CONCLUSION.
I must finish my story, though it seems hardly worth telling, since my
nephew, my tower of strength and trust, had suddenly sunk away from me
in the prime of his manhood.
The light seemed gone out of the whole world, and my heart felt dull
and dead, as if I could never heed or care for anything again. Even
Dermot's illness did not seem capable of stirring me to active anxiety
in this crushed, stupid state, with no one to speak to of what lay
heavy on my heart, no one even to write to; for who would venture to
read my letters? nay, I had not energy even to write to poor Miss
Woolmer. We got into a way of going on day after day with Dora's
little meals, the backgammon, and the Mayne Reid, till sometimes it
felt as if it had always been thus with us from all time, and always
would be; and at others it would seem as if it were a dream, and that
if I could but wake, I should be making tea for Harold in our cheerful
little drawing-room at Mount Eaton. At last I had almost a morbid
dread of breaking up this monotonous life, and having to think what to
do or where to go. The Randall Horsmans must long for our departure,
and my own house was in a state of purification, and uninhabitable.
The doctor said that Dora must be moved as soon as it could be managed,
for in that London attic she could have no impulse towards recovery;
and while it still seemed a fearful risk, he sent us off to St.
Clement's, a little village on the south coast, where he knew of rooms
in a great old manor-house which had sunk to farmer's use, and had a
master and mistress proof against infection.
When I brought my tired, worn-out, fretting charge in through the great
draughty porch, and was led up the old shallow oak stairs to a big
panelled room, clean and scantily furnished, where the rats ran about
behind the wainscot, and a rain-laden branch of monthly rose went tap,
tap against the window, and a dog howled all night long, I thought we
had come to a miserable place at the end of the earth. I thought so
still the next morning, when the mist lay in white rolls and curls
round the house; and the sea, when we had a peep of it, was as
lead-coloured as the sky, while the kind pity of the good wife for
Dora's weak limbs and disfigured face irritated me so that I could
hardly be civil.
Dora mended from that day, devoted herself to the hideous little lambs
that were brought in to be nursed by the fire; ate and drank like a
little cormorant, and soon began to rush about after Mr. and Mrs. Long,
whether in house or farm-yard, like a thing in its native element,
while they were enchanted with her colonial farm experience, and could
not make enough of "Little Missy."
I had a respite from Mayne Reid, and could wander as far as I pleased
alone on the shingle, or sit and think as I had so often longed to do;
but the thoughts only resulted in a sense of dreariness and of almost
indifference as to my fate, since the one person in all the world who
had needed me was gone, and I had heard nothing whatever of Dermot
Tracy. He might be gone out to his mother and sister, or back to
Ireland. Our paths would never come together again, for he thought I
did not care for him. Nay, was I even sure of his recovery? His
constitution had been much tried! He was in a strange place, among
mere professional nurses! Who could tell how it had been with him?
Everything went from me that had loved me. Even Dora was to leave me
as soon as people ceased to be afraid of her.
Letters had found out the married pair on their return from the
cataracts of the Nile. Eustace had immediately been vaccinated
fourteen times, but he was shocked and appalled, and the spirit of his
letter was--
O while my brother with me stayed,
Would I had loved him more,
and I forgave him much.
Hippolyta likewise wrote with feeling, but it rather stung me to be
thanked for my care of "her poor little sister," as if Dora were not my
child before she was hers. As soon as it was considered safe, Dora was
to be returned to Horsman keeping, and as the Randall party declined to
receive her again, Philippa would convey her to a school at Baden-Baden.
And Dora declared she was glad! There was none of the angry resistance
with which she had left me in the spring; when I had done nothing for
her compared with what I had gone through for her now; but I believe I
was dull company, and showed myself displeased at her hardness and wild
outbreaks of spirits, and that the poor child longed to escape from all
that reminded her of the unbearable sorrow at the bottom of her heart.
But it was a grievance to a grievance-making temper, such as I feel
mine was.
The most wholesome thing I received was a letter from Prometesky, to
whom I had written the tidings that Harold would never need his comfort
more. The old man was where the personal loss was not felt, and he
knew more deeply than anyone the pain which that strong fervent heart
suffered in its self-conquests, so that he did not grieve for Harold
himself; but he gave me that sympathy of entire appreciation of my loss
which is far better than compassion. For himself, he said his last
link with the world was gone, he found the peace, and the expression of
penitence, his soul required, in the course he was about to embrace,
and I might look on this as a voice from the grave. I should never
hear of him more, but I should know that, as long as life was left him,
it would be spent in prayers for those whose souls he had wrecked in
his overboiling youth. He ended with thanks to all of us, who he said
had sent him to his retreat with more kindly and charitable
recollections than he should otherwise have carried thither. I never
did hear of him again; Dermot went to the convent some years later, and
tried to ascertain if he lived, but the monks do not know each others'
names, and it failed.
The village of St. Clement's, a small fishing-place, was half-a-mile
off, through lanes a foot deep in mud, and with a good old sleepy
rector of the old school, not remarkable for his performances in
Church. I was entering the little shop serving as the post-office,
where I went every day in the unreasonable expectation of letters, when
I heard a voice that made me start, "Did you say turn to the right?"
And there, among the piles of cheeses, stood a figure I knew full well,
though it had grown very thin, and had a very red and mottled face at
the top.
We held out our hands to one another in silence, and walked at once out
of hearing. Dermot said he was well, and had been as kindly looked
after as possible, and now he had been let out as safe company, but his
family and friends would hardly believe it, so he had come down to see
whether he could share our quarantine.
Happily a few cottages of the better sort had accommodation for
lodgers, and one of them--for a consideration--accepted "the
gentleman's" bill of health. He walked on by my side, both of us
feeling the blessing of having someone to speak to. He, poor fellow,
had seen no being who had ever heard of Harold, except George Yolland,
who came when he was too ill to talk, and we went on with the
conversation that had been broken off weeks before, with such comfort
as it could give us in such a loss as ours.
He walked all the way back with me, and I was frightened to see how
tired he looked. I took him to Mrs. Long for the refreshment she loved
to give, and begged for the pony for him to ride home on, and a boy to
fetch it back.
It was wonderful how much more blue there was in the sea the next day,
how the evergreens glistened, and how beautiful and picturesque the old
house grew; and when I went out in the morning sunshine, for once,
inclined to admit some beauty in the staggering black-legged and
visaged lambs, and meditating a walk to the village, I saw Dermot
coming across the yard, so wearily and breathlessly, that I could only
say, "How could you?"
He looked up piteously. "You don't forbid me?" he said.
I almost cried as I told him it was only his fatigue that I objected
to; and indeed he was glad enough to take Dora's now vacated place on
the great sofa, while we talked of Viola. Writing to her had been, of
course, impossible for him, and he had only had two short notes from
her, so meaningless that I thought she wrote them fearing to disturb
him while he was ill; but he muttered an ominous line from Locksley
Hall, vituperated Piggy, and confessed that his ground for doing so was
that his mother reported Viola as pleased with foreign life, and happy
with her cousins. I said it was his mother's way, and he replied,
"Exactly so; and a girl may be worried into anything." A slight
dispute on that score cheered him a little, for he showed himself
greatly depressed. He was going--as soon as he had gathered a little
strength--back to the duties he had promised to fulfil on his own
property, but he hated the thought, was down-hearted as to the chances
of success, and distrustful of himself among discouragements, and the
old associations he had made for himself. "It is a different thing
without Alison to look to and keep one up," he said.
"There are higher motives," was my stupid speech.
"It is precious hard on a poor fellow to be left alone with his higher
motives, as you call them, before he has well begun to act on his
lower."
And then, I don't know how, he began talking drearily, almost as if I
was not there, of his having once begun to fancy he could do something
creditable enough to make me some day look on him as I used to do in
the good old times. My heart gave a great bound, and remembering how
Harold said I discouraged him, out came, "How do you know that I don't?"
How he sprang up! And--no, I can't tell what we said, only we found it
was no new beginning, only taking up an old, old precious
thread--something brought it all out. He had talked it all over with
Harold when he came back from Florence, and had taken home a little
hope which he said had helped him through the solitary hours of his
recovery. So it was Harold who, after all, gave us to one another.
Outspoken Dora informed us, before the day was much older, that the
Longs had asked whether that was her brother, or my young man. So we
took them into our confidence, and even borrowed "the trap" for one of
the roughest and the sweetest drives that ever we had, through those
splashing lanes, dropping Dermot at his lodgings to write his letters,
while the harvest moon made a path over the sea, no longer leaden, but
full of silvery glittering light. There had something come back into
the air which made us feel that life was worth living, after all!
Next morning the good people, who were much excited about our affairs,
sent the pony for him, and he came in full force with that flattering
Irish tongue of his, bent on persuading me that, old lovers as we were,
with no more to find out about one another, there was nothing to wait
for. 'How could he go back by himself (what a brogue he put on! yet
the tears were in his eyes) to his great desolate castle, with not a
living man in it at all at all, barring the Banshee and a ghost or two;
and as I had nothing to do, and nowhere to go, why not be married then
and there without more ado? If I refused, he should think it was all my
pride, and that I couldn't take that "ornary object," as he had
overheard himself described that day. (As if I did not love him the
better for that marred complexion!) His mother? His uncle? They had
long ago repented of having come between us ten years ago, and were
ready to go down on their knees to any dacent young woman who would
take him, let alone a bit of an heiress, who, though not to compete
with the sixty-thousand pounder, could provide something better than
praties and buttermilk for herself at Killy Marey.'
I could not help thinking dear Harold might have remembered Killy
Marey's needs when he gave me that half of his means. And as to going
back to Mount Eaton, ghosts of past times would meet me there, whose
pain was then too recent to have turned into the treasure these
recollections are to me.
There would be just time, Dermot declared, if he put up our banns the
very next Sunday, to go through with it before the time Pippa had
appointed for receiving Dora, and it would save all the trouble of
hunting up a surrogate and startling him with his lovely face.
However, he did startle the poor old parish clergyman effectually by
calling on him to publish the banns of marriage between Dermot Edward
St. Glear Tracy and Lucy Percy Alison, both residing in this parish. He
evidently thought we were in hiding from someone who knew of some just
cause or impediment; but whereas we certainly did full justice to our
ages twenty-eight and twenty-six, he could only try to examine us
individually very politely, but betraying how uncomfortable he was.
It was most amusing to see how his face cleared up when, two days
later, he met us on the beach with a dignified old white-haired
gentleman, though Dermot declared that the imposing title mentioned on
the introduction made him suspect us of having hired a benignant stage
father for the occasion.
The dear old uncle Ery had actually come down to chaperone us, and
really act as much as possible as a father to me; and as I had likewise
sent for Colman and a white silk dress, the St. Clement's minds were
free to be pleasantly excited about us. Lord Erymanth had intended to
have carried us off to be married from his castle, but we begged off,
and when he saw Dermot, he allowed that it was not the time to make a
public spectacle of what (Dermot was pleased to say) would have the
pleasing pre-eminence of being "the ugliest of weddings," both as to
bridegroom and bridesmaid. For he and Dora used to make daily fun of
their respective beauties, which were much on a par, since, though she
had three weeks' start of him, the complaint having been unmitigated in
her, had left much more permanent-looking traces. Those two chose to
keep each other up to the most mirthful nonsense-pitch, and yet I am
sure none of us felt so light of spirit as we must have appeared,
though, perhaps, the being on the edge of such a great shadow made the
sunshine seem brighter.
We had considered of beginning with a flying visit to see how poor
Viola really was, but the Italian letters prevented this. Lady Diana
accepted me cordially and kindly as a daughter, and said all that was
proper; but she actually forestalled us by desiring her son not to come
out to her, for she thought it much better for Viola not to have
painful recollections revived, and Viola herself wrote in a way that
disappointed us--loving indeed, but with a strain of something between
lightness and bitterness, and absolutely congratulating her brother
that there was no one on my side to bring up bygones against him. One
half of her letter was a mere guide-book to the Roman antiquities, and
was broken off short for some carnival gaiety. Lord Erymanth clearly
liked his letters as little as we did. In the abstract, in spite of
the first cousinship, I am afraid he would rather have given Viola to
Pigou St. Glear than to Harold Alison, but he had thought better of his
niece than to think she could forget such a man so soon.
However, the day came. Dora slept with me, and that last night when I
came to bed, I found the true self had made a reassertion in one of
those frightful fits of dumb hysteria. Half the night Colman and I
were attending to her, but still she never opened to me, more than by
clinging frantically round my neck in the intervals. She fell asleep
at last, and slept till we actually pulled her out of bed to be dressed
for the wedding; but we agreed that we could not expose our uncle (who
was to escort her to Northchester station) to being left alone with her
in one of these attacks, and, as our programme had never been quite
fixed, we altered it so far as to pass through Northchester and see her
safe into Baby Horsman's hands.
She was altogether herself by day, gave no sign of emotion, and was as
merry as possible throughout the journey, calling out to Dermot airily
from the platform that she should send him a present of sour krout from
Baden. Poor child, it was five years before we saw her again!
We had scarcely had time to settle in at Killy Marey before Lady Diana
implored us to meet her in London, without explaining what was the
matter. When we came to Lord Erymanth's house, we were met by Viola,
very thin, but with a bright red colour on her usually pale cheeks, and
a strange gleaming light in her eyes, making them larger than ever; and
oh, how she did talk! Chatter, chatter, about all they had seen or
done, and all the absurdities of the people they had met; mimicking
them and making fun, and all the time her mother became paler and
graver, looking as if she had grown ten years older. It went on so all
dinner-time. She talked instead of eating, and all the evening those
bright eyes of hers seemed to be keeping jealous watch that no one
should exchange any words in private.
Nor could we till poor Lady Diana, with a fagged miserable face, came
to my room at night, and I called Dermot in. And then she told us how
the child had "seemed to bear everything most beautifully," and had
never given way. I believe it was from that grain of perversity in
Viola's high-spirited nature, as well as the having grown up without
confidence towards her mother, which forbade her to mourn visibly among
unsympathising watchers; and when her hope was gone led her in her dull
despair to do as they pleased, try to distract her thoughts, let
herself be hunted hither and thither, and laugh at and play with Pigou
St. Glear quite enough to pass for an encouraging flirtation, and to
lead all around her to think their engagement immediately coming on.
The only thing she refused to do was to go to the Farnese Palace, where
was the statue to which there had more than once been comparisons made.
At last, one day, when they were going over the Vatican Galleries,
everyone was startled by a strange peal of laughter, and before a
frieze of the Labours of Hercules stood Pigou, looking pale and
frightened, and trying to get Viola away, as she stood pointing to the
carrying home of the Erymanthian boar, and laughing in this wild forced
way. They got her away at last, but Piggy told his father that he
would have no more to do with her, even if their uncle left her half
his property, though he never would tell what she had said to him.
Since that time she had gone on in this excited state, apparently
scarcely eating or sleeping, talking incessantly, not irrationally, but
altogether at random, mockingly and in contradiction to everyone;
caring chiefly to do the very thing her mother did not wish, never
resting, and apparently with untiring vigour, though her cheeks and
hands were burning, and she was wasting away from day to day.
Lady Diana really thought her mind was going, and by this time would
have given all she had in the world to have been able to call Harold
back to her. Diana Enderby tried reproofs for her flightiness, but
only made her worse; with Dermot she would only make ridiculous
nonsense, and utter those heartrending laughs; and when I tried to
soothe her, and speak low and quietly, she started away from me, showed
me her foreign purchases, or sang snatches of comic songs.
Dermot went at last to consult the same doctor to whom, half a year
before, he had taken Harold; and it was contrived that he should see
and hear her at a dinner-party without her knowledge. He consoled us
very much by saying that her mind was not touched, and that it was a
fever on the nerves, produced by the never having succumbed to the
unhappiness and the shock which, when he heard in what manner she had
lost Harold, he considered quite adequate to produce such effects.
Indeed, he had been so much struck with Harold himself, that he was
quite startled to hear of his death, and seemed to think an excess of
grief only his due. He bade us take her to her home, give her no
external excitement, and leave her as much as possible to go her own
way, and let her feel herself unwatched, and, if we could, find her
some new yet calming, engrossing occupation.
We took the advice, and poor Lady Diana besought us to remain with her
for the present; nor, indeed, could we have left her. Our chief care
was to hinder her oppressing her daughter with her anxiety; for we
found that Viola was so jealous of being watched that she would hardly
have tolerated us, but that I had real business in packing up my
properties at Mount Eaton. For the first week she took up her old
occupations in the same violent and fitful way, never sitting long to
anything, but rushing out to dash round the garden, and taking long
walks in all weathers, rejecting companionship.
From various causes, chiefly Lady Diana's wretchedness and anxiety,
Dermot and I had to wait a week before we could have the pony-chaise
and go together to Harold's grave. The great, massive, Irish granite
cross was not ready then, and there was only the long, very long, green
mound, at my mother's feet. There lay two wreaths on it. One was a
poor thorn garland--for his own Hydriot children had, we heard, never
left it untended all the winter--the other was of a great
white-flowered rhododendron that was peculiar to the Arked garden.
Was it disloyal to Harry that we thought more of Viola than we did of
him that first time we stood by his grave? It was an immense walk from
Arked to Arghouse Church, over four miles even by the shortest way,
which lay through rough cart-tracks which we had avoided in coming, but
now felt we had better take.
Nearly half way home, under a great, old pollard ash, we saw a little
brown figure. It was Viola, crouched together with her head on her
knees, sitting on the bank. She started up and tried to say something
petulantly joking about our always dogging her, but she broke down in a
flood of tears to which sheer weariness conduced. She was tired out at
last, footsore, and hardly able to move a limb, when Dermot almost
lifted her into the carriage, the dreadful, hard self-control all over
now, when, in those long lanes, with the Maybushes meeting overhead,
she leant against me and sobbed with long-pent anguish, while her
brother walked at the pony's head.
She had quite broken down now, and her natural self was come back to
us. When we came home, I got her up to her own room and Dermot went to
his mother. She had a long, quiet sleep, lying on her bed, and when
she woke it was growing dark on the May evening. She looked at me a
little while without speaking, and her eyes were soft again.
"Lucy," she said, "I think I have been very naughty, but they made me
so."
I said, as I kissed her, that I thought "they" had done so.
"_He_ would not have let anybody make him so," she said. "I was the
bad one. I was almost unfaithful. I told him so to-day."
"Not unfaithful, dearest, only harassed and miserable beyond all
bearing."
"Nothing is beyond bearing. I said so to myself over and over again.
That was why I would let no one see that I minded."
"You tried to bear it proudly, all by yourself," I said; "that was what
made it so dreadful."
"He said it was God's will," said poor Viola, "but I knew it was
mamma's. I did what he told me, Lucy; I did not get so wrong as long
as he lived, but after that I did not care what became of me, and yet I
did love him as much as ever."
She seemed to look on me as his representative, and was now ready to
take any persuasion of mine as coming from him. She admitted her
mother, was gentle and natural with her, ate and drank at her bidding,
and went to bed pale and worn down, but not ill. She never gave in or
professed indisposition, but for more than ten days she "went softly,"
was very tired, and equal to nothing but lying on the sofa and sitting
in the garden; and it was in those days that sometimes with her
brother, sometimes with me, she went over all that we could tell her,
or she tell us, of him who had been so dear to us all. The first time
she was alone with Dermot, she kissed every remaining mark she could
find in his face, and said she had ached to do it every time she saw
him. All those wells of deeper thought that had been so long choked by
the stony hardness of a proudly-borne sorrow seemed suddenly to open,
when she gave herself up to the thought of Harold. She even arrived at
sorrow for the way she had treated her mother; when he had given up his
own hope rather than make her disobedient. She asked Lady Diana's
pardon. She had never done so voluntarily in her whole life. She was
met by tears and humility that softened and humiliated her in her
sorrow more than aught else. Her precious flower-pot was in her window
with its fragrant verbena, and I gave her the crystal cross again,
telling her where I had found it, and she held it a moment and said,
"Some day it will be buried with me. But I must do something to feel
as if I deserved it. You know it comes to me like a token out of the
sea of glass like unto crystal, where they stand that overcome! I
think I'll only wear it at night when I think I have done something, or
conquered a bit of my perverseness with mamma."
A sudden idea came over me. Mr. Benjamin Yolland was in dire want of a
lady as reference to a parish woman for his Hydriots. I had begun, but
had been called away. Miss Woolmer had tried, but was not well enough,
and there was no one else whom he thought capable. I was to stay at
Arked for six weeks more; should I put Viola in the way? It would be
work for him.
She caught at it. Lady Diana bridled a little as she thought of the
two young men who managed the Hydriots, but the doctor's prescription
recurred to her mind, and she consented.
Need I tell you how dear Aunt Viola's soul and spirit have gone forth
with those Hydriot people, how from going once a week to meet the
parish woman at Miss Woolmer's, she soon came to presiding at the
mothers' meetings, to knowing everybody, and giving more and more of
her time, her thoughts, her very self to them and being loved by them
enormously. The spirit, fun, and enterprise that were in her fitted
her, as they began to revive, for dealing with the lads, who were sure
to be devoted to anything so pretty and refined. When she began, the
whisper that she was the love of their hero, gave them a romantic
interest, and though with the younger generation this is only a
tradition, yet "our lady" has won ground of her own, and is still fair
and sweet enough to be looked on by those youths as a sort of flower of
the whole world, yet their own peculiar property. For is she not a
Hydriot shareholder, and does she not like to know that it was to
Harold's revival of those shares that she chiefly owes her present
means? Since her mother's death she has lived among them at the house
that was old Miss Woolmer's, and is tranquilly happy in finding
happiness for other people, and always being ready when any one needs
her, as our dear old uncle does very often, though I think her Hydriot
boys have the most of her.
Hippolyta made Eustace a good wife, and watched over him well; but
there was no preventing his deficiency from increasing; it became
acknowledged disease of the brain, and he did not survive his cousin
six years. Happily none of his feebleness of intellect seems to have
descended to Eustace the third, who is growing up a steady, sensible
lad under his mother's management; and perhaps it is not the worse for
Arghouse to have become a Horsman dependency.
It was the year before Eustace's death that the conductress of the
school at Baden wrote to Mrs. Alison about Dora. The sad state of her
brother had prevented her coming home or being visited, and though I
exchanged letters with her periodically, we had not sufficient
knowledge of one another for any freedom of expression after she had
conquered the difficulties of writing.
When she was a little more than sixteen, came a letter to tell that she
was wasting away in either atrophy or consumption, and that the doctors
said the only hope for her was home and native air. Poor child! what
home was there for her, with her sister-in-law absorbed in the care of
her brother, whose imbecility was no spectacle for one in a critical
state of health and failing spirits? We were at Arked at the time, and
offered to go and fetch her (it was Dermot's kind thought), leaving the
children to Viola's care.
Poor dear, what a sight she was! Tall in proportion to the giant breed
she came of, but thin to the most painful degree, and bending like a
fishing-rod, or a plant brought up in the dark, which, by-the-by, she
most resembled, with her white face and thin yellow hair. Her
complexion had recovered, but her hair never had, nor, as it proved,
her health, for she had been more or less ailing ever since she came,
and the regimen of the frugal Germans had not supported the
fast-growing English girl's frame, any more than the strict and
thorough-going round of accurate education had suited the untrained,
desultory intellect, unused to method or application. Nor did the
company of the good, plodding, sentimental maedchens give any pleasure
to the vehement creature, whose playfellow from babyhood had been a
man--and such a man! Use did no good, but rather, as the childish
activity and power of play and the sense of novelty passed, the growth
of the womanly soul made the heart-hunger and solitude worse, and
spirit and health came yearly to a lower level.
She was too languid to be more than indifferent when she saw us, and
the first sign of warmth that she gave was her kiss, when I went back
to visit her after putting her to bed at the hotel. She looked up, put
her arms round my neck, and said, "This is like the old days."
We brought her by slow stages to London, where Hippolyta came up to see
her for one day, and was terribly shocked. The doctors were not
hopeful, but said she might go where she pleased, and do what she
liked, and as her one wish was to be with us, my dear husband laughed
to scorn the notion that, whatever had been dear to Harold, should not
be his sacred charge, and so we took her back.
And there, she did not die. She lay on the sofa day after day, watched
the children at play, and listened dreamily to the family affairs,
rested and was petted by us both, called it very comfortable, and was
patient, but that whole winter seemed to remain where she was, neither
better nor worse. With the spring came a visit from George Yolland, a
prosperous man, as he well deserved to be, and the foremost layman in
all good works in the neighbourhood since dear old Lord Erymanth had
been disabled. In the forenoons, when I was teaching the children, and
Dermot was busy, he was generally in the drawing-room, talking to Dora,
whose blue eyes had a vivid silent intelligence, like no one but
Harold's. From the first day he had confirmed my conviction that, at
any rate, she was not dying now, and she began to start into strength.
She sat up all the evening, she walked round the garden, she drove out,
she came down to breakfast. The day after that achievement, she came
to me sobbing for joy with something inaudible about "his sake," while
George was assuring Dermot that there was only one woman in the world
for him!
So, on a bright summer day, we gave her to the friend Harold had gained
on the same day as Dermot, and she went to be the happy mistress of
Mount Eaton, and reign there, an abrupt woman, not universally liked,
but intensely kind and true, and much beloved by all who have cared to
penetrate through her shell.
There! my work is done, though I fear it is a weaker likeness of my
young Alcides than even the faded photograph by my side, but I could
not brook that you, my children, should grow up unknowing of the great
character to whom your father and I owe one another, and all besides
that is best in our lives. There are things that must surprise you
about your dear father. Remember that he insisted on my putting them
in, and would not have them softened, because, he said, you ought to
have the portrait in full, and that, save at his own expense, you could
not know the full gratitude he feels to the man who made a new era in
our lives. He says he is not afraid either of the example for you, or
that you will respect him less, and I know you will not, for you will
only see his truth and generosity.
L. P. T.
All that your mother has written is true--blessings on her!--every word
of it, except that she never could, and I hope none of you ever will,
understand the depth and blackness of the slough Harold Alison drew me
out of, by just being the man he was; nor will she show you--for indeed
she is blind to it herself--that it was no other than she, with her
quiet, upright sweetness and resolution, that was the making of him and
of both of us. Very odd it is that a woman should set it all down in
black and white, and never perceive it was all her own doing. But if
you see it, young people, what you have to do is to be thankful for the
mother you have got and try to be worthy of her, and if the drop of
Alison blood in you should make one of you even the tenth part of what
Harold was, then you'll be your father's pride, and much more than he
deserves.
D. E. ST. G. T.
Thank you, dear brother, for having let me see this, though I know Lucy
did not intend it for my eyes, or she would not have been so hard on
poor mamma. It shows me how naughty I must have been to let her get
such a notion of our relations with one another, but an outsider can
never judge of such things. For the rest, dear Lucy has done her best,
and in many ways she did know him better than anybody else did, and he
looked up to her more than to anyone. But even she cannot reach to the
inmost depth of the sweetness out of the strong, nor fully know the
wonderful power of tender strength that seemed to wrap one's mind round
and bear one on with him, and that has lasted me ever since, and well
it may, for he was the very glory of my life.
V. T.
I am glad to have read it, because it explains a great deal that I was
too much of a child to understand; but I don't like it. I don't mean
for putting in the fatal thing I did in my ignorant folly. I knew
that, and she has softened my wilfulness. But there's too much
flummery, and he was a hundred times more than all that. I had rather
recollect him for myself, than have such a ladylike, drawing-room
picture; but Lucy means it well, and it is just as he smoothed and
combed himself down for her. Nobody should have done it but George.
He would have made a man of him.
D. Y.
As if George could have done it! A lady must always see a man somewhat
as a carpet knight, and ill would betide both if it were not so. But,
allowing for this, and the want of "more power to her elbow," I am
thankful to Mrs. Tracy for this vivid recall of the man to whom I and
all here owe an unspeakable debt. For my own part, I can only say that
from the day when I marvelled at his fortitude under the terrible pain
of the lion's bites, to that when I saw the almost unexampled triumph
of his will over the promptings of a disordered brain, he stood before
me the grandest specimen of manhood I ever met, ever a victor, and,
above all, over himself.
G. Y.