisabeth found themselves together.
"You are very quiet to-day," she said; "how is that? You are generally such a chatty person, but to-day you out-silence the Sphinx."
"You know the reason."
"No; I don't. To my mind there is no reason on earth strong enough to account for voluntary silence. So tell me."
"I am silent because I want to talk to you; and if I can't do that, I don't want to talk at all. But among all these grand people you seem so far away from me. Yesterday we were such close friends; but to-day I stretch out groping hands, and try in vain to touch you. Do you never dream that you seek for people for a long time and find them at last; and then, when you find them, you can not get near to them? Well, I feel just like that to-day with you."
Elisabeth was silent for a moment; her thoughts were far away from Cecil. "Yes, I know that dream well," she said slowly, "I have often had it; but I never knew that anybody had ever had it except me." And suddenly there came over her the memory of how, long years ago, she used to dream that dream nearly every night. It was at the time when she was first estranged from Christopher, and when the wound of his apparent indifference to her was still fresh. Over and over again she used to dream that she and Christopher were once more the friends that they had been, but with an added tenderness that their actual intercourse had never known. Which of us has not experienced that strange dream-tenderness—often for the most unlikely people—which hangs about us for days after the dream has vanished, and invests the objects of it with an interest which their living presence never aroused? In that old dream of Elisabeth's her affection for Christopher was so great that when he went away she followed after him, and sought him for a long time in vain; and when at last she found him he was no longer the same Christopher that heused to be, but there was an impassable barrier between them which she fruitlessly struggled to break through. The agony of the fruitless struggle always awakened her, so that she never knew what the end of the dream was going to be.
It was years since Elisabeth had dreamed this dream—years since she had even remembered it—but Cecil's remark brought it all back to her, as the scent of certain flowers brings back the memory of half-forgotten summer days; and once again she felt herself drawn to him by that bond of similarity which was so strong between them, and which is the most powerfully attractive force in the world—except, perhaps, the attractive force of contrast. It is the people who are the most like, and the most unlike, ourselves, that we love the best; to the others we are more or less indifferent.
"I think you are the most sympathetic person I ever met," she added. "You have what the Psalmist would call 'an understanding heart.'"
"I think it is only you whom I understand, Miss Farringdon; and that only because you and I are so much alike."
"I should have thought you would have understood everybody, you have such quick perceptions and such keen sympathies." Elisabeth, for all her cleverness, had yet to learn to differentiate between the understanding heart and the understanding head. There is but little real similarity between the physician who makes an accurate diagnosis of one's condition, and the friend who suffers from the identical disease.
"No; I don't understand everybody. I don't understand all these fine people whom we are with to-day, for instance. They seem to me so utterly worldly and frivolous and irresponsible, that I haven'tpatience with them. I daresay they look down upon me for not having blood, and I know I look down upon them for not having brains."
Elisabeth's eyes twinkled in spite of herself. She remembered how completely Cecil had been out of it in the conversation on the launch; and she wondered whether the King of Nineveh had ever invited Jonah to the state banquets. She inclined to the belief that he had not.
"But they have brains," was all she said.
Cecil was undeniably cross. "They talk a lot of nonsense," he retorted pettishly.
"Exactly. People without brains never talk nonsense; that is just where the difference comes in. If a man talks clever nonsense to me, I know that man isn't a fool; it is a sure test."
"There is nonsense and nonsense."
"And there are fools and fools." Elisabeth spoke severely; she was always merciless upon anything in the shape of humbug or snobbery. Maria Farringdon's training had not been thrown away.
"I despise mere frivolity," said Cecil loftily.
"My dear Mr. Farquhar, there is a time for everything; and if you think that a lunch-party on the river in the middle of the season is a suitable occasion for discussing Lord Stonebridge's pecuniary difficulties, or solving Lady Silverhampton's religious doubts, I can only say that I don't." Elisabeth was irritated; she knew that Cecil was annoyed with her friends not because they could talk smart nonsense, but because he could not.
"Still, you can not deny that the upper classes are frivolous," Cecil persisted.
"But I do deny it. I don't think that they are a bit more frivolous than any other class, but I thinkthey are a good deal more plucky. Each class has its own particular virtue, and the distinguishing one of the aristocracy seems to me to be pluck; therefore they make light of things which other classes of society would take seriously. It isn't that they don't feel their own sorrows and sicknesses, but they won't allow other people to feel them; which is, after all, only a form of good manners."
But Cecil was still rather sulky. "I belong to the middle class and I am proud of it."
"So do I; but identifying one's self with one class doesn't consist in abusing all the others, any more than identifying one's self with one church consists in abusing all the others—though some people seem to think it does."
"These grand people may entertain you and be pleasant to you in their way, I don't deny; but they don't regard you as one of themselves unless you are one," persisted Cecil, with all the bitterness of a small nature.
Elisabeth smiled with all the sweetness of a large one. "And why should they? Sir Wilfred and you and I are pleasant enough to them in our own way, but we don't regard any of them as one of ourselves unless he is one. They don't show it, and we don't show it: we are all too well-mannered; but we can not help knowing that they are not artists any more than they can help knowing that we are not aristocrats. Being conscious that certain people lack certain qualities which one happens to possess, is not the same thing as despising those people; and I always think it as absurd as it is customary to describe one's consciousness of one's own qualifications as self-respect, and other people's consciousness of theirs as pride and vanity."
"Then aren't you ever afraid of being looked down upon?" asked Cecil, to whom any sense of social inferiority was as gall and wormwood.
Elisabeth gazed at him in amazement. "Good gracious, no! Such an idea never entered into my head. I don't look down upon other people for lacking my special gifts, so why should they look down upon me for lacking theirs? Of course they would look down upon me and make fun of me if I pretended to be one of them, and I should richly deserve it; just as we look down upon and make fun of Philistines who cover their walls with paper fans and then pretend that they are artists. Pretence is always vulgar and always ridiculous; but I know of nothing else that is either."
"How splendid you are!" exclaimed Cecil, to whose artistic sense fineness of any kind always appealed, even if it was too high for him to attain to it. "Therefore you will not despise me for being so inferior to you—you will only help me to grow more like you, won't you?"
And because Cecil possessed the indefinable gift which the world calls charm, Elisabeth straightway overlooked his shortcomings, and set herself to assist him in correcting them. Perhaps there are few things in life more unfair than the certain triumph of these individuals who have the knack of gaining the affection of their fellows; or more pathetic than the ultimate failure of those who lack this special attribute. The race may not be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but both race and battle are, nine times out of ten, to the man or the woman who has mastered the art of first compelling devotion and then retaining it. It was the possession of this gift on the part of King David, that made men go in jeopardyof their lives in order to satisfy his slightest whim; and it was because the prophet Elijah was a solitary soul, commanding the fear rather than the love of men, that after his great triumph he fled into the wilderness and requested for himself that he might die. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that to this lonely prophet it was granted to see visions of angels and to hear the still small Voice; and that, therefore, there are abundant compensations for those men and women who have not the knack of hearing and speaking the glib interchanges of affection, current among their more attractive fellows. There is infinite pathos in the thought of these solitary souls, yearning to hear and to speak words of loving greeting, and yet shut out—by some accident of mind or manner—from doing either the one or the other; but when their turn comes to see visions of angels and to hear the still small Voice, men need not pity them overmuch. When once we have seen Him as He is, it will matter but little to us whether we stood alone upon the mountain in the wind and the earthquake and the fire, while the Lord passed by; or whether He drew near and walked with us as we trod the busy ways of life, and was known of us, as we sat at meat, in breaking of bread.
As Elisabeth looked at him with eyes full of sympathy, Cecil continued—
"I have had such a hard life, with no one to care for me; and the hardness of my lot has marred my character, and—through that—my art."
"Tell me about your life," Elisabeth said softly. "I seem to know so little of you and yet to know you so well."
"You shall read what back-numbers I have, but most of them have been lost, so that I have not readthem myself. I really don't know who I am, as my father died when I was a baby, and my poor mother followed him in a few months, never having recovered from the shock of his death. I was born in Australia, at Broken Hill, and was an only child. As far as I can make out, my parents had no relations; or, if they had, they had quarrelled with them all. They were very poor; and when they died, leaving one wretched little brat behind them, some kind friends adopted the poor beggar and carried him off to a sheep-farm, where they brought him up among their own children."
"Poor little lonely boy!"
"I was lonely—more lonely than you can imagine; for, kind as they were to me, I was naturally not as dear to them as their own children. I was an outsider; I have always been an outsider; so, perhaps, there is some excuse for that intense soreness on my part which you so much deprecate whenever this fact is once more brought home to me."
"I am sorry that I was so hard on you," said Elisabeth, in a very penitent voice; "but it is one of my worst faults that I am always being too hard on people. Will you forgive me?"
"Of course I will." And Elisabeth—also possessing charm—earned forgiveness as quickly as she had accorded it.
"Please tell me more," she pleaded.
"The other children were such a loud, noisy, happy-go-lucky pack, that they completely overpowered a delicate, sensitive boy. Moreover, I detested the life there—the roughness and unrefinement of it all." And Cecil's eyes filled with tears at the mere remembrance of his childish miseries.
"Did you stay with them till you grew up?"
"Yes; I was educated—after a fashion—with their own sons. But at last a red-letter day dawned for me. An English artist came to stay at the sheep-farm, and discovered that I also was among the prophets. He was a bachelor, and he took an uncommon fancy to me; it ended in his adopting me and bringing me to England, and making of me an artist like himself."
"Another point of similarity between us!" Elisabeth cried; "my parents died when I was a baby, and I also was adopted."
"I am so glad; all the sting seems to be taken out of things if I feel I share them with you."
"Then where is your adopted father now?"
"He died when I was five-and-twenty, Miss Farringdon; and left me barely enough to keep me from abject poverty, should I not be able to make a living by my brush."
"And you have never learned anything more about your parents?"
"Never; and now I expect I never shall. The friends who brought me up told me that they believed my father came from England, and had been connected with some business over here; but what the business was they did not know, nor why he left it. It is almost impossible to find out anything more, after this long lapse of time; it is over thirty years now since my parents died. And, besides, I very much doubt whether Farquhar was their real name at all."
"What makes you think that?"
"Because the name was carefully erased from the few possessions my poor father left behind him. So now I have let the matter drop," added Cecil, with a bitter laugh, "as it is sometimes a mistake tolook up back-numbers in the colonies; they are not invariably pleasant reading."
Here conversation was interrupted by Lady Silverhampton's voice calling her friends to lunch; and Cecil and Elisabeth had to join the others.
"If any of you are tired of life," said her ladyship, as they sat down, "I wish you'd try some of this lobster mayonnaise that my new cook has made, and report on it. To me it looks the most promising prescription for death by torture."
"O bid me die, and I will dareE'en mayonnaise for thee,"
"O bid me die, and I will dareE'en mayonnaise for thee,"
exclaimed Lord Bobby, manfully helping himself.
And then the talk flowed on as pleasantly and easily as the river, until it was time to land again and return to town. But for the rest of the day, and for many a day afterward, a certain uncomfortable suspicion haunted Elisabeth, which she could not put away from her, try as she would; a suspicion that, after all, her throne was not as firmly fixed as she had hoped and had learned to believe.
He that beginneth may not end,And he that breaketh can not mend.
He that beginneth may not end,And he that breaketh can not mend.
The summer which brought fame to Elisabeth, brought something better than fame to Willie Tremaine. All through the winter the child had grown visibly feebler and frailer, and the warmer weather seemed to bring additional weakness rather than strength. In vain did Alan try to persuade himself that Willie was no worse this year than he had been other years, and that he soon would be all right again. As a matter of fact, he soon was all right again; but not in the way which his father meant.
Caleb Bateson's wisdom had been justified. Through his passionate love for little Willie, Alan had drawn near to the kingdom of God; not as yet to the extent of formulating any specific creed or attaching himself to any special church—that was to come later; but he had learned, by the mystery of his own fatherhood, to stretch out groping hands toward the great Fatherhood that had called him into being; and by his own love for his suffering child to know something of the Love that passeth knowledge. Therefore Alan Tremaine was a betterand wiser man than he had been in times past. A strong friendship had gradually grown up between himself and Christopher Thornley; and it was a friendship which was good for both of them. Though Christopher never talked about his religious beliefs, he lived them; and it is living epistles such as this which are best known and read of all thoughtful men, and which—far more than all the books and sermons ever written—are gradually converting the kingdoms of this world into the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. Alan would have refuted—to his own satisfaction, if not to Christopher's—any arguments which the latter might have brought forward in favour of Christianity; but he could not refute the evidence of a life which could never have been lived but for that Other Life lived in Judæa nineteen centuries ago. Perhaps his friendship with Christopher did as much for Alan as his love for Willie in opening his eyes to the hidden things of God.
The intercourse with the Tremaines was, on the other hand, of great advantage to Christopher, as it afforded him the opportunity of meeting and mixing with men as clever and as cultivated as himself, which is not always easy for a lonely man in a provincial town who devotes his loneliness to intellectual pursuits. Christopher was fast becoming one of the most influential men in Mershire; and his able management of the Osierfield had raised those works to a greater height of prosperity than they had ever attained before, even in the days of William and John Farringdon.
But now the shadows were darkening around Alan Tremaine, as day by day Willie gradually faded away. Felicia, too, at last awoke to the real stateof the case, and, in her way, was almost as anxious as her husband.
During the spring-time, as Willie's life grew shorter with the lengthening days, the child's chiefest delight lay in visits from Christopher. For Elisabeth's sake Christopher had always felt an interest in little Willie. Had not her dear hands fondled the child, before they were too busy to do anything but weave spells to charm the whole world? And had not her warm heart enfolded him, before her success and her fame had chilled its fires? For the sake of the Elisabeth that used to be, Christopher would always be a friend to Willie; and he did not find it hard to love the child for his own sake, since Christopher had great powers of loving, and but little to expend them upon.
As Willie continually asked for Elisabeth, Felicia wrote and told her so; and the moment she found she was wanted, Elisabeth came down to the Willows for a week—though her fame and the London season were alike at their height—and went every day to see Willie at the Moat House. He loved to have her with him, because she talked to him about things that his parents never mentioned to him; and as these things were drawing nearer to Willie day by day, his interest in them unconsciously increased. He and she had long talks together about the country on the other side of the hills, and what delightful times they would have when they reached it: how Willie would be able to walk as much as he liked, and Elisabeth would be able to love as much as she wanted, and life generally would turn out to be a success—a thing which it so rarely does on this side of the hills.
Christopher, as a rule, kept away from the MoatHouse when Elisabeth was there; he thought she did not wish to see him, and he was not the type of man to go where he imagined he was not wanted; but one afternoon they met there by accident, and Christopher inwardly blessed the Fate which made him do the very thing he had so studiously refrained from doing. He had been sitting with Tremaine, and she with Felicia and Willie; and they met in the hall on their way out.
"Are you going my way?" asked Elisabeth graciously, when they had shaken hands. It was dull at Sedgehill after London, and the old flirting spirit woke up in her and made her want to flirt with Christopher again, in spite of all that had happened. With the born flirt—as with all born players of games—the game itself is of more importance than the personality of the other players; which sometimes leads to unfortunate mistakes on the part of those players who do not rightly understand the rules of the game.
"Yes, Miss Farringdon, I am," said Christopher, who would have been going Elisabeth's way had that way led him straight to ruin. With him the personality of the player—in this case, at least—mattered infinitely more than any game she might choose to play. As long as he was talking to Elisabeth, he did not care a straw what they were talking about; which showed that he really was culpably indifferent to—if not absolutely ignorant of—the rules of the game.
"Then we might as well walk together." And Elisabeth drew on her long Suède gloves and leisurely opened her parasol, as they strolled down the drive after bidding farewell to the Tremaines.
Christopher was silent from excess of happiness.It was so wonderful to be walking by Elisabeth's side again, and listening to her voice, and watching the lights and shadows in those gray eyes of hers which sometimes were so nearly blue. But Elisabeth did not understand his silence; she translated it, as she would have translated silence on her own part, into either boredom or ill-temper, and she resented it accordingly.
"You are very quiet this afternoon. Aren't you going to talk to me?" she said; and Christopher's quick ear caught the sound of the irritation in her voice, though he could not for the life of him imagine what he had done to bring it there; but it served to silence him still further.
"Yes—yes, of course I am," he said lamely; "what shall we talk about? I am afraid there is nothing interesting to tell you about the Osierfield, things are going on so regularly there, and so well."
How exactly like Christopher to begin to talk about business when she had given him the chance to talk about more interesting subjects—herself, for instance, Elisabeth thought; but he never had a mind above sordid details! She did not, of course, know that at that identical moment he was wondering whether her eyes were darker than they used to be, or whether he had forgotten their exact shade; he could hardly have forgotten their colour, he decided, as there had never been a day when he had not remembered them since he saw them last; so they must actually be growing darker.
"I'm glad of that," said Elisabeth coldly, in her most fine-ladylike manner.
"It was distinctly kind of you to find time to run down here, in the midst of your London life, to seeWillie! He fretted after you sadly, and I am afraid the poor little fellow is not long for this world." And Christopher sighed.
Elisabeth noted the sigh and approved of it. It was a comfort to find that the man had feelings of any sort, she said to herself, even though only for a child; that was better than being entirely immersed in self-interest and business affairs.
So they talked about Willie for a time, and the conversation ran more smoothly—almost pleasantly.
Then they talked about books; and Elisabeth—who had grown into the habit of thinking that nobody outside London knew anything—was surprised to find that Christopher had read considerably more books than she had read, and had understood them far more thoroughly. But this part of the conversation was inclined to be stormy; since Christopher as a rule disliked the books that Elisabeth liked, and this she persisted in regarding as tantamount to disliking herself.
Whereupon she became defiant, and told stories of her life in London of which she knew Christopher would disapprove. There was nothing in the facts that he could possibly disapprove of, so she coloured them up until there was; and then, when she had succeeded in securing his disapproval, she was furious with him on account of it. Which was manifestly unfair, as Christopher in no way showed the regret which he could not refrain from experiencing, as he listened to Elisabeth making herself out so much more frivolous and heartless than she really was.
"This is the first time I have had an opportunity of congratulating you on your success," he said to her at last; "we are all very proud of it at Sedgehill;but, believe me, there is no one who rejoices in it a tithe as much as I do, if you will allow me to say so."
Elisabeth was slightly mollified. She had been trying all the time, as she was so fond of trying years ago, to divert the conversation into more personal channels; and Christopher had been equally desirous of keeping it out of the same. But this sounded encouraging.
"Thank you so much," she answered; "it is very nice of you all to be pleased with me! I always adored being admired and praised, if you remember."
Christopher remembered well enough; but he was not going to tell this crushing fine lady how well he remembered. If he had not exposed his heart for Elisabeth to peck at in the old days, he certainly was not going to expose it now; then she would only have been scientifically interested—now she would probably be disdainfully amused.
"I suppose you saw my picture in this year's Academy," Elisabeth added.
"Saw it? I should think I did. I went up to town on purpose to see it, as I always do when you have pictures on view at any of the shows."
"And what did you think of it?"
Christopher was silent for a moment; then he said—
"Do you want me to say pretty things to you or to tell you the truth?"
"Why, the truth, of course," replied Elisabeth, who considered that the two things were synonymous—or at any rate ought to be.
"And you won't be angry with me, or think me impertinent?"
"Of course not," answered Elisabeth, who mostcertainly would; and Christopher—not having yet learned wisdom—believed her.
"I thought it was a distinctly powerful picture—a distinctly remarkable picture—and if any one but you had painted it, I should have been delighted with it; but somehow I felt that it was not quite up to your mark—that you could do, and will do, better work."
For a second Elisabeth was dumbfounded with amazement and indignation. How dare this one man dispute the verdict of London? Then she said—
"In what way do you think the work could have been done better?"
"That is just what I can't tell you; I wish I could; but I'm not an artist, unfortunately. It seems to me that there are other people (not many, I admit, but still some) who could have painted that picture; while you are capable of doing work which no one else in the world could possibly do. Naturally I want to see you do your best, and am not satisfied when you do anything less."
Elisabeth tossed her head. "You are very hard to please, Mr. Thornley."
"I know I am, where your work is concerned; but that is because I have formed such a high ideal of your powers. If I admired you less, I should admire your work more, don't you see?"
But Elisabeth did not see. She possessed the true artist-spirit which craves for appreciation of its offspring more than for appreciation of itself—a feeling which perhaps no one but an artist or a mother really understands. Christopher, being neither, did not understand it in the least, and erroneously concluded that adoration of the creator absolves one from the necessity of admiration of the thing created.
"I shall never do a better piece of work than that," Elisabeth retorted, being imbued with the creative delusion that the latest creation is of necessity the finest creation. No artist could work at all if he did not believe that the work he was doing—or had just done—was the best piece of work he had ever done or ever should do. This is because his work, however good, always falls short of the ideal which inspired it; and, while he is yet working, he can not disentangle the ideal from the reality. He must be at a little distance from his work until he can do this properly; and Elisabeth was as yet under the influence of that creative glamour which made her see her latest picture as it should be rather than as it was.
"Oh, yes, you will; you will fulfil my ideal of you yet. I cherish no doubts on that score."
"I can't think what you see wrong in my picture," said Elisabeth somewhat pettishly.
"I don't see anything wrong in it. Good gracious! I must have expressed myself badly if I conveyed such an impression to you as that, and you would indeed be justified in writing me down an ass. I think it is a wonderfully clever picture—so clever that nobody but you could ever paint a cleverer one."
"Well, I certainly couldn't. You must have formed an exaggerated estimate of my artistic powers."
"I think not! You can, and will, paint a distinctly better picture some day."
"In what way better?"
"Ah! there you have me. But I will try to tell you what I mean, though I speak as a fool; and if I say anything very egregious, you must let my ignorance be my excuse, and pardon the clumsyexpression of my intentions because they are so well meant. It doesn't seem to me to be enough for anybody to do good work; they must go further, and do the best possible work in their power. Nothing but one's best is really worth the doing; the cult of the second-best is always a degrading form of worship. Even though one man's second-best be intrinsically superior to the best work of his fellows, he has nevertheless no right to offer it to the world. He is guilty of an injustice both to himself and the world in so doing."
"I don't agree with you. This is an age of results; and the world's business is with the actual value of the thing done, rather than with the capabilities of the man who did it."
"You are right in calling this an age of results, Miss Farringdon; but that is the age's weakness and not its strength. The moment men begin to judge by results, they judge unrighteous judgment. They confound the great man with the successful man; the saint with the famous preacher; the poet with the writer of popular music-hall songs."
"Then you think that we should all do our best, and not bother ourselves too much as to results?"
"I go further than that; I think that the mere consideration of results incapacitates us from doing our best work at all."
"I don't agree with you," repeated Elisabeth haughtily. But, nevertheless, she did.
"I daresay I am wrong; but you asked me for my candid opinion and I gave it to you. It is a poor compliment to flatter people—far too poor ever to be paid by me to you; and in this case the simple truth is a far greater compliment than any flattery could be. You can imagine what a high estimate I haveformed of your powers, when so great a picture as The Pillar of Cloud fails to satisfy me."
The talk about her picture brought to Elisabeth's mind the remembrance of that other picture which had been almost as popular as hers; and, with it, the remembrance of the man who had painted it.
"I suppose you have heard nothing more about George Farringdon's son," she remarked, with apparent irrelevance. "I wonder if he will ever turn up?"
"Oh! I hardly think it is likely now; I have quite given up all ideas of his doing so," replied Christopher cheerfully.
"But supposing he did?"
"In that case I am afraid he would be bound to enter into his kingdom. But I really don't think you need worry any longer over that unpleasant contingency, Miss Farringdon; it is too late in the day; if he were going to appear upon the scene at all, he would have appeared before now, I feel certain."
"You really think so?"
"Most assuredly I do. Besides, it will not be long before the limit of time mentioned by your cousin is reached; and then a score of George Farringdon's sons could not turn you out of your rights."
For a moment Elisabeth thought she would tell Christopher about her suspicions as to the identity of Cecil Farquhar. But it was as yet merely a suspicion, and she knew by experience how ruthlessly Christopher pursued the line of duty whenever that line was pointed out to him; so she decided to hold her peace (and her property) a little longer. But she also knew that the influence of Christopher was even yet so strong upon her, that, when the timecame, she should do the right thing in spite of herself and in defiance of her own desires. And this knowledge, strange to say, irritated her still further against the innocent and unconscious Christopher.
The walk from the Moat House to Sedgehill was a failure as far as the re-establishment of friendly relations between Christopher and Elisabeth was concerned, for it left her with the impression that he was less appreciative of her and more wrapped up in himself and his own opinions than ever; while it conveyed to his mind the idea that her success had only served to widen the gulf between them, and that she was more indifferent to and independent of his friendship than she had ever been before.
Elisabeth went back to London, and Christopher to his work again, and little Willie drew nearer and nearer to the country on the other side of the hills; until one day it happened that the gate which leads into that country was left open by the angels, and Willie slipped through it and became strong and well. His parents were left outside the gate, weeping, and at first they refused to be comforted; but after a time Alan learned the lesson which Willie had been sent to teach him, and saw plain.
"Dear," he said to his wife at last, "I've got to begin life over again so as to go the way that Willie went. The little chap made me promise to meet him in the country over the hills, as he called it; and I've never broken a promise to Willie and I never will. It will be difficult for us, I know; but God will help us."
Felicia looked at him with sad, despairing eyes. "There is no God," she said; "you have often told me so."
"I know I have; that was because I was such ablind fool. But now I know that there is a God, and that you and I must serve Him together."
"How can we serve a myth?" Felicia persisted.
"He is no myth, Felicia. I lied to you when I told you that He was."
And then Felicia laughed; the first time that she had laughed since Willie's death, and it was not a pleasant laugh to hear. "Do you think you can play pitch-and-toss with a woman's soul in that way? Well, you can't. When I met you I believed in God as firmly as any girl believed; but you laughed me out of my faith, and proved to me what a string of lies and folly it all was; and then I believed in you as firmly as before I had believed in God, and I knew that Christianity was a fable."
Alan's face grew very white. "Good heavens! Felicia, did I do this?"
"Of course you did, and you must take the consequences of your own handiwork; it is too late to undo it now. Don't try to comfort me, even if you can drug yourself, with fairy-tales about meeting Willie again. I shall never see my little child again in this life, and there is no other."
"You are wrong; believe me, you are wrong." And Alan's brow was damp with the anguish of his soul.
"It is only what you taught me. But because you took my faith away from me, it doesn't follow that you can give it back to me again; it has gone forever."
"Oh, Felicia, Felicia, may God and you and Willie forgive me, for I can never forgive myself!"
"I can not forgive you, because I have nothing to forgive; you did me no wrong in opening my eyes. And God can not forgive you, because therenever was a God; so you did Him no wrong. And Willie can not forgive you, because there is no Willie now; so you did him no wrong."
"My dearest, it can not all have gone from you forever; it will come back to you, and you will believe as I do."
Felicia shook her head. "Never; it is too late. You have taken away my Lord, and I know not where you have laid Him; and, however long I live, I shall never find Him again."
And she went out of the room in the patience of a great despair, and left her husband alone with his misery.
On this side of the hills, alas!Unrest our spirit fills;For gold, men give us stones and brass—For asphodels, rank weeds and grass—For jewels, bits of coloured glass—On this side of the hills.
On this side of the hills, alas!Unrest our spirit fills;For gold, men give us stones and brass—For asphodels, rank weeds and grass—For jewels, bits of coloured glass—On this side of the hills.
The end of July was approaching, and the season was drawing to a close. Cecil Farquhar and Elisabeth had seen each other frequently since they first met at the Academysoirée, and had fallen into the habit of being much together; consequently the thought of parting was pleasant to neither of them.
"How shall I manage to live without you?" asked Cecil one day, as they were walking across the Park together. "I shall fall from my ideals when I am away from your influence, and again become the grovelling worlding that I was before I met you."
"But you mustn't do anything of the kind. I am not the keeper of your conscience."
"But you are, and you must be. I feel a good man and a strong one when I am with you, and as if all things were possible to me; and now that I have once found you, I can not and will not let you go."
"You will have to let me go, Mr. Farquhar; for I go down to the Willows at the end of the month, and mean to stay there for some time. I have enjoyed my success immensely; but it has tired me rather, and made me want to rest and be stupid again."
"But I can not spare you," persisted Cecil; and there was real feeling in his voice. Elisabeth represented so much to him—wealth and power and the development of his higher nature; and although, had she been a poor woman, he would possibly never have cherished any intention of marrying her, his wish to do so was not entirely sordid. There are so few wishes in the hearts of any of us which are entirely sordid or entirely ideal; yet we find it so difficult to allow for this in judging one another.
"Don't you understand," Farquhar went on, "all that you have been to me: how you have awakened the best that is in me, and taught me to be ashamed of the worst? And do you think that I shall now be content to let you slip quietly out of my life, and to be the shallow, selfish, worldly wretch I was before the Academysoirée? Not I."
Elisabeth was silent. She could not understand herself, and this want of comprehension on her part annoyed and disappointed her. At last all her girlish dreams had come true; here was the fairy prince for whom she had waited for so long—a prince of the kingdom she loved above all others, the kingdom of art; and he came to her in the spirit in which she had always longed for him to come—the spirit of failure and of loneliness, begging her to make up to him for all that he had hitherto missed in life. Yet—to her surprise—his appeal found her cold andunresponsive, as if he were calling out for help to another woman and not to her.
Cecil went on: "Elisabeth, won't you be my wife, and so make me into the true artist which, with you to help me, I feel I am capable of becoming; but of which, without you, I shall always fall short? You could do anything with me—you know you could; you could make me into a great artist and a good man, but without you I can be neither. Surely you will not give me up now! You have opened to me the door of a paradise of which I never dreamed before, and now don't shut it in my face."
"I don't want to shut it in your face," replied Elisabeth gently; "surely you know me better than that. But I feel that you are expecting more of me than I can ever fulfil, and that some day you will be sadly disappointed in me."
"No, no; I never shall. It is not in you to disappoint anybody, you are so strong and good and true. Tell me the truth: don't you feel that I am as clay in your hands, and that you can do anything with me that you choose?"
Elisabeth looked him full in the face with her clear gray eyes. "I feel that I could do anything with you if only I loved you enough; but I also feel that I don't love you, and that therefore I can do nothing with you at all. I believe with you that a strong woman can be the making of a man she loves; but she must love him first, or else all her strength will be of no avail."
Farquhar's face fell. "I thought you did love me. You always seemed so glad when I came and sorry when I left; and you enjoyed talking to me, and we understood each other, and were happy together. Can you deny that?"
"No; it is all true. I never enjoyed talking with anybody more than with you; and I certainly never in my life met any one who understood my ways of looking at things as thoroughly as you do, nor any one who entered so completely into all my moods. As a friend you are most satisfactory to me, as a comrade most delightful; but I can not help thinking that love is something more than that."
"But it isn't," cried Cecil eagerly; "that is just where lots of women make such a mistake. They wait and wait for love all their lives; and find out too late that they passed him by years ago, without recognising him, but called him by some wrong name, such as friendship and the like."
"I wonder if you are right."
"I am sure that I am. Women who are at all romantic, have such exaggerated ideas as to what love really is. Like the leper of old, they ask for some great thing to work the wonderful miracle upon their lives; and so they miss the simple way which would lead them to happiness."
Elisabeth felt troubled and perplexed. "I enjoy your society," she said, "and I adore your genius, and I pity your loneliness, and I long to help your weakness. Is this love, do you think?"
"Yes, yes; I am certain of it."
"I thought it would be different," said Elisabeth sadly; "I thought that when it did come it would transform the whole world, just as religion does, and that all things would become new. I thought it would turn out to be the thing that we are longing for when the beauty of nature makes us feel sad with a longing we know not for what. I thought it would change life's dusty paths intogolden pavements, and earth's commonest bramble-bush into a magic briar-rose."
"And it hasn't?"
"No; everything is just the same as it was before I met you. As far as I can see, there is no livelier emerald twinkling in the grass of the Park than there ever is at the end of July, and no purer sapphire melting into the Serpentine."
Cecil laughed lightly. "You are as absurdly romantic as a school-girl! Surely people of our age ought to know better than still to believe in fairyland; but, as I have told you before, you are dreadfully young for your age in some things."
"I suppose I am. I still do believe in fairyland—at least I did until ten minutes ago."
"I assure you there is no such place."
"Not for anybody?"
"Not for anybody over twenty-one."
"I wish there was," said Elisabeth with a sigh. "I should have liked to believe it was there, even if I had never found it."
"Don't be silly, lady mine. You are so great and wise and clever that I can not bear to hear you say foolish things. And I want us to talk about how you are going to help me to be a great painter, and how we will sit together as gods, and create new worlds. There is nothing that I can not do with you to help me, Elisabeth. You must be good to me and hard upon me at the same time. You must never let me be content with anything short of my best, or willing to do second-rate work for the sake of money; you must keep the sacredness of art ever before my eyes, but you must also be very gentle to me when I am weary, and very tender to me when I am sad; you must encourageme when my spirit fails me, and comfort me when the world is harsh. All these things you can do, and you are the only woman who can. Promise me, Elisabeth, that you will."
"I can not promise anything now. You must let me think it over for a time. I am so puzzled by it all. I thought that when the right man came and told a woman that he loved her, she would know at once that it was for him—and for him only—that she had been waiting all her life; and that she would never have another doubt upon the subject, but would feel convinced that it was settled for all time and eternity. And this is so different!"
Again Cecil laughed his light laugh. "I suppose girls sometimes feel like that when they are very young; but not women of your age, Elisabeth."
"Well, you must let me think about it. I can not make up my mind yet."
And for whole days and nights Elisabeth thought about it, and could come to no definite conclusion.
There was no doubt in her mind that she liked Cecil Farquhar infinitely better than she had liked any of the other men who had asked her to marry them; also that no one could possibly be more companionable to her than he was, or more sympathetic with and interested in her work—and this is no small thing to the man or woman who possesses the creative faculty. Then she was lonely in her greatness, and longed for companionship; and Cecil had touched her in her tenderest point by his constant appeals to her to help and comfort him. Nevertheless the fact remained that, though he interested her, he did not touch her heart; that remained a closed door to him. But supposing that her friends wereright, and that she was too cold by nature ever to feel the ecstasies which transfigure life for some women, should she therefore shut herself out from ordinary domestic joys and interests? Because she was incapable of attaining to the ideal, must the commonplace pleasures of the real also be denied her? If the best was not for her, would it not be wise to accept the second-best, and extract as much happiness from it as possible? Moreover, she knew that Cecil was right when he said that she could make of him whatsoever she wished; and this was no slight temptation to a woman who loved power as much as Elisabeth loved it.
There was also another consideration which had some weight with her; and that was the impression, gradually gaining strength in her mind, that Cecil Farquhar was George Farringdon's son. She could take no steps in the way of proving this just then, as Christopher was away for his holiday somewhere in the Black Forest, and nothing could be done without him; but she intended, as soon as he returned, to tell him of her suspicion, and to set him to discover whether or not Cecil was indeed the lost heir. Although it never seriously occurred to Elisabeth to hold her peace upon this matter and so keep her fortune to herself, she was still human enough not altogether to despise a course of action which enabled her to be rich and righteous at the same time, and to go on with her old life at the Willows and her work among the people at the Osierfield, even after George Farringdon's son had come into his own.
Although the balance of Elisabeth's judgment was upon the side of Cecil Farquhar and his suit, she could not altogether stifle—try as she might—hersense of disappointment at finding how grossly poets and such people had exaggerated the truth in their description of the feeling men call love. It was all so much less exalted and so much more commonplace than she had expected. She had long ago come to the conclusion—from comparisons between Christopher and the men who had wanted to marry her—that a man's friendship is a better thing than a man's love; but she had always clung to the belief that a woman's love would prove a better thing than a woman's friendship: yet now she herself was in love with Cecil—at least he said that she was, and she was inclined to agree with him—and she was bound to admit that, as an emotion, this fell far short of her old attachment to Cousin Anne or Christopher or even Felicia. But that was because now she was getting old, she supposed, and her heart had lost its early warmth and freshness; and she experienced a weary ache of regret that Cecil had not come across her path in those dear old days when she was still young enough to make a fairyland for herself, and to abide therein for ever.
"The things that come too late are almost as bad as the things that never come at all," she thought with a sigh; not knowing that there is no such word as "too late" in God's Vocabulary.
At the end of the week she had made up her mind to marry Cecil Farquhar. Women, after all, can not pick and choose what lives they shall lead; they can only take such goods as the gods choose to provide, and make the best of the same; and if they let the possible slip while they are waiting for the impossible, they have only themselves to blame that they extract no good at all out of life. So she wrote to Cecil, asking him to come and see herthe following day; and then she sat down and wondered why women are allowed to see visions and to dream dreams, if the actual is to fall so far short of the imaginary. Brick walls and cobbled streets are all very well in their way; but they make but dreary dwelling-places for those who have promised themselves cities where the walls are of jasper and the pavements of gold. "If one is doomed to live always on this side of the hills, it is a waste of time to think too much about the life on the other side," Elisabeth reasoned with herself, "and I have wasted a lot of time in this way; but I can not help wondering why we are allowed to think such lovely thoughts, and to believe in such beautiful things, if our dreams are never to come true, but are only to spoil us for the realities of life. Now I must bury all my dear, silly, childish idols, as Jacob did; and I will not have any stone to mark the place, because I want to forget where it is."
Poor Elisabeth! The grave of what has been, may be kept green with tears; but the grave of what never could have been, is best forgotten. We may not hide away the dear old gnomes and pixies and fairies in consecrated ground—that is reserved for what has once existed, and so has the right to live again; but for what never existed we can find no sepulchre, for it came out of nothingness, and to nothingness must it return.
After Elisabeth had posted her letter to Cecil, and while she was still musing over the problem as to whether life's fulfilment must always fall short of its promise, the drawing-room door was thrown open and a visitor announced. Elisabeth was tired and depressed, and did not feel in the mood for keeping up her reputation for brilliancy; so it waswith a sigh of weariness that she rose to receive Quenelda Carson, a struggling little artist whom she had known slightly for years. But her interest was immediately aroused when she saw that Quenelda's usually rosy face was white with anguish, and the girl's pretty eyes swollen with many tears.
"What is the matter, dear?" asked Elisabeth, with that sound in her voice which made all weak things turn to her. "You are in trouble, and you must let me help you."
Quenelda broke out into bitter weeping. "Oh! give him back to me—give him back to me," she cried; "you can never love him as I do, you are too cold and proud and brilliant."
Elisabeth stood as if transfixed. "Whatever do you mean?"
"You have everything," Quenelda went on, in spite of the sobs which shook her slender frame; "you had money and position to begin with, and everybody thought well of you and admired you and made life easy for you. And then you came out of your world into ours, and carried away the prizes which we had been striving after for years, and beat us on our own ground; but we weren't jealous of you—you know that we weren't; we were glad of your success, and proud of you, and we admired your genius as much as the outside world did, and never minded a bit that it was greater than ours. But even then you were not content—you must have everything, and leave us nothing, just to satisfy your pride. You are like the rich man who had everything, and yet took from the poor man his one ewe lamb; and I am sure that God—if there is a God—will punish you as He punished that rich man."
Elisabeth turned rather pale; whatever had she done that any one dared to say such things to her as this? "I still don't understand you," she said.
"I never had anything nice in my life till I met him," the girl continued incoherently—"I had always been poor and pinched and wretched and second-rate; even my pictures were never first-rate, though I worked and worked all I knew to make them so. And then I met Cecil Farquhar, and I loved him, and everything became different, and I didn't mind being second-rate if only he would care for me. And he did; and I thought that I should always be as happy as I was then, and that nothing would ever be able to hurt me any more. Oh! I was so happy—so happy—and I was such a fool, I thought it would last forever! I worked hard and saved every penny that I could, and so did he; and we should have been married next year if you hadn't come and spoiled it all, and taken him away from me. And what is it to you now that you have got him? You are too proud and cold to love him, or anybody else, and he doesn't care for you a millionth part as much as he cares for me; yet just because you have money and fame he has left me for you. And I love him so—I love him so!" Here Quenelda's sobs choked her utterance, and her torrent of words was stopped by tears.
"Come and sit down beside me and tell me quietly what is the matter," said Elisabeth gently; "I can do nothing and understand nothing while you go on like this. But you are wrong in supposing that I took your lover from you purposely; I did not even know that he was a friend of yours. He ought to have told me."
"No, no; he couldn't tell you. Don't you seethat the temptation was too strong for him? He cares so much for rank and money, and things like that, my poor Cecil! And all his life he has had to do without them. So when he met you, and realized that if he married you he would have all the things he wanted most in the world, he couldn't resist it. The fault was yours for tempting him, and letting him see that he could have you for the asking; you knew him well enough to see how weak he was, and what a hold worldly things had over him; and you ought to have allowed for this in dealing with him."
A great wave of self-contempt swept over Elisabeth. She, who had prided herself upon the fact that no man was strong enough to win her love, to be accused of openly running after a man who did not care for her but only for her money! It was unendurable, and stung her to the quick! And yet, through all her indignation, she recognised the justice of her punishment. She had not done what Quenelda had reproached her for doing, it was true; but she had deliberately lowered her ideal: she had wearied of striving after the best, and had decided that the second-best should suffice her; and for this she was now being chastised. No men or women who wilfully turn away from the ideal which God has set before them, and make to themselves graven images of the things which they know to be unworthy, can escape the punishment which is sure, sooner or later, to follow their apostasy; and they do well to recognise this, ere they grow weary of waiting for the revelation from Sinai, and begin to build altars unto false gods. For now, as of old, the idols which they make are ground into powder, and strawed upon the water, and given them to drink;the cup has to be drained to the dregs, and it is exceeding bitter.
"I still think he ought to have told me there was another woman," Elisabeth said.
"Not he. He knew well enough that your pride could not have endured the thought of another woman, and that that would have spoiled his chance with you forever. There always is another woman, you know; and you women, who are too proud to endure the thought of her, have to be deceived and blinded. And you have only yourselves to thank for it; if you were a little more human and a little more tender, there would be no necessity for deceiving you. Why, I should have loved him just the same if there had been a hundred other women, so he always told me the truth; but he lied to you, and it was your fault and not his that he was obliged to lie."
Elisabeth shuddered. It was to help such a man as this that she had been willing to sacrifice her youthful ideals and her girlish dreams. What a fool she had been!
"If you do not believe me, here is his letter," Quenelda went on; "I brought it on purpose for you to read, just to show you how little you are to him. If you had loved him as I love him, I would have let you keep him, because you could have given him so many of the things that he thinks most about. But you don't. You are one of the cold, hard women, who only care for people as long as they are good and do what you think they ought to do; Cecil never could do what anybody thought he ought to do for long, and then you would have despised him and grown tired of him. But I go on loving him just the same, whatever he does; andthat's the sort of love that a man wants—at any rate, such a man as Cecil."
Elisabeth held out her hand for the letter; she felt that speech was of no avail at such a crisis as this; and, as she read, every word burned itself into her soul, and hurt her pride to the quick.
"Dearest Quenelda" (the letter ran, in the slightly affected handwriting which Elisabeth had learned to know so well, and to welcome with so much interest), "I have something to say to you which it cuts me to the heart to say, but which has to be said at all costs. We must break off our engagement at once; for the terrible truth has at last dawned upon me that we can never afford to marry each other, and that therefore it is only prolonging our agony to go on with it. You know me so well, dear little girl, that you will quite understand how the thought of life-long poverty has proved too much for me. I am not made of such coarse fibre as most men—those men who can face squalor and privation, and lack all the little accessories that make life endurable, without being any the worse for it. I am too refined, too highly strung, too sensitive, to enter upon such a weary struggle with circumstances as my marriage with a woman as poor as myself would entail; therefore, my darling Quenelda, much as I love you I feel it is my duty to renounce you; and as you grow older and wiser you will see that I am right.
"Since I can not marry you whom I love, I have put romance and sentiment forever out of my life; it is a bitter sacrifice for a man of my nature to make, but it must be done; and I have decided to enter upon amariage de convenancewith Miss Farringdon,the Black Country heiress. Of course I do not love her as I love you, my sweet—what man could love a genius as he loves a beauty? And she is as cold as she is clever. But I feel respect for her moral characteristics, and interest in her mental ones; and, when youth and romance are over and done with, that is all one need ask in a wife. As for her fortune, it will keep me forever out of the reach of that poverty which has always so deleterious an effect upon natures such as mine; and, being thus set above those pecuniary anxieties which are the death of true art, I shall be able fully to develop the power that is in me, and to do the work that I feel myself called to do.
"Good-bye, my sweetest. I can not write any more; my heart is breaking. How cruel it is that poverty should have power to separate forever such true lovers as you and I!
"Your heartbroken"Cecil."
Elisabeth gave back the letter to Quenelda. "Do you mean to tell me that you don't despise the man who sent this?" she asked.
"No; because I love him, you see. You never did."
"You are right there. I never loved him. I tried to love him, but I couldn't."
"I know you didn't. As I told you before, if you had loved him I would have given him up to you."
Elisabeth looked at the girl before her with wonder. What a strange thing this love was, which could make a woman forgive such a letter as that, and still cling to the man who wrote it! So there was such a place as fairyland after all, and poor littleQuenelda had found it; while she, Elisabeth, had never so much as peeped through the gate. It had brought Quenelda much sorrow, it was true; but still it was good to have been there; and a chilly feeling crept across Elisabeth's heart as she realized how much she had missed in life.
"I think if one loved another person as much as that," she said to herself, "one would understand a little of how God feels about us." Aloud she said: "Dear, what do you want me to do? I will do anything in the world that you wish."
Quenelda seized Elisabeth's hand and kissed it. "How good you are! And I don't deserve it a bit, for I've been horrid to you and said vile things."
There was a vast pity in Elisabeth's eyes. "I did you a great wrong, poor child!" she said; "and I want to make every reparation in my power."
"But you didn't know you were doing me a great wrong."
"No; but I knew that I was acting below my own ideals, and nobody can do that without doing harm. Show me how I can give you help now? Shall I tell Cecil Farquhar that I know all?"
"Oh! no; please not. He would never forgive me for having spoiled his life, and taken away his chance of being rich." And Quenelda's tears flowed afresh.
Elisabeth put her strong arm round the girl's slim waist. "Don't cry, dear; I will make it all right. I will just tell him that I can't marry him because I don't love him; and he need never know that I have heard about you at all."
And Elisabeth continued to comfort Quenelda until the pale cheeks grew pink again, and half the girl's beauty came back; and she went away at lastbelieving in Elisabeth's power of setting everything right again, as one believes in one's mother's power of setting everything right again when one is a child.
After she had gone, Elisabeth sat down and calmly looked facts in the face; and the prospect was by no means an agreeable one. Of course there was no question now of marrying Cecil Farquhar; and in the midst of her confusion Elisabeth felt a distinct sense of relief that this at any rate was impossible. She could still go on believing in fairyland, even though she never found it; and it is always far better not to find a place than to find there is no such place at all. But she would have to give up the Willows and the Osierfield, and all the wealth and position that these had brought her; and this was a bitter draught to drink. Elisabeth felt no doubt in her own mind that Cecil was indeed George Farringdon's son; she had guessed it when first he told her the story of his birth, and subsequent conversations with him had only served to confirm her in the belief; and it was this conviction which had influenced her to some extent in her decision to accept him. But now everything was changed. Cecil would rule at the Osierfield and Quenelda at the Willows instead of herself, and those dearly loved places would know her no more.
At this thought Elisabeth broke down. How she loved every stone of the Black Country, and how closely all her childish fancies and girlish dreams were bound up in it! Now the cloud of smoke would hang over Sedgehill, and she would not be there to interpret its message; and the sun would set beyond the distant mountains, and she would no longer catch glimpses of the country over the hills.Even the rustic seat, where she and Christopher had sat so often, would be hers no longer; and he and she would never walk together in the woods as they had so often walked as children. And as she cried softly to herself, with no one to comfort her, the memory of Christopher swept over her, and with it all the old anger against him. He would be glad to see her dethroned at last, she supposed, as that was what he had striven for all those years ago; but, perhaps, when he saw a stranger reigning at the Willows and the Osierfield in her stead, he would be sorry to find the new government so much less beneficial to the work-people than the old one had been; for Elisabeth knew Cecil quite well enough to be aware that he would spend all his money on himself and his own pleasures; and she could not help indulging in an unholy hope that, whereas she had beaten Christopher with whips, her successor would beat him with scorpions. In fact she was almost glad, for the moment, that Farquhar was so unfit for the position to which he was now called, when she realized how sorely that unfitness would try Christopher.
"It will serve him right for leaving me and going off after George Farringdon's son," she said to herself, "to discover how little worth the finding George Farringdon's son really was! Christopher is so self-centred, that a thing is never properly brought home to him until it affects himself; no other person can ever convince him that he is in the wrong. But this will affect himself; he will hate to serve under such a man as Cecil; I know he will; because Cecil is just the type of person that Christopher has always looked down upon, for Christopher is a gentleman and Cecil is not. Perhaps when he finds out howinferior an iron-master Cecil is to me, Christopher will wish that he had liked me better and been kinder to me when he had a chance. I hope he will, and that it will make him miserable; for those hard, self-righteous people really deserve to be punished in the end." And Elisabeth derived so much comfort from the prospect of Christopher's coming trials, that she almost forgot her own.