MR. DINGWELL AND MRS. MERVYN CONVERSE.
CLEVE was assiduous in consoling Miss Caroline Oldys, a duty specially
imposed upon him by the voluntary absence of Lady Wimbledon, who spent
four or five hours every day at Malory, with an equally charitable
consideration for the spirits of Lord Verney, who sat complaining in
pain and darkness.
Every day he saw more or less of the Rev. Isaac Dixie, but never
alluded to his midnight interview with him at Clay Rectory. Only once,
a little abruptly, he had said to him, as they walked together on the
green----
"I say, you must manage your duty for two Sundays more--you _must_
stay here for the funeral--that will be on Tuesday week."
Cleve said no more; but he looked at him with a fixed meaning in his
eye, with which the clergyman somehow could not parley.
At the post-office, to which Miss Oldys had begged his escort, a
letter awaited him. His address was traced in the delicate and
peculiar hand of that beautiful being who in those very scenes had
once filled every hour of his life with dreams, and doubts, and hopes;
and now how did he feel as those slender characters met his eye? Shall
I say, as the murderer feels when some relic of his buried crime is
accidentally turned up before his eyes--chilled with a pain that
reaches on to doomsday--with a tremor of madness--with an insufferable
disgust?
Smiling, he put it with his other letters in his pocket, and felt as
if every eye looked on him with suspicion--with dislike; and as if
little voices in the air were whispering, "It is from his wife--from
his wife--from his wife."
Tom Sedley was almost by his side, and had just got his
letters--filling him, too, with dismay--posted not ten minutes before
from Malory, and smiting his last hope to the centre.
"Look at it, Cleve," he said, half an hour later. "I thought all these
things might have softened him--his own illness and his mother's
death; and the Etherages--by Jove, I think he'll ruin them; the poor
old man is going to leave Hazelden in two or three weeks, and--and
he's _utterly_ ruined I think, and all by that d--d lawsuit, that
Larkin knows perfectly well Lord Verney can never succeed in; but in
the meantime it will be the ruin of that nice family, that were so
happy there; and look--here it is--my own letter returned--so
insulting--like a beggar's petition; and this note--not even signed by
him."
"Lord Verney is indisposed; he has already expressed his fixed opinion
upon the subject referred to in Mr. Sedley's statement, which he
returns; he declines discussing it, and refers Mr. Sedley again to his
solicitor."
So, disconsolate Sedley, having opened his griefs to Cleve, went on to
Hazelden, where he was only too sure to meet with a thoroughly
sympathetic audience.
A week passed, and more. And now came the day of old Lady Verney's
funeral. It was a long procession--tenants on horseback, tenants on
foot--the carriages of all the gentlemen round about.
On its way to Penruthyn Priory the procession passed by the road,
ascending the steep by the little church of Llanderris, and full in
view, through a vista in the trees, of the upper windows of the
steward's house.
Our friend Mr. Dingwell, whose journey had cost him a cold, got his
clothes on for this occasion, and was in the window, with a
field-glass, which had amused him on the road from London.
He had called up Mrs. Mervyn's servant girl to help him to the names
of such people as she might recognise.
As the hearse, with its grove of sable plumes, passed up the steep
road, he was grave for a few minutes; and he said--
"That was a good woman. Well for _you_, ma'am, if you have ever
one-twentieth part of her virtues. She did not know how to make her
virtues pleasant, though; she liked to have people afraid of her; and
if you have people afraid of you, my dear, the odds are they'll hate
you. We can't have everything--virtue and softness, fear and love--in
this queer world. An excellent--severe--most ladylike woman. What are
they stopping for now? Oh! There they go again. The only ungenteel
thing she ever did is what she has begun to do now--to rot; but she'll
do it _alone_, in the _dark_, you see; and there _is_ a right and a
wrong, and she did some good in her day."
The end of his queer homily he spoke in a tone a little gloomy, and he
followed the hearse awhile with his glass.
In two or three minutes more the girl thought she heard him sob; and
looking up, with a shock, perceived that his face was gleaming with a
sinister laugh.
"What a precious coxcomb that fellow Cleve is--chief mourner,
egad--and he does it pretty well. 'My inky cloak, good mother.' He
looks so sorry, I almost believe he's thinking of his uncle's wedding.
'Thrift, Horatio, thrift!' I say, miss--I always forget your name. My
dear young lady, be so good, will you, as to say I feel better to-day,
and should be very happy to see Mrs. Mervyn, if she could give me ten
minutes?"
So she ran down upon her errand, and he drew back from the window,
suffering the curtain to fall back as before, darkening the room; and
Mr. Dingwell sat himself down, with his back to the little light that
entered, drawing his robe-de-chambre about him and resting his chin on
his hand.
"Come in, ma'am," said Mr. Dingwell, in answer to a tap at the door,
and Mrs. Mervyn entered. She looked in the direction of the speaker,
but could see only a shadowy outline, the room was so dark.
"Pray, madam, sit down on the chair I've set for you by the table. I'm
at last well enough to see you. You'll have questions to put to me.
I'll be happy to tell you all I know. I was with poor Arthur Verney,
as you are aware, when he died."
"I have but one hope now, sir--to see him hereafter. Oh, sir! _did_ he
think of his unhappy soul--of heaven."
"Of the other place he did think, ma'am. I've heard him wish evil
people, such as clumsy servants and his brother here, in it; but I
suppose you mean to ask was he devout--eh?"
"Yes, sir; it has been my prayer, day and night, in my long solitude.
What prayers, what prayers, what terrible prayers, God only knows."
"Your prayers were heard, ma'am; he was a saint."
"Thank God!"
"The most punctual, edifying, self-tormenting saint I ever had the
pleasure of knowing in any quarter of the globe," said Mr. Dingwell.
"_Oh!_ thank God."
"His reputation for sanctity in Constantinople was immense, and at
both sides of the Bosphorus he was the admiration of the old women and
the wonder of the little boys, and an excellent Dervish, a friend of
his, who was obliged to leave after having been bastinadoed for a
petty larceny, told me he has seen even the town dogs and the asses
hold down their heads, upon my life, as he passed by, to receive his
blessing!"
"Superstition--but still it shows, sir"----
"To be sure it does, ma'am."
"It shows that his sufferings--my darling Arthur--had made a real
change."
"Oh! a _complete_ change, ma'am. Egad, a _very_ complete change,
_indeed_!"
"When he left this, sir, he was--oh! my darling! thoughtless,
volatile"----
"An infidel and a scamp--eh? So he told me, ma'am."
"And I have prayed that his sufferings might be sanctified to him,"
she continued, "and that he might be converted, even though I should
never see him more."
"So he was, ma'am; _I_ can vouch for that," said Mr. Dingwell.
Again poor Mrs. Mervyn broke into a rapture of thanksgiving.
"Vastly lucky you've been, ma'am; _all_ your prayers about him, egad,
seem to have been granted. Pity you did not pray for something he
might have enjoyed more. But all's for the best--eh?"
"All things work together for good--all for good," said the old lady,
looking upward, with her hands clasped.
"And you're as happy at his _conversion_, ma'am, as the Ulema who
received him into the faith of Mahomet--_happier_, I really think.
Lucky dog! what interest he inspires, what joy he diffuses, even now,
in Mahomet's paradise, I dare say. It's worth while being a sinner for
the sake of the conversion, ma'am."
"Sir--sir, I can't understand," gasped the old lady, after a pause.
"No difficulty, ma'am, none in the world."
"For God's sake, _don't_; I think I'm going _mad_" cried the poor
woman.
"Mad, my good lady! Not a bit. What's the matter? Is it Mahomet?
You're not afraid of _him_?"
"Oh, sir, for the _Lord's_ sake tell me what you mean?" implored she,
wildly.
"I mean _that_, to be sure; what I _say_," he replied. "I mean that
the gentleman complied with the custom of the country--don't you
see?--and submitted to Kismet. It was his fate, ma'am; it's the
invariable condition; and they'd have handed him over to his Christian
compatriots to murder, according to Frank law, otherwise. So, ma'am,
he shaved his head, put on a turban--they wore turbans then--and, with
his Koran under his arm, walked into a mosque, and said his say about
Allah and the rest, and has been safe ever since."
"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the poor old lady, trembling in a great agony.
"Ho! _no_, ma'am; 'twasn't much," said he, briskly.
"All, all; the last hope!" cried she, wildly.
"Don't run away with it, pray. It's a very easy and gentlemanlike
faith, Mahometanism--except in the matter of wine; and even that you
can have, under the rose, like other things here, ma'am, that aren't
quite orthodox; eh?" said Mr. Dingwell.
"Oh, Arthur, Arthur!" moaned the poor lady distractedly, wringing her
hands.
"Suppose, ma'am, we pray it may turn out to have been the right way.
Very desirable, since Arthur died in it," said Mr. Dingwell.
"Oh, sir, oh! I couldn't have believed it. Oh, sir, this shock--this
frightful shock!"
"Courage, madam! Console yourself. Let us hope he didn't believe this
any more than the other," said Mr. Dingwell.
Mrs. Mervyn leaned her cheek on her thin clasped hands, and was
rocking herself to and fro in her misery.
"I was with him, you know, in his last moments," said Mr. Dingwell,
shrugging sympathetically, and crossing his leg. "It's always
interesting, those last moments--eh?--and exquisitely affecting,
even--_particularly_ if it isn't very clear _where_ the fellow's
going."
A tremulous moan escaped the old lady.
"And he called for some wine. That's comforting, and has a flavour of
Christianity, eh? A _relapse_, don't you think, very nearly?--at so
unconvivial a moment. It must have been _principle_; eh? Let us
hope."
The old lady's moans and sighs were her answers.
"And now that I think on it, he must have died a Christian," said Mr.
Dingwell, briskly.
The old lady looked up, and listened breathlessly.
"Because, after we thought he was speechless, there was one of those
what-d'ye-call-'ems--begging dervish fellows--came into the room, and
kept saying one of their long yarns about the prophet Mahomet, and my
dying friend made me a sign; so I put my ear to his lips, and he said
distinctly, 'He be d--d!'--I beg your pardon; but last words are
always precious."
Here came a pause.
Mr. Dingwell was quite bewildering this trembling old lady.
"And the day before," resumed Mr. Dingwell, "Poor Arthur said,
'They'll bury me here under a turban; but I should like a mural tablet
in old Penruthyn church. They'd be ashamed of my name, I think; so
they can put on it the date of my decease, and the simple inscription,
Check-mate.' But whether he meant to himself or his creditors I'm not
able to say."
Mrs. Mervyn groaned.
"It's very interesting. And he had a message for you, ma'am. He called
you by a name of endearment. He made me stoop, lest I should miss a
word, and he said, 'Tell my little linnet,' said he"--
But here Mr. Dingwell was interrupted. A wild cry, a wild laugh,
and--"Oh, Arthur, it's _you_!"
He felt, as he would have said, "oddly" for a moment--a sudden flood
of remembrance, of youth. The worn form of that old outcast, who had
not felt the touch of human kindness for nearly thirty years, was
clasped in the strain of an inextinguishable and angelic love--in the
thin arms of one likewise faded and old, and near the long sleep in
which the heart is fluttered and pained no more.
There was a pause, a faint laugh, a kind of sigh, and he said--
"So you've found me out."
"Darling, darling! you're not changed?"
"Change!" he answered, in a low tone. "There's a change, little
linnet, from summer to winter; where the flowers were the snow is.
Draw the curtain, and let us look on one another."