The marriage day came, and the chimes were ringing merrily in the old square tower of the little vicarage church, scaring the swallows from their nests amid the leaves and the clustering ivy, and, aware of the event, numbers of the parishioners and of Colonel Daubeny's tenantry, in their holiday attire, were toiling up the steep and picturesque pathway that led through shady dingles to the quaint edifice which overlooked the Cray. The humble old-fashioned organ gave forth its most joyous notes; and what was wanting in splendour or decoration in a church so old and rural, was amply made up by the masses of flowers, many of them the rarest exotics from the conservatories of Colonel Daubeny, and these garlanded the round chancel arch and the short dumpy Saxon pillars, while the altar in its deep recess was gay with them; when Laura, leaning on the arm of her father, the old thin-faced and silver-haired Vicar, and followed by her six bridesmaids, all lovely little girls, relatives of both families, dressed alike, and attended closely, too, by her two brothers, the thoughtless lads, whom she had sacrificed herself to serve and advance in life, was led slowly up the church, the cynosure and admiration of every eye, for all the people knew and loved her.
The gift of the bridegroom—a handsome, grave, and manly-looking fellow, whose hair, though only in his fortieth year, Indian service had slightly streaked with grey, and whose best man was his old chum and comrade, Charlie Fane—her bridal dress, priceless with satin and lace, shone in the successive rays of sunlight as she passed the painted windows, her bridal veil floated gracefully and gloriously around her, by its folds hiding the ashy pallor of her charming face, and her eyes that were aflame with unshed tears, and trembled to look up, lest they should encounter those of Jack Westbrook, full of upbraiding and bitterness; but Jack was at that moment miles away occupying his mind with very different matters, though he well knew what was then being enacted at Craybourne Church.
She stood and knelt as one in a dream side by side with Philip Daubeny at the altar rail before her father, and it certainlydidstrike the former with something of alarm rather than surprise, that when she was ungloved by a fussy and blushing little bridesmaid, and when she placed her hand steadily and without a tremor in his, it was icy and cold, as that of Lucy Ashton on her ill-omened bridal morn.
She uttered all the words of the service in a low and distinct voice, yet never once were her dark blue eyes raised to those of the earnest and generous Philip Daubeny, whose glances, moderated of course by the knowledge that they were so closely observed, were full of love and tenderness; and, in truth, even at that solemn moment, Laura felt that though he had her highest respect and her genuine esteem, she did not love him, and could only pray to Heaven, in her silent heart, that the time might come when she should do so as a wedded wife.
Laura bore up nobly. If she clung to her husband's arm, and thus sent a thrill to his heart as they quitted the gloomy fane, with its earthy odour, for the sunshine of the churchyard, where the cheers of assembled hundreds greeted them, it was only because she felt weak, and wondered when the time would come that would see her laid in yonder vault, where all the Daubenys of past ages lay—the vault, with its ponderous door, mildewed and rusty, and half-hidden by huge fern leaves and churchyard nettles—and on reaching the Vicarage she nearly fainted, greatly to the terror of Daubeny and the anxiety of all.
Avoiding the former, she clung to her father.
"Kiss me, papa," she said again and again. "Kiss me, papa; are you pleased with me—pleased with your poor Laura now?"
"Yes, my darling, yes," replied the old Vicar, folding her in his arms. He had heard much of Jack Westbrook: but thought that, so far as himself and his family were concerned, "matters were now, indeed, ordered for the best" in her marriage with the Squire of Craybourne.
A man of the world—one who had seen twenty years of dangerous military service in the East—Phil Daubeny was one of whom any woman might be proud, handsome, wealthy, and well-born, and all thought that Laura was as happy in her choice as in her heart; but the image of Jack Westbrook, of whom he knewnothing, stood—and was for a time fated to stand—as a barrier between her and the man she had vowed to "love, honour, and obey;" and most earnestly in her soul did she pray, as the carriage bore her from her beloved home for ever, that never more in this world might Westbrook's path cross hers; but not that she feared evil would come of it, for Laura was too wifely, too pure, and too good for such an idea to occur to her.
Amid the congratulations of friends, under the radiant smiles of her husband, even when her head nestled on his shoulder and his strong arm went lovingly round her; amid all the innumerable gaieties of Paris, of Brussels—a new world to her—this ghost seemed morbidly to haunt her; yet the honeymoon glided away, and the second month found them, amid all the charms of midsummer, located in their luxurious home at Craybourne Hall, from the upper oriels of which she could see the smoke, from the old clustered chimneys of the Vicarage, curling about the leafy coppice.
Daubeny had missed something responsive, he knew not what, in his wife, whose general listlessness, with a certain far-seeing expression of eye, began to pain and bewilder him. He kept his thoughts to himself; yet his brave and loving nature craved ever for some secret sympathy which Laura failed to accord him, and so there gradually began to yawn between them a chasm which neither could define, and the existence of which they would stoutly have denied. To Daubeny it became a source of keen and growing misery. But one night the scales fell from his eyes.
Finding himself alone and idle in London, he turned into the back stalls of the opera. The piece had not commenced; the orchestra were at the overture; the gas was somewhat low; and by some heedless fellows who were sitting in front of him he heardhis own namementioned once or twice in conversation, and was compelled to listen, thereto.
"Jack Westbrook has got over it all now," one said. "Of course thestingof wounded self-esteem, at being thrown over for rich old Phil Daubeny, rankled for a time. The fair Laura was his first love—never saw such a pair of spoons in all my life, don't you know—privately engaged, and all that sort of thing."
"And now I have no doubt she will flirt with any man who will flirt with her. Of course, it is always the way—and she don't care for Daubeny, poor devil!"
"I don't think shewillflirt," said the first speaker.
"Bah! every woman has some weak point, if you can only find it out."
"Most men, too, I suspect; but the fair Laura is clad in the armour of virtue."
"Jack Westbrook might find some weak points in that armour, too; and he won't drop out of the hunt, perhaps."
Then followed a reckless laugh that stung the soul of Daubeny to madness. The Opera stalls were no place for that which is so abhorrent in "society"—a scene; so instead of dashing their heads together, as he felt inclined to do, he softly left the place just as the overture ceased and the act-drop rose; and he went forth in a tempest of that kind of rage which always becomes the more bitter for having no immediate object to expend itself on; and even the speed of the night express seemed a thousand degrees too slow as it bore him homeward to Craybourne Hall. She had been engaged, had a lover—her first lover, too—and all unknown to him!
He had both seen and heard of Westbrook; but not in this character. Her first love—her only love! How many uncounted kisses had, of course, been exchanged, of which he knew naught (and had no business with then)? How much of the bloom had been worn off the peach ere it became his? He was full of black wrath, and saw much now that he saw not before, and could quite account for all her coldness. Yet, although he knew it not, the girl who had always esteemed was now learning tolovehim as she had never even loved Jack Westbrook!
Late though the hour—the first of morning—he proceeded at once to his wife's dressing-room, where she was awaiting his return in a charming blue robe that made her fair beauty look more charming still, for there were colour and brightness in her face and a love-light in her eyes at his approach, till the abruptness of his entrance and the set sternness of his white visage startled her.
"Philip!"
"Can it be true what I have heard to-night, Laura, that you loved Westbrook, of the Hussars," he demanded, "and, while loving him, married me for my money, and what I might do for the old Vicar and his sons? Is it truth that, when he gave you to me at the altar of yonder church, your marriage vow was a black lie and your false heart teemed with love for another? Speak!" he thundered out; but she could only lift her timid eyes to him imploringly, and spread her little white hands in deprecation of the coming malediction. Her voice was gone. "Your silence affirms all I have heard," he continued, in accents that trembled with jealousy and sorrow. "Oh, God, what a fool and dupe I have been!"
"I know not what you have heard, Philip; but, as He hears me, I have been a true and faithful wife to you."
"In playing a part you did not feel," he cried scornfully, "but I will aid your play no more. From this hour we meet never again on earth. Here, in this house, for which you sold yourself, I shall leave you, with all its luxuries, till such time as a more regular separation can be brought about; and the sole sorrow of my heart is now, that I cannot leave you free to wed this fellow Westbrook, the cause of all your incompatibility and coldness to me."
He flung away, and left her in a gust of fury.
"Philip, Philip!" she exclaimed, but she heard the hall door close; and then, as his steps died away in the distance, she fell on the floor, overcome by her sudden and terrible emotions—startled, shocked, and conscience-stricken.
Days passed on—days of sorrow, anxiety, and futile watching for a footfall that came no more. Whither he had gone she knew not, nor could she discover, and she was left to her tears and unavailing grief, amid the splendour of Craybourne Hall. She saw now how erring she had been; that, while nursing a mere fancy, she had lost the true love of a good and generous man, whose last words had been the first harsh ones he had ever addressed to her.
Gone! gone! She felt how much she really loved him now, and all the more that a secret tie was coming, and must come ere Christmas, to bind them stronger together. She must let him know of this dear hope; but how?Wherehad he gone? To death, perhaps, and she might have a child in her bosom that Philip could never, never see!
The weeks became months, and the heart of the strangely-widowed wife grew sick and heavy as lead with hopeless waiting, watching, and agonising yearning—dead even to the speculations of those around her, to whom the absence of her husband seemed, of course, most unaccountable, if not unkind and cruel.
But for the sake of her child she wished that she might die when it saw the light. Surely, then, Philip would forgive her when he saw its little face, and she was laid within the vault, the mildewed and rusted door of which she had regarded with a shudder on her marriage morning—the vault where all the dead Daubenys lay.
So in the fulness of time her baby was born—a little fairy boy—and her father named it Philip, for him who was still so strangely absent, and hot and burning were the tears with which Laura bedewed its tiny face as it nestled in her bosom; and amid the new emotions awakened by maternity she prayed God to forgive her for having longed to die; for no baby in the world could be like hers, that lay so round and soft and warm in her white bosom, and was fast growing so like papa!
But where was he wandering? Why was he not with her? Surely he would returnnow? Yet the days still rolled monotonously on, and winter drew nigh. The trees in Craybourne Chase were leafless; the fern, amid which the deer made their lair, was turning red, and the uplands became powdered with snow.
"To what a dreary and dreadful Christmas do I look forward, papa!" she exclaimed to the sorrowing old Vicar, "and I do so love him! Philip, Philip, come back to me, and do not leave me thus to die!" she would wail, ever and anon, in her helplessness.
And now there came a day which she was fated never, never to forget! Her husband's firm friend and old comrade, who had been his groomsman, the stout-hearted and gallant Charlie Fane, arrived at Craybourne with a face as white as the snow in the Weald of Kent—the bearer of terrible tidings, which he had heard that morning at the club, and these he had to break—he knew nothow—to Laura, though they had been broken abruptly enough to himself.
Jack Westbrook had raised his head from the morning paper just as Fane entered the room,
"By Jove! look here, Charlie!" exclaimed Westbrook in an excited tone, "there has been a dreadful accident to the train between Paris and Calais, and among the killed—mangled out of all shape—the report says, is Colonel Philip Daubeny, a British officer. His card-case was found in his pocket."
"My God! Poor Laura, poor Phil!" exclaimed Fane, as he took the paper in his trembling hands, and in ten minutes after wasen routefor Craybourne Hall.
"Poor devil!" thought Westbrook, as he lit a cigar; "who knows but I may get the reversion of the widow, with her tin, after all?"
It was Christmas Eve at Craybourne Hall, as elsewhere all over the Christian world; but the stillness as of death reigned there, and Laura, a widow now in heart indeed, lay tossing restlessly on her laced pillow, fighting, as it were, with the grim King, and forgetful even of her infant. Never had that old hall, ever since the Tudor days, seen a more sorrowful Christmas Eve. All the landscape around it wore a shroud of ghastly white. The Cray was frozen in its bed, and all the shrubs and trees seemed turned to crystal, that sparkled with diamond lustre in the light of the moon and stars. Over the snowy waste the Christmas bells in the old Vicarage church rang out "Peace on Earth—Peace on Earth, and goodwill towards men;" but there was no peace—peace of the heart, at least—in the stately hall; yet such a winter had not been seen for years, and great things, the old Kentish folks said, were sure to occur, for never had the holly been so covered with scarlet berries. What a Christmas for Laura!
In her chamber, dimly-lit and closely watched, she lay helpless and stunned by the depth of her woe, and honest Charlie Fane, who had seen much of human suffering in his time, watched her like a brother; and, in that chamber, there was no sound heard but the sighs of the sufferer and the chimes of the distant bells.
Suddenly there was a noise of feet and voices in the corridor without. A figure entered—was it the phantom of Philip Daubeny?
No! the strong grasp that tightened on the hand of Fane forbade that idea; and, in a moment more, the husband, looking pale and rather worn, was bending over the wife who had fainted in his arms. In Philip's face there was no sternness now, but passionate love, pity, and tears, and agony, too, till Laura revived.
"Not killed—not even injured, Philip?" exclaimed Fane.
"No, thank Heaven! but a poor fellow was to whom I lent my Ulster when hurrying homeward. Do you forgive me, darling Laura—forgive my cruel desertion?"
"Oh, yes, my love—my own Philip—all—all! And is the little fellow not a darling too—and so like you, Philip?" said the broken, half-hushed voice.
And as Philip, with a bursting heart, hung over his wife and child, he could hear more merrily than ever the joyous bells that told of the promise given 1800 years ago to the Chaldean shepherds as they watched their flocks by night in Judæa.
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LIMD., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.