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Title: Dead men's shoes, vol. 1 (of 3)
Author: M. E. Braddon
Release date: May 28, 2026 [eBook #78772]
Language: English
Original publication: London: John Maxwell and Co., 1876
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78772
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEAD MEN'S SHOES, VOL. 1 (OF 3) ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores:
_italics_.
DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
DEAD MEN’S SHOES
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET’
ETC. ETC. ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
[Illustration: (Colophon)]
LONDON
JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.
4, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
1876
[_All rights reserved._]
To SIR J. CORDY BURROWS, J.P.,
BRIGHTON.
DEAR SIR CORDY BURROWS,
If anything can justify the dedication of a book to any one, it
surely must be a friendship that has lasted nearly twenty years;
marked on your side by many acts of care and kindness, and on mine
by a most sincere appreciation of your genial and generous nature.
I have therefore great pleasure in recording this fact, and I have
still greater pleasure in dedicating this story to you.
Believe me,
Dear SIR CORDY BURROWS,
Very sincerely yours,
THE AUTHOR.
RICHMOND, _February, 1876_.
CONTENTS TO VOL. I.
CHAP. PAGE
I. ‘PLUNGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY’ 1
II. ‘O WORLD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS!’ 24
III. THE TRUE METAL 39
IV. ‘HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US THAT HAS NOT BEEN’ 47
V. SIBYL FAUNTHORPE’S DIARY 60
VI. THE ÉLITE OF REDCASTLE 94
VII. DRIFTING INTO HAVEN 104
VIII. THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL 117
IX. UNCLE TRENCHARD 131
X. SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD 140
XI. HOW STEPHEN TRENCHARD FORGIVES 152
XII. LOVE, THEN, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE 171
XIII. THE SWEETS OF LIFE 195
XIV. MAKING READY FOR VICTORY 208
XV. TOWN AND COUNTY 221
XVI. A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR 246
XVII. THE WANDERER’S RETURN 273
XVIII. AT ARM’S LENGTH 287
DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
CHAPTER I.
‘PLUNGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.’
A girl-woman alone on Battersea Bridge, reading a letter in the
December sunset--one of those mild autumnal afternoons which hang
upon the skirts of winter. A girl in years--a woman in cares. Dark
brown eyes set in a pale, sharply set face; mouth rosy and beautiful
in form, but too firm in its lines to be altogether lovely in a
woman. A girl whom the passers by look at interrogatively, wondering
that so much beauty should go alone, and so poorly clad. Her clothes
are not common, but shabby--a black silk dress that has once been
handsome and fashionable; a black felt hat trimmed with threadbare
velvet; a sealskin jacket worn bald at the edges, and dull with
exposure to hard weather; gloves which indicate that to be gloved
at all has cost the wearer a struggle; boots whose decay is no less
evident than the symmetry of the slender feet they cover. She walks
listlessly up and down the pavement of the bridge--just the one quiet
promenade to be found in this neighbourhood--reading a letter from
home, or the place which was her home two years ago. She has seen
much of the world during these two years,--in her own opinion too
much, for she has seen not the fair and shining fabric in life’s
loom, but the ragged sleave thereof.
This is the letter which she reads, not once, but three times over,
with deepest attention, as she paces up and down the quiet old
bridge, while the sunset fades from the cold gray river, and from
that Dutch picture of old red roofs and water-side shanties on the
Middlesex shore, which painters have loved, and which the Thames
Embankment may perchance have blotted out by this time:--
‘_Redcastle, December 11th, 186-._
‘MY DEAR SIBYL,
‘An event has happened which I think likely to exercise a
wonderful influence for good upon all our lives. Stephen
Trenchard, your mother’s brother, the uncle Stephen you have all
talked about as children, and whose wealth was your poor mother’s
boast, has returned to England, after nearly thirty years’
absence, yellow, wrinkled, withered, and eccentric in manners and
habits, but I think not unkindly disposed to any of us. He has
taken a house at Redcastle, and is anxious to have his nieces
about him, as he calls it. Marion has already exchanged the
discomforts and deprivations of a parish doctor’s household for
the Oriental luxuries of Lancaster Lodge. I dare say you remember
the house, a square stone building with two tall iron gates, and
two lodges within thirty yards of the hall door. Some people
will have grandeur at the sacrifice of consistency. He seems--I
mean your uncle Stephen--to have taken a great fancy to Marion.
I meet her lolling in his barouche, trying to look as if she had
been accustomed to ride in a three hundred guinea carriage all
her life, and really doing it very well. Jenny has also been to
see her uncle, but he thought her rough and uncultivated, and I
fear that, with her present deficiency of manners, she has little
chance of pleasing him. I have sent her to Miss Mercer’s, as a
day scholar, since Michaelmas, but as she _will_ talk to the boys
going and returning, I really think the change is doing her more
harm than good. I have dined with Mr. Trenchard, and can assure
you that the splendour of his table is something to remember. I
don’t pretend to be a judge of wines, though I could give you
a lecture upon tannic acid, alcohol, and so on--experience, to
my mind, being better than theory, and my opportunities of the
rarest--but I know that after dining with Stephen Trenchard I
felt as if my veins ran quicksilver. Well, my dear, I want you
to have your chance as well as Marion, and I think the best and
wisest course for you will be to beg a month’s holiday from your
employer, Mrs. Hazleton, and come to spend Christmas with your
poor old uncle Robert. No doubt if you do, your rich old uncle
Stephen will ask you to transfer your society to Lancaster Lodge,
and then you and Marion will have equal chances. I dare say it
will end by his asking one or both of you to live with him and
keep his house. He has, I believe, something like a million to
leave behind him, and you three girls are his nearest relations,
and his natural heirs. He has spoken very kindly of your mother.
‘Let me know what Mrs. Hazleton says about a holiday. If a month
is too much you might ask for a fortnight. I should think it most
unlikely that you need ever return to her. With such a man as old
Trenchard for your uncle, and well disposed towards you, your
teaching days ought to be over.
‘Your affectionate Uncle,
‘ROBERT FAUNTHORPE.’
‘My teaching days,’ repeats the young woman, bitterly. ‘He little
knows that they were the height of luxury compared to what has come
after them.’
The letter is addressed to--
MISS FAUNTHORPE,
AT MRS. HAZLETON’S, 19, LOWTHER STREET,
ECCLESTON SQUARE.
It has been re-addressed by an humble friend of Miss Faunthorpe’s, in
the person of Mrs. Hazleton’s housemaid, who has enclosed the letter
in an envelope directed to--
MRS. STANMORE,
AT MRS. BONNY’S, 11, DIXON STREET,
CHELSEA.
An address which indicates a descent in the social scale from the
semi-Belgravian gentility of Lowther Street, Eccleston Square. And
how comes Miss Faunthorpe to be Mrs. Stanmore, while her affectionate
uncle, Robert Faunthorpe, remains unaware of a transmutation which
must needs have some influence for good or evil on his niece’s future
career? Marriage is one of those inadvertences which can hardly go
for nothing even in the easiest life.
‘So Marion is exhibiting herself about Redcastle in a three hundred
guinea barouche,’ says Mrs. Stanmore, putting the letter in her
pocket, ‘while I have hardly shoes to my feet. I--who was supposed to
be the handsome sister, and the clever sister, and the lucky sister!
And I dare not show my face in Redcastle, not even if half a million
of money is to be lost by my absence. To think that uncle Stephen
should choose just this particular time for his return; to think that
he should return at all, when Marion and I made up our minds ever so
long ago that he was little better than a myth, and was sure to have
married a begum without telling anybody, and to die in India, leaving
all his money to horrid copper-coloured children. Lucky for Marion!’
Then, after a pause, leaving the bridge and entering the shabby
street leading to Cheyne Walk, she continues her self-communing
thus:--
‘What shall I say to uncle Robert? Suppose he were to come to town
and call at Mrs. Hazleton’s. He may have money now to pay for the
journey. It was safe enough before. Poor uncle Robert never had a
spare pound, or ever wasted a shilling, except the shillings he had
to pay for summonses because of being behindhand with the taxes. If
he should come up to London? Or if uncle Stephen should be in town
and call in Lowther Street? More likely that. Anglo-Indians are such
active creatures. What am I to do?’
Thus disjointedly run her thoughts, as she walks--very quickly
now--along the narrow, shabby street, past the fried-fish shop, and
the pork butcher’s, and the emporium for second-hand goods--from a
picture of the Holy Family, after Raffaelle, very much framed, to
a flat iron, or a pair of bluchers--the greengrocer’s, also coal
merchant, the cook-shop, with its steam-tarnished windows and reeking
odour of boiled beef and stick-jaw pudding.
‘That reminds me,’ Mrs. Stanmore says to herself, as the reek of
cooked provisions salutes her nostrils, ‘there’s nothing for dinner.’
She pauses and takes counsel with herself. Her eye wanders from the
cook-shop to the fishmonger’s, thence ranges to the pork butcher’s.
Her election lies among these. Cambridge sausages are savoury, but
dear; and Mrs. Bonny, the landlady, has a trick of overdoing all
things entrusted to her culinary art. A pound of Cambridge sausages,
reduced to grounds and grease, are hardly worth the shilling they
cost. Boiled beef is expensive and weighs heavy. For a cheap relish,
a zest which shall make bread and butter supply the place of dinner,
your fishmonger is your best friend. Mrs. Stanmore patronizes the
finny tribe. She selects an eight-penny haddock, dried and salted,
from the merchant’s store, and carries it home with her, rolled up in
brown paper. She stops at the cheap baker’s for a half-quartern loaf,
with which the bit over is not unacceptable. ‘I wonder what Marion
would think if she could see me now?’ she asks herself; ‘Marion who
always complained of my pride, and called herself the Cinderella of
the family. Her Cinderella-ship never brought her so low as this.’
Home! bitter mockery of a sweet word. She turns out of the shabby
street into a street still shabbier, narrow, dirty, and out at
elbows. Yet at its worst not quite so bad as a modern street under
the same conditions, for the red brick houses are substantial and
roomy, and the worm-eaten oaken window-frames shut out the wind
better than the speculative builder’s warped and shrunken deal.
The house which Mrs. Stanmore enters is dark and gloomy. The wail
of a fretful child sounds from the basement as she lets herself in
at the street door with a convenient latch-key. A glimmer from the
kitchen stairs is the only light visible, and to this glimmer Mrs.
Stanmore seems to address herself.
‘I’ve brought home a haddock, Mrs. Bonny. Will you be kind enough to
broil it at six o’clock?’
‘Oh, very well,’ answers a querulous voice from unseen depths below.
‘You can put the ’addock on the window-sill. I’ll come and fetch it
when I’ve got time; but I can’t say nothink about its being done by
six, for my fire’s got low after ironin’. The parlour has gone out to
tea.’
This last remark has a reproachful sound, as who should say, ‘You
never spare me trouble by going out visiting.’
Mrs. Stanmore deposits the dried fish, and ascends the dark,
old-fashioned staircase, smelling of mice, whose hurried scamper is
audible behind the mouldering wainscot. One room, the first-floor
front, comprises Mr. and Mrs. Stanmore’s share of number eleven,
Dixon Street. It is happily a rather large room, with three windows,
provided with old-fashioned window-seats. The furniture is old
like the house, worn and dingy, but solid furniture that has
served several generations of housekeepers and a ragged regiment of
lodgers. In the glow of a cheery little fire the dim old room has a
homely, not unfriendly look. The old tent bedstead has been pushed
into the most obscure corner. There are two arm-chairs, with faded
chintz covers, a sofa, large and ponderous. There is a round table
opposite the wide old fireplace, and another table against the wall,
surmounted by a japanned iron tea-tray of a bright red ground with a
landscape in the middle, a rosewood tea-caddy, a pair of blown glass
decanters, empty, a family Bible--the landlady’s--a ragged copy of
Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ and two odd duodecimo volumes of ‘Tom Jones,’ in
brown calf--the lodger’s.
Mrs. Stanmore lights a small paraffine lamp, takes off jacket and
hat, and proceeds to prepare the evening meal. She has tea-things and
tea-kettle to her hand in the roomy and mousey old closet beside the
fireplace--such a closet as is only to be found in old houses, large
enough for half a dozen burglars to hide in, or a whole nursery of
children to play in, and with all manner of odd corners and shelves,
and perchance an inner cupboard lurking mysteriously in its paneled
recesses.
Mrs. Stanmore fills the kettle, and sets out the tea-things on the
red japanned tray, and cuts a plate of bread and butter, and makes
a round of toast deftly enough, though a year ago she was about the
least handy of her sex in such small domestic offices. That stern
schoolmistress, necessity, has taught her many things. How young
she looks in the ruddy light of the fire, as she kneels on the
hearth-rug toasting that round of bread for the poor meal that is to
be dinner, tea, and supper, all in one for Mrs. Bonny’s first-floor
lodgers!--how young and how pretty! every feature so daintily
fashioned, eyes so darkly lustrous, colouring so delicate; young, and
with much need of love and sympathy, of comfort and careful tendance.
‘And so uncle Stephen has really come home--richer than we ever made
him in our dreams when we were children--and Marion is tasting all
the pleasures his wealth can buy for her, Marion whom I pitied so
when I left her behind me at Redcastle. She might pity me now, from
the depth of her heart, if she could see me. She might have written
to tell me the change in her fortunes--selfish thing. I suppose it
is on account of my not answering her last two letters--such stupid
letters as they were too--full of “I hope you are free from cold,”
and “I trust you are enjoying the nice autumn weather”--and Uncle
Robert’s rheumatic gout.’
She lapses into deeper meditation, looking into a red cavern in the
heart of the fire, forgetful of the toast which hangs despondently
upon the twopenny tin toasting-fork, shaped like Neptune’s trident.
Meditation full of rue, for she has done the most foolish thing a
woman can do, except one, which is to repent too late of her folly;
and she is fast coming to that ultimate stage of foolishness, vain
regret for an irrevocable act.
She is still kneeling in front of the fire, absent-minded, absorbed,
when the door opens, and a young man comes in, slowly, heavily, like
one who brings no gladness with him, and has no hope of finding
comfort at home. He comes quietly to the hearth, lays his hand upon
Sibyl’s shoulder, and addresses her not unkindly, but with little
warmth in his tone.
‘Well, little old woman, brooding over the fire as usual? What’s the
matter now?’
‘Not much more than usual,’ his wife answers, without looking up.
‘You’ve had your customary luck, I suppose?’ she inquires, after a
pause, during which her husband has taken off his shabby overcoat,
and flung himself into one of the arm-chairs.
‘Yes, the wheel of fortune hasn’t turned the other way yet. It
revolves persistently, but always--like the planets--in the same
direction. The immutable laws of bad luck are not to be abrogated
in my favour. The fellows I wanted to see--butterfly friends of the
past, who might lend me a fiver if I could catch them in the right
humour--were all out. The situation I applied for has been given to
somebody else. They had a hundred and thirty-nine applicants, the
principal told me, and gave the berth to the applicant who dotted
his i’s with the nearest approach to mathematical precision. “We
take a man’s handwriting as the physical expression of his mental
bias,” said the principal, “and what we want is precision.” Now
you know I never dot my i’s at all, or if I do the dot is so far
from the letter as to make my meaning all the more unintelligible.
So much for the clerkship. The commission agency we saw advertised
turns out a “do.” Agent required to put down fifty pounds as a
guarantee of _bona fides_. I applied for an agency in the wine
trade, offered to a young gentleman moving in good society and able
to push a new brand of champagne; but when the wine merchant saw
me, he asked, rather pertinently, if I moved in good society in
this coat. I told him I was a gentleman by birth and education, and
knew some of the best people in London. “Very likely, my dear sir,”
replies the grape-doctor, “but you don’t visit them. We want young
men who dress well, and look as if they could afford to drink the
wine they recommend; men who have the appearance of wealth with the
unscrupulousness of poverty.” Rather neatly put by our friend the
gooseberry-fermenter, wasn’t it?’
‘And you have done nothing, earned nothing, are no nearer earning
anything than you were yesterday?’ asks Sibyl, without lifting her
eyes to his face.
Yet the time was, not a year ago, when to gaze upon that countenance
seemed to her like reading a poem, when every turn of the handsome
head, every sparkle of the dark eyes--eyes ever of uncertain hue but
always dark--was a thing to remember and dream about;--when to watch
him across a crowded room was quiet happiness, all-sufficing for an
exacting love--when to hear his voice, gay or grave, was sweeter than
music.
And now he sits a few paces from her, worn out, weary, dispirited,
in sore need of comfort, and she cannot raise her eyes from moody
contemplation of the fire. The difference is marked, the reason
obvious. A year ago he was an undeclared lover--to-day he is an
actual husband. Then there was not a many-petalled flower which did
not suggest the question, ‘Loves me, loves me not?’ Now he has loved
her and won her, and they have essayed to sail along the river of
life together, and found the navigation difficult--ay, hard and
bitter as that weedy swamp through which Sir Samuel Baker’s craft was
toilfully dragged under Afric’s torrid sky.
‘You couldn’t give a neater definition of my position,’ replies Alex
Secretan, otherwise Stanmore. He has striven to hide his destitution
under an assumed name, just as his wife has kept the secret of an
imprudent marriage by retaining a false address. Either mystery may
be discovered at any moment, so various are the accidents of life.
‘Don’t consider me frivolous if I remind you that I haven’t eaten
anything since half-past eight this morning, and the perambulation of
stony-hearted London is conducive to an inward craving. I won’t call
the feeling by so healthy a name as hunger. It’s a compound sensation
of sickness and emptiness. Is there anything to eat except bread and
butter? It’s a very nice thing in its way, but one comes to object
to it on the same ground that Louis the Fourteenth’s confessor took
about partridges.’
‘Mrs. Bonny is broiling a haddock,’ replies Sibyl, listlessly.
‘What good Catholics we are! keeping Advent all the week through. We
had bloaters yesterday, and dried sprats the day before. All our days
are Ember days.’
‘Fish is the cheapest thing I can get, Alex.’
‘No doubt, but it generally entails after expense in the way of an
extra half-pint of beer. No matter. Let Mrs. Bonny bring forth the
haddock,’ exclaimed Alexis, applying himself diligently to the toast,
which Sibyl has just buttered.
She tinkles the bell gently, as a polite hint to Mrs. Bonny. She dare
not give a peremptory ring, as she might for a servant whose wages
she paid. Mrs. Bonny--when letting her lodgings--professes to give
attendance to her lodgers, but that attendance is scanty, and yielded
as a favour rather than a right. A lodger who wants extra luxuries,
such as onion sauce with a shoulder of mutton, or fried liver and
bacon for supper, must make things very sweet to Mrs. Bonny. An
order for the theatre, or even an occasional tumbler of grog, has a
mollifying effect on her disposition, the loan of a newspaper soothes
her sensitive mind. The Stanmores are too poor to offer even these
small attentions, and are sometimes backward in the payment of their
rent, and thus receive stinted service grudgingly given. Sibyl pours
out the tea languidly, and with the air of a person out of health.
She eats a little bread and butter, but without appetite, and when
the haddock appears at last, borne by a slipshod girl, Mr. Stanmore
has that fish all to himself, Sibyl refusing any portion thereof.
Alexis contemplates her pityingly--tenderly even;--that haggard,
sickly look in the delicate face touches him.
‘Poor girl, how pale and ill you look! No appetite too. That’s a bad
sign. I wish I could have brought you home something more tempting
than this old finnan. A bird, a sweetbread, or something of that
kind.’
‘I could not eat the most exquisite dinner that was ever cooked,
Alex, so you needn’t trouble yourself to regret that. But I do wish
for something, very much.’
‘What is it, darling? You ought to have every wish gratified just
now. You would, if you had married a rich cheesemonger, or a
wharfinger, or a packer, or a cotton-spinner, or a brass-founder,
anything except that lowest animal in the scale of creation, a
broken-down swell. What is it, Sibyl?’
‘I want ten pounds, Alex,’ she answers, intently, her elbow on the
table, her chin supported by her hand, her eyes upon his face,
attitude and expression alike earnest.
‘Ten pounds, my dearest! We have been wanting ten pounds ever since
our honeymoon.’
‘Don’t speak of our honeymoon,’ exclaimed Sibyl, fretfully. ‘It
maddens me when I think how you squandered money that might have kept
us in comfort for a year.’
‘My love, you are so easily maddened,’ remonstrates Alexis,
placidly--he has never been seen out of temper. ‘I dare say it was
foolish to go the pace quite as fast as we did, but you had never
seen Paris, and April in Paris with the woman one loves is the
nearest approach that I can imagine to paradise.’
‘You speak as if you had tried it often,’ says Sibyl, with a sneer.
‘Bah, child, a mere _façon de parler_. Do you remember our drives to
the Cascade, in the balmy spring nights, when the stars were shining
on the Bois, and how we used to sit in the lamplit gardens of the
_café_, eating ices and making love? If ever we grow rich, Sibyl,
we’ll go back to Paris and have another honeymoon. But how about
these ten pounds, little woman? What can you want with ten pounds?’
The young wife rises, glides behind her husband’s chair, and, leaning
on his shoulder, whispers something in his ear, a something at which
he smiles tenderly, sadly, and turning in his chair, draws the young
face--so wan and yet so fair--down to his lips.
‘By Jove!’ he exclaims, ‘poor little woman, I am a brute, never to
have thought of it. You want to buy clothes for the poor little
beggar who is to make his first appearance upon the stage of life,
before the innocent lambkins have begun to bleat in the meadows,
undisputed heir to his father’s impecuniosity. The lower animals have
the advantage of us in that respect, by the by. The lambkins come
into the world amply provided. You shall have the money, Sibyl. Yes,
if I have to borrow, beg, rob for it. You shall have it somehow,
even if I were driven to beg of my bitterest foe, ay, of Stephen
Trenchard himself.’
His arm is round her and he feels her start at the name.
‘Don’t be frightened, little woman. That’s only a figure of speech.
I never saw Stephen Trenchard in my life, and as to begging of
him, there’s nothing more unlikely, since he is, to the best of my
knowledge, an inhabitant of the city of palaces, otherwise Calcutta.’
‘He might have come back to England, Alex, without your knowing
anything about it,’ suggests Sibyl.
‘Ay, that might he have done easily, child, seeing that he is a very
insignificant person in this big busy world, and that I know nothing
whatever about him, except that he did me deadly wrong before I was
born.’
‘And you were taught to hate him?’
‘Yes verily, before I learned my catechism I learned to hate Stephen
Trenchard with a righteous and a godly hate, for was he not the
falsest and meanest of men? and the Scripture does not forbid us to
hate falsehood and meanness. If Eve had hated the serpent a little,
humanity in general would not have gone wrong. Trenchard was like the
serpent, a creature that crawled, a wriggling worm in the guise of a
man. He wriggled and wormed himself into the fortune that should have
been my father’s; he wriggled and wormed himself into the heart of my
father’s first love; and he did all this wrong,--deliberate wrong,
mark you, basely conceived, the study of his days and nights, with a
smiling face, clasping his victim’s hand in friendship all the while,
so that no thunderbolt falling from the skies could have surprised
my father more than the discovery that his arch enemy was _there_,
hiding under the mask of his humble friend.’
Alexis has risen, and paces the room, fired by this memory of a
lesson learned in earliest boyhood. As deeply as he loved his dead
father, so deeply does he hate his father’s enemy and betrayer. Sibyl
watches him, thoughtful and perplexed. Of all things difficult to
impossibility, nothing could seem more so than to reconcile her love
and duty to her husband, and her desire to win her uncle’s fortune.
CHAPTER II.
‘O WORLD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS!’
Given a ten-pound note which must be had. Query, where to get it? A
problem not over-easy of solution for a man who has exhausted the
generosity of those few friends who are generous, and discovered the
hollowness of those numerous acquaintances who, not ill-natured in
the beaten way of friendship, will do anything for a friend except
open their purse-strings.
A sharp December morning. The wind has changed in the night from
south-west to due east, and there has been a light fall of snow,
which is whitening the various and picturesque roofs of Chelsea, and
hangs on the ragged elm branches on Cheyne Walk. The river is dun
colour, the sky iron-gray, as if the atmosphere were heavily charged
with snow. Butchers’ boys, cabmen, and those denizens of the street
who seem to get through their daily round of labour with an ample
margin of leisure for gossip and standing about at corners, look up
at the darkened vault of heaven and opine that there will be a heavy
fall of snow before night.
This is the cold world which Alexis Secretan faces, leaving his wife
asleep in the old tent bed at number eleven, Dixon Street. She has
fallen into slothful habits of late, pleading as her excuse that
there is so little to get up for, now-a-days. Certainly not pleasure
or prosperity, not even so much as a new book to read, for does not
that ragged old ‘Don Juan,’ whose bitterest verses Alexis gloats over
in his gloomiest moods, constitute, with graceless ‘Tom Jones,’ the
entire stock of literature in Sibyl Secretan’s reach?
Ten pounds. He faces the bitter blast blowing up the river from
Plumstead and Woolwich and all the chilly eastern marshes, and
seeming to concentrate its biting power upon innocent Cheyne Walk, he
faces the rasping wind moodily, puzzling out this insolvable problem,
where to get ten pounds! Where to get it? that is the only question.
The how to get it has been settled from the beginning. He must
borrow it. He has almost outgrown the sense of degradation which
accompanies the earlier stages of the borrower’s piteous career,--he
has almost reached the lower depth of the hardy and habitual
borrower. He has but to settle with himself upon whom he shall make
his demand. For himself he might perchance never have stooped to
borrow. He would have emigrated rather, and lived by the sweat of his
brow in some new country where men are equal, and poverty less than a
crime; or, his heart failing him, he might have flung himself and his
difficulties off Waterloo Bridge, and so made an easy end of them;
but with a young and beloved wife dependent on him for daily bread he
has sacrificed pride and independence, manhood and honesty even, he
sometimes thinks, and for the last six months has lived a wretched
hand-to-mouth existence, trying to get employment all the time, and
occasionally earning a fortuitous five-pound note, but supporting
the burden of life for the most part by the aid of loans obtained
from the associates of happier days. He is not a man upon whom so
pitiful a position sits lightly; though--being gifted by nature with
a peculiarly sweet and easy temper--he has a way of taking his
troubles placidly, especially in the presence of his wife, and his
railings at Fate and Fortune, though frequent, are philosophical
rather than angry or vindictive. He is a man who, if Nature’s
bounties are to be counted as a heritage, is not undowered. Eminently
handsome, of a noble presence, athletic, with a constitution to
which illness and disease are unknown--with a voice that can soothe
or charm, threaten or command--an eye that dominates man and the
lesser animals alike--a quick, bright intellect--a wondrous power
of endurance--that noble quality which in a horse we call ‘stay,’
which in man is perhaps the crowning characteristic of manhood,--with
such gifts as these, Alexis Secretan should hardly count himself ill
furnished for the battle of life. Unhappily, the old fairy story of
the Princess’s christening gifts repeats itself more or less in every
man’s life. Among the numerous good fairies who were invisible guests
at Alexis Secretan’s baptismal feast two evil fairies slipped in
unawares. These were Poverty and Unthrift.
‘He shall have little of this world’s goods,’ said the first.
‘And he shall squander that little,’ added the second.
This baptismal curse has been fulfilled. The only son of a
disinherited father, Alexis has yet escaped the chastening influence
of that sharp schoolmaster, Poverty. His mother’s fortune was
enough to support father and son in luxurious idleness, and in a
happy-go-lucky, easy kind of life in foreign cities, where life
is cheaper, gayer, and brighter than at home. At seventeen his
father’s influence was sufficient to obtain him a commission in a
crack regiment. Father and mother died within a year of each other,
and soon after Alexis had put on his epaulettes. The remnant of
his mother’s fortune--the bulk thereof having been anticipated,
and made away with from year to year as necessity impelled--served
to keep the young man going in an expensive profession for about
five years, during which he had the good fortune to see some active
service, distinguish himself by various displays of reckless daring,
and obtain a captaincy. At the end of the fifth year he had spent
the last shilling of his capital, and was in debt. Knowing the
impossibility of living on his pay, he sold out, and for some
time--about a year and a half--contrived to live upon the proceeds
of his commission, having thus sacrificed his military career to
the necessities of eighteen months’ idleness, and to that miserable
condition of a noble profession which makes it impossible that a
gentleman should live by his sword.
Alexis reviews the ranks of his acquaintances as he walks
Londonwards. He has exhausted the bounty of his easy-going, and, in
some cases, open-handed brother officers. No hope of help there.
His foreign education has left him without school friends near at
hand. Honest Max, or jovial Fritz of Heidelberg might advance him a
thaler--or a handful of groschen--were they within reach, but their
normal state is impecuniosity.
There is but one source left undrained. Even in this depth of
destitution he has not yet appealed to his mother’s sole surviving
sister, his aunt Louisa, co-heiress with his mother of a rich
Manchester manufacturer, and more fortunately married than his
mother. Aunt Louisa is the wife of Dudley Gorsuch, barrister, in
large practice, and member for Glaseford, in the Potteries, a
self-made man, self-important, and worshipping rank and mammon, as
the Ammonites worshipped Moloch. On this bleak December morning
it occurs to Alexis that aunt Louisa, being of his mother’s kin,
must have some green spot in her nature, some place in her heart
accessible to softer feeling, were it but the size of a pin’s point,
and that he, her nephew, destitute and forlorn, ought to be able to
find that place.
He has dined at her house when he was a dashing young officer, well
dressed, well surrounded; has been entertained bounteously by her,
made much of, presented to her friends with some touch of pride,
being verily a young man for women to be proud of in his prosperous
days. At that happier time aunt Louisa appeared to him worldly, but
good-natured, hospitable, benevolent even.
He is at the bottom of Grosvenor Place by this time, and has made up
his mind to try aunt Louisa.
Mr. and Mrs. Gorsuch live in a street out of Grosvenor Place, too
expensive a street for Mr. Gorsuch’s means, which are larger in
appearance than reality; but a fine house in a fine neighbourhood is
a standing evidence of wealth, and as such is worth all it costs.
There are so many things in which prudent careful people can save
money; notably in their meals and the food they give their servants,
since these matters appertain to the inner economy of a household,
and are secrets to the outer world. Mrs. Gorsuch pinches in all
domestic details, even down to scouring-paper. Mr. Gorsuch gives
three state dinners in the season, supplied by Gunter, banquets of
imposing appearance, but washed down with wines that range from half
a crown to four and sixpence per bottle.
Alexis, fully aware of his broken-down appearance, is too wise to
put forward his relationship as a claim to be admitted, despite the
footman’s suspicious look.
He simply asks to see Mrs. Gorsuch, but he gives his real name, Mr.
Secretan.
He is left in the hall while the footman communicates with his
mistress, whose voice is heard in the library at the back of the hall.
‘She can hardly deny herself when I can hear her talking,’ thinks
Alexis.
She does not deny herself. The man ushers him into the library--a
square apartment with a gloomy outlook, and two pompous bookcases,
containing law books, and a few of those classic authors whose works
are more largely bought than read.
A fire burns frostily and cheerily in the bright steel grate.
Mrs. Gorsuch sits at the table, with a row of tradesmen’s books
and a ponderous plated inkstand before her. She has been trying
to reconcile discrepancies between the butcher’s account of meat
delivered and her own idea of the meat that ought to have been
consumed. Three pounds of rump-steak sit heavily upon her soul. She
cannot see how those three pounds of butcher’s meat can have been
honestly eaten, and she is haunted by the image of an all-devouring
policeman--or those bloodsuckers, the cook’s relatives.
She is a little dried-up looking woman, with stiff bands of light
auburn hair, pepper-castored with gray; a brown merino gown, a
pinched-looking lace cap, and a double eye-glass attached to a chain
which glitters in the rosy light of the fire, as she turns to look at
her visitor, glass in hand.
‘Alex!’ she exclaims, ‘Good heavens, what a change!’
She saw him last as a guest at one of her state dinners, elegant,
prosperous-looking, with the easy self-assured air of a man certain
of success in life. She sees him now reduced to the lowest ebb in the
tide of man’s existence. He comes to her as a beggar. Mendicancy is
written on his face.
‘Yes, there’s a marked decadence from the young man about town,
is there not?’ he replies. ‘You see the brand which Destitution
stamps upon her children. I have fallen very low in the world since
I used to come to your swell parties. You were very kind to me in
those days, aunt,’--Mrs. Gorsuch winces, knowing so well what is
coming,--‘so kind that I have made up my mind to sue for a small
kindness to-day. It goes against the grain, but----’
‘Before we talk about kindnesses, Alexis, perhaps you will be good
enough to explain how you have sunk to this absolutely disreputable
condition?’ asked Mrs. Gorsuch, looking at her nephew’s boots.
‘The easiest thing in the world,’ answers Alexis, with agreeable
recklessness. ‘I have spent all my money, and have not yet acquired
the knack of earning more.’
He sees, dimly, that there is little to be hoped from this flesh and
blood of his, and that placid despair which is his normal condition
enables him to take things easily.
‘Earning!’ echoes aunt Louisa, with a bitter sneer. ‘It isn’t in any
of your race to earn the bread they eat. My father made his fortune
by honest industry, your father thought he honoured our family when
he exchanged his landless gentility for my sister’s thirty thousand
pounds. Poor Maud! it was a luckless day that brought him across her
path.’
‘Reserve your pity, aunt Louisa. My mother’s married life was a happy
one. I can bear witness to that.’
‘Happy!’ exclaims Mrs. Gorsuch, contemptuously. ‘Was she in society?’
This question she evidently considers unanswerable. Alexis respects
her opinion, and makes no reply.
‘Can you compare her position with mine?’
‘Certainly not. You have a handsome house in a fashionable street, a
bishop for your right-hand neighbour, an earl on your left hand. You
have the orthodox establishment of a lady, and all the cares that
accompany it. My mother lived a roving life in some of the loveliest
places of this earth, and had no servant but the maid who waited on
her when she was well and nursed her when she was ill, and loved her
dearly always. My mother’s society consisted of the few friends who
were faithful to her through all changes of fortune. Those do not
count, of course. No, she was not in society; but perhaps when you
and she compare notes as to your earthly experiences in a wiser world
you may find that the balance has been more evenly adjusted than you
suppose now.’
Mrs. Gorsuch has hardly heard him. Her mind is troubled by a grave
doubt.
‘I hope you did not tell the butler that you are my nephew,’ she
says, anxiously.
‘I had too much discretion for that. And now, aunt, not wishing to
intrude myself or my boots (he has perceived her uneasy glances at
those patched offenders against the decencies of life) upon you
longer than is absolutely necessary, I will come to the point. Will
you lend me, or give me, ten pounds? If Fate is against me you may
call it a gift, but if Fortune favour me it shall be repaid tenfold.
I needn’t tell you how badly I want money. My appearance testifies to
my necessities, but it is not for myself that I am a beggar. It is
for my wife, soon to become a mother.’
‘What?’ almost shrieks Mrs. Gorsuch. ‘Married! Without income or
profession, you have linked yourself to some unhappy creature?’
‘Yes, we have taken the liberty to unite our destitution. If the
worst comes to the worst the same pan of charcoal that serves for one
will accommodate the other.’
‘Your impiety shocks but does not surprise me,’ says Mrs. Gorsuch.
‘Such sinful imprudence could hardly be found in a man of religious
principles.’
‘No, prudence and piety generally go in double harness. Well, aunt, I
have my answer. You won’t lend or give me the money?’
‘In the first place, I have not such a sum to lend. Mr. Gorsuch’s
position demands the expenditure of our income. We are never in
debt,’ with a shudder, ‘but we have never anything to spare. I had
to strain every nerve in order to pay our annual contribution to the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.’
‘And you have nothing left for a starving nephew at home.’
‘Even if I were in a position to advance you this money--which I
repeat I am not--I cannot see that your condition would be materially
improved by the loan. Where would you be when the money was spent?’
‘Exactly where I am now. The money is not for myself, but for my
wife. I should not touch a sixpence of it.’
‘Who was this unfortunate young woman when you married her?’
‘Will you lend me ten pounds?’ asks Alexis, ignoring the question.
‘Sadly to be pitied, poor creature, whoever she was. Some young
person of inferior position, I dare say.’
‘Will you lend me ten pounds?’
‘I have already told you that I have no such sum at my disposal,
Alexis,’ replies Mrs. Gorsuch. And then, hesitatingly, reluctantly
extracting a coin from a plethoric-looking Russia leather purse, she
adds, ‘If half a sovereign will be of some small assistance----’
‘It won’t,’ answered her nephew, abruptly. ‘I dare say I could make
as much in a day by sweeping a crossing, and I shouldn’t feel myself
so degraded as if I took the money from you. Good-bye, aunt.’
He has opened the door before he concludes, and Aunt Louisa endures
agonies for the rest of the day, fearful that the butler, or man of
all work, heard that last address. Remorse for her treatment of her
nephew troubles her not at all.
‘He cannot say that I sent him away empty-handed,’ she reflects. ‘I
offered him half a sovereign.’
CHAPTER III.
THE TRUE METAL.
Alexis Secretan turns his back upon the solemn responsibilities of
Tubal Street, Grosvenor Place, sick with anger and despair. He is
angry with himself rather than with his aunt. He loathes himself for
having invited such humiliation.
‘I ought to have known her better,’ he muses. ‘A woman who gives
showy dinners and cheap wines, and talks of her friend the Duchess
of Landsend, or the Countess of John-o’-Groat; a woman whose name
appears in the subscription list of all the orthodox charities, just
under the nobility, and who never keeps a servant six months. And yet
she is my mother’s sister, of the same race; my mother, whose nature
was all kindness, and with whom to give was as natural as to breathe.’
He stands at Hyde Park Corner, indifferent to the east wind and the
falling snow,--fine small snow-flakes that lie unmelted where they
fall.
‘Now which way shall I turn myself in search of a friendly soul?’ he
asks.
He turns south-westward, perhaps to escape that biting easterly
blast, and walks towards Brompton, listlessly, hopelessly, walking
fast to keep himself warm, but with no settled purpose.
Past the Bell and Horns Tavern he stops and looks up at one of the
houses in the high road, a house with a front garden--or railed
enclosure, which courtesy calls garden--a snowy parallelogram, in
which flourish four melancholy bushes, like dwarf cypresses in a
graveyard. The house is neat and bright-looking, and a bill in the
parlour window announces that apartments are to be let within.
Alexis opens the gate as if familiar with its structure, goes up
to the door hesitatingly, knocks, and asks to see Mr. Plowden. He
is ushered forthwith into the back parlour, where a man of about
his own age, pale and thoughtful-looking, sits by an indifferent
fire painting a map. A pile of unpainted maps, a battered old tin
paint-box and brushes lie on the table before him. The thin white
hand travels dexterously, rapidly over the paper, leaving a delicate
line of colour behind it.
The map-painter looks up at Alexis, brush in hand, surveys him from
head to foot, wonderingly, and drops the brush full of colour, on the
map.
‘Captain Secretan!’ he exclaims, ‘Is it possible?’
‘It’s true, at any rate,’ answers Alexis, holding out his hand, which
the other grasps affectionately. ‘Theoretically impossible, perhaps,
but absolutely true. Just wash off that splash of cobalt, Dick. I
shouldn’t like you to spoil one of your maps on my account.’
‘I’m so glad to see you,’ says Richard Plowden, dabbing the map with
a sponge rather nervously. ‘I was afraid you’d quite forgotten me,
and that we should never see you here again, either as a lodger or
a friend. However, here you are, and I’m heartily glad to see you,’
poking the dingy little fire vigorously, and then holding out his
hand again to Alexis; ‘but I’m afraid things haven’t been going so
well with you as they ought. You look----’
‘Poor,’ interjects Alexis. ‘You’re not far out. Poverty and small-pox
are unmistakable diseases. You can see them in a man’s face. Before
you say another kind word to me, Dick, I must tell you the truth--the
naked, unpleasant truth. I come to you as a beggar. Knowing how hard
you work for every shilling you earn--knowing what a good fellow
you are--good son, good friend, good Christian--I am mean enough to
come here and ask you to help me. The worthless drone appeals to the
honest, independent bee.’
‘So far as I can help you,’ replies Mr. Plowden, with undiminished
kindliness, ‘I am at your service. You were a profitable lodger
to my mother, and a kind friend to me. It isn’t many gentlemen in
your position who would have condescended to associate with a lame
invalid, who gets his living by painting maps. I know those evenings
when you used to come and smoke your pipe down here were some of the
happiest in my life.’
He walks about the room as he speaks, drags a chair to the fireside
for Alexis, takes a loaf of bread, a bottle of anchovies, a pat of
butter, and a bottle of ginger wine out of the chiffonier, spreads a
napkin, and arranges this temperate refreshment on one side of the
table, pushing his maps and colour-box to the other. He walks lame,
but is active and hardy notwithstanding.
‘Do you suppose I should have spent many evenings with you if I had
not found your company pleasant, Dick?’ says Alexis, lightly. ‘I
found that you had read more and thought more than any fellow of my
acquaintance, and it was refreshing to me to hear your ideas upon
all manner of subjects. And then I flattered myself that you liked
me, and were pleased with my talk of the gay world; above all, about
that stage you love so well and see so little of. Do you remember
how we used to discuss the actors of the day, Dick, and settle how
Shakespeare ought to be interpreted?’
‘Do you think I can ever forget?’ asks Richard Plowden. ‘I’ve not so
many friends that I can afford to forget the one who was the first
to tell me I had a mind. Do you know, Captain Secretan, that I’ve
had the impertinence to write a book since then? Do peg into those
anchovies, captain, and don’t mind cutting the knobs off the loaf. I
like crumb as well as crust.’
‘A book, Dick. An essay on the genius of Shakespeare!’
‘Nothing so ambitious, or so unlikely to sell. A geography for
schools, on a new system. It is not published yet, but I have reason
to believe that it will be, and that I shall make a little money by
it. So you may have less compunction in borrowing a pound or two.’
‘Dear old Dick!’ exclaims Alexis, who has been doing ample justice to
the anchovies and bread and butter, and warming himself with a glass
of ginger wine. ‘Unhappily, it is not a question of a pound or two. I
want ten pounds.’
Richard Plowden’s countenance falls. It is not that he would measure
his friendship, but ten pounds is an awful sum.
‘If I ever can repay it I will, and with interest at a more than
usurious rate. But it is almost a mockery to talk of repayment in my
present condition.’
Richard limps to the chiffonier without a word, takes out a little
japanned cash-box, unlocks it, and extracts therefrom a five-pound
note and five sovereigns.
‘I had the money ready for the Christmas rent,’ he says, ‘but you are
welcome to it. We shall be able to rub along without it, I dare say.’
What pinching and deprivation this rubbing along process will cost,
Alexis can pretty well guess, for he has seen how the widow Plowden
and her son live at the best of times.
He takes the money with a faltering hand, and turns away his face to
hide the tears that disfigure it, the first that he has shed since he
wept for his mother’s death.
Presently he grows cheerful again, resumes his seat, finishes his
luncheon, and then tells Richard Plowden the story of his decadence,
an unvarnished tale which his humble friend hears with deepest
interest.
‘If you could put me in the way of earning a few shillings a week
by any kind of labour, however humble, you would be doing me even a
greater favour than you have done me this day; and yet, knowing your
circumstances as I do, I feel as if you had given me ten years of
your life instead of ten pounds.’
Richard Plowden promises that he will turn the matter over in his
mind, and see what he can do, and so the two young men part, as
firm friends as in the days when Mrs. Plowden’s first-floor lodger,
the dashing young captain, was the object of her son’s affectionate
admiration, his ideal of all that is noble and splendid in manhood.
CHAPTER IV.
‘HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US THAT HAS NOT BEEN.’
Alexis speeds homeward joyously, elate as if he had conquered
fortune. He has borrowed money from a social inferior, and yet does
not feel humiliated. That interview with Richard Plowden has cheered
him wondrously. The patient, gentle soul working at monotonous
task-work in a gloomy back parlour, with no outlook save blank wall
and cistern, working uncomplainingly, nay, even cheerfully, has read
him a lesson. There must be work for a strong, healthy fellow like
himself when a cripple in a back room can earn his living. Alexis
begins to think he has tried life at the wrong end, that in striving
for some shabby-genteel, reduced-gentleman’s occupation, he has
overlooked those lowlier and less sophisticated avocations which
offer themselves to every honest man.
‘We’ll emigrate as soon as the little woman is strong enough for
a sea voyage,’ he tells himself, ‘and I’ll turn shepherd on the
Australian downs.’
Sibyl receives him with an eager look, full of questioning. She is
sitting on the hearth-rug as he comes into the room, in her favourite
attitude, looking into the fire, her ruffled hair golden in the ruddy
light, her eyes heavy with thought or care.
His elated aspect tells her that he has been successful. She rises
and runs to him, trembling with anxiety.
‘Have you got the money?’
‘Yes, Sibyl. Of all my friends, the one who could least afford to
lose it was the only one to lend it. Here it is, little one. You must
make it go a long way, for it has cost me sore humiliation.’
‘It was lent grudgingly, then?’
‘No; but it was refused heartlessly by the wrong person before I hit
upon the right one. Make the most of it, my love, now you’ve got it.’
His wife takes the little parcel of money from his hand, slowly,
looking downward, and without a word.
‘You are pleased, little woman?’
‘It was very good of you to try so hard,’ she answers in a low voice.
She begins to busy herself about her husband’s dinner without another
word. This evening she gives him half a pound of rump-steak, an
unwonted feast, at which his soul rejoices.
‘I am faring sumptuously to-day,’ he says, as she sits opposite to
him, pouring out the tea with a listless, absent air, which he takes
for physical languor. ‘I have had a superb luncheon already.’
All that evening Sibyl is unwontedly silent, and Alexis, not caring
to describe his interview with Mrs. Gorsuch, has not much to tell her
after he has related Richard Plowden’s generosity. He has recourse
to the tattered leaves of ‘Don Juan,’ and sits sniggering over his
favourite passages, and feeling as if he and the poet were both
outside the human race generally, and could afford to ridicule and
despise it.
He sallies forth early next morning, despite the snow, which now
clothes the land as a garment, and goes straight to Brompton, to have
another cheery talk with Dick Plowden, and to inquire whether that
back parlour philosopher has hit upon any method by which he, Alexis,
may earn his daily bread.
Richard is hopeful. He has an uncle engaged in a large shipping
agent’s office, an uncle who would have obtained employment for
Richard himself, had Richard’s legs been more serviceable in active
life. To this uncle, Mr. Sampson Plowden, Dick writes a long letter,
setting forth his friend’s capacities and desire for employment;
and, armed with this recommendation, Alexis speeds to the offices of
Messrs. Keel and Skrew, in a narrow alley out of Fenchurch Street. He
sees Sampson Plowden, an active little elderly man, who asks him if
he can write a good hand, and if he is quick at accounts. Alexis asks
for a sheet of paper, and writes a few lines in a clerk-like hand,
taking care to dot his i’s this time, and then volunteers to solve
any arithmetical puzzle that Mr. Plowden likes to set him.
‘Well, I’ll take your word and Dick’s as to the book-keeping,’
replies Mr. Plowden. ‘We employ a good many clerks, and sometimes
have to send one to Australia, which makes a vacancy. The next
time this occurs you shall hear of it. The junior clerks are in my
department, and it’s in my province to engage or dismiss them. I’ll
bear you in mind, Mr. Stanmore.’
‘If you could send me to Australia,’ hazards Alexis, glowing with
hope, ‘it would suit me admirably.’
‘Well, well, that would be a matter involving much consideration.
However, you shall hear from me at the first opportunity.’
This is not much, but it is something; for Mr. Plowden looks like a
man who means what he says, and Dick has given him a high character
for integrity and kindness of heart. Alexis plods homewards, cheered
and sustained by sorrow’s pole-star, Hope.
He lets himself in at number eleven, Dixon Street, the door being on
the latch, and goes upstairs, prepared to find Sibyl in a brighter
frame of mind than usual, busy at her needlework most likely, the
lamp burning, the hearth swept, the evening meal set out, with
neatness which lends its charm even to poverty.
The room looks curiously blank and dreary as he enters it. The fire
has gone out; cheerless sight, with that white world outside, and
the thermometer below freezing-point. There is no tea-tray, no white
cloth on the table, no lamp burning. The dusk is just light enough
to show him that the room is empty, and that no preparation has been
made for his refreshment.
He goes back to the landing and calls over the balusters to his
landlady: ‘Has my wife been out long, Mrs. Bonny?’
‘She went out just before dinner-time,’ screams a voice from below.
Dinner-time with Mrs. Bonny means one o’clock.
‘She has gone to buy things, I dare say,’ thinks Alexis, ‘gone to
London most likely. She ought to have been home by half-past four,
though, if she went as early as one. Did she leave any message, Mrs.
Bonny?’ he asks, calling over the balusters again.
‘No,’ replies the landlady, curtly, ‘she didn’t leave no message, but
she took a carpet bag.’
‘A carpet bag,’ repeats Alexis, with a puzzled air, as he goes back
to the blank, cold room. ‘What could she want with a carpet bag? To
bring the things home, perhaps,--foolish little thing! As if a parcel
wasn’t lighter to carry than a carpet bag.’
He gropes for wood and coals in the bottom of the roomy cupboard,
and lights a fire, patiently, toilfully, not unskilfully, with hands
which have learned many offices unknown to the elegant Captain
Secretan.
He is dispirited by his wife’s absence, but not angry. That placid,
easy temper of his is full of tenderness and indulgence for the
‘little woman’ whose brief married life has been so full of care, who
approaches the mystery of maternity under such sorrowful conditions.
He lights his fire, brings out a loaf, a starveling slice of cheese,
and some small-beer in a bottle, and sits by the hearth to eat
his meal in the firelight. As he eats and drinks his eyes wander
thoughtfully round the firelit room, jets of flame flashing and
twinkling on the wainscot.
‘Not a bad old room by any means,’ he thinks, ‘if one had just enough
money to live in it comfortably.’
He fancies that in Sampson Plowden’s friendship he has found the clue
that shall extricate him from the maze of adversity. How happy Sibyl
and he might be in this humble old room were he but employed as clerk
at Messrs. Keel and Skrew’s with a salary of say thirty shillings a
week! Not an ambitious desire, surely, in a young man whose family
history is set forth with some flourish in Burke’s ‘Landed Gentry.’
‘I shall have something pleasant to tell the little woman when
she comes home, at any rate,’ thinks Alexis, as he sips the flat
fourpenny ale, put carefully away after last night’s supper.
A pert little flame spurts out of a knob of coal just at this moment,
brightening the whole room, and Secretan’s eye, wandering idly as he
muses, is attracted by a spot of white upon the sideboard.
‘A letter, by Jove!’ he exclaims. ‘Who the deuce can have written to
me, when not a mortal knows my address?’
He rises--listlessly--apprehending no advantage from the letter,
lights the lamp, and goes over to the sideboard. The letter is from
his wife.
‘DEAR ALEXIS,
‘Our misery of the last few months has opened my eyes to the sad
truth that it would have been far better for both of us had we
never met, or had we been wise enough to defer our marriage till
we had some settled means of living. What am I but a burden to
you? How many situations there are in which you could get your
living were you alone and unfettered! while I could at least
return to the dull drudgery of teaching, and escape the pinch
of absolute poverty. Do not think me cold-hearted, dear Alexis,
when I tell you that I am weary of our continual struggle, and
that I have resolved to end it by an act which may provoke your
indignation, but which, I feel assured, will result in your
advantage. I set you free from the burden of a wife whom you have
found it too bitter a task to support. You have rarely uttered a
complaint, but I have seen despair in your face often enough to
learn that it has settled in your heart. Without me you may begin
the world afresh. Apart from you I shall have opportunities of
prosperity as Miss Faunthorpe, which I could never have as Mrs.
Secretan. If my lot changes, and fortune smiles, as I dare to
hope it will, you shall hear of me; and even if you blame me for
a separation which your anger may call a desertion, believe at
least that in severance, as in union, I shall be ever your true
and loyal wife,
‘SIBYL.’
Alexis reads and re-reads this letter like a man who hast lost
the power of understanding his mother tongue, and pores over
familiar words as though they were the hieroglyphics of an Assyrian
inscription.
So cold, so heartless, so deliberate. His heart sickens at the
thought of such cruelty. In all his adversity, with starvation
staring him in the face, he has thought of his wife as part of
himself; has never considered the responsibility of providing for
her as doubling the difficulty of existence; has never for a moment
remembered that life might be easier to him without her. He has
been sorry for her, has thought of her deprivations, her endurance,
but of the burden upon himself--never. All hopes and dreams of a
happier future have centred themselves in her. To win a brighter home
for her, to surround her with comfort, has been his one ambition.
Reckless as his marriage was, he has never repented it. Fettered hand
and foot as he has found himself by that ill-considered act, he has
never wished the tie loosened.
He stands with the letter in his hand, repeating the words to himself
incredulously. It must be a jest--a trick to test his love--anything
but the base and bitter truth.
He puts the letter in his pocket at last, goes downstairs, and
penetrates the sacred domain of Mrs. Bonny; namely, the front
kitchen, which is at once the parlour or living-room, where Mr.
Bonny, employed as a railway porter, tastes the sweets of domestic
leisure, and the apartment in which Mrs. Bonny cooks for her lodgers.
The back kitchen makes a cheerful bedroom, and in summer-time, when
Mr. Bonny trains scarlet runners over the window, enjoys a rustic
outlook.
Alexis is received somewhat coldly by Mrs. Bonny, that lady being
intent upon frying sausages for the railway porter’s evening repast,
and resenting all intrusion upon her private domain on principle.
He questions her closely as to the mode and manner of his wife’s
departure, but she can tell him no more than she has told him
already. Mrs. Stanmore went out between twelve and one o’clock,
carrying a small carpet bag.
‘I shouldn’t have known anything about it if I hadn’t happened to
meet her as I was fetching of the dinner beer, our Mary Ann being
washing, and no one else to fetch it.’
‘Did she say nothing to you?’
‘Not a word; she just gives me a nod, in her off-hand way, and walks
on.’
That is all. Alexis goes upstairs again, heavily, slowly, and paces
the deserted room. By-and-bye he pauses before a rickety old chest of
drawers with brass handles and locks, opens a drawer, and finds it
empty. It is the drawer that contained his wife’s poor remains of a
wardrobe that had never been richly furnished, a few under garments,
a collar or two, and so on. These she has evidently taken with her.
Nothing could have been more deliberate than her departure.
Presently a curious idea occurs to him, improbable, but it takes a
strong hold upon him nevertheless.
Has she gone to make away with herself? and is this heartless letter
of hers a tender device to save him the pain of knowing that she had
been driven by despair to suicide?
This seems to him more likely, more natural than that the wife he
loves can desert him; can, with coldest calculation, barter love and
truth against the chances of prosperity.
What those chances are he knows not. He is so ignorant of his wife’s
family and surroundings as not to know that Sibyl Faunthorpe is the
niece of Stephen Trenchard.
Why he is thus unenlightened is a question that can be only answered
by a retrospect, and will be best answered in Sibyl’s own words.
CHAPTER V.
SIBYL FAUNTHORPE’S DIARY.
Lowther Street, _November 14, 186_--. I suppose to keep a diary is
about as foolish a thing as any one can do--waste of time in the
present, and self-abasement in the future. I dare say I shall hate
myself when I read over these pages in years to come, and see what a
stupid creature I was at nineteen years of age. However, I am driven
to scribble about myself and my feelings for want of anything better
to do in the long, lonely evenings, when the children are gone to
bed, and Mrs. Hazleton is out, and I have the dreary schoolroom
all to myself. I used to read any novel I could find lying about
downstairs, and bring up here for an evening, till Mrs. Hazleton
found me out and forbade it. ‘Novels, my dear Miss Faunthorpe,’ she
preached, ‘are the worst possible reading for a young woman in your
position--enervating the mind, weakening the logical faculty, which
in your brain I regret to say is sorely deficient.’ I felt inclined
to ask her why she reads novels if they are so injurious. She has a
knack of reading one’s thoughts, and answered my objection before
I could give it expression. ‘For the head of a household, who must
always have some portion of care and anxiety, novel-reading is an
innocent relaxation; but the instructor of youth should employ her
leisure in widening her circle of knowledge. The books in the study
bookcase are quite at your service, Miss Faunthorpe, whenever you
like to avail yourself of them,’ and then she sailed out of the room
to go to a dinner party, dressed in maroon velvet and old Brussels
lace, and looking very handsome--for an old woman. She must be
five-and-forty at the least.
Perhaps I ought not to complain of my bondage, for I might be worse
off than I am. Mrs. Hazleton is fond of preaching, but she is not
unkind to me. She has no grown-up daughters, and whenever she has
company I am asked down to the drawing-room to play and sing and make
myself generally useful; and as she has a good deal of company, this
happens tolerably often. Luckily, music is my strong point. When Mrs.
Hazleton is in a good humour she takes me for a drive in the park,
and I see the world and hear what is going on. I go to a fashionable
church with the children on Sundays and Saints’ days, and am
altogether much better off than in my uncle Robert’s poverty-stricken
household, in dull old Redcastle, where I knew no one worth knowing,
and where life is only another name for vegetation. I am sure the
cabbages in uncle’s wretched kitchen-garden had quite as much
enjoyment of life as Marion and I--more indeed, for they had sunshine
and perpetual idleness, and bees and butterflies buzzing and skimming
about them, while we had old house-linen to patch and darn, and the
tradesmen’s books to puzzle over, and Jenny to teach, and mend for,
and scold, and puddings to make, and buttons to sew on from January
to December. I think there never was such a man as uncle Robert for
wrenching the buttons off his shirts, and pushing his toes through
his socks.
So, at the worst, though I have to grind French, Italian, and German
verbs in a mill all the week through, and listen to those wretched
children strumming Kalkbrenner’s exercises three hours a day, I am
better off than Marion. I have forty pounds a year to spend upon
clothes, and I see a great many nice people. Mrs. Hazleton boasts
that she only knows the best people. ‘I am no tuft-hunter, my dear,’
she tells me when she is in one of her expansive moods. ‘You will see
very few titles in my card-basket; but the people I know belong to
some of the best families in England.’
_December 3._--Such a tiresome, dreary week. Mrs. Hazleton has dined
out four evenings out of six, and now on the fifth she has taken
off the children to see the new actor at the Haymarket. ‘I am sorry
there won’t be room for you in the box, Miss Faunthorpe,’ she said,
with her chilly politeness, after I had been toiling for an hour
helping Moyson, the children’s maid, to tie Lucinda’s ribbons, and
brush Laura’s hair, and sew on a tucker for Magdalen. So here I am at
half-past seven o’clock, my hearth swept, and my fire made up, as
solitary as an old maid with a small annuity.
I have been down to the study, and chosen a couple of volumes, the
best I could find in a dry-as-dust collection of antiquities--the
‘Citizen of the World’ and a volume of the _Spectator_,--but I don’t
feel equal to reading either. It suits my present humour better to
scribble my complaints against fortune in this ridiculous book of
mine. What a lucky woman Mrs. Hazleton is! Married to a wealthy
Indian judge, and left a widow six years ago with an ample fortune;
too old to care about marrying again, but not too old to be admired
and made much of by her friends; her children young enough to be kept
in the schoolroom for the next four years. Impossible to imagine
a more independent position. What a contrast between her fate and
mine! I have never known what it is to have my own way, and yet,
when I was a child, I thought I had only to be ‘grown up’ in order
to taste all the sweets of life. Perhaps that was because of the
nonsense people talked about my good looks. I can fancy no greater
misfortune for a girl in my position than to be brought up with the
idea of being a beauty. When I was a little thing people were always
drawing comparisons between Marion and me to Marion’s disadvantage;
and before I was twelve I knew quite well that I was the pretty Miss
Faunthorpe. Even old Hester, who never had a civil word for me at the
best of times, used to feed my vanity with her taunts about my pretty
face and my uselessness. ‘Handsome is that handsome does,’ she used
to say, by which I knew very well that she thought me handsome. Then
came school, and I was set up as a beauty, and courted and petted by
one-half of the girls, and detested by the other half, and nagged at
by Marion, who was set against me by the disagreeable comparisons
people were always making between us. What was the consequence of
all this? I grew up with the idea that as soon as I left school,
some rich young man, handsome and agreeable into the bargain, would
fall in love with me at first sight, and that I should be married in
grand style at the parish church--six bridesmaids and ever so many
carriages and pairs--before the admiring eyes of all Redcastle. I
came home to uncle Robert’s dull red house, prepared for conquest.
Life would be like a fairy tale. Some fine summer morning the
handsome young prince would appear, and I should be raised at once
from Cinderella’s obscurity to Cinderella’s high fortune. Foolish
creature that I was! I used to lie awake at night telling Marion the
grand things I would do for her when I was married.
‘Where is the prince to come from, Sib?’ she asked me once, rather
maliciously. ‘You know there are not above three such young men in
Redcastle--young Taylor, the lawyer’s son; Mr. Lacy, the biscuit
manufacturer; and George Pinsford, the coachmaker.’
‘Biscuit manufacturer!’ I exclaimed. ‘Do you suppose I would marry a
low tradesman? Aren’t there the county families, stupid?’
Well, here I am, after two weary years’ home life with uncle Robert,
who I must say is the dearest old thing in the world. Here I am,
nearly twenty, and no nearer finding the prince of fairy lore
than when I left Miss Worrie’s establishment for young ladies at
Kilmorden, after three years’ experience as pupil-teacher. Here I am,
a poor drudge of a governess, at just ten pounds a quarter, thankful
for being asked down to the drawing-room, where my beauty goes for
very little. All Mrs. Hazleton’s friends have found out by this time
that I am ‘only the governess,’ and have left off asking one another
who I am, as they used to do at first with some show of interest. I
sing, or play, and some one who has been chattering the whole time
says languidly, ‘Very nice, really. _Thank_ you, Miss Faunthorpe.’
And I sit in the angle between the back drawing-room fireplace
and the window-curtain for the rest of the evening, watching and
listening, with no more part in what is going on than if I were at a
theatre.
Let me look in the glass and see what this lauded beauty is which has
brought me so little luck. A small straight nose very sharply cut,
a short upper lip, under lip a thought too full, teeth good, chin
round and dimpled, face a perfect oval, eyes darkest brown; the sort
of eyes which, I believe, are usually called black. Hair dark brown,
with a tinge of gold where it ripples--the colour usually called
chestnut. Present expression discontent and a tendency to ill temper.
I have given up that foolish notion of a rich husband, but I
sometimes indulge in another day-dream, perhaps just as foolish. What
if my rich uncle, Stephen Trenchard, were to come home, take a fancy
to me, and leave me a fortune? Such things have happened. I remember
how my poor mother used to talk of her brother Stephen, the Indian
merchant, and of the ship that was coming home to bring her ease and
comfort, and which never came. Will the ship come home for me, I
wonder, now that my poor mother has been lying ten years in her quiet
grave?
_December 13._--The most wonderful thing has happened--the most
unlooked-for, the most extraordinary. My heart beats so fast at the
mere thought of it, that I am almost breathless as I write these
lines. My hand trembles, and the letters look blurred and dim before
my eyes.
I have seen the son of Philip Secretan, my uncle Stephen’s deadly
enemy--the man whom he supplanted in the affections of a weak old
father--for surely any father must be weak who would disinherit his
son in favour of a dependant, the man from whom he received the
injury that lamed him for life. How often have I heard my mother
tell the story, always putting her brother’s conduct in the most
favourable light! He was honest, indefatigable, steady--a favourite
clerk in the firm of Secretan Brothers, Manchester merchants. He
fully deserved the unexpected fortune that came to him, while
Philip’s dissipation and extravagance were justly rewarded by
disinheritance. Yet somehow in spite of poor mamma’s special
pleading, my sympathy was always with this unfortunate Mr. Secretan,
who saw his father’s wealth pass into the possession of his father’s
confidential clerk.
I once asked mamma what kind of a man this Philip Secretan was. She
told me that she had only seen him once in her life, but that he
impressed her as being remarkably handsome and a perfect gentleman.
And now I have seen his son, Captain Secretan. He was at Mrs.
Hazleton’s party last night. I had no idea who he was till
afterwards. He was standing before the fireplace in the back
drawing-room when I went back to my corner after singing ‘Porghi
Amor,’ standing with his back to the fire talking to old Colonel
Syceman. He is tall and strong-looking, and has, to my mind, a
most beautiful countenance. I never called a man beautiful before,
and I dare say I shall laugh at the expression when I read over
this stupid diary some day; but I cannot call his face less than
beautiful. It is such a noble face, with just the grand look I could
fancy in Achilles. I was reading Pope’s ‘Iliad’ to the children this
afternoon, and I thought of Captain Secretan every time Achilles
spoke. It seemed to me almost as if I could see him standing up
before me, confronting Agamemnon. He is dark, with boldly cut
features, a good-humoured expression about the mouth, and a somewhat
dreamy look in the dark gray eyes. I have seen handsomer faces, but
none that ever interested me as deeply. He is a man I should believe
in with all my soul if he were my friend; a man I should lean upon
as on a rock of defence if he were of my kindred. But he is nothing
to me, and I am hardly likely to see him again.
Mrs. Hazleton spoke of him at luncheon to-day as a foolish young
fellow who has sold his commission, and whose future career must be
disastrous unless some distant relations were to die and leave him
their property. As a rule, distant relations are not so obliging.
She spoke with her reverential tone of his family, which is one of
the oldest in Hampshire, although his grandfather was a Manchester
merchant; and she informed me that his first cousin, once removed, is
a baronet, Sir Douglas Secretan, with a large estate in somewhere or
other.
I wonder whether I shall ever see him again.
_December 30._--I have seen him again, three, four, five, six, seven
times. Three times in Mrs. Hazleton’s drawing-room, three times in
the park, when I was out walking with the children; and once in
Desmond Street when I had gone out alone to post a letter.
I dare say it was very wrong, and that I shall be ashamed of myself
when I read over this dreadful diary, but when Captain Secretan asked
me whether I ever walked in the park with the children, I said yes;
and when he asked me what time, I said between three and five; and
after that, when he asked me if I ever went out alone, I told him
yes, sometimes, just before half-past five, to post my home letter.
How kind he is! how clever! how interesting! and how well we seem
to know each other, though we have only met seven times! There is
evidently no association for him in the name of Faunthorpe. This is
only natural, as my mother did not marry till some years after her
brother’s quarrel with Philip Secretan. How much I regret, now, that
I did not learn the exact particulars of that quarrel! I have only
a vague idea of the circumstances; but from what my mother told me,
I know that, although Philip Secretan was the sufferer, my uncle
Stephen was as vindictive as if he also had been injured.
Perhaps the injurer is sometimes more angry than the injured.
My mother always declared that her brother was innocent of guile or
wrong-doing from first to last, but now that I know Mr. Secretan’s
son I feel still more inclined to side with my uncle’s enemy.
He, Captain Secretan, has told me the history of his life, his
careless happy youth spent abroad, with a father and mother whom he
idolized. He was educated at Heidelberg, came from Heidelberg to
Woolwich, to an army tutor, joined his regiment at twenty, and sold
out after five years’ service, a few months ago. He has now all the
world before him, he says, and has only to choose a career. He is
energetic and clever, and can hardly miss success in anything he may
attempt.
How changed our walks seem, now that there is always the chance of
meeting him! As I see him coming to meet us along the wintry avenue,
the familiar scene seems to grow beautiful, the sun shines brighter,
the birds break out into singing. They may have been singing before,
perhaps, and I too absorbed to hear them; but it seems as if they
began a glad chorus at his coming. I did not think that winter
afternoons could be so beautiful; the calm still air, the blue-gray
sky, the black tracery of the tall elm trees against the yellow
sunset.
He told me yesterday that his father would have been a rich man, but
for the treachery of a friend whom he had loved and trusted. A cold
sick feeling came over me, just as if the treachery had been mine,
and I had suddenly come face to face with my victim.
‘The only lesson my father ever taught me was to revile that man’s
name, and to carry my hatred of him with me to the grave. An evil
lesson for a kind-hearted man to teach, you’ll say; but for all that,
I don’t believe there ever beat a kinder heart than my father’s.’
I can easily believe this. Kindness and sweet temper are Captain
Secretan’s chief characteristics; a bright good humour which cheers
one like sunshine. A way of looking at life on the pleasantest side
which would inspire hopefulness in the most dismal mind. I know how
low-spirited, discontented, and wretched I was growing just before I
knew him, and how changed and brightened life seems to me now.
The children doat upon him, and are as pleased as I am to meet him in
our walks. He talks to them about all their small pleasures, and is
able to interest himself in their ideas much better than I, who spend
my life with them. Sometimes he paces up and down the broad walk with
the three girls hanging about him, telling them one of the fairy
tales we all know so well, and he has a way of giving a new charm
and interest to the old stories, while his little touches of modern
slang come in here and there with the funniest effect, and set us off
laughing till the tree-tops seem to shake with our laughter.
‘How odd that we should meet you again to-day, Captain Secretan!’
cried Magdalen the day before yesterday, when we found him at the
entrance of the broad walk.
‘Not at all odd, if you insist on coming this way, little one,’ he
said. ‘This is my afternoon constitutional. But if you very much
object I’ll take the other side of the park.’
‘Oh, no, no, please come always,’ shouted the three; and then they
asked for Cinderella, Captain Secretan’s modernized Cinderella,
whose ball dress was made in New Bond Street, and whose cruel
step-mother had a box on the second tier at Covent Garden.
It was yesterday afternoon that I met him in Desmond Street, a
dreary drizzling afternoon, which made me think the sooner the year
came to an end the better. I had been feeling rather depressed and
disheartened all the morning. The children had all gone to a morning
performance of the pantomime at Drury Lane, and I had the day to
myself, as Mrs. Hazleton graciously informed me. I don’t think
leisure is an unalloyed good for those who have few pleasant thoughts
to brighten their solitude. I sat mending my clothes, and thinking
about Captain Secretan. My thoughts were not happy ones. I was
shocked to find what a hold this stranger had taken upon my mind, and
how difficult it was for me to think of any one else, or to imagine
my life without him. Yet I knew that he was nothing, and never could
be anything to me. Poor, but proud, and of good birth, moving in what
Mrs. Hazleton calls the best society, he will naturally select a
woman of fortune for his wife. He is handsome, agreeable, has many
gifts which distinguish him from the common run of young men, and
will have no difficulty in making an advantageous marriage. Of an
obscure little pauper like me he would never think seriously for a
moment, unless his thoughts were dishonourable; and I know him and
trust him well enough already to wager my life against that. What
has he to do with me, then, or I with him? Absolutely nothing. We
are only fooling each other by this friendship, which is so sweet to
me, and which must needs have some charm for him, since he takes the
trouble to cultivate it. Better for both of us that we should see
each other no more, or only upon the public stage of Mrs. Hazleton’s
drawing-room. I will tell him so seriously and honestly the next time
we are alone together for a minute or two, while the three girls
march on before us. This doesn’t often happen, for I think Lucinda is
more deeply in love with the captain than----! What was I going to
write? Than a girl of twelve ought to be. This is the lecture which
I read myself yesterday while I worked at that tiresome mending.
All my Christmas quarter’s salary will go for a black silk dress, as
I must have one good and fashionably made gown to wear downstairs.
I wanted so much to have sent uncle Robert a little present, and I
should have liked to buy Marion a winter hat; but that is out of the
question. Shall I have my dress made with flounces, or a trained
skirt?
It was dark when I went out to post my letter; dark, and wet, and
uncomfortable, and there was nothing farther from my thoughts than
the idea of meeting Captain Secretan between Lowther Street and the
post office, though I am bound to confess that the captain himself
was not very far from my thoughts. I had posted my letter, and was
coming away from the office, when a tall man, looking very big in a
great rough overcoat, crossed the road and came towards me. I knew
him in a moment, but a strange shy feeling came over me, and I walked
on ever so fast, pretending not to know him. The street is quiet and
lonely, and I heard his footsteps hurrying after me.
‘Do you always walk like a sporting pedestrian when you are alone,
Miss Faunthorpe?’ he asked, coming by my side.
I started a little at the sound of his voice, although I knew so well
that he was there. Yesterday was one of my nervous days, I suppose. I
said something about its being such a disagreeable evening.
‘Yes,’ he answered, with his good-tempered laugh, ‘the old year is
making himself as obnoxious as he can in order that we may not regret
him. It is rather unpleasant weather. You dislike this drizzling rain
I dare say. I rather like it, for it reminds me of grouse-shooting
in the Highlands. I was even going to ask you to take a little walk
round Eccleston Square before you go back to your schoolroom.’
‘I couldn’t think of such a thing,’ I answered, sharply, feeling that
the proposal was an impertinence.
‘Couldn’t you? Then it wasn’t right in me to propose it, I suppose,’
he replied, placidly. ‘And yet I should be so glad of half an
hour’s quiet talk with you. It’s very nice telling the children
fairy stories, but rather a hindrance to conversation. Well, we’ll
postpone the walk round the square till we’ve pleasanter weather and
you know me better. Do you know I have been thinking of you so much
in the last few days.’
Had he? There must be something sympathetic in our thoughts then, for
he has never been out of mine.
We had turned into Lowther Street by this time, and I was weak enough
to be glad that it is such a long street. I would not have gone three
yards out of my way with him if the happiness of my life had depended
on it, but there was no harm in letting him walk as far as Mrs.
Hazleton’s door with me.
‘Yes, I have been thinking about you a good deal, Miss Faunthorpe,’
he said, after a pause. ‘I have been thinking what might have
happened if I had been a rich man and free to follow my own
inclination.’
This was telling me plainly that he was neither rich nor free.
‘Can you guess what I fancied would have happened in that case?’
‘No, indeed.’
‘I thought it just possible that I might have been tempted to ask you
to be my wife.’
He waited for my reply, but I was dumb. I felt choking, and could not
find a word to answer him.
‘What would you have said in that case?’
Some diabolical counsellor suggested a flippant answer instead of a
serious one.
‘Isn’t your question rather like Lord Dundreary’s?’ I asked. ‘If you
had had a brother, do you think he would have liked cheese?’
‘I see,’ he said, with a disappointed tone, ‘I am not to expect a
serious answer to a hypothetical question. I dare say you are right,
Miss Faunthorpe. In all life’s delicate questions women are always
wiser than men.’
I thought that he had taken the easiest way of telling me that his
circumstances forbade him to think of marrying me.
‘In that case,’ I said to myself, ‘he has no right to waylay me as I
come from the post;’ and I tried to feel very angry with him.
‘So you didn’t go home to spend your Christmas holidays?’ he said
presently.
‘Home! Do you suppose I could afford to travel to Yorkshire and back
for a week’s pleasure? Besides, I have no real home. My sisters and I
are dependent on my uncle’s bounty, and he is only a parish doctor,
who finds it a hard thing to pay his butcher and baker.’
I was determined to let him know how poor I am, and how wise he has
been in coming to the conclusion that I am no wife for him.
‘Poor little thing,’ he said compassionately, and his pity did me
good somehow. It did not gall, as most people’s pity does.
‘Poor little girl,’ he said again, after a few moments’ silence. ‘An
orphan, and sent out into the world to bear the burden of servitude
and all ill-usage “that patient merit from the unworthy takes.” One
would suppose that you could hardly be worse off than you are at
present?’
This was not very cheering, but I said nothing. We were near Mrs.
Hazleton’s door by this time, and yet we had been walking slowly.
‘Any change would be for the better, one would think,’ he said,
musingly. ‘A change that would give this poor little waif a sworn
protector and defender,--a husband pledged to toil for her and
cherish her. But a poor husband--a man at war with fortune--bah! I’ll
tell you what it is, Miss Faunthorpe,’ he burst out suddenly, ‘with
your lovely face you ought to make a brilliant marriage.’
‘So I was told when I was sixteen,’ said I, ‘but I’m almost twenty,
and the fairy prince in the shape of a rich husband hasn’t appeared
yet.’
‘You wouldn’t despise an eligible opportunity of exchanging Mrs.
Hazleton’s schoolroom for a house in Kensington Palace Gardens, I
suppose? You have a feminine inclination for fine clothes, servants
with powdered heads, carriages and horses, and a box at the opera?’
‘I am human, and I don’t pretend to be superior to the weaknesses of
humanity,’ I answered, feeling that I was making myself intensely
disagreeable.
He provoked me, somehow, by his nonchalant manner of discussing my
position and prospects. Luckily, we were quite at the door now, and I
was able to beat a retreat before anything still more unpleasant had
been said upon either side.
‘Good afternoon, Captain Secretan,’ I said.
‘It must be good-bye,’ he answered, ‘I am going into Norfolk
to-morrow for a month’s shooting.’
I felt as if he had said that he was going to Australia, but I only
answered ‘Oh, in that case, good-bye;’ and so we shook hands again,
and then he lifted his hat and went away, while I gave the bell a
good sharp pull that insured its being answered promptly.
I don’t quite know whether I like him or hate him; but whichever
feeling it is, it must be rather strong of its kind, as I cannot get
him out of my thoughts. I am inclined to think that it is hatred.
What could be more disagreeable or humiliating than his way of
speaking about me before my face, as if I had been miles away? ‘Poor
thing, poor little waif!’
I grow hot and red when I think of it.
_Jan. 14._--The year is just a fortnight old. There has been snow,
but bright clear weather, a blue sky, and sunshine. We walk in
Kensington Gardens every day, and meet him every day. He makes the
three girls run races with their hoops, he being umpire, and during
the race he and I are able to talk without restraint. He only stopped
four days in Norfolk. He told me that the shooting was very good, but
that he was bored to death after the second day, and yet it was in a
pleasant country house that he was staying at, according to his own
account. There was to be a ball the very day after he came away, but
he did not care to stay for it. Curious man!
My black silk dress has come, and is a great success. I dread to see
the dressmaker’s bill, as I have only reserved a sovereign for the
making, and I am afraid she will charge me something nearer three.
The dress certainly fits to perfection, and is beautifully finished;
the trimmings simple, but of the best quality. At home, Marion and I
used to make our own dresses, but after going nearly out of my mind
for a week over piping-cord and button-holes, I always felt myself a
dowdy at the last.
Mrs. Hazleton has a dinner party to-morrow, Captain Secretan is
coming in the evening, and I shall wear my new dress. Have I made up
my mind yet whether I like him or hate him?
Yes. I do neither. I love him--love him--love him.
There, it is written at last. Foolish old diary, how I shall despise
you and myself some day when I read over this wretched page!
_Jan. 16._--Such a delicious party last night! Captain Secretan
was the first person I saw when I slipped quietly in at the back
drawing-room door. He was watching the door, and those dark eyes
brightened at sight of me. I sang to him, I played to him, I talked
to him, the party was all him. The rest of the people were only
the medium through which I saw him,--or they were like trees in
a landscape, and he the living figure in the foreground. I know
he likes to talk to me, and to hear me sing or play; but I wonder
whether he loves _me_.
_Feb. 3._--It has come at last. He has asked me plainly,
straightforwardly, anxiously, earnestly, to be his wife.
He has told me that he is poor, that he is living just now on the
money he got for his commission. He has nothing else, but he has
youth, health, and strength, some talents, and he is willing to work.
With a wife whom he fondly loved he would have a motive for beginning
a new career.
‘I’m such a happy-go-lucky fellow,’ he said, in his bright, cheery
way, ‘that I can hardly bring myself to put my shoulder to the wheel
for my own sake, but if I had you to work for, pet, I should slave
like a Goliath.’
I don’t like to remind him that the Philistine soldier was more
remarkable for strength than industry.
He made me say yes, and promise whatever he liked. How could I resist
him, when I love him so dearly that the lightest touch of his hand
makes me tremble? and there seems to me more pathos in his voice than
in the tenderest phrase of Mozart’s. He is so straightforward, so
candid, so noble. He wanted to take Mrs. Hazleton into his confidence
immediately, so that I might be married very quietly from her house.
‘We have nothing to wait for, darling,’ he said, ‘unless we were to
wait till I have made a fortune, which would mean at least half a
dozen years of severance,--just the brightest, happiest years of life
sacrificed to a sordid scruple, an unworthy doubt of Providence. If
you love me, Sibyl, you will not talk of waiting.’
‘I should like to be wise and prudent,’ I told him, ‘but your
impetuosity carries me along like a torrent.’
‘Love is a torrent,’ answered he, ‘do not oppose so poor a thing as
reason against its sacred might.’
I entreated him to say nothing to Mrs. Hazleton. An idea had occurred
to me which made me hesitate, even with my lover’s hand clasping
mine, as to the wisdom of yielding to his prayer.
I remembered a strange fact, which had almost slipped out of my mind
lately. I remembered that Alexis Secretan is the natural inheritor
of his father’s hatred, the natural enemy of my rich uncle, Stephen
Trenchard, the uncle from whom I have been taught to expect a
fortune. If I marry Captain Secretan, I surrender all hope of favour
from my uncle.
I begged Alex--he has taught me to call him Alex--to say nothing to
Mrs. Hazleton yet awhile. I wanted time to think.
After all, this hope of fortune from my uncle Stephen may be only
a dream, vain as that idea of a rich husband with which I used to
delude myself when I was a schoolgirl. On the other hand, I have
the knowledge from my poor mother that my uncle was a very rich man
twenty years ago (I have the knowledge from his last letter to my
uncle Robert, enclosing a twenty-pound bank bill as a present for
Marion and me); that he has never married, and has no intention of
marrying; that he looks forward to returning to his native country
in a few years and making the acquaintance of his nieces. Too good
a chance in all this, surely, to be thrown away. It would be rather
a bitter thing for me to see Marion chosen for her uncle’s heiress,
while I was left a pauper.
What am I to do? How am I to choose between Alexis and the
possibility of a large fortune?
Prudence suggests that I should only pledge myself to Alexis on
condition that our marriage shall be deferred for some years.
We are both young. We can afford to wait a few years, and yet have a
good deal of the brightness of life before us. My uncle Stephen is
an old man, older no doubt at his age than men who have spent their
lives in Europe. Whether I am to inherit any portion of his wealth is
a question that must be decided in a few years. I must tell Alex that
he must wait. If his love is real and earnest it cannot be lessened
by time.
_Feb. 5._ I have told him my decision. Vain, hopeless, to talk of
reason with a man whose inclination is his only law. He tells me
that if I really cared for him I could not propose dreary years of
separation. My statement that I have rich relatives who may leave me
money if I marry to please them, and are sure to leave me nothing
if I marry without their consent, fell on ears obstinately deaf to
reason. Love like this is worse than a torrent--it is a maelstrom.
Prudence, reason, worldly wisdom, are mere straws in the whirlpool.
I must see him no more.
_Feb. 7._ I have seen him again. Poor Alex! He looks so unhappy. How
sweet to know that I have such power over him!--I, to whom he seemed
such a far-off creature two months ago. Is the chance of fortune
worth such a love as his?
_Feb. 8._ Stephen Trenchard may live to be as old as Old Parr, and
leave his money to the Asylum for Idiots, after I have sacrificed
youth and love and all that is sweetest in life to the sordid hope of
fortune.
_Feb. 9._ A hopelessly wet day. I have seen him walk up and down the
street three times in the rain. I know his dear umbrella.
_Feb. 11._ In the Broad Walk again yesterday. It is all settled. I
am to give Mrs. Hazleton a month’s notice to-morrow--our agreement
is a month’s notice on either side--in the event of my proving
inefficient, she said. Not in the event of my not liking the
situation. Oh dear no, of course not.
I am so agitated that I can hardly write. This day month I am to have
my boxes packed, and go quietly away in a cab at ten o’clock in the
morning, drive to the station and deposit my luggage, and then meet
Alexis, with whom I shall drive back to the quietest little church
in Ecclestonia, where we are to be married. No witnesses but the
pew-opener and the clerk; no announcement in the _Times_. The secret
of our marriage kept from everybody who knows us, at the outset, at
any rate, so that if Stephen Trenchard dies in India--a likely thing
after all--I may still inherit my share of his fortune. Dear old
uncle Robert is such an easy-going man, that as long as I tell him I
am comfortably situated with my employer he will never put himself
out of the way to know more. He has not an acquaintance in London
whom he could ask to call upon me at Mrs. Hazleton’s. There is no
such isolation as poverty.
I have arranged with Jane Dimond, the under housemaid, about my
letters. She will receive any that come to Lowther Street for me,
and post any that I send her to be posted. I have given her quite
a heap of things, the weeding out of my wardrobe, and made her my
friend for life.
_March 11._ To-morrow is to be my wedding day. Oh fearful day! on
which hangs all my life to come. Will the future be blessed or
accursed for to-morrow’s vows?
I wish Marion and uncle Robert could have been with me. It would all
have seemed more real. I remember my foolish fancies--my castles in
the air. The grand wedding at which I used to see myself figuring
as chief performer; my white satin dress and Brussels flounces; the
carriages; the favours; the crowd; Mendelssohn’s Wedding March; the
joyous peal of bells. Those bells are sounding in my ears to-night.
To-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow! Before noon to-morrow I shall have
ceased to be Sibyl Faunthorpe. My name will be Sibyl Secretan--name
of all others most abhorrent to my uncle, Stephen Trenchard.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ÉLITE OF REDCASTLE.
Redcastle is a country town. It is not a manufacturing town, or a
seaport, or a garrison town, or a settlement in any manner designed
to be of wide and general use to society. It exists for itself alone,
and is exclusive to a fault. It is on the high road to nowhere.
Erase it from the map of England to-morrow, and nobody but its own
inhabitants would be the worse off for its evanishment. It produces
nothing but elderly people with limited incomes, and scandal. For
the cultivation of this last article Redcastle is like a mushroom
bed in a cellar, a dark corner of the land in which fungi abound and
flourish.
It is not a bad town in which to enjoy a brief span of repose from
the turmoil and bustle of the industrial and commercial world;--the
world of labour and pleasure, profit, loss, and pain. Not a bad
old town in which to dream away a joyless, painless old age. But to
live in Redcastle, to bound one’s hopes within its brick and mortar
confines, to regulate one’s life by its petty proprieties and narrow
creed! Heaven pity that wretch to whom destiny flings the lot of
life-long bondage in Redcastle.
It is a clean old town. Scarcely in laborious Holland, where the
servant maids scrub the chimney-pots and pipe clay the gutters,
would you find a cleaner. A rainy day, which makes mud and slush in
busier places, only washes down and renovates Redcastle. The one wide
street, with its massive old brick houses, square, and strong, and
substantial--the historic gateway, which divides the one street into
two, Below Bar and Above Bar--and the fine old Coach and Horses Inn,
where seldom coaches or horses are seen to stop, the inn which, save
for the mildest indulgence in billiards, and brandy and soda among
the youth of the town, seems to exist rather as a part and parcel
of Redcastle, an institution essential to the honour and glory of
the town, than for any commercial purpose, since it appears morally
impossible that the establishment can be self-supporting,--all
these are the pink of cleanliness. The pretty little minster, more
architecturally perfect than many a grander fane, looks as if it
were kept under a glass shade. The market-place presents on off days
a broad expanse of spotless pavement blinking and smiling up at the
sun. The turnpike road on which Redcastle lies is one of the best in
Yorkshire; the narrow lanes and by-streets leading up to that broad
stretch of common land known as Redcastle Woods, apparently for the
sole reason that it is barren of anything taller than a hazel-bush,
are innocent of mud or smoke. The scanty suburbs of the town present
a sprinkling of smallish houses, for the most part uninteresting
of aspect, but all scrupulously clean. Those modern edifices, the
Wesleyan Chapel, the Independent Chapel, and that masonic temple the
Athena Lodge, are of whitest freestone, with shining windows, and
hearthstoned steps embellishing their classic porticoes.
Redcastle, producing nothing, and offering no attraction to
visitors, is naturally not a wealthy settlement. The rich inhabitants
of Redcastle can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Yet
there is perhaps no town in England in which respect for wealth
is more deeply implanted in the human mind. It is a saying of the
profane that twopence halfpenny will not consort with twopence in
Redcastle, but this is not a true saying, for more than it worships
wealth does Redcastle worship appearances, and if A, with twopence,
can put on the semblance of threepence, he shall be assuredly held
higher than C, who lacks the art to obtain as much show out of
twopence halfpenny.
The _élite_ of Redcastle--that is to say, persons of fixed income
or established professional earning, ranging from eight to eighteen
hundred per annum--live within a narrow circle. The houses
immediately below Bar, and the houses immediately above Bar, shelter
the aristocracy of the town. Below Bar, grave old red brick houses of
the early Georgian period, roomy, and comfortable within, respectable
of aspect without; above Bar, houses of a more modern date, stone
façades, French windows, porches, verandahs, larger gardens, and
ostentatious stabling, rarely used, save for the accommodation of a
pony chaise, like one of Falstaff’s buck baskets.
Within this charmed circle, in the largest of the stone-fronted
houses above Bar, resides Colonel Stormont, who enjoys the privileges
of retirement and half-pay, cheered by the society of his wife and
family, the family consisting of a grown-up son and two grown-up
daughters who, of various views upon other questions, are at one in
the opinion that Redcastle was called into being for their especial
behoof, and who regulate their conduct by that idea.
Colonel and Mrs. Stormont take the lead in Redcastle society.
Their names are at the head of the croquet and archery club, which
black-balls every one who is suspected of having once had a cousin
connected with trade. They are chief patrons of the assize and
masonic balls. They sanctify the more chaste and classic of the
Redcastle concerts with their august presence, or, at least, Mrs.
Stormont allows her name to grace the list of patronesses, and add a
lustre to the programme of the evening’s harmony. If St. Cecilia had
come to life again she could hardly have been in more request among
the concert-givers than Mrs. Stormont, who scarcely knows Mozart from
Offenbach, or Beethoven from Brinley Richards.
To offend Colonel and Mrs. Stormont would be to be at war with
Redcastle; and it is doubtful if any one so unfortunately placed
could continue to reside in the town. He would be obliged to depart,
exiled by that awful ban; like Ovid from Rome, or Dante from Florence.
In the large stucco-fronted house with the Norman turret resides
Mr. Marlin Spyke, the great shipbuilder of Krampston-on-Tybur. Mr.
and Mrs. Spyke live with some splendour, but a self-contained kind
of life, not conducive to wide popularity. They receive very little
company, their names grace the subscription list of no local charity,
they patronize no local entertainment, they attend no masonic or
benevolent ball. They are negatively great, and will be remembered
when they are dead for the many noble deeds they have not done.
After the Stormonts and the Marlin Spykes come the professional
classes below Bar; Mr. Jewson, the chief local solicitor and vestry
clerk; Dr. Mitsand, an elderly man of some distinction, being one of
the army surgeons who endured and ameliorated the miseries of the
Crimean war; Mr. Groshen, the banker; Mr. Farrer, the curate; and a
few others, whom it is needless to particularize. On the outskirts of
the town reside three or four gentlemen who derive their income from
houses or lands, are more rustic in their bearing and attire than
the inhabitants of the citadel, and in a general way give themselves
airs, as affecting to belong to the county families. Afar off in
their various fastnesses, isolated, inaccessible, unapproachable,
live the county families. A few of them are on visiting terms with
the Stormonts, Dr. Mitsand, and the clergy of Redcastle; but they
regard the town otherwise as a depôt for groceries and draperies,
and a centre of Radicalism for the lower classes. Their big family
landaus, with tall, slab-sided horses and brass harness, pervade
the street on fine afternoons; their sons trot briskly through the
quiet town on hunting mornings in well-worn pink. They turn out
occasionally for a concert, and take care to testify by loud talk and
laughter among themselves, and a supercilious contemplation of the
rest of the audience through eye-glasses, that they hold themselves
as creatures apart from the townspeople.
Within ten miles of Redcastle is that thriving seaport,
Krampston-on-Tybur, famous for ship-building, ropemaking, linseed
crushing, sugar baking, and general exportation and importation.
Krampston has noisy, bustling streets, miles of quays, labyrinths
of docks, drawbridges that arrest the pedestrian at every turn, so
intersected is the land by narrow inlets of water. Krampston has
very little ‘society,’ in the Redcastle sense of that word, but it
has commercial activity, the vigorously throbbing pulse of active
and useful life, name, and place and power in the world. The word
‘Krampston’ branded on bale or packing-case is familiar in Buenos
Ayres or Sierra Leone, in Pernambuco or Timbuctoo, while the name
of Redcastle is hardly known out of the post office or British
Gazetteer.
Among the _élite_ of Redcastle--the archons--the equestrian
order--Robert Faunthorpe, surgeon and parish doctor, has no place.
The _élite_ give him good-day when they meet him trudging toilfully
above or below Bar, or trotting meekly along one of the lanes on
his unkempt pony. Good, easy-going little man, ever ready to help
the helpless to whom he ministers, often squeezing a shilling or a
sixpence out of his ill-furnished purse where he feels that drugs
alone are of no avail. Kindly gentleman though he is, the _élite_ of
Redcastle cannot recognise him as a member of their order. He lives
in a shabby red house at the fag-end of the town, grooms his pony,
digs in the garden, keeps one old woman-servant of eccentric aspect;
he takes snuff inordinately--perhaps it is his only consolation--and
the normal shabbiness of his clothes is enhanced by the process. His
existence is altogether unorthodox. He is beyond the pale.
True that he has reared three orphan nieces, the children of a
brother who died penniless ten years ago; and it is hardly to be
supposed that this act of benevolence has not cost him as much as the
maintenance of a groom and gardener. But Redcastle cannot recognise
these small charities. They judge a man as they judge his house, by
the front which he presents to the world. They would recognise the
groom and gardener as elements of social status. They smile gently
at the idea of the three orphan nieces as a harmless eccentricity of
that eccentric little man, Dr. Faunthorpe.
Happily Robert Faunthorpe, M.R.C.S., and Dr. by courtesy, is of all
men the last to regret that social heaven to which he has never
ascended. He sees Colonel and Mrs. Stormont, Dr. Mitsand, and Mr. and
Mrs. Groshen revolving in their orbits as he sees the planets, and
envies them no more. The idea that they do him any unkindness by not
inviting him to their dinner parties, by not extending the hand of
friendship to his fatherless nieces, never enters his mind. He is so
simple-minded a little man that he is content to go his way and let
other people go theirs.
An eccentric, evidently, as Redcastle opines.
CHAPTER VII.
DRIFTING INTO HAVEN.
It is a soft, calm evening, early in April, and Dr. Faunthorpe’s
shabby old house is as much brightened by the westering sunlight as
it can be brightened by anything less than the three coats of paint
for which its worm-eaten woodwork has been languishing for the last
twenty years. There has not been a five-pound note expended upon the
repair or the beautification of Robert Faunthorpe’s house within the
memory of the oldest inhabitant of Redcastle. It is scrupulously
clean, and that is the best that can be said of it. There is a small
garden in front, where flourish those homely perennials which demand
little care and no artificial nutriment,--lupins, Canterbury bells,
flags, London pride, polyanthuses, primroses, and wall-flowers.
Behind the house there is a long strip of ground where the surgeon
cultivates cabbages and potatoes, leeks and potherbs, leaving only
two narrow borders for floriculture. Happily there are ancient rose
bushes in these neglected borders,--rose bushes from which Beauty’s
father might have gathered those large red cup-shaped cabbage roses
that grow in a child’s picture book. The borders are edged with box,
tall and thick,--box that has been growing for a century. The low
red walls, crumbling into hollows where the birds have pecked at the
brickwork, crowned with dragon’s-mouth, stonecrop, and houseleek,
would be delicious in a picture, and are not unlovely in reality.
At the bottom of this long narrow garden there is a patch of ground
set apart for the benefit of Scrub, the pony, upon which grow
purple-flowered tares, three crops in a twelvemonth sometimes.
Within, the house has a certain air of homely comfort. The shabby old
furniture has that well-worn look which in some wise endears goods
and chattels to their owners. Beeswax and labour have done their best
to brighten and beautify the ancient mahogany bureaus, the clumsy
walnutwood bedsteads and tables,--made at a time when walnutwood was
almost as cheap as deal. Cracked old jars and bottles of common blue
delf adorn the tall narrow wooden mantelpieces; curtains of watered
moreen, once crimson, but faded to a tawny brown, drape the deeply
recessed windows of parlour and surgery. The rooms are spacious, but
low; the ceilings sustained by massive beams painted black. The walls
are for the most part paneled, and the paneling has been painted a
dingy pink or a dirty drab. To keep this paneling spotless is the
old servant’s anxious care, and much house-flannel and soft soap are
expended thereupon to Dr. Faunthorpe’s aggravation,--that good easy
man having no passion for cleanliness in the abstract.
A wide stone passage leads from the front door to the half-glass door
opening into the back garden, thus letting light and air through the
old house. A clumsy mahogany-framed barometer, a row of hat-pegs,
and a faded map of England are the only furniture of this passage,
or hall, as a modern house-agent would call it. A roomy, solid old
staircase, with shallow treads, and ponderous balusters, leads to the
upper chambers, which are numerous and of fair size. To the right
of the front door is the parlour, on the left the surgery. Behind
the surgery is the best parlour; behind the every-day parlour is the
large stone-paved kitchen.
For this house, with its acre of garden, Dr. Faunthorpe pays twenty
pounds a year; so there is some saving of house-rent in residence
at Redcastle, if your soul aspires not after any higher state than
comfortable vegetation, and you are content to inhabit the inferior
end of the town.
Dr. Faunthorpe paces his front garden on this calm April evening,
smoking his pipe. He is a smoker as well as a snuffer, and finds
solace in tobacco after his daily round. This is his hour of rest
and leisure. True that it may be broken in upon at any moment by
some sudden call for his services, but his regular daily labour, his
measured grind at life’s mill, is over.
He prefers the small front garden for his evening pipe to the larger
ground at the back,--first, because he is to the fore if wanted;
and secondly, because, his house being on the high road, it is just
possible that something may go by, vehicle or passenger, to the
enlivenment of his leisure.
He is meditative and silent, but not alone. His niece Marion, a tall
girl with wavy light hair, and a pre-Raphaelite figure, stands in a
listless attitude by the gate. His niece Jenny, an overgrown girl of
twelve, with a very short frock and stalwart legs, encased in brown
worsted stockings, is watering the flowers, and making as much mess
as it is possible to make in the operation.
‘Just look what puddles you are making in the path, stupid,’ exclaims
the elder sister, peevishly regarding the efforts of her junior. ‘I
do wish you’d leave things alone. You’re always up to some mischief
or other.’
‘I suppose I shouldn’t be mischievous if I let the primroses die for
want of water,’ remonstrates the junior, in no wise abashed. ‘That’s
what you’d do, with your laziness and fine-lady ways. You were bad
enough before you went to stay with uncle Stephen, but you’re ever
so much worse now. I’m sure I wish he’d kept you there instead of
sending you back, like a bad penny. Uncle Robert and I were as jolly
as sandboys while you were away.’
The young person sets down her water-pot and delivers this diatribe
with arms akimbo, like Madame Angot’s daughter. Marion shudders.
‘Sandboys! What an expression for a young lady!’ she ejaculates.
‘Pray where’s the harm in sandboys?’ demands the incorrigible Jenny.
‘They’re more respectable than you, as far as I can see, for they get
their own living.’
‘My dear,’ remonstrates uncle Robert mildly, ‘that is not the way to
address your elder sister.’
‘Why does she come and loaf about here, then, with her
stuckupishness? Why doesn’t she go and be a governess like Sibyl? If
she heard what Hester says of her she’d be ashamed of herself.’
‘My love, you have no right to quote Hester.’
‘Hester is an impertinent, mischief-making creature,’ exclaims Marion.
‘And as to your sister going out as a governess, my dear,’ continues
uncle Robert mildly, ‘with her expectations it would be about the
most foolish thing she could do.’
‘Expectations,--dead men’s shoes!’ exclaims the terrible child,
twirling the watering-can so that its last drops sprinkle Marion’s
pretty blue dress. ‘I should hate myself if _I_ was mean enough to
calculate upon what any one would leave me.’
‘Quite right of you,’ says Marion, with a supercilious laugh--that
sneering schoolgirl laugh, which we all remember to have been crushed
by occasionally in our youth,--‘for certainly no one is likely to
leave _you_ money.’
‘I dare say not, with you in the way,’ answers the irrepressible
Jenny. ‘They’d feel they were doing an act of charity bestowing their
fortune on you, for it would be the same as leaving it to the Asylum
for Idiots. One simpleton provided for, at any rate.’
With this the imp swings round upon her heels as on a pivot,
brandishes the watering-pot as an Indian savage his club, and gallops
into the house. Jane Faunthorpe never walks. She has the action of
an unbroken colt, and seems, when in motion, to have as many legs
as that animal. When she comes downstairs there is a sound as of a
sack of coals flung from the upper story. How the old house sustains
itself under her youthful vigour is a mystery to the parish doctor.
‘I’d run after her and give her a good box on the ears,’ says Marion,
viciously, ‘if I didn’t want to see the omnibus go by.’
_The_ omnibus is a stunted covered vehicle, like a carrier’s cart
garnished with glazed windows, which plies between the station and
the outskirts of Redcastle, and it is nearly time for this conveyance
to pass with its evening freight. There are sometimes as many as five
people arrive by the six o’clock train from Krampston,--nay, the
Krampston train sometimes brings that rare bird, a passenger from
London.
‘It’s a pity you ever sent that child to a day school, uncle Robert,’
Marion remarks presently, wiping the waterspots daintily from her
dress. ‘She was bad enough before, but now she is simply intolerable.’
‘My love, I couldn’t afford a boarding school, and I was obliged
to send her somewhere,’ replies the surgeon, in his longsuffering
way. ‘At home she was learning only to dig potatoes and to whistle,
neither of which pursuits is an attractive accomplishment in a young
lady. The child is not bad at bottom.’
‘Perhaps not,’ answers Marion, snappishly, ‘but the bottom must be a
long way down. I’ve never come to it yet.’
‘She is very warm-hearted.’
‘Yes, if warmth of heart consists in rushing at one like an
avalanche, hugging one round the neck like a bear, and rumpling one’s
collar atrociously, without the faintest provocation.’
‘She is not of an idle disposition,’ remonstrates the uncle. ‘I found
her cleaning the back kitchen windows at half-past six this morning.
No one had asked her to do it.’
‘Of course not. That’s just the reason she did it.’
‘If you would take a little more pains with her, Marion,’ suggests
Dr. Faunthorpe, timidly----
‘Pains! I might take _agonies_, and without the least effect. Didn’t
I begin to teach her music----’
‘Yes, my dear, but you didn’t go on.’
‘Well, you just try to teach her anything, uncle Robert--just
try--that’s all,’ says Marion, with awful significance, and then
breaks out with a sigh, ‘Oh dear, is this precious old omnibus never
coming?’
‘It is rather late, my dear. But as it isn’t going to bring us any
one we care about, we needn’t worry ourselves about it.’
‘It would be something to look at just for a minute. If you only knew
what a difference there is between the look-out down here and above
Bar. There there’s almost always something going by--Mrs. Stormont’s
basket carriage, or Master Groshen’s pony, or the butcher’s cart.’
‘Ah, my dear, I’m afraid that long visit to your uncle Trenchard has
spoiled you for my quiet home.’
‘No, it hasn’t, uncle,’ answers the girl, with a little gush of
feeling in the midst of her petulance, just strong enough to show
the better side of her nature--‘no, it hasn’t, for this is home and
that isn’t. I should always feel that if I spent the rest of my life
with uncle Stephen. Of all the old fidgets----! Well, I suppose I
oughtn’t to say anything against him, for he has been very kind to
me in his way. He has given me a good deal of money from first to
last, though I must say he doled it out stingily, as if he liked the
money better than me; and it is nice staying at his house--one feels
one’s self somebody. Only think of the Stormonts, and the Groshens,
and the Marlin Spykes calling on him before he had been three weeks
in Redcastle, while you’ve lived here thirty years and they’ve never
called upon you.’
‘People at this end of the town are not visited, my dear,’ replies
the doctor, mildly, as one who bows to the mysterious ways of
Providence and questions not. ‘I dare say the _élite_ of Redcastle
called upon your uncle out of kindness, he being a stranger.’
‘He being a millionaire, uncle, that’s what you mean. Very much
they’d have called upon him if he’d been a stranger who wanted to get
his living. Think of the Stormonts giving a dinner party on purpose
for him, and inviting _me_--after ignoring me for the last four
years--staring me in the face, after church, for two hundred Sundays,
and taking no more interest in me than if I were a stone cherub on
a tablet in the minster, and now, all of a sudden, being so fond of
me. It’s too ridiculous. If I was as worldly as they are, I’d take a
little more pains not to show it.’
‘The world is worldly, my love,’ replies uncle Robert, with his
resigned air. ‘You can hardly expect it to be otherwise. For my part,
I am very glad to think that the Stormonts have taken notice of you,
and that you’ve been invited out with Mr. Trenchard. It may lead to
your making a good marriage, though you needn’t set your mind upon
that now, as it is tolerably certain your uncle will leave you an
independence. I only wish Sibyl were at home to have her share of
good fortune.’
‘It’s her own fault if she isn’t,’ says Marion.
‘Say rather her conscientiousness, my dear. She doesn’t like to leave
Mrs. Hazleton in a difficulty about her children; and very right too.
But I hope Mrs. Hazleton will suit herself with a new governess very
soon, and let Sibyl come home. Mr. Trenchard has asked for her so
often, and it really seems flying in the face of Providence for her
to be out of the way.’
‘If she wasn’t a stupid, she wouldn’t be at Mrs. Hazleton’s beck and
call,’ says Marion, and then exclaims, shrilly, ‘Here’s the omnibus,
and lots of people inside. Why, there’s some one nodding to us--a
lady in a gray hat--and--I declare, the ’bus is stopping. Why, it’s
Sibyl.’
The blundering vehicle stops before Dr. Faunthorpe’s gate; a shabby
carpet bag--only a carpet bag--is handed down from the roof, and
in the next instant Sibyl is in the homely little garden, sobbing
hysterically on her uncle’s shoulder.
He presses her to his breast tenderly, and looks in the pale, wan
face.
‘Why, my darling, how ill you look--how changed--how thin!’
‘I’ve had so much hard work, uncle,’ she answers, faintly, ‘but,
thank God, I am at home at last.’
CHAPTER VIII.
THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL.
‘Home at last,’ cries the wanderer, with glad thankfulness.
This is a night of rejoicing in Dr. Faunthorpe’s modest dwelling. The
prodigal daughter has returned, and the fatted calf, or at least so
much of him as a cutlet, fried as only Hester can fry a veal cutlet,
is served up in her honour. How cheery and homely the common parlour,
with its shabby old furniture, dimly illuminated by two composite
candles which leave the paneled corners in densest shadow, seems to
those tired eyes!
‘It is so nice to be at home again, uncle,’ says Sibyl lovingly, as
she draws her chair a little nearer the doctor’s at supper-time.
‘What an old dear Hester is! and how deliciously she cooks!’
‘If you’re so fond of home, I wonder you stayed away so long,’
remarks Marion, who cannot help being occasionally disagreeable in
her petty way. There was nothing large-minded about Marion, Sibyl
used to complain. She would never commit a big sin, but would forfeit
heaven by a multitude of infinitesimal faults.
‘Marion’s faults are like the animalculæ in a glass of water,’
remarked Sibyl on another occasion, ‘too minute to be seen without a
microscope, but making the water unwholesome all the same.’
‘I had to stop away to suit other people’s convenience,’ replies
the prodigal, looking downward as she squeezes lemon juice upon her
cutlet.
‘How altered you must be!’ says that odious Marion. ‘Other people’s
convenience used to be the last thing you thought about. When is your
luggage coming?’
‘My luggage? I brought it with me.’
‘I mean the rest of your luggage. The omnibus man brought in nothing
but a carpet bag.’
‘That is my luggage,’ answers Sibyl, colouring to the roots of her
hair. It is the first tinge of red that has warmed her delicate cheek
since her arrival. ‘I gave one of Mrs. Hazleton’s servants that
horrid old heavy trunk of mine.’
‘But your dresses, your linen, you can’t get them all into that
carpet bag,’ cries Marion, almost in a shriek. To be without variety
of clothes is the last calamity she can conceive among the miseries
of humanity.
‘I have not one dress besides this. You can’t have any notion how
one’s dresses wear out in a schoolroom--mischievous romping girls
pulling one about all day long, ink spilt in every direction,
candle-grease on all the tables, cups of tea perpetually turned over.
I was determined to buy nothing during the last quarter, so I wore
my old dresses till they were almost in rags, and gave them to my
favourite housemaid when I came away.’
‘I dare say it was an excellent plan,’ says Marion, shrugging her
thin shoulders, ‘but you won’t be in a condition to make a very good
appearance in Redcastle till you’ve new things. People will expect
you to bring down the London fashions too. They come out on the first
of March, don’t they?’
‘What a pity Fate made you a gentleman’s daughter Marion,’ remarks
Sibyl, with a cold sneer. ‘You would have made such a capital
milliner. Your soul would have been in your work.’
Dr. Faunthorpe sits back in his chair, reposeful, after that little
bit of hot supper, which is not an every-day luxury. The small
snappings and snarlings of his nieces hardly discompose him, he is so
used to their sisterly talk. He is glad to have his handsome niece
at home again, seated close to his chair, with all those familiar
winning ways which have won her the first place in his heart; small
gushings of loving speech, tender little smiles, gentle touches of a
white fluttering hand--graces of manner which may mean very little,
but are very sweet; petty Circean arts which have beguiled honest men
to ruin and death before to-day.
‘My darling,’ he says presently, as the dark brown eyes smile upon
him, brightening in the candlelight, ‘I am so glad you have come
back. It wasn’t wise to stay away so long at the risk of vexing your
uncle Trenchard: but I’ll say no more about that. You are here, and
all is well. You must go and see him to-morrow.’
‘How can she,’ exclaims Marion, ‘in that gown?’ pointing
contemptuously to Sibyl’s shabby alpaca, an alpaca which has seen
much service, cockled by the rain, and frayed at the edges of the
cuffs, and with that shrunken and dwindled appearance that ill-used
garments are apt to assume.
‘Pshaw, what does her gown matter? You can lend her a gown. You have
gowns enough and to spare.’
‘None that will fit Sibyl,’ replies Marion, who prides herself on her
superior height. ‘She’s welcome to wear one, but it’ll be two inches
on the ground.’
‘Can’t she run a tuck, or cut a bit off?’ argues uncle Robert.
‘I shall have to give you a tonic, my love,’ he adds, contemplating
his elder niece anxiously, ‘you are looking so fagged and worn.’
‘I am at home with you, uncle Robert; that is the best tonic for me,’
replies the girl fondly.
She is fond of him to-night. This shabby old home, which she
abandoned in sheer discontent two years ago, seems very dear to her
just now. It is a haven for a storm-beaten soul.
‘You will have a better home than this, my pet, I hope, for the
greater part of your time,’ answers the doctor, cheerily. ‘I’ve no
doubt your uncle Trenchard will ask you to stay with him as he did
Marion. She was quite three months at Lancaster Lodge, and is to go
back again by-and-bye. I look upon her as little more than a visitor
here; but she is kind enough to make the best of her old uncle
Robert’s humdrum house.’
‘It is a great relief to be here for a change, uncle,’ answers
Marion. ‘I felt a fine lady at uncle Trenchard’s, but I feel my own
mistress here. If it wasn’t for that tyrannical old Hester your house
would be liberty hall; and I can forgive even Hester when she is in a
good humour and makes hot cakes for breakfast.’
An hour later and uncle Robert has smoked his after-supper pipe,
and the girls are in their bedroom, the old room which Sibyl knows
so well, with its ridiculous flowered paper, low ceiling, and high
painted dado, and curious brass safety bolts upon the door, as if
burglars were a contingency to be provided against in that humble
dwelling. How well she remembers the long narrow chimney-piece,
the basket-shaped grate with its wide hobs, the open-work brass
fender, the painted four-post bedstead, drab and green, with skimpy
dimity valance, and two starveling curtains. The rickety deal
dressing-table, the streaky looking-glass, which used to reflect
a fair girl’s face wondering at its own beauty. The tall mahogany
wardrobe that never was opened without threatening to topple over
and wreak destruction on its violator. The scanty strips of bedside
carpet, dull in colour and perplexing in pattern. How often she has
pored and puzzled over those interwoven scrolls, in sheer idleness
of thought. All things are unchanged. There are the wretched old
ornaments on the mantelpiece. The pasteboard spill-boxes, adorned
with faded gold paper, ancient works of art by fingers that have long
been dust. The little black Wedgwood vases, urn-shaped, funereal.
The hand screens with lithographs of Dr. Syntax pasted thereupon,
and more paper gilding. The two black profile miniatures of dead and
forgotten relatives.
It seems a dear old room somehow to Sibyl to-night, for it brings
back the feelings of her innocent girlish days, when life, if it had
few pleasures, had no cares. Now life means perplexity. Existence
is an entanglement from which only some happy turn of fortune can
extricate her.
She sits in her old place on the window-seat, and loosens the long
twisted roll of rich brown hair, which falls over her bare shoulders
like shining drapery.
‘Goodness!’ cries Marion, ‘how skinny your shoulders have grown!’
‘Have they?’ says Sibyl, coolly, glancing downwards at a white neck
and arms in which the bones are too sharply defined for beauty.
‘Then we shall look more like sisters when we wear low dresses. Your
shoulders were always skinny.’
Marion is silenced for the moment, and proceeds with the destruction
of that elaborate edifice of hair and hair-pads which she constructs
with infinite pains every morning, even though no one outside her own
small family circle is likely to be gratified by the sight thereof.
Marion’s hair has been washed and doctored to the fashionable
pre-Raphaelite colour. It is thick and fluffy, and short, only just
covering the points of her bony shoulders, and standing out round her
head like an exaggerated nimbus. It is not bad hair altogether, and
Marion thinks it one of her strong points, like her pre-Raphaelite
figure, her long narrow foot, eighteen-inch waist, arched eyebrows,
white teeth, and other small graces, some of which are the
praiseworthy result of patient training.
‘Do let me see your pretty things, Sibyl,’ the younger sister
exclaims presently, twisting one of her yellow tresses in and out of
a hair-pin.
The elder looks up, startled out of a profound reverie.
‘What pretty things?’
‘Well, you must have something to show me--presents--things you have
bought out of your salary. I’m sure I should have a lot to show out
of forty pounds a year for two years. Glove-boxes, sealskin purses,
card-cases, neck-ties, lace, gloves, and so on. I dare say that
carpet bag is bursting with them.’
‘It is doing nothing of the kind. I found that it was as much as I
could do to dress myself decently for Mrs. Hazleton’s parties and pay
my laundress. Evening dresses are so unprofitable.’
‘They must be, if you have _nothing_ to show out of eighty pounds. I
never thought you could bring yourself to wear such a dress as that
alpaca thing,’ adds Marion, pointing contemptuously to Sibyl’s shabby
gown hanging on a peg upon the door. ‘I expected to see you come home
quite a woman of fashion.’
‘People who teach unruly children, and have to take them out walking
in all weathers, have not much chance of being fashionably dressed,’
answers Sibyl, wearily. ‘Perhaps if you could contrive to put dress
out of your mind for five minutes or so, Marion, we might have a
little rational conversation.’
‘Oh, very well; of course I know what an inferior mind mine is.
You used to tell me so often enough. But you were once rather fond
of talking about dress, and I thought, perhaps, if you’ve nothing
to show me you might like to see my dresses--_not_ home-made. Miss
Eylett has made every one, and a pretty price she has charged me.’
Marion wrenches open the refractory door of the wardrobe, and
displays three calico-shrouded garments, hanging in a row, like
sheeted ghosts. One by one she brings forth these treasures, whisking
off their covering, and displaying each to Sibyl with a dexterous
twirl of her arm. A bronze brown silk; a pale gray, with elaborate
ruchings of satin; a black silk, which stands on end for very
richness of fabric.
‘There,’ she exclaims, swelling with pride, ‘I wore the gray--new--at
Colonel Stormont’s.’
‘At Colonel Stormont’s! Is the world coming to an end, or what
convulsion of nature brought you and the Stormonts together?’
‘I was asked to dinner with uncle Trenchard.’
‘And uncle Trenchard gave you the money to buy those dresses, of
course.’
‘Yes. He said, “Well, my dear, I suppose you’ll want a new gown;”
and then he gave a heavy sigh, and took a bank note out of an
old-fashioned red pocket-book, and then he looked at the note so
long that I was afraid he was going to change his mind, and then he
gave another sigh, deeper than the first, and handed me the note--a
ten-pound note. I tried to kiss him the first time, but he didn’t
seem to like that, for he gave me a little peevish push, and said
“There, my dear, that’ll do.”’
‘Funny old man! How many ten-pound notes has he given you?’
‘Four altogether. He always sighs just in the same way, as if every
note was a wrench. He’s inordinately rich, of course, but it seems to
hurt him so to part with his money that I can’t help thinking of that
dreadful story of Douglas Jerrold’s, “The Man made of Money,” and
fancying that uncle Trenchard is unrolling a bit of himself when he
gives away a bank note.’
‘It’s only such people who get inordinately rich,’ replies Sibyl,
plaiting her long thick hair into one massive tail for the night.
‘And how did you get on with uncle Trenchard, upon the whole?’
‘Oh, very well indeed. It was so nice driving about in his new
barouche, with a lovely pair of chestnuts, and feeling one’s self
looked up to by all Redcastle; and I had a splendid bedroom and
dressing-room, and we dined at half-past seven every day, with two
men waiting upon us. I used to feel afraid of them just at first,
especially the butler, who looks the image of Mr. Groshen the banker,
and that took away from the grandeur; but I soon got accustomed to
them, and learned to speak to them in an offhand way, just like Mrs.
Stormont.’
‘Marion,’ says Sibyl, earnestly, ‘do you think uncle Trenchard
intends to leave us his money?’
‘Well, I should think he must leave it to us or to hospitals; and if
we can manage to please him----’
‘We must please him, Marion, and wind ourselves into his withered old
heart somehow. It would be ridiculous, abominable, shameful, for the
money to be left to hospitals when we want it so badly. It’s no use
to enjoy the luxuries of his house, to take a ten-pound note from him
now and then. That kind of thing will only make poverty seem worse to
us afterwards. We must have his fortune.’
Her eyes dilate and brighten, her lips tremble faintly as she leaves
off speaking, and then her face changes in a moment, and tears run
down her wan cheeks.
‘Gracious, Sibyl!’ cries Marion, rushing at her with a bottle of eau
de Cologne and a towel, and dabbing her forehead with the perfume. ‘I
declare you’re quite hysterical. Of course we must have his money--if
we can get it. What has the fidgety old thing come home to England
for except to make our acquaintance and leave us his fortune? He has
as good as said so ever so many times.’
Marion’s sisterly attentions check that hysterical attack of Sibyl’s,
and the two girls lie down side by side affectionately, after a brief
formula in the way of evening prayer.
Deep in the chill spring night Sibyl’s head tosses restlessly on
the pillow, and the sleeper’s lips murmur sorrowfully in troubled
dreams,--
‘Alex, Alex--don’t be so cruel, Alex. Forgive--you know--your
sake--yes, yes--as much as for my own.’
So pleads the sinner’s vexed soul; self-excusing, self-accusing, even
in dreams.
CHAPTER IX.
UNCLE TRENCHARD.
Stephen Trenchard paces his smooth gravel walk in the April sunshine,
after tiffin, looking at the sparrows, and blackbirds, and thrushes
disporting blithely on his velvet lawn, or hopping away into the
shadow of evergreens--great masses of laurel and laurustinus,
rhododendron and bay, which surround the smooth expanse of grass in a
semicircular sweep.
Very perfect is the order of Mr. Trenchard’s garden--not a yellow
leaf on the laurels, not a daisy peeping pertly, silver-white, from
the lawn, not a branch that grows awry. In the kitchen-garden yonder,
far away behind the shrubbery, the fan-shaped fruit-trees look like
geometrical patterns on the yellow brick walls. The apples and pears
are all wired into exactest growth, and not a twig is allowed its own
way. Mr. Trenchard is in his garden by six o’clock every morning,
and his severe eye interrogates the smallest sprig of groundsel,
and rebukes the very slugs that vie with him in early rising. Mr.
Trenchard is not a master to be trifled with, and his gardeners know
it. For every shilling he expends he will have twelve pennyworth of
labour--nay, thirteen or fourteen pennyworth if he can get it. Woe
be to the wretch who tries to put him off with elevenpence halfpenny
worth of industry!
‘I’ve had to work for my money,’ says Mr. Trenchard, ‘and I expect
value for my money from other people.’
He walks briskly up and down, looking to the right and left with an
eye bright and quick as a bird’s, a small black eye, which looks the
blacker for its whitened lashes. He is of middle height, very thin,
very yellow. He has sharply cut features; nose thin, pointed, and
aggressive-looking; lips also thin, and of a disagreeable pallid
hue; eyebrows iron-gray, thick and bushy; brow narrow; perceptive
ridge strongly marked, upper head receding; hair thick, short, and
iron-gray, like the eyebrows, brushed into two sharp points, like a
terrier’s ears.
Mr. Trenchard wears nankeen waistcoat and trousers, very loose
for his lean limbs, and a glossy black frock coat, also loose, a
black satin scarf with a gold pin, and high shirt collars; a double
gold eye-glass dangles on his breast, a glass which he wears for
show rather than use, but which intensifies the severity of his
countenance when he reproves his gardeners, or lectures his butler.
He is a man who has toiled early and late, until the other day, when
he took it into his head to give up his counting-house to a junior
partner, and come back to England and enjoy the evening of his life
at his ease. He has been a man of one idea all his days, and the
single object of his existence has been the accumulation of money.
The process of money-making, the honour and homage which the world
renders the reputed millionaire--these have been so sweet to him that
the question of what he is to do with his wealth has rarely presented
itself seriously to his mind.
On his sixty-ninth birthday he awoke suddenly to the consciousness
that whatever personal enjoyment he meant to have out of his wealth
must be obtained within the next ten, twelve, or fifteen years. Even
with his vigorous constitution he could hardly hope to live beyond
the age of eighty-five. Forty years in India must take something out
of a man, be he never so temperate, and abstemiousness has been one
of Stephen Trenchard’s virtues.
So at sixty-nine he said to himself, ‘It is time for me to go back to
England; let the world see what a position I have made for myself,
and take all the good I can out of life.’
His seventieth birthday has not yet arrived, and he has built for
his soul a lordly treasure-house, or in other words, he has taken
upon lease, decorated, and furnished Lancaster Lodge, one of the
best houses in his father’s native town of Redcastle: he has hired
servants, purchased carriages and horses, and begun a plain-sailing
English gentleman’s life on a very liberal scale. The result so far
has been eminently satisfactory. His house to him a kingdom is, he
rules his servants, indoor and outdoor, with a rod of iron, and feels
himself a potentate.
Very pleasant to him is the incense which Redcastle offers to his
wealth. People whose fathers and grandfathers snubbed or ignored
his father, the struggling solicitor, bow down and worship the
Anglo-Indian Plutocrat. He accepts their adoration with supreme
coolness, and a quiet arrogance which his admirers extol as innate
aristocracy of mind.
It has pleased him to permit his niece Marion Faunthorpe to bask in
the sunshine of his favour. She is not handsome enough to charm his
eye, which is critical in the matter of feminine beauty, nor is she
clever enough to amuse him; but she is rather a pretty thing to have
about his house, and she does very well for a listener when he is in
the humour to tell his prosy old stories of dead and gone Calcutta
scandals. She knows how to hold her tongue when he is inclined to
be silent, is solicitous for his small comforts, quiet as a mouse
when he takes his after-dinner nap. She behaves gracefully at table,
neither eats nor drinks too much, looks stylish when fashionably
dressed, moves about the house quietly, and is not altogether
deficient in tact. He is content, therefore, to tolerate her as a
frequent guest, but does not appreciate her warmly enough to ask her
to take up her permanent abode with him.
He has made many inquiries about Sibyl, and has been vexed by her
non-appearance. The Stormonts, the Groshens, and other notabilities
have praised the absent girl’s beauty, having found out all at once
that a young person whose existence they never troubled themselves to
acknowledge was the loveliest girl in Redcastle. ‘Quite the belle of
the place, I assure you, Mr. Trenchard,’ says Mrs. Stormont.
‘Indeed,’ remarks Stephen Trenchard. ‘She was invited out very much,
I suppose?’
‘Well, no, dear Mr. Trenchard, she was too young, you know--almost a
child. And then your brother-in-law is so retiring. We could never
have got him out of his shell.’
If there is one thing in that region of trifles outside the money
market which Mr. Trenchard appreciates it is beauty in woman.
Having heard his eldest niece so enthusiastically praised, he is
particularly anxious to see her, ever so much the more anxious
because her indifference has thwarted him.
‘She must be a queer kind of girl,’ he tells himself, ‘to hang back
from a rich uncle, to prefer drudging as a governess to sponging
upon me. Marion is glad enough to take all she can get, and would
kneel down and kiss my shoe-string if I asked her. Her feelings are
transparent enough. This other one must be something out of the
common.’
A wonderful advantage this for Sibyl at starting; though it is an
advantage she has gained accidentally.
The great lodge bell clangs out, while Mr. Trenchard paces up and
down, and startles the respectable tranquillity of Above Bar with its
clamour. He takes out his watch. Too early for a ceremonious visit.
Mr. Trenchard walks round by the side windows of his large square
mansion, and comes within view of the gate. Two ladies enter, both
young and slim, both tall, but one rather shorter than the other. The
taller gives a little eager cry and runs forward to him, the second
advances more slowly.
‘Dear uncle Stephen,’ cries Marion, pursing up her lips to be kissed,
an operation which uncle Stephen performs with a slightly reluctant
air, ‘Sibyl has come home quite unexpectedly,’ Marion is always out
of breath at the beginning of a visit, a pretty gushing way which
some people call charming, ‘and I thought I might bring her--to--see
you--dear uncle John.’
‘Thought you might bring her. Of course you might bring her. Haven’t
I been asking to see her ever since Christmas? So that is Sibyl, is
it?’ looking at the graceful figure lingering on the sunlit grass a
few yards away from him. The bright face is flushed with palest rose,
the dark full eyes are looking slily at him, the dark brown hair is
burnished by the sun. A fair picture of peerless youth for crabbed
age to admire.
‘So that is Sibyl! Yes, she is very lovely. Those sycophants haven’t
exaggerated. Come here, my love, come to your old uncle. Naughty
child, why did you stay away so long?’
He holds out his lean old arms, he folds her to his breast, he kisses
her lovingly, paternally, as he has never yet kissed Marion, despite
her affectionate blandishments.
‘Well, I never!’ Marion exclaims inwardly, standing a little aloof,
and feeling that her reign is over.
CHAPTER X.
SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD.
The favourable impression which Sibyl makes on her uncle Stephen
Trenchard is a fact too obvious for diversity of opinion.
Marion reluctantly, sullenly even, admits that truth, with many
sneers and inuendos about winning manners and hollow-heartedness.
‘I have never laid myself out to please uncle Stephen as Sibyl lays
herself out,’ murmurs the injured maiden. ‘I can’t flatter people
with my looks. I haven’t Sibyl’s caressing ways. I can’t pretend
more affection than I feel; and I must say that uncle Stephen’s dry
little jerky ways of speaking and looking at one are not calculated
to develop affection.’
Thus argues Marion in the easy atmosphere of uncle Robert’s every-day
parlour. The girls are seated at supper with Dr. Faunthorpe, trifling
with morsels of bread and cheese, after having dined with Mr.
Trenchard.
‘I did not find him hard or dry,’ replies Sibyl. ‘He seems really
kind and affectionate, and I was grateful to him for his warm
welcome. I don’t know what you mean by my laying myself out to please
him. I remembered that he was poor mamma’s only brother, and our own
flesh and blood, the uncle I had heard so much about years ago, and I
was naturally touched by our meeting.’
‘Ah,’ says Marion, ‘what an advantage it is for a woman to be able to
cry when she likes! How _do_ you manage it, Sib?’
‘If the tears came into my eyes to-day it was because I am not very
strong just now, Marion,’ answers Sibyl, reddening. ‘You are really
the most horrid girl I ever met with.’
‘However horrid I am, I am not double-faced,’ replies the other,
promptly. ‘I should be ashamed to court uncle Trenchard if I were
you, when I remember the things you’ve said about him.’
‘What things?’
‘What a convenient memory yours is! Haven’t you said that you
despised him for his meanness as a young man--that he won his way in
the world by double-dealing, by base flattery of his patron--that all
your sympathy was with the young man he supplanted, Mr. Secretan?’
At that name Sibyl flushes crimson, and then grows ashy pale.
‘Ah, I see you do remember,’ cries Marion, triumphantly.
‘Marion,’ exclaims the mild little surgeon, with a rare flash of
anger, ‘I will not have your sister teased in this manner. How dare
you accuse her of falsehood or hypocrisy? She has as good a right to
Stephen Trenchard’s favour as you have.’
‘Yes, and to his fortune. Let her have it all,’ cries Marion, tempted
to go into hysterics, but thinking better of it immediately. ‘She is
to go and stay with him, and keep house for him, directly she can get
her things ready, which, considering she came home without a rag,
must take some time. She is to pay him a long visit. I’m nobody now.’
‘My love, you have had your innings,’ pleads the pacific doctor.
‘Oh, of course, and just as I have got to understand his ways and
know how to please him I am pushed aside.’
‘My dear, his sense of justice will induce him to distribute his
bounty fairly.’
‘His sense of justice did not prevent his kissing Sibyl more
affectionately than he has ever kissed me.’
‘Mere fancy on your part, I have no doubt,’ says the doctor.
After this little burst of temper Marion calms down and is tolerably
placable. She even discusses her sister’s outfit with some show of
interest. Mr. Trenchard has given Sibyl five-and-twenty pounds. ‘I
suppose you are pretty well provided with cash, little one,’ he said,
just before she wished him good night, ‘an independent-minded young
woman like you who goes out into the world to get her own living is
sure to have a well-lined purse.’
Sibyl blushed, and owned that her purse had no lining at all.
‘Ah, I see, sent help home to the old doctor,’ muttered Mr.
Trenchard, fortunately not loud enough for Marion to hear, or that
sharp-tongued young person would inevitably have set him right.
‘Well, well, very right, very proper.’
And then the crimson pocket-book was slowly brought forth, and Mr.
Trenchard sighed a desponding sigh as he opened it, a sigh that
was like a funeral gun for his departed bank notes. Sibyl went
back to the dingy old house at the bottom of the town richer by
five-and-twenty pounds than when she left it at midday.
The girls go out gaily enough next morning to Carmichael’s, _the_
haberdashery, linendrapery, and silk mercery establishment of
Redcastle, to supply the void in Sibyl’s wardrobe. Five-and-twenty
pounds is not much for a young lady of large ideas, but Sibyl,
schooled in the philosophy of small means, makes the most of that
sum. She spends all her money at Carmichael’s, and trusts to
Providence and Stephen Trenchard for means to pay Miss Eylett for
the making up of her dresses, and Mr. Korksoll, the bootmaker, for
the equipment of her pretty little feet. It is astonishing how far
away from the thoughts of Miss Eylett and Mr. Korksoll seems the
notion of payment now that Miss Faunthorpe’s rich uncle has returned
from the Indies. ‘You are to send the things home to me at Lancaster
Lodge,’ says Sibyl, and that seems as good as paying for them.
Sibyl has asked for a week in which to prepare herself for this
important visit, and that week is occupied in the stitching, hemming,
sewing, felling, gathering, and trimming of underclothing--the
fashion of ready-made linen not having yet vitiated the housewifely
habits of Redcastle. The lower middle classes make their own
garments, laboriously, and are proud of their toil; the upper classes
employ school children, reduced widows, or virtuous orphans for the
labour, and contrive thereby to exercise a good deal of patronage at
a very small expenditure.
Sibyl revives considerably during this week of preparation. She
manages to rest a good deal, other people taking the chief burden of
getting her clothes made on their shoulders. She lies on the sofa in
the shabby old parlour, staring idly at the white and yellow spring
flowers that brighten the dull brown beds yonder in the familiar
garden, the white pear blossoms tossing gaily in the light April
wind, the jonquils peeping over the tall box border, the sword-shaped
lily of the valley leaves cleaving the damp mould in the shadow of
the bulging moss-grown wall, summer’s harbinger in the shape of a
butterfly skimming over the tender rose leaves. A dull old house
verily--a limited prospect, this long strip of walled garden, yet
sweet and soothing to one who has suffered. Sweet to lie at rest on
the slumberous sofa, with no thought or care for the day, and with
but vaguest thought of the morrow.
‘If uncle Trenchard leaves me a fortune life will be made so easy,’
Sibyl muses, her arms folded above her head, her eyes fixed dreamily
on the waving white pear-bloom, ‘I shall have but to call Alex back
to me, and we can be happy together again, and taste the sweets of
life again, as we did in our brief bright honeymoon. Poverty and love
cannot live long together; but love with plenty of money--_that_
means paradise.’
The future, dimly veiled though it is, seems very easy to her just
now. She is elated by her uncle’s evident admiration of her. She has
made just the impression that she would have wished to make upon that
fate-disposing relative. To follow up that impression will be simple
enough. Has she not been told of her winning ways, of those small
fascinations which make a woman powerful for good or evil? Has she
not been always her uncle Robert’s favourite, everybody’s favourite,
without effort on her own part? while Marion, painfully anxious
to please, has been looked on rather as a nuisance, a vivacious
nonentity of whom one might easily have too much.
Mr. Trenchard’s carriage calls every afternoon, with its coachman and
footman in respectable Puritan drab liveries, to take the two young
ladies for an airing; Mr. Trenchard himself rarely making any use of
the equipage, which he keeps rather as an appanage of his state than
for pleasure or convenience. It is very agreeable to Sibyl to drive
up the long street, with its ascending scale of social importance,
from the shabby old houses at uncle Robert’s end of the town to the
stately stone mansions above Bar. Very agreeable to pass the _élite_
whom Marion has just begun to know, and salutes with delighted becks
and bows, but whom Sibyl surveys with a stony stare, affecting to
have not the faintest notion who they are.
‘That Faunthorpe girl is handsomer than ever,’ says Colonel Stormont
to his wife, whom he is driving in a pony carriage a size or two
larger than a washing basket. ‘She’s pretty sure to come in for a
tidy share of the old fellow’s money, I should think. Not a bad match
for Frederick.’
Frederick is the hope of the Stormonts--great at cricket, croquet,
and athletics, fire brigade and volunteer rifle corps; a youth with
very thin legs, and not much body, who wears a cutaway coat that just
clears his hips, and has never been seen in an overcoat, or without a
flower in his button-hole.
‘No family,’ says Mrs. Stormont, pursing up her lips.
‘Family be bothered!’ remarks the colonel. ‘Old Trenchard is rolling
in money. What’s the good of family? It won’t keep a roof over your
head, or pay the tax-gatherer. Commerce is the thing now-a-days. If
Fred doesn’t marry a rich woman pretty soon he’ll have to go into
commerce. You ought to take notice of those Faunthorpe girls.’
‘I’ll call next week,’ replies Mrs. Stormont, obediently.
Sibyl’s beauty is the talk of the town. Redcastle is suddenly
awakened to the consciousness of loveliness that scarcely moved it
to admiration two years ago, although the girl’s beauty had then
the bloom and freshness of unchastened youth. Perhaps she is really
lovelier now. Sorrow and passion have passed there, and left the
exalted look of an awakened soul, where there was before only girlish
innocence, curious and wondering about a world of which it knew
nothing. She has eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The
mystery of life has been revealed to her. Be sure that Eve’s beauty
had a deeper meaning after she came out by the fatal gate where the
angel with the flaming sword kept watch and ward.
The carriage comes at the week’s end to fetch Miss Faunthorpe and
her belongings, to the tribulation of her young sister Jenny, who has
had so much of Marion lately that she is deeply grieved to lose Sibyl.
‘It will be ever so much worse for me when you’re gone,’ she says.
‘You do stand up for a fellow sometimes. She’ll be sending me
upstairs for her handkerchief or her keys three times an hour, and
making me crimp her hair till my fingers ache, and unpick her old
dresses. I wish uncle Trenchard would let me go with you. I shouldn’t
cost much or be in his way. And now uncle Robert says I’m not to go
to school any more, because it makes me vulgar, and Marion is to go
on with my education. A nice education it will be! I don’t believe
she knows when William the Conqueror came over, or who invented
potatoes.’
Sibyl tears herself from the lamenting damsel, kisses uncle Robert
with a plaintive little look more expressive of gratitude than many a
lengthy oration, and takes her place in the barouche, which becomes
her as a frame does a picture, and seems as much her attribute as
Juno’s car to the goddess.
‘Good-bye, Poverty,’ she says to herself as the chestnuts throw up
their fore-legs as if they were playing cup and ball, and dash off
towards the Bar. ‘It shall go hard with me if my name is not written
in uncle Trenchard’s will before long.’
CHAPTER XI.
HOW STEPHEN TRENCHARD FORGIVES.
The new life at Lancaster Lodge suits Sibyl as if she had been
created for no other purpose than to sit at her uncle’s table,
pour out his coffee, air his newspapers, play or sing to him in
the evenings, and take her own pleasure for the rest of the day.
Housekeeping is an easy burden in so well-ordered an establishment.
The trained servants perform their duties, light for the most part,
with mechanical precision. The service is too good to be forfeited
by scamped work, or forgetfulness of the master’s wishes. Stephen
Trenchard has let his servants understand that he will have fullest
value for his money, that there must be no talents stowed away in
napkins in his household. He has contrived to inspire them with
wholesome fear, and is served to the utmost of their power.
Sibyl is not afflicted with a genius for domestic matters. She
remembers with a shudder those days in Dixon Street when she had to
cater for a penniless husband, and make ninepence do the work of a
shilling. She remembers this weary time, and reposes in her low easy
chair, novel in hand, the garden smiling at her through the open
French window, horses and carriages at her disposal, luxury around
her, all Redcastle subjugated and more or less prostrated at her
feet,--she keenly remembers the past, and deems her present life
worthy some sacrifice, more especially as the present is made still
brighter by vague hopes of happiness, and a reconciliation of all
life’s perplexities in the future.
She has her dark moments, naturally. What life is without shadow?
There are moments when she thinks of one she has fondly loved--fondly
loves still, perhaps, in some sealed chamber of her heart. There are
hours in which she wonders, with remorseful wonder, how _he_ fares
whom she so ruthlessly abandoned.
‘For his future advantage,’ she tells herself; ‘as Mrs. Secretan I
should have forfeited my uncle’s fortune--as Miss Faunthorpe I may
win it and share it with my husband.’
Established as Stephen Trenchard’s favourite niece, Sibyl finds
herself an object of unbounded interest and admiration with the
_élite_. Mrs. Stormont, although overflowing with kindness, at first
shows some disposition to patronize, but finding this eldest Miss
Faunthorpe a young woman not amenable to patronage, changes her note
and accepts Mr. Trenchard’s niece as ‘one of ourselves,’ elected and
chosen to sit in the high places of Redcastle.
‘The girl has a wonderful air,’ argues Mrs. Stormont, ‘when you
consider that she is totally without family.’
‘Talking of family,’ muses the colonel, ‘I hope it’s all right about
old Trenchard’s money, and that he hasn’t left any niggers over in
Calcutta to whom he may leave his fortune.’
‘My dear Reginald, I’m surprised at you,’ exclaims the lady, with a
look of horror. ‘Mr. Trenchard goes to church every Sunday, and is
altogether a most correct person.’
‘We don’t know what he may have been in India, though,’ says the
colonel. ‘He may have been a devil-worshipper, and danced an
exaggerated highland fling at devil-dances; or a Mahometan, or a
Brahmin, or a Thug. He seems to have plenty of money, and that’s
about all we know of him.’
Notwithstanding which ignorance as to Stephen Trenchard’s antecedents
the colonel and his wife continue to court and cherish him,
arranging the nicest little dinners for him, with Mr. Groshen to
sit opposite to him and discourse upon the money market; lavishing
affection on Sibyl, inquiring kindly about the exiled Marion--as
remote at the unvisited end of the town as if she had been removed
to another hemisphere--and making themselves generally subservient
and agreeable. Frederick Stormont, with his cutaway coat and legs
like sticks of sealing wax, calls frequently at Lancaster Lodge,
and is deeply interested in everything that interests Sibyl,--the
flower-garden, the horses; he even volunteers to be interested in
the poultry, but bottles his enthusiasm upon finding that Miss
Faunthorpe has no taste for Dorkings, Spaniards, or Cochin-Chinas.
There is a billiard-room at Lancaster Lodge, and Frederick is
great at billiards. He drops in of an evening, and plays with Mr.
Trenchard; he teaches Sibyl how to handle her cue, and discourses
wisely on the theory of angles.
‘Well, pretty one,’ says Mr. Trenchard one night, when Fred has
taken his departure with obvious reluctance, and uncle and niece
are loitering by the billiard-table, Sibyl leaning over the green
cloth to aim at the distant red, dressed in pale gray silk, with
innumerable flounces, and knots of mauve ribbon dotted about among
them, a masterpiece of Miss Eylett’s art. ‘Well, my pet, I think it’s
pretty clear what that young gentleman comes here for.’
‘Billiards, I should think,’ replies Sibyl, pushing her cue gently
backwards and forwards as she meditates her aim. ‘They have no table
at the Stormonts, and it is cheaper for him to play here than at the
“Coach and Horses.”’
‘The billiard-table is a very good excuse, my dear, but the gentleman
comes to see you.’
‘Poor thread-paper!’ exclaims Sibyl, with a contemptuous laugh. ‘For
his own sake--if the thing can feel--I hope not.’
‘Why, he’d be a very good match for you, wouldn’t he?’ asks her
uncle, looking keenly at her from under his penthouse brows. ‘These
Stormonts are great people, the leaders of Redcastle society. You
could hardly do better than marry into their set.’
‘If I were likely ever to marry, which I’m not,’ says Sibyl,
pocketing her ball triumphantly off the red, ‘I’d marry a _man_.’
‘Never likely to marry! what do you mean by that?’
‘Simply that I’m quite happy as I am, and that I mean to stop with
you, and take care of you, please uncle Stephen, until you get tired
of me.’
She has been living with her rich uncle nearly three months, and
there is no more talk of her being a visitor at Lancaster Lodge.
It is her home. Marion may come and go, but Sibyl remains. Stephen
Trenchard cannot do without her.
‘I shan’t get tired of you in a hurry,’ answers Mr. Trenchard, ‘but
I think for your own sake you ought to marry when you get a good
opportunity. I was only joking about that whipper-snapper, who walks
about the place as if the very paving stones were his property, and
couldn’t give you change for a five-pound note if you asked him for
it. He’s not the man for you. But with your pretty face you are sure
to find the right kind of man before long, a man with brains and
money, and when you do I hope you’ll be wise enough to marry him.
It’s all very well while I’m here to take care of you, but when I’m
dead and gone----’
‘When you are dead and gone I shall have your money, you dear old
thing,’ thinks Sibyl, but says not a word. She only goes to her
uncle’s side, and lays her face upon his shoulder, and gives him
one of those gentle little caresses which Marion would as soon have
offered to the Zoological Garden’s tiger as to her Anglo-Indian uncle.
‘Yes, pretty one, I should like to see you well married before my
time comes,’ says Stephen Trenchard.
‘Now you know, uncle, that you are under a solemn agreement with me
to live till you are ninety,’ replies Sibyl, shaking her finger at
him with playful menace.
She has grown very intimate with her uncle in these three months,
her playing, her singing, her bright talk, her sparkling, vivacious
little ways have won the old man’s confidence. Stern to all the rest
of the world, implacable in all his dealing with men, suspicious
alike of equals and inferiors, tyrannical to his servants, he
is yet wondrously gentle to Sibyl. His inherent meanness, his
mental incapacity to give, cannot be wholly subjugated even by
her influence, but what money he bestows upon her he gives less
grudgingly than to Marion. He feels the loss of so many pounds a
shade less keenly when Sibyl’s pleasure is in question, and though he
grumbles sorely at the costliness of a woman’s toilet he is pleased
to see his niece expensively dressed, and may in time come to regard
her costume as one of the accessories of his own grandeur, like his
stables or hothouses.
Rarely, despite the confidence that is established between them, has
Mr. Trenchard talked to Sibyl of his past life, of his youth never.
He tells her his prosy old stories of Calcutta society, of men with
whom he has had commercial dealings, of clever frauds and chicaneries
which he chuckles over as the _coups d’état_ of the trading world,
but of himself he speaks very little. Never, above all, has the fatal
name of Secretan crossed his lips; and Sibyl is longing to find out
the state of his feelings now, after this lapse of time, in relation
to that name.
If he had learned, in the lapse of years, to forgive the man he
injured and over-reached, if he had grown to feel some touch of
remorseful pity for the supplanted son, what a happiness it would be
to fall on her knees at his feet and confess the secret of her life,
to be pardoned for her duplicity, set free from the toil and trouble
of falsehood, able to call her proud young husband back to her side,
and to begin life again, honest in the sight of man and at peace with
God!
She is continually musing upon this question, and would give much for
an opportunity of sounding her uncle’s feelings. It comes one day
unawares, and she has no longer need to speculate or wonder about
Stephen Trenchard’s sentiments upon the subject of an old enemy.
It is a drowsy July afternoon. The summer is at its hottest, and Mr.
Trenchard and his niece are sitting on the lawn after that elaborate
meal, half breakfast, half luncheon, which the Anglo-Indian calls
tiffin. The lawn behind Lancaster Lodge is a delightful place on a
warm summer day. Three or four old elms, a spreading cedar, a Spanish
chestnut, and a couple of noble plane trees afford abundant shade.
The grass is smooth as velvet. Garden chairs, low and luxurious, are
dotted about under the trees. Newspapers, and Sibyl’s work-basket,
bestrew the light iron table. Changing lights and shadows flit and
flicker among the leaves, and Stephen Trenchard’s lean figure,
stretched to its full length, reposes at ease on a bamboo reclining
chair, a glass of potash water on one side of him, a cigar-case on
the other.
Sibyl is reading to him out of yesterday’s _Times_, when he
interrupts her with a sudden sigh, which is almost a groan.
‘What is the matter, uncle Stephen?’
‘You had better leave off,--even your soft voice irritates me.’
‘Your nervous headache not gone yet, uncle Stephen?’
‘Gone! It’s worse than ever. This English summer is more oppressive
than Indian heat, or it seems so to me at any rate.’
Sibyl searches in the little work-basket lined with blue satin,
fishes out a silver-stoppered scent-bottle, and is on her knees by
her uncle’s side in a moment, dabbing his yellow forehead with her
handkerchief steeped in eau de Cologne.
‘Thank you, my dear, that will do. I don’t care about it.’
He gives her an impatient little push, as disapproving so much fuss,
but not before she has disarranged one of those terrier-ear wisps
of iron-gray hair, and been startled by a scar which disfigures the
forehead beneath it, a long narrow seam, which crosses the temple
diagonally just below the roots of the Hair.
‘Uncle Stephen, were you ever in battle?’
‘Battle, child? What nonsense! Of course not.’
‘Or in a mutiny--or anything? How did you get this dreadful scar?’
‘From the foul blow of a scoundrel,’ answers Stephen Trenchard,
deadly pale. ‘From the man who lamed me for life. Did you never hear
your mother speak of Philip Secretan?’
‘Yes, uncle Stephen, I have heard her say that he treated you very
badly.’
‘Oh, she owned as much, did she? The world in general would have it
that I used him badly, that I had no right to the money his father
left me--a paltry thirty thousand; that I ought to have stood on one
side and said, “No, blood is thicker than water. You’ve been an idler
and a profligate--a bad son, the business would have gone to wreck
and ruin if it had been left to you to save it. I’ve toiled, I’ve
slaved, I’ve planned and plotted, I’ve borne the heat and burden of
the day; but still you are the son, and you’ve a right to come in at
the eleventh hour and rob me of my just reward, simply because you
are the son.” That’s what the world would have had me do, in the high
and mighty justice it is so good at dealing out for other people, and
so bad at yielding on its own account. Some went so far as to say
that the will was forged, and I was the forger. Luckily for me, old
Mr. Secretan had published his intention of disinheriting his son,
and making me his heir, the year of the great Manchester failures,
when his house tottered, and I had the luck to save it by a desperate
stroke of business.’
‘He was very fond of you, I suppose, this old Mr. Secretan?’ asks
Sibyl, breathlessly.
‘Fond of me? Yes, perhaps as much as it was in his nature to be fond
of anything, except money. He hated his son, knowing that he was a
spendthrift, and would squander every shilling the old man had toiled
for. He trusted me--he looked up to me. “If you were my son,” he used
to say, “I shouldn’t be tortured by the thought that this business
would go to ruin when I’m in my grave.” The day he said that for the
first time I made up my mind that I was to be his heir. Philip’s
follies and vices helped me, but my own patience and industry were
the chief agents.’
‘And there was a quarrel between you and Philip Secretan?’ asks
Sibyl, seated on the grass and plucking up little tufts of it
nervously, as she watches her uncle’s vindictive face with eager
eyes, reading doom there.
‘Yes, when the will had been read, and he knew the worst--he ought
to have expected it if he had a grain of sense,--Philip Secretan
followed me out into the grounds. His father’s house was a few miles
outside Manchester, a fine old place enough, but neglected,--the old
man was too fond of money to spend much on house or gardens. Philip
followed me to the back of the grounds, where there was a wild bit of
shrubbery and a hollow that had once been a stone quarry, and which
had been left, either because people didn’t care about the expense
of filling it, or because they fancied it was picturesque. In any
case it was dangerous, and an abomination that ought to have been
done away with. Well, I was close to the edge of this hollow--there
being a short cut to the Manchester road just beyond it--when Philip
overtook me. He didn’t spare me, I can tell you, for, apart from the
money question, there was an old sore between us. The girl he wanted
to marry had done me the honour to prefer his father’s confidential
clerk. She was a sensible girl, and saw the point to which our lives
were drifting. When he had called me reptile, and a few other equally
agreeable names, finding that he couldn’t sting me into retaliation
by abuse of that kind, he came close up to me and struck me across
the face with his open hand. “There, cur,” he cried, “and let’s
see if that will warm your fish’s blood into manly feeling.” I had
been in a burning rage all the time at his insolence, but had held
myself in check, in pity for his disappointment, which was hard to
bear, no doubt, richly as he had deserved it. I was a man, and the
shame of a blow was too much even for my sluggish temper, trained
to patience by long servitude. I closed with him, and we wrestled
together on that path by the quarry. Now mark the cowardice of this
fine gentleman, who boasted of his honour, and called me a sneak
and reptile! He was twice my match in weight and size, three times
my match in training, a practised athlete, a skilled boxer, every
muscle developed by exercise. To use his force against mine was
simply murder. I was the shuttlecock, and he the battledore. I had
a confused sense of blows raining on my head, as from a Nasmyth’s
hammer, coloured sparks dancing before my eyes, fire shooting out
of my brain, and then I was hurled bodily into the air, and fell
crashing through the brushwood into the quarry. It seemed like
falling from the highest cliff that breasts the Atlantic.’
‘How dreadful!’ says Sibyl, with a gasp.
‘It was deep in the night when I awoke, and the stars were shining.
I wondered where I was, and how I came to see the pole-star looking
straight down at me. Pain came before memory, acute, agonizing pain,
and then I knew that my leg had been shattered somehow. I lay in the
quarry till past eight o’clock next morning, suffering indescribable
torture. At last, however, some labourers heard my faint cries for
help, found me, and carried me to the nearest roadside inn, whence
I was conveyed to the Manchester Infirmary. Here I lay for five
months--the most miserable months of my life--while the fractured
bones united. It was a compound fracture, and for some time I was
threatened with amputation. When I rose from the hospital bed I
was lame for life. The broken leg had contracted in the process of
healing. Surgery had done its best for me, and had saved my leg; but
surgery left me a cripple; for which life-long injury I had to thank
Philip Secretan. I had to thank him for something else too, for the
girl who had pretended to love me chose this time for throwing me
over, and making a better match.’
‘And in those weary months, lying on your bed of pain, you learned to
forgive your enemy,’ suggests Sibyl, very gently.
‘Learned to forgive him! Yes, if forgiveness means undying hatred;
if forgiveness means the rankling memory of an unatonable wrong; if
forgiveness means to remember him and curse him every time a change
of wind brings back the old grinding pain in this crippled limb. If
that means forgiveness, Philip Secretan and his race are forgiven.’
‘His race?’ falters Sibyl ‘You could feel no rancour against his
children.’
‘I could. I do,’ answers the old man, vindictively. ‘Let no viper of
that blood cross my path. “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and
the children’s teeth are set on edge.” There’s Scripture for you. I
believe in that good old heathen creed one reads of in Greek legends,
of an accursed race. Of Philip Secretan’s after career I know little
or nothing. He had the devil’s luck as well as his own, and married
a woman with money, soon after his father’s death, but I never heard
what became of him. He may be living or dead. If he lives, let him
keep out of my way. If he has left children, my dearest hope is that
they are penniless, homeless, street Arabs, whose playground is the
gutter, whose ultimate destiny is the gallows.’
‘Uncle, for mercy’s sake----’
‘My curse light on him and his seed to the third generation! There,
child, don’t cry. You should have known better than to tempt me to
talk of Philip Secretan.’
CHAPTER XII.
LOVE, THEN, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE.
After that summer day under the plane trees, Sibyl utters the name
of Secretan no more. Hope of relenting on her uncle’s part there is
none. If Alexis could forgive the man who in his version of the story
came basely between father and son to cheat the son of his heritage,
and tricked the lover out of his mistress, Stephen Trenchard’s
stubborn soul would still remain unsoftened. Reconciliation between
these two was impossible. To retain her uncle’s favour, and inherit
a portion of his wealth, Sibyl must keep the secret of her marriage.
A painful part to play even for a mind not untrained in deceit; but
a necessary part, Sibyl tells herself. A difficult game, but for a
stake well worth the winning. She has no exact measure of her uncle’s
possessions. He has never talked to her of his investments, or told
her his income, but she has a fixed idea that his wealth is almost
without limit, that, like the Rothschilds or the Duke of Westminster,
he could scarcely state the sum-total of his riches if he were
asked for exact figures. His fortune is a rolling mass of gold, she
supposes, which grows larger at every turn, like a snowball. The
respect she sees paid to him by the elect of Redcastle establishes
her in this conviction of Stephen Trenchard’s importance, for she
knows that in this case importance can only mean money.
Lancaster Lodge is one of those handsomely finished, solidly built
houses which adorn the outskirts of every country town, and are like
temples dedicated to the genius of commonplace; houses in which the
butler’s pantry has been as carefully considered as the drawing-room,
and in which my lady’s boudoir is just as unlovely as John Thomas’s
attic under the leads. All the principal rooms are large and square
and lofty. The passages are broad and straight. The staircase is well
proportioned, ventilated and lighted to perfection. Impossible to
find fault with a house which, as the house agent proudly puts it,
possesses all the requirements for a gentleman’s family. Equally
impossible to feel the slightest interest in a mansion which neither
awes by its splendour nor attracts by its eccentricity, nor charms by
the lowlier graces of homeliness and simplicity. A coffin descending
that mathematical staircase would lose its awfulness in the pervading
atmosphere of commonplace. A cradle in any of those rooms would seem
to have lost its way, and wandered into a desert, where baby-life
could not endure. No sadly sweet fancies of domestic joys that are no
more entwine themselves about this dwelling of Stephen Trenchard’s.
It looks like what it is--an old bachelor’s house,--and Mr. Trenchard
could hardly have chosen a habitation more completely in harmony with
his own character.
The Redcastle upholsterer, a man whose stock in trade appears
to consist of two easy chairs and a sideboard--but who can do
great things at a push,--has furnished Lancaster Lodge with
appropriate splendour. All is solid and grandiose; dark crimson
draperies--velvet in the dining-room and library, satin brocade in
the drawing-room--subdue the garish light and give a sombre grandeur
to the rooms. Heavy oak furniture, thickest Turkey and Persian
carpets; varied spoil of carved black wood, ivory, porcelain, and
Bombay inlaid work, which Mr. Trenchard has brought home with him
from India,--everywhere the evidence of wealth.
To Sibyl the house seems simply perfect. Its luxury, its soft silent
splendour, contrast so pleasantly with the humble homeliness of her
uncle Robert’s old-fashioned, low-ceiled rooms; the stealthy-footed
footman, who spends so much of his time looking at nothing particular
out of the hall window, that he grows sedentary in his habits,
and fancies he has disease of the heart; the ponderous butler in
his glossy black suit and irreproachable white tie; the smart
maid-servants, in crisp starched cambric, tight-waisted, prim,
supercilious, as if Mr. Trenchard’s importance as the richest man in
Redcastle shed reflected glory upon them. The household has an air
of quiet dignity which impresses Sibyl wonderfully. Her soul reposes
itself in this land of fatness. She looks back at her life in Dixon
Street, its one room, its manifold privations, veritable starvation
hovering near like the wan spectre of approaching doom, and the
change seems too wonderful for anything but a dream. Does she think
of the husband who shared her poverty, whom she abandoned to endure
misfortune alone, deserted in the darkest hour of their wedded life?
When does she not think of him? Memory and regret are interwoven with
the fabric of her life. She consoles herself--justifies her desertion
of Alexis--by the idea that life must have been made easy to him by
their separation. As a married man with a helpless wife to provide
for, he was like a vessel waterlogged; relieved of that burden, he is
the same ship free to sail for any port in quest of fortune.
One night, in the solitude of her prettily furnished bedroom, all
rose-coloured chintz and shining maple, furnished especially for
a young lady’s occupation at Mr. Trenchard’s order, Sibyl takes
out an insignificant paper-covered book from among her most sacred
possessions, and opens it with a hand that trembles a little as
she sits alone in the lamplight. It is like opening the grave of
the past. That little sixpenny book is the diary she kept at Mrs.
Hazleton’s--her brief love story.
Tearfully, sorrowfully, she reads that record of her first and only
love, the story of a time when in singleness of mind and simplicity
she surrendered her heart to its conqueror.
‘I love him, I love him, I love him,’ she reads, almost blinded by
tears. She remembers the gush of passionate feeling with which those
foolish words were written. ‘And one little year after I wrote that
line I deserted him,’ she says to herself, wondering at her own
hardness of heart.
‘What a fool I must have been when I wrote this book!’ This is her
verdict as she closes the volume; yet she feels as if it were the
best and brightest part of her life in which those foolish pages were
written, and that she was happier in those days than she is now,
although she has become a personage in Redcastle.
She looks round her room wonderingly, glancing at the maple wardrobe
which contains so many pretty dresses, such a treasury of ribbons and
lace, and the frivolities women love.
‘Would I exchange all this, and the hope of a fortune from my uncle,
for the dismal second-floor schoolroom at Mrs. Hazleton’s, and the
freshness and sweetness of first love?’ she asks herself; and for a
moment it seems to her that could a good fairy give her back the days
that are no more, she would be a gainer by the exchange.
If she could know that her husband was safe and well, that he had
prospered since she left him, or that things had gone tolerably well
with him, she might feel more at ease than she does. But she knows
nothing of what has happened to him since the beginning of the year,
when he was seen at Redcastle, a dismal apparition; and of this
appearance of his she only hears by chance, a few days after her
perusal of her diary, from no less a person than her younger sister
Jane, otherwise Jenny.
Sibyl is spending the day with her uncle Robert, a visit which
ranks as a condescension now that she is on intimate terms with the
Stormonts, the Groshens, Dr. Mitsand, and, in a word, the _élite_
of Redcastle. She is received by her indulgent old uncle with all
honour. Hester prepares an extra good dinner, a dainty little loin
of veal, and a curry of yesterday’s roast mutton, followed by the
unwonted extravagance of a tart and a pudding. Marion sees this
relaxation of the economic bow with certain sniffings and bridlings,
indicative of suppressed indignation.
‘I never knew such a time-server as Hester,’ she remarks, as she
surveys the table, laid as for a feast, a clean tablecloth in the
middle of the week, almonds and raisins for dessert, an altogether
ruinous expenditure. ‘She didn’t make this fuss about you when you
were at home, but now she pays her court to the heiress elect.’
‘No more an heiress elect than you or Jenny, I should imagine,’
replies Sibyl, lightly. ‘I think it is pretty clear that uncle
Trenchard means to leave his money among us, though he has not said
as much.’
‘Yes, and the lion’s share to you, no doubt, though he has known me
longest,’ says Marion, snappishly.
‘A precious sight of his money I’m likely to get, when he never
so much as asks me to go and see him,’ observes Jenny, whereupon
both sisters swoop down upon her in denunciation of such a noun of
quantity as ‘a precious sight.’
‘Where do you pick up your language, child?’ cries Sibyl. ‘Not in the
streets surely, since Marion teaches you, and you have no occasion to
be running about.’
‘A fat lot Marion teaches me!’ says the incorrigible child. ‘She nags
at me for an hour and a half by the kitchen clock every morning, and
calls that education.’
‘Pray, in what edition of Lindley Murray do you find the verb “to
nag”?’ demands Marion, with the air of a pedagogue.
‘It’s as good a verb as any other. I nag, thou naggest, he or she
nags, generally she; or take it in Latin if you like, Nago, nagas,
nagat, nagamus, nagatis, nagant; first conjugation; perfect, nagavi.’
‘I’m afraid that Jane has rather an unruly temper,’ remarks Dr.
Faunthorpe, mildly.
‘Oh, of course it’s Jane. Marion is never aggravating. _You_ don’t
find me unruly, do you, uncle?’ Jane adds coaxingly, as she sidles
up to the gentle, easy-tempered little doctor, who has gone through
life placidly bearing other people’s burdens, and has never murmured
against a destiny that has weighted him with three orphan nieces.
Later in the afternoon Sibyl and Jane are alone together in the
garden, Marion having lost her temper at croquet, and left them to
themselves.
The little bit of grass upon which they play is not many sizes bigger
than the billiard-table at Lancaster House. The balls and mallets are
in the last stage of shabbiness, and chipped into icosahedrons.
‘You must both come to afternoon tea to-morrow, if it’s fine, and
play croquet on uncle Trenchard’s lawn,’ says Sibyl, condescendingly,
as if she were inviting them to her own house. Perhaps this
patronizing invitation has something to do with Marion’s loss of
temper five minutes afterwards, when Jenny sends her ball into a
distant cabbage bed. The sources of bad humour are more often complex
than simple.
It is a warm September afternoon, one of those days in which people
incline to sitting in gardens rather than walking on dusty high
roads. Sibyl sits on the grass as she was wont to do three years
ago, before she was anybody’s heiress. Jenny sprawls, with an
appalling display of legs and boots and rusty bootlaces, at her
sister’s side.
‘Now, Sibyl’ she says, eagerly, ‘tell us about the parties you go to.’
‘Pray, who is your companion?’ inquires Sibyl, with a contemptuous
droop of her heavy eyelids. ‘I see no one here but yourself.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ says Jane, staring.
‘No more do I when you say tell _us_.’
‘Oh, lor, as if it mattered! You’re as bad as Marion. Now do be nice,
Sib, for once in a way, and tell me what it’s like going to the
Stormonts. Only fancy you’re being asked there ever so many times;
and to think how often I’ve passed their door when we’ve been out for
walks, and the inside of it has seemed as far off as heaven; further,
indeed, for they say we’re sure to go to heaven if we’re good, but
we’re not sure of going to the Stormonts unless we’re rich. What’s it
like, Sib? do tell.’
‘Well, they live in a house, as you know, since you’ve seen the
outside of it, and they eat their dinner at a table, just as we do,
and they are rather stupid after dinner, and the ladies go up into
the drawing-room and talk about other people who are not there, and
a little about the minster, and the clergymen, and the schools, and
look at one another’s dresses. I can see them count the flounces on
my dress sometimes, and actually take the pattern of it under my
nose, which I consider an impertinence.’
‘Is it nice going to grand dinners?’ asks Jane, breathlessly.
‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s rather a mild kind of enjoyment. It doesn’t
quicken one’s pulse by a single throb. It isn’t like riding a good
horse, or seeing a race, or hearing a great singer, or even getting a
good break at billiards. There’s no excitement, no elation; but one
feels one is doing the right kind of thing, that this is what one was
born for.’
‘Are the dinners nice?’ inquires Jenny, licking her lips gluttonously.
‘They are very grand,’ replies Sibyl. ‘I don’t know that I should
care about _vol-au-vent à la Financière_, or _petites timbales de
gibier_ for a continuance, and with so many made dishes one has the
idea that one is eating up all the cold meat that has accumulated in
the last week; and one gets rather tired of seeing saddle of mutton
and boiled fowls everywhere,--for whether you call fowls _poulets à
la Béchamel_, or _chapons en demi-deuil_, they are very much the same
birds.’
‘Capons in half-mourning! That is funny. Do you know what _my_
favourite dinner is, Sib? Bullock’s heart with veal stuffing and
currant jelly. Do you ever have _that_ at Colonel Stormont’s?’
‘You must never mention such a dish, Jenny. It’s positively
revolting.’
‘But you used to like it, and liver and bacon, and sheep’s head with
parsley and butter. But never mind your dinners, tell me about your
beaux. Marion says that young Mr. Stormont was in love with her until
you lured him away.’
‘Marion is a ---- fool.’
‘You must have lots of lovers now that you go into such grand
society, Sib, because you are the beauty of the family, you know.
We all know that, and that’s what makes Marion so cross sometimes.
“I’m nobody,” she says; and then she squeezes her waist in another
half-inch, and fancies she has got the better of you. She’s awfully
proud of her figure, you know.’
‘You mustn’t talk disrespectfully of your elder sister, Jenny,’
remonstrates Sibyl, yawning. The plebeian two o’clock dinner and the
game of croquet in the afternoon sun have made her sleepy.
‘Then I won’t talk of her at all. Tell me about your lovers, Sib,
that’s a deal more interesting.’
‘Nonsense, child! I have no lovers.’
‘But you had one once. Yes, I saw somebody who was in love with you
once, though he must have gone down in the world dreadfully since you
had had anything to say to him, for he looked little better than a
beggar when I saw him.’
Sibyl has sunk into a reclining attitude, with half-closed eyes,
and is dropping into a gentle doze, but at this speech of Jane’s
she starts into a sitting posture again, and looks intently at her
sister, very pale.
‘What do you mean?’ she cries. ‘What was he like? Where did you see
him? When? Tell me all about it this instant.’
‘Ah, I see you know the person I speak of. You wouldn’t be in such a
way if you didn’t. How pale you are, Sibyl! Do you care for him very
much?’
‘Will you tell me what you are talking about, child?’ exclaims Sibyl,
passionately.
Jane begins her story with deliberation and importance.
‘I have always kept it a secret,’ she prefaces, ‘feeling that it
might get you into a row with uncle and Marion, and I’ve wanted to
tell you about it ever since you came home, but have never had a
chance of being alone with you till this afternoon.’
‘For goodness’ sake go on. What was the man like?’
‘Very handsome and noble-looking, though his clothes were dreadfully
shabby. His coat was shabbier than uncle’s, snuff and all, but it
looked as if it had been a more gentlemanly coat in its day; and as
for his poor boots, it made my heart bleed to see them. I wanted to
give him my new shilling, one uncle Robert gave me on Christmas
Day, for it was the day after New Year’s Day that I saw the man, you
know----’
‘I know nothing. Never mind how you came by the shilling.’
‘But he pushed away my hand gently, and said, “No, my dear, I’m not a
beggar, though I dare say I look like one.”’
‘Poor fellow,’ sighs Sibyl.
‘Oh, Sibyl, I did feel so ashamed of myself for having offered him
that shilling,--ever so much ashameder than he did,’ adds Jenny,
coining a comparative in the impetuosity of her speech.
‘Can’t you tell me about it straight--beginning at the beginning?’
demands Sibyl, impatiently.
‘Well, it was the day after New Year’s Day. I detest New Year’s Day.
Church in the morning, and dulness in the afternoon--and I came into
the garden to have a run all by myself, and to get out of Marion’s
way. It was a little after four, between the lights, you know, and a
wretchedly cold afternoon. Well, you know the lane at the bottom of
the garden----’
‘Of course,’ says Sibyl, with an involuntary glance in that
direction. Beyond the plot of lucerne there is a low wall, and
on the other side of the wall an accommodation road leading to a
neighbouring farm.
‘Well, he was there, looking over the wall, and he beckoned to me.
I was afraid at first, thinking he might be a robber, but as I had
nothing but my hoop to be robbed of I went up to the wall to look
at him, and then I saw somehow in a moment that he was a gentleman,
though I am sure you wouldn’t have given twopence for his hat.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He asked me if my name was Faunthorpe, and then if I had a sister
called Sibyl. “Yes,” says I, “but she’s away in London.” “Where?”
says he. “At Mrs. Hazleton’s, Lowther Street, Eccleston Square,” says
I. “Is that all you know about her?” says he. “What more can I know
about her?” says I. “She’s very happy, I believe, and she’s very
well,--at least, she was when uncle heard from her last.” “When was
that?” says he. “About three weeks ago,” says I. And then he sighed
heavily, and he looked so white and tired that I pitied him with all
my heart.’
‘Poor fellow,’ sighed Sibyl again.
‘Ah, you do know him then?’ cries Jane.
‘How can I tell? He didn’t tell you his name, I suppose.’
‘Not a bit of it. He asked me a lot of questions about you. Did we
expect you home soon? and so on, but I could tell him no more than
I had told him at first. You were at Mrs. Hazleton’s, and you were
likely to stay there, for anything I knew. I didn’t know that uncle
Robert wanted you to come home at that time. They don’t take _me_
into their confidence.’
‘You didn’t mention uncle Trenchard?’ asks Sibyl, with a scared look.
‘Of course not; why should I go and mention our rich uncle to a
wandering tramp that might go and steal his plate? At least, I don’t
mean that, for when once I had heard the poor thing speak it never
entered my mind that he was anything but a gentleman. Who is he,
Sibyl? Do tell me. Some one who fell in love with you in London; saw
you go in by Mrs. Hazleton’s carriage perhaps, and fell in love with
you at first sight, and followed you about everywhere, and neglected
his profession, and went to the dogs for your sake. Do tell me all
about him.’
‘How do I know who the man was?’ says Sibyl, absently. There is no
shadow of doubt in her mind. This wanderer was her husband, who had
come to Redcastle in quest of her.
‘I’ll describe him if you like. I can see him before me at this
moment. He is tall and dark, with rather large features, regular
features, but striking, not one of those straight-nosed waxwork faces
one sees in a hairdresser’s shop. His lower lip projects a little,
which gives him rather a scornful look till he smiles, and then he
has the kindest expression. “Dear child,” he said, and patted my
shoulder so kindly, “you are just a little like your sister when
you look up at me as you are looking now.” You won’t think that a
compliment, I know, Sib, but he said it. Who is he, Sib? Do tell me.’
‘I have not the remotest idea,’ replies Sibyl, with provoking
indifference.
‘Come now, you wouldn’t have been so agitated when I spoke about him
if you hadn’t guessed who he was.’
‘I was not agitated,’ says Sibyl, pretending to yawn.
‘Oh, very well, if you like to tell crammers, of course I can’t help
it. My experience of elder sisters is that they may break all the
commandments with impunity, and drive a coach and six through the
Catechism. I think they wash their hands of Christianity when they’re
confirmed.’
‘Jane, you are not only blasphemous, but you’re extremely impertinent
to _me_,’ exclaims Sibyl.
‘Well, if that’s all I get for keeping your secrets!’
‘That was wise of you at any rate, Jenny,’ says Sibyl, making haste
to relent. ‘Marion would have made no end of mischief out of nothing.
Never mind the man in the lane, dear. We’ll forget all about him. He
was some foolish fellow, no doubt. And if you’d like a new frock for
Sunday, Jenny, you shall have that pretty checked peach-coloured silk
of mine, and I’ll get Miss Eylett to make it up for you.’
‘Oh you dear!’ cries Jane, crimsoning with rapture. ‘That lovely
peach-colour! How sweet I shall look, if--’, with a doubtful look at
her well-worn boots--‘if uncle Robert will only give me new boots.’
‘If he won’t, I know somebody else who will. And, Jenny, if you could
contrive to keep your hair a little smoother, and your hands a shade
cleaner, you wouldn’t be the worst-looking child in Redcastle,’
says Sibyl, drawing her younger sister towards her, and bestowing a
condescending kiss upon that young person’s forehead. ‘Now mind when
you come to afternoon tea with me to-morrow you make yourself look as
nice as ever you can.’
‘I’ll do my best, Sib, but I know I shall feel shabby before those
stuck-up servants. When is uncle Trenchard going to have Marion to
stay with him again, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. That’s a question I can’t ask him, you see.’
‘I suppose not; but Marion’s rather cut up at his not inviting her,
you know. I say, Sib, I fancy Marion’s nose is out of joint since
you’ve come home.’
Sibyl smiles--a self-satisfied smile. She is very sure of her uncle’s
preference--knows quite well that he considers Marion something of a
simpleton, and not a little of a bore.
‘It isn’t my fault, Jenny, if uncle Trenchard likes me best,’ she
says, complacently.
The sisters go in to tea after this, Jenny with her arm round Sibyl’s
waist.
‘I say, Sib, when you’re married, and have a beautiful house of your
own, you’ll have me to stay with you sometimes, won’t you? I’ll be
good, and keep my hair tidy.’
‘I mean never to marry, Jane; at least, not during uncle Trenchard’s
lifetime. I mean to keep his house for him, always.’
‘But he may live to be ninety--twenty years to come,--and a nice
old woman you’d be by that time. Who’d have you then? You ought to
marry now, Sib, while you have such advantages; that’s what uncle
Robert says. Do be married soon, that’s a dear, and let me be your
bridesmaid--in white muslin over pink silk. Is Frederick Stormont
very nice?’
‘He’s absolutely detestable,’ replies Sibyl, and immediately without
rhyme or reason bursts into tears. She is thinking of the fond and
faithful husband who came to Redcastle in quest of her, and departed
hopeless.
Where is he? what is he doing? how has he fared since that bleak
January afternoon when he found his journey had been useless?
Starving, perhaps; or worse--dead. Slain by his own hand in some dark
hour of despair. Has she not reason to fear the worst of one she left
without hope?
Three days later, by the help of her old ally, Mrs. Hazleton’s
housemaid, Jane Dimond, Sibyl contrives to insert the following
advertisement in the second column of the _Times_ supplement:--
‘S. S. to Alexis.--You are not forgotten. In all I do I am
faithful to you and your interests. I look forward to our
reunion. Wait and hope, as I do. Write and tell me where you
are, and what you are doing.--Address, S. S., Post Office, Hale
Street, Pimlico.’
This advertisement is inserted three times, and the housemaid
inquires diligently at the Hale Street Post Office during the
following fortnight for a letter addressed to S. S. No such letter
comes, and Sibyl’s vague fears of evil are intensified by this
ominous silence.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SWEETS OF LIFE.
Not a word has been said by Mr. Trenchard as to his testamentary
intentions in reference to his three nieces, but in the mind of
Redcastle it is an established fact that Sibyl is to inherit the bulk
of her uncle’s property. The other two girls will get something,
no doubt, Mrs. Stormont remarks obligingly to Mrs. Groshen, the
banker’s wife, as those two ladies take their afternoon tea
together, ceremoniously, in the Stormont drawing-room, a spacious
apartment with a good deal, of white paneling, gold moulding, and
looking-glass, and not much besides in the way of furniture, a barren
tract of Brussels carpet, with an islet here and there in the shape
of sofa, ottoman, or coffee-table.
‘The other two girls will get something, of course--two hundred a
year each, perhaps: and a very nice income too, for young women not
likely to marry. But mark my words, Mrs. Groshen, Sibyl is the
heiress. Mr. Trenchard positively doats upon her.’
‘Do you think her pretty?’ asked the banker’s wife, languidly.
She has been esteemed a beauty in her time, on the strength of
an aquiline nose and a large pale blue eye, and she does not
particularly approve of these new lights.
‘Well, yes, decidedly pretty--in her peculiar style. Features rather
too sharp, perhaps, and a sad want of colour.’ The Miss Stormonts
rejoice in vivid complexions. ‘But she has fine eyes.’
‘Yes, fine eyes,’ assents Mrs. Groshen.
‘Though I cannot say I like their expression.’
‘No more do I,’ says Mrs. Groshen, warmly.
‘Perhaps the nicest thing about her is her manner. She has really
charming manners.’
‘Ye-es, very agreeable manners,’ drawls Mrs. Groshen.
‘If they were not so painfully artificial.’
‘That’s the very thing that struck me,’ says Mrs. Groshen,
brightening.
The banker’s wife rustles home in her silk attire, and tells Mr.
Groshen at dinner how the Stormonts are trying their uttermost to
catch Mr. Trenchard’s niece for their empty-headed son Frederick.
‘This Mr. Trenchard is very rich, I suppose?’ she says,
interrogatively.
‘Enormously. I wish he’d keep an account with us,’ replies the banker.
Sibyl accepts all the homage Redcastle can offer her, with a
tranquillity which raises her not a little in the estimation of the
_élite_. She takes Mrs. Stormont’s somewhat oppressive kindness as
a matter of course, and is unawed by the splendour of the Groshens’
dinner-table, which for plate, china, glass, floral decoration, and
hothouse fruit, takes precedence of other tables in Redcastle.
‘I don’t pretend to do things as Mrs. Groshen does,’ the Redcastle
matrons inform one another apologetically. ‘We can’t all be bankers.’
Mrs Stormont volunteers her services in escorting Sibyl to concerts,
and other local entertainments which a man of Mr. Trenchard’s age may
not care to patronize. Stephen Trenchard is quite willing that Sibyl
should take advantage of these friendly offers, but, to his surprise,
and perhaps gratification, the girl refuses.
‘I am very fond of music, uncle Trenchard,’ she says, ‘but I shall
not go out of an evening without you. That would be a pretty way of
keeping you company.’
‘But, my dear, there is some difference between seventy and twenty.
Crabbed age and youth cannot dwell together; or if they do, youth
must have a holiday now and then.’
‘You are not crabbed, and I am very happy with you,’ answers Sibyl.
‘Flatterer,’ exclaims Stephen Trenchard, not the less pleased.
‘Artful hussy,’ thinks Mrs. Stormont, and by-and-bye in the course of
that cutting and wounding which passes for conversation in Redcastle,
that lady informs Mrs. Groshen that Sibyl Faunthorpe is one of the
deepest girls it was ever her fate to encounter.
‘She’ll have that old man’s money, my dear, every sixpence,’ says
Mrs. Stormont, emphatically.
‘Then your Fred ought to have her.’
‘Why, you see, my dear, these Faunthorpes are people of no family.’
‘You mean that he has asked her and been refused,’ remarks Mrs.
Groshen, astutely.
‘I don’t think a Stormont is likely to find himself rejected by a
parish doctor’s niece,’ replies the colonel’s wife, with suppressed
indignation. ‘As to Mr. Trenchard’s fortune, it is nothing to boast
of after all. It has all come from trade.’
This is a thrust at the banking business.
‘I fancy that is the source of most people’s money now-a-days,’
returns Mrs. Groshen, blandly. ‘Professional men seldom seem to have
much.’
Hereupon the two ladies, having indulged in a few friendly passes on
their own account, return to the slaughter of the absent, and kiss
each other affectionately at parting.
Sibyl’s dissipations are therefore, by her own desire, confined to
those festivities to which Mr. Trenchard is bidden, and which take
the dignified and substantive form of dinners. No one could think of
inviting the master of Lancaster Lodge to ‘come in’ in the evening.
Dinners of first quality, A1 at Lloyd’s, are those to which Mr.
Trenchard is bidden, and very splendid are the banquets with which at
longish intervals he gratifies his friends in return. Wonderful is
the regard which Redcastle has for Mr. Trenchard, and its eagerness
to win and retain his friendship. It is not to be supposed that the
_élite_ have any expectation of profiting in a direct manner by his
wealth. They have none. But they like to adorn their table with a
rich man. They like to put him forward as one of their best friends,
and to know that less privileged people are smitten with envy. They
invite him very much for the same reason that they buy costly fruit
out of season, and waxen blossoms from the hothouse instead of
homely roses ripened in the sun. He reflects honour and glory upon
themselves. It is a distinction to be on intimate terms with so much
money. Mr. Trenchard’s Redcastle friends brag about his wealth as
if it were their own, smack their lips as they tell each other his
income, and that he has never less than fifty thousand at call, in
case some sudden opportunity for a stroke of business should crop up
in Calcutta. Has Stephen Trenchard told his new friends the amount
of his income, or the sum he keeps uninvested? Hardly, for he is the
most reticent of men as to his own affairs. But Redcastle has a knack
of evolving facts about other people’s business out of its inner
consciousness.
A year has slipped away, unawares almost it seems to Sibyl, despite
lurking pangs of remorse, silent hours given to regret. Life at
Lancaster Lodge is such an easy thing. It is so pleasant to have
everything one desires, to be praised and petted, and invited here,
there, and everywhere, and to refuse the most flattering invitations
upon the last fashionable absurdity in note-paper. Pleasant, in a
word, to be Miss Faunthorpe of Lancaster Lodge, instead of Miss
Faunthorpe of nowhere. There is something of the lotus-eater’s dreamy
idlesse assuredly in this reposeful existence at Lancaster Lodge.
Conscience has been lapped to sleep before the year is out, and Sibyl
has persuaded herself that Alexis Secretan has carved his way to
independence somehow or other, and is getting on very well indeed in
some distant quarter of the globe, whence he will doubtless return by
some happy conjuncture of events soon after uncle Trenchard’s death,
which calamity in the course of nature will come to pass in a few
years.
‘And then we shall both be amply rewarded for the sacrifice we have
made in this separation,’ muses Sibyl, as if the separation had been
a voluntary one on her husband’s side as well as her own.
Mr. Trenchard takes life tolerably easily considering that he has
his own way in everything, an indulgence which acts as an irritant
upon some dispositions. He is feared and obeyed in his own house,
flattered and caressed out of it. His servants work for him as no
other man’s servants work, and obey, and tremble at his footstep. He
accepts all that Redcastle can give him, dines out a good deal among
the _élite_, tells his prosy old Indian stories again and again,
to listeners who always laugh in the right places. He enjoys the
homage offered to his wealth, and chuckles over the weakness of his
flatterers as he drives home with his niece.
‘If my name were in the _Gazette_ next Wednesday morning, before
Wednesday night I should be friendless,’ he says; ‘and the people we
have dined with this evening would be gloating over my downfall.’
‘Oh, uncle! they would be sorry, surely,’ exclaims Sibyl, more for
the sake of conversation than from any belief in the good-heartedness
of her friends.
‘Sorry that they had been taken in--that they had mistaken a poor man
for a rich one, no doubt; but for me, not a whit. Society in a place
like Redcastle is made up on the co-operative system--is a club to
which a man is admitted upon certain understood conditions. The first
of these is that he should be well off.’
‘Luckily you are never likely to put our friends to the test,’ says
Sibyl.
‘Of course not. And in the meanwhile there’s no harm in calling them
friends. One name does as well as another when you are talking of
unrealities.’
The year has gone, and Marion has not been asked to stay with her
uncle Trenchard--a fact which she resents bitterly, and ascribes
to double-dealing on the part of Sibyl. She has been at Lancaster
Lodge tolerably often, but only as Sibyl’s visitor, and although
she accepts all Sibyl’s invitations, it is almost unbearable to be
invited and patronized by a sister. Sibyl has established herself as
Mr. Trenchard’s adopted daughter. He coolly declares that she suits
him better than Marion, and that she is to keep his house till she
marries.
‘I suppose I must have made myself very disagreeable to him in
the three months I spent here,’ remarks Marion one bright April
afternoon, digging her croquet ball into the ground with misused
energy. She has come to spend the afternoon with Sibyl.
‘No, dear, I don’t think it was so bad as that,’ replies Sibyl,
graciously; ‘but you didn’t succeed in making yourself agreeable to
him.’
‘I know I made myself a perfect slave,’ complains the injured Marion;
‘toasting his newspapers, and running for his slippers, and peeling
walnuts for him till my fingers were black. I’m sure I don’t know
what he wants--the nasty old thing!’
‘Now really, Marion, I can’t consent to hear the best of uncles
called names,--on his own croquet lawn, too.’
‘Very much the best of uncles for you, but give me uncle Robert.’
‘Well, my dear, you’ve got him. Haven’t I left you in undisturbed
possession of our paternal uncle?’
‘All I can say is that it is positive injustice,’ murmurs Marion, as
the game proceeds.
Frederick Stormont strolls in five minutes afterwards and takes a
mallet, whereupon the sisters become all smiles and graciousness.
He goes in to afternoon tea with them, and they sit on the crimson
brocade sofas sipping orange pekoe out of Indian teacups, waited on
by the most accomplished of footmen, and discussing the petty gossip
of Above and Below Bar. An empty life assuredly. But it is pleasant
to sit in a handsome room, almost an indoor garden in its abundance
of choicest flowers, a sunlit lawn beyond the open windows; pleasant
to be dressed in the last fashion; pleasant to be admired, even
though the eyes of the admirer are pale in hue and porcine in shape;
pleasant to feel that in life’s eager race one has shot ever so far
ahead of one’s younger sister. So, at least, feels Sibyl as she
accepts Mr. Stormont’s vapid homage, and allows Marion to be useful
as her foil.
Mrs. Groshen is strictly incorrect in her conjecture about this young
man’s wooing. Frederick has not been rejected by Mr. Trenchard’s
niece. He has not yet ventured to propose to her, and when pushed
hard upon the subject by his father, he always asks for time.
‘I think she likes me,’ he says complacently, ‘but, by Jove, you
know it doesn’t do for a man to hurry that kind of thing; you’re so
impatient, you see, you want a fellow to round the Cape before he’s
got across the Bay of Biscay. Miss Faunthorpe has a good deal of
reserve about her and that kind of thing, and she’s just the sort of
girl to throw over a fellow who proposed to her before she’d quite
made up her mind about liking him.’
‘She’s a long time making up her mind about you,’ replies the
colonel, pensively. ‘And upon my word, you know, Fred, if you don’t
marry a woman with money you’ll have to do something for yourself.
Things can’t go on like this much longer. By Jove, you know, you’ll
have to emigrate. I don’t see that there’s anything you could do
in England. You’re too old for the army, or the navy, or the civil
service; you’ll have to try the colonies.’
‘I might do something, kangaroo-shooting in New Zealand,’ says
Frederick, meditatively.
‘Hang it, sir! a man can’t get his livin’ kangaroo-shootin’,’ roars
the colonel. ‘You’d better marry Trenchard’s niece.’
‘She’s a very jolly girl,’ says Fred, vaguely. He would have called
Electra or Antigone, Joan of Arc or Mary Stuart, jolly. He knows no
higher praise to bestow on the woman of his choice.
CHAPTER XIV.
MAKING READY FOR VICTORY.
The fair spring days flit by; the violets and primroses, bluebells
and wind-flowers, fade in the copses, unseen, unknown, uncared for,
save by a few peasant children; the white blossoms of the pears--the
pinky bloom of the apples--have drifted away on the light west winds
like summer snow; ferns uncurl their tender fronds in thicket and
lane, and stand up to hail the summer. The cuckoo’s last call dies
in the silence of the wood, the skylark’s clear carol rings out
above the tall green corn. Summer has come--summer has come--and the
little children of Redcastle--the children of the commonality, at
least--wander far afield under the midday sun, and lose themselves
in distant woods, and drain the cup of summer joys to the dregs. The
children of the _élite_ regard summer as a period in which they wear
starched frocks, find French and German grammar more than usually
oppressive, and entertain hopes of going to the sea-side.
Sibyl welcomes June and the roses with a languid greeting. That
smooth, easy life has begun to pall a little on Stephen Trenchard’s
niece. Despite its pleasantness, it is at best a monotonous
existence, and youth’s eager spirit revolts against monotony. Not
willingly would Sibyl confess even to herself that she is tired of
Lancaster Lodge and Redcastle dinner parties, Redcastle compliments,
Redcastle life altogether.
She wishes that her uncle would extend the circle of his
acquaintance, yet is obliged to admit that it would not be easy for
him to do so at Redcastle. The county people have not called upon
Mr. Trenchard. Aloof in their fastnesses among the hills and moors,
the county people refuse to bow to the golden calf, hug themselves
in their social privileges, and do not recognise the fact of an old
gentleman having made money in India as a reason why they should
go out of the beaten track to take notice of him. From their lofty
region of territorial estate they look down with an equal disdain
upon professional and commercial people who live in a town and call
five acres of garden and paddock _land_. Stephen Trenchard’s million
is nothing to them, or if they think of his wealth at all, it is with
resentment, as a sign of the times, and an irrefutable proof that
England is going to the dogs.
Perhaps it is the very fact of the county people’s exclusiveness
which makes Sibyl regard them with a certain amount of interest.
Those big broad-shouldered young men she has seen ride past her
window in the hunting season, sitting their horses much more easily
than Frederick Stormont sits his chair, glorious in ‘pink’ and
buckskins, loud voiced, large whiskered, seem to her of a different
race from young Groshen, or young Stormont, or Dr. Mitsand’s
pale-faced spectacled son, whose manly vigour has degenerated into
brains, Mr. Twells the curate, or Mr. Jewson the lawyer. To her
fancy there is something grand about these sons of the soil, a rough
nobility, an outspoken contempt for the petty conventionalities which
constitute the small despotism of Redcastle society. _Cæsar est supra
grammaticam._ The county people are above good manners--that is to
say, good manners as understood in Redcastle.
The town and the county meet occasionally in the hunting-field, where
the county looks on with a smile at some of the town’s feats in
horsemanship, leaves the town three fields behind for the most part,
and now and then deposits the town in ditches or hangs it out to dry
on a stiff bullfinch.
Twice in every year town and county meet on equal ground. Redcastle,
small and obscure as it is in the eyes of the outer world, boasts a
racecourse, and as pretty a course in a small way as any in England.
Less than a mile out of the town, on that broad open common known as
Redcastle Woods, gleam the white posts of the course, and the white
walls of the stand, a permanent and substantial building. Redcastle
has its spring and summer meeting, two days on each occasion--and
just the merriest two days in that part of the world. Granted that
horses of much weight or _prestige_ rarely appear at Redcastle;
the fact only leaves the ground open to the horses of the local
aristocracy, and makes the races so much the more interesting to
Redcastle itself.
Sibyl has never seen a race in her life, and it was not without a
struggle that she declined Mrs. Stormont’s invitation to join her
party at the spring meeting. Now comes the summer meeting, and
another invitation from the leader of Redcastle society.
‘Rose and Violet,’ the dear girls are named after those favourite
flowers--five feet ten each of them, and with the complexions of
cookmaids;--‘Rose and Violet will be so disappointed if you refuse
to join our party, my dear Sibyl. Of course I say nothing of Fred’s
feelings.’
‘Why don’t you go with them, child?’ asks Mr. Trenchard, when Sibyl
reads him the letter, laughing as she reads.
‘I don’t care for pleasures that you cannot share, uncle.’
‘Nonsense, my dear! I could share this if I liked. For my part, I
could never understand what people could see in a race, unless as a
hazardous investment with the possibility of enormous returns. I can
fancy a bookman enjoying the races in a business-like way; but for
people to sit in their carriages to look on at other people winning
or losing, and call it pleasure, that passes my comprehension.’
‘I should like to see a race for once in my life,’ says Sibyl,
languishing for any novel sensation that may ruffle the mill-pond of
her existence.
‘Then write and accept Mrs. Stormont’s invitation, my dear.’
‘You won’t think me unkind for going without you?’
‘I should think you much more unkind if you wanted me to go with you.’
So it is settled. Sibyl tells her dear Mrs. Stormont that she is
charmed to accept her kind invitation, and summons Miss Eylett
to immediate counsel. She has ever so many pretty dresses in her
wardrobe, but she must have something new for this occasion, with a
view to crushing dear Violet and Rose by the exhibition of a dress
they have never seen before. The invitation has been given a week
before the races, so there is time for preparation. The council is a
solemn one, and by the intensity of Sibyl’s desire to look her best
may be measured her hatred of dear Rose and Violet.
‘Now mind, Miss Eylett,’ she begins, after she has looked through
_Le Follet_ and pronounced all the illustrations ‘hideous,’ ‘I must
have nothing that can possibly look like a shopkeeper’s wife’s Sunday
gown--no flaming pink or blue that people can see a mile off----’
‘Mauve, or a rich voylet, now,’ suggests Miss Eylett, in her
persuasive voice.
‘My dear Eylett, mauve and violet are the colours vulgar people
choose when they want to be genteel.’
‘A sweet French grey.’
‘Give me a housemaid’s afternoon gown at once.’
‘A cinnamon brown.’
‘A doctor’s wife’s dinner dress. No, I must have some pale indistinct
colour softened with a cloud of India muslin. A dress which looks
nothing particular at a distance, but which is fit for a princess
when you come to look into it. Mr. Trenchard gave me an embroidered
Indian muslin, which will be just the thing, over a pale maize corded
silk,--you know the shade I mean, straw-colour shot with apricot.’
Sibyl opens a huge camphor chest, in which she keeps her treasures,
and displays a muslin dress fine as a cobweb, and covered with
embroidery.
‘Exquisite!’ exclaims Miss Eylett; ‘what taste you have, Miss
Faunthorpe!’
She would have been just as enthusiastic had Sibyl suggested
pickled-cabbage colour, picked out with pea-green.
‘And you must make me a bonnet exactly to match the dress.’
‘Of course, Miss Faunthorpe, I’ll go round to Carmichael’s at once,
and see if they’ve got the colour; and if they haven’t I’ll take the
three o’clock train to Krampston.’
This question settled, Sibyl feels easy in her mind, and looks
forward to next week with pleasure. The summer is at its height--mid
July,--and a delicious July, warm, dry, ripening roses and ripening
corn, swelling the peaches on the wall, and reddening the apples in
the orchard--all the land basking in the sun, and Redcastle High
Street a place to look at blinkingly between two and five in the
afternoon, and a burning ploughshare to walk upon. Marion and Jenny
come toiling along the sun-baked pavement in the very hottest hour
of the afternoon to visit their prosperous sister,--Jane splendid in
the peach-coloured silk and new boots, and a hat that is too small
for her large round head, with its thick brown hair in curls that no
application of the hair-brush will reduce from their disorder to the
smoothness of civilization.
Sibyl receives her sisters languidly, under the plane trees,
exhausted by her interview with Miss Eylett. Marion’s temper is not
improved by the warm walk, or by the labour of getting Jenny up in a
style befitting Lancaster Lodge.
‘There never was such a troublesome child,’ she complains as she
sinks into a rustic arm-chair, conscious that her face is the colour
of a boiled lobster, while Sibyl, in cream-coloured Indian silk, and
a turquoise blue sash, is looking divinely pale. ‘Look at her legs.
She has grown out of that frock already; and as for ever keeping her
decently dressed, I defy you. There’s the print of a slice of bread
and butter on the front breadth, and smears of marmalade all over the
sleeves, though she’s only worn the frock on Sundays.’
‘Let her wear it every day and wear it out,’ says Sibyl, generously;
‘she shall have another for best.’
‘Oh, you dear!’ cries Jenny; ‘but if you knew what a life Marion
leads me when I’ve a good frock on you might think it a greater
charity never to give me one.’
‘You ungrateful minx,’ exclaims Marion, ‘didn’t I stand half an hour
this broiling afternoon doing your hair?’
‘Pulling it, you mean,’ responds Jenny. ‘If you’d combed it with a
hay-fork and brushed it with a bush harrow you couldn’t have hurt me
more.’
‘There’s gratitude!’ ejaculates Marion, pointing to the offender.
‘_My_ idea of gratitude is thankfulness for things we want,’ reasons
Jenny, who is good at argument. ‘I didn’t want my hair pulled.’
‘Well, Sibyl,’ says Marion, ‘is uncle Trenchard going to the races?’
Everybody thinks and talks of the races at this time. It is the one
subject of conversation in Redcastle. A rare thing for Redcastle to
have so much as one subject of conversation; as a rule, the town
contrives to be conversational about nothing.
‘No, uncle Trenchard hates races. I am going with the Stormonts.’
‘Indeed! I thought you wouldn’t go anywhere without your uncle.’
‘No more I would in an ordinary way, but I felt a kind of interest in
the races. One hears so much of them.’
‘I feel a kind of interest in them too,’ says Marion, with an injured
air. ‘I’ve been hearing about Redcastle races ever since I left
school, and yet, living so near, I’ve never seen them. Uncle Robert
has got a pony that would take us, but he has not got the spirit.
You might have asked uncle Trenchard to let you take us all in his
barouche. I dare say uncle Robert would have gone if you’d taken him.’
Sibyl looks doubtful as to the delight of such a family party.
‘I’ve accepted Mrs. Stormont’s invitation, you see,’ she replies,
apologetically.
‘Oh yes, of course, catch you putting yourself out of the way for
anybody! Another girl in your position might have thought of her poor
relations. What are you going to wear?’
Sibyl describes the costume which she and Miss Eylett have arranged
that morning. Poor Marion listens in an agony of envy.
‘What a lot of money uncle Trenchard must give you!’ she exclaims.
‘No, he doesn’t give me much, but he allows me to keep an account at
Carmichael’s.’
‘Well,’ sighs Marion, ‘I would give a year of my life to go to the
races this day week.’
‘What a pity our lives are not transferable like railway stock,’ says
Sibyl, airily. She is not deeply moved by Marion’s piteous condition.
Her mind is occupied with a prophetic vision of her triumphs next
Wednesday. She will see and be seen by the county. That idea is more
inspiring than the prospect of a day spent with the Stormonts, whom
she knows by heart, or even the privilege of beholding Mrs. Groshen’s
raiment, which is sure to be resplendent and of the very latest
fashion, however hideous in the abstract and individually unbecoming
that fashion may be.
CHAPTER XV.
TOWN AND COUNTY.
A curious thing happens that evening after dinner. It is Mr.
Trenchard’s habit to read the daily papers at his ease in the
drawing-room as soon as he has withdrawn from the dinner-table;
or, if he is idly disposed, Sibyl reads to him, and beguiles him
into placid slumber. This evening he reads the papers for himself,
beginning, as usual, with the _Times_, which he studies profoundly.
He sits in his easy chair by one open window. Sibyl yawns over a
novel at another. Rather dreary these summer evenings at Lancaster
Lodge, when twilight’s purple shadows rise ghost-like among the
trees on the lawn, and the gates are closed upon the outer world.
Welcome even such commonplace interruption as the advent of Frederick
Stormont, and an adjournment to the billiard-room.
Sibyl looks up from her book with a start at a sudden movement of
her uncle’s. What was that half-stifled exclamation which sounded
so like an oath? Stephen Trenchard is standing up, with the paper
crumpled in his right hand, staring blankly at his niece. She goes to
him, looks at him in frightened interrogation; but he neither sees
nor hears her. Is this some kind of seizure,--epileptic, paralytic?
She thinks so, tremblingly, for a moment, before Mr. Trenchard’s keen
black eyes resume their power of vision and look into hers.
‘Dearest uncle, what is the matter?’
‘Nothing that need concern you, Sibyl. A friend, an old friend of
mine, dead in India. The announcement of his death shocked me, that’s
all. I ought not to have been surprised. At my age a man must expect
old friends to drop off. Go back to your book, my dear. There is no
reason for you to be agitated.’
Sibyl looks wonderingly at the paper in her uncle’s hand. It is not
the supplement. That, with its births, marriages, and deaths, lies on
the carpet unopened. She remembers that the deaths of distinguished
people are sometimes recorded in the body of the paper, and this
friend of her uncle’s is doubtless a person worthy of an obituary
paragraph.
‘I am so sorry,’ she says sympathetically.
‘So am I. But it was to be expected. Go back to your book, child.’
Perceiving that sympathy is not required, Sibyl returns to her seat
by the distant window. Marion would have hung about her uncle for a
quarter of an hour bemoaning his loss and offering stale crumbs of
consolation.
Sibyl hears the door shut ten minutes afterwards, and looking up,
sees that Stephen Trenchard has vanished. She hastens to look for the
newspapers, eager to find out all she can about her uncle’s departed
friend; but Mr. Trenchard has taken the papers with him, and when
she searches for them next day in his study and in other likely
places, they are not to be found. Nor does Mr. Trenchard reappear
that evening. The butler brings Sibyl a message at tea-time to the
effect that his master has letters to write, and will take tea in his
study. So that particular infusion of hyson with which Mr. Trenchard
is in the habit of irritating his nerves is carried to the study on a
salver, and Sibyl is left to spend her evening alone.
There are times, on just such an evening as this, when memory recalls
that one room in Dixon Street, Chelsea, and his company whose easy
temper and natural gaiety of heart could brighten deepest poverty
with an occasional ray of light.
‘If I could have borne poverty as well as he, we might have struggled
on together to the end,’ she thinks, with a touch of remorse. ‘But
then what a pity it would have been to lose uncle Trenchard’s
fortune! How ghastly pale he looked to-night, poor dear man!’
Mr. Trenchard seems a little out of sorts for the next few days,
not quite so keen and far-seeing, so exacting or high-handed in
his household as it is his wont to be. He has a preoccupied air, a
thoughtful look, and is evidently much concerned by the loss of that
departed friend whose name he has not mentioned.
Sibyl wonders at this a little, never having heard Mr. Trenchard talk
of any intimate friend in India. He has told numerous stories of
Calcutta society, of trade and chicanery in that palatial city; but
of friendship, of intimate congenial companions, he has not breathed
a word. Nor in the year and a half of his residence at Redcastle has
a single Anglo-Indian acquaintance visited him. Impossible to imagine
a man more independent of friendship, yet he seems cut to the quick
by the death of this distant friend, and is slow to recover his
equanimity.
Mrs. Stormont calls about three days before the races, and finds
Mr. Trenchard and his niece on the lawn, the gentleman asleep, or
meditating, his countenance shrouded by an orange-coloured bandanna,
like a new veiled prophet, the lady working point lace at the rate of
a stitch a minute.
The kind soul has come to talk about the races.
‘I wish you could be induced to join us, dear Mr. Trenchard.’
‘You’re very good, my dear madam, but the thing is not in my way.
I hardly know whether a horse should have four legs or six. If you
were to show me a six-legged animal I doubt if I should remark the
redundancy.’
‘And yet you have the finest carriage horses in Redcastle.’
‘Because I did not choose them myself, madam.’
‘I shall call for you at half-past twelve, my dear,’ says Mrs.
Stormont, turning to Sibyl. ‘Fred is going to ride. I shall hire
Shrub’s landau and pair. My poor dear ponies would be frightened to
death on a racecourse.’
Shrub is the proprietor of the George Hotel and livery stables and
has the honour of ministering to the _élite_ on all state occasions.
‘Why hire Shrub’s landau when my barouche is at your service?’ asks
Mr. Trenchard. ‘I shall be glad to give that idle coachman of mine a
day’s work.’
‘My dear Mr. Trenchard, you are too kind. Such an idea never entered
my head.’
‘Odd if it didn’t,’ thinks Sibyl, ‘when you are always making use of
the carriage in some way or other.’
The Stormonts have allowed Sibyl to drive them a good deal during
the last few months, to the infinite relief of the ponies and the
buck-basket, both of which institutions are slightly the worse for
wear. You may get fifteen years’ good work out of a pony, but when he
approaches his majority his powers are apt to wane.
Mrs. Stormont allows herself to be entreated, and finally yields
gracefully, and with an airy coquetry, but only on condition that Mr.
Trenchard shall dine with them on the race day. This he promises,
with certain reservations.
‘If I feel myself up to the mark, I’ll come,’ he says, ‘but I have
not been particularly well lately.’
‘Uncle Trenchard has lost an old friend in India,’ explains Sibyl,
and seeing her uncle’s impatient frown, is sorry she has made the
remark.
‘Indeed!’ exclaims Mrs. Stormont, thirsting for information. ‘In
the civil service or the army? The colonel has so many old Indian
friends.’
‘My friend was neither in the civil service nor the army,’ says Mr.
Trenchard, and says no more.
Mrs. Stormont is disappointed, but she has got the carriage, which
was the object of her visit, so she drifts off into the usual
Redcastle talk. ‘Have you seen the Groshens lately?’ and ‘Did you
hear that Dr. Mitsand has been very ill?’ and so on; with which
interesting discourse she beguiles the next half-hour.
The race day comes with the calendar, and a glorious day, hot blue
sky, roads white with dust, grass brown and slippery, bad for the
horses, opine the learned in such matters. The grand stand is
gleaming in the sun, flags are flying, the town is all astir, flies
are driving to and fro between station and racecourse, with visitors
from Krampston, people who smell of commerce and dockyard, oakum and
tar, a rough lot in the estimation of genteel Redcastle. At half-past
twelve the Trenchard barouche calls for Mrs. Stormont and her two
daughters; Sibyl has taken her place in it already. She wishes to sit
with her back to the horses, but this Mrs. Stormont will not allow,
and after a little polite skirmishing she takes her place next that
lady, the Miss Stormonts side by side on the opposite seat, which
they fill to overflowing. On the way to the course the ladies have
time for a silent review of each other’s apparel. Rose and Violet
are in washed muslins and home-made bonnets. Mrs. Stormont wears her
dove-coloured moire, which is an institution in Redcastle, and as
well known as the town clock.
‘Here comes Mrs. Groshen’s carriage. I suppose she is going to crush
us with some new finery,’ says Rose, with a venomous look at the
maize silk and India muslin.
‘I hope it will be in a little better taste than usual,’ remarks
Violet, who is of a more calculating temper than her sister. ‘What
lovely embroidery that is of yours, Sibyl! I can’t help noticing it.’
Frederick joins the party presently, on a brute of a gray horse,
whose ownership he participates with young Jewson, the lawyer’s son.
The joint animal, having very little mouth to speak of at the best,
and being ridden on opposite principles by his two proprietors, is
about as manageable as a watering-place donkey. Frank Jewson, who
is the better equestrian of the co-owners, boasts that he rides
with his knees. Fred Stormont hangs on by the reins, and makes the
wretched quadruped’s mouth his fulcrum. He is not happy on horseback
himself, or the cause of happiness to his steed, and the joint
proprietorship is an extravagance which he can ill afford. But he
feels that the horse gives him social status, and endures bravely.
The beast is consistent, and starting with a fixed idea that the
sooner he gets back to his stables the better for his own well-being,
tugs desperately at every turning in the endeavour to make a short
cut home, and if confronted in his straight course with any object
which he dislikes, wheels sharp round, and sets off at a lively trot
stable-wards. The first half-hour of Mr. Stormont’s ride is one
prolonged tussle with the gray, which, in the pride of their hearts,
the joint proprietors have christened Flying Dutchman.
‘The Dutchman is awfully fresh to-day, Fred,’ remonstrates Rose,
when the gray has backed into the landau half a dozen times, in his
efforts to go up every side street or alley; ‘hadn’t you better try
him on the curb?’
‘I think I am riding him on the curb,’ says Fred, looking doubtfully
at his reins, which are in an inextricable muddle, ‘the fact is
Jewson spoils his mouth. Yah, you beast, what’s the matter now?’
as the Dutchman, taking objection to a very small child in a white
pinafore, gathers all his legs together, collapses, and scrambles
frantically across the street, with a noise as of a detachment of
cavalry.
‘Is that a fit?’ asks Sibyl, when Mr. Trenchard’s horses have
recovered from their consternation at this manœuvre.
‘No, it’s only a shy. He cannot stand a perambulator.’
‘Nor a woman in a red cloak, nor a baker’s cart, nor a
washing-basket, nor a chimney sweep, nor a heap of stones, nor an
organ,’ says Rose, indignantly; ‘I never knew such a beast. He’ll
have your life some day, Fred, I feel convinced.’
‘He’s more than half thoroughbred,’ says Frederick, leaning over to
pat the animal’s neck--an attention which the Dutchman resents by a
sudden slouch forward, and a furious shake of his head, whereby he
all but precipitates Fred upon the paving stones.
‘Are you fond of riding?’ asks Sibyl, as the horseman pulls himself
together, scarlet after his struggles with his steed, and settles
into a jolting trot beside the barouche.
‘P--p--passion--ate--ly,’ says Fred, the syllables jerked out of him
piecemeal by the gray.
‘But that seems rather an uncomfortable horse to ride.’
‘He’s a little fidgety in the town, but he’s splendid when you get
him on the turf. You should see him in a stretching gallop across the
grass.’
Mr. Stormont omits to state that in these stretching gallops he is
entirely at the Dutchman’s mercy, and suffers abject terror.
They turn out of the Market-place presently, into a broad lane
leading to the woods--a lane in which there are nice old houses on
one side, and orchards on the other, and at the top of this lane they
come out upon that open stretch of greensward, with a hollow full
of hazel bushes, hawthorn, and blackberry here and there, which is
dignified with the name of Redcastle Woods.
Yonder towers the stand, white in the sunshine, flags blue, red, and
yellow, fluttering gaily, the oval course on the southern side of a
slope, and a fringe of carriages and smartly dressed people--a simple
rustic racecourse, with its local gentry, and sprinkling of citizens
from busy Krampston.
The Stormont barouche takes its position among the great ones of the
land, and by good luck finds itself in the very lap of the county.
The magnates of Redcastle are six carriages off, Mrs. Groshen becking
and nodding at her friends, gorgeously arrayed in a brilliant mauve
silk, which glistens in the sun, and a bonnet loaded with feathers.
There are many greetings between Mrs. Stormont and her
neighbours--for the Stormonts occupy the border line of Redcastle
society, and are graciously regarded by the county families. Loud
‘how d’ye do’s’ are uttered by the occupants of a tall coach next
door to the barouche, two young men and two young women are seated on
the box--the men in homespun tweed, the women in brown holland and
brown straw hats. Two grooms in dark green, and mahogany tops, are in
attendance.
‘Are we going to have some good racing, Sir Wilford?’ asks Mrs.
Stormont, radiant at finding herself in such good company, and Mrs.
Groshen afar off like Dives. The bigger of the gray men answers in a
loud good-natured voice, dropping lightly down from his perch, and
coming close to the barouche.
‘Not much fun, I’m afraid; wretched lot of leather platers. Going to
speculate, Miss Stormont? Better put something on Stagheen for the
Cup. Sure to win.’
He addresses himself to the fair Rose, shaking hands with her the
while, but he looks at Sibyl. That delicate clear-cut face, with its
brown eyes, is strange to him, and in a place where everybody knows
everybody else that is enough to awaken interest.
Sibyl remembers him as one of the hunters she has seen ride past the
walls of Lancaster Lodge, clad in weather-stained scarlet.
He is tall--six feet two--broad shouldered, with the frame of
an athlete. He has shaggy brown hair, shaggy brown moustache,
good-humoured gray eyes, a commonplace nose, a good, firm mouth, and
strong square chin, large hands in well-worn tan gloves.
‘Sir Wilford Cardonnel, Miss Faunthorpe,’ says Mrs. Stormont,
graciously.
Sir Wilford takes off his hat and looks pleased, but is little wiser
than before. This name of Faunthorpe means nothing for him.
‘Fond of racing?’ he inquires, following up the introduction.
‘This is the first time I was ever at a race,’ replies Sibyl. ‘But I
think I shall enjoy it very much.’
‘Then you don’t belong to this part of the country, I suppose? We
Yorkshire folks are always going to races.’
‘Yes, I have lived in Redcastle ever since--or almost ever since, I
left school.’
‘And have never come to the races?’
‘I couldn’t get anybody to bring me,’ replies Sibyl, frankly.
‘Neither of my uncles care about races. Good gracious!’
This exclamation is evoked by a most startling apparition on the
other side of the course, exactly opposite the barouche. A shabby
old pony carriage, quite the most ancient vehicle of its kind in
Redcastle, a dilapidated, unkempt pony, with his nose in a nose-bag,
an elderly gentleman in a discoloured white hat, a young woman
in pink muslin, and a girl of nondescript appearance, in short
petticoats, standing on the back seat of the pony carriage, in order
the better to survey the brilliant scene, and making a positively
awful exhibition of her legs.
These are uncle Robert, Marion, and Jenny. Sibyl beholds them with
unmitigated consternation. She will be obliged to acknowledge them
presently, to avow her relationship to that wretched chaise, that
odious pony, in the face of the county families, nay, the highest and
mightiest of the high and mighty--the Cardonnels of the How, people
she has heard the Stormonts talk about with as much reverence as if
they had the prosperity of the county in their keeping, wound up the
sun like a clock, and turned on the rain from a tap in their custody.
‘This is Marion’s doing,’ thinks Sibyl, indignantly. ‘That girl is
capable of anything. To think that they must needs come and perch
themselves exactly opposite us!’
There seems deliberate malice in the act. A few minutes ago there was
only empty space where the pony chaise stands now. The chaise has
been placed there since the arrival of the barouche.
Dr. Faunthorpe surveys his niece’s party mildly through his
spectacles; Marion nods and kisses her hand; but Sibyl, once having
seen her danger, looks every way except towards the doctor’s chaise.
Jenny, more energetic than her elders, is not to be baffled. Finding
nods and hand-kissing unnoticed, she raises her shrill young voice,
and screams, ‘Sibyl, Sibyl! Look this way, Sibyl.’
‘Who is that leggy child calling?’ asks Sir Wilford, looking at Jenny
through his race-glass, which brings her to the end of his nose.
‘What an excitable young person! And what a funny party! A little old
man in spectacles and a white hat, a tall young woman with ginger
hair, and that leggy child dancing about upon the cushions. And what
a pony! The very one Noah had in the ark, I should think.’
Sibyl grows crimson. Can she acknowledge her kith and kin after
this? While she hesitates, Mrs. Stormont raises her gold-rimmed
binoculars, and scrutinizes the opposite party.
‘Why, my dear,’ she exclaims, not sorry to set off any obligation
involved in the loan of the barouche by the humiliation of its owner,
‘it’s that dear, good little man, Dr. Faunthorpe, and your sisters. I
wonder you didn’t recognise the pony; there’s not another like him in
Redcastle.’
‘Is that little girl your sister?’ says Sir Wilford. ‘I beg your
pardon and hers if I said anything impertinent. She seems a fine,
high-spirited girl, but in an awful state of excitement. Shall I
bring her across to you? She wants to speak to you, I fancy.’
‘Oh, pray leave her where she is,’ replies Sibyl. ‘She’s a dreadful
nuisance. There, there, child,’ nodding to the obnoxious hoyden;
‘won’t that do?’
Jane kisses her hand again vehemently, and having succeeded in
attracting her sister’s attention, seems tolerably resigned.
Sibyl feels that her maize-coloured silk and India muslin, the
barouche, and all things are a failure after this. And there are
the Miss Cardonnels in their plain holland gowns, with satchels
at their waists, brown hats, brown feathers, brown holland
umbrellas--singularly plain attire, which looks in better form for a
racecourse than Sibyl’s flower-show costume.
Sir Wilford stands by the barouche for an hour or more, and tells
Sibyl all about the horses. He devotes himself to her almost
exclusively before the face of Redcastle. Fred Stormont, pounding
restlessly about upon the gray, and bringing that excited animal to
anchor beside the barouche, when he can, feels that he is nowhere,
and begins to think that he has erred on the side of caution and
hesitancy in his wooing of Stephen Trenchard’s niece.
The races may not be good races from a professional point of
view,--the horses may be the very refuse of famous stables, but the
excitement and exhilaration of the crowd are not lessened by that
fact. No weighty stakes are lost or won, but every one seems happy.
Broad grins are the only wear. There is a great deal of picnicking
between the races, and people who would have lived through the day
at home on a biscuit and a glass of sherry, do wild things in the
consumption of lobster salad, chicken, mayonnaise, and pigeon pie.
Mrs. Stormont has provided the most refined of baskets,--delicate
papers of anchovy and chicken sandwiches, fragile biscuits, some
choice fruit, and a bottle of dry sherry. These favours she dispenses
to her party, while Sir Wilford and his people are devouring their
lobster salad on the roof of the drag, enlivened by a running fire of
champagne corks.
Fred, roving to and fro on the gray, declines the maternal sherry.
‘No thanks, mother; when I’m dry myself I don’t want my wine dry.
I’ll go and do a bitter at the stand presently.’
Sibyl has gradually recovered that death-blow of the pony carriage.
Sir Wilford Cardonnel’s attentions have put her in good humour.
It is as if some prince of the blood-royal had paid her homage in
the presence of his subjects, and she knows that Mrs. Groshen and
Mrs. Marlin Spyke, the Miss Jewsons, and above all dearest Rose and
Violet, will be provoked to envy by the distinction thus conferred
upon her. Indeed, dear Rose’s brow has a cloudy look already, and
Violet is snappish. Only Mrs. Stormont preserves her equanimity, and
smiles upon the baronet when he re-descends from the drag and takes
up his position again beside the barouche.
Sibyl’s ignorance of racing matters is curiously attractive to him
from its novelty, his sisters being learned in the minutest details
of the turf, and as well up in stable talk as their brother’s stud
groom, under whom they have graduated. He lingers by her side till
the races are nearly over, and his grooms go to fetch the horses. The
important duty of seeing these animals put to distracts him a little,
but he comes back again at the last to say good-bye to Mrs. Stormont
and her daughters and to Sibyl.
‘I should like you to know my sisters,’ he says, ‘I am sure you’d
suit each other,’--a mendacious assertion inspired by the exigencies
of the situation, Sir Wilford knowing very well that town and county
have seldom an idea in common. He has not ventured to bring about
an introduction on the course, his sisters being at an inconvenient
altitude, and of an uncertain temper. But he feels that he must
contrive to see more of Miss Faunthorpe somehow or other. Who can
she be? She is too richly dressed for a governess, and the Stormonts
are too civil to her. Yet she must be a nobody, or Mrs. Stormont
would have taken care to parade her people. He resolves to call
on the Stormonts in a day or two, and find out all about their
_protegée_; and sustained by this resolution, he takes his reluctant
leave. How splendid his coach looks to Sibyl! the four broad-chested
bays, with their honest English-looking heads, horses that mean
work, the steel chains, the black harness, austerely simple in its
mounting, the grooms in Lincoln green, the two girls in brown holland
nodding good-bye to the Stormonts as Sir Wilford drives away, making
a wide sweep upon the turf, his horses going as if this was the
happiest moment of their lives, his grooms climbing into their places
after the team has started, with some hazard of life and limb, but
with honour to themselves.
‘Charming man, Sir Wilford Cardonnel,’ says Mrs. Stormont. ‘The
Cardonnels are one of the oldest of our county families. How do you
like him, Sibyl?’
‘He seems good-natured,’ replies Sibyl, carelessly. What are the
Cardonnels to her? and what avails this young man’s admiration, save
to flaunt in the face of her acquaintance? _Her_ name is written in
the Book of Fate, and in the registers of St. Apollonius, Pimlico.
‘The soul of good nature. His sisters are charming too; great friends
of Rose and Violet’s.’
‘Uncommon intimate,’ says Fred, who has dragged that unyielding gray
up to the carriage once more. ‘They see one another twice a year,
I should think. For my part, I detest the county people. They’re a
parcel of narrow-minded snobs, who think the beginning and end of
life is to ride straight to hounds.’
Having relieved his jealous pangs by this vindictive burst, Fred goes
to look after Mr. Trenchard’s horses, and presently the barouche
falls in with the line of vehicles driving towards the town, Fred and
the gray in attendance, that animal suddenly amenable to reason now
that he is going back to his stable.
Sibyl drives home with the Stormonts, with whom she is to dine.
‘I do hope your dear uncle will join us at dinner,’ says Mrs.
Stormont.
That hope is nipped in the bud, for among the day’s letters Mrs.
Stormont finds a note from Stephen Trenchard:--
‘DEAR MRS. STORMONT,
‘I do not feel well enough to avail myself of your kind
invitation for this evening, so must ask you to excuse me. I will
send the carriage for Sibyl at half-past ten.
‘Yours very truly,
‘STEPHEN TRENCHARD.’
‘I’m afraid your uncle is breaking up, my dear,’ remarks Mrs.
Stormont with a sigh. ‘I saw a change in him when I called the other
day.’
‘That is strange,’ says Sibyl, ‘for he has not been actually ill. He
has not kept his room for a single day.’
‘He is a man of iron nerves, my love, and would be reluctant to give
way to illness, but I feel sure that he is declining. At his age, and
after a life in India, you cannot expect to have him with you many
years.’
Sibyl looks grave. No, she has not counted on her uncle living many
years, or at least when she deserted her husband she told herself
that the old man’s life could be but brief, and that a few years of
patience would be rewarded by fortune and independence for all her
life to come. But since she has lived with uncle Trenchard she has
been inclined to think differently. In his wiry frame and active
habits, his temperance, his iron nerves, there seems the promise of
life prolonged to its utmost limits. He may live to be ninety, and
she be almost an old woman ere she reap the wages of her toil; and in
that case what is to become of Alexis?
Mrs. Stormont’s remark inspires a new hope. The end may not be so far
off after all. She is not ungrateful to her uncle, she is not without
some kind of affection for him, but the hope of reunion with her
husband, of forgiveness and atonement, is sweet.
CHAPTER XVI.
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR.
The dinner at the Stormonts is as other dinners in the same house.
The guests are Mr. and Mrs. Groshen, Dr. and Mrs. Mitsand, and one
Miss Mitsand, the ugliest, as Fred remarks with a sense of injury.
The flower-pots on the table, the silver dishes, the ruby hock
glasses, the finger-glasses engraved with the Greek key pattern, the
talk, the twaddle, Mrs. Groshen’s Honiton lace, how well Sibyl knows
them all! She breathes a sigh for the days that are gone, before that
slow, pompous banquet is ended, and thinks that after all there was
more pleasure in a haddock and a cup of tea in Dixon Street than in
all this provincial splendour.
The talk is chiefly of the races, who was there and who was not
there. The county families are brought on the table, and discussed
fully, together with their genealogies, which are as well known and
as complicated as if they were Greek heroes or demigods.
Mrs. Stormont praises Sir Wilford Cardonnel, and those dear girls
his sisters, and talks of the rose-garden and ferneries at the How;
whereby she bears down rather heavily upon Mrs. Groshen, who has
never been bidden to that earthly paradise. Mr. Groshen opines that
Sir Wilford is better off than most of the county people, whom he
disparages as a shabby lot, but adds that at the rate Sir Wilford
is going on with his drags and hunters he is likely to outrun the
constable before he is many years older.
That the evening entertainment which follows the feast is dull, not
even Mrs. Stormont’s dearest friend Mrs. Groshen could deny, were her
views taken on the subject.
Sibyl knows every piece of furniture in the drawing-room by heart,
every photograph in the album. She knows the Miss Stormonts’
favourite fantasias better than those performers themselves, or they
would play more correctly. She knows exactly how she will be asked
to play one of her lovely pieces, or to sing one of her sweet songs,
and how the young ladies will pretend to delight in Chopin, and the
elders praise her wonderful ‘fingering,’ and how stifled yawns will
at intervals prevail among the company. She knows how Violet will
tell her about some new fern she has discovered, ‘such a darling’;
and how Rose will ask her if she is going on the Continent this year,
and will then favour her with some interesting facts about her Swiss
tour with papa three years ago.
What a blessed relief when the clock on the mantelpiece strikes
eleven! Sibyl has been wondering for ever so long why her carriage
has not been announced.
‘Dear Mrs. Stormont, I think they must have forgotten me,’ she says.
‘But we are such near neighbours, I can walk home easily.’
‘My love, it is quite early; don’t talk of going; the carriage will
come for you, I am sure. We want another of those delicious sonatas.
Not going, surely, Mrs. Groshen,’ cries Mrs. Stormont, rejoicing in
her soul to see the banker and his wife advancing to her, stately and
smiling, to tell her that they have spent ‘a most enjoyable evening.’
Every one discovers that it is frightfully late. No one would have
supposed it for an instant. How swift are the pinions of Time when
pleasure quickens them!
Mrs. Stormont, pressed by Sibyl, makes an inquiry about Mr.
Trenchard’s carriage. It has not come.
‘We walked here,’ says Mr. Groshen. ‘Matilda grumbled about her
dress, but I wouldn’t have my horses harnessed again after they
had come from the racecourse, and I couldn’t have them standing in
harness while she changed her dress. It is no use having fine horses
if you don’t study them a little. And we’re such near neighbours.
We’ll take care of you, Miss Faunthorpe, if you don’t mind walking.’
‘I should like it,’ says Sibyl, with a longing look at the cool
purple night beyond the open window of the gaslit room.
Fred springs up eagerly from the ottoman on which he has been sitting
in patient attendance on the unattractive Miss Mitsand.
‘Let me see you home, Miss Faunthorpe. I shall be delighted.’
Sibyl runs away to put on her bonnet, and the guests issue forth in
a bevy. Dr. Mitsand’s useful brougham is waiting, the others walk
home in the tranquil perfumed air. Fred offers his arm, which Sibyl
accepts with the infinite ease of indifference. Mr. and Mrs. Groshen
make themselves agreeable by walking on briskly.
‘Isn’t it a lovely night?’ gasps Fred, rapturously.
‘Yes, it’s very fine. We generally have nice evenings in June.’
‘Ye-es,’ replies Fred, after judicious consideration. ‘I think we do.
Nice long evenings, at any rate. The twenty-first being the longest
day, of course, is a reason. Nice month for races, too; but rather
rainy sometimes, don’t you think?’
Sibyl concedes the point.
‘I remember one wet June--poured all the month--regular cats and
dogs. The racecourse was a morass; of course the heaviest timbered
horse won. Here we are, I declare, close to Lancaster Lodge! How I
wish it was further off!’
‘Not very flattering to me to wish us less near neighbours,’ says
Sibyl, laughing.
‘Oh, come now, Miss Faunthorpe, you know I don’t mean that; but just
for to-night, for the sake of prolonging this delightful walk.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, please,’ says Sibyl. ‘And be kind enough to
ring the bell.’
They are standing at the gate by this time, and Fred lingers, as if
loth to perform that necessary duty.
He rings, and the lodgekeeper opens the side gate. Sibyl offers Mr.
Stormont her hand on the threshold, but gives him no invitation to
enter the domain.
‘Good night,’ she says, and then cries suddenly, ‘Do you hear that?’
It is a most melodious jug-jugging from a dark clump of chestnuts
near the gate.
‘I hear something chirping,’ replies Fred, dubiously.
‘It’s the nightingale. It sings every night just at this time. Isn’t
it exquisite?’
‘Rather throaty,’ says Fred.
‘Good night,’ repeats Sibyl, shutting the gate in his face.
‘Horrid young man!’ she ejaculates.
How dark, and cool, and silent, save for those nightingales, the
grounds are to-night! She is in no hurry to go into the house. The
dewy turf, the tall black trees standing out against a sky of mixed
light and colour, the moon rising grandly above the elms yonder, just
where the Lancaster Lodge grounds meet the edge of Redcastle Park,
Sir John Boldero’s domain--all is beautiful.
Sibyl walks slowly along the shrubberied drive, and round to the lawn
behind the house, that wide sweep of velvet grass upon which she and
her uncle spend the summer afternoons. Mr. Trenchard’s study is on
this side of the house. The lighted windows inform Sibyl that he has
not yet retired for the night.
The study opens on the lawn by a half-glass door. She can go into the
house this way, and surprise her forgetful uncle by her return, and
tell him all about her day, about Sir Wilford Cardonnel’s attentions,
of which she is proud. She thinks it will please her uncle to know
that one of the magnates of the land has admired her.
She goes towards this glass door, but makes a dead stop before one
of the study windows, startled by what she sees there. It is nothing
very remarkable, perhaps, at the first showing, only uncle Stephen
and a stranger; but the stranger is no ordinary person, and there is
that in Stephen Trenchard’s face which makes the scene remarkable.
The lamp burns brightly on the official-looking table, which
is spread with papers--formidable-looking papers, bristling
with figures, ruled with red ink. They are laid open, as if for
inspection, and among them lies an open ledger.
Sibyl has no experience which can teach her the exact nature of these
papers, but she knows instinctively that they must have some relation
to commerce.
Stephen Trenchard’s face is black as thunder. His left hand lies on
that open ledger; with the right he points to a column of figures,
running his square forefinger down the column with a vicious dig of
the nail here and there, as much as to say, ‘Look at that, sir, and
at that!’ and ‘What do you say to that?’
The stranger stands at Mr. Trenchard’s elbow. He is a foreigner--an
Oriental--Sibyl thinks, though his plain and faultless clothes are
perfectly English. He has a dark olive skin, eyes black as night, an
aquiline nose, a narrow oval face, and silky blue-black hair. He is
something less than middle height, stout, and sleek. His lips move
softly, and his plump yellow hand seems to expostulate as Stephen
Trenchard scowls at the figures.
‘Who can he be?’ wonders Sibyl, abandoning all intention of seeing
her uncle to-night. ‘Some Indian friend of uncle Stephen’s, I
suppose. But what can all those papers mean, and why does uncle
Stephen look so angry? He looked just like that when he spoke of
Philip Secretan.’
She goes round to the front of the house. The hall door is open, and
the footman is airing himself on the threshold, listening to the
nightingales.
‘Why wasn’t the carriage sent for me?’ asks Sibyl.
‘Indeed, ma’am, I don’t know. Was it ordered?’
‘I suppose so. Mr. Trenchard said he would send it.’
‘I’m afraid master must have forgotten, ma’am. I didn’t take no
message to the coachman. Perhaps it was the gentleman coming to see
him that put it out of his mind.’
‘I suppose so. Who is the gentleman? Do you know?’
‘No, ma’am, there was no name given. The gentleman came after dinner,
about nine o’clock. He came from London, I believe. The London train
hadn’t been long in when he came, and he’s been with Mr. Trenchard
ever since.’
‘Is he going to stay here to-night?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am. There’s been nothing said, but Mrs. Skinner had
the Blue Room got ready in case it should be wanted, as a premonitory
measure.’
Sibyl yawns languidly, and goes upstairs to her own room, puzzled,
but not seriously disturbed. This stranger has come on some
business errand evidently. She knows that her uncle’s temper is not
particularly placid, and concludes that he has been irritated by some
vexation of a commercial character. Yet she cannot understand how
this can be, since she has been taught to believe that Mr. Trenchard
has retired from business.
Curiosity would impel her to await the stranger’s departure in the
drawing-room, or to discover whether he is to remain for the night;
but she does not care to encounter her uncle in his present temper,
and he would doubtless be offended by anything that could look like
espionage.
It is nearly midnight when she goes to her room. Her windows open on
the garden, and are above those of the study. She seats herself by an
open window, and looks out into the cool, shadowy garden. Presently
she hears a voice raised in anger, her uncle’s voice, she knows; but
the stranger’s tones never reach her ear.
‘His voice is like his looks, I dare say,’ she thinks, ‘soft, and
silky, and cunning. I shouldn’t think he was the kind of man uncle
Trenchard would trust.’
She wastes more than an hour in undressing, brushing her hair,
putting away her finery. The clocks strike one, but those lighted
windows still shine upon the dark turf below.
‘What a long interview!’ she thinks. ‘This Indian gentleman must
surely be going to stay all night. He would never leave the house at
such an hour as this.’
She falls asleep at last, worn out by the fatigues of the day, but at
the last moment hears that angry voice of her uncle’s suddenly raised
in a gust of passion.
She wakes next morning with an uneasy sense of something having gone
wrong; but it is some moments before that scene in the room beneath
flashes back upon her.
‘Who can that man be?’ she asks herself again, ‘and why was uncle
Trenchard so angry? Some Indian merchant, perhaps, to whom he has
lent money. The loss of a few thousands ought not to make him so
angry. It must be like a drop in the ocean compared with his immense
wealth. But then I know he is fond of money, and that it pains him to
part even with a ten-pound note.’
She dresses, and goes down to the dining-room, looking as fresh as
the newly opened roses, to which the nightingale sings at sundown.
Mr. Trenchard is in his accustomed seat, the big crimson morocco
arm-chair drawn into the bay-window. The sashes are up, and the
sweet morning air comes in across the flower-beds. Eight o’clock is
the hour for breakfast, winter and summer, at Lancaster Lodge, and
unpunctuality is little less than a crime in the eyes of Stephen
Trenchard, who is usually dressed in his blue frock coat and nankeen
waistcoat and trousers by six, and prowling about the grounds to the
discomfiture of his gardeners.
He is a shade paler than usual, and has purple shadows under his
eyes. His hand shakes a little, Sibyl thinks, as he turns the
leaves of the Manchester daily, which he reads every morning before
breakfast. The face he turns to her as she bends over him to
administer her morning kiss has an old and wan look in the sunshine.
Can it be that Mrs. Stormont is right, and that Stephen Trenchard is
breaking up?
There are no early prayers at Lancaster Lodge. Mr. Trenchard has his
ideas upon religion, and his own particular creed by which he is
to stand or fall, no doubt; but whatever these are, he keeps them
strictly to himself. He never goes to church, a neglect of duty
which in a person of Mr. Trenchard’s consequence Redcastle regards
as an eccentricity, but which would make a social outlaw of a small
butcher or baker. He has no objection to Sibyl’s attendance at the
minster, where she exhibits the latest fashions on Sunday mornings.
He is no declared infidel. He simply ignores religion, as a thing he
has been able to dispense with all his life.
Sibyl takes her place before the silver urn, and begins the business
of tea-making. Mr. Trenchard drinks green tea unmixed with black,
and is very particular about the preparation of the beverage. Marion
has never succeeded in pleasing him in this matter. Sibyl has never
failed.
‘You are looking so tired this morning, dear uncle!’ she says, in her
soft winning voice. ‘You were up very late last night, were you not?’
‘How do you know that? You were in bed, I suppose?’
‘Not till twelve o’clock. I stayed rather late at the Stormonts,
thinking you would send the carriage for me.’
‘The carriage? ah, to be sure. I forgot.’
‘It didn’t matter in the least. I walked home. That horrid Fred
brought me. Such a lovely night, the walk would have been delightful
with any one else.’
‘Ah, you don’t like young Stormont?’ says Mr. Trenchard, looking
sharply at her. ‘I’m glad of it, child. He’s a genteel pauper at
best. You must marry some one better than that.’
Sibyl pales at the mention of marriage.
‘I don’t mean to marry at all, uncle. I’m much happier as I am, with
you.’
‘Stuff and nonsense, my dear! Marriage is a woman’s mission, and with
your pretty face you are sure to get a rich husband.’
‘You wouldn’t have me marry for money, uncle Trenchard!’ cries Sibyl,
with a horrified look.
Here is this old man, rolling in wealth, and yet counselling a
mercenary marriage.
‘I wouldn’t have you marry without money. You are no girl to play at
love in a cottage. That’s a game you’d soon grow tired of.’
Sibyl starts as if she had been stung.
‘Don’t talk of marriage, uncle Trenchard. The subject is hateful to
me. There is no one in Redcastle that I care for, or am ever likely
to care for.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ replies Mr. Trenchard, with a moody look, as
he resumes his newspaper.
Stephen Trenchard is not a man who riots in the good things of this
life. His breakfast consists of a cup of green tea and a little bit
of dry toast. His other meals are of the simplest. But there is
considerable epicureanism in his simplicity, and he resents a bad
dinner as a personal injury.
‘I expected to find a visitor here this morning,’ Sibyl says
presently, too curious to be silent on the subject of that nocturnal
interview in Mr. Trenchard’s study.
‘Indeed! Have you invited any one?’
‘I should not take such a liberty without your permission--unless it
were Marion or Jenny. I thought the gentleman who was with you last
night would stay----.’
Her uncle looks at her with a darker frown than she has ever provoked
before.
‘The gentleman came on business, and left as soon as his business
was concluded,’ replies Mr. Trenchard, in chilling tones. ‘The less
you trouble yourself about my affairs, Sibyl, the better for our
mutual happiness.’
‘I only wondered----’ falters Sibyl.
‘Don’t wonder. It’s a most unprofitable occupation of the mind. Who
told you there was any one with me last night?’
‘I saw him.’
‘Saw him? How?’
‘The night was so lovely, that I walked round the garden after Fred
Stormont left me at the gate, and I was coming in at your study door,
seeing your lamp burning, when I saw that you were not alone.’
‘The gentleman you saw is a Calcutta merchant, an old acquaintance,
who wanted my advice in a critical turn of his affairs. And now you
know all that there is to be known, and may leave off wondering.’
Mr. Trenchard sips his tea and nibbles his dry toast in silence, and
presently disappears altogether behind the county paper.
Sibyl is disappointed. She expected to be questioned about yesterday,
to be asked if she had made any conquests, to be able to describe
Sir Wilford Cardonnel’s obvious subjugation, and the effect which
it produced on the Stormonts,--Rose’s envious looks, Violet’s
constrained civility, Fred’s anguish of mind as he curveted on the
unmanageable gray.
Finding her uncle indisposed for conversation, Sibyl leaves the
dining-room as soon as decency permits, and flits away to her
favourite retreat--the garden. Life which is all a summer holiday is
pleasant enough, doubtless; but oh, how monotonous! and, in Sibyl’s
case, how lonely!
This morning, exhausted with yesterday’s excitement, she throws
herself back in her low wicker chair wearily, and sighs two or three
times in a quarter of an hour without knowing why,--sighs for the
days that are gone--for poverty and Alexis, perhaps, though she would
hardly confess as much.
The roses glorify the garden, the trees cast their deep cool shadows
on the sunny grass; the house yonder, with all its windows shining
in the sun, its venetians, its flower-boxes, its prosperous air, as
of a habitation for which wealth has done its uttermost,--all these
things remind her that her lot has fallen in a pleasant place. Yet
she yearns for something more.
How soon will it come? How soon will the heritage for which she waits
be hers? Mrs. Stormont has noticed a change in Stephen Trenchard, and
that change has been very obvious to Sibyl’s eyes this morning.
She struggles against sordid, mercenary thoughts, but they are
too strong for her. She cannot help speculating about the future
which seems drawing nearer, that future which is to reunite her to
Alexis--to open the door of a new glad world, to release her from
this dull bondage in the narrow paths of provincial pretence and
respectability.
She knows that she is her uncle’s favourite niece. Marion is
suffered to come and go, but is rarely favoured with so much as a
civil word or a kindly glance from Mr. Trenchard. Jenny he openly
abominates. Her noisy bouncing ways distress him beyond measure, and
she is rarely admitted to his presence. Sibyl therefore concludes
that--although Mr. Trenchard, out of kindly feeling, may leave a
few thousands to Marion and Jenny, just enough to secure them a
competence--the bulk of his fortune will be hers. That vast wealth
which has made Redcastle bow down before him will be hers; and
Redcastle, which already fawns upon her--honouring her prospective
riches--will fall prostrate and worship her.
‘Poor uncle Trenchard,’ she thinks, compassionately. ‘What is the
good of money to the old? His prosperity comes at the wrong end of
life. What can his wealth give him? A fine house, where he lives
alone, a splendid solitude. Horses which he rarely uses. For all the
personal gratification he has out of his wealth he would be as well
off with six hundred a year. But he has the homage of Redcastle,
which would not be given to a man of limited income, even though he
devoted half his revenue to acts of charity.’
Sibyl sees the end of her bondage coming near, and thinks of Alexis
with tender longing for reunion. Will he come back to her? Will he
forgive her? Yes, a thousand times yes. He loves her too well to be
obdurate. Whatever anger he may have felt at her abandonment of him
will melt away before her smiles.
It is a trial to be so ignorant of his fate, not to know where he is
or what he is doing, whether fortune has been kind or cruel to him.
Great heaven! if he should be dead! If the fight should have been too
hard, and he fallen!
Her heart grows cold at the mere thought that such a thing is
possible. She shudders, clasps her hands over her eyes as if to
shut out the horrid spectacle. If he were dead; hope’s airy palace
built on a fatal quicksand; and the future she has looked forward to
a future never to be realized! No, she will not think of anything
so hideous. Fate must be kind to true love, and she has loved her
husband truly, even when deserting him to secure fortune. She
remembers how often she has heard him say that it is easy for a
single man to fight the battle of life, that alone he could have
struggled on somehow, could have obtained employment, could have
roamed the world till he found just the one spot where he could
prosper. He has never said it reproachfully. He was too fond of her
for that. But he has said it; and the memory of that speech is a
consoling thought to Sibyl just now.
‘He has emigrated, I dare say,’ she thinks. ‘He had a longing to try
his luck in Australia. He is on the other side of the world, most
likely, and when I am free to call him back to me, I shall have to
wait ever so long before he can come.’
She is aroused from this reverie, from the deepest deep of thought,
by the mellifluous soprano of Mrs. Stormont, raised inquiringly--that
society voice in which a comedy actress makes some trivial inquiry at
the wing before she appears on the stage.
‘In the garden?’ screams Mrs. Stormont. ‘Dear child! I will find her.’
Mrs. Stormont emerges from the shrubbery, rustling in a flounced
cambric morning dress. She wears a black lace shawl, her last
summer’s bonnet ‘done up’ inexpensively by her maid, and in honest
truth has been ‘up town’ to pay her tradesmen’s weekly accounts. The
Stormonts, though near, are good pay.
‘Old Mother Stormont will haggle about the bone in a bit of brisket,
and she will worry about her Sunday sirloin,’ says Mr. Heffer, the
butcher, ‘but she do pay uncommon reglar, I will say that for the old
gal.’
Familiarity, induced by Mrs. Stormont’s frequent personal visits of
complaint or inspection at Mr. Heffer’s shop, has bred contempt in
that citizen’s mind. The customers he respects are those who never
cross his threshold or weigh his meat.
Mrs. Stormont is followed by a tall stranger in gray, who looks about
him admiringly, and whom Sibyl hardly recognises at the first glance.
‘Charming place--kept so well, too--garden much neater than my
fellows keep the How. How d’ye do, Miss Faunthorpe? Hope you weren’t
tired by the races yesterday.’
Sibyl blushes becomingly, startled by this sudden appearance of the
mighty Sir Wilford Cardonnel--startled out of all sad thoughts, and
gratified by this proof of her power.
‘I met this tiresome Sir Wilford in the market-place, Sibyl,’ says
Mrs. Stormont with juvenile playfulness--which sits upon her portly
middle age about as becomingly as the airy gauze bonnet on her
pepper-and-salt chignon,--‘and he insisted upon my bringing him to
call on you. I hope you are not shocked with us for invading you at
such a barbarous hour.’
Sibyl assures Mrs. Stormont that the hour is a matter of no
importance.
‘You are just as glad to see us as if we had come in proper visiting
hours,’ exclaims the lady. ‘What a dear candid child she is! I don’t
know what you did with my poor Fred last night, Sibyl, but you sent
him home quite low-spirited.’
This is said with meaning, and Sir Wilford looks at the speaker
curiously.
‘Poor Fred,’ he cries in his loud voice, ‘I think it must have been
the bumping he got on that bony gray that made him low-spirited.’
‘I’m afraid I said good night rather abruptly,’ says Sibyl, ‘which
was very ungrateful of me after his kindness in seeing me home. But I
was vexed with him for not appreciating our nightingales.’
‘Not appreciate the nightingales! How odd!’ exclaims Mrs. Stormont.
‘Fred has such an ear for music.’
‘Shouldn’t have thought it from his trotting,’ remarks the candid Sir
Wilford. ‘Man with a good ear always keeps time in the saddle. So
you’ve nightingales here, Miss Faunthorpe? Shouldn’t have thought it,
so near the town. We’ve no end of ’em at the How. Jug-jug-jug from
sundown till midnight. I should like to show you our gardens at the
How, by the by. Mrs. Stormont might drive you over some day.’
Mrs. Stormont, divided between her desire to be intimate with the
best of the county families, and her maternal solicitude for Fred,
whose interests are evidently in peril, can only smile blandly
and assentingly. To drive over to the How in a friendly way is to
take the highest rank in Redcastle society. Mrs. Groshen will feel
absolutely crushed when she is told of such a visit. And after all,
poor Fred’s courtship hangs on hand dismally, and may never come to
anything. Sibyl, although courted by the whole family, has given
no token of preference for the eldest hope. Sibyl with Stephen
Trenchard’s fortune, and exalted into Lady Cardonnel, would be a
splendid person to know. The dear girls, Rose and Violet, would be
asked to stay at the How, no doubt; might make splendid matches,
marry into the county.
The conversation meanders on in the same elevated strain for half
an hour while Sibyl and her visitors walk round the garden, Sir
Wilford admiring everything ‘monstrously,’ to use his own phrase, and
grumbling a good deal about those ‘fellows’ of his at the How.
‘I never saw such flower-beds,’ he says; ‘there’s not a dead leaf
among ’em.’
‘My uncle is very particular about the garden,’ says Sibyl.
‘That reminds me that I must ask to be introduced to your uncle.’
‘I dare say he is in his study,’ replies Sibyl. ‘I’ll run and see.’
She has an idea that it would hardly do to take Sir Wilford to her
uncle without some note of preparation, Mr. Trenchard being somewhat
out of sorts to-day.
She is saved the trouble of going to the study, however, for Stephen
Trenchard is seen coming across the lawn in his Panama hat, and they
all three go to meet him. He receives Mrs. Stormont and Sir Wilford
graciously, and, the luncheon bell ringing while he is conversing
with them, insists upon their staying to luncheon. So they all go
together to the dining-room, Mrs. Stormont protesting that her
absence will be the cause of consternation at home.
Sibyl is fluttered and a little pleased at the idea of having made
such an important conquest,--a useless triumph, of course, for a
woman in her position, but one that flatters womanly vanity.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE WANDERER’S RETURN.
The great city lies seething like some unholy caldron under the
blazing August sun, when a lonely wayfarer returns to it after two
years’ exile on the other side of the world. Rank and fashion,
middle-class wealth, professional respectability, have deserted the
airy western squares and streets for English watering-places, Welsh
mountains, Scottish moors, Irish lakes, or broiling Continental
esplanades, spas, conversation-houses, Rhine steamers, and so on;
but from this eastern end of the city there is no such exodus; here
life holds on patiently through the dog days, here labour knows no
respite, and the grinding of the universal mill slackens not.
Alexis Secretan, just disembarked from the famous clipper ship
_Oronoko_, surveys the dingy street, the driving crowd, with wonder,
not unmingled with loathing. What a weary city it seems to this man,
who walked its stony ways two years ago a seeker for bread, and for
the most part found only the natural product of the soil--a stone! He
has found fortune kinder at the antipodes, man more friendly, Nature
more liberal of her smiles, less shut out and constrained by brick
and mortar. He has achieved no sudden prosperity, he has worked hard
and honestly, and has done well; so well as to be able to come back
to this sophisticated, unfriendly city, whither fate draws him as a
magnet.
It is not possible for a man to feel more lonely than this returning
wayfarer. In all the vast city which spreads itself about and around
him there lives only one person from whom he can hope for a friendly
smile of welcome. His humble friend Dick Plowden is the only being to
whom he can go with any certainty of not being considered a bore and
an intruder. His old brother officers--the companions of his brief
day of prosperity,--alas! he wore out the friendship of those when
he sank to that lowest grade in the animal creation--the borrowing
animal.
Dear old Dick! honest, friendly Dick, to whom he has long since
repaid that ten-pound note borrowed for the false wife who deserted
him--it is to Dick he goes naturally to-day, as brother goes to
brother. It is to Dick’s recommendation to Messrs. Keel and Skrew
he owes the honourable independence of the last two years. But for
Dick’s influence he would never have got that fair start in a new
world which has enabled him to keep his head above water, and do
Messrs. Keel and Skrew honourable service on the other side of the
globe.
He can afford to take a hansom, and drive down to the Brompton Road
as fast as a broken-down thoroughbred can take him. Dear old Dick is
in the little back parlour hard at work, as on that snowy day when
desperation guided Alexis to that last resource of the desperate--the
humble friend of better days. But Dick is not occupied to-day in the
mechanical drudgery of map-painting; he is writing a book, a little
book on astronomy, for the use of schools,--that elementary geography
of his having been a success.
He starts up at sight of Alexis, who has pushed by the maid of all
work and entered unannounced. The two men greet each other heartily.
‘Captain Secretan! What a delightful surprise! and looking so well
too, so handsome, just like my original captain, who took mother’s
first floor.’
‘Dear old Dick!’
‘But I did not expect you home for ever so long. I thought you were
going to stop at Sidney, working for the firm until you had made your
fortune.’
‘Fortune is all very well, Dick--and the firm is all very well.
They have been liberal employers, and I have worked honestly for
them, and been lucky in my dealings for them. But the soul of man
needs something more than fifteen per cent. commission upon all his
dealings. There was an emptiness in my heart, Dick, out yonder--a
cavity that needed filling somehow,--so I took the first opportunity
to slip across to the old world, though God knows there’s little
chance of filling the vacuum here. However, I shall only stop a month
or so, and then go back again. The firm has been very kind about
the matter. I told them my health was failing, and that the voyage
home was my only hope of getting strong again, so they gave me a
free passage both ways, and I’m to hold counsel with them about the
opening of a new branch of the business out yonder.’
‘And were you really ill?’ asks Richard Plowden, sympathetically.
‘What I told the firm was not much more than the truth, old fellow.
When heart-sickness sets in, bodily sickness is pretty sure to
follow. My nights were growing sleepless, full of bad thoughts. Well,
Dick, you can guess my first question. Any news--of her?’
Richard Plowden shakes his head despondingly.
‘I am the last to hear of her,’ he says,--‘I who live as much out of
the world as if I were a hermit in a cave.’
‘She might have come to you to inquire about my fate, knowing you
were the only friend adversity had left me.’
‘She has never come.’
‘Nor written?’
‘Not a line. Forgive me if I wound you, Captain Secretan----.’
‘Call me Alex, Dick, or we shall quarrel.’
‘Forgive me if I seem to speak hardly of her, but upon my honour,
Alex, it seems to me that you have nothing to do but to forget her.
She deserted you when you had the most need of her love, when, if she
had been a true woman, she would have clung to you most fondly.’
‘Granted, Dick. She was selfish, base, cowardly. We had sunk together
into the slough of despond, and she contrived to scramble out of it
and leave me in the mire. She was clever enough to make use of me
to accomplish her escape, sent me out among hard-hearted humanity
to borrow, beg, or steal the means by which she meant to separate
herself from my fallen fortunes. Do you think I came across the
world to seek for her? No, Dick, I am not such a fool. I have been
cheated once. I shall never be her dupe again. Do you think I could
ever trust her any more?--that if fortune smiled upon us, and she
pretended to love me, I could feel any confidence in her truth, any
security in her affection? The void in my heart is to be filled, but
not by her. I came back to the old world to look for my child,--the
child that was to be born to me when my cruel wife left me.’
‘You do not even know that the child survived its birth?’
‘What a Job’s comforter you are, Dick! I know nothing except that I
am going to hunt for the mother in order that I may find the child.’
‘The law would give the custody of so young a child to the mother.’
‘I snap my fingers at the law. Truth is great and shall prevail. So
base a wife must be an unworthy mother. I will find her price for
the child. She will sell that as she sold me--for a mess of pottage.
When I left England I was desperate--mad, perhaps, or I should not
have left the land that held my child. My loneliness in that strange
world yonder awakened a father’s feelings, I found out how dreary
a prospect life is to a man who stands alone--a blank and barren
desert, with no green oasis--no distant city to which he may direct
his steps--a lonely pilgrimage leading nowhere.’
‘How shall you commence your search?’
‘I have thought of that question many a time on board the _Oronoko_.
There is little choice of plan left open to me. You remember that
before Messrs. Keel and Skrew took me into their employment, I went
to Redcastle, the place my wife came from when she came to London
as Mrs. Hazleton’s governess. I saw Sibyl’s younger sister, made my
inquiries, and found that Sibyl had not been heard of at Redcastle.
She had not gone straight home to her uncle, the parish doctor, as
I had supposed it probable she would, and flung herself and her
troubles upon his shoulders. No, she was too artful for that. She
had some deeper game in view--some rich relative from whom she had
expectations, as I gathered dimly from her letter. I could find out
nothing more from the girl than that Sibyl was supposed still to be
in Mrs. Hazleton’s employment--that her marriage was not known to her
family, that she had not reappeared at Redcastle, or received any
help from her uncle the doctor. Where could she be, and how could she
be living? She must have found the wealthy friend whose existence I
inferred from her letter, and this wealthy friend or relative was
evidently not an inhabitant of Redcastle. She must have found a safe
haven somewhere. I made no further attempt to trace her. I was too
deeply stung by her abandonment. “Let her go,” I said to myself, as
I crawled wearily away from that dismal country town, through the
January weather, “she and I have done with each other.” I did not
foresee that the hour would come in which the thought of my child
would be more precious to me than my false wife’s love had ever
been. But in my lonely days in a strange land--lonely in spite of
what the world calls friendship--I have suffered my hopes to build
themselves round that one image--the child whose face I have never
seen. Now, Dick, there seem to be only two sources of information
open to me. I can go down to Redcastle again, and renew my inquiries
at Dr. Faunthorpe’s; or, before doing that, I can hunt up an honest
creature who used to be housemaid at Mrs. Hazleton’s, and who made
herself useful to my wife in sending her letters, and so helping her
to sustain the falsehood which she chose to practise upon her uncle,
for quite inadequate reasons, as they always seemed to me. But there
are minds to which double-dealing is an absolute pleasure, and hers
may be of that order,’ adds Alexis, bitterly.
‘You have not dined,’ says Richard Plowden, by way of changing
the conversation. ‘I’ll order a steak and potatoes. You’ll enjoy
an English rump-steak after ship fare, and you know mother’s a
first-rate cook. You’ll take up your quarters with us, of course,
while you are in London?’
‘I shall go to Redcastle to-morrow, Dick, if I can find Jane Dimond,
the housemaid, this evening. But if you can give me a bed for
to-night, I will accept it with all gratitude. Don’t trouble about
dinner. I had a substantial lunch on board the _Oronoko_. I’ll go to
Lowther Street at once, and we can smoke our pipes together when I
come back, and talk over old times, when I was a careless, thriftless
bachelor. How selfish I am, talking of my own affairs all this time,
and never so much as congratulating you on your success as an author!’
‘Don’t call me an author,’ protests Dick, blushing. ‘That’s putting
me too much upon a level with Scott and Bulwer, and geniuses of that
kind. I was lucky enough to hit upon an easy, simple way of stating
hard facts--making information a little more attractive than it has
been made for young minds, and the style took with the schools and
teachers. My little handbook of geography has gone through fifteen
editions, and has been quite a fortune to me, and I’m now doing the
sixth in a series of handbooks, all more or less geographical, up
to the present one, in which I venture upon astronomy. So you see
map-painting led to something, after all.’
‘Intelligence and industry always lead to something, Dick. There
would be a screw loose in the scheme of the universe if they could
ever lead to nothing.’
‘Those little books have done wonders for us,’ exclaims Dick, with
harmless pride. ‘Mother doesn’t work half so hard as she used,
though she will stick to the cooking; and she has a silk gown to wear
on Sundays,--doesn’t it rustle, too! you can hear it at the very top
of the staircase,--none of your soft silks for mother, but a silk
that stands alone and lets you know that it’s there. And I’ve got a
garden. See!’
The Duke of Devonshire could feel no loftier pride in the possession
of Chatsworth than swells Richard Plowden’s breast to-day, as he
draws up the Venetian blind and allows his cherished garden to burst
upon Alexis Secretan’s admiring gaze.
It is a quadrangle of fifteen feet square, shut in by whitewashed
walls, overshadowed by leaden cisterns, bounded by the slated roofs
of a mews, but Dick has built rockeries in the corners, rockeries
where ferns flourish greenly. He has trained ivy over one wall--that
blessed parasite which is so fair and quick-growing a screen for
brick and mortar abominations--Virginia creeper over another. The
grass is soft and green, and in the middle of the little plot there
is a stone basin--a timeworn old basin which Dick has picked up
for half a sovereign in a builder’s yard, but a basin in which a
slender jet of water actually plays. Scarlet geraniums in green tubs
give colour to the picture; an old stone bench, also a bargain of
Dick’s, offers repose to the idler in this narrow pleasaunce. Shut
in as it is by mews and back kitchens,--overshadowed as it is by
cisterns,--Richard Plowden’s garden is absolutely pretty. Alexis
accords it his unmeasured approbation.
‘It’s the first English garden I’ve seen for the last two years,
Dick, and it smiles at me like a welcome home. Yes, I’ll come back in
time to smoke a cigar on that stone bench of yours under the summer
stars.’
‘We drink tea out there on fine Sunday afternoons in the warm
weather,’ says Dick, smiling at the ferns and rockwork, ‘and you
can’t imagine how proud mother is. I’ve got the real _Osmunda
regalis_, or flowering fern, in that corner, though you’d hardly
believe it; and there’s a _Polypodium_ over there that a friendly
lodger of ours brought me from Ilfracombe.’
‘Well, Dick, I must go and look for Jane Dimond, but I’ll be back in
a couple of hours at latest.’
Dick limps to the door with his friend, and follows his figure with
admiring eyes till it vanishes in the current of wayfarers.
‘What a fine fellow he is! and to think that a wife could desert him!
I’ll ask mother to get a bit of something nice for supper, a veal
cutlet and a few peas, or a chicken and a slice of broiled ham.’
CHAPTER XVIII.
AT ARM’S LENGTH.
There are some people whose houses never change; people whose
habitations are in a manner symbolical of their lives, and whose even
tenor of existence nothing less than the undertaker can overthrow.
Mrs. Hazleton is one of these eminently respectable personages.
She has occupied the house in Lowther Street for the last ten
years. She has gone to the sea-side every year of those ten, and
at exactly the same period, has returned after the same interval,
has given her great parties at the same seasons, and has lived a
methodical and prosperous existence, with satisfaction to herself
and her neighbours, and with considerable profit to the surrounding
shopkeepers. When the London season is over, Mrs. Hazleton goes to
the sea-side, not because she belongs to that flight of fashionable
swallows who follow pleasure’s summer from clime to clime, but
simply because London in August is unendurable,--baking pavements,
scorched verdure, dust and grime on everything, and a sense of
desertion in all those regions which the upper ten thousand and a
considerable portion of the lower million inhabit.
There could not be a better time for Alexis to make his inquiry
without having to present himself in a formal manner to his old
acquaintance. Mrs. Hazleton is at Scarborough, with children,
governess, and _femme de chambre_. The blinds are all down, save one
of the venetians in the dining-room, which is drawn up about halfway,
and in the space thus exposed to view the comfortable round face of
Mrs. Hazleton’s cook, and the lanky countenance of Mrs. Hazleton’s
sandy-haired footman--a footman whose visage is happily unfamiliar to
Alexis--exhibit themselves. Cook and footman are engaged in looking
out of the window. There is not much for them to see in Lowther
Street on this August evening, but it is a relief to be above ground
for a little while, after the twilight of those underground dungeons
to which the London domestic is confined.
Alexis mounts the steps, and knocks and rings, under the calm survey
of those two pair of eyes. The sandy-haired footman is not impressed
by Mr. Secretan’s appearance. Alexis is carelessly dressed in
garments of a colonial cut, a velveteen shooting jacket, a soft felt
hat, clothes chosen for ease and hard wear rather than for fashion.
The footman yawns audibly, and when reminded of his duties by a nudge
from cook’s plump elbow, mutters contemptuously, ‘Oh, hang it! that
fellow can wait, you know;’ and then withdraws himself lazily from
his post of observation, and anon opens the street door a little way,
filling the opening with his person.
‘Is there a young woman called Dimond in service here now?’ asks
Alexis.
‘Dun know, I’m shaw,’ replies the flunkey, with another yawn. ‘What
do you want with her?’
‘We won’t go into particulars till you find out whether she’s still
here,’ answers Alexis, coolly. ‘Perhaps you will condescend so far as
to inquire of your fellow-servant?’
‘Hi, cooky,’ bawls the footman, ‘what’s our Jane’s name? Dimond,
ain’t it?’
‘Of course it is. You might have known,’ answers cook, who has come
into the hall, and now contemplates Alexis over the youth’s shoulder.
‘What do you want with Jane Dimond?’ she inquires, sharply. ‘There’s
no followers allowed here.’
‘I’m not a follower,’ answers Alexis, ‘but I want to see Jane Dimond
alone for five minutes, on business.’
The countenances of cook and footman plainly express an apprehension
that this is the beginning of a deep-laid scheme against the family
plate.
‘I’ll tell you what, young man,’ says the cook, with asperity, ‘my
missus is out of town, and we don’t want no airy sneaks loafing about
while she’s away.’
‘And it ain’t no good for them to loaf,’ adds the sandy-haired young
man, who has not shaved for the last day or two, and whose chin is
adorned with a tawny stubble like a newly-cut wheat field. ‘The plate
has all been sent to the bank.’
Alexis fairly bursts out laughing.
‘Is there so much difference between a chimney-pot hat and a wide
awake? between Poole and a colonial tailor?’ he says to himself,
and then he adds aloud. ‘If one of you simpletons will take the
trouble to call Jane Dimond, she will be able to tell you that I’m
a gentleman, and that I have not come after the tea-spoons or the
umbrellas. I’ll wait in the street for her. You can tell her that a
gentleman from Australia wants a few words with her.’
Cook and footman whisper doubtfully for half a minute, and then shut
the door upon Mr. Secretan, leaving him to infer their acquiescence
with his request.
He paces the pavement for five minutes or so, and then the
good-natured Jane Dimond comes down the steps, while cook and footman
stand in the doorway to watch the proceedings.
They see Jane gesticulate as in extreme surprise at sight of Alexis,
and then the two walk a little further off, quite out of earshot, to
the aggravation of Jane’s fellow-servants, whose curiosity is by this
time raised to the highest pitch.
‘I shouldn’t wonder if he was some haristocratic arf-brother of ers,’
says cook, who is a devoted student of “Reynolds’s Mysteries of
London.” ‘Life is full of family secrets and such like.’
‘Lor, sir,’ says Jane Dimond, when she has recovered the shock of
surprise; ‘I thought you was dead and gone.’
‘Did you, Jane. Why?’
‘Because I fancied if you was in the land of the livin’ you wouldn’t
have turned a deaf ear to that advertisement.’
‘What advertisement?’
‘The advertisement as Miss Faunthorpe--I beg pardon, Mrs.----’
‘Never mind the name, girl. Tell me all about the advertisement.’
Jane explains herself in a roundabout way, but in due course Alexis
knows all that Jane knows, except his wife’s present abode. That the
girl refuses to tell even to him.
‘She told me to keep it a secret, and I’m not going to tell no one
without her permission,’ says Jane resolutely.
This resolve the husband combats, but in vain.
‘I’ll arst her leaf to tell you, and when I’ve got her leaf I’ll
tell you,’ answers Jane. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t move me from that.’
‘Telegraph to her then directly,’ cries Alexis, taking out a handful
of silver. ‘Come with me to the nearest telegraph office, and I’ll
write the message for you. You can put in the address yourself.’
‘No, I won’t send her no telegrafts, lest I should get her into
trouble with her friends. I’ll write to her.’
‘Inexorable girl! Is she in the country?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the country post is gone ever so long. I shall have to wait
twenty-four hours before you can get her answer.’
‘I can’t help that,’ says Jane, with an inflexible air. ‘She’s
trusted me, and I’ll do my dooty by her. As you’ve stayed away so
long it can’t hurt you to stay a little longer.’
‘Stayed away so long, cruel girl! Don’t you know that it was she who
left me?’
‘Whatever she did, I make no doubt she did it for the best,’ answers
Jane, true to the fair young governess whose donations of lace and
ribbon, soiled gloves, darned stockings, and friendly smiles, had
won her heart years ago.
‘See here, Jane,’ says Alexis, unfolding a five-pound note. ‘Here’s
something to buy you a silk gown for Sundays. Now don’t you think
that you could contrive to tell me the address at once? You know my
wife wishes to see me. The advertisement says that.’
‘No, it don’t,’ answers Jane, taking a tiny slip of paper out of her
shabby old portemonnaie. ‘The advertisement says nothing of the kind.’
She reads as follows:--
‘S. S. to Alexis. You are not forgotten. In all I do I am
faithful to your interests. I look forward to our reunion. Wait
and hope, as I do. Write and tell me where you are, and what you
are doing.--Address, S. S., Post Office, Hale Street, Pimlico.’
‘There, you see,’ exclaims Jane, triumphant. ‘There’s not a word
about wanting to see you. She only wants to hear from you.’
‘Heartless woman!’ mutters Alexis. ‘Yet I’m glad she was just a
little anxious to know my fate. I’ll go to a coffee-house, and write
to her, and bring the letter to you to post. There’s the silk gown
for you all the same, Jane, to show that I bear no malice.’
‘Oh, sir!’ cries the housemaid, overcome by this generosity, ‘I
couldn’ think----’
‘You needn’t think about it. You’ve only to take the money and buy
your gown. I’ll go and write my letter.’
He goes to the nearest coffee-house and writes to Sibyl. There is a
touch of bitterness in the composition, though his wounded heart is
full of love for her all the time. Neither exile nor the sense of her
unkindness have been strong enough to exclude her from his heart. He
may pretend to himself and to his friend Dick Plowden that he has
ceased to love his wife, that he seeks his child alone; but the mere
fact that she has sought to obtain tidings of him is enough to melt
his heart, to change pride and anger to love and pardon.
‘Whatever the exalted sphere in which you now move,’ he writes,
‘you may be glad to know that your desertion has not quite been
the death of me. I have contrived to live, somehow, though
indignation against your cruelty has lacerated my heart, and
love for the wife who deserted me has proved an incurable
disease. I have not starved or been driven to hang myself, and I
have come back from the other side of the world because I have
a foolish hankering to know the fate of the woman who swore at
the altar to love, honour, and obey me, and kept her vow by
abandoning me in my darkest hour of need. Where are you, Sibyl?
and with whom? What has been your reward for deserting me? Has
your scheme of life been a wise one? Have your hopes prospered?
‘Write and answer all these questions freely and fully if you
recognise the tie which, in the sight of God and man, makes us
two one. Tell me about our child, the infant I have never seen,
yet whose baby face has haunted my dreams. You have given your
babe to the care of strangers perhaps, but I conclude you have
watched over its welfare.
‘Tell me further if there are in your life--prosperous as it may
be--some few weaker moments when your heart yearns for reunion
with the husband you once loved. But no, love, I will show you
an easier way. Do not stop to answer one of these questions.
‘Write, Sibyl, from your heart to mine. Tell me in three words
to come to you, and I will come. I will come, dear, and all the
past, all that you have made me suffer, shall be forgotten and
forgiven in the rapture of our reunion.--Yours for ever, if you
will have it so,--ALEXIS.’
He is swayed to and fro by diverse passions as he writes this
letter, now all bitterness, now fond unreasoning love. He has not
the courage to read over his effusion, but seals and addresses it
hastily, and hurries back to Lowther Street. There is no difficulty
about admittance this time. Jane Dimond opens the door, receives the
letter, and promises to post it that evening.
It is too late for any of the provincial mails, but it is something
to be assured that there shall be no needless delay.
‘I shall call for the answer the day after to-morrow, in the evening.
You ought to have it by that time,’ says Alexis, and it seems to him
that the interval will be an unendurable space of time.
He thinks about that advertisement as he goes back to the Brompton
Road. Sibyl must have cared for him a little, despite her heartless
abandonment of him, or she would not have felt this anxiety to be
informed of his fate. She would not have committed herself by an act
likely to entangle her fate with his. Once having released herself
from him she would have held herself altogether aloof--she would
have stretched no friendly hand across the gulf if she had not loved
him. Her heart was still his, he tells himself, when she made that
appeal to him. Whatever her scheme of life--whatever game she was
playing--her heart was true to him.
Comforted by this assurance he is inclined to be wondrously
indulgent, to forgive much, should she but prove herself worthy to be
forgiven.
He tries to occupy himself with hard-headed business during that
weary interval in which he waits for Sibyl’s reply. He goes down
to Messrs. Keel and Skrew’s office, and enters upon the discussion
of certain extensions and improvements in the Australian branch of
the business, improvements which his experience of the colony has
suggested to him. He is well received, and his views approved by Mr.
Keel, the senior partner--a gentleman with large ideas, a palatial
villa on Clapham Common, vineries, pineries, succession houses, and
a stable which is a perennial source of profit to the horse dealers
and the veterinary surgeon, and a well-spring of heart-burning and
annoyance to its proprietor. Mr. Keel is a gentleman who talks of
thousands as meaner people talk of sixpences, and is rumoured to have
started in life thirty years ago as a stevedore, and to have founded
his fortunes upon the ill-gotten gains supposed to be inseparable
from that function.
Mr. Keel is pleased with Mr. Secretan’s suggestions.
‘You’re about the only fellow I ever sent out who seems to understand
the Australian trade,’ he says approvingly, ‘and I shall push you,
young man, mark my words, I shall push you.’
Cheered by this assurance, Alexis thinks what a nice thing it will
be for him to go back to Sidney with his wife and child for his
companions, if Sibyl will but show herself true metal after all, and
if his child lives. Two formidable ‘ifs.’
He builds a delightful castle in the air, and looks so well, fed upon
this nutriment of hope, that Samuel Plowden scrutinizes him with a
serio-comic expression when he returns to the outer office after his
interview with Mr. Keel.
‘Why, I thought you came home on sick leave, youngster,’ says the
kindly clerk. ‘By Jupiter, I never saw any one looking better.’
‘All the effect of the voyage, Mr. Plowden, I assure you. I was a
shadow when I went on board at Sidney.’
The second day after Mr. Secretan’s interview with Jane Dimond has
come, and in the evening Alexis knocks at the familiar door in
Lowther Street, with a heart that seems to beat louder than the
knocker.
Jane Dimond appears promptly, and divining his impatience, gives him
the expected letter without a word. He wrings her hand in speechless
gratitude, as if the letter were a boon from her; bids her a brief
good night, and goes away with his prize. He would rather read the
letter in the street, unwatched, than open it in Mrs. Hazleton’s
hall, under the housemaid’s friendly eyes.
Yes, it is from Sibyl, in the hand he knows so well. The last letter
he received from her was that cruel renunciation, that most heartless
farewell--the loosening, nay, the severing of every link between
them. She writes to him again. There is communion between them once
more. The thought thrills him.
She begins well at all events:--
‘DEAREST--DEAREST--DEAREST!’
There is love’s foolish rapture in a gush of pen and ink.
‘Thank God for your dear letter, though it is not altogether
kind. Still it promises forgiveness for my wrong-doing, and that
is much. Thank God for the knowledge that you are living and
well. My heart grew very heavy when that advertisement of mine
remained unanswered.
‘You ask me if my scheme of life has realized what I counted
upon, if my hopes have prospered. I can say yes to both those
questions. I am on the road to high fortune, fortune which
you and I will share in happy days to come if you are as true
to me as I am to you, though seeming estranged. In a very
little while, dear, my most anxious hopes will be realized. The
realization is so near that it would be worse than folly to
sacrifice those hopes now, as I must sacrifice them if I were to
obey you, and say come to me.
‘I long to see you, my heart aches, my soul sickens at the
thought that we must wait for the hour of reunion. But I am not
so weak a slave to impulse as to abandon my prize, just as it is
almost won. We must wait, dearest. I ask from you patience and
trust. I give you my daily prayers, my nightly dreams. There is
no wrong-doing in my scheme of life. I injure no one, least of
all do I wrong you. I only forego the happiness of sharing your
life for a little while in order to make it brighter afterwards.
‘Write to me, dear husband, from time to time, and let me write
to you, but let our correspondence pass through the hands of
that good girl, Jane Dimond. I know your impulsive nature, and
I cannot trust you with my address, for fear you should come
here and destroy all my plans. I am known in my present circle
only as Miss Faunthorpe. All my hopes would be shipwrecked if I
stood confessed as Mrs. Secretan. Yet, believe me, there is no
shadow of wrong to you in this concealment. It is for our mutual
welfare. You ask me about our child, Alexis. Our child, our son,
is safe and well. I dare tell you no more than that.
‘Ever, through all changes and dangers, your true and loving wife,
‘SIBYL.’
‘Is she mad?’ Alexis asks himself, indignantly, after reading this
letter. ‘Does she think I am to be put off with loving words and
assurances of constancy? Does she suppose that she can keep me at a
distance by concealing her address and writing to me under cover to
a housemaid? Wherever she may have hidden herself, my business shall
be to find her, and my first visit shall be to Redcastle. I’ll go
straight to her uncle, the doctor, and unearth this mystery.’
END OF VOL. I.
LONDON:
J. AND W. RIDER, PRINTERS,
BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE.
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
silently corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences
within the three volumes of this work and consultation of external
sources. Some hyphens in words have been silently removed and
some silently added when a predominant preference was found in
the original work. Except for those changes noted below, original
spellings in the text and inconsistent or archaic usage have been
retained.
Page 12: “its panelled recesses” replaced with “its paneled
recesses”.
Page 34: “Mrs. Gorsuch, contempuously” replaced with “Mrs.
Gorsuch, contemptuously”.
Page 37: “would be materally” replaced with “would be materially”.
Page 39: “the solemn responsibilites” replaced with “the solemn
responsibilities”.
Page 58: “By-and-by he” replaced with “By-and-bye he”.
Page 86: “He has aked” replaced with “He has asked”.
Page 122: “again by and by” replaced with “again by-and-bye”.
Page 147: “a vivacious nonenity” replaced with “a vivacious
nonentity”.
Page 168: “ths most miserable” replaced with “the most miserable”.
Page 176: “to its conquerer” replaced with “to its conqueror”.
Page 177: “and a currie” replaced with “and a curry”.
Page 183: “à la Béchamelle” replaced with “à la Béchamel”.
Page 198: “and by-and-by” replaced with “and by-and-bye”.
Page 262: “the county pa er” replaced with “the county paper”.
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
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