We will not conceal from the reader that Elly is now twenty-one and more, but that the marriage has not yet taken place. There has been sickness and trouble at Edgeley, and the only daughter of the house has not been able to withdraw from the post of duty: but since she became of age she and her betrothed have corresponded fully. She knows everything that goes on at the works, and all the new steps John is taking, and received telegrams three or four times a day when that dreadful catastrophe occurred which everyone has read of, when the machinery broke down and the water poured back into the old channels, and for a moment everything seemed in jeopardy. John dragged her into that as if she had been his head clerk: he demanded her sympathy at every moment, clamouring in her ears with his telegrams, in a way which excited all the village. Indeed, there has been no political convulsion, no contested election, no crime or accident for fifty years, which has thrilled through Edgeley like that supposed collapse of the works in theThames Valley. When all was right, the whole community began to breathe again. Dick, who was at home on furlough, trudged backward and forward between the rectory and the post-office for several days, too impatient to wait for the telegraph boy: and when it was all over he was the man who electrified the rectory and all the community by saying, ‘This will never do.’ Dick was a man of few words, like his father; an easy-going man who let other people manage most of his affairs for him; but when much enforced he would say a word of weight all the more startling from its rarity. He said these words one evening after dinner in the midst of the family, suddenly when nobody expected it. He brought down his hand upon the table, not roughly, but with sufficient sound to call attention, and he said,
‘This will never do. This business about Elly and Jack. He is a better man than any of us. What does it matter who was his father? He’s his own father, and all his relations. And that Mrs. Cattley’s a sweet little woman. Don’t let’s have any more nonsense about it,’ said Dick.
The rector gasped, and Mrs. Egerton fell a-crying, and Percy rose and left the table. But Elly held out her hand to her big brother, and the thing was as good as settled from that day.
Let it be a comfort to all virtuous young persons in a similar position that, as long as they hold out and are firm and constant, some one will always arise at the end and face all obstructions with the verdict of good sense and honest sympathy, saying in face of all unnecessary objections, whether of birth or of money: ‘This will never do.’
But with all his success, and with the happiness which is about to come, one great cloud remains on John Sandford’s life, a fear which sometimes takes his breath away and makes his heart sick, the fear that some day when he suspects nothing, some sweet day—it might be his marriage morning, it might be any happy anniversary—there will suddenly appear round a corner a stumbling, shambling figure, never without a certain attractiveness even in its degradation, a sort of charm of careless innocence in the midst of guilt. Sometimes when he goes through the works with perhaps a littleelation in the greatness of his undertaking and the consciousness of the crowd which looks up to him as master, surrounding him with that veiled obsequiousness which makes the head of great industrial enterprises like a little king—the sight of some shadow in the distance will take all the strength and courage out of him.
‘There is no telling when the fancy may take me.’ These words come back to his ears with a meaning far more than was ever intended. But as a matter of fact there is cause enough to fear. For May never meant anything steadily or for long all his life. And when the fun to which he looked forward is exhausted—which is a thing that soon happens on the shady side of life—who can tell that the fancy may not take him to bring the remnants of his worn-out existence home? Poor wretch, for whom love and honour do not exist, but only fear and pity! the good man, the prosperous and happy, who has deserved his prosperity, as well as the other deserved his misery, is still the Son of His Father, and still bound for ever in this world at least, wretchedness to well-being, honour to shame.
There is, however, one way in which this piece of personal history may be safely made to end like a fairy-tale. Susie and her curate went home to their new parish like a pair of doves to their nest. And these two lived happy ever after, if ever any pair did so in this troubled yet not always miserable world.
THE END.LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.