IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ENDEAVOURS, TO THE BEST OF HIS ABILITY, TO GIVE
A FINAL REPLY TO THE QUESTION, "WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?"
SCENE--The banks of the lake at Fawley. George is lending his arm to
Waife; Mrs. Morley, seated on her camp-stool at the opposite side of the
water, is putting the last touch to her sketch of the Manor-house; Sir
Isaac, reclined, is gravely contemplating the swans; the doe, bending
over him, occasionally nibbles his ear; Fairthorn has uncomfortably edged
himself into an angle of the building, between two buttresses, and is
watching, with malignant eye, two young forms, at a distance, as they
moved slowly yonder, side by side, yet apart, now lost, now emerging,
through the gaps between melancholy leafless trees. Darrell, having just
quitted Waife and George, to whose slow pace he can ill time his
impatient steps, wonders why Lionel, whom, on arriving, he had, with
brief cordial words, referred to Sophy for his fate, has taken more than
an hour to ask a simple question, to which the reply may be pretty well
known beforehand. He advances towards those melancholy trees. Suddenly
one young form leaves the other--comes with rapid stride through the
withered fern. Pale as death, Lionel seizes Guy Darrell's hand with
convulsive grasp, and says: "I must leave you, sir; God bless you! All
is over. I was the blindest fool--she refuses me."
"Refuses you!--impossible! For what reason?"
"She cannot love me well enough to marry," answered Lionel with a
quivering lip, and an attempt at that irony in which all extreme anguish,
at least in our haughty sex, delights to seek refuge or disguise. "Likes
me as a friend, a brother, and so forth, but--nothing more. All a
mistake, sir--all, except your marvellous kindness to me--to her--for
which Heaven ever bless you."
"Yes, all a mistake of your own, foolish boy," said Darrell, tenderly;
and, turning sharp, he saw Sophy hastening by, quickly and firmly, with
her eyes looking straightward--on into space. He threw himself in her
path.
"Tell this dull kinsman of mine that 'faint heart never won fair lady.'
You do not mean seriously, deliberately to reject a heart that will never
be faint with a meaner fear than that of losing you?"
Poor Sophy! She kept her blue eyes still on the cold grey space, and
answered by some scarce audible words--words which in every age girls
intending to say No seem to learn as birds learn their song; no one knows
who taught them, but they are ever to the same tune. "Sensible of the
honour"--"Grateful"--"Some one more worthy," &c., &c.
Darrell checked this embarrassed jargon. "My question, young lady, is
solemn; it involves the destiny of two lives. Do you mean to say that
you do not love Lionel Haughton well enough to give him your hand, and
return the true faith which is pledged with his own?"
"Yes," said Lionel, who had gained the side of his kinsman, "yes, that is
it. O Sophy--Ay or No?"
"No!" fell from her pale, firm lips--and in a moment more she was at
Waife's side, and had drawn him away from George. "Grandfather,
grandfather!--home, home; let us go home at once, or I shall die!"
Darrell has kept his keen sight upon her movements--upon her countenance.
He sees her gesture--her look--as she now clings to her grandfather. The
blue eyes are not now coldly fixed on level air, but raised upward as for
strength from above. The young face is sublime with its woe, and with
its resolve.
"Noble child," muttered Darrell, "I think I see into her heart. If so,
poor Lionel, indeed! My pride has yielded, hers never will!"
Lionel, meanwhile, kept beating his foot on the ground, and checking
indignantly the tears that sought to gather to his eyes. Darrell threw
his arm round the young man's shoulder, and led him gently, slowly away,
by the barbed thorn-tree-on by the moss-grown crags.
Waife, meanwhile, is bending his ear to Sophy's lip. The detestable
Fairthorn emerges from between the buttresses, and shambles up to George,
thirsting to hear his hopes confirmed, and turning his face back to smile
congratulation, on the gloomy old house that he thinks he has saved from
the lake.
Sophy has at last convinced Waife that his senses do not deceive him, nor
hers wander. She has said, "O grandfather, let us ever henceforth be all
in all to each other. You are not ashamed of me--I am so proud of you.
But there are others akin to me, grandfather, whom we will not mention;
and you would be ashamed of me if I brought disgrace on one who would
confide to me his name, his honour; and should I be as proud of you, if
you asked me to do it?"
At these word, Waife understands all, and he has not an argument in
reply; and he suffers Sophy to lead him towards the house. Yes, they
will go hence--yes, there shall be no schemes of marriage! They had
nearly reached the door, when the door itself opened violently, and a man
rushing forth caught Sophy in his arms, and kissed her forehead, her
cheek, with a heartiness that it is well Lionel did not witness!
Speechless and breathless with resentwent, Sophy struggled, and in vain,
when Waife, seizing the man by the collar, swung him away with a "How
dare you, sir," that was echoed back from the hillocks--summoned Sir
Isaac at full gallop from the lake--scared Fairthorn back to his
buttresses--roused Mrs. Morley from her sketch, and, smiting the ears of
Lionel and Darrell, hurried them, mechanically as it were, to the very
spot from which that thunder-roll had pealed.
"How dare I?" said the man, resettling the flow of his disordered
coat--" How dare I kiss my own niece?--my own sister's orphan child?
Venerable Bandit, I have a much better right than you have. Oh, my dear
injured Sophy, to think that I was ashamed of your poor cotton print--
to think that to your pretty face I have been owing fame and fortune--and
you, you wandering over the world--child of the sister of whose beauty I
was so proud--of her for whom, alas, in vain! I painted Watteaus and
Greuzes upon screens and fans!" Again he clasped her to his breast; and
Waife this time stood mute, and Sophy passive--for the man's tears were
raining upon her face, and washed away every blush of shame as to the
kiss they hallowed.
"But where is my old friend William Losely?--where is Willy?" said
another voice, as a tall, thin personage stepped out from the hall, and
looked poor Waife unconsciously in the face.
"Alban Morley!" faltered Waife, "you are but little changed!"
The Colonel looked again, and in the elderly, lame, oneeyed, sober-
looking man, recognised the wild jovial Willy, who had tamed the most
unruly fillies, taken the most frantic leaps, carolled forth the blithest
song-madcap, good-fellow, frolicsome, childlike darling of gay and grave,
young and old!
"'Eheu, fugaces, Postume, Postume,
Labuntur anni,'"
said the Colonel, insensibly imbibing one of those Horatian particles
that were ever floating in that classic atmosphere--to Darrell medicinal,
to Fairthorn morbific. "Years slide away, Willy, mutely as birds skim
through air; but when friend meets with friend after absence, each sees
the print of their crows' feet on the face of the other. But we are not
too old yet, Willy, for many a meet at the fireside! Nothing else in our
studs, we can still mount our hobbies; and thoroughbred hobbies contrive
to be in at the death.
"But you are waiting to learn by what title and name this stranger lays
claim to so peerless a niece. Know then Ah, here comes Darrell. Guy
Darrell, in this young lady you will welcome the grandchild of Sidney
Branthwaite, our old Eton school friend, a gentleman of as good blood as
any in the land!"
"None better," cried Fairthorn, who had sidled himself into the group;
"there's a note on the Branthwaite genealogy, sir, in your father's great
work upon 'Monumental Brasses.'"
"Permit me to conclude, Mr. Fairthorn," resuined the Colonel; "Monumental
Brasses are painful subjects. Yes, Darrell,--yes, Lionel; this fair
creature, whom Lady Montfort might well desire to adopt, is the daughter
of Arthur Branthwaite, by marriage with the sister of Frank Vance, whose
name I shrewdly suspect nations will prize, and whose works princes will
hoard, when many a long genealogy, all blazoned in azure and or, will
have left not a scrap for the moths."
"Ah!" murmured Lionel, "was it not I, Sophy, who taught you to love your
father's genius! Do you not remember how, as we bent over his volume, it
seemed to translate to us our own feelings?--to draw us nearer together?
He was speaking to us from his grave."
Sophy made no answer; her face was hidden on the breast of the old man,
to whom she still clung closer and closer.
"Is it so? Is it certain? Is there no doubt that she is the child of
these honoured parents?" asked Waife, tremulously.
"None," answered Alban; "we bring with us proofs that will clear up all
my story."
The old man bowed his head over Sophy's fair locks for a moment; then
raised it, serene and dignified: "You are mine for a moment yet, Sophy,"
said he.
"Yours as ever-more fondly, gratefully than ever," cried Sophy.
"There is but one man to whom I can willingly yield you. Son of Charles
Haughton, take my treasure."
"I consent to that," cried Vance, "though I am put aside like a
Remorseless Baron. And, Lionello mio, if Frank Vance is a miser, so much
the better for his niece."
"But," faltered Lionel.
"Oh, falter not. Look into those eyes; read that blush now. She looks
coy, not reluctant. She bends before him--adorned as for love, by all
her native graces. Air seems brightened by her bloom. No more the
Outlaw-Child of Ignominy and Fraud, but the Starry Daughter of POETRY AND
ART! Lo, where they glide away under the leafless, melancholy trees.
Leafless and melancholy! No! Verdure and blossom and the smile of
spring are upon every bough!"
"I suppose," said Alban, "it will not now break Lionel's heart to learn
that not an hour before I left London, I heard from a friend at the Horse
Guards that it has been resolved to substitute the regiment for Lionel's;
and it will be for some time yet, I suspect, that he must submit to be in
gloriously happy. Come this way, George, a word in your ear." And
Alban, drawing his nephew aside, told him of Jasper's state, and of
Arabella's request. "Not a word to-day on these mournful topics, to poor
Willy. To-day let nothing add to his pain to have lost a grandchild, or
dim his consolation in the happiness and security his Sophy gains in that
loss. But to-morrow you will go and see the stricken-down sinner, and
prepare the father for the worst. I made a point of seeing Dr. F. last
night. He gives Jasper but a few weeks. He compares him to a mountain,
not merely shattered by an earthquake, but burned out by its own inward
fires."
"A few weeks only," sighed George. "Well, Time, that seems everything
to man, has not even an existence in the sight of God. To that old man
I owe the power of speech to argue, to exhort, and to comfort;--he was
training me to kneel by the deathbed of his son!"
"You believe," asked the Man of the World, "in the efficacy of a deathbed
repentance, when a sinner has sinned till the power of sinning be gone?"
"I believe," replied the Preacher, "that in health there is nothing so
unsafe as trust in a deathbed repentance; I believe that on the deathbed,
it cannot be unsafe to repent!"
Alban looked thoughtful, and George turned to rejoin Waife, to whom Vance
was narrating the discovery of Sophy's parentage; while Fairthorn, as he
listened, drew his flute from his pocket, and began screwing it,
impatient to vent in delicate music what he never could have set into
words for his blundering, untunable tongue. The Colonel joins Darrell,
and hastens to unfold more fully the story which Vance is reciting to
Waife.
Brief as it can, be the explanation due to the reader. Vance's sister
had died in childbirth. The poor young poet, unfitted to cope with
penury, his sensitive nature combined with a frame that could feebly
resist the strain of exhausting emotions, disappointed in fame,
despairing of fortune, dependent for bread on his wife's boyish brother,
and harassed by petty debts in a foreign land, had been fast pining away,
even before an affliction to which all the rest seemed as nought. With
that affliction he broke down at once, and died a few days after his
wife, leaving an infant not a week old. A French female singer, of some
repute in the theatres, and making a provincial tour, was lodging in the
same house as the young couple. She had that compassionate heart which
is more common than prudence or very strict principle with the tribes who
desert the prosaic true world for the light sparkling false one. She had
assisted the young couple, in their later days, with purse and kind
offices; had been present at the birth of the infant--the death of the
mother; and had promised Arthur Branthwaite that she would take care of
his child, until she could safely convey it to his wife's relations,
while he wept to own that they, poor as himself, must regard such a
charge as a burthen.
The singer wrote to apprise Mrs. Vance of the death of her daughter and
son-in-law, and the birth of the infant whom she undertook shortly to
send to England. But the babe, whom meanwhile she took to herself, got
hold of her affections; with that yearning for children which makes so
remarkable and almost uniform a characteristic of French women (if
themselves childless) in the wandering Bohemian class that separates them
from the ordinary household affections, never dead in the heart of woman
till womanhood itself be dead, the singer clung to the orphan little one
to whom she was for the moment rendering the cares of a mother. She
could not bear to part with it; she resolved to adopt it as her own.
The knowledge of Mrs. Vance's circumstances--the idea that the orphan,
to herself a blessing, would be an unwelcome encumbrance to its own
relations--removed every scruple from a mind unaccustomed to suffer
reflection to stand in the way of an impulse. She wrote word to Mrs.
Vance that the child was dead. She trusted that her letter would
suffice, without other evidence, to relations so poor, and who could have
no suspicion of any interest to deceive them. Her trust was well
founded. Mrs. Vance and the boy Frank, whose full confidence and
gratitude had been already secured to their correspondent for her kind
offices to the young parents, accepted, without a demur or a question,
the news that the infant was no more. The singer moved on to the next
town at which she was professionally engaged. The infant, hitherto
brought up by hand, became ailing. The medical adviser called in
recommended the natural food, and found, in a village close by, the nurse
to whom a little time before Jasper Losely had consigned his own
daughter. The latter died; the nurse then removed to Paris to reside
with the singer, who had obtained a lucrative appointment at one of the
metropolitan theatres. In less than two years the singer herself fell a
victim to a prevailing epidemic. She had lived without thought of the
morrow; her debts exceeded her means; her effects were sold. The nurse,
who had meanwhile become a widow, came for advice and refuge to her
sister, who was in the service of Gabrielle Desmarets. Gabrielle, being
naturally appealed to, saw the infant, heard the story, looked into the
statement which, by way of confession, the singer had drawn up, and
signed, in a notary's presence, before she died; looked into the letters
from Mrs. Vance, and the schoolboy scrawls from Frank, both to the singer
and to the child's parents, which the actress had carefully preserved;
convinced herself of the poverty and obscurity of the infant's natural
guardians and next of kin; and said to Jasper, who was just dissipating
the fortune handed over to him as survivor of his wife and child: "There
is what, if well-managed, may retain your hold on a rich father-in-law
when all else has failed. You have but to say that this infant is his
grandchild; the nurse we can easily bribe, or persuade to confirm the
tale. I, whom he already knows as that respectable baroness, your
Matilda's friend, can give to the story some probable touches. The lone
childless man must rejoice to think that a tie is left to him. The
infant is exquisitely pretty; her face will plead for her. His heart
will favour the idea too much to make him very rigorous in his
investigations. Take the infant. Doubtless in your own country you can
find some one to rear it at little or no expense, until the time come for
appeal to your father-in-law when no other claim on his purse remains."
Jasper assented with the insouciant docility by which he always
acknowledged Gabrielle's astuter intellect. He saw the nurse; it was
clear that she had nothing to gain by taking the child to English
relations so poor. They might refuse to believe her, and certainly--
could not reward. To rid herself of the infant, and obtain the means to
return to her native village with a few hundred francs in her purse,
there was no promise she was not willing to make, no story she was too
honest to tell, no paper she was too timid to sign. Jasper was going to
London on some adventure of his own. He took the infant--chanced on
Arabella--the reader knows the rest. The indifference ever manifested by
Jasper to a child not his own--the hardness with which he had
contemplated and planned his father's separation from one whom he had
imposed by false pretexts on the old man's love, and whom he only
regarded as an alien encumbrance upon the scanty means of her deluded
protector--the fitful and desultory mode in which, when (contrary to the
reasonings which Gabrielle had based upon a very large experience of the
credulities of human nature in general, but in utter ignorance of the
nature peculiar to Darrell) his first attempt at imposition had been so
scornfully resisted by his indignant father-in-law, he had played fast
and loose with a means of extortion which, though loth to abandon, he
knew would not bear any strict investigation;--all this is now clear to
the reader. And the reader will also comprehend why, partly from fear
that his father might betray him, partly from a compassionate
unwillingness to deprive the old man of a belief in which William Losely
said he had found such solace, Jasper, in his last interview with his
father, shrank from saying, "but she is not your grandchild!" The idea
of recurring to the true relations of the child naturally never entered
into Jasper's brain. He considered them to be as poor as himself. They
buy from him the child of parents whore they had evidently, by their
letters, taxed themselves to the utmost, and in vain, to save from
absolute want! So wild seemed the notion, that he had long since
forgotten that relations so useless existed. Fortunately the nurse had
preserved the written statement of the singer--the letters by Mrs. Vance
and Frank--the certificate of the infant's birth and baptism--some poor
relics of Sophy's ill-fated parents-manuscripts of Arthur's poems--baby-
caps with initials and armorial crests, wrought, before her confinement,
by the young wife--all of which had been consigned by the singer to the
nurse, and which the nurse willingly disposed of to Mrs. Crane, with her
own formal deposition of the facts, confirmed by her sister, Gabrielle's
old confidential-attendant, and who, more favoured than her mistress, was
living peaceably in the rural scenes of her earlier innocence, upon the
interest of the gains she had saved in no innocent service--confirmed yet
more by references to many whose testimonials could trace, step by step,
the child's record from its birth to its transfer to Jasper, and by the
brief but distinct avowal, in tremulous lines, writ by Jasper himself.
As a skein crossed and tangled, when the last knot is loosened, slips
suddenly free, so this long bewildering mystery now became clear as a
commonplace! What years of suffering Darrell might have been saved had
he himself seen and examined the nurse--had his inquiry been less bounded
by the fears of his pride--had the great lawyer not had himself for a
client!
Darrell silently returned to Alban Morley the papers over which he had
cast his eye as they walked slowly to and fro the sloping banks of the
lake.
"It is well," said he, glancing fondly, as Fairthorn had glanced before
him, towards the old House, now freed from doom, and permitted to last
its time. "It is well," he repeated, looking away towards that part of
the landscape where he could just catch a glimpse of Sophy's light form
beyond the barbed thorn-tree; "it is well," he repeated thrice with a
sigh. "Poor human nature! Alban, can you conceive it? I, who once so
dreaded that that poor child should prove to be of my blood, now, in
knowing that she is not, feel a void, a loss! To Lionel I am so distant
a kinsman!--to his wife, to his children, what can I be? A rich old man;
the sooner he is in his grave the better. A few tears, and then the
will! But, as your nephew says, 'This life is but a school;' the new-
comer in the last form thinks the head-boy just leaving so old! And to
us, looking back, it seems but the same yesterday whether we were the
last comer or the head-boy."
"I thought," said Alban, plaintively, "that, for a short time at least, I
had done with 'painful subjects.' You revel in them! County Guy, you
have not left school yet; leave it with credit; win the best prize." And
Alban plunged at once into THE CRISIS. He grew eloquent; the Party, the
Country, the Great Measure to be intrusted to Darrell, if he would but
undertake it as a member of the Cabinet; the Peerage, the House of
Vipont, and immortal glory!--eloquent as Ulysses haranguing the son of
Peleus in Troilus and Cressida.
Darrell listened coldly; only while Alban dwelt on "the Measure," in
which, when it was yet too unripe for practical statesmen, he had
attached his faith as a thinker, the orator's eye flashed with young
fire. A great truth is eternally clear to a great heart that has once
nourished its germ and foreseen its fruits. But when Alban quitted that
part of his theme, all the rest seemed wearisome to his listener. They
had now wound their walk to the opposite side of the lake, and paused
near the thick beech-trees, hallowed and saddened by such secret
associations to the mournful owner.
"No, my dear Alban," said Darrell, "I cannot summon up sufficient youth
and freshness of spirit to re-enter the turbulent arena I have left. Ah!
look yonder where Lionel and Sophy move! Give me, I do not say Lionel's
years, but Lionel's wealth of hope, and I might still have a wish for
fame and a voice for England; but it is a subtle truth, that when a man
misses a home, a link between his country and himself is gone. Vulgar
ambition may exist--the selfish desire of power; they were never very
strong in me, and now less strong than the desire of rest; but that
beautiful, genial, glorious union of all the affections of social
citizen, which begins at the hearth and widens round the land, is not for
the hermit's cell."
Alban was about to give up the argument in irritable despair, when
happening to turn his eye towards the farther depth of the beech-grove,
he caught a glimpse--no matter what of; but quickening his step in the
direction to which his glance had wandered, he seated himself on the
gnarled roots of a tree that seemed the monarch of the wood,
widespreading as that under which Tityrus reclined of old; and
there, out of sight of the groups on the opposite banks of the lake--
there, as if he had sought the gloomiest and most secret spot for what he
had yet to say, he let fall, in the most distinct yet languid tones of
his thoroughbred, cultured enunciation: "I have a message to you from
Lady Montfort. Restless man, do come nearer, and stand still. I am
tired to death." Darrell approached, and, leaning against the trunk of
the giant tree, said, with folded arms and compressed lips:
"A message from Lady Montfort!"
"Yes. I should have told you, by-the-by, that it was she who, being a
woman, of course succeeded where I, being a man, despite incredible pains
and trouble, signally failed, discovered Arabella Fossett, alias Crane,
and obtained from her the documents which free your life forever from a
haunting and torturing fear. I urged her to accompany me hither, and
place the documents herself in your hand. She refused; you were not
worth so much trouble, my dear Guy. I requested her at least to suffer
me to show to you a paper containing Jasper Losely's confession of a
conspiracy to poison her mind against you some years ago--a conspiracy
so villanously ingenious that it would have completely exonerated any
delicate and proud young girl from the charge of fickleness in yielding
to an impulse of pique and despair. But Lady Montfort did not wish to be
exonerated; your good opinion has ceased to be of the slightest value to
her. But to come to the point. She bade me tell you that, if you
persist in sheltering yourself in a hermit's cell from the fear of
meeting her--if she be so dangerous to your peace--you may dismiss such
absurd apprehension. She is going abroad, and between you and me, my
dear fellow, I have not a doubt that she will marry again before six
months are out. I spoke of your sufferings; she told me she had not the
smallest compassion for them."
"Alban Morley, you presumed to talk thus of me?" cried Darrell, livid
with rage.
"Strike, but hear me. It is true you would not own, when I was last at
Fawley, that she was the cause of your secluded life, of your blighted
career; but I knew better. However, let me go on before you strangle me.
Lady Montfort's former feelings of friendship for you are evidently quite
changed; and she charged me to add, that she really hoped that you would
exert your good sense and pride (of which Heaven knows you have plenty)
to eradicate an absurd and romantic sentiment, so displeasing to her, and
so--"
"It is false! it is false! What have I done to you, Colonel Morley,
that you should slander me thus? I send you messages of taunt and
insult, Mr. Darrell! You cannot believe it--you cannot!"
Caroline Montfort stood between the two, as if she had dropped from
heaven.
A smile, half in triumph, half in irony, curved the lip of the fine
gentleman. It faded instantly as his eye turned from the face of the
earnest woman to that of the earnest man. Alban Morley involuntarily
bowed his head, murmured some words unheard, and passed from the place
unheeded.
Not by concert nor premeditation was Caroline Montfort on that spot; she
had consented to accompany her cousin to Fawley, but before reaching the
park gates her courage failed her; she would remain within the carriage;
the Colonel, wanted in London as soon as possible, whatever the result of
his political mission to Darrell, could not stay long at Fawley; she
would return with him. Vance's presence and impatient desire to embrace
his niece did not allow the Colonel an occasion for argument and parley.
Chafed at this fresh experience of the capricious uncertainty of woman,
he had walked on with Vance to the Manor-house. Left alone, Caroline
could not endure the stillness and inaction which increased the tumult of
her thoughts; she would at least have one more look--it might be the
last--at the scenes in which her childhood had sported--her youth known
its first happy dreams. But a few yards across those circumscribed
demesnes, on through those shadowy serried groves, and she should steal
unperceived in view of the house, the beloved lake, perhaps even once
more catch a passing glimpse of the owner. She resolved, she glided on;
she gained the beech-grove, when, by the abrupt wind of the banks,
Darrell and Alban came suddenly on the very spot. The flutter of her
robe, as she turned to retreat, caught Alban's eye; the reader
comprehends with what wily intent, conceived on the moment, that
unscrupulous schemer shaped the words which chained her footstep, and
then stung her on to self-disclosure. Trembling and blushing, she now
stood before the startled man--He startled out of every other sentiment
and feeling than that of ineffable, exquisite delight to be once more in
her presence; she, after her first passionate outburst, hastening on, in
confused broken words, to explain that she was there but by accident--by
chance; confusion growing deeper and deeper--how explain the motive that
had charmed her steps to the spot?
Suddenly from the opposite bank came the music of the magic flute, and
her voice as suddenly stopped and failed her.
"Again--again," said Darrell, dreamily. "The same music! the same air!
and this the same place on which we two stood together when I first dared
to say, 'I love!' Look! we are under the very tree! Look! there is
the date I carved on the bark when you were gone, but had left Hope
behind. Ah, Caroline, why can I not now resign myself to age? Why is
youth, while I speak, rushing back into my heart, into my soul? Why
cannot I say, 'Gratefully I accept your tender friendship; let the past
be forgotten; through what rests to me of the future while on earth, be
to me as a child. I cannot--I cannot! Go!"
She drew nearer to him, gently, timidly. 'Even that, Darrell,--even
that; something in your life--let me be something still!"
"Ah," he said with melancholy bitterness, "you deceive me no longer now!
You own that, when here we stood last and exchanged our troth, you in the
blossom, and I in the prime, of life--you own that it was no woman's
love, deaf to all calumny, proof to all craft that could wrong the
absent; no woman's love, warm as the heart, undying as the soul, that you
pledged me then?"
"Darrell, it was not--though then I thought it was."
"Ay, ay," he continued with a smile, as if of triumph in his own pangs,
"so that truth is confessed at last! And when, once more free, you wrote
to me the letter I returned, rent in fragments, to your hand--or when,
forgiving my rude outrage and fierce reproach, you spoke to me so gently
yonder, a few weeks since, in these lonely shades, then what were your
sentiments, your motives? Were they not those of a long-suppressed and
kind remorse? of a charity akin to that which binds rich to poor, bows
happiness to suffering?--some memories of gratitude--nay, perhaps of
childlike affection?--all amiable, all generous, all steeped in that
sweetness of nature to which I unconsciously rendered justice in the
anguish I endured in losing you; but do not tell me that even then you
were under the influence of woman's love."
"Darrell, I was not."
"You own it, and you suffer me to see you again! Trifler and cruel one,
is it but to enjoy the sense of your undiminished, unalterable power?"
"Alas, Darrell! alas! why am I here?--why so yearning, yet so afraid to
come? Why did my heart fail when these trees rose in sight against the
sky?--why, why--why was it drawn hither by the spell I could not resist?
Alas, Darrell, alas! I am a woman now--and--and this--"
She lowered her veil, and turned away; her lips could not utter the word,
because the word was not pity, not remorse, not remembrance, not even
affection; and the woman loved now too well to subject to the hazard of
rejection--LOVE!
"Stay, oh stay!" cried Darrell. "Oh that I could dare to ask you to
complete the sentence! I know--I know by the mysterious sympathy of my
own soul, that you could never deceive me more! Is it--is it--"
His lips falter too; but her hand is clasped in his; her head is
reclining upon his breast; the veil is withdrawn from the sweet downcast
face; and softly on her ear steal the murmured words, "Again and now,
till the grave--Oh, by this hallowing kiss, again--the Caroline of old!"
Fuller and fuller, spreading, wave after wave, throughout the air, till
it seemed interfused and commingled with the breath which the listeners
breathe, the flute's mellow gush streams along. The sun slopes in peace
towards the west; not a cloud in those skies, clearer seen through yon
boughs stripped of leaves, and rendering more vivid the evergreen of the
arbute and laurel.
Lionel and Sophy are now seated on yon moss-grown trunk, on either side
the old grey-haired man, as if agreeing for a while even to forget each.
other, that they may make him feel how fondly he is remembered. Sophy is
resting both her hands on the old man's shoulder, looking into his face,
and murmuring in his ear with voice like the coo of a happy dove. Ah,
fear not, Sophy; he is happy too--he who never thinks of himself. Look
--the playful smile round his arch lips; look--now he is showing off Sir
Isaac to Vance; with austere solemnity the dog goes through his tricks;
and Vance, with hand stroking his chin, is moralising on all that might
have befallen had he grudged his three pounds to that famous INVESTMENT.
Behind that group, shadowed by the Thorn-tree, stands the PREACHER,
thoughtful and grave, foreseeing the grief that must come to the old man
with the morrow, when he will learn that a guilty son nears his end, and
will hasten to comfort Jasper's last days with pardon. But the Preacher
looks not down to the death-couch alone; on and high over death looks the
Preacher! By what words Heavenly Mercy may lend to his lips shall he
steal away, yet in time, to the soul of the dying, and justify murmurs of
hope to the elm of a life so dark with the shades of its past? And to
him, to the Preacher, they who survive--the two mourners will come in
their freshness of sorrow! He, the old man? Nay, to him there will be
comfort. His spirit Heaven's kindness had tempered to trials; and, alas
for that son, what could father hope more than a death free from shame,
and a chance yet vouchsafed for repentance? But she, the grim, iron-grey
woman? The Preacher's interest, I know, will soon centre on her:--And
balm may yet drop on thy wounds, thou poor, grim, iron-grey, loving
woman.
Lo! that traitor, the Flute-player, over whom falls the deep grateful
shade from the eaves of the roof-tree reprieved; though unconscious as
yet of that happy change in the lot of the master which, ere long, may
complete (and haply for sons sprung in truth from the blood of the
Darrell) yon skeleton pile, and consummate, for ends nobler far, the plan
of a grand life imperfect;--though as yet the musician nor knows nor
conjectures the joy that his infamous treason to Sophy so little
deserves; yet, as if by those finer perceptions of sense impressed ere
they happen, by changes of pleasure and of pain, which Art so
mysteriously gives to the minds from which music is born, his airs, of
themselves, float in joy: Like a bird at the coming of spring, it is
gladness that makes him melodious.
And Alban Morley, seemingly intent upon the sketch which his amiable
niece-in-law submits to his critical taste ere she ventures to show it to
Vance, is looking from under his brows towards the grove, out from which,
towering over all its dark brethren, soars the old trysting beech-tree,
and to himself he is saying: "Ten to one that the old House of Vipont now
weather the CRISIS; and a thousand to one that I find at last my armchair
at the hearth of my schoolfriend, Guy Darrell!"
And the lake is as smooth as glass; and the swans, hearkening the music,
rest still, with white breasts against the grass of the margin; and the
doe, where she stands, her fore-feet in the water, lifts her head
wistfully, with nostrils distended, and wondering soft eyes that are
missing the master. Now full on the beech-grove shines the westering
sun; out from the gloomy beech-grove into the golden sunlight--they come,
they come--Man and the Helpmate, two lives re-betrothed--two souls
re-united. Be it evermore! Amen.