The Project Gutenberg eBook of Phemie Keller, vol. 3 of 3
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Title: Phemie Keller, vol. 3 of 3a novel
Author: F.G. Trafford
Release date: August 6, 2023 [eBook #71359]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Tinsley Brothers, 1866
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHEMIE KELLER, VOL. 3 OF 3 ***
PHEMIE KELLER.
A Novel.
BY F. G. TRAFFORD,
AUTHOR OF “GEORGE GEITH,” “CITY AND SUBURB,” “MAXWELL DREWITT,” “TOO
MUCH ALONE,” “WORLD AND THE CHURCH,” “RACE FOR WEALTH.”
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND.
1866.
[_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved._]
LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I.— SORROWFUL TIDINGS 1
II.— WIDOWED 24
III.— THE LETTER 35
IV.— MEETING 62
V.— RECONCILED 96
VI.— THE LAST ENEMY 119
VII.— OLD FRIENDS AND OLD PLACES 141
VIII.— PHEMIE’S JOURNEY 175
IX.— THE RETURN 201
X.— BASIL’S COMFORTER 217
XI.— CONFESSIONS 230
XII.— PHEMIE EXPRESSES HER OPINIONS 265
XIII.— CONCLUSION 287
PHEMIE KELLER.
CHAPTER I.
SORROWFUL TIDINGS.
It was drawing towards the close of the year 1856 (there may be some
among my readers who can recollect what a dull, foggy, cheerless ending
that year had), when one morning the post to Marshlands brought with it
an Indian letter for Captain Stondon.
The post often brought Indian letters there—long letters (for though the
writer addressed his epistles to Captain Stondon, he knew they would be
read by Phemie), full of descriptions of the country, of his
occupations, of his prospects, of his hopes.
Nearly three years had elapsed since Basil’s departure, but time made no
difference in the regularity of his correspondence. Let him be busy or
the reverse, the young man still found leisure to despatch his budget of
news. Perhaps he felt that on those letters Phemie lived; that her
existence was only rendered supportable by the excitement of waiting for
his missives, and hearing them read aloud; that she loved the sight of
his handwriting as she had once loved the sight of himself; that she
counted up the days as they came and went—counted how long it was since
the arrival of his last letter, how long it would be before the advent
of his next. The time had passed with her somehow; she was no longer the
girl Phemie; she had changed from the young wife, from the beautiful
gracious hostess, to a quiet, undemonstrative woman, who tried with all
her heart and all her soul to do her duty.
It had come to that—for lack of explanation—even because of her
husband’s excessive tenderness and consideration, she found she could
only give him duty, never love. Her lover was gone from her—she had
driven him away! Her lover, who had not married Miss Derno after all,
who had loved her, her only—Phemie Stondon, who now sat with her hands
folded, and her untasted breakfast before her, waiting for the news
which Captain Stondon appeared unusually loth to communicate.
When he went away she vowed she would never ask a question concerning
him, and so far she never had; but now she saw something in her
husband’s face which impelled her to say—
“Is Basil ill—is there anything the matter?”
Captain Stondon looked at his wife as she spoke, and seeing her pale,
anxious countenance—her eager, earnest expression, turned sick as he
answered—“He is ill; he is coming back to England. You see what he
says.” And he tossed the letter over to her, and then got up and walked
to the window, and looked out, with such feelings of bitterness swelling
in his heart as were only imagined by God and himself.
He made no man his confidant; but the knowledge that had come to him
among the pines, while the autumn wind moaned through the branches, and
went sobbing away into the night, had whitened his hair, and bowed his
head, and taken the pride and the trust and the happiness out of his
heart. He had his wife safe—as the world calls safety; there was no
speck on her honour, so far as the world knew. Yet no time could ever
make her seem to him as she had been—the Phemie he had held to his heart
among the hills. The pure, innocent, guileless Phemie had gone, and left
him in her stead a woman, whose thoughts morning, noon, and night, were
wandering over the sea; who loved Basil as she had never loved him; whom
he could not accuse of perfidy, because she had not been false; to whom
he dared not speak of his sorrow, because he dreaded seeing her face
change and change at finding her secret discovered, her trouble known.
And all the time Phemie was wishing that by any means he and she could
come nearer to each other again—that she could show him more love, more
attention, greater attachment. She was very wretched, and she wanted
some one to comfort her; it made her miserable to notice his whitening
hair, his bent head, his feeble steps, his failing health; she thought
of him now with a tenderness such as she had never felt for him in the
years before any one came between them; and if she could by any will or
act of her own have kept her thoughts from wandering away to that man in
the far-off land, she would have done so.
Even now she was not glad to hear he was coming back; she laid down the
letter when she had quite finished it; and her husband, turning from the
window, caught her eyes making a very long and sorrowful journey into
the future. He knew by that look she was true—knew that the clear,
honest eyes could never have held such a sad, wistful expression in
their blue depths, had the news not been a trouble to her as well as a
surprise.
She was thinking the same thoughts as her husband at that moment; she
was wondering, as he was wondering, whether Basil were really ill or
whether he was making bad health a pretext for returning to England; and
she was resolving that if Basil came home unchanged, she would at all
hazards speak to her husband, and let him comprehend how matters really
stood; while he, on his part, was thinking that, supposing Basil were
playing a false game in any way, he would either take Phemie abroad, or
else—well, yes—there should be confidence—painful confidence between
them at last.
And yet the man’s heart yearned towards Basil. He had been fond of him
as he might have been of a son; and if he were ill, if he had overcome
his madness, if he could live in England, and yet not seek to destroy
what measure of peace still existed in Phemie’s heart, Captain Stondon
felt he should be glad to see the man whose love for his wife had driven
him forth into exile, on British ground again.
The mysteries of human nature are inexplicable; its inconsistencies are
never ending. For any outsider even to attempt to describe all Captain
Stondon had thought and felt about his wife and Basil—about Basil and
his mother—about himself and Phemie, would be useless. I can only say
that he was sorry and he was glad at the news contained in Basil’s note.
He had been wretched about the young man; Mrs. Montague Stondon made his
life a weariness concerning her son. He felt that if Basil died abroad
he should feel as though he had almost two deaths to answer for. If
Basil would only marry, if Phemie could only forget the love that had
been a curse to her, if he could only see oftener the look in his wife’s
face which had just comforted him, he believed his declining days might
still be bright with sunshine.
And Phemie’s first comment on the letter was satisfactory.
“Of course,” she said, “Basil will go to his mother. He had better not
come here. I would rather he did not learn to look upon Marshlands as
his home again. Do not think me hard, Henry,” she went on, pleadingly;
“I have my reasons. It was bad for Basil leading the idle life he did
with us, it was indeed.”
“My love, my own darling wife, if you only tell me what you wish, I will
be guided by you. I think I should have been wise to listen to you
before.”
“Well, listen to me now,” she entreated; “if his health be really bad,
give him a handsome allowance and let him travel. Let him make his
head-quarters with his mother—let him do anything but come here. You
will not give in to him, Henry?” she went on; “you will be firm; you
will keep our home as it is, without bringing strangers here again. Will
you not?—will you not?”
She was older then than when this story opened—older by ten years; but
her beauty at seven-and-twenty was almost as great as it had been at
seventeen; and while she stood there, pleading against the love of her
heart—stood with flushed cheek and soft, low, tender voice, in the tones
of which there was yet a touch of passionate regret, Captain Stondon
felt that, though they had been separated for so long, there would still
be danger for Basil near her; and then he wished Basil were not
returning. He would have given half Marshlands to have kept him out of
England.
There was one thing, however, which induced Captain Stondon to believe
that his relative was really ill—viz., the fact that he meant to perform
his homeward journey by long sea, to spare himself the fatigue of the
overland route. There could be no deception about this matter. He
mentioned the name of the vessel in which he had taken his passage; he
stated the period about which she might be expected to arrive; he
requested Captain Stondon to break the news of his serious illness to
his mother, and ask her to prepare for his reception.
“God knows,” he finished, “whether I shall ever live to see England
again; but if I do, I should like to stay for a time at Hastings.”
Reading his letter over for the first time, the earnest brevity of his
communication failed to strike Captain Stondon; but the longer he
pondered over Basil’s words, the more satisfied he felt that he had been
stricken down by some terrible sickness, and that perhaps he was, after
all, only coming home to die.
“And if so—better so,” Phemie thought; “better he should die than that
we should have to live through the past again, with its shame, and its
sorrow.” And then, in the solitude of her own room, she covered her face
with her hands, and wept aloud.
Can the old love ever die? Can we ever bury that body out of our sight,
and heap the mould upon it, and tramp it into the clay? The men and the
women may change—they may grow old—they may die—they may pass from the
familiar haunts, and the place which has known them may know them no
more; but still the picture painted long and long before on the canvas
of some human fancy remains young and fresh and lovely. There it hangs
on the walls of the heart, and not all the world’s dust—not all the
world’s cares—not all time’s ravages can make those dear features other
than beautiful for ever.
Well, well, the dark days were at hand when Phemie could have nothing
but recollection; when the picture hung in the innermost chamber would
be all she might ever hope to see more; when the man’s memory would be
encircled with a halo of mystery; when a sad and tender interest would
surround the last hours of Basil Stondon’s life, giving to his fate that
sad and pathetic interest which was alone needed to fill Phemie’s cup of
love and sorrow full unto overflowing.
The ship sailed, and the ship came, but Basil Stondon did not arrive
with her; neither did the next Indian mail bring any explanation of his
absence. Captain Stondon wrote to the owners, who stated, in reply, that
they knew a Mr. Stondon had sailed in the _Lahore_; but as the vessel
had been laid up for repairs, and the captain and mates and most of the
crew had shipped in a new merchantman belonging to the same firm for
China, till the return of the mates or captain they (Messrs. Hunter,
Marks, Son, and Co.) would be unable to obtain further information.
Meanwhile, they remained Captain Stondon’s obedient servants.
After that there ensued a pause, during which Captain Stondon wrote to
General Hurlford, requesting tidings of Basil. Before any reply could be
looked for to this communication the news of the Indian mutiny arrived
in England, and throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain there
arose such a cry of distress and terror as drowned the sound of any
single grief—of any individual’s solitary sorrow.
Straightway down to Marshlands came Mrs. Montague Stondon—came demanding
her son as though Captain Stondon hid him there in durance.
“You know, now, what has happened to him,” she said. “He saw what was
approaching, and would not desert his post. You see for yourself.” And
she thrust the “Times” into Captain Stondon’s face. “General Hurlford is
killed; and Thilling, and Osmonde, and hundreds of others whose names
are not mentioned; and my boy is dead too—murdered—butchered, and by
you.”
Marshlands never witnessed such scenes previously as were enacted within
its walls for a fortnight after that. Mrs. Montague would not stay in
the house of her “son’s murderer,” but remained at Disley, where she
made descents on Captain Stondon, whose life she almost harassed out of
him by entreating that he would obtain accurate information for her.
“If I could but know where he was buried, it would comfort me,” she
said. And then she relapsed into violent hysterics at the idea that
perhaps he was not buried at all. “First my husband—now my son. And it
was your doing, his going out there,” she would remark to Captain
Stondon, Phemie, and Miss Derno. “You were all against him—all. Because
he was next heir you hated him. You sold him into captivity as Joseph’s
brethren sold him; and now he is dead, and I shall see his face no
more.”
“One ought not to speak ill of the dead,” remarked Miss Derno. “But sure
am I that whatever has happened to Basil, he never of his own free will,
got into the middle of that mutiny; and it is perfectly unreasonable for
you to insist on anything of the kind.”
“Where is he, then?” demanded Mrs. Montague.
“That I am quite unable to tell you,” answered Miss Derno. “If only for
Captain Stondon’s satisfaction, I wish I knew. But my belief is that
Basil is not dead at all.”
“I wish I could believe that, Miss Derno. Oh! I wish I could,” said
Captain Stondon. And the poor old man, utterly broken down by the
absence of the son and the reproaches of the mother, burst into tears.
At this period Phemie took the most decided step of her married life.
She forbade Mrs. Montague Stondon the house.
“You shall not come here,” she said, “and speak to my husband as you do.
We are as sorry about Basil as even you can be.” For a moment she
faltered. “We did all we could for him while he was in England; and if
anything has happened to him, Captain Stondon is not the one to blame
for it. He cannot bear these reproaches. He is not able to leave his
room to-day; and the doctor says he must be kept perfectly quiet, and
free from excitement.”
Then Mrs. Montague Stondon broke out. She denounced Phemie as a scheming
adventuress; she spoke of Captain Stondon as a cold-blooded murderer.
She declared Miss Derno was a disappointed woman, and that Phemie had
wanted to catch Basil for her cousin Helen; failing in which object, and
angry at having no children to succeed to the estate, she sent him
abroad to die.
She showed how grievously the idea of losing Marshlands had affected
her. She declared the only reason Phemie wished to prolong Captain
Stondon’s life was because at his death she would cease to be a person
of consequence.
To all of which Mrs. Stondon listened quietly, till the speaker was
quite exhausted, when she took her by the hand and led her towards the
door.
“I am not going to put any indignity on Basil’s mother,” she said; “but
as no person shall have a chance of uttering such words before me twice,
I mean to see you to your carriage myself, and must beg you never to
enter the gates of Marshlands again so long as I am mistress here.”
A servant was standing in the hall as the pair passed out together—and
so Mrs. Montague had to content herself with hissing in Phemie’s ear—“I
hope I shall live to see you a beggar, to see you back in the mud he
picked you out of.”
“You are very kind,” Phemie answered, aloud, and she remained at the
hall door watching the carriage till it disappeared from sight. Then she
turned away and walked slowly up the stairs, and along the wide
passages, and entered the room where her husband was lying in bed, with
the doctor seated beside him.
“That letter, dear,” he murmured; “that letter we had this morning. I am
afraid I shall not be able to make the inquiries for some time.”
“If you are better to-morrow, shall I go to town and see Mr. Hunter?”
she asked, “or should you like me to send for my uncle?”
“I should like you to do both,” he answered; and accordingly the next
day Phemie started for London, and proceeded from the Eastern Counties
Railway Station, where Duncan met her, to the offices of Messrs. Hunter,
Marks, Son, and Co., Leadenhall Street.
“You will come and stay with us?” Duncan said. The “us” referring to
himself and his sister Helen, who was his housekeeper; but Phemie
refused.
“I must return to Marshlands as soon as possible,” she said. “I feel
wretched about being away at all, only it was a comfort to Captain
Stondon for me to come up and learn what Mr. Hunter had to tell us. They
have got his boxes, Duncan.”
“Then he did sail?”
“I am going to hear all about it—all they can tell me.” And she looked
out at the block there always is at the point where Cornhill and
Gracechurch and Leadenhall Streets join, in order to hide her face from
Duncan.
The punishment was not over; it was now but the beginning of the end.
Mr. Hunter received her in a large office on the first floor, which was
well, not to say luxuriously, furnished. There were comfortable chairs,
there was a library-table in the centre of the room, the floor was
covered with a turkey carpet, the blinds were drawn down over
plate-glass windows. The only articles out of keeping with the generally
stylish appearance of the apartment were three large boxes, one of which
had been opened, and to which Mr. Hunter directed Mrs. Stondon’s
attention.
“We advertised those boxes for months, and at last opened one of them.
It is so unusual a thing for passengers’ luggage not to be labelled,
that when Captain Stondon applied to us for information we never thought
of associating that luggage with his missing relative. But the papers we
have discovered leave no doubt as to the gentleman’s identity; and one
of the sailors, who was laid up from the effects of an accident when the
_Singapore_ was ready for starting, has since called here and given us
full particulars on the subject of his fate. He says he remembers a
gentleman being carried down to the _Lahore_ the very morning she
sailed. He looked in a dying state when brought on board, and before a
week had passed all was over. He was buried the next day.”
“Where?” Phemie interrupted—then—
“Oh, my God!” It was all the moan she ever made, but she reeled as she
uttered it—reeled and would have fallen but that Duncan caught her.
“There is but one burial-place for those who die at sea,” was the reply,
spoken gently and hesitatingly. “Far from land, it is impossible to do
anything with the body except——”
“I did not know that this lady was so near a relative,” began Mr.
Hunter, apologetically; but Phemie broke across his sentence.
“What more? He was buried, you say? Had he no one with him—no servant—no
friend?”
“He had his servant, the man tells me, who took the bulk of his luggage
away with him directly the _Lahore_ came into the docks. He must have
satisfied the captain on the matter by some plausible tale, or else he
would not have been permitted to do so. How he chanced to leave those
boxes I am at a loss to imagine, for I conclude his object was to
appropriate the property. We can hear nothing further, however, till the
return of the _Singapore_, for the surgeon who was on board the _Lahore_
has gone on even a longer voyage, and will be away for three years.”
“The passengers?” suggested Duncan.
“True,” answered Mr. Hunter, “you might learn something from them. About
these boxes? You would wish them sent on to Marshlands, I presume?”
“No,” said Phemie; “his mother ought to have everything belonging to
him. I will write to her, and then she will say where she should like
them forwarded.”
She asked no more questions, she made no further remark; there were no
confidences exchanged between her and Duncan on their way back to the
station, only as he stood by the carriage window waiting till the train
should move off, her cousin said, a little bitterly—
“How fond you were of that man, Phemie.” And she replied—
“If you had died far from home and friends as he did, should I not be
sorry for you too?”
She put up her face and kissed him as she spoke these words. The Phemie
of old was dead—the vain, fanciful, exacting Phemie; but for my part, I
love better the Phemie who sat back in the carriage all the way down to
Disley than the Phemie who had looked out over the flat Cambridgeshire
fields five years before.
It was over—with her as with him; she had earned her wages, and they
were being paid to her as the months rolled by. Death—he was dead! What
had life to offer her in the future? what could the years bring to her
worse than this?
At Disley, the carriage was waiting for her, and something in the
footman’s face as he stood aside while she entered it, made her pause
and ask—
“How is your master?”
“He has been worse since morning, ma’am; the doctor was with him when we
left Marshlands.”
“Drive fast, Sewel,” she said to the coachman; “do not spare your
horses.” And accordingly Sewel took his favourite pair of bays back to
Marshlands (to the intense astonishment of society) at a gallop.
CHAPTER II.
WIDOWED.
Phemie was not in the house two minutes before she knew her husband had
had a paralytic stroke. The doctor was still with him; but in such a
case, what can a doctor do? When the Almighty strikes—when the blow
falls, which no skill is able to avert—of what use are God’s
instruments?
From that day Phemie’s work was laid out for her. To nurse him, to tend
him, to take the man who had raised her from poverty to wealth, hither
and thither as the medical men advised, or as his own fancy dictated;
that was the employment of Mrs. Stondon’s life.
Mr. Aggland, now a widower, came and stayed at Marshlands; he it was who
propped the sick man up in bed—who read to him—who amused him—who
accompanied them from place to place—who thought that never a husband
had found so devoted a wife as Phemie—who made his head-quarters in
London, that he might be near his niece, and who, after Mr. Keller’s
death, made his head-quarters at Roundwood, Mrs. Keller not desiring to
continue her residence there.
Phemie was a great woman at last. An heiress in her own right—a person
who, without any Marshlands at all, could have taken a high place in
society; and yet the Phemie of those days was humbler, sweeter than the
Phemie who had dreamed dreams in the valley of Tordale—who had lingered
beside the waterfall, and sat beside Strammer Tarn.
How did her new dignity of heiress become her? many a reader may want to
know; and yet I think the reader who asks that can have read the
life-story of Phemie Keller to little purpose.
How does wealth affect those who have discovered the powerlessness of
wealth to confer happiness? How did wealth affect this woman who had not
found wealth do much for her?
It simply suggested to her one idea—that money had come too late; that
her life had been throughout one great mistake; that, as a rule, lives
were great mistakes.
The burden of the song was sorrow—the refrain of the song was work. And
her work, as I have said before, was laid out for her: she had from the
day she returned from London to attend to her husband, ceaselessly.
They went for the winter to Hastings. The doctor recommended it, and
Phemie went wherever the medical men desired.
Now the sea talked to her differently: all through those long, dreary,
interminable months she listened to the winds and the waves while they
mourned to her of Basil’s last resting-place—of the restless ocean, in
the midst of which he had lain him down to sleep.
In those days there was no one to come between her and her husband—no
one; friend—nor lover—nor relation—and accordingly Phemie was able to
devote herself to him heart and soul.
For a time he seemed to rally, but the constitution was too
enfeebled—the shock had been too severe. While they were at Hastings,
Captain Stondon had a second stroke; and though his doctor pooh-poohed
the calamity to Phemie, still she felt unsatisfied, and paid a visit to
a London physician on her own account.
“If a person have a second paralytic stroke,” she said—“remember I want
the simple truth—what is the usual consequence? Can the patient
recover?”
For a moment, the man of large experience hesitated, then he said,
“After a second stroke, as a rule, there can be but one thing more—a
third——”
“Which is——” Phemie suggested.
“Death.”
She turned away—she felt suffocating. Death! He had been her best friend
through the most trying period of her life; and she had loved—oh,
heavens! in spite of all faults and shortcomings, she _had_ loved him.
“I should like you to see my husband,” she faltered out. And then the
doctor was very sorry for his words; but he went down to Hastings to see
Captain Stondon notwithstanding.
She wanted to get him back to Marshlands; but the medical attendants
shook their heads. She would have given anything to be able to move him
to his own home; but the physicians said that unless a decided change
for the better occurred such a journey was not to be thought of.
“You would like to get back, dear,” she said to him, when the spring
buds were jutting out—when the primroses were springing in the
hedges—when the hyacinths in Fairlight Glen were showing for flower; and
the poor lips that could now answer in nothing save monosyllables,
framed the one word—“Yes.”
“Shall I try to move you there, darling?” she asked; and the dim eyes
lighted up with pleasure, and the wan fingers clasped hers tighter, and
over the white lips passed the monosyllable “Yes!” once more.
“You do not like this place,” she went on, fearful that her own
detestation of the sea—the cruel sea, might be leading her astray with
regard to his wishes; and he answered, “No!”
Then she resolved to move him. And she did it.
Before a fortnight was over he was lying in his own room at Marshlands,
listening to the song of the birds—to the cawing of the rooks—to the
sweet spring sounds—that never seem quite the same when heard away from
home.
In the years gone by he had wished a wish—he had prayed a prayer; and
now, when the dark days were come upon him—when his strength was turned
into weakness—his noon changed to night—when he lay unable to
speak—unable to move—the memory of that prayer came back to him.
“O God!” he said, when he stooped over the pool, and drank of the
waters, “when Thy good time comes, leave me not to die alone.”
Through the days that had passed since then, his soul went back. Tordale
was with him in the time of which I am now writing, as the days of his
boyhood were with him when he lay bruised and maimed at the foot of
Helbeck.
For ever he was turning round that rock which brought him within view of
the valley and the waterfall and the everlasting hills. Eternally the
dull plash of the stream as it fell over the rocks—the faint rustling of
the leaves—the mourning farewell of the rivulet—the trickling of the
water among the stones—sounded in his ear. Dead as he was to the scenes
of this beautiful world—powerless though he was to lift himself up and
look forth on God’s earth, which he had loved so dearly, still he could
remember many things, and amongst them Tordale, which he had once said
lightly he should never forget.
Never! for ever! There he had been happy—there he had met Phemie—there
he had heard that sweet girlish voice singing the old Covenanting
Hymn—there he had wooed and won her, and now the tale was told—the sands
were running out—the sun was near its setting—the end which comes sooner
or later to all human hopes and fears, troubles and pleasures, was
drawing nigh unto him; the wife who had never loved him as much as he
had loved her, still hung over his sick-bed, and anticipated his
lightest want.
“If she could but know.” And in those hours, had speech been vouchsafed
to him, he could have talked to her about their common trouble. “If God
would but give me power to talk once more, I would not remain silent as
I have done.” And with light from eternity streaming in upon the pages
of the past, he saw that his silence had been wrong, his forbearance
useless; he vaguely comprehended that if he had opened his heart to
Phemie in the days gone by, Basil need not have left for India, while
perfect confidence would have reigned between him and her.
“But she will understand it when I am gone,” he thought; “she will know
then how I loved her through all.”
That was the story the weary eyes tried to tell Phemie as they followed
her about the room; that was the assurance he tried to convey when he
clasped her soft hand—when by sign and gesture he kept the dear, pale,
changed face near to his own; when he looked at the white cheek, white
and worn; when he strove to return the remorseful kisses she laid upon
his lips.
Summer came—summer with its sunshine, its roses, its mirthful gladness,
its wealth of beauty and of perfume—summer came and shone down on the
sweet valley of Tordale once again.
Twelve years previously, Captain Stondon, seated in the church porch,
shaded from the mid-day sun, wearied with his walk from Grassenfel, had
speculated vaguely upon death; and now, lying in his bed at Marshlands,
with the windows flung wide to admit both air and sunshine, tired with
his long walk through life, he thought about death once more.
After all, when it comes to this with any person, no existence seems to
have lasted for years, and years, and years. There has been a sunrise
and a noontide and a sunset; the day is done, the night draws on, the
task is finished, the labourer hies him homeward from the last hour’s
work he shall ever be called upon to perform.
What more—what more! Oh, friends, the longest life ends with some work,
to our thinking, left unfinished—some seventh unresolved—some lesson
unlearnt; but who amongst us can tell the why and the wherefore of this
mystery? Who can explain the meaning of this universal law? We can write
the story up to a certain point, but there our knowledge ceases.
When mortal sickness comes to put a finish to the life-history, what can
any one say further? The man has lived, the man has died, the day is
ended, the night has closed in. Draw we the curtains, and leave the
room—there is nothing further to be written; sleep has come to the tired
eyelids—ease to the worn-out frame; there is great peace where there was
much suffering. The heat has been borne, the burden is laid aside; the
wayfarer has reached his long home; the unquiet heart is still; in the
shadows of evening man ceases from his work and from his labour, and
sinks to his long rest.
What more? Nothing, my readers; that is, nothing of the stranger whom we
met so long ago gazing in the summer sunshine upon Tordale. Captain
Stondon was dead, and Phemie—a widow! and there was no direct heir to
Marshlands.
CHAPTER III.
THE LETTER.
When trouble came upon her, Phemie was not left alone to bear it. Kind
hearts and loving sympathised with her—friendly hands clasped hers—true
men and women were near to give what comfort they could, or, at all
events, to share in her distress.
Mr. Aggland and Duncan, and Helen and Miss Derno, were all with Phemie
when the end came. Norfolk was importunate in its inquiries—Norfolk,
professing to feel very sorry about Captain Stondon’s death, wondered
who would succeed to the property, and whom Phemie would marry.
Mr. Ralph Chichelee had hopes—intentions, rather, would perhaps be a
better word; but then other people had intentions also, so perhaps it is
scarcely fair to mention his in particular.
Phemie was still beautiful enough to attract admiration—still young
enough to love and be loved—still fascinating enough to choose a second
husband and rule over a new home. The prospect opened out before Phemie
by Captain Stondon’s death seemed to society like a vision of fairyland.
She might marry an earl. The Duke of Seelands had inquired particularly
who she was one day when he beheld her driving from the Disley Station.
How would Phemie like the strawberry leaves? Norfolk began forthwith to
wonder, while the man who had loved her so well was lying dead in one of
the pleasant rooms at Marshlands. Concerning “that young man Aggland”
the gossips had also something to say; they marvelled if, instead of
marrying for rank, Phemie’s uncle would trap her into wedding her
cousin. Where would she live? What would she do? She possessed a fine
property of her own, and doubtless Captain Stondon had done well
pecuniarily by his wife.
Was not this a dainty dish for a county to feast on and speculate over?
while the flavouring was supplied by an all-devouring curiosity to know
who was the next heir male. Remote relations, unheard of before, came
from the uttermost parts of the earth to claim the property. Stondons
who had gone down in the world—Stondons who had gone up in the social
scale—arrived at Disley when the news of Captain Stondon’s death was
noised abroad. There was no near heir, and every man of the connection
consequently claimed to be next-of-kin. Who would be master? What would
Phemie do? Whom would Phemie marry? What a pity she had no children—what
a sad thing it was Mr. Basil Stondon had gone abroad! These were the
questions and remarks everybody made and everybody asked.
As for Phemie, she grieved for her dead husband with a sorrow which was
neither conventional nor circumscribed. The best friend woman ever
possessed he had been to her through all the years of her married life.
Through that part of her existence when she may be said to have lived he
had stood beside her.
In sickness, in sorrow, in prosperity, he had thought of her, and of her
only. No one in the after time could ever be so fond or proud of her as
he had been; no one could ever step in and fill his place. She had never
had to think for herself—to take any trouble which his love could keep
from her; he had been true and faithful and tender, and the return she
had made would have broken the heart of the man who now lay so still and
stiff, could he have known it.
“Better so,” she thought, “better so. I would rather see him thus”—and
she kissed the cold brow and lips—“than imagine his grief, could he have
guessed what I was—I whom he trusted—too well, too well!” And she wept
through the hours beside his coffin till her friends forcibly removed
her.
“I never loved him enough—I never knew till now how much I loved him,”
were the contradictory sentences she kept constantly repeating; and then
Miss Derno, who could guess so well wherein the worst sting of this
death lay, drew the poor weary head on to her breast and rested it
there.
“And I was once very unjust to you,” Phemie went on, sobbing out her
confession. “There was a time when I thought I did not like you, and it
was wicked of me to misjudge you as I did. You forgive me, dear, don’t
you? and you will not ask me why I misjudged you?”
“I forgive and I will not ask. Shall we be friends now—true friends for
evermore?” And she bent down till her curls swept Phemie’s face, and
then the poor trembling lips touched hers, and the widow broke out
sobbing more passionately than ever.
So the days wore on—the weary days with death in the house—till at last
the morning came when all that was mortal of Captain Stondon passed out
of the gates of Marshlands and on to the churchyard at the other end of
the hamlet. He had gone for ever. Phemie realised that fact when she
stole to the room where he had lain—when she understood that she had
looked on his face for the last time in this world—when she turned
desperately towards the future, and confronted it without his
help—without his supporting hand—without his encouraging
voice—alone—wholly and entirely, so far as the close companionship, as
the watchful care given to her by Captain Stondon was concerned.
She had not valued him living, and now he was dead.
She had sorrowed for that man lying under the sea, and there was treason
in her sorrow towards the husband just taken from her. Even indeed in
that bitter hour she could not put the memory of Basil aside—could not
help thinking how hard it was he had been taken in his youth and hope
away from earth, away from Marshlands!
She thought this, and then, with a despairing moan, knelt down in the
room where she should never more see her husband, and cried till the
fountain of her tears seemed exhausted, till, for very faintness and
weariness, she could cry no more.
When Captain Stondon’s will came to be read, it was found that he had
indeed remembered his wife with the most generous and ungrudging
trustfulness.
He had saved and purchased—purchased this little estate and that small
farm; invested in some paying companies, and accumulated money for her
benefit. With the exception of an annuity to Mrs. Montague Stondon, and
some few legacies, he left Phemie the entire of his personal property,
all he had been able to put by during the years since he came into
possession of Marshlands. There was no condition attached; he said
nothing about a second marriage, he made no proviso, he attached no
restrictions, he left almost everything he owned in the world, to Phemie
absolutely after his death, just as in life he had given her his heart
and his substance, wholly and unconditionally.
As for Marshlands, of course it had to go to the next heir—but who was
the next heir?
There were not wanting claimants in abundance. Stondons from Devonshire,
Stondons from Perth, Stondons from Ireland, Stondons from abroad, were
eager in pressing their separate claims. Old men and young, men who
looked as though they had been buried for a hundred years and then dug
up again, and let out for a day to state where they were born, and who
had been their father—men again who were worn and haggard, to whom even
a few acres of the great estate would have been ease and competence—men
who had all their lives long been fighting the battle of poverty, and
probably pawned some of their goods to defray the expenses of the
journey—men fresh from their oxen and their ploughshares, who had come
“parly,” with a sharp country practitioner: all these laid siege to
Marshlands, and strove to make their title appear good; and whilst they
were wrangling and disputing over the matter, Phemie still clung to the
old walls like a cat, reluctant to quit the place where fires had once
blazed cheerfully for her.
She wrote to her late husband’s lawyers, begging them to give her timely
notice when the new owner might be expected, and the answer which came
back sounded to her like the voices of the dead.
They enclosed a letter which, “as she would perceive,” Captain Stondon
had instructed them to forward to her a month after his decease,
whenever that might occur, and they begged to assure her she should have
full information whenever anything definitive was settled. They (Messrs.
Gardner, Snelling, and Co.) thought it was useless considering the
claims of any other person until the fact of Mr. Basil Stondon’s death
was proved past doubt.
“Proved past doubt.” Oh, heavens! is it not hard to think that what is
evidence sufficient for love is not evidence sufficient for law? Till
that instant Phemie had never for a moment doubted the accuracy of the
tidings which had reached England, but now, with a bound, hope sprung to
life again.
It had been so easy to remain true to her husband with Basil dead; but
Basil living! Over and over and over she conned the lines suggesting
this probability, while the other letter—the enclosure, the message from
the newly-made grave—lay unheeded beside her.
To do Phemie justice, she did not couple together the sentences—Basil is
living, and I am free. She had never thought of marrying him, and she
did not now; but she had loved him, and, as I have said, the old love
never dies; it is the one thing in this mutable world which is
immutable; it is the one temporal possession of our mortality which is
immortal. She could not kill it, she could not bury it; the winter’s
frosts and the winter’s snows had lain upon it, yet here it was,
springing up fresh and green and fair and beautiful as ever.
If he were but alive! and then all at once her eyes fell on her black
dress, and she remembered with a shock the man who was but too surely
dead. There lay his letter, with this written on the outside—“To be
given to my wife one month after my death in case she survives me; to be
burnt in the event of her dying before me.”
It always seems a solemn and a strange thing when the idea of his or her
own death is presented as a precautionary possibility to the mind of a
person in health.
Insurance forms, for instance, appear to put a matter about which most
people, I suppose, think sometimes after a fashion, in a new light
before the senses of an intending insurer.
There is a regular debit and credit statement. You may die—you may not
die; you are such an age, and inasmuch as you are such an age, the
chances are against the length of the years to come; on the other hand,
you are healthy, active, temperate. It is not a sermon, it is not a
warning, it is not a mere possibility; it is a rule-of-three sum worked
out, not very accurately it may be, but still calmly and
dispassionately. You may die, you may not die, and you are rated
accordingly; you may live, you may not live, and the law and common
sense take precautions in consequence.
When that letter was written the future lay shrouded from view, that
future was the present now, and he had died; but she might as well have
died, and then—why that letter would have been burnt, and she never a
bit the wiser.
Life’s firmest ground is insecure, its strongest fortresses powerless
against the touch of the great destroyer. Vaguely this idea took root in
Phemie’s mind as she read the lines I have copied, ere breaking the
outer seals and taking out the letter folded inside.
“Mrs. Stondon” was the direction on the cover, but on the actual
envelope were traced the words—“To my dear wife,” and the paper that
envelope contained began—“My dearest Phemie.” His! The hand that penned
the sentence, that had been warm when the letter was folded, sealed, and
directed, was cold enough now.
Well-a-day!—ah, well-a-day!—there are many bitter hours in life, and one
of those hours was striking for Phemie then. In the twilight she sat
reading, while her tears fell fast and hot on the paper; in the twilight
she understood at last the nature of the man she had loved so
lightly—the man who, in the time of his fiercest trial, wrote thus to
the wife whose heart he found had never throbbed with love for him.
“MY DEAREST PHEMIE,—When you receive this I shall be lying in my quiet
grave, and you will be my widow. To you, my widow, I write that which I
could never have said to my wife. It seems to me at this moment that I
am almost writing these words from another world, for the old things
bear new forms, and life itself is changed to me within the last few
hours. My love, my wife, my child, I know all now—your strength, your
weakness, your secret; and if I could give you happiness at this moment
by any personal sacrifice, God is my witness—God in whose presence I
shall stand when you read this—that I would try to do so; but, my
darling, it is impossible. I cannot undo the past: let me try to make
amends in the future.
“I did wrong, Phemie—I did wrong; but it is only within the last
twenty-four hours that I see this. I was old, and you were young; I was
rich in money and love, and you in youth, beauty, virtue, the power of
winning affection. In your inexperience, my darling, I took you unto
myself, away from all chance of happy love—away to the temptation to
which I have exposed you. Blind! blind! blind! I thought I could have
made you so happy, Phemie, and I have learned that it was not in my
power to do so. Forgive me, dear—forgive,—for I am very penitent, and
very miserable!
“What I want to say to you, my darling, is this. If, when you read these
lines, you think Basil can be to you all I tried to be, marry him after
what the world thinks a prudent and fitting interval. Let no thought of
me come between you and him, save this, that if it seems good to you to
cast your lot with his, I wish you to do so. You have done your
uttermost to give the old man your love. I know by what I heard last
night that you have not hurt his honour, and I would in the years to
come you should give your hand where your heart is now. Give it,
remembering that if I had any need to pardon I have pardoned; that I
have done my best to repair my error, and secure for you freedom from
temptation during my lifetime, and happiness after my death. I never
suspected you; I never spied upon you; all my knowledge came from
others. The enclosed told me of your intended meeting with Basil this
evening. I leave it for you to see, as perhaps you may guess who sent it
(I cannot), and be on your watch against a secret enemy when I am here
to guard you no longer. This is the last thing I can do for you. God
grant it may turn out for your welfare here and hereafter.
“H. S.”
In the twilight she read it; when the summer night came, she still sat
on thinking with a terrible despair, with a sickening remorse about the
irreparable past—about the hopeless future. He had known—he had known
how fond she was of Basil; but he could never know now how fond she had
been of him! And Phemie would have given all the years of her future
life for ten minutes from the past—ten minutes to explain, to confess,
to weep out her repentance, and then, if need be, to part.
But amid all her grief there was another and perhaps a stronger
feeling—anger against the person who enlightened Captain Stondon, who
had driven Basil across the seas.
She could have fought out her fight alone, she thought. Had she not done
so? She could have spoken herself to her husband when she found the
burden of the day too much, the heat of the battle too fierce. How came
it she had never suspected interference before? How could she ever have
forgiven Miss Derno, and varied in her opinion concerning her?
“She wrote that letter.” Thus Phemie ended the mental argument. “She
fancied she would get him for herself, and she did not care what misery
she brought to any one else—a double-faced hypocrite! Well, Miss Derno,
you have played your last game out with me.” And Phemie folded up the
letters, and put them aside in a drawer, resolving to make no mention of
their contents to any one.
She felt wretchedly ill. Her head was burning, her hands and feet were
cold as ice. When her maid came to know if she would wish her tea
brought up into her dressing-room, she said, “No,” and bade the woman
say to Mr. Aggland that she desired to see him.
“Uncle,” she began, when he obeyed the summons, “I have had a great
shock to-night, and I fear I am going to have a bad illness. Count
that,” and she laid his fingers on her pulse; “promise me that if I
should be delirious you will get a nurse from London. I do not want
Helen nor any of the servants to come near me, and, beyond everything,
keep Miss Derno away.”
Whereupon Mr. Aggland went downstairs, and sending off straightway for a
doctor, told Miss Derno he thought Phemie must be “lightheaded;” acting
upon which information, Miss Derno went upstairs, and knocked at Mrs.
Stondon’s door, which was opened by Mrs. Stondon’s maid, who said her
mistress had gone to bed with a bad headache.
“Is that Miss Derno?” cried out Phemie; “let her come in—I wish to speak
to her; and you may go away, Marshall. Are you there?” she exclaimed, as
the door closed behind the woman. “Come near to me. That will do. Now
then, what do you want?”
“I want to know how you are, dear,” said Miss Derno, approaching the
bed, and trying to take one of Phemie’s hands in hers, but Phemie pulled
it away.
“I will be fair and frank with you, Miss Derno,” she began; “I will
speak freely to you now, as I once thought never to speak freely to
mortal. Within the last few hours I have learnt all; I have learned who
sent Basil Stondon to India; who told my husband that I—that he——”
“That Basil loved you,” supplied Miss Derno, “If you mean that, I
certainly plead guilty; but, Mrs. Stondon, was I wrong?”
“Wrong or right what business had you to come between my husband and
me?” retorted Phemie, sitting bolt upright in bed; while the loosened
waves of her hair, that she wore ordinarily braided so closely under her
cap, rippled down over throat and shoulders and pillows. “Could you not
have left _me_ to deal with Basil without breaking the heart of as good
a man as ever possessed an unworthy wife?”
“I never told Captain Stondon that I thought you loved Basil,” was the
reply.
“But you sent him where he could hear it for himself,” answered Phemie.
“You told him to go to the pine plantation that night when Basil and I
parted.”
Here Mrs. Stondon stopped: there seemed to come around her as she spoke
the twilight of the autumn evening, the moaning of the wind, the leaves
beneath her feet. She could not go on, and so she paused, while Miss
Derno said—
“I never did—I never even knew till this moment that Basil and you had a
parting interview, or that Captain Stondon was present at it.”
“You cannot expect me to believe that,” was the retort; “you wanted
Basil for yourself; you thought if once he were separated from me, he
would marry you. No means seemed too treacherous to secure such a
prize.”
“Now heaven help the woman!” broke in Miss Derno. “Mrs. Stondon,” she
continued, “are you mad? Can you think that I should scheme to win Basil
Stondon? I, who refused him twice before he ever lost his heart to you?”
Hearing that, Phemie fell back on her pillow.
If Miss Derno thought to make peace by such a sentence, she mistook the
nature of the woman she was speaking to.
There was no balm in Gilead for a wound like this. To have given her own
love, to have deceived her husband, to have wasted her affection on a
man who had loved another before her! It seemed like the very bitterness
of death, and Phemie struggled against conviction.
“If you did not wish to marry Basil; if you did not write that letter,
who did?” she said, half turning her face towards Miss Derno.
“I cannot tell; I cannot be sure, though I may guess——”
“That is only half an answer,” persisted Phemie.
“Well, then, I guess Georgina Hurlford wrote it. She would have had no
objection to become Mrs. Basil Stondon; and I believe she was capable of
committing any meanness, if by so doing she could compass her own ends.”
For a moment Phemie paused; then she said—
“You confess you told my husband Basil cared for me?”
“I do; and I told him so in all honour and honesty of purpose. I knew
you would not tell him. I saw Basil would never leave Marshlands of
himself, and it was best I did speak to Captain Stondon. Though going to
India cost Basil his life, it was best for you both that he did go. You
cannot deny the truth of what I am saying.”
“I do deny it,” retorted Phemie, fiercely. “I would have gone through
fire and water; I would have suffered tortures; I would have died myself
cheerfully before letting him guess the miserable truth he learnt that
night among the pines. It is no use my making any secret of what you
already know. I tell you, hating you all the time for your knowledge,
that I did love Basil Stondon—God forgive me—more than I ever loved any
man on earth. I loved him, detesting myself for loving him; I loved him
more than my husband, but I loved my husband better; and because I loved
him better—because he trusted, idolized, and believed I was as good and
true as a wife ought to be, I had rather have fought my own battle out
to the end. I would rather have borne twenty times as much as I did bear
than that he should have come to share any part of the trouble with me.
Oh Lord!” finished Phemie, passionately, “will my punishment never end?
Will there come no day that shall see the last of this my sin?”
“Mrs. Stondon!” And Miss Derno laid a beseeching hand on Phemie, but
Phemie again shook it off.
“You put division between us—you meddled in that which did not concern
you—you sent Basil to India—you embittered the last days of my husband’s
life. I know now, I know now,” she wailed out, “what made him look at me
as he often did, and I will never forgive you, never—if you were dying
this minute I would not—if I were dying I would not; and I do not
believe Basil ever cared for you much, and I do believe you wrote that
note. If you meddled in one part, why not in the other?”
“It is of no use, I suppose, striving to argue with you,” answered Miss
Derno. “There is only one thing I will say, however; not very long ago
you told me you were sorry ever to have misjudged me. You are misjudging
me now, and you will be sorry for having done so hereafter.”
“I shall have to bear that sorrow then as I have had to bear others,”
was Phemie’s reply. “You came here professing to be fond of
me—professing to like me better than any other woman in the world, and
all the time you were scheming against me and mine; you were trying to
put division between me and my husband; you thought perhaps nothing
would kill him so soon as to tell him I was too fond of Basil; very
likely you hoped to get Basil and Marshlands together. I am saying
exactly what I think—I cannot be a hypocrite, though you are one.”
“Mrs. Stondon, I never told any one you were too fond of Basil, and I
never sent Captain Stondon to any place where he was likely to hear that
fact for himself. What is the cause of all this excitement? who has been
putting ideas into your mind? from whom have you heard?”
“I have heard from the dead,” answered Phemie; “and they, I suppose, may
be trusted to speak the truth. You came spying here, watching my every
word and look and movement, and then, having somehow guessed the truth,
you went and informed my husband that Basil loved me. That is on your
own confession—out of your own mouth I convict you. After that you
expect me to believe you did not go further, and tell him I loved Basil.
Do you imagine I am an idiot? do you think I have lost my senses
altogether? No, no, Miss Derno, there is a point at which credulity
ceases, and you could never make me credit Georgina Hurlford wrote that
note, unless I heard it from her own lips.”
“Which it is not very probable you will do, in this world at all
events,” said Miss Derno; “for I have not the slightest idea that she is
still living. Let that be as it may, however, I can only repeat what I
have said, I did not try to do you any harm. I did not desire that Basil
should marry me. I have tried to be your friend, and though you will not
be my friend, I shall never change to you. Do not let our last word be
one of anger. Good-by.”
But Phemie only turned her head aside, and the great mass of her hair
was all Miss Derno could see of her.
“Good-by,” repeated Miss Derno, putting her hand over Phemie’s shoulder,
but Phemie would take no notice.
“Good-by,” she said for the third time, and she stooped and kissed the
shining tresses which had first caught Captain Stondon’s fancy. “God
knows whether or not we shall ever meet again, but may He keep and bless
you!”
And turning away she left the room slowly, and returning to Mr. Aggland,
told him his niece was not at all delirious.
“But she has taken offence at something she fancies I have done,” added
Miss Derno; “and it will be best for me to leave here to-morrow morning.
Do not try to make peace between us; in time she will discover her
mistake, and till then I can be patient.”
CHAPTER IV.
MEETING.
Spring came round again; and Phemie, walking about the grounds at
Marshlands, saw the crocuses and the snowdrops blooming, the daffodils
rearing their gaudy heads in triumph, the violets peeping modestly up
from amongst their thick covert of green leaves, and the primroses
blossoming in the hedgerows and beside the wood paths.
In due time the wild hyacinths opened their blue and white bells, and
perfumed the air with a delicious fragrance; in the copses the wood
anemones shone like stars in shaded places; there was fresh foliage on
the trees, the grass felt soft and velvety under foot; there was a stir
of life throughout all nature—nature so recently awakened from her long
winter’s rest. And Phemie, looking around her—looking back at the years
which were past, and forward at the years which were to come—thought
sadly that for all inanimate nature there is a spring-time as well as an
autumn, but for man no second youth, no returning April wherein the
flowers of his former existence can blossom and bloom as of yore.
She had passed through grievous sickness since the night she and Miss
Derno parted; she had suffered mentally and bodily, and she was only now
just crawling out again into the air and the sunshine, to see what the
sweet sights and sounds of spring could do for her—she whom the world
thought so fortunate a woman.
For was not she young, well dowered, well cared for? She had Roundwood
to fall back upon whenever Marshlands came to be claimed by its rightful
owner. Her husband was dead; but people said if she could not please
herself again, supposing she desired to do so, who could?
Society felt it was the proper thing for her to live in strict
seclusion, to receive no visitors, to be in a poor state of health and
in low spirits; but at the same time society concluded that when the
days of mourning were expired, Mrs. Stondon would feel that it had been
the will of God for Captain Stondon to die, and that as he was to die,
she ought to be thankful it had likewise been the will of God to provide
her with a satisfactory portion of this world’s goods.
Many people were already making inquiries as to the amount of personalty
Captain Stondon had left behind him, and how he had disposed of
it—whilst the value of Roundwood was known to a shilling. Those ladies
who had brothers or sons anxious to marry a wife able to contribute her
share towards the expenses of a household, ventured finally to remark to
Mr. Aggland that they thought dear Mrs. Stondon was leading too much the
life of a hermit, and that a little society, “not exactly society, but
merely seeing a few intimate friends, would be extremely good for her.”
To which Mr. Aggland replied, in all truthfulness, that he thought the
shock had been almost too much for his niece. “They were so much
attached,” he added, “she seems to feel his loss more and more every
day.”
(Which was not encouraging to the young men.)
“She will be better perhaps when we get her away from Norfolk,” went on
Mr. Aggland; “change of scene will, I hope, work wonders. It is her
first great sorrow in life, and you remember, madam, ‘Every one can
master a grief but he that has it.’ Few are able to say just at the
first—‘The hand of the Lord hath wrought this.’ In time, I have no doubt
but that her present anguish will—
‘Settle down into a grief that loves
And finds relief in unreproved tears;
Then cometh sorrow like a Sabbath, and, last
Of all, there falls a kind oblivion
Over the going out of that sweet light
In which we had our being.’”
“What a wonderful memory you have, Mr. Aggland,” said his visitor, with
a simper; and then she drove down the avenue, and called at half-a-dozen
houses, and whispered in each of them—“I do think there must be some
little insanity in Mrs. Stondon’s family. That uncle of hers is as
eccentric and odd as possible. His brain seems to me a perfect library,
or rather a book filled with familiar quotations.”
“It did not strike me that they were familiar at all,” said Mr. Ralph
Chichelee; “quite the contrary, indeed.”
“And, besides,” put in Mrs. Enmoor, who had rather an affection for
Phemie, “he is not her uncle by blood, only by marriage.”
“But it is so strange the way she goes on,” persisted the first speaker;
“she sees no one—she goes out nowhere—she is even ‘not at home,’ or ‘too
ill to receive’ to the clergyman’s wife.”
“Do you not believe she is ill, then?” asked Mr. Chichelee.
“I met her out driving one day last week, and I am sure she then looked
like a ghost,” added Mrs. Enmoor. “I was quite shocked to see her.”
“But she adopts no means to get well.”
“I hear she is having that place of hers in Sussex put into thorough
order,” said Mr. Chichelee. “No doubt she will soon be leaving
Marshlands now; and that reminds me—has anything been heard of the
missing heir?”
“People seem convinced he is dead,” was the reply.
“And who is the fortunate man in that case?” inquired Mr. Chichelee.
“A Mr. Haslett Stondon, I hear,” answered Mrs. Enmoor; “who was born in
Canada—a great boor, I am told. Ah! Marshlands will never again be what
it was—poor dear Captain Stondon!” finished Mrs. Enmoor, with grateful
reminiscences of all Phemie had tried to do for her and hers in that
pretty drawing-room which looked out over the flower-garden, and the
walk under the elm trees.
It was all true—Phemie was going away, and Marshlands would never again
be bright and gay as formerly. Mrs. Stondon had scarcely realised to
herself how much she loved Marshlands till she was called upon to quit
it. Roundwood might be a very nice property, but it was not Marshlands.
And to leave Marshlands, to vacate the old familiar rooms in favour of
Mr. Haslett Stondon, a man who openly stated he should never reside
there, and that with all his heart and with all his soul, and with a
good many oaths into the bargain, he wished she would stay, as it would
save him the expense of a caretaker!
Phemie wished so too; but still she could not continue to live in the
house she had owned, as a mere tenant. It was best for her to effect her
change of residence as speedily as might be, and try to get over all her
troubles at once. The ray of hope that had illumined her life had faded
away. No tidings came of Basil; there seemed no reason to doubt but that
it was really he who had died on board the _Lahore_.
“We will leave this and go to Roundwood, uncle, before the summer is
over,” she said one day. And Mr. Aggland eagerly assenting—forthwith
preparations for their departure were made, and bills were posted on
every wall and paling in the neighbourhood, announcing that on the —th
inst. there would be an auction at Marshlands of household furniture,
carriages, stock, farming utensils, &c.
“I intend to have that inlaid cabinet,” said Mrs. Hurlford to her
husband.
“And I,” answered he, “that roan horse, if he goes at all reasonable.”
“It seems strange to me she can bear to sell the furniture,” remarked
soft-hearted little Mrs. Enmoor, never thinking that Phemie wanted to
have done with all the old associations—that she wished to forget—to
begin an entirely new life in a new place.
When once her own personal effects were off the premises, Mrs. Stondon
meant to proceed to Roundwood, leaving her uncle to arrange all other
matters for her; and it wanted but a day or two of her intended
departure when a special messenger arrived with a letter from Messrs.
Gardner, Snelling, and Co., stating that Mr. Basil Stondon was alive,
that he was in England, that he might be expected at Marshlands almost
at any hour.
“Uncle!” She put the letter into his hands, and then fell back in a dead
faint on the sofa where she was seated.
“My dear child,” Mr. Aggland said, when the weary eyes opened once more,
and rested on the paper lying on the table, “my poor Phemie, I must get
you away; you must be kept quiet. These surprises and sudden tidings are
killing you. Those men might have had more consideration, more sense.
You must leave Marshlands.”
Then, as it seemed, speaking almost without her own will, Phemie cried
out—
“Let me wait and see him—let me see the dead man alive again, and then
take me where you will, away from this for ever. Let me stay,” she went
on, with earnest pleading, “just to welcome him back, just to make him
feel he has come home, and I will leave the next hour.”
That was her first prayer; her second was to leave immediately—to have
everything packed up, and ready for immediate departure.
Then a new fancy seized her: she would have all the bills for the
auction taken down; she would have every article of furniture put back
in its place; the mirrors refixed, the pictures rehung, the curtains
re-arranged; there should not be a chair out of place when the wanderer
returned.
“My husband would have wished it so,” she said to Mr. Aggland, and Mr.
Aggland gave orders to have the rooms they had already vacated put in
order, the fatted calf killed, and the house got ready for the reception
of the new owner.
He certainly inclined to the opinion that Phemie was a little out of her
mind. He had long thought her odd—and now he was confident his niece was
not merely odd, but also something more.
“Fainting and crying, and having the whole place upset on account of the
return of a man whom she never could bear—for whom she never had a civil
word!” Mr. Aggland muttered; but he comforted himself a moment
afterwards by recollecting that—
“——Good as well as ill,
Woman’s at best a contradiction still;”
and thought that perhaps, when all was said and done, Phemie’s
eccentricities were matters not of mind but of sex.
“I am not sure that it is good for women to have their own way,” he
reflected; “for if they have the guiding of themselves they are never
content with one road for two minutes together. Likely as not, she will
want the bills posted again to-morrow, so I won’t have them taken down
at any rate.”
“Do you not think it would be well for you to send a messenger, begging
Mrs. Montague Stondon to come down here to receive her son?” he ventured
to propose next morning.
“Am I mistress here now?” Phemie angrily retorted. “Is the house mine,
to ask or to bid keep away? I ought to be out of Marshlands at this
minute. I shall merely remain to touch hands with Basil, and bid him
welcome home, and then go when he arrives. Let the luggage be sent over
to Disley, and it will be ready for whatever train we choose to start
by.”
“But I think it most improbable he will be here for some days; he will
naturally remain in London to see his lawyers and his mother, and——”
“Basil Stondon will come straight on to Marshlands,” she interrupted.
“He will not lose an hour in hastening to—to—take possession of his
property.” And her heart fluttered like a bird’s as she spoke; while Mr.
Aggland answered—
“That she seemed to have a high opinion of Mr. Basil Stondon and of his
unselfishness. If he will feel no sorrow for your husband’s death, and
only rejoice at your having to leave Marshlands, why do you remain to
receive him, why can you not travel to Roundwood at once?”
“Because it would seem hard to him—no matter what he may be—for no
creature to be here to say, ‘I am glad you are alive—God give you
happiness as He has given you wealth.’”
“Well, suppose I stay here and say all that in your name?” suggested Mr.
Aggland, who had an intuitive feeling his niece would be better away. “I
can tell him all your wishes—how you desire that he shall retain the
whole or any portion of the furniture—how the cows and horses, the sheep
and the pigs are his to command, if he have any liking for any of
them—how you have enough and to spare without stripping the house of its
ornaments. I can say as well as you that ‘there is no winter’ in your
generosity; can prove how good a steward you have been, spending your
own money on another’s land. All that has occurred here since his
departure I can relate for his benefit, and I can bring news to you at
Roundwood where and how he has passed the time during which we have all
thought him dead. Will you take my advice, Phemie, and go? The memories
he will recall, the excitement of seeing a man risen from the grave, as
one may say, will certainly prove too much for you. Will you go?”
“I have a fancy to stay, uncle,” she answered; “just as I said before,
to wish him health and happiness before I leave Marshlands for ever.
Most likely I shall never enter its doors again—let my last thought of
the old home be a gracious one.”
And there came such a sad, wistful look into the sweet face that Mr.
Aggland could press the point no further. He only said it should all be
as she wished, and entreated her to lie down and recruit her strength,
so that when the journey had to be taken she might be ready for it.
“I hope to see the colour back in your cheeks some day, my dear,” he
concluded. “We will all take such care of you when we get you among us
once more, that you shall not have any choice left but to get well and
strong again. With all your life still before you, it will never do for
you to settle down into a desponding invalid.”
“Have patience,” Phemie answered; “let me only get this meeting over—let
me once begin a new existence elsewhere, and I will try to make a good
thing of it.”
“Have you not made a good thing of it?” he asked; but Mrs. Stondon shook
her head.
“We will not talk about the past,” she replied; “the present is enough
for us, surely. Let me go now, uncle,” she added; “I want to be quiet
for a time, quiet and alone.”
Mr. Aggland followed her with his eyes, as she ascended the staircase.
He felt there was something about Phemie which he could not
understand—which he had never understood—“and which _I_ probably never
shall,” he decided, when he heard a distant door close behind her. “I do
think she is very odd but somehow very sweet.”
Could he have seen what Phemie was doing at that very moment, he would
have thought her odder still.
She was standing before her mirror, looking at all that was left of the
Phemie who had once been so beautiful; looking at the pale, wan face, at
the sharpened features, at the dark lines under her eyes, at the lines
across her forehead, at her figure round and symmetrical no longer, at
the ghastly whiteness of her cheeks, at the widow’s cap which concealed
her hair, at the black trailing dress.
Her beauty! Ah, Heaven! that had been a dream too, and it was gone—like
her youth, like her gaiety, like her pride, like her vanity, like her
innocence of soul—gone for ever.
She turned away from the glass, and covered her face with her hands. She
was no heroine, only a woman; and she could not help mourning over the
fact that her youth was gone and her beauty with it.
Yet what had youth and beauty done for her?—what? Had they not led her
into temptation? Had she not wept such tears, whilst her eyes were
bright, and her face round, and her cheeks blooming, as she hoped never
to shed again till the day of her death?
Had her very loveliness not brought such suffering upon her as had
wrought the wreck she was? Why should she mourn because she had no
attractions left to charm the man who once loved her so passionately?
Why was it so terrible to her now to realise the full force of the truth
which had glimmered across her understanding that night when she sat
looking through the darkness down over Tordale?
She had owned one life—on this side of the grave she could never own
another. In the eyes of the world she had made a very good thing of it;
she had married well, she had associated well, she had succeeded to the
Keller property; her husband also had left her abundantly provided for;
she had done well so far as money was concerned, but for all that Phemie
knew, now when she sat looking—not through the darkness down upon
Tordale, but back through the years to her girlhood—that her life had
been a lost one, that although there were plenty more lives in the world
still to be lived out and made much of or spoiled—enjoyed or marred—yet
there could be no second existence for her, no return of the years, no
retracing of her steps, no re-writing the book, no erasing the past.
Do you comprehend at last the story I have been trying to tell?—the
story which has had in it so little of variety or excitement, but yet
that was after all the tale of a woman’s life—of a woman who, like the
rest of us, whether man or woman, had but one—and spoiled it! In the
world’s great lottery, as I said early in these pages, her little
investment might seem a mere bagatelle; but it was the whole of her
capital notwithstanding.
And she had lost! Looking back, this conviction forced itself upon her;
she had lost, and it was too late for her to hope for a profit in the
future.
Had she hoped? had she still clung to the idea of that man loving her?
had she believed they might again meet for once, as of old, and then
part? What had she thought? what had she hoped till she looked
critically at herself in the unflattering mirror?
My reader, I cannot tell—though that was an hour when Phemie tried hard
to understand herself, to comprehend why she had wished to stay—why she
now wished to go.
All that passed swiftly and sharply through her heart, it would be well
nigh impossible for any one to imagine. She could not have told herself
aught save this—that her part was played out, on a stage where every
step had proved a failure; that there was literally nothing more left
for her to do, save walk behind the scenes, and leave the ground clear
for those who had still to act out their life’s drama—ill or well, as
the case might be.
She rose and stood in the middle of her room irresolute. Should she go?
should she not go? should she play the hostess in Marshlands for the
last time? remain to greet the new owner and then pass away like the old
year? or should she follow the bent of her own inclination and avoid
this meeting?
Could she bear to see his look when he saw her changed face? could she
assume indifference, or he forgetfulness?
“I will go,” she concluded; and the grey evening shadows were settling
down as this idea became a fixed determination. “I will go!—better to
seem unkind than to play the fool. My uncle will wait and welcome him—a
fitter one to do so than I.” And she rang her bell, and bade Marshall
pack the few articles still lying about, and prepare for their immediate
departure.
“I think we can catch the night express,” she said; and she went
downstairs to speak to her uncle about it.
He was not in the drawing-room, and while she remained for a moment
irresolute, there was a noise in the hall as of some one’s arrival.
She tried to move forward to the door, but the blood rushing back to her
heart took the power of movement from her. He had come—he had come from
out of those great waters—from the grave—out of the past. She forgot the
years—she forgot her widow’s weeds—she forgot the dead husband lying in
the churchyard beyond the village—she forgot the loss of her beauty—the
time that had passed—she remembered nothing save this man whom she had
loved, and who had come back again; and when the door opened she
stretched out her arms towards him, and cried—“Basil—Basil!”
Then, as in a sort of fright, the dead alive, with a quick glance behind
him, answered warningly, while he advanced to meet Phemie—
“And my wife!”
There are times when the very excess of their fear gives men courage;
there are occasions when the very intensity of the suffering deadens
sensation; and there are also moments in life when, out of the very
depth of the previous humiliation, there arises sufficient pride to
carry humanity over the most critical moment of its agony and despair.
Such a moment arrived to Phemie then. She had forgotten her pride—her
dead—her resolutions; she had stretched out her arms with a great cry of
joy to the lost who was found. Another second, and, God help her! she
would have let him take her to his heart; but, almost before his name
had passed her lips there came crashing down upon her that cruel warning
sentence—
“And my wife.”
Then she saw his wife. Standing behind him in the doorway, with her
bright, mocking eyes fixed on Phemie’s face, was the woman he had
married.
She was younger than Phemie; watching had not paled her cheeks, nor
grief wasted her figure. The mourning dress which made Phemie look so
white and worn and haggard only set off the other’s beauty to greater
advantage; and there was a malicious satisfaction playing over every
feature, as the new mistress of Marshlands heard Basil’s remark, and
perceived the effect it produced on Phemie. But next moment Phemie was
mistress of the position.
“You are welcome!” she said, and she held out her hand, which neither
shook nor faltered, towards the woman who had supplanted her. “I have
waited here to say this to both of you, Georgina; waited to wish you
health, wealth, and happiness in Marshlands—before leaving it for ever.”
She was like a queen beside the new arrival—like a queen in her manner,
her carriage, her address; and when she turned and spoke to Basil, and,
looking him straight in the face, told him—with just that tremor in her
voice which comes into most voices when people speak of a great pain
endured—of a great peril escaped—how she had mourned for his reported
death—how she had suffered much suspense and much sorrow concerning
him—how even at that moment she could scarcely believe it was really to
Basil Stondon, Basil raised from the dead, she was speaking—she still
remained in possession of the field, and Mrs. Basil Stondon, _née_
Hurlford, gained no advantage over her.
Phemie speaking to Basil never tried to conceal how much the thought of
his death had affected her; never strove to explain away her cry at his
entrance. She had sustained a grievous defeat, and yet she mastered her
men so well, she displayed her resources so admirably, she addressed the
wife with so gracious a courtesy, and the husband with such an earnest
joy and sincerity, that Georgina could scarcely decide whether, after
all, she was not the one worsted in the encounter—whether the former
mistress of Marshlands had not the best of the day.
She could not even flatter herself into thinking her arrival was driving
Phemie off the field; for Phemie’s preparations had all been made before
she knew Basil Stondon had brought a wife back with him.
The departing combatant always, too, seems, like the Parthian, to be
able to leave some stinging arrow behind him. There is a victory in the
mere act of “going,” the greatness of which is generally felt, though
rarely, I believe, acknowledged.
There is a grand moral power in walking out of a room, or driving away
from a house, that produces an effect on the individuals left behind. It
is action—it is force—it is doing what another person is unable to do.
Their intentions are powerless to detain; the will of the one combatant
has been stronger than that of the other; and perhaps it was some idea
of this kind which made Mrs. Basil Stondon so earnestly press Phemie to
remain.
“You will not pain us—you will not be cruel?” she urged. But Phemie had
made all her arrangements, and was not to be turned aside from her path.
“I stayed but to bid you welcome—you, Basil, whom I knew were coming,
you also, Georgina, whom I did not expect—it seems I remained to receive
you both. Having done so, let me go, for this is my home no longer, and
no kindness can ever make it seem home to me again.”
She passed by them, and walked towards her uncle. “Is the carriage
ready?” she asked; adding, in an undertone, “For God’s sake let us get
away from here at once!”
And still Phemie kept moving forward, and next moment caught sight of
Basil’s child.
The nurse was surrounded by a group of excited domestics, who, standing
in the centre of the hall, were criticising and admiring the heir, a
fine boy, who neither cried nor shrieked, but kept essaying to talk, and
crowing mightily.
There are limits to all things, and there were limits even to Phemie’s
self-command. From that group she turned aside and fled, up the wide
staircase, along the corridor, to the room that had been hers, but
which, like all the rest, must now be abandoned to strangers. She sent
away her maid, she put on her bonnet, she threw her shawl around her,
she took one last look out over the park, and then hurried away from the
familiar apartment as though a plague were in it.
The carriage was at the door, her maid on the box beside the coachman;
Georgina stood at the hall door, and Basil came out and assisted Phemie
into her brougham. As he did so he whispered—
“I wanted to come down alone, but she would not let me.”
Then Mr. Aggland took his seat beside his niece, and Phemie, leaning
forward, bowed a farewell to Basil and his wife; and the horses sprang
forward down the long avenue and through the gates, and were soon
dashing along the level road leading to Disley, leaving Marshlands far
behind.
So long as they were under the shadow of the pines and the elm-trees,
uncle and niece never exchanged a sentence; but once they were outside
the domain, Mr. Aggland laid his hand gently on the poor thin fingers
which were knotted and twisted together in a kind of convulsive agony,
and said, “Phemie!”
No other word—but at the sound of that she flung herself on his breast
and cried with such a frenzy of grief that he answered her inarticulate
appeal for comfort with broken words of consolation and sympathy.
“Don’t!” she cried—“don’t! I deserve it all. Let me bear it. Oh, uncle,
do you understand what has been the misery of my life at last?”
What was there to be said—what to be done—what?—but to secure a
compartment all to themselves, and stow Marshall and the smaller effects
into another. He felt thankful to have caught the express, even though
Sewel’s bays had been greatly distressed in order to compass that
desirable end. He knew Phemie’s grief must have its way; and so he let
her lie back and weep out her trouble as they dashed on through the
night.
He did not speak to her. He did not go near her. She sat in her corner,
and he in his; and they both thought—thought—while the hours went by.
They travelled the same mental course—he in his way, she in hers. He
recalled to mind the girl who had come to him in his sanctum to ask his
advice, and whom he had afterwards prayed might never know what it was
really to love.
And this was the end. O God! this was the end. And the man’s eyes were
dim with tears as he bent forward and looked out into the darkness.
Whilst Phemie!—she was reciting to herself and preaching out of her own
experience a sermon upon it.
She had gone back to Tordale too. She was sitting—unmarried—unwooed—in
that little church under the shadows of the everlasting hills. The man
whom she afterwards wedded, came in at the porch, and entered the pew,
and shared her book, and he was nobody to her then.
She had been dreaming of heroes of romance—lords and knights and young
esquires. And what was that middle-aged tourist to her? What concern was
he of hers? What meaning had the text Mr. Conbyr selected for her
either?
“The wages of sin is death!” he said. And Phemie looked down at her
faded muslin dress—at her poor finery—and thought of Lord Ronald
Clanronald while the preacher proceeded.
Well, the years had gone by. And she dreamed no more of youths of high
degree—of skirts of green satin—of the great future that might be in
store for her. The old things regarded then were unheeded now; but the
truth heard so many a long day before came home to her fully in the half
darkness of that summer night.
“The wages of sin is death!” Had they not been death to her? death to
every pleasant memory—to every innocent recollection—to every future
hope—to every dream of happiness—to every plan—to every desire. There
was nothing in her past she could look back to with satisfaction; there
had been flowers, but there was a blight on them; there had been bright
green foliage, but, behold, the trees were naked and bare; there had
been a fair sunny landscape, but the clouds had come up, and in lieu of
sunshine there was blackness—instead of rejoicing, despair.
She had given her love to that man—for his sake she had forgotten her
husband, been cruel to herself. For his sake! Ah! Heaven! and he had
forgotten her—forgotten all her tears—all her struggles—all her
sorrow—and suffered his wife to come down and see her humiliation.
Wife and child—wife and child! had now taken possession of Marshlands.
Where she had been much she was now nothing. Where she had been exalted
she was brought low. Her day was declining, her reign over. “The wages
of sin is death!” And the woman’s tears flowed fast.
On through the flat Cambridgeshire fields—on to the point where
Hertfordshire and Essex shake hands—on to the marsh lands, and the
nursery-grounds round and about Water Lane and Tottenham—on in the glad
light of a summer’s morning across the Lea—and away within sight of the
wooded heights of Clapton to Stratford and Mile End—and so to
Shoreditch.
On! she had preached her sermon—she had conned her lesson. She had dried
her eyes, and was looking over the fields and the river—over the
house-tops and the sea of red-tiled roofs, at the life on which she was
going to enter.
The hour before dawn is always the darkest; and that night was probably
the blackest, in its deep despair, which Phemie Keller ever passed
through.
Yet with the dawn came light; and this was the beam of sunshine which
stole in on Phemie Keller’s life—Duty.
Were there no sick to tend—no poor to visit—no sorrowing ones to
comfort—no children to educate?
Though she had erred she would yet try to do whatever work her hand
found to do.
“I will not sit down in idleness, uncle,” she said. “I have sinned—I
have suffered—but I will try——”
And as the train, with a shriek and a whistle, steamed into Shoreditch
Station, her uncle bent down and kissed her hand with an intense pity,
with an unutterable sympathy.
“‘Employment is nature’s physician,’ says Galen,” he remarked. “God in
His mercy grant that it may bring you back to health.”
“I mean to try,” she repeated; and she drew her veil over her face, and
passed out, with the bright sunlight of that summer’s morning streaming
on her, into the deserted London streets.
CHAPTER V.
RECONCILED.
It was the height of the season at Hastings; the yearly heaven of
lodging-house keepers had arrived; they could be firm about rent, linen,
the use of plate, boot-cleaning, and kitchen fires; the millennium of
temporal prosperity had, after months of weary waiting, come at last,
and the reign of the saints by the sea-side had begun. As for the
sinners, they had a terrible time of it. At what hour they should eat;
the Spartan nature of the cookery they might expect; the rooms
wherewithal they must needs content themselves; these things were
announced to them by the powers in the ascendant with a severe
composure.
Any man who had all his life entertained an idea that he was entitled
for his money to money’s worth, needed but to set foot in Hastings to be
undeceived.
It was the harvest time; and all the native population of Hastings—under
the Castle of Hastings, on a level with the Castle, of St.
Leonards-on-Sea, and the various regions lying back from the shore, but
still studded with villas and terraces—put in the sickle.
The Egyptians had come down to the sea-side, and the householders
forthwith set about considering how they should best spoil them. Rents
were doubled—extras were put on—items were run up—bells were not
answered—servants were harassed to death—every dwelling was crammed,
from basement to garret—cooks were arrogant—housemaids breathless—and
still the cry went on, “They come!”—and still the place got fuller and
fuller; and it was, as I have said, the height of the season in Hastings
the romantic.
Was there ever a prettier bathing-place?—was there ever a more charming
dwelling for a short time? Was there ever a town round and about which
there were to be found lovelier walks and drives—sweeter bits of rural
scenery—more enchanting views over the great sea?
Most people seemed to have thought Hastings perfection that year, for
they came flocking to it as cattle go down into a pond to drink.
They came—the autocrats of the fashionable and the would-be fashionable
world—to St. Leonards, to the great houses fronting the sea, to Warrior
Square, to the little houses up back streets, and to the terraces, hung
up so high that ordinary limbs ached before the temporary home was
reached.
Then there were old-fashioned folks who affected Hastings—who thought
the old town seemed more home-like and pleasant than the new—who brought
their money to spend within easy walk of the East Cliff—who loved the
roads leading away to Fairlight—and the old churches in the High
Street—and who declared the bathing was better at Hastings than at St.
Leonards.
Anyhow, Hastings and St. Leonards were full—too full for comfort; but
not too full for amusement to anyone who knew London and its people
well.
To the country squire, to the grand folks who, by reason of their great
wealth and greater gentility, are far removed from all the pleasures of
watching their commoner fellows and trying to understand their ways,
these sea-side places must seem, as a rule, stale, flat, and
unprofitable. It is the naturalist who loves to note the habits and
instincts and modes of existence of the commonest animal; the bees going
and coming—the ants busy at work—the mole heaps in the garden: the
eccentricities of toad life have no charm to anyone who does not
understand something of the nature of bee, or ant, or mole, or toad: and
in like manner, the person who does not comprehend the modes of life and
habits of thought of the men and the women he sees around him, cannot
reasonably be expected to take much interest in observing their
peculiarities.
There are those, however, who ask no better enjoyment than watching
Jones, Brown, and Robinson out for a holiday; who delight in tracing
Jones to his clique, and Brown to his, and Robinson to his; who
luxuriate among snobs; who, watching them staring out of the windows at
St. Leonards, or airing themselves in the balconies at Robertson
Terrace, or lounging up and down the Parade, or adventuring their necks
on the backs of much-enduring horses, can classify the swell, the
millionaire, the fortune-hunter, the pretender, the distant relation of
some great house, the newly rich, the poor man of family, to a nicety.
And behold! there are all the men, women, and children he has become so
familiar with in the course of his walks and residences round London.
There is Paterfamilias, drearily promenading with Materfamilias, and
making believe to enjoy a holiday, which is a continual anxiety, and, as
the poor man feels, an unwarrantable expense.
In the whole of his married life he has never before seen so much of his
children, and he never—heaven forgive him!—wants to see so much of them
again. He is tired of the objectless days passed in the unexciting
society of the wife of his bosom and of his numerous progeny. On the
whole, he wishes the holiday were over, and he back at business once
again; while Materfamilias wages war with the landlady, and is pathetic
concerning the price of meat.
There are the young ladies from No. 7, who will go out in the yacht
twice a day, together with a friend, who has invariably to be relanded,
if the sea proves rough, amidst the pity of the passengers and the
secret maledictions of the crew. There is young Tomkins, the
corn-factor, taking great airs upon himself, walking in sandboots along
the Parade, and staring in the face of every woman he meets; there is
his future father-in-law, driving out his better-half in one of those
pony-carriages that are a cross between a clothes and a plate basket,
and charioteering the safest and most docile of ponies, who could not
run away if he would—as Alexander might have been supposed to manage
Bucephalus, had that animal ever been harnessed to a modern dog-cart. In
all Hastings there is nothing more amusing than to watch these amateur
whips, who hold the reins wide apart, and with great skill manage to
keep a firm grasp on the whip at the same time.
No young blood tooling his four-in-hand along the high road ever felt
grander than a regular cockney at Hastings seated behind a
slowly-trotting pony _en route_ to Crowhurst.
I have often wondered what the ponies say to each other about their
hirers when they get back to their chaff and their oats at night. Do
they take any part of the hauling and mauling out in sneers and
sarcasms?—do they curse the day when basket-carriages were invented?—do
they make lamentation over their weary legs and roughly-handled
mouths?—do they tell about how they are cantered up hill and rattled
down?—do they scoff at the hundred weights of flesh they have had to
pull about?—do they recount their experiences, and do they, as a rule,
consider mankind a mistake?
And as for the riding-horses—for the galled backs, for the broken
winds—for the way they are mauled about, and pulled from side to side
and harassed with curbs—and men who do not know what to do with either
bridle or whip—and women who will hang on their crutches—and equestrians
generally, who seem to think horses machines, incapable of weariness or
aching bones—what shall we say of all this?—what of the great people who
drive about in their own carriages, languidly surveying the commonalty
through eye-glasses?—what of the little people who walk up and down for
hours and go to the beach to pick up shells, and sit on the benches and
listen to the music?—what of the lonely men and the solitary women?—what
of the excursionists who come down from London to stay for one day, and
are taken back at a single fare, and who eat more apples, pears, and
plums, and drink more beer in that time than an inexperienced person
might deem possible?—what of the nobs who come down here, for any
purpose, as it would seem, judging from their faces, save pleasure?—what
of the snobs, who ape the airs of the nobs, and enjoy themselves little
accordingly?—what of the lawyer you have known so well in London, who
mounts to the very top of the East Cliff, and lies down on the grass
there, far away from men and the noise thereof—lies down, not to think,
or to look, or to dream, but to rest!—what of the invalid, who gazes out
from shaded window at the changing groups upon the shore?—what of the
children and the nursemaids, of the lovers and the newly married, of the
childless and the widowed? What? Dear reader, go to Hastings, and look
upon them all for yourself; go, as Mrs. Stondon did, and yourself a
dispassionate observer, look over the throng.
It was in the height of the season that Phemie found herself in Hastings
once again, and the waves broke against the Parade, and the sea kept up
its perpetual murmur, and the wind went sobbing away out upon the waters
just as she could remember it doing in the days that were gone.
She did not come to Hastings as a visitor. She took no furnished
apartments. She had to listen to no dissertations on the subject of
plate, linen, and boot-cleaning. She was in Hastings for a purpose, not
for any pleasure. She had come quickly, and she meant to return without
delay; for which reasons she and Mr. Aggland took up their quarters at
the hotel which stands at the east end of Robertson Terrace.
Seated by the window, straining her eyes out over the sea, Phemie went
back over the years that had elapsed since she first beheld the Castle,
the Parade, the East and West Cliffs.
She had come to Hastings to see an old friend who was mixed up with
every sad memory of her life. Of all places Hastings was, perhaps, the
one she would most have shrunk from revisiting; but necessity is a hard
taskmaster, and necessity had brought Mrs. Stondon back to the sea, to
the visitors, to the music, to the moonlight once again.
She wanted to see Miss Derno. On her arrival at Roundwood, immediately
after her hurried departure from Marshlands, her first act was to
inquire at what time the post went out; her next to write a letter.
Writing letters being an employment to which, at this present age of the
world, men and women are much addicted, the fact of Phemie inditing an
epistle before she rested or refreshed herself would scarcely be worth
mentioning, had it not chanced that the missive in question was one over
which she wept many tears and breathed many sighs.
It was a confession that she had been wrong, that she had been guilty of
grievous injustice; it contained expressions of deep regret; it
concluded with an earnest prayer for forgiveness.
In the main Phemie was of a just and a generous nature. She never spared
herself, and she could not let the sun set, after her discovery of
Basil’s marriage, till she acknowledged that Miss Derno’s suspicions of
Georgina had been correct, that her own suspicions of Miss Derno had
been wrong.
She had let Basil Stondon come between her and everything she most
esteemed and valued; between herself and her husband; between herself
and her family and her friends; between herself and purity; between
herself and God.
And fully aware of all this, in her deep self-abasement, in the first
agony of her mortified pride and vanity, with the first smart of the
dreadful wound spurring her on, with the past spread open before her
like a book, Phemie wrote such a letter to her old friend as caused Miss
Derno, when at length it reached her, to mourn with an exceeding sorrow
for the misery of the woman whom she had first met so young, so
guileless, so shy and unsophisticated.
She had always loved Phemie; loved her spite of her faults, her whims,
her injustice, her variableness; and she tried, when she answered the
letter, to convey some assurance of this love to Mrs. Stondon.
The letter had been forwarded to her by Mrs. Hurlford. She said—“I would
have answered it in person, but I am ill, dear, and I cannot go to you.
I hear your health is far from good, or I would pray you to come and see
me. If you are strong enough to travel here, I should like to see you,
as it is scarcely probable I shall ever be able to leave Hastings
again.”
That was the errand which brought Mrs. Stondon to Hastings, to see her
old friend, to look in her face, and touch her hand once more. That!
Phemie sat and thought about it, till at length, turning to her uncle,
she said—
“I think she must be back by this time. Shall we go and see?”
He took his hat in silence, and they passed out of the hotel side by
side. The radiant beauty of old was gone, and yet many a man turned to
look after the fair widow as she swept along the Parade, turning her
eyes neither to right nor to left, but looking straight forward, like
one who sees something away in the indefinite distance.
They had inquired at the house in Robertson Terrace where Miss Derno
lived, if she were come in, but the servant said she had not yet
returned.
“Very likely, ma’am, she is on the Parade. She generally goes out about
this time in a Bath-chair, to listen to the music and to watch the tide
coming in.”
Along the Parade, therefore, Phemie walked, as I have said, with her
black dress trailing behind her, with her eyes fixed on every advancing
group, on every approaching figure.
There had been a time when on that same Parade she felt dreamily,
dangerously happy; and as she walked along, the past was very present
with her, and the woman’s heart bled, remembering the sweetness of the
hours gone by, and contrasting that sweetness with the bitterness of the
hours which were then passing.
Lonely and widowed, childless and deserted, with the man who had loved
her so truly dead, with the man whom she had loved so passionately
married to another woman, whose son would hereafter be master of
Marshlands—no wonder that the people who looked admiringly at Phemie’s
stately walk, and turned back for another glance at her queenly figure,
felt instinctively that the widow’s dress, that the sweeping garments,
covered a sorrowful story; that the new comer had wept bitter tears,
kept weary vigils, passed through much sorrow, and seen bitter
suffering.
She was an old actor now on the stage which she had once regarded from
afar off as a mere spectator; she had gone through the tragedy, she had
played out the most important scenes in her own life, and she listened
to the moaning and murmuring of the sea with a comprehension clear and
distinct of its meaning.
She felt that although she might still have to appear on the boards of
existence, and act in other men’s pieces, appear in the comedies and
tragedies of other people’s lives, still that her own was over.
At thirty her spring-time and her summer were gone. They had not been
sunshiny or genial seasons to her; and the early blossoms which might
have brought forth fruit in the autumn had died away and withered and
rotted, and the rain had beaten down her roses, and withered the buds of
promise, and cankered the root of every pleasant flower.
Her wounds were fresh, and Phemie felt them opening again with every
step she took. There was not a foot of all that place but she knew and
loved. There was not a spot of ground round which there did not hover
some memory of the olden time. She could remember the airs and the
waltzes they had listened to in the days before Basil went over the sea.
She could recollect where they sat watching the waves come rushing up on
the shore; the sight of the East Cliff standing out against the sky
affected her like a sudden pain.
She had rejoiced here and she had lamented—she had been happy while he
walked by her side—she had hearkened to the moaning of the sea—to the
voices of the night when they came evening after evening and spoke to
her—through the whole of the winter she passed at Hastings with her
husband—about the depths wherein she then thought Basil was lying.
Was his death one half so bitter as his resurrection? Was it not easier
for her to mourn him dead than behold him lost to her? Yet—no—no—the
woman’s love was stronger than the woman’s pride. Life for him—life at
any price—at any suffering to herself. He would be happy and she could
bear; and she looked out seaward as she thought this, and the waves came
murmuring gently up on the shore—gently and peacefully.
“Phemie, I think this is Miss Derno.”
It was Mr. Aggland who spoke, pointing to a lady seated in an
invalid-chair, which was turned so as to catch the rays of the setting
sun, that were streaming over town and castle, over cliff and sea.
“Miss Derno—surely not!” exclaimed Phemie, “That skeleton Miss Derno!”
And she went forward doubtingly, and looked in the sick woman’s face.
“Mrs. Stondon!”—“Miss Derno!”—they exclaimed at the same moment, and the
two had met once more.
That was no place for loving greeting, for tender inquiry, for
affectionate discourse; and it was not till Miss Derno had been wheeled
back to her lodgings, and, assisted by a gentleman who was introduced to
Mrs. Stondon as Major Morrice, had walked into the house, that the
friends could speak to one another—heart to heart, and soul to soul.
“Forgive me, dear!”—that was the burden of Phemie’s entreaty.
“I have nothing to forgive,” was the reply; “and I am so glad—so glad to
see you again—to have you near me before I go.”
“You are not dangerously ill though, darling, are you?”
“Mrs. Stondon”—Miss Derno raised the head which was resting in her lap,
and bade Phemie look in her face—“do you think I am much like a woman
who has long to live?” she asked, earnestly. “And I have so wished to
live—so wished it, God forgive me.”
Then in the quiet twilight, while the sound of voices floated to them
from the Parade—while the music rose and fell—while the visitors walked
up and down—while the feet of many people hurried by—while the moon rose
over the East Cliff—while the waves came washing up on the shore, and
the sound of the waters fell on the ear like a subdued accompaniment to
the noisy melody of human fears and hopes which was still being sung on
the strand, just the same as formerly, Miss Derno told the story of her
life to Phemie.
It was the old story of a mutual love which yet could not end in
marriage—of a rich father desirous that his only son should marry well,
and unwilling for him to choose beauty and goodness and youth when money
formed no part of the lady’s dower.
It was the old story of the girl who would not endanger her lover’s
worldly prosperity—who would not let him be pauperised for her sake.
It was the old story of rings exchanged, of vows breathed, of an
engagement entered into, of eternal constancy promised—then they parted.
He went to India, she remained with her aunt.
After that there was foul play; she was represented to her lover as
faithless, as married, as happy.
“My letters never reached him, his letters never reached me,” she
proceeded; “and though I knew, though I was confident there had been
treachery somewhere, still I could not go on writing when I got no
reply. A woman cannot force herself on a man,” said Miss Derno, with a
slight return of the light, easy manner which Phemie had so much admired
in former days. “Even if she believes he wants her, it is a difficult
matter for her to press so valuable a possession on his acceptance—I
could not, at all events. How was I to know the falsehoods he was told
concerning me, and unknowing, I argued, ‘If he wants me he will come
back for me; he will come back some day.’ And he has come back,” she
finished, “to find me the wreck you see.”
“Was Major Morrice then——?” began Phemie.
“He was my first love and my last,” said the dying woman, and the tears
came into her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as she spoke. “I could
have married often,” she went on. “I say it in no spirit of idle vanity,
but merely to show that I did not remain faithful, as many a woman does,
simply because she has had no chance of being otherwise than faithful—I
could have married often, I could have married well, as the world talks
about such things, but the love of my youth was the love of my life, and
I could take no second love into my heart for ever. He has never been in
England since we were parted till now. He would not have come back yet,
only that his father is dead, and there were many things requiring his
presence. He returned at the same time as Basil Stondon; they were
fellow-passengers in the steamer, and they landed together at
Southampton. From Basil he heard I was not married, that I had always
remained true, and he came to me here—came to pray me at last to be his
wife. Think of it—think after the years of waiting, and to have to die
and leave him.”
She covered her face with her hands, and sobbed aloud, while Phemie
said, gently—
“And can nothing——”
“Nothing can save me,” added Miss Derno, completing her friend’s
sentence, “and I am not going to fight against the unconquerable—I am
not going to try to avert the inevitable. Nothing worse can come to me
than the look I saw on Gordon Morrice’s face when we first met. My fate
was reflected there as in a glass. He has learned to disguise his
thoughts since that—to speak hopefully of the future, but I know—I
know——”
And she turned her head towards the window, and looked out at the groups
standing on the Parade, at the young girls walking up and down, squired
by attentive cavaliers. Her life had been full like theirs once—full of
bliss and joy and happiness—full as the tide at its highest; but now the
waves were ebbing, ebbing, leaving the sands of time, receding from the
green shores of earth, rolling back—slowly, surely—into the depths of
the mysterious sea.
CHAPTER VI.
THE LAST ENEMY.
It did not require any very great amount of pressing to induce Miss
Derno to exchange her lodgings in Robertson Terrace for rooms at
Roundwood. She was ready enough to make the attempt, at all events, for
there is something in human nature which rebels at the idea of dying
among strangers, and paying extra rent for a death.
“I shall only be a burden and a trouble to you,” she said, in answer to
Phemie, “only be a nuisance in your house—you had better leave me where
I am.” But still her eyes belied her lips; they looked wistfully at Mrs.
Stondon, while she replied—
“I had not better leave you, and I will not. It is but little I can do
for you now, but let me have the satisfaction of doing that little. Say
you will come—it is all I ask, we will manage everything else, if only
you can bear to leave Hastings and come with us.”
“But I have so many belongings,” hesitated the other; “my cousin, and
maid, and—and—have you mentioned the matter to Major Morrice?”
“Yes, and he has agreed to make Roundwood his head-quarters for the
present too,” answered Phemie, cheerfully; but as she said this, Miss
Derno looked first in the sweet face bent down over her, and then turned
away and sighed.
Would it ever come to that?—when she was lying cold and dead—would
Gordon Morrice grow in time to love Phemie, and would Phemie learn to
love him? The possibility of such a result flashed upon the poor
invalid’s mind in a moment; and if tears did blind her eyes, who can
wonder?
She had loved the man, and he could never be anything to her now; but
another might be much to him, and if that other should be Mrs. Stondon,
why better Mrs. Stondon than anyone else, for then her memory would not
quite pass away; they would think of her sometimes in the quiet
eventide—remember the woman who had loved them both.
There is many an idea that seems unpleasant enough at first, which yet
grows, as time passes by, familiar and agreeable; the face of a possible
contingency appears strange when it looks in suddenly through the
windows of our soul, but by degrees that strangeness wears off, and we
become accustomed to its presence, and should miss it were it to leave
its wonted place.
Our plans and our ideas come to seem to us finally like friends; we
sketch them, we fill them in, we add a touch here, make some improvement
there, and then, when we have finished and perfected them, we cannot
bear to part with our ideals—cannot endure that the touch of reality
should level our dream-castles with the ground.
Miss Derno found this to be the truth, at any rate. At first the idea of
Phemie and Gordon Morrice growing near and dear to one another disturbed
and troubled her; but as the days went by—as she beheld the objectless
routine of Mrs. Stondon’s life—as she saw how the sorrows she had passed
through were graven on her heart—how deep the iron had entered into her
soul; as she watched her flitting hither and thither, anticipating every
want of her sick visitor, and moving heaven and earth to compass her
recovery, Miss Derno began to hope—she who had done with hope in this
world for herself—that some day Phemie might marry Gordon Morrice, and
put the irremediable past, with its sin, its suffering, its repentance,
away from her like a garment which, having been worn, is laid aside for
ever.
That Phemie should not marry again—that in the very prime of her life
she should thrust hope and love and joy aside—that she should live for
other people’s children, and preside over a desolate and lonely
household, seemed to Miss Derno terrible, and she took many an occasion
to talk to Mrs. Stondon about the past and about the future, trying her
mind on various subjects, but finding that only two strings in the
instrument returned their full tone to her delicate touch.
She would speak fully about the past, about her husband, about—well,
there is no use in standing over nice in the terms one employs—her
lover; repentance, and affection; her regret for her husband, her regard
for Basil.
“Why should I tell you any falsehood about the matter?” Phemie said, one
day; “it is all dead and gone—the love, the shame, the struggle, the
remorse. I did love Basil Stondon, but I love him no longer; the moment
I saw his wife I was cured, and being cured, I wonder how any man can
love another man’s wife. I could not love another woman’s husband. I
could not,” she repeated, seeing a look of incredulity in Miss Derno’s
face.
“And yet you say you have done with life?”
“What has that to do with the matter?”
“Much. No person has done with life till he has met with some fatal
disappointment in it. If you shut yourself up here, seeing no one,
visiting no one, receiving no one, not even your intimate
acquaintances—both Basil and his wife will be apt to think you are a
disappointed woman, and after a while the world may think so too.”
“What would you have me do?” Phemie inquired.
“I would have you act as if your life were before, not behind you; as
though there were still some happiness left in existence, even though
Basil be married, and Georgina mistress of Marshlands. I would not have
you leave the world and take a kind of social veil, burying yourself
among these cousins of yours, and forgetting that a woman of property
has scarcely a right to reside in such strict privacy as you propose.
When your time of mourning is over, go out, see people, visit, take an
interest in what is going on around you, and you will find as the years
pass that happiness comes with occupation, and that the worst remedy in
the world for a wound is always to be keeping your hands upon it and
pulling the sore open.”
“I have occupied myself,” Phemie answered. “I have planned schools. I
have visited the poor. I have relieved the sick. I have devoted myself
to my family.”
“My dear Mrs. Stondon, you must do more. You must amuse yourself. You
must devote yourself to the good work of getting strong, mentally and
bodily; of taking joy out of the days as they come and go; of being
interested—really interested—in your fellows. Do it at first from pride.
Put it out of anyone’s power to say Mrs. Stondon is a broken-hearted and
a disappointed woman.”
“That can never be said with any truth of me,” answered Phemie, “for I
am not disappointed, and I am not broken-hearted; and if Basil had never
seen Georgina Hurlford, it would not have made any difference between
us. After that—after that letter, I would never marry any one—I never
would.” And Phemie covered her face with her hands, and sobbed aloud.
“What letter are you talking about?” asked Miss Derno.
“I am talking of the one my husband left for me. I will show it to you.
I have never shown it before to any person.” And Mrs. Stondon rose and
left the room, returning in a few minutes, however, with the letter,
which has previously been copied into these pages.
“Read that,” she said, “and never speak again as if I could marry a
second time. Oh! if I had but known; if I had but known!”
If she had but known! Ah, Phemie, not alone by you have those words been
spoken. Tremblingly, despairingly, when it was too late, white lips have
murmured that sentence—faltering tongues uttered it hopelessly.
If she had but known! Is not that the burden of most human lamentations,
of most mortal regret? What might we not all, men and women alike, have
made of our lives, which are now past and gone, squandered and lost to
us, if we had but known—oh, God! if we had but known!
Silently Miss Derno folded up the letter and gave it back to her friend.
Quietly and thoughtfully she looked out at the landscape which lay
before her, clad in its autumn robes of gold and russet, of red and
brown, then she said—
“Dear Phemie—let me call you Phemie—if he could speak to you now, he
would bid you be happy; and you will try to be happy for our sakes—for
his and for mine—for love of your dead husband and your dead friend.”
“I will try.”
“And supposing, Phemie, that in the future some good and faithful man
should come, praying you to be his wife, and that you hesitate whether
to say yea or nay, will you think of this letter and of me, and remember
that both told you it would be no treachery to those you loved in the
past for you to be happy in the future?”
Then in a moment Phemie’s grief broke out again.
“You will have it, then?” she said. “Well, then, you shall, only never
mention the matter to me more. If I had loved less, I should have
suffered less. Basil Stondon was so dear to me, that no man could ever
win my heart again. This is the simple truth; and it is the truth, also,
that I would not marry Basil Stondon were he single to-morrow, and came
praying to me—praying as——”
She could not finish her sentence. The memory of all he had prayed—of
the grief he had tried to bring upon her—of all the shame he had striven
in his selfish recklessness to compass—rushed in a full tide through
Phemie’s heart, and choked her utterance.
“She will think differently some day,” Miss Derno mentally argued; but
the sick woman felt disappointed, nevertheless. She would have liked to
join their hands, to speak out fully to both of them, to bid them be
happy, yet not quite forgetful of her, and then, as such was God’s will,
to go.
It was not to be, however; though Phemie grew to like Major Morrice
greatly, though he learned to watch her coming and going and made such
inquiries as induced Miss Derno to believe he suspected the truth, so
far at least as Basil Stondon was concerned—it was not to be. The sick
woman’s disease went on apace, but never a bit nearer to one another
came the pair. The months went by—it was the dead time of the year, the
days were dull and dark, and the roll of the sea as it came in on the
shore could be heard all the night long at Roundwood. There were many
storms, and it was a trying season altogether—trying even to those in
health, to the dwellers in great cities, and doubly trying to the ailing
and dying far away in the country, who had nothing to do save think
about their ailments, and nothing to look at save nature dressed in her
deepest suit of mourning.
At last the year turned: and one day, when the sun came struggling
forth, Phemie said—
“We shall soon have spring here.”
“I wish I might live to see it—oh, I wish I might,” answered Miss Derno.
“Why, surely, dear, you have no expectation of leaving us so soon?” Mrs.
Stondon began; but a look in her friend’s face made her stop and
hesitate. “I had hoped,” she went on, “that the mild weather would do
you good—that we perhaps might go abroad—and——”
“Ah, Phemie love, you must go abroad alone; only I wish I might live
till the spring. I think I should go away more certain about the next
world if I could only once again see the flowers springing and the
leaves budding in this.”
Greatly Miss Derno took, in those days, to Mr. Aggland. He could supply
her with a verse or an extract at any instant. He had the whole Bible
almost off by heart, and was able to finish out whatever thought was
trembling through her mind with text and quotation.
Sometimes Phemie would say, half-reproachfully, “I think you like better
to have my uncle with you than me.” To which Miss Derno was wont to
reply,
“You know you do not believe what you are saying; but still it is very
pleasant to have everything put into shape for one in a moment. There is
not a thought crosses my mind, not a doubt perplexes me, but I find the
same thought has occupied and the same doubt perplexed some other human
being long before I was born. Your uncle makes me not feel so lonely in
my mind, Phemie—that is the secret of my liking to have him near me.”
And it was but natural that this should be so—that the texts, the
quotations, the scraps of poetry, the verses of pathetic songs should,
as Miss Derno said, render the mental road she was travelling less
solitary and weary.
Long time had passed since Mr. Aggland led the quire at Tordale, and his
voice was not so true or full as formerly; but still, in the evenings,
the invalid loved to lie and listen to the hymns and the songs with
which his memory was stored.
It is one thing to hear religious and serious subjects spoken of at
great length, till the brain grows weary and the mind wandering—to have
a full meal forced upon weak digestion at stated intervals—and another
to have the cup of refreshment touch the lips whenever they are parched
and feverish.
When there is too much thrust upon the patient the power of assimilation
ceases, and the food which was intended to nourish turns to poison in
the system; and, more especially when the act of dying is spread over a
long period, the sufferer wearies of the constant recurrence to
spiritual topics and longs for rest—longs for time to think out one fact
ere another is placed before him for consideration.
This was Miss Derno’s case at all events. She could not have borne any
one beside her who would constantly have been praying or constantly
reading. This excitement, beneficial doubtless in some cases, would have
driven her distracted; but she loved to talk in the evenings to Mr.
Aggland on those subjects which had always dwelt next to his heart.
He had thought under the shadow of the everlasting hills about that land
“where sorrow cometh never.” Walking round his farm, he had reflected on
many things besides wheat and turnips, sheep and harvest time. He had
considered his life, and felt, though at the period Carlyle was as a
sealed book to him, life was no idle dream, but a solemn reality—his
own—all, as the great writer says, “he had to front Eternity with.”
A man of this nature was just the person Miss Derno needed to be near
her in the hour of her bitterest trial: one who could remind her that
“God is better than his promise, if He takes from man a long lease and
gives him a freehold of a greater value;” who never remained silent for
lack of words, as so many of us do, but could always fit in the right
sentence in the right place; whose “mynde to him a kyngdome was,” and
who felt himself monarch over every idea it contained.
Who was more fitted to remind the dying woman that “Jesus Christ is the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever?” Who could better bring in the
quotation, “Religion troubles you for an hour—it repays you by
immortality?”
Did she shrink from the path before her—he was able to quote Moir—
“When spectral silence pointeth to decay,
How preacheth wisdom to the conscious breast?
Saying—‘Each foot that roameth here shall rest.
To God and Heaven, Death is the only way.’”
Were she wavering and doubtful, he would say—
“Oh! my friend,
That your faith were as mine—that thou couldst see
Death still producing life, and evil still
Working its own destruction—couldst behold
The strifes and tumults of this troubled world
With the strong eye that sees the promised day
Dawn through this night of tempest.”
He could assure her, when she felt loth to leave the world—
“That there is nothing beautiful in this,
The passioned soul has clasped—but shall partake
Its everlasting essence—not a scent
Of rain-drench’d flower, nor fleece of evening cloud
Which blended with a thought that rose to heaven,
Shall ever die.”
Never weary was he of talking about the fair land where—
“Unbroken droop the laden boughs, with heavy fruitage bent;
Of incense and of odours strange, the air is redolent;
And neither sun, nor moon, nor stars dispense their changeful light,
But the Lamb’s eternal glory, makes the happy city bright.”
Never did he tire when his theme was of that City “whose inhabitants no
census has numbered; through whose streets rush no tides of business;
that city without grief or graves—sins or sorrows; whose walls are
salvation, and whose gates are praise.”
Softly, in the firelight, while she leaned back in her chair, and
listened to his voice, he would recite—
“There is rest without ony travaille,
And there is pees without ony strife,
And there is bright sommer ever to see,
And there is never winter in that countrie,
And there is great melody of angels’ songe,
And there is preysing Him amonge,
And there is alle manner friendship that may be,
And there is ever perfect love and charitie,
And there is wisdom without folye,
And there is honestie without vileneye.”
Was she timorous—“Death,” he assured her, “is but a shadow from the rock
eternity.”
But why multiply examples? why go on to tell at greater length how the
whole burden of his discourse was—
“But since our souls’ now sin-obscured light
Shines through the lanthorn of our flesh so bright;
What sacred splendour will this star send forth
When it shall shine without this vail of Earth?”
She had to travel a darksome road, but he brightened the way for her. He
was so sure himself, concerning the certainty of the truths he uttered,
that it seemed impossible for her to doubt. A man himself who had never
much regarded the ways, nor manners, nor fashions of this present world,
he was able to give her, who had lived in the world all her life, many
hints as to where she was going astray, in what errors she was
indulging.
He brought her the first snowdrop that put its head above ground; he
searched all the banks and hedgerows for the “pale primrose;” he told
her when and where the birds were building, and how many eggs there were
in the blackbird’s nest.
Well, she had her wish! She lived to touch snowdrops and primroses; to
hear the birds singing, and see the trees putting forth; she lived till
nature put off her winter clothing, and the sun shone over the earth
once more; then——
“Gordon, I feel I shall soon have to go now,” she said, one morning.
“Thank you for staying with me to the last.”
She put her arms round his neck, and drew his face down to hers.
“If all had gone well,” she whispered, “we should now have been man and
wife for sixteen years. I wonder would that have made this parting any
easier?”
Over and over and over again Major Morrice kissed her, but it was a
minute before he could steady his voice sufficiently to answer—
“You know I wanted you to be my wife even at the end.”
“I know it,” she sighed; “but Gordon, if you marry, as I hope you may,
you will not feel it so hard to put another in the place I did not quite
fill, as——”
“Oh, my love, my love! was it for my sake you refused?” and the man’s
tears fell upon her like rain; “as if I could ever put another in your
place; as though my life were not over to all intents and purposes now.”
“I want Phemie,” was the only answer she made, and Phemie drew near.
“You will be friends when I am gone,” she went on, speaking thickly and
with difficulty. “You will not grow to be quite strangers to one another
as time goes by. You will let Gordon talk about me to you, won’t you,
dearest. And Gordon,” he stooped his head, and Phemie drew back—“if ever
you think—in time—do not let any thought of me—remember I wished——”
Fortunate was it for Phemie that she had no idea of what caused Major
Morrice’s face to flush so painfully in an instant—what made him look
aside as she arranged the pillows for her who would so soon have done
with earth—for her who was passing swiftly to that land where no kindly
offices avail—where love, and tenderness, and regret, and unselfishness
are equally useless and vain.
All the day long they never left her; all the day long she lay waiting
for death to come, and it was quite evening ere she went.
Beside her were some flowers, fresh gathered in the morning, withered
and dying.
“The flower fadeth,” she said, feebly, turning towards Mr. Aggland; and,
answering her thoughts, he answered—
“But the word of our God shall stand for ever.” A few minutes more and
it was all over.
“Comfort him for me, Phemie,” were her last words; and with her hand
clasped in that of the man she had loved so faithfully, she fell asleep.
She lived, as she had desired, till the flowers sprang and the trees
budded; and she left this world certain about the next.
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” said Mr. Aggland,
thoughtfully, as he lingeringly left the room.
CHAPTER VII.
OLD FRIENDS AND OLD PLACES.
Time went by, and still Phemie remained unmarried.
Suitors had come, and suitors had gone; but to each and all the widow’s
answer was the same. She would never take a second husband. And so time
went on, and she was still, as I have said, unmarried.
But the years had in other respects worked great changes in her. She was
not the Phemie we have seen in the pages that have been written. She was
outwardly a changed Phemie; a woman who, finding that neither work nor
solitude availed to bring her peace, went in for distraction, and was to
be met with at every concert, flower-show, pic-nic, what you will.
It was Duncan Aggland who had greatly contributed to bring about this
alteration; Duncan, who, seeming to imagine he owned a kind of
reversionary interest in his cousin, had wanted her to cast her fortunes
with his, and when she declined to do so, remarked that she was staying
single for the sake of Basil Stondon—that he knew she was, and that
everybody said (oh! the horror of that everybody) no young woman would
mew herself up at Roundwood as she did if she had not been disappointed
by some one; and that further, he (the speaker) had not been so blind as
perhaps she imagined to the state of affairs at Marshlands.
Mr. Duncan Aggland was very angry, or perhaps he would never have
uttered such very disagreeable truths; and, like all people who are
angry, he got the worst of the encounter, for Phemie thanked him for his
engaging frankness, and begged that for the future he would not consider
Roundwood so much his home as formerly.
“Because,” she finished, “I purpose taking a house in town, and I might
see more of you then than would be at all agreeable if you continued to
visit me as often as you have done.”
“But I am doing so well, Phemie,” he pleaded, becoming submissive in a
moment. “I am to be taken into partnership next year, and——”
“No one can be more delighted to hear of your worldly advancement than
I,” broke in Phemie. “I am charmed to know you are doing so well, and I
have not the least doubt of your ability to maintain a wife; but on
principle I object to the marriage of cousins, and whomsoever I may
choose hereafter to marry, be quite sure it will not be you.”
“That is plain at any rate,” said the young man.
“I meant it to be so,” she answered; “obscurity can serve no good
purpose on either side; you have made a mistake, that is all, and it
would be unkind in me not to undeceive you. Now, good-bye, and when you
meet with any one you consider worthy to become Mrs. Duncan Aggland, I,
as the female head of your family, shall be most happy to call upon
her.” With which speech, Mrs. Stondon dismissed her admirer, and from
that day forth devoted herself, so far as any mere observer could
discover, heart and soul to amusement and frivolity.
People who had seen the widow during her time of mourning marvelled to
behold her, when that time was over, emerging from her seclusion,
accepting all invitations, appearing here and there and everywhere,
seeming to care very little what was thought about her, providing only
she could pass the time and make the hours fly quicker.
“What a flirt that woman is,” some one said, casually, to Basil Stondon,
when speaking of his relative.
“Yes,” thought Basil, as he walked home, “what a flirt! Hang her, she
never was anything but a flirt. If she had, my life might have been a
different one.”
So, when men stumble over a pebble they are apt to blame the pebble
instead of their own stupidity; so, when they fall into a hole they are
in the habit of anathematising the hole for being there instead of their
own blindness which was unable to see it; and so on precisely the same
principle Basil accused Phemie of causing misfortunes which had been
brought about entirely by himself.
As for the life she led—the heartless, purposeless, unsatisfying
life—what can we say but this, that there are some people who when they
are in trouble take to dram-drinking, while others prefer opium; and in
like manner there are men and women who mentally seek the oblivion of
excitement, while others court the deadening monotony of seclusion.
Which is worst—providing the patient must run to either extreme—to one
the wine cup, or to another the opium? They are both so injurious, you
answer, that it would be impossible to make a choice, and yet for Phemie
I think the intoxication of society was the least hurtful of the twain.
To a temperament like hers—secure against disappointment, against love,
against expectations that could never be realised—excitement was surely
less fatal than inaction, the round of gaiety than the round of
endurance.
The world was, as usual, critical and not over kind in its remarks upon
her: some people saying she was seeking for a coronet, others that a
title would content her, even if the title were no higher than that of
baronet.
As to her views and wishes, if she had any, all her own relatives were
at fault, even Mr. Aggland, who only once ventured to say—
“Be cautious, my dear, remember,
That lovely face will fail;
Beauty’s sweet—but beauty’s frail—
’Tis sooner past—’tis sooner done,
Than summer’s rain or summer’s sun
Most fleeting when it is most dear,
’Tis gone while we but say ’tis here.”
To which Phemie answered by putting her hand over his mouth, and saying—
“Ah, uncle, it went long ago; no need to remind me of how fast youth and
beauty pass away.”
They were rather unique, this uncle and niece, and much sought after in
London society accordingly. Every grace of manner, every art and
conventionality Mrs. Stondon had acquired so dearly, she put forth now
to win her popularity and regard.
Her little affectations were brought out once again—brought out and
aired after years. She fenced, she rallied, she retorted, she laughed,
she looked grave, according to the rules she had taken so much trouble
to learn.
Well, well, life is strange, and women are the strangest part of life,
and Phemie could not have given a reason for what she did save this,
that she hoped some day to meet Basil Stondon and his wife in society,
and astonish them with her cold bright wit, her unimpassioned manner,
her worldly ideas, and her unromantic views of life.
And so the years went on, as I have said, and still there was only one
suitor who hung back, one man who felt that a woman like this was not
calculated to make his life happy, his home a peaceful one.
Obedient to the last request her lips had framed, Major Morrice never
through the years lost sight of his dead love’s friend, but visited her,
talked with her, walked with her, and had been so near proposing many
times that the world had almost ground for its gossip when it said at
last they were engaged.
Never, however, even within sight of that shore came they: the woman was
serious—she really did not intend to marry again. When her friends
fancied she was in jest, she spoke in sober earnest.
Had she been as one of those with whom she was associating, she might
have buried not one but twenty husbands, and assisted at the obsequies
of the last with cheerful resignation. But life with its sorrows, was an
earnest affair to Phemie, and its troubles were matters of serious
import to her.
“I suppose you think I like this whirl,” she said, one day, to Major
Morrice; and he answered,
“It is impossible for me to think otherwise, seeing how thoroughly you
seem to enjoy it.”
“One must live,” Mrs. Stondon asserted, a little defiantly.
“True; but is it necessary always to live in public?” he replied.
“It is to me,” she said; “it is to me.”
“Would it be impertinent if I asked why?” and he spoke with a tone of
pity in his voice such as Phemie had not heard previously in the voice
of any one unconnected with her by blood or kinship.
“Because I have no home ties,” she returned; “because I have neither
father nor mother, brother nor sister, husband nor children; because I
am lonely—lonely beyond all power of description. There, you have made
me talk about myself; now forget me. Let us talk about something else.”
“May I talk about myself?” he asked, drawing a little nearer to her.
“Yes; that is always a welcome topic,” she answered. And he went on—
“I, too, am lonely in the world. Why should we not cast our loneliness
together. Will you take me—knowing all the past—for your husband? I will
strive to prove myself worthy of the trust——”
She was astonished—too much astonished perhaps at first to answer; but
at last she slowly said—
“Major Morrice, you do not know what you are saying; you do not know
what you are asking——”
“I am praying you to be my wife,” he replied. “Having loved your friend
as far as man can love, I am beseeching her friend to make me happy.”
She laid her hand on his shoulder, and looked steadily in his face while
she answered—
“Major Morrice, you may know how much the past has taken from me when I
say I cannot accept a husband even like you. I think I may truly affirm
that I love and honour you more than any man on earth; but I cannot
marry you. I would not give one like you the mere husk of a love out of
which the heart was eaten long and long ago.”
Very tenderly he talked to her, but it was of no use. Very earnestly he
pleaded that he had affection enough and to spare for both. Phemie was
resolute.
“You are worthy a better fate,” she said. “I have done harm enough in my
life, let me be fair and true and honest now.”
And she was all these, though it may have been that for the moment she
felt tempted to flee from the awful loneliness of her purposeless
existence—from the cold selfishness of the world to the warmth and the
welcome of his love.
But it was not to be—it was never to be. She had toiled for her wages in
the years which were gone, and her wages were now being paid to her by
no niggardly hand.
That which we contract for we must fulfil—that which we agree blindly,
or with our eyes open, to receive, we must content ourselves withal.
“The wages of sin is death.” She had sinned, and death fell on every
blade of grass near her—on every shrub—on every flower.
It was the summer time, and a great longing came over her to see the
hills and the mountains and the valleys and the wild dale country once
more.
“I should like to go to Cumberland for a month,” she said, one day; and
accordingly she and her uncle and Helen set forth together on that long
northern journey which wearied Phemie even before she reached the old
“Salutation” Inn, which has greeted so many a tourist entering the Lake
District.
But, spite of her weariness, she could not rest in the hotel. Tired and
exhausted, Helen went off to bed, while Mr. Aggland and his niece walked
along the road which leads from Ambleside to Rydal.
They walked in silence; he was busy with his thoughts, she with hers.
They had come back to the old country again, though not to the old
place. They had crossed the frontier and passed out of the flat, rich
southern lands into the lake district, where mountains rose to the sky
and streams came down the hill sides; and the traveller, wandering
solitary over the fells, heard the plash of distant waterfalls alone
breaking the desolate silence.
They had come back from the bustle of great towns, from intercourse with
many men, from the life which always grows more rapid and more exciting
the nearer people draw towards London—to the old quiet home, to the
tarns, to the heather, to the mountains, to the valleys, which were all
the same as when Phemie had dwelt among them, the adopted daughter of
the owner of the Hill Farm.
She had left the wild mountain country when the sun was shining
brightly; in the noontide, in the light; she returned to walk through it
once more, but the grey evening shadows were settling down over the
landscape, as the shadows had settled upon her life. She left it to
become a great lady, and she had achieved that object. She had gained
wealth and position, and she was now wondering, as she looked to right
and left, what wealth and position availed.
They walked on, and the pure sweet air coming down from among the hills
seemed to put fresh life into her, to restore something of the
elasticity of her youth. Side by side, still in silence, they passed by
Rydal Hill, through Rydal village, and so on till they came within sight
of a house which most tourists in that part of England must have paused
to admire. It is a cottage set back a little from the road, looking over
Rydal Lake, with Nab Scar and Helm Crag overshadowing it, with the sweet
greenery of that lovely country swelling away from it on all sides, with
the summer flowers giving forth their sweetest perfume around it, with
climbers and creepers trailing over it—a delightful spot in which to
live, a sad place in which to die.
There are nooks on the earth that seem too beautiful to leave; there are
seasons when everything in nature is so perfect, when her skies are so
soft, her woods so leafy, her sunsets so gorgeous, her mornings so
bright and gladsome, her streams so clear, her lakes so calm, her
flowers and shrubs so fragrant, that it seems impossible for man to go
away from all this beauty and brightness, to close his eyes on the face
of this lovely world, and never to open them in time again.
Some thought of this kind came across Phemie’s mind as she stood looking
at the lake and the landscape, which now lay bathed and steeped in
moonlight. For the first time for years she felt that there was a
happiness in the mere fact of existence; that no human being can have
quite done with life so long as he remains in the flesh. It came upon
her suddenly that she had been wrong, that she had done wrong, in
suffering herself to grow so weary of so beautiful a world; and as out
of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh, so out of her heart
dropped the sentence,
“I think one might grow almost happy again, uncle, living in a place
like this.”
Then they turned and retraced their steps, talking as they went, talking
under the moonlight of many things about which they had held their peace
for years; and it was getting late when they found themselves in
Ambleside once more, and entering the Salutation, at the door of which
hotel some excursionists were just alighting.
“Mother, and father, and children,” decided Phemie, as she passed them
by; and she would have gone upstairs and thought no more of them but for
a voice which she fancied she knew, exclaiming,
“Don’t run in so rudely, Harry; keep back, sir.” Whereupon at once the
lady said, “You are always snubbing that boy, Basil.”
The person so addressed never turned to answer; he caught the child, who
was rushing past Phemie, with one hand, while with the other he raised
his hat and apologised for his son’s forwardness.
“You need not apologise to me,” answered Phemie; “we are too old friends
to stand on ceremony.” And she put out her hand and clasped his again
after years—after years.
“Well, I declare,” cried Mrs. Basil Stondon, while they all stood
grouped together in the hall; “if this is not a pleasant surprise. Who
would have thought of meeting you here?”
“There is nothing extraordinary in meeting me,” Phemie answered; “the
wonder is meeting you.”
“It was a fancy of Basil’s,” that gentleman’s wife replied. “He wanted
to come north—and so we came north; we have been here, in Westmoreland I
mean, ten days, and I for one was getting terribly sick of it; but now
you are in the same place it will make a difference. It is so horrid
being among strangers, not having a soul one knows to speak to.”
Phemie agreed that to be so placed must indeed be distressing; and they
all adjourned upstairs, and having arranged to spend the evening
together, the ladies took off their bonnets while the gentlemen ordered
tea.
“And you positively look younger than when I saw you last,” remarked
Mrs. Basil Stondon, querulously; “but it is easy for you to look young:
free from care and without children, and surrounded by every blessing
and comfort, why should you not keep your beauty?”
“I have not kept it,” answered Phemie, and she sighed as she spoke;
though the past with its vanities, and its temptations, and its sorrows
and its repentance seemed like a dream to her at the moment. “I have not
kept it, and there is no reason why I should have kept it. Youth cannot
stay with us for ever, Georgina; if it did, girls would have small
chance of ever being either wooed or wed.”
There was a little side blow in this sentence, and Georgina felt it. Her
youth had helped her to secure Basil, a prize she often told him was
scarcely worth the trouble, to which remark he had a habit of retorting—
“You did not think so at one time, at least, judging by the trouble you
took,” for Basil never hesitated to remind his wife of the efforts she
had made to win him, and was not over delicate about recapitulating to
her all the advantages she had gained for herself by the match.
They lived such a life that the presence of any stranger seemed a
relief; and accordingly both husband and wife eagerly pressed Mr.
Aggland, and Phemie, and Helen to join them in their various excursions,
and to make up parties for visiting Keswick, and Coniston, and
Ullswater, and many a lovely spot much more accessible from Ambleside
than those just enumerated.
Day after day they passed together, evening after evening they spent,
talking in the moonlight or across the tea-table; but the more Phemie
saw of Basil and his wife, the more wretched she felt satisfied they
were.
Georgina had not found the game all profit, and was disappointed in some
way. Basil did not care for the woman he had married, and took no pains
to conceal that the only creature for whom he now lived, and moved, and
had his being, was Harry, his son and heir, whom his mother spoiled past
redemption, and encouraged in all acts of disobedience and rebellion,
possibly to annoy his father.
As for the little girl, she went to the wall entirely; neither father
nor mother seemed to recognise her as belonging to the same species as
Master Harry, who was for ever up to some mischief, and being
perpetually called to account for his misdeeds by Basil, who “snubbed
the child,” so said his wife.
“And I do hope,” exclaimed Georgina, when the day of separation came at
last, “that you will come and spend a long time with me in Norfolk. It
would be a real charity, for Basil is scarcely ever in the house. He
leaves me alone from morning till night. Now do come, will you?”
“Do you really wish me to come, Georgina?” asked Mrs. Stondon, who had
latterly begun to doubt whether she heard and saw correctly. “Are you
speaking honestly and truly, when you say you wish I would do so?”
“Honestly and truly, and there is my hand on it,” laughed Georgina.
“And your husband?”
“Oh! my husband must answer for himself. I never presume to understand
what may be the state of Basil’s mind on any subject. If you wish him to
invite you also, I will ask him to write you a letter requesting the
honour, et cetera; but I should have thought my invitation sufficient.
You are such a great lady now, though, there is no knowing how to deal
with you.”
“I will come,” answered Phemie, suddenly, “sometime in the autumn, when
the trees are looking their best.”
“That is a dear good creature,” remarked Mrs. Basil Stondon, mentally
adding, “now that will drive Mrs. Montague away; and if I once get her
out of the house, I will take precious good care she never enters it
again.”
From which speech it will be perceived that Georgina Stondon was not a
particularly different individual from Georgina Hurlford, but rather
that she was capable of planning and scheming a little still.
Late in the season Phemie returned to Roundwood; but she had not been
long settled there before a letter arrived from Marshlands entreating
her not to forget her promise, but to come as soon as ever she could,
and bring her uncle with her.
His part of the performance Mr. Aggland emphatically declined, and he
could not quite resist saying to his niece—
“Phemie, do you think it is right for you to go? Are you safe—are you
strong—are you not mad, think you, to fling yourself into such peril
again?”
They were standing in the drawing-room at Roundwood as he spoke thus, he
on one side of the centre table, she on the other; and the light of the
wax candles fell full on her face as she remained for a moment silent
ere she answered—
“I am safe—I am strong—and I am not mad—and I place myself in no peril.
I am speaking the truth,” she added, with a smile. “I have no feeling
now for Basil Stondon except that of friendship and pity. Seeing him as
he is—not as I fancied him, but as he actually is—has done more towards
curing me than all my punishment—than all my resolution.”
And she put her hand in his, and he felt that it did not tremble—that
every finger lay passive—that every nerve seemed still.
“A woman’s mind is one of the inscrutable mysteries of this earth to
me,” decided Mr. Aggland, as he thought over the puzzle of Phemie’s
conduct in his own apartment. “I reared that woman—I watched her in
childhood, girlhood—and best part of her womanhood I have spent by her
side—and yet I know no more about her than if she were the greatest
stranger upon earth. Well, she seems resolved to put herself in danger,
but it is not my fault. Now, heaven and earth,” finished the perplexed
philosopher, “is it?”
Down to Disley, Phemie travelled—over the old familiar ground the train
swept on; and she took off her bonnet, and, drawing the blue curtain so
as to shade her eyes from the glare of the light, looked out across the
country just as she had done that day when she returned to Norfolk after
her long sojourn abroad.
The fields were the same—the stations—the towns—the hedgerows—the
poplars. Everything seemed unchanged excepting herself.
There was a great hush in the still autumn afternoon—a strange quietness
in the air. Phemie thought of that journey afterwards, and remembered
how often a calm precedes a storm. She was travelling down into Norfolk,
all unconsciously, to fulfil a mission; and as the train sped on she
tried to account to herself for the desire she felt to revisit
Marshlands and to spend a few weeks with Basil and his wife.
It was no love for Basil. She knew that. She had examined her heart, and
found the idol in possession no longer. Her youth had gone, and the
passionate attachment of her youth with it. And yet something
remained—some tie of memory, or association, or affection, or pity,
which was strong enough to bring the woman back to Marshlands—to the
dear home where she had been so happy and so wretched.
There came a point in that journey, however—at Cambridge, I think—when
Phemie, unable fully to analyse her own sensations, turned coward, and
would fain have gone back again.
She dreaded the sight of the old place, of the familiar rooms, the
resurrection of the thousand-and-one recollections. She did not know
whether, after all, she could be quite brave when the pines and the elms
appeared standing clear against the sky as of yore. One by one the
details of the picture which had been blurred and destroyed a little by
the lapse of years came out clearly and distinctly before her view.
Only one thing she could not realise fully. Basil master of Marshlands,
Georgina mistress, she herself their guest; children’s voices echoing
about the place, and those very children leaving their games and their
amusements, their father and their mother, to come to her.
Was that the bait which lured the lonely woman back to her old home? I
do not know how she could have blinded and deluded herself into
ignorance on this point when she knew that the only gentle, womanly
tears she had shed for years fell over the face of Basil’s little girl.
She had never desired children—she had always held them away from her at
arm’s length, and yet now she would have liked to carry “Fairy,” as she
called her, back to Roundwood, whether for love of the little creature,
or for love of its father, or simply because she wanted to have
something all to herself, who can say? Only one fact is certain—the only
pleasant hours she passed in Marshlands were those when she and Fairy
wandered about the grounds hand-in-hand—when the child came to her room
and listened to story and legend and song—when the little feet came
running to meet her, making sweet pattering music by the way—when the
soft arms were stretched out to “Mamma Phemie,” to “dear, dear Mamma
Phemie,” who came at last to the conclusion it was best for her to leave
Marshlands before Basil saw what an idiot she had grown.
But Basil saw it all—saw how his children turned from his wife to the
woman he still loved better than his wife, and he grew angry at Georgina
for having asked Phemie to the house, and words at last waxed hot
between them on the subject.
For ever and for ever they were quarrelling, so far as difference of
opinion was concerned, and wrangling over their differences. Phemie’s
presence or Phemie’s absence signified little, only the quarrels became
more vehement. Basil accused Georgina of striving to hurt and annoy him,
Georgina declared that he had by his temper driven away every old
acquaintance they possessed, and that she was determined to have
somebody to speak to.
“If Mrs. Stondon were the devil,” she remarked, with somewhat unladylike
vehemence, “I would cultivate her. I mean to go and stay with her. I
intend to be asked to her house in town, and I do not intend to live any
longer with your mother.”
“If you mean to have your own way in everything, then,” retorted Basil,
“you had better put in your list that you will have to live without me.”
“That would be no loss—a decided gain,” replied Georgina. And thus the
battle terminated for the time, only to be resumed the next day about
Harry, who, young though he was, should, his father declared, be sent to
school forthwith, unless his mother would have him kept out of the
stable-yard, and away from the horse’s heels.
“I tell you now what it is,” said Basil, collecting all the men and
women servants together, and addressing them _en masse_, “the first time
I find Master Harry in the stables, or out about the grounds anywhere by
himself, I will discharge you every one. Take this for notice, for by ——
I will keep my word.”
“What a milksop you would make of the boy,” sneered Mrs. Basil Stondon.
“What must the servants think of you?”
“They cannot think less of me than I do of myself for ever having been
such a cursed fool as to marry you,” retorted Basil. Whereupon one word
led, as usual, to more, and the quarrel terminated in Basil flinging a
few things into a portmanteau and starting for a friend’s house, as was
his wont whenever matrimony and the cares thereof grew too much for him.
Fain would Phemie have followed his example and taken flight also, but
Georgina entreated her so earnestly to remain, that Mrs. Stondon
yielded, and wrote to her uncle not to expect her at Roundwood for a
week or ten days.
“Now I hope to heaven,” was Mr. Aggland’s secret thought, “she is not
getting too fond of that place again, nor of its owner.” And his hope
was fulfilled.
Phemie had grown perfectly sick of the place, but she stayed on as a
matter of kindness to Georgina, and perhaps, also, with some faint hope
of opening the misguided woman’s eyes, and making his home more
comfortable for Basil.
“It is of no use talking,” remarked Georgina, one morning; “he ought to
have married you, that is the whole secret of the affair, and—and——” She
turned her head sharply away, and Phemie heard her sob. She had packed
the cards, she had won all she asked for, and this was the result—a
wretched home, a neglectful husband, a cat and dog existence. How could
Phemie help—spite of all the misery Georgina had wrought her—feeling
sorry for the unhappy wife?
“You might surely make a better thing of your life still,” she said,
gently, “if you would only agree to bear and forbear; if you would only
bring up Harry as his father wishes; if you would only just try for a
little time, the effect of meeting his views instead of thwarting them,
I am certain you might be a great deal more comfortable. I am confident
Basil would pay back every concession with interest.”
“He would not,” she answered, slowly. “You may think you know Basil, but
you do not. He has never forgiven me, and he never will. He might not
have cared much for you had you been married to him, but as you were
not, he thinks he only required you to make him the happiest man on
earth. I thought I could have made him love me once,” she went on,
speaking more rapidly; “but I was mistaken. The way to make a man like
my husband hate you, is to belong to him. I ought not to show you what
an escape you had,” she added; “but I owe you a good turn for the bad
one I did you when I was a girl; and for all the rest, I have forgiven
you long ago, I have indeed.”
“You are very kind,” answered Phemie; “but I have not the slightest idea
what you had to forgive.”
“Have you not? I may tell you some day, but not at present.” And
Georgina walked, as she spoke, to the window, opened it, and stepped out
on the balcony mentioned in the earlier portion of this story.
She remained leaning over it for a few minutes, turning every now and
then to address some sentence to Phemie, who stood behind her in the
drawing-room. She talked much about Miss Derno, and how greatly she had
disliked her, how firmly she had believed in her designs on Basil.
“I really thought at the time,” she was proceeding, when she suddenly
stopped.
“What—what is it?” she broke out. “What are they bringing? Mrs.
Stondon—quick—look, do you see that?”
Phemie ran, at the words, into the balcony, and then as instantly left
it, and rushed from the drawing-room, and out at the front door, and
round the house, and through the shrubberies, to a point where she met
the men who had attracted Georgina’s attention.
“What is the matter?” she asked, with a quick look behind to see if
Georgina were following. “What is it?” And the group parted in silence
and let her look for herself.
Involuntarily she cried out, and the cry was repeated at her elbow by
the wretched mother, who shrieked—
“I knew it was Harry. Bring him in and send for the doctor. Ride for
your lives. Why do you all stand there doing nothing?” she went on
fiercely, for the men never moved, but looked either down to the ground,
or else each in his fellow’s face. “Do you hear me? Go for the doctor.
Give me my son.”
“Give him to me,” Phemie said, and they put the child into her arms. His
little hand dropped limp as they did so, and his head fell back.
“Ride for the doctor,” Phemie ordered, “for your mistress.” And she led
the way into the house, carrying the dead heir of all those broad lands,
of all that fine property, while the men lifted Georgina from the
ground, where she had dropped, not absolutely fainting, but down in an
incapable heap, and bore her in after the boy, for whose sake she had
once forgotten her pain and her travail, and rejoiced that there was a
man-child born into the world!
CHAPTER VIII.
PHEMIE’S JOURNEY.
For hours Mrs. Basil Stondon lay in that merciful stupor.
While tender and pitying hands dressed the child for his long sleep,
dressed him all in white and left him on his little bed—while the
servants went about the darkened house with quiet tread, and asked one
another under their breath what their master would say, and whether they
should all be dismissed, and if an inquest would have to be held—while
the few remaining leaves on the elm trees fell one by one off the bare
branches—while the late autumn day drew to its close—Georgina still lay
without speaking a word, without moving hand or foot.
By her side Phemie sat thinking, not so much of the miserable mother or
of the dead boy, but rather of what Basil would say—of how Basil would
feel.
Once she went halfway down stairs intending to send a messenger for him;
but long before she reached the bottom of the flight she changed her
mind and ascended the broad stairs again.
Two or three times she took up a pen and drew paper and portfolio before
her, thinking to write and break the news.
She began—“My dear Mr. Stondon,” and tore that up; then she commenced,
“Dear Basil,” and tried to go on and tell him of the disaster that had
happened.
But it would not do. When a person thinks, words flow like water; when
he writes, they freeze on the paper; and Phemie tore up that epistle
likewise.
Then she went and looked at the child—at the glory of golden hair—at the
round smooth cheeks—at the body which had been so full of life and
health but a few hours before. He had been a troublesome imp when
living—a restless, noisy, daring, unmanageable boy; but he was quiet
enough now. He had been wont to push “Fairy” away from Phemie’s side,
and to strike Phemie when she took his sister up in her arms and
comforted her. There was not a dress in Mrs. Stondon’s wardrobe but bore
testimony to the strength of Master Harry’s hands, but the child was
quiet enough now; and when Phemie looked upon all that remained of
Basil’s son—when she felt what he would feel when he came to look upon
his dead also, she fell on her knees beside the boy, and her heart
seemed to cry in spite of her own desire—“How will he bear it! how will
he ever endure this sight!”
Any one entering that room would have imagined Phemie to be praying, as
kneeling on the floor she remained with her arms stretched over the
snowy sheet, and her head resting upon them; but in reality Phemie was
not praying—she was thinking—going over the weary past—traversing the
old roads over again—wondering when the end would come, and what the end
would be.
As she had suffered, was he to suffer? As she had wept, was he to weep?
Had the hour for settlement come at last, and was this part of his
temporal wages?
Sin! He had sinned, and while Phemie knelt there in the gathering
darkness she recited to herself that story out of The Book which
begins,—
“There were two men in one city, the one rich and the other poor. The
rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds, but the poor man had
nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up.”
She never knew why that pathetic tale—so terribly pathetic that the
sinner’s sin is almost forgotten in the sinner’s misery and
humility—should come back to her memory then.
Was it for the sins of the father that the child which had been born
unto Basil, and become to him as the very apple of his eye, was taken
away thus—the fruit of his body for the sin of his soul.
Was it? Phemie had enough of the old Covenanting spirit in her religion
to say, in answer to her own question, “Lord, it is just;” and yet her
softer, weaker, human nature trembled to think of that inexorable
justice which seemed never to forget to remember sin—which seemed never
weary of awarding punishment.
“O God, let me bear—let me;” and Phemie prayed at last. All the dross
had been taken out of her nature, and I think she was pure and unselfish
at that moment as the angels in heaven. “Punish him no further—but let
me bear all;” and then she bethought her of the words of Solomon the son
of David.
“If they sin against Thee (for there is no man that sinneth not), and
Thou be angry with them, and deliver them to the enemy; yet if they
bethink themselves and repent, and make supplication, saying,—We have
done perversely; we have committed wickedness: Then hear Thou in Heaven,
and forgive the sin of Thy people.”
“Hear, O Lord,” Phemie added, and her tears fell hot and fast. “Hear and
pity, and enable him to bear this trouble Thou hast laid upon him.”
“Who will tell Basil?” she marvelled, as she rose from the ground—“who?”
And she wished her uncle were with her, feeling that he perhaps might
have been the best bearer of bad tidings possible to find under the
circumstances.
“I can telegraph for him at any rate,” she considered, and the idea gave
her immediate relief.
He would advise and assist. There were a dozen things he could see to,
and his presence would be a restraint—a man’s presence always was.
Phemie decided to send for him, and half-an-hour afterwards one of the
Marshland servants was galloping to Disley in order to despatch her
telegram.
He had not been gone ten minutes, however, before Georgina spoke.
“Is it true?” she said, faintly; and Phemie answered, “It is true.”
“He is dead, then?” and Mrs. Stondon replied, “Everything that could be
done was done; but he never moved after the horse kicked him.”
There ensued a silence; then the wife uttered her husband’s name.
“Shall I write to him?” asked Phemie. “I have not done so till I heard
what your wishes were.”
“You must go to him,” was the reply.
“Go—I—” repeated Phemie.
“Yes, he will never come back if you do not—never; and you owe it to
me,” went on the wretched woman, “to do what I ask. I told you this
morning I had forgiven you long ago, but it was not the truth. I thought
it was then; but I must have been mistaken. If you go, and bring him
back, and keep him from cursing me, I will forgive you—I will kiss the
ground you walk on—I will love you as I have hated you. Go!”
“What shall I say to him?” asked Mrs. Stondon.
“What you like. You used to be able to wind him round your finger, try
your power now. Go, go, for God’s sake, before he hears about it from
any other person—go.”
Phemie rose and stood irresolute, then—“It is not fitting I should do
this thing,” she said. “I will write to him if you like, or I will
telegraph to my uncle to go to him direct, but you ask too much of me,
Georgina, you do indeed. Basil is certain to return to see his child,
and then you can tell him about—about—the accident. I cannot interfere
between man and wife.”
“Cannot you?—give me the medicine, or wine, or water, or something; and
let me speak out my mind. Have you never interfered between us?” she
went on, after swallowing the wine Phemie poured out for her. “Have I
not felt you stepping between us every hour since my marriage. Did you
not lay it on him as a curse—that he should never love any one as he
loved you. Did not you, and has not the curse stuck? Has he ever loved
another since—has he ever loved me?” and the unloved wife broke out into
a fit of such passionate weeping as took Phemie totally by surprise.
“Dear Georgina,” she began soothingly, but the other interrupted her
with—“You need not try to smooth the matter over; if it had not been for
you he might have loved me (I have been lying thinking over it all while
you were out of the room), but as it was, he never loved me, and he will
hate me now. He will say I did it, and perhaps he will say true.
Whatever he wished Harry not to do I encouraged Harry to do, and now—and
now—he will never speak to me again; he never will.”
“He will not be so cruel, so unmanly,” Phemie said; but Georgina
answered, “Ah! you do not know Basil Stondon, he can be both when he
likes,” and she buried her face in the pillows, and sobbed aloud.
“I will go to him,” Phemie murmured; her soul travelled back at that
instant over the years, to the days when Basil had been cruel and
unmanly towards her, and she accepted the errand which was now put upon
her, as she would any other that had arisen out of the mad foolishness
of that wretchedly happy time. “If I were to telegraph though to him to
return, as Harry was ill, and then break it to him on his return, would
it not do as well as my going?”
“The people at the station would tell him.”
“But if I met him at the station.”
“He would hear about it on the line.”
It was thus Georgina answered every argument, and at length, worn out by
her importunity, Phemie yielded, and was about leaving the room to make
the needful arrangements for her departure, when she was stopped once
more.
“Whom were you thinking of taking with you,” asked Georgina.
“Either Harris or Marshall,” was the reply. “Harris, if you could spare
him, would be the best.”
“Take neither,” was the reply; “Basil would get the truth from them.”
“And do you absolutely wish me to travel to a strange place by myself.”
“Yes—to serve me—to do me such a kindness,” and she took Phemie’s hand
and kissed it humbly.
Within an hour Mrs. Stondon drove out of the gates of Marshlands, and
started, all alone, to find Basil. Less than most women of the present
day had she ever been thrown on her own resources, and the journey which
no woman would have regarded as a pleasant one, seemed formidable in the
extreme to her. All night she travelled on main lines or cross lines;
now the compartment she occupied was shunted on one side at a junction,
again she had to get out at some hitherto unheard of station and change
carriages, in order to reach her destination, which was a little
out-of-the-way village in Yorkshire, where she arrived cold and stiff
and weary, next morning at nine o’clock.
Quarry Moor boasted neither hotel nor station, nor town nor village.
Passengers who desired to alight there, communicated their wishes to the
guard at the previous stopping place; and accordingly, Phemie found
herself dropped at a gate, without a house in sight, or a living being
to speak to, except the man who made signals that passengers were to be
taken up, and who resided during business hours in a wooden box beside
the line.
With some difficulty Phemie made this individual understand her
position, and after a little hesitation, he gave her what probably might
be regarded as sound advice.
In a wonderful accent he said, “she had better go straight on till she
came to Mr. Urkirs’ farm, and if you tell him what you want, happen he
will spare one of his labourers to take your message over to Goresby
Manor.”
Very patiently Phemie plodded on, with the moor stretching to right and
left, the straight unfenced road before her, and the cold grey sky
above. It did not seem to her that it was really she, Phemie Stondon,
who was walking all by herself through Yorkshire; who had been
travelling by night till she was frozen and stupefied; the whole
performance appeared so like part of a dream, that she had to stop
occasionally to realise she was hundreds of miles from her own home, and
half way across Quarry Moor, on her way to tell Basil of his son’s
death.
On her arrival at the farm, Phemie found Mr. Urkirs out, but Mrs. Urkirs
received the stranger very graciously, and at once promised to send one
of the men over to Goresby.
“Mr. Goresby is our landlord,” she explained, “and very likely the
gentleman you want is one I saw riding past here with him yesterday. If
you would like to go on, William shall put the horse in the chaise and
drive you over—but perhaps you would not——”
Mrs. Urkirs stopped; the thought in her mind was—perhaps the lady might
not care to drive in a chaise with William for charioteer, but there was
a look in Phemie’s face that told the worthy woman she would have gone
in a wheelbarrow had any necessity existed for her doing so.
“I need not go on,” Phemie answered, however. “If you would allow me to
remain here, I should much prefer doing so. Can you let me write a note
to Mr. Stondon. He may not understand a verbal message.”
Considering the present price of paper, considering the millions of
steel pens that are manufactured, and the rivers of ink which flow
annually out of London, it is wonderful to consider that there are
hundreds of thousands of houses in the United Kingdom where a letter
never seems to be written, where ink might be made of attar of roses,
and pens sold at a guinea a piece, judging from the specimens of each
which are presented for a visitor’s benefit.
Even in the midst of her sorrow and anxiety, Phemie could not help some
idea of this sort passing through her mind.
Mrs. Urkirs brought her first a quarter of a sheet of letter paper, then
a bit of blotting paper about an inch and a-half square, then one of
those penny stone ink bottles which were invented for the confusion of
mankind, together with an old steel pen—which she rubbed “soft,” as she
said, on the hearthstone—and a quill that had apparently been in use for
a couple or so of generations.
Out of these materials Phemie constructed her epistle. It seemed
easier to write in the lonely farm-house than it had done at
Marshlands—besides, she had no time to lose, no paper to waste; as the
words were set down so they had to stand.
“Dear Basil,” she began, and she wrote closely that she might not run
short of space. “Dear Basil, I have come all this way at Georgina’s
request to say Harry is very ill, and to beg you to return home with me
at once. I entreat of you not to let anything prevent your coming. Mrs.
Urkirs kindly allows me to remain here till the messenger returns. I
have directed him, if you are not at the Manor, to follow and give this
to you.
“PHEMIE STONDON.”
It was the first letter she had ever written to Basil, and while she
folded it up she thought about that fact.
After William had mounted and departed she still went on thinking, and
sate by the fire considering how strange it was she never should have
written to him before—that no necessity had arisen through all the years
of their acquaintance for her to send him even the merest line. How
wonderful it was that on her should devolve the duty of making the man
she loved wretched!
“I do not know how I shall ever tell him,” she thought. “I do not.”
“And the child is very ill, ma’am, you say,” remarked Mrs. Urkirs at
this juncture.
“He is dangerously ill,” answered Phemie.
“And what a journey it was for you,” went on the farmer’s wife, who—the
excitement of looking up writing materials and of despatching William
over—was beginning to think the business odd.
“A fearful journey,” was the reply, and Mrs. Stondon shivered.
“Could no person have come but you, ma’am,” was the next question.
“His mother thought not,” answered Phemie.
“You are the gentleman’s sister, I suppose,” suggested Mrs. Urkirs,
after a pause, devoted to considering how she could possibly get at the
bottom of the mystery.
“No,” Phemie said; “I am only a very distant relative of Mr. Stondon,”
and she rose as she spoke and leaned her head against the stone
mantelshelf, and thought how she could best stop the woman’s questions.
“Mrs. Stondon had a very special reason for wishing me to carry the
message instead of entrusting it to a servant,” she began at last. “I
will tell you what that reason was before I go, but I cannot do so until
after I have spoken to Mr. Stondon.”
From that moment the two got on admirably. They talked about farming,
about Yorkshire, about children, about London, about Norfolk, about
Marshlands, about every conceivable topic, including the health of Mr.
Urkirs and his “one fault,” as his wife styled it, namely a
disinclination to leave a “drain of spirits in a bottle.”
Phemie had gone in a little for model farming at Roundwood, and was able
to discourse gravely concerning stock and milch cows, soils and
rotations.
The lessons she had learned among the hills were applied practically to
the lands in Sussex, and Mrs. Urkirs told her husband subsequently that,
to be a lady, Mrs. Stondon knew more about cropping than any woman she
had ever met with.
Mrs. Stondon, on her part, was thinking all the time they conversed, of
Basil’s child and the Hill Farm. Could she really ever have lived in a
farm-house? Was it true that Basil’s boy was dead? In a vague kind of
way she began to wonder whether, when he and she returned to Marshlands,
they might not find it was all a mistake—that the doctor had done
something—that Harry would yet be restored. Mercifully, death, when we
are away from it, is hard to realise; till the first force of the blow
is almost expended we never seem quite to lose hope; and thus it was
that Phemie had to rouse herself occasionally in order to remember that
the life was gone past recovery—that Basil could never hear Harry’s
voice again—that it was to his dead not to his sick she had come to
summon him.
“I wonder how soon your man can return,” she said at last.
“Well, ma’am, it depends on whether he would have only to go to Goresby
or further. If Mr. Stondon was at the Manor he might—— But here is the
gentleman himself,” she added, as Basil came galloping along the road
and up to the farm, where, flinging his bridle to one of the labourers,
he threw himself from his horse and came hurriedly into the house.
“What is the matter with Harry?” were the first words he spoke.
“He has met with an accident,” answered Phemie, while Mrs. Urkirs
discreetly withdrew.
“How—when—where?” he persisted.
“Yesterday; somehow in the stable-yard.”
He muttered an oath, and took a turn up and down the farm kitchen before
he broke out—
“Weren’t there enough of you about the house to have kept him out of
harm’s way. Sometimes I cannot think what women were sent into the world
for at all.”
She did not answer him. She knew what he did not know, and it kept her
tongue quiet, otherwise Phemie was not the one to have endured such a
speech quietly.
Her silence had its effect, however, for he said next moment—
“I beg your pardon; of course I was not thinking of you, but of my
wife.”
“Say what you like to me,” Phemie replied, “but spare your wife. She has
suffered enough; she is very seriously ill.”
In answer to which appeal Basil said something under his breath, to the
effect that she could sham illness when it suited her purpose, and
impose on doctors as she had once imposed on him.
“She is not shamming now, at any rate,” Phemie answered, and Basil
continued his walk.
“Is he badly hurt?” he began again, after a pause.
“I am afraid so.”
“Is he in danger?”
“He is.”
“Was he insensible?”
“Yes; he had not spoken when I left.”
“And why did you leave him? Why could you not have sent one of the
servants?”
“Because I know everything that could be done for him would be done, and
I wished you to return to Marshlands immediately. I wanted to telegraph,
but Georgina would not hear of it; so I started to find you as soon as
possible.”
“You have travelled all night then?”
“Yes; I arrived here at nine o’clock this morning.”
“You must be very tired,” and he came up to where she stood and looked
in her face.
“If travelling for a year could do you or yours any good, Basil, I
should not mind being tired!” she exclaimed, and her eyes filled with
tears, to remember nothing she could do might be of any use now, to him
or his.
He remained silent for an instant; but then, putting out his hand, he
touched hers, and said, piteously—
“What a fool I was, Phemie!—oh, what a fool!”
“Do not be one now then, Basil,” she answered, and she drew her hand
away from his and stepped back a pace or two.
“When does the train start?” she asked, and the question brought Basil
to his senses.
“We have not much time to spare,” he said; “there is a train at one
o’clock. If we catch that we can then get a special once we reach the
main line. But how are you to get over to the station? How did you come
here?”
“I walked,” she answered, “but Mrs. Urkirs will allow one of her men to
drive me back, I know.” And so it was settled that they should start
immediately, and while Basil went out to speak about putting in the
horse, Phemie talked to Mrs. Urkirs, and with that individual’s
assistance equipped herself for the journey.
When everything had been prepared for their departure; when Mrs.
Stondon, duly wrapped up, was seated in Mr. Urkirs’ light cart; when
Basil was mounted, and the boy whom he meant to take charge of his horse
to Goresby had nestled down into the body of the vehicle, behind Phemie
and the driver, the former stooped over the wheel and whispered to Mrs.
Urkirs—who had come out to see that the rug was so disposed as to keep
her visitor’s dress from being splashed—stooped and whispered—
“The child is dead, and I want to break it to him gently as we go home.”
“I would rather she had the breaking of it to him than I,” remarked Mr.
Goresby when Mrs. Urkirs, an hour subsequently, communicated to that
gentleman the piece of information she had gained.
Mr. Goresby was a fresh, hearty, middle-aged squire, of the
men-who-have-no-nonsense-about-them stamp, and he did feel most
grievously sorry to hear of the misfortune that had fallen on his
friend.
“Was this Mrs. Stondon a young woman?” he asked—standing beside the door
of the farm-house, with his arm through his horse’s bridle, and his foot
keeping turning—turning a loose stone as he spoke.
“Over thirty, I should think, sir,” was the reply. “Tall and
stately-looking, and proud, seemingly, till you came to speak to her,
but then she was just as pleasant and homely as yourself. She sat there
in that corner by the fire, and cried when she talked about the child as
she might if it had been one of her own. It was wonderful of her coming
all this way by herself; there are few ladies, I am thinking, would have
done it.”
“You are right there, Mrs. Urkirs,” answered the squire, and he mounted
his hack and rode leisurely home to Goresby Manor, wishing to himself he
had seen Phemie, and marvelling whether she was the former love he had
once heard the mistress of Marshlands twitting her husband concerning.
“I suppose there is a woman at the bottom of every misfortune that
happens to a man, if we could only search deep enough,” decided Mr.
Goresby, who, being a bachelor, had always felt an intense curiosity to
know the ins and outs of whatever love affair it was in Basil Stondon’s
past which had, as he mentally rounded the sentence, “put his life all
wrong.”
CHAPTER IX.
THE RETURN.
While Mr. Goresby was trotting back to the Manor, over the Yorkshire
moors, Phemie and her companion were travelling southward as fast as a
train which stopped at every station and kept time at none, could take
them.
They had the compartment to themselves, and each five minutes Phemie
looked at her watch, and said to herself, “Now in a quarter of an hour I
shall have told him,” but when the quarter came and passed, Basil still
thought his child was living.
He talked continuously about Harry and about his wife; he let the whole
history of their wretched experience drop from his lips, sentence after
sentence. He said it was Marshlands she had wanted, and Marshlands she
had got; he declared she thwarted him in his every wish—that it was
enough for him to express a desire, and straightway she opposed him.
“As for her children, she never cared for them—not in the least,” he
went on; “she never cared for me either. Give her money and dress, and
equipage and servants, and she would not fret if she never saw me more.
She shall have her wish now; she may live in London or any place she
likes, so as she leaves me and the children in peace at Marshlands. The
children!” he broke off suddenly. “Oh! Phemie, do you think Harry will
recover?”
“I am afraid there is no hope,” she answered, trying to steady her
voice.
“She must not let me see her if anything happens to him,” he said,
doggedly, and he went on to ask his companion whether she thought they
would be in time, and then he broke into a rage about the slowness of
the trains, about the folly of not telegraphing for him instead of
coming, about the certainty that whatever Georgina planned was sure to
be wrong, about his conviction that if Phemie had stayed at Marshlands
more might have been done for the boy.
“Who would sit up with him last night?” he went on; “who would attend to
everything that the doctor directed? The idea of leaving the place with
only servants under the circumstances, and Georgina even not being able
to see to things! I think she is mad, I really do.”
“I sent for my uncle,” remarked Phemie.
“That is what she never would have thought of,” was the husband’s
comment. Phemie drew back in her corner, feeling she could not tell him
the worst, that he was impracticable, that he was selfish beyond
anything she could have conceived of, that his affection for his child
was but another form of affection for himself.
What good had her coming wrought, then? Had it done any one of the
things Georgina had prayed of her to effect? They would speak indeed,
but there would be a quarrel—possibly a separation, for that was
evidently the result Basil desired to bring about.
Never before, never had Phemie felt herself so powerless as with this
man, who once professed to love her; and it was for him—oh! Heaven, it
was for one like this—she had broken her husband’s heart, and nearly
brought dishonour on an honest man.
“How I loved him—God of mercy, _how_ I loved him,” she murmured to
herself, while her companion still kept rhyming out his complaints, and
then, thinking of all the misery of the past—of the terrible trial in
store for him—of the fearful contrast between his thoughts and hers, her
self-command gave way, and covering her face with her hands, sobbed like
a child.
In an instant Basil ceased his lamentations; the very tone of his voice
changed as he asked her what was the matter—what he had said to vex
her—why she was weeping. He drew her hands from before her eyes with a
gentle force, and prayed her to stop crying, or, at all events, to tell
him what she was crying for.
“I was thinking about the years gone by,” she answered.
“Those happy years,” he said, and the voice was tender as the voice she
remembered so well.
“Were they happy to you?” she returned. “They were not so to me. Can you
bear to look back upon them?—I cannot,” and then, urged by necessity,
Phemie made a speech which brought the colour to her cheeks and dried
the tears in her eyes. “You said you loved me in those days, Basil—was
it true?”
“True as sorrow,” he answered; but he felt there was something behind
her question, and he kept his hand on her arm, and prevented her turning
completely away from him, while she proceeded—
“I do not want to go back and tell of all the misery you caused me then,
but I do want you to promise me something now, for the sake of that old
dead love of the long ago.”
“Not dead, Phemie!—not dead!” he replied.
“Do not say that, or you stop me,” she returned; “or say it if you can,
remembering everything, and I will frame my request differently. For the
sake of the man who forgave you and me, both of us, will you promise to
grant me one favour?”
“I will.”
“I want you not to speak harshly to your wife. I want you not to
reproach her. I want you never by word or look to lay this—this accident
at her door, whether Harry lives or whether he dies.”
He remained for a few moments looking down at the carpet on the floor of
the carriage, then he answered—“You do not know everything, and your
request is harder to grant than perhaps you can imagine, but still I
will keep my promise—I will not reproach her;” and he got up from his
seat and went to the opposite window to that at Phemie’s left hand, and
looked out over the country, and stamped his foot for very impatience at
the slow rate of travelling, and wondered if they ever should arrive at
the junction, and how long it would take to get a special train ready.
She let him run on for a time in this manner, while she searched about
for some form of words in which she might convey an idea of the worst to
him. Over and over again he said—“nothing ever really hurt children;
that they were like cats and had nine lives;” he wondered if Mr. Aggland
would think of having a surgeon down from London; he mourned about his
own absence from home, and then he began abusing the railway
arrangements once more, and finally, pulling out his watch for the
hundredth time, declared they ought to be at the junction in ten
minutes.
“Once there, instead of waiting for the express we must get a special,
and push on at a very different pace to this.”
He flung himself into the seat by the window, as he spoke, and Phemie
having at last made up her mind that she would tell him, left her place,
and took the one opposite to that he occupied.
She had been thinking over the words she should use for hours, and yet
now no word she had intended to employ was uttered.
“Basil.”
“Yes, Phemie.”
“We need not hurry so much.”
“What do you mean?”—he asked the question as though there was no
necessity for him to do so.
He read the answer in her face.
“Oh! Basil—Basil!” she cried; and after that there was a great silence,
while the train swept on.
She did not dare to look at him—but she felt blindly about for his hand,
and took and held it in hers;—and he let it lie there passive.
When they came near to the junction, she resumed her old position, from
which she stole a glance at Basil.
His face was shaded by his hand, and she could tell nothing of how it
was with him.
With a great shriek and hustle, the train rushed into the station.
“He was dead, then, when you left,” Basil said, without lifting his
head, or turning his face, or moving his hand.
“Yes,” she answered; and the train stopped, and the junction he had
desired so earnestly to reach was gained.
Through the darkness, Phemie and Basil travelled on together, not by any
special train but by the express, in which once again they were able to
have a compartment to themselves. By the time they left the junction,
the short day was drawing to its close; and before they had got twenty
miles nearer home it was quite dark, and the stations through which they
shot were lighted up and bright with gas.
They never spoke to one another. Greatly that journey reminded Phemie of
a former one she had undertaken, when, through the night, she and her
uncle hastened away from Marshlands to seek a new home. Then it had been
Mr. Aggland who sate beside the window looking out into the summer
night; now it was Basil who never turned his head away from the
contemplation of the blackness, which was no darker than his own
thoughts.
Through the night the train dashed on—through the hours he and she never
opened their lips to speak to one another.
She would have given anything to hear his voice—to hear even the sound
of lamentation and the words of mourning, but Basil remained obstinately
mute.
He was thinking of his boy—his first-born—the child whom he brought from
India with him—thinking of him, and of his wife, and of the woman who
had carried the evil tidings to him.
For the first time, also, he was thinking of his life—of his past—of the
sin that past held.
Every idea seemed vague and shadowy—the only one certainty he appeared
able to grasp being that Harry was dead, and that he was travelling home
to see him.
Home—what a mockery the word sounded!
At Disley they found Mr. Aggland waiting for their arrival on the
platform.
“I brought the carriage over on chance,” he said, “hoping you might
return by this train. Mrs. Stondon is very ill,” he added, addressing
Basil. But Basil paid no attention to the sentence.
“Does he know?” whispered Mr. Aggland to his niece, who nodded an
affirmative.
After they reached Marshlands, Basil stood in the hall for a moment,
like a man trying to collect his senses; but when Phemie was going to
leave him with her uncle, he detained her, saying—
“I want to see——”
“Had you not better wait a little?” she asked.
He only answered her with an impatient gesture, and motioned that she
should lead the way.
She ascended the staircase, he following; they passed by the door of
Mrs. Stondon’s room, and at the end of a long corridor crossed the
threshold of the chamber in which the child lay.
Almost involuntarily as it seemed, Basil caught hold of Phemie’s hand,
after the fashion of a frightened girl; and so, together, side by side,
they walked towards the bed.
He let her draw back the sheet, and then, trembling violently, looked
upon his boy.
Till that moment it seemed as if he had not fully realised his loss. But
whenever his eyes fell on the face—which was the face of his first-born
and yet that of a stranger,—when he touched the little cold hands, and
pressed his lips on the icy cheeks, Basil Stondon gave way, and his
grief burst out wild and uncontrolled.
Phemie moved back and closed the door. Then, standing at a distance from
him, she let the trouble flow on unchecked,—only, with folded hands and
bowed head, prayed for him silently.
There are few things in life harder to look upon than a man’s violent
sorrow;—and Phemie found it hard to witness Basil’s. But yet she never
tried to comfort him; she never crossed the room and laid her hand on
his shoulder, and spoke to him words of sympathy. She knew the passion
must find vent;—she felt that such an outburst was better for him than
his former silence; and so she let the grief take its course without
check or comment.
“Tell me about it,” he said at last; “tell me all you know.” And, thus
entreated, Phemie told him how the child had given his nurse the slip,
and got round to the stables during the men’s dinner hour.
“Sewell saw him, but not in time,” she went on. “He saw Harry striking
the young grey horse with a leather strap across the hind legs—so”—and
Phemie imitated the boy’s heedless stroke. “Sewell shouted to him to
come away, and ran across the yard to catch him, but before he could
reach the stall the animal kicked out, and Harry never stirred again.”
“I have punished him for that very trick a dozen times at least,” said
Basil; “and his mother has called me cruel for hindering him. What have
they done with the horse?”
“I do not know,” answered Phemie.
He went away along the corridor, and down the staircase, and so into the
servants’ hall; where, finding Sewell, he desired him to have the grey
killed at once.
After that he returned to Harry’s room; and neither persuasion nor
remonstrance could induce him to move from it.
“Do you remember your promise, Basil?” Phemie asked at last, seeing that
he made no movement to go and speak to his wife.
“Perfectly,” he answered.
“And do you mean to keep it?” she persisted.
“I am keeping it,” he said; “and shall keep it all the better if I stay
away from her. I cannot go and see her; I cannot. If you will have it, I
shall say something you would be sorry for. Do not ask me.
Phemie—Phemie—for heaven’s sake, leave me alone.”
But she would not leave him alone. She prayed and entreated of him to go
and see his wife. She persisted that unless he did so, he would be but
quibbling with his word—breaking faith with her. She reminded him that
it was Georgina’s child as well as his who lay before him; and at last,
finding her words had none effect, she left the room, and tried to
soothe his wife with such excuses for his absence as she could invent.
After a time, however, a message came from Basil, desiring to speak with
her.
“I will go and tell her I shall never reproach her, if you wish me to do
so,” he said. “You have been very good to me, Phemie—very good, and
kind, and patient; and you have gone through much for my sake, and I
will pleasure you in this matter if you like.”
“God bless you, Basil,” answered Phemie—“God bless and comfort you;” and
she stood aside while he passed into his wife’s room, closing the door
behind him.
CHAPTER X.
BASIL’S COMFORTER.
There is a story told of a boy who, journeying through a thick wood,
prayed diligently that Providence would deliver him from the dangers of
the forest, until at last the trees were left behind, and the open
country reached. Then said the lad, breathing a deep sigh of relief,
“That will do; I can take care of myself now.”
What the boy said, we feel—not merely in our relations with the
Almighty, but day by day in our dealings with our fellows.
While the danger is imminent, we are glad of any assistance, of any
help, but the moment the wood is left behind, and safer ground reached,
we mentally echo the lad’s cry, and exclaiming, “We can take care of
ourselves now,” are glad to be rid of our benefactors, and think we
never can get the pilot fast enough off our decks—on to his own.
It was not long before Phemie discovered that Georgina, having got back
her husband and escaped his anger, desired to be rid of the instrument
who had brought about this result.
Prospective gratitude, as I have often before remarked, is one
thing—retrospective another. Prospectively, Mrs. Basil Stondon had
promised wonderful things to Phemie, if she did her bidding;
retrospectively she rather underrated her services, and felt in the
present jealous of her influence and power over Basil.
In those days if Phemie said “Go” to Basil he went. The more he thought
of the woman whose life he had made so poor in happiness, the more he
loved her—not with the unholy love of old—not with the passion which had
scorched and blighted the green verdure, and the fair flowers of their
once sweet Paradise—but soberly and purely, as a worshipper might love a
saint.
He was not afraid of being with her now. He did not feel her presence
torture—the sight of her a snare. No great human passion, unless indeed
it may be revenge, can live within sight of death—and the way in which
Phemie told him of his calamity had cured Basil, and changed him for
life.
In his vigil beside his boy the past came and kept him company, and he
repented him of the evil, and wished unavailingly he could go back
through the years, and live them over again.
He had made her a lonely, desolate woman—a woman who in her widowhood
could not even take to her soul the poor consolation of having done her
duty faithfully by a husband she never loved. He had broken Captain
Stondon’s heart—he had wakened him from a pleasant dream. He had shown
him the gold of the crown he wore was to him but as valueless tinsel—the
gem he had prized so highly but glass in his possession. From the old
man he had snatched away the last precious thing life held for him—faith
in his wife’s love—belief in her perfect truth and purity. He was taken
home and warmed beside his hearth, and when he had eaten his bread, and
shared his affection, he turned and stung his benefactor; and then he
left England, and the years had come and the years had gone, and he was
rich and respected—yet—should he escape?
If he had forgotten, had God? If his sin had passed from his memory,
like breath from the surface of a mirror, did it follow that the sin was
forgiven? Though he had buried his fault—though he had hidden it away
from sight—though the turf was green, and the roses blooming—there was
still the body of his fault lying waiting for that resurrection which
comes, even in this world, at an hour men least expect it, for the sins,
and the follies, and the shortcomings, and the commission and the
omission of their youth.
Trouble makes a man reflect: like adversity, it is a great teacher—and
in the weary, weary hours that elapsed between his son’s death and the
funeral, Basil Stondon learned more than he had ever done before, all
his life long.
Hitherto the tale which experience traces on the memories of each of us
had been to him as a narrative in a strange tongue; but now he got by
degrees the clue to the mystery—the key to the cypher, and read the
story day by day painfully and carefully. It had not been all a confused
jumble of events, sorrows, temptations, joys, trials. Neither did it
prove a disjointed puzzle that would not piece together and make a
finished and perfect whole; but rather it was the fulfilment of a great
truth which, once forced upon his attention, he had still elected to
make light of—“The wages of sin is death.”
Painfully he patched the map of his life together, and found those words
traced across it.
Death—not such death as had come to his boy, not such peace and quiet,
not such repose and freedom from trouble, but death like what had fallen
upon Phemie—living death—death to happiness, to hope, to the future. For
wages are paid that they may be spent; and there can be no spending, no
buying; no eating and drinking, of the bread of bitterness, of the
waters of affliction, in the grave.
It was clear to him at last. He should have to bear as she had been
forced to bear. She told him this truth herself—not hardly or
pharisaically, not with the air of one who having been a martyr glories
in recounting his sufferings, but pitifully and tearfully, across his
son’s body; and when the agony of this new light proved too much for
him, when he bowed his head and covered his face and wept anew, she
repeated to him the burden of that which she had said to herself before
she went forth to seek him—
“Would God I could bear it for you; if it might be, I would bear all
gladly.”
“I wish the punishment had fallen entirely upon me,” he answered,
humbly.
He was much changed in those days—changed towards his wife more
especially, and yet Georgina did not feel satisfied. She knew who had
wrought this alteration, even at her own request; and that knowledge
woke to life the old jealousy, the old dislike, the old hatred of her
successful rival.
“It is quite time we were back at Roundwood, uncle, I think,” said
Phemie to her uncle, as they walked together about the grounds on the
day preceding that fixed for the funeral.
“We will go to-morrow if you like, dear,” he answered. “You have done
all you can do here. Mrs. Basil Stondon is, doubtless, greatly attached
to you, and you have been of much use to her; but yet I believe—
‘Of honey and of gall in love there is store,
The honey is much—but the gall is more.’”
“I am sure there is more gall than honey in her love for me,” replied
Phemie; “and therefore, although I do hope I have been of use here, I
will pack up and go.”
“I would, Phemie, I could see you packing up and making preparations for
happiness on your own account,” he said, significantly.
“You speak in enigmas,” was her reply.
“Do I? Let me try then to speak plainly to you, Phemie. I would see you
married, sweet. I would have you try to give back love for love to a
worthy man who loves you dearly.”
“Who is he?” she inquired.
“One who is much at Roundwood, who misses no opportunity of visiting
you, of talking with you—who——”
“You mean Major Morrice, I conclude,” she interrupted. “He is certainly
much at Roundwood, but for once your penetration has been at fault. It
is Helen he wants. I am forestalling his petition, but you need take no
notice of that when he comes to present it. Only cease connecting the
idea of marriage and me, uncle, for I wed no more till death woos me.”
“Phemie, you grieve me.”
“Grieve you, when I tell you a good man and a true wants to marry your
daughter, and will ask you for her in due time. Uncle, it is you who
grieve me. I did not think you so selfish and short-sighted.”
She spoke laughingly, but he answered her seriously.
“Phemie, was there one of them I ever loved better than you? Had you
been my own flesh and blood a hundred times over, could you have been
nearer to me than has been the case?”
“I think not—I am positive not,” she said; “but what then?”
“Then, dear, because you are so dear to me, I would see you happy.”
“Happiness, uncle,” she answered, “is to be compassed by the widow as by
the wife—by the childless as by the mother. I am happy now—believe me, I
speak the truth.”
And she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek as she said this.
“I told you I would find work to do,” she continued; “and I mean to try
and carry out my idea: the girl’s lovers shall be mine—to paraphrase the
old Scotch song—their husbands mine;—their children, my sons and
daughters. There is a child here I love very much,” she went on, with a
little hesitation; “a poor, neglected child, I wish I had for mine very
own.”
“Do not wish for her, Phemie;—other people have more need of her than
you,” Mr. Aggland replied; and before Phemie left Norfolk she knew he
had advised her well.
Next morning the child who so lately had been regarded as heir to
Marshlands, was borne from its gates and laid in the Stondons’ vault,
close beside Phemie’s husband.
Dust to dust—ashes to ashes. The words were spoken, and the mourners
returned.
“We will go by the last train, and stop in London for the night,” Mr.
Aggland suggested; and as he suggested, so Phemie agreed.
When it was growing dark she went to Georgina’s room, and bade her
good-bye.
“Good-bye,” said Mrs. Basil Stondon, who felt, it might be, some qualms
of reproach at seeing her unloved visitor depart according to her secret
desire. “Good-bye, and thank you a hundred times over.”
“Good-bye,” answered Phemie; “and if ever you want my help again, come
to me, Georgina, for I shall never come to you.”
“Why?” asked the mistress of Marshlands; and Phemie replied—“You know
why as well as I do. Because you do not wish to have me here; because it
is well we should walk on our separate paths, apart.”
“You always were peculiar,” observed Mrs. Basil Stondon.
“Was I?” replied Phemie. “At all events, I always (unavailingly perhaps)
tried to be honest;” which retort silencing her enemy, she put her lips
to Phemie’s face and bade her farewell—not sorrowing.
Phemie then went to perform a harder task, that of taking leave of
Basil.
He had shut himself in what was called the library after his return from
the funeral, and remained there the whole afternoon, refusing to be
comforted.
Time after time Phemie gently knocked, but still obtaining no answer she
went up to the nursery, and taking “Fairy” in her arms came downstairs
again and rapped on the panel loudly.
“I want to speak to you,” she said. “I must speak before I go.”
He came across the room and unlocked the door and gave her admittance,
and then she walked to a chair near the table at which he had been
sitting, and tried to induce him to take the child from her arms, but he
motioned her away.
“Mamma—Mamma Phemie,” sobbed the little girl in a passion of grief,
hiding her face on Phemie’s breast, “is he sorry it was not me? Nurse
says he is.”
Phemie looked at the father, who had heard his child’s words—looked at
him—and as Basil stretched out his hands, rose and gave him his
daughter.
“Fay! Fay!” he cried, sobbing like a woman; and he took the little
creature to his heart, who nestled there.
CHAPTER XI.
CONFESSIONS.
The months went by, and there were changes at Roundwood; such changes as
Phemie had prophesied. If Major Morrice’s wooing was long, his wedding
was speedy; and early in the ensuing year he took his wife to her new
abode.
Was Olivia Derno forgotten? you ask, and I answer No; but the man had
his life to live though she was dead, and he felt it no slight on her
memory to marry one who had known and loved her.
It was a very good match for Helen. “Very wonderful,” said Mrs. Keller,
with her nose in the air, “for a poor farmer’s daughter.”
“Never mind, Mrs. Keller,” observed Phemie, with that terrible knack of
reading people’s thoughts which her relative had noticed on the occasion
of her first visit. “Major Morrice would have been almost too old a
husband for any of your girls, and we will see what we can do for them
yet. I think I have been a rather successful match-maker.”
At this Mrs. Keller bridled, and wondered what Mrs. Stondon was talking
about.
“About your daughters,” answered Phemie quietly. “You do not want them
to live single all their lives, I suppose; and if eligible husbands
offer, you will not say them nay. Had I daughters, I should give them
every opportunity of falling in love I could devise——”
“My dear Mrs. Stondon!”
“My dear Mrs. Keller!”
“Is it not time enough,” said the latter lady, “to consider these
matters when a gentleman proposes?”
“And treat marriage as an alliance between two high and mighty powers,
instead of an affair between man and woman,” answered Phemie. “Just as
you will. Let the girls come down here and stay, taking their chance of
meeting a good husband, as they might of meeting a desirable
acquaintance; or keep them away, it is immaterial to me; only, had I
girls, I should give them an opportunity of making their choice, and
deciding whom they loved best, before the irrevocable words were
spoken—the matrimonial Rubicon crossed.”
Mrs. Keller laughed, and said her hostess was eccentric; but for all
that she let her girls be among the number of Helen’s bridemaids, and
felt quite a maternal flutter when she heard a bachelor baronet was one
of Major Morrice’s dearest friends and his nearest neighbour.
To the surprise of every one interested in the matter, however, Duncan
Aggland conceived a most violent affection for the second Miss Keller,
and begged her mother to consider his request favourably.
He was not a baronet, and he was in business, but still the lady
consented to ignore his trade for the sake of his income.
“There are many engineers Members of Parliament,” she remarked
meditatively to Mrs. Stondon, at which observation Phemie laughed till
she was weary.
“Pray do not put that idea into Duncan’s mind,” she said, “or he will
never attend to his business;” and Mrs. Keller took the advice and held
her peace.
“The birds are all on the wing, uncle,” she said to Mr. Aggland one day,
“and we shall soon be left solitary;” but it was in a more cheerful tone
than formerly Phemie spoke. The days brought their duties with them, and
the due discharge of daily duties ultimately ensures happiness to the
man or woman who tries to act aright.
“And it will soon be summer again,” Phemie proceeded; “where shall we go
this year?”
They sat in the twilight of the spring evening talking about this place,
and about that; and then as the darkness drew on the night became
cloudy, and the rain began to patter against the window-panes. The wind
rose also, and they could hear the angry rush of the waves as they came
rolling up louder and louder upon the shore.
“Heaven have mercy on those who are out at sea,” said Mr. Aggland,
looking forth into the gathering darkness, “for it is going to be a wild
night;” and at the words Phemie shivered with the strange shivering of
old.
She moved to the piano and played the first few bars of Handel’s “Lord,
what is man?” then she rose again and stirred the fire into a blaze, and
pulled the chairs into comfortable positions, and turned the lamp up to
a desirable height, and then stood before the hearth meditatively.
“Sing for me, Phemie dear, if you are not tired,” said her uncle, who
knew that when these restless moods came on, music was the best and,
indeed, the only sedative. “Sing for me a song or a hymn, a ballad or a
psalm—what you will, only sing.”
Obediently she walked across the room and began making melody. Now she
sang, and again she played; now it was “_Ave Verum_,” and then she
stopped abruptly and drew her hands from the instrument, only to
commence that sonata of Beethoven’s which contains within its leaves the
Funeral march upon the death of a Hero.
“What a night it is!” she broke off at last to say, “do you hear the
rain?”
“And how the wind is howling!” answered Mr. Aggland; “it puts me in mind
of the way it used to come up the valley at Tordale, running like a
racehorse between the hills, and then flinging itself against our door.
Do you remember how it beat for admittance—how it rattled against the
windows—how it screamed and shrieked, as if it were a living thing, to
be let in—only to be let in?”
“Yes,” Phemie said, pursuing the same idea; “and how it used to go away,
sobbing and moaning like one in great pain, across the moor to Strammer
Tarn. I often thought in those days I should have loved to be beside the
Tarn when the night wind came home there; I always felt as though it
lived among those great rocks and boulders. Do you not wonder whether it
is as rough a night up in the Cumberland Hills as it is down here by the
coast? Do you wonder who is living in the old place now, and whether
they are gathered close round the fire as we had a way of gathering when
the wind was howling at the door?”
“I often think about the old place, Phemie,” he said. “When I am sitting
quietly here by your fireside, dear, in such peace and comfort as I once
thought never to know, my fancy turns many and many a time back to
Tordale; it was a sweet spot—ay, you might travel far to find one
lovelier—beautiful as Roundwood is, I never can fancy it so perfect as
Tordale. I wish we had a drawing of the valley. I think I shall ask
Duncan, next time he is in the north, to bring me a sketch of it.”
She turned a little from the piano, and, leaning her elbow on the keys,
bade him go on and talk to her about their Cumberland home—
“Which I supposed we shall love best of all,” she finished, “to the
end.”
“Yes,” Mr. Aggland replied, “probably, for—
‘This fond attachment to the well-known place,
Whence first we started into life’s long race,
Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway,
We feel it e’en in age, and at our latest day.’
—But, mercy on us! how the rain is coming down! I do not think I ever
heard heavier rain even in Cumberland;” and he rose as he spoke, and,
putting the curtains aside, looked out into the night.
Just then there came a ring at the front door—a peal, hurried, loud, and
yet conveying the idea of the bell having been pulled by an unsteady
hand.
“Who on earth can it be at this hour, and in such a storm?”
Phemie had started up as the peal echoed through the house, and uncle
and niece stood looking apprehensively in each other’s faces for a
moment, wondering what could be wrong.
“It must be a message from one of the boys,” said Mr. Aggland, hurrying
next instant to the drawing-room door; but before he could reach it a
servant announced Mr. Basil Stondon, and that gentleman entered.
“What a night for you to choose,” exclaimed Mr. Aggland.
“What have you got there?” asked Phemie, pointing to something which lay
hidden under Basil’s coat.
“A trifle for you to take care of for me,” he answered, “if you will;”
and he put the rough covering gently aside, and showed her Fay lying
fast asleep in his arms.
“Basil”—Phemie could not find another word to say to him.
“What is the meaning of it?” Mr. Aggland asked. “Is your wife ill—are
you mad—or is she dead?”
“She is dead to me,” Basil answered; “take my child, Phemie, and let me
go; I only came to ask you to be kind to her.”
The water was absolutely dripping off him as he spoke—he stood in a
little pool in the centre of the room—outside, the rain was pouring down
in torrents, and mingling with the noise of the rain was the howling of
the wind and the rushing sound upon the shore, of the not far distant
sea.
“Go up to my uncle’s room and change your clothes directly,” was
Phemie’s unromantic comment on this explanation; “give me the child.
Basil, you are mad.”
For some time he stood it out with her that he would neither change his
dripping garments nor remain in Roundwood even for the night.
“Where are you going?” asked Phemie.
“I have no plan; I am not sure; I do not know.”
“Well, then, I do,” she interrupted. “You will go direct off to bed, and
take something at once to prevent your catching your death of cold.”
“He was not cold,” he persisted. “He was burning with heat—he had walked
over from the station carrying Fay—and——”
“Took off your top-coat to keep her dry,” again interrupted Phemie; “the
consequence of which will be that if you do not take immediate care of
yourself, you will be seriously ill.”
“He did not mind that—he should like to be ill—he should like to die. If
it had not been for Fay, he would first have shot Georgina, and then
himself.”
“What has she done?” asked Phemie, hushing the child, who, having been
awakened by the light and the talking, had begun to cry.
“She has been false to me,” he answered.
“Nonsense,” retorted Phemie. “Basil, you are mad, as I said before.”
“Perhaps so; but a thing like that is enough to make a man feel a little
discomposed;” and he thrust a letter into her hand, which she held
unopened while she said:—
“Now be reasonable, and listen to me. Standing in your wet clothes, or
wandering about the country, will not mend matters in the least. Unless
you do what I ask you, I will not take care of Fay; I will not even put
her to bed, nor take charge of her for a single night.”
“But why should I remain?” he began; which sentence Phemie cut short by
directing a meaning glance towards her uncle, who at once laid his hand
on Mr. Stondon’s arm and led him from the room.
Then Phemie rang for her maid, and gave Fay into her charge, after which
she unfolded the missive Basil had left with her, and read one of the
most glowing and tender loveletters it had ever fallen to her lot to
peruse.
Her first idea was that her senses must be playing her some trick; her
next was a purely feminine wonder as to what manner of man could have
become so desperately enamoured of Georgina Stondon.
“After that,” said Mistress Phemie to herself, “I will never disbelieve
in witchcraft again;” and she remained standing beside the fire, not so
much shocked as astonished—lost, in fact, in such a labyrinth of
amazement and conjecture as completely bewildered her senses.
“I would not have believed it, Basil,” she said, “if I had not seen it;
and I do not believe it yet.”
Mr. Aggland brought their unexpected guest downstairs again to the
drawing-room, and then left him and his niece to talk the matter over
together.
“I quite agree with you, Phemie, that he is mad,” he whispered ere he
went; “but he will be better in the morning if you can only induce him
to eat something and go quietly to bed. Let him talk—it will do him
good.”
Having received which piece of advice, Phemie went back to the man she
had once loved so passionately, and spoke to him the words I have
written.
“I would not have believed it had I not seen it, and I do not believe it
yet.”
He looked up at her with a sad, hopeless expression in his face.
“She did not deny it, and I gave her the chance of doing so.”
What could any one say in reply to this? Even Phemie stood mute; while
he went on angrily:—
“What did I ever do, that she should have played me false? Have I not
been a good husband to her? Has she not had wealth and standing? Was she
not poor, and did I not make her rich? If we did quarrel at times, it
was all her own fault. Since—since Harry died, I swear to you, Phemie, I
never have spoken a cross word to her—never. I have tried to live at
peace with her. If I had been like other husbands——”
“Oh, Basil, stop!—oh, Basil, stop!” Phemie cried out shrilly, like one
in some bodily pain; for, as he spoke, there came up before her the
memory of another husband very unlike Basil indeed—a husband who had
taken a young girl from poverty and drudgery to raise her to wealth and
station—a husband who had never looked coldly on her—a husband who stood
between his wife and the world—who had been so careful of her reputation
that he would not acknowledge even to her that her purity was in
peril—who removed the stumbling-block from her path, and the snare from
her feet—and then grew suddenly old and infirm, and died bearing his
burden of sorrow to the grave with him patiently.
Till she heard this man vaunting himself—this poor, weak, selfish sinner
thanking God that he was not as other sinners—it had never fully come
home to her what a great heart it was he and she had mutually
broken—what a grand nature they had tricked and deceived.
But the dagger had found the vulnerable point at last, and every nerve
in Phemie’s body thrilled with pain as she implored of him to stop.
For a moment he stared at her in surprise, but then he knew how he had
hurt her—how and where; and a dead silence ensued—a silence like that
which fell between them when she took her place opposite to his in the
railway carriage, and told him there was no need to hurry.
During that pause each fought out a mental battle, and then, when they
had waged their conflict, beaten down separately the phantoms that came
up to reproach them, Phemie turned to Basil and said calmly, as though
that cry of irrepressible agony had never escaped her lips:
“There is no name. Have you any idea who it is?”
“Not the least,” he answered; “but I will know; I will find it out; I
will free myself and my child from her—I will.”
“No, you shall not,” Phemie interrupted. “Let Georgina be what she may,
you shall not do this thing until, at all events, you have had time to
think over the matter calmly and justly. You shall hold your peace about
her; you shall make no scandal; you have been mad enough in coming here
in this fashion to-night, and bringing Fairy with you, and talking
before the child as you have done; but that is all the more reason why
you should be quiet and prudent now.”
She calmed him down by degrees, and after a time, although she could not
get him to go to bed, she did induce him to eat something, and to sit
down before the fire, “like a rational being,” as she observed.
When he thought Mr. Stondon must have had ample time to say his say, Mr.
Aggland re-entered the room, and urged upon him the desirability of his
at once swallowing a certain decoction of herbs, which would, so that
gentleman assured him, prevent his having to retire into what Charles
Lamb calls “that regal solitude, sickness.”
“I should like to be sick,” retorted the other, pettishly.
“Should you?” said Mr. Aggland; “’twould be a pity, then, to balk so
reasonable a fancy;” and he leaned back in his chair and gave over the
patient, who remained looking steadfastly at the fire, while from a
little distance Phemie contemplated him.
He was a young man no longer; his youth, like her own, had flitted by,
leaving no outward traces of its former presence. He was not the Basil
Stondon who had come to her beside Strammer Tarn, brushing his way
through the heather to the spot she occupied. He was middle-aged, and
worn and haggard, not in the least resembling the dream-hero who had
crossed the hills too late—too late.
When she thought of that hero, Phemie could see the man no more for the
tears that blinded her.
Dreams, friends—dreams! I wonder if we ever shed such bitter tears when
the realities of our lives are destroyed and the once sure earth cut
from beneath our feet, as we do when, in a mist-wreath, the air-castle
vanishes—when the once limitless lands of our fairy kingdom disappear in
the depths of the ocean, and are lost to our sight for ever.
Prosperous as her life had proved, Phemie at any rate found it hard to
look back upon the dreams and fantasies of her girlish days with
equanimity.
She had been thinking much of Tordale and the Hill Farm—of the old old
life—of the beauty of that secluded valley—of the Church—of the
waterfall, of the mountains and the fells—before Basil broke in upon her
reminiscences; and now she could not help bringing his figure as she
remembered it into the mental picture likewise—she could not avoid
recalling _that_ day—when, among the glorious sights and sounds of
summer, he crossed the hills in order to tell her all his love.
Strammer Tarn at that moment was more real to her than her luxuriously
furnished room at Roundwood. Basil—the dream-hero Basil, the careless,
handsome, thoughtless, wicked, and yet not intentionally wicked
sinner—was more real to her than Georgina’s husband. She, herself, was
for the moment no widow—no worn, changed woman—but a wife in the full
flush of her beauty, resisting the temptation to which that very beauty
had exposed her, trying to stand firm against his love and her own.
It was all like a story to her that night, like a real tale of another
person’s life, and I think the Phemie who was no longer young, and who
had passed through much suffering, and who knew that no temptation could
come to her to shake her more, felt sorry for that far-away figure
which, crouching among the heather and the grass and the wild thyme,
wept passionately.
Does the tale grow wearisome, reader?—are these particulars too minute?
If they be, bear with me still a little, I pray, for the story is
drawing to its end; the last page will soon be reached, the final touch
given to the figures we have been studying, the volume completed, the
book closed and laid aside; and before that end is reached, I would have
you take in the retrospect of Phemie Keller’s life as she took it in,
and regard her, as for one moment she regarded the girl, and the woman,
she beheld standing young and fanciful and foolish—young and beautiful
and tempted—pityingly.
But not one half so much pity did she feel for that former self, as she
did for the man who sat by her hearth, whose punishment had fallen upon
him so late.
Thinking of the Basil she had known—thinking of all he might have made
of his life—of his opportunities—of his position—of his friends—of his
winning manners—of his frank, free, generous disposition—Phemie thought
her heart must break for very pity, for very remorse, to remember she
had ever a hand in bringing about so poor an ending to a once promising
story.
How might a woman like herself, had she only been true, and kept him
from loving her, or changed his unholy love into respect and trust and
admiration, not have moulded such a nature.
He had loved Miss Derno, and yet Miss Derno came in time to be the best
friend, the most faithful adviser his manhood ever knew.
“Oh! if I had only loved him less, or loved my husband more,” thought
the poor soul, as a finish to her own bitter reflections; “_this_ need
never have come upon him; he might have stayed in England and married a
different wife, and been happy instead of wretched; useful in his
generation, instead of a mere cumberer of the ground.”
When she had arrived at this point in her argument, Basil came back from
his mental journey, wherever it had taken him, and speaking like a man
wakened suddenly from sleep, said that he thought he should like to bid
her goodnight, that he was beginning to feel very chilly.
“You had better take my prescription,” observed Mr. Aggland; and Basil
did take the dose, which proved impotent, however, to work the cure its
discoverer promised it should effect, for next morning he was so ill he
could not rise, and before the following night fever set in, and for a
time all his troubles were forgotten.
He raved frantically indeed, but not about his sorrows; as is often the
case, his mutterings contained no reference to the cause of his illness;
he wandered in imagination, not through the night carrying his child
with him, not across the seas to seek his fortune, not over the hills to
find Phemie, blue-eyed and auburn-haired; but backwards and forwards—to
and fro in a land full of strange fancies—of mad vagaries—of unreal
horrors—of fearful delusions—of horrible spectres.
Very rapidly he got worse, so rapidly, indeed, that before Mrs. Montague
Stondon could be written to and arrive from Paris, which capital she was
then honouring with her presence, the doctors had begun to look very
grave, and, to adapt an old saying to present use, although they hoped
the best, evidently believed the worst.
When it came to that, Phemie declared that, let the consequences be what
they might, she should send for his wife; and Georgina was sent for
accordingly.
Almost before Phemie thought it possible she could arrive, Mrs. Basil
Stondon reached Roundwood, reached it with the cold hardness, with the
insolent sarcasm beaten and pinched out of her face.
“Why did you not write to me before?” she asked, almost fiercely.
“Because I was not certain whether I ought to write at all,” Phemie
replied.
“Then he came straight to you: I might have known he would; and Fay is
here also, I suppose; and—he showed you the letter.”
“He did, but we will not talk about that now.”
“But we will talk of it, if you please. You believed in that letter, I
suppose—you mourned over my shortcomings—you sympathised with a man who
was tied to so wicked a wife—you dreamed perhaps of a divorce, and
thought it within the bounds of probability that Basil Stondon and
Euphemia Stondon might one day stand before the altar. Did you? I hope
you did, for the letter was a sham! Ay, you may look at me,” she went on
with a hysterical laugh. “I wrote it every word myself, and I left it in
his way on purpose to see if I could rouse any feeling in him.”
“What an idiot you must be, Georgina,” exclaimed Phemie, indignantly;
“what a senseless, wicked, foolish, childish trick it was. If he dies,
his death will be at your door. How could you do it?—how came such a
plan ever to enter your mind?”
“One cannot live near ice and not desire to thaw it,” was the reply;
“may I see him?” she added, more humbly; “would it do him any harm if I
spoke to him for a moment?”
“He will not know who you are,” the elder woman answered; and she led
the way to where Basil lay, his wife following.
Then for the first time Phemie understood that Georgina loved her
husband with all her heart, and soul, and strength; that all through
their married life the attachment had been on her side, that she would
have done anything to secure his affection, had she known how; that it
would, as she declared, kill her if his illness proved fatal.
“I did more to win his heart than ever you could have done,” she said,
when at last Phemie had dragged her from the sick-chamber. “I would have
gone through fire and water for him, but he never loved me—never!”
“He must have loved you, or he would not have married you,” Phemie
answered.
“I made him marry me,” was the reply. “He married me because I loved
him; do you understand that, Mrs. Stondon—you, who were so cold, and so
prudent, and so selfish? If I had been in your place, if I had been
married fifty times, I would have left my husband for his sake. If he
had loved me as he loved you, I would have quitted Marshlands had he
held up his finger for me to come. I nursed him,”—she continued,
speaking hurriedly and excitedly,—“I nursed him all through that illness
he had in India. I brought him back from death. He could not have lived
but for my care. It is no light thing, let me tell you, tending a man
through a long sickness out in that climate, and when he got better I
was like a ghost; but he knew I loved him,—knew no woman could have done
what I did had she not loved him, and he married me, and I thought I had
won the battle at last.”
“And afterwards,” Phemie suggested, as the speaker paused.
“Afterwards!” repeated Mrs. Basil Stondon. “You want me to go on and
tell you how you beat me at every move—how it was your men on the board
prevented my winning the game. So be it. The game has not been all
profit to you either, so I must rest satisfied.”
“For pity’s sake,” entreated Phemie, “forget that he ever was fond of
me; let the dead past lie: it was never so fair or pleasant that you
need be continually taking off the coffin-lid to look at it.”
“Don’t talk to me about coffins,” exclaimed Georgina, with a shudder,
“and he so ill; and as for your request, I would let the past lie if I
could. I would bury it half a mile deep, and never desire to hear of it
again, if you and he would only let me; but is it in a woman’s
nature—cold as you are, I put it to you, would it be even in yours—to
see a stranger preferred before you—to feel that she is seated in the
innermost chamber while you are shivering outside on the doorstep?”
“It would not,” Phemie answered; “but then I am not in the innermost
chamber, so there is no use in making yourself miserable about the
matter.”
“If you are not, who is?” demanded Mrs. Basil Stondon; and Phemie
remained silent for very want of the ability to answer the question. “If
you had not been, would he have come to you with that letter?—would he
have rushed straight as he did from me to you? Go back over your own
life. When Captain Stondon found out that you and Basil were so fond of
one another, what did he do? Did he fly from you as he might from a
pestilence? Did he publish the story to Miss Derno, or any other miss or
madam in the kingdom? Did he?”
“No,” replied Phemie; “but then my husband was a very different man to
yours.”
“True,” said Mrs. Basil Stondon, “he was a very different man, and a
very much better. You had a good husband, if you had only known how to
value him; but still, good or not, different or not different, had Basil
loved me he never would have come to you. It was my last attempt; now I
throw up the cards.”
And when Georgina concluded, she made a movement as of flinging
something from her, and turned sullenly aside.
Finding, however, that Phemie did not speak, she faced round again and
asked,—
“Have you got nothing to remark on all that? When Basil gave you his
version you were surely not so dumb?” But still Phemie made no reply.
She was wondering whether she should ever be able to reconcile this
pair—whether any interference of hers might produce some good
result—whether, if he lived, she could bring about some better
understanding—whether, if he died, he would first recover sufficiently
to speak kindly to his wife ere he departed.
“Are you going to open your lips again to-day?” persisted Mrs. Basil
Stondon; and at last Phemie answered, while she rose and laid her hand
gently on Georgina:—
“Yes. I am going to ask you, why you will persist in regarding me as
your enemy? When I followed Basil into Yorkshire—when I brought him home
with me—when I broke the bad news to him in such a way that he never had
an angry feeling towards you in consequence, was I your enemy? Was I
not, at all events, only doing your bidding—only trying to accomplish
what you wanted, to the best of my ability?”
“Yes; but it seemed so hard for such interference to be necessary,” said
Georgina, softening a little.
“Was that my fault? He married you; why he married you is quite beside
the question; he did marry you, and for years you had him all to
yourself. I should not care if a man had loved fifty women before he
made me his wife. If I could not turn them all out, and keep the citadel
against them, I should say I did not deserve to have it.”
“And does the same rule hold good with regard to husbands, Mrs.
Stondon?” asked the other, maliciously.
“We were talking of wives, not of husbands,” answered Phemie; and
continued: “Feeling as you did towards me, why did you ever ask me to
Marshlands?—why did you press me to stay there?”
“Because I was weary of my life—because you were better than
nobody—because it looked well—because it tormented Basil—stop; let me go
back to the beginning, where you interrupted my story. I do not mind
showing you my hand, now the game is over. We were married, as I told
you; the mutiny broke out, and we were bound still closer by the feeling
of a common danger; besides, he was grateful to me. Oh! yes, he was
grateful, for he set great store by his life, and I had saved it! My
father was killed, as you heard, and Basil was sorry for my loss.
Altogether, though I knew he did not love me even then, still we got on
very well for a time, and the only quarrel we had originated in his
obstinate refusal to write to Captain Stondon and tell him of his
marriage.”
“‘You are afraid of _him_ letting _her_ know, I suppose,’ I was provoked
at last into saying. That was my first downrightly bad move, and you
were the occasion of it.
“‘It was your doing, then, that I had to leave Marshlands,’ he answered
on the instant, almost indeed before I had time to wish my own words
unspoken, ‘how did you manage it?’
“I told him all—I did really—all that you have assured me came to your
knowledge after you were left a widow. I could not help writing that
note. I would have done anything to part you—anything to get him out to
India with us—I was so fond of him; but he put it all down to love of
Marshlands; and so, when at last news came to us of your husband’s
death, he turned to me and said, ‘You have got that which you schemed
for so well and so long; I wish you joy of it.’
“There was something else, though, in his mind at the moment—something I
read out of his face that I knew he would not have put into words for
anything; but I did for him. I said, ‘You are thinking she is free, and
I am bound. I am bound, and she is free!’”
“Have mercy, Georgina!”—It was Phemie who entreated this boon. She was
turning faint and sick at such a thought being put before him in its
naked deformity; but Georgina’s answer made her stand erect and defiant
once more.
“Do you think, if I had not mercy on him, I am going to take pity on
you?” she asked. “I told him his thought in so many words. I taunted him
with it, and then we had a fearful quarrel—the first of our new series,
which has never ceased from that day to this. It was then he informed me
of the pleasant ban you had laid upon him—almost exultingly he spoke of
how your words had come true—of how, although you might never be to him
what I was, yet that still you would always be something nearer and
dearer by far. He did not spare me a pang, you may depend upon it. Then
I learned what was in my husband; I have never unlearned that knowledge
since.”
“I am very sorry,”—Phemie uttered this sentence humbly—“forgive me,
Georgina, my share in your misery. What you tell me is very terrible—it
must have been dreadful for you to bear.”
“I did not bear it,” was the quick reply; “I did not even regard it as
payment for breaking the heart of a better man, than ever you were a
woman. I battled against it; I was hard, and he was harder; I would not
accept my position, and he scoffed at me when I tried to alter it. We
came back to England, and he wanted to travel down to Marshlands alone;
but I had a suspicion we should find you there, and I was resolved not
to lose the sight of that interview at any rate. I had the advantage, so
far as he was concerned, for he really felt afraid to meet you, and it
was a triumph for the time being. Next to getting the thing one wants
for one’s self, the greatest pleasure in life is seeing another
disappointed in getting it also. Altogether,” proceeded Mrs. Basil
Stondon, “I fancy I got the best in that matter. Had I not been present,
there would have been opportunity for some tender passages between Basil
and yourself. What is wrong, now?” she added, as Phemie suddenly moved
aside, and drew her hand away, and shook her dress, seeming to think
there must be contagion in the very touch of her companion’s garments.
CHAPTER XII.
PHEMIE EXPRESSES HER OPINIONS.
“What is wrong?” repeated Mrs. Stondon, her indignation breaking bounds
at last, “only this, Georgina, that if you marvel why you have never
been able to win Basil’s love, I do not. How one woman could speak to
another as you have spoken to me this day I cannot comprehend. What you
must be made of to say the things, to utter the taunts, to inflict the
wounds you have done, passes my understanding. I used to blame your
husband for his neglect and unkindness. I do not blame him now. My sole
wonder is that he has stayed with you at all. I should not have done it
had I been in his place.”
“You know nothing about me,” returned Georgina, who was more astonished
and subdued by the foregoing speech than she would have cared to
acknowledge—“and therefore you cannot understand my feelings. You never
loved him as I did.”
“No, I never did,” Phemie answered, “and I thank Heaven for it. All the
love you are capable of feeling for any one is very poor and mean and
selfish; and, as I said before, if you think a nature such as yours is
one calculated to win love from man, woman, or child, you are greatly
mistaken. The man is not in existence, at least I hope he is not, who
would not come in time to hate a woman that could deliberately inflict
such suffering on another woman as you have forced me to endure to-day,
and many a day before—many and many a day.”
Was it true—were these words, which, in the very extremity of her
passion and anguish, escaped from Mrs. Stondon’s lips, as true as
Heaven? Georgina had heard similar words before spoken by her husband,
and the very remembrance of the fact lent additional bitterness to her
tone as she exclaimed—
“And have I endured nothing at your hands? Is it nothing to have had you
standing between me and him every hour since we were married—to know he
has never regarded me save as an encumbrance, a burden; to feel he loved
your little finger better than my whole body?”
“I could not help that,” Phemie returned. “If, knowing what you knew,
you chose to marry him, I am not to be held responsible for the
unhappiness of either of you. Had it been in my power to make him give
affection to you, he should have done it. I did not want to keep the
heart of any woman’s husband. I would not have taken from you a grain of
his love, could any act of mine have prevented his wasting it upon me. I
have never asked for it. I have never sought it.”
“Not even when you stayed at Marshlands to welcome him home, I suppose,”
remarked Georgina; and there was a moment’s pause ere Mrs. Stondon
replied—
“It was foolish for me to stay; foolish and weak; but yet, when the
grave gives up its victim, when the sea returns its dead, can we stop to
argue about wisdom and propriety? I did wrong in remaining, but I did
not remain with any purpose of trying to revive the past between us, I
only waited to bid him welcome home before I left Marshlands for ever.”
“Of course,” remarked Georgina drily—“you told us that at the time, and
made your exit with singular felicity, I admit; but still it strikes me
that had it not been for my appearance——Shall I go on, or will you
supply the rest of the sentence for yourself?”
“You can go on, or you can remain silent, whichever seems most
agreeable,” answered Phemie. Remaining at Marshlands was the one part of
her conduct since her husband’s death which she had always feared to
analyse too exactly, which she could neither explain to another nor
defend to herself; it was the weak point in her armour, and she could
not hinder this woman stabbing her through it, again and again. She
remembered all she had felt when she beheld Georgina’s bright mocking
eyes looking at her distress. She was never likely to forget the dull
horrid shock of that apparition, nor the first sight of _their_ child,
nor the despairing misery of her heart as she travelled away through the
night, reciting to her own soul every line of the weary story which I
have endeavoured throughout the course of the preceding pages to tell.
But for that one error of stopping to greet the man whom she ought to
have avoided, his wife could have had no power over her now. Even as it
was, however, Phemie fought out her fight bravely, and continued—
“You can put any construction on my conduct that pleases you; it is
perfectly immaterial to me whether you believe I stayed for the purpose
of winning Basil, as you would have done, or remained for the simple
reason I have before stated, as was really and truly the case. You can
think I am like you or like myself, whichever you choose. I shall enter
into no further explanation or discussion, but only repeat what I said
at first, that I never sought Basil’s love, and you know in your heart
that I speak the truth.”
“It is a truth difficult to grasp,” was Georgina’s reply.
“Most truths are difficult to grasp,” agreed Mrs. Stondon; “it is very
difficult for me now to believe that, feeling as you say you have always
done towards me, it was of your own free will you asked us to join our
party to yours at Ambleside; of your own free will you renewed the
acquaintanceship which had been allowed so completely to drop; of your
own free will, and at your own special and earnest invitation, repeated
over and over again, not merely verbally but in writing, I went to visit
you at Marshlands; of your own free will you almost forced me to remain
with you when I really desired to return home; of your own free will you
sent me a long journey into Yorkshire to bring back the husband you have
since then alienated again from you by your senseless, childish folly.
Truths such as these are hard to grasp, but still they are truths for
all that.”
And Phemie, as she concluded this pleasant sentence, reared up her head
with a certain haughty defiance, and looked down on Georgina, who,
remembering at the moment all this disdainful woman might still be able
to do for her, stretched out her hand and tried to draw Mrs. Stondon
back into her former position.
Mrs. Stondon’s temper was up, however; and she therefore disengaged her
dress, and moved a little farther away from her visitor—who said,
deprecating,
“I always liked you for yourself;—that may explain much which has seemed
to you inexplicable. When you did not come between me and Basil, I was
as fond of you as I ever was of any one, except him; but it is not
easy—no wife ever does find it easy—to endure a stranger’s
interference.”
“Did I want to interfere?” Phemie retorted. “Whose doing was it that I
ever had the misfortune to meddle in your affairs at all? Did I kill
your child? Did I wish to go running about the country after your
husband? Do you think it was any pleasure to me travelling by night, and
walking over those horrid moors, and begging at strange houses for help,
horses and messengers, from the hands of strangers, in order that I
might find, and bring him to you speedily? Would any woman on earth have
started on such an errand of her own inclination? Do you imagine I
enjoyed that return journey with him? Can you not conceive that it was
torture—absolute torture—telling him about his son’s death?—that the
task you set me was a very difficult one, and proved by no means easy of
accomplishment?”
“If you could only imagine what he has been like since!” observed
Georgina.
“Why, he told me he had never spoken a cross word to you from that day
to this;—that he had given you no ground, not the slightest, for——”
“I know what you mean—the letter. He spoke truly—and yet—and yet—is
there not a worse unkindness than harshness? I would rather have
quarrelled with him fifty times a day, than live with him as we have
lived together lately. He never has said a cross word. He told me he had
promised you he would not. He only grew perfectly indifferent. I never,
in fact, saw him from morning until night,—and then all at once I
thought I would see if nothing could move him—if I could not work him up
into a fury, if I could not wring one word of affection from him. I grew
sick of seeing him and Fairy,—he so fond of her—she so fond of him. If
he had only given _me_ a little love, I should not have minded—I should
not, indeed, so much.”
She turned her eyes, as she finished this sentence—not on Phemie, but
out upon the lawn; and Mrs. Stondon could not avoid seeing the pained
worn look there was in her once bright countenance—the pinched
expression I have mentioned before, about her cheeks and mouth.
“All my life long,” she began again, and the tears came trickling slowly
down her face, “I never loved anything but him—never. Whom had I to
love?—neither brother nor sister nor mother: perhaps I should not have
cared for them, had I possessed them all; but I was never tried. There
was no one in the world to care for me excepting my father, and he lived
in India; and if he had been in England, you know what he was. Often and
often I wonder what you would have been like, had you been brought up
like me;—what I should have been like, had I been born and lived my life
among those Agglands. I think I might have been different. I am
confident you would.”
“It is not impossible,” said Phemie, coldly.
“I was always at school—always either there or with my father’s sisters,
who were, I do think, the most horrid old women on earth. When I went
down into Norfolk, and stayed with the Hurlfords, it was like getting
into Paradise—they were so different to the people I had been used to;
and yet still you know they are nothing very particular in the way of
amiability either. I had met Basil before. I was so happy to be near
him: but I hated Miss Derno; and afterwards I hated you.”
“Thank you,” said Phemie; “truth is best, even if it be disagreeable.”
“I loved you; indeed, indeed I did, till I found out Basil cared for
you. Believe it or not, just as you choose—I did love you, if it was
only for the opportunities you gave me of meeting him; but when I saw
how it was between you, I thought I should go mad. I could have torn
your hair out by the roots, I was so jealous of it. I felt glad when
everybody said you would be disfigured for life after that accident. It
was so hard—oh! it was so hard—when you had such a husband, and after
Basil had paid me attentions. Do justice to me in that matter, Mrs.
Stondon. Might not any girl have thought——”
“He was in love with her—certainly,” answered Phemie. “I never saw Basil
speak to a girl excepting tenderly; but I do not think he was more
tender to you than to others. If he had, I believe I should have noticed
it;” and the speaker adjusted her white linen cuff with an appearance of
careless indifference, while Georgina exclaimed—
“Do not be cruel, too—do not—do not! What is the use of being superior,
as people call you, to our weaknesses and foibles—what is the use of
standing where you do, if you cannot afford to forgive and be generous
with a woman like me?”
“What is it you require, Georgina?” asked Mrs. Stondon. “What is it you
want? I told you when we parted at Marshlands I would help you if I
could, and I will help you; but I cannot be your friend. I can forgive,
but it is no such easy matter to forget.”
And the cuff was buttoned over again. She unfastened it while she was
speaking, and then employed her leisure in settling it to her
satisfaction. It was an aggravating piece of apparel to Basil’s wife,
for somehow it placed her at a disadvantage in the _tête-à-tête_.
“You will allow me to remain here—till—he is either better or worse,”
she said.
“Assuredly. Did I not write, requesting you to do so?”
“And when he gets well, you will tell him about that letter, and——”
“No, I cannot do that. I will not meddle in your affairs any more. I
will never place myself again in such a position that I can be accused
of making love to any woman’s husband. Besides, you will tell him a much
better story than I could.”
“Surely you believe me when I say it was all my own doing.”
“My knowledge of your skill in letter-writing is so great that I feel no
difficulty in crediting your singular statement. The fact is,” proceeded
Mrs. Stondon, suddenly changing her tone, “you have placed yourself in a
most difficult position with a man whom it is well-nigh impossible to
persuade, and you must try to get out of this scrape for yourself. There
is time enough, however, for you to think over the matter, for there is
no possibility of any immediate change; and even when he does get
better, you must not harass him with your confessions till he is strong
enough to bear them.”
“And if he speaks to you on the subject——”
“I shall tell him what I think—that a woman who could act as you have
done is only fit for Bedlam. And now,” added Phemie, “had you not better
go to your own room for a little while and rest after your journey? I
will send Marshall to you in case you require anything.”
“Do not send her. I require nothing—except—except——”
“What?” asked Phemie, icily.
“Your forgiveness and your friendship.”
“Nonsense!” returned Mrs. Stondon. “You want neither one nor the other,
Georgina. There is no use in trying to impose upon me. When you can wipe
out the memory of the words you have spoken this day, you will then
perhaps be able to persuade me you value the friendship or affection of
any woman, but not till then. Nay, do not go on your knees to me—it is
perfectly unnecessary and extremely ridiculous. Pray get up,” she
entreated; “some of the servants may come in, or my uncle, and it does
look so excessively absurd. Pray get up;” and almost by force Phemie
raised her visitor from the floor, and went with her to her room, and
left her in an easy-chair with—to quote Mrs. Stondon—“an embroidered
handkerchief smelling of millefleurs held to her face, and an evident
inclination to weep abundantly.”
“I told her it would be the very best way possible for her to employ her
time,” said Mrs. Stondon to her uncle, as they stood together in the
dining-room. “Of course, she thinks me a hard-hearted Goth; but I mean
to teach Mrs. Basil Stondon that she shall not be insolent to me with
impunity, and that I will not endure such speeches as she has made
to-day patiently from anyone on earth.”
“Phemie, Phemie, the woman is in great trouble.”
“She has brought it on herself.”
“Does that make it any easier to bear?” asked Mr. Aggland.
“And after all I did for her,” went on Mrs. Stondon.
“You ought to forget your own good deeds, dear.”
“Uncle, you are unreasonable—you expect me to be more than human; you
think I should bear—bear—and never give back an answer—that I should
endure to be put upon, and trampled under foot, and made use of, by
anyone who likes to come and say, ‘I have need of you.’”
“Because, Phemie, it may be that they only come as messengers—that it is
really God who has need of you. My child, did you not once say you would
try to do whatever work He gave you? And is not endurance oftentimes as
much His work as leading armies or commanding fleets? Be patient with
this poor wayward soul, who goes wandering on, making herself and other
people wretched—unknowing how to compass what she wants. Remember that
charity not only ‘suffereth long and is kind,’ but that it ‘is not
easily provoked; that it beareth all things; hopeth all things; endureth
all things.’”
“I am no saint,” she said, a little sullenly; for Georgina had “put her
out” thoroughly—had chafed and angered and hurt her.
“Did anybody ever think you were, Phemie?” he asked; and the _naïve_
question made her laugh a little. “I am positive I never did,” he
continued; “but I tell you what I do think, Phemie—that you ought to
stand far above such petty annoyance. If you cannot bear indignity
patiently, who can? If you will not be generous, where shall I turn and
seek for magnanimity?—
‘It behoves the high,
For their own sake, to do things worthily.’
“You ought to follow Coleridge’s advice, and
‘Gently take that which ungently came,
And without scorn forgive.’
And further,—
‘If a foe have kenn’d,
Or worse than foe, an alienated friend,
A rib of dry rot in thy ship’s stout side,
Think it God’s message, and in humble pride
With heart of oak replace it.’
I will not quote any more of the lines, because I do not much approve
the spirit of those that follow. My dear,” he added, speaking very
earnestly and very pathetically, “you have been mercifully dealt with:
will you not deal mercifully by another?”
She bent her head till her brow touched the marble chimney-piece, but
did not answer for a moment. Then—“You are not going to be hard and
unforgiving, are you?” he said.
“No, uncle; I was only thinking,” she replied—“thinking of a remark
Georgina made.”
“I should forget it at once,” he recommended.
“It was nothing unpleasant—nothing disagreeable,” answered his niece.
“She only said she often wondered what she would have been had she been
brought up like me. She seems to imagine her education has made her what
she is.”
“Ay, poor thing, ay!” exclaimed Mr. Aggland, pityingly. He always felt
very sorry for a woman who had been brought up, as he phrased it, “in
the world,” and was quite willing to be of Mrs. Basil Stondon’s opinion.
“There is a reverse side to the question also,” he said, continuing the
idea; for education was a hobby it delighted him to ride. “Had you been
brought up as she was, Phemie, how would it have fared with you?”
“Better perhaps, uncle,” she replied; but he shook his head and declared
she knew she was answering him idly, “for you must believe there is
something in early training,” he added, “something in the bending of the
twig”—something in hearing when very young of that which makes men,—
‘Ply their daily task with busier feet,
Because their hearts some holy strain repeat.’
At the same time, however,” finished Mr. Aggland, “I incline greatly to
the opinion that he who said ‘characters are nurtured best on life’s
tempestuous sea,’ was right also; but this poor creature seems neither
to have had one experience nor the other. You will be kind to her,
Phemie. Remember, he may not live—think how soon she may be left a
widow.”
Mrs. Stondon did not require that last argument to induce her to return
to her guest’s room and beg for admittance; but it drained the only drop
of bitterness which was left in her away, and softened her heart
completely.
“I am very sorry for having been cross,” she began, hesitatingly—“it was
very wrong of me, and——”
Georgina never let her proceed further in her apology. She threw her
arms round Phemie’s neck, and kissed her over and over again.
“It was my fault,” she said, “all my fault; but I have been so
miserable, and so jealous of you; after what has passed, perhaps you
will not believe me if I say I am grateful, but if he only recovers, and
we come together once more, I will try to show you—I will try to do
better than I have done. I wish I had never done you any harm, I do. I
wish I could live my life over again and be honest and straightforward.
If we could only see things at the beginning as we see them at the
end—oh! if we only could!”
From that day the two women became friends. Resolutely Phemie set
herself to do what she could for Georgina, and the poor wife, whose home
had been always such an unhappy one, grew different in the atmosphere of
love and thoughtfulness.
“It is like being in heaven,” she said one day to Mr. Aggland. “I do not
wonder at Basil hating me if this was the kind of life he had pictured
to himself. What do they say about him now?” she asked Phemie, who
returned at the moment from speaking to the doctors.
“Only what you already know,” answered Mrs. Stondon—“that he is
dangerously ill;” and Phemie turned away, for the crisis was drawing
near.
CHAPTER XIII.
CONCLUSION.
There is nothing colder than a night-vigil; be the curtains drawn never
so closely, the fire piled never so high, there still comes an hour at
the turn of the night when the cold steals inside the draperies, and
takes up its position on the hearth alongside the watcher, seeming to
say, “I have as good a right to the heat as you,” and it absorbs the
heat accordingly.
What is that shiver which tells us, spite of fires and closed doors,
that the turn of the night has come; that chill which creeps through the
body, even in the summer time, if we are keeping our solitary watch by
the sick-bed, or travelling hour after hour through the darkness?
Some people say that the hour before dawn is the coldest, and this is
possible; but it is not cold with the peculiar chilliness of which I am
now speaking, and which produces precisely the same effect upon the
nerves as the sudden withdrawal of pressure at the gas-works produces in
a room.
In a moment the lights of the soul seem to burn dim, while that strange
cold crosses the threshold and takes possession of the watcher’s spirit.
None perhaps, save those who have habitually watched through the night,
worked at a trade or a profession, or sat in attendance on the sick,
will understand exactly what I am trying to write about, and yet the
effects of this atmospheric change must have been felt some time or
other by all men and all women to whose fate it has fallen ever to keep
a solitary vigil, or to walk alone at night either through London or the
country, or beside the desolate sea-shore.
It is at that hour they come fully to comprehend why intramural burials
are so pernicious—it is then the sewers give forth their effluvia, and
the scent of flowers grows heavy and oppressive—it is then we close the
window to keep the smell of the seringa from entering our chamber, and
cast away the lilies that seemed once so sweet—then we take desponding
views of sickness and of the future, and shrink alike from the work of
this world, and the rest of the unseen!
Through the night, Mr. Aggland and Phemie and the nurse watched Basil
Stondon, and when the hour to which I have referred came, Phemie arose,
and, wrapping her shawl more closely round her, moved to the side of the
sleeper and took up her position there.
As she did so, the lights in her heart were burning dim. She feared the
worst—she believed he would not recover, and that the end was very near.
She had persuaded Georgina to lie down, promising to call her should
there be any decided change for the worse. The nurse was dozing on a
sofa behind the door; Mr. Aggland, seated by the fire, was reading
Jeremy Taylor’s sermon concerning the “Foolish Exchange;” and there was
a great stillness in the room as well as that peculiar cold, while
Phemie softly drew a chair to the bedside in order to watch the sleeper
more closely.
Eighteen years, or thereabouts, have elapsed since first in the church
at Tordale, when the summer sun was shining on the earth, you, reader,
were introduced to Phemie Keller. Should you care in that which is the
darkest and coldest hour of all the night to gaze upon her again?
Those authors who, commencing with heroines of eighteen, take leave of
them when they quit the church-door at twenty, have a great advantage
over the other members of their craft who are compelled to talk of women
when they have passed the Rubicon of female attractiveness.
Youth is so pretty, so fresh, so engaging, so full of poetry and romance
and gaiety! And once youth is gone, when there are lines on the brow,
and memories in the heart, and graves in the past, how shall the
interest of the story be kept up—the reader led on to follow the path of
maid, or wife, or widow into middle age?
Still, as lives are lived after twenty, so the tale of those lives must
be told; and, although eighteen years have gone, Phemie’s beauty has not
quite departed with them—it is not a thing of the past to this present
day.
She wears her widow’s cap, and the glory of auburn hair still remains
thick and glossy, sunshiny and wonderful, as of old. It may not be the
young hair that first attracted Captain Stondon, but it is a woman’s
hair for all that—soft, luxuriant, beautiful as ever.
What more, you ask, what more? Oh! friends, we cannot both eat our cake
and have it. We may not go through the years, and enjoy them, we may
live through the years, and learn experience out of them, and remain
just as we were at the beginning.
How would you wish it to be? We came upon her first a girl—a farmer’s
adopted daughter—dressed in a large-patterned, faded gown—in a coarse
straw bonnet—unacquainted with the usages of society—a child of the
hills, who had her dreams of fortune, and admiration, and love,
nevertheless, just like your daughters, sir, and yours, and yours.
Once again you look upon her, but draw back, declaring this cannot be
Phemie Keller! And yet the change which seems so wonderful to you has
come gradually upon her, and it is the past which seems to her
incredible, rather than the present.
A self-possessed and still beautiful woman—a saint rather then a
Hebe—with lilies abiding in her pure face rather than roses—with
features regular and perfect as of old.
Should you not like that face to be near you when you lie dying? I
should. It gives the idea of all passion, all envy, all jealousy, all
uncharitableness, having been taken out of it by the grace of God.
She still wears black. Till she is laid in her coffin, I do not think
Phemie will ever cease to do so; but black, as Duncan Aggland somewhat
cynically remarked, is becoming to her, and few people would wish to see
Mrs. Stondon differently attired.
As for the rest, she has, as she had ever, lovely hands, and a stately
figure, and a gracious presence; somewhat thin she may be, somewhat too
slight for her height; but yet her admirers dispute this fact, and
declare Mrs. Stondon to be perfection.
This shall be as you please, reader; for those who love Phemie best,
affirm it is not for her outward beauty, they delight in this woman,
whose story is almost told; but rather because there is that in her
which they can trust and honour, which they have searched for elsewhere
in vain.
She has come forth from the fire purified, and the face which looks on
Basil Stondon is the face of one who, having passed through deep waters,
has found rest for her soul at last.
Yet her thoughts were not happy as she sate by the bed gazing on the
sleeper.
She sate thinking about him, and about men like him. She marvelled how
the world would go on, if all in it were as weak, as helpless, as
vacillating as he. She wondered, if he recovered, how it would be with
him and Georgina. And she could not help going on to speculate what her
lot might have proved had it been cast with such a husband, instead of
with the true, good man who had stood between her and the world—who had
loved her better than himself—who had remembered her in the hour of his
bitterest agony,—and who had left her with his wealth no restriction
save to make herself happy if she could.
People think about strange things when they watch by sick-beds. It is
not always the malady which absorbs them—not always the end they sit
considering; rather, oftentimes, they speculate about the patient,
wondering concerning him and life, and his allotted part in the great
drama—how far his existence has been useful—how far, according to their
light, the world would have been better or worse had such an one never
existed.
Very vaguely Phemie recalled the years of Basil’s life since he and she
met, and marvelled whether his future, if he were spared, would be as
purposeless as his past had been.
There lay a great sorrow at her heart—a sorrow too deep for tears—as she
looked on the face of the man she had loved so long and so intensely.
Sleep always is a wonderful state to contemplate—except in the case of a
child. The man’s troubles are forgotten—his schemes laid aside—his
thoughts are far away from the concerns of his every-day life;—and his
body shares in the great change likewise—the keen eyes are closed—the
windows of the brain are closely shaded—the lips open to utter no biting
sarcasm—no ready excuse—no words of censure—no sentence of
explanation;—the features remain quiet—the over-wrought nerves are
still.
Never a movement is there, either in the restless fingers or in the
hands, that are so seldom unemployed. Almost feigning death, the sleeper
remains so quiet that the watcher longs to wake him—to bring him back
from himself and rest, to his fellows and the rush and bustle and hurry
of life.
Time after time Phemie rose and bent over the sick man, to assure
herself he was still breathing. Softly as the summer wind touches the
leaves, she laid her fingers on his wrist, to feel if the pulse were
still beating; till, at length satisfied there was no cause for
immediate apprehension, she leaned back in her chair and waited—waited,
for whatever might be the result.
He had aged more than she. There were deeper lines on his face than on
hers—thin and white were his cheeks—worn and wasted his body—his hair
was all tangled—his beard and moustache untrimmed. Basil, the young
strong man, was gone, and there lay there in his stead another Basil to
him who had walked with her among the heather and across the fells.
The night wore on, and through the closed blinds dawn peeped with grey
eyes into the sick-chamber; then, in due time, the sun began to rise,
and Phemie turned wearily to greet his beams.
How would it be in that room when the sun set? Would she then have
looked her last on Basil Stondon living. Should she thenceforth have to
think of him as dead?
She crossed the room and, putting the curtains aside, looked out. It was
a lovely morning in the early spring, and the birds were singing their
fiercest—piping fit to burst their little throats for joy that it was
daylight once again. All the east towards which she gazed was glorious
with colour, and the distant sea lay like a lake reflecting back the
sky.
Sadly, and with a gesture of utter weariness, Mrs. Stondon dropped the
curtains and returned to her post. Her eyes were dazzled with the bright
sunlight, and for the moment she could not see that Basil was awake and
looking at her.
“Phemie,” he said; and then she knew he was saved. And while the sun
rose higher and higher in the heavens—while the songs of the birds grew
louder and more frantic—while the sea rolled gently in upon the
shore—while every tree, and leaf, and shrub, and flower looked bright
and glad in the light of morning—a great cry of exceeding joy ascended
to the Throne of God; for the man was left to make a better thing of his
life—to be a spendthrift of his time and a waster of his happiness, a
faithless steward and a thankless unprofitable servant, never more.
She did not let him see his wife for a time. The illness had been too
sharp to allow of sudden surprises—of much conversation during
convalescence; but, as the days passed by, Phemie talked to him about
his wife—about their unhappy disagreements—and openly and without
reserve, as though she had been speaking of some other person, about
herself.
Not without tears did she speak of that past Eden in which they had
eaten of the fruit which brings forth death. Not unmoved did she talk of
her own shortcomings—of her own repentance. From the old text she
preached the sermon of their lives but as no good sermon ends without
holding out some hope for him who turns from the evil of his ways, and
seeks even at the eleventh hour to cleave to the right—so Phemie, having
faith that every word she spoke was true, assured Basil it was certain
he might yet know happiness, and come in time to think of the story I
have told but as a trouble that had been borne—as sorrow which had been
endured.
She made him comprehend, after much difficulty, how faulty he had been
in his conduct towards his wife. Never did she weary of repeating to him
her belief that it was in his own power to make or to mar the peace of
every future hour.
“You have never understood each other—you have never tried to comprehend
her—you have never allowed her to understand you; but now, as you must
travel through your lives together, do try to travel peaceably.”
“And your future, Phemie,” he asked—“what of that?”
“It shall be happy, too,” she answered. “We do not look for a land
without shadows when the noontime is over; but the land on which the
evening light is shining may be very beautiful for all that.”
And she laid her hand in his which he stretched out towards her; and the
man and the woman who had loved one another so much when their high noon
of life threw no shadow, looked steadfastly at one another, and
discoursed silently, he to her, she to him.
In that hour, heart told to heart all it had suffered—all it felt strong
enough to do. Without a word being spoken, each knew what was passing
through the other’s mind; and as their fingers locked together and then
were withdrawn, Phemie comprehended that Basil had sworn to God he would
strive in the future to make atonement for the past.
As he might have gripped a man’s hand in order to confirm a promise, to
render verbal assurance unnecessary, Basil grasped with thin fingers the
soft, small white hand, which she put in his.
And thus they buried the old love for ever; and so Basil returned from
the darkness of the valley of death—death physical and mental—to take
his place in the world, and to fulfil the duties which his wealth and
his station entailed upon him.
As for Phemie, what more is there to tell, save that she is now a happy,
and a contented, and a useful woman; still beautiful, and still a widow.
Suitors come to her, suitors such as she dreamed of when she built
castles in the air among the Cumberland hills, but Phemie’s answer to
one and all is—No.
If she could live her life over again with her present experience; if
she could retrace the old road with a knowledge of its snares and its
pitfalls, she would choose a second time as she chose the first, and
take for her husband the man to whom she would strive to be a faithful
and loving wife—the man who in the first chapter of this story, after
toiling under the noontide heat, came suddenly within view of Tordale
church, and who beside Strammer Tarn, amid the purple heather, within
sound of the plashing waterfall, where ivy and lichens covered the face
of the rocks, and ferns and foxglove grew between the stones, and the
stream laved the mosses and the tender blades of grass, wooed and won,
young, vain, fanciful, blue-eyed, auburn-haired Phemie Keller.
THE END.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHEMIE KELLER, VOL. 3 OF 3 ***
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