In which Lady Alice pumps the Bishop.
Lady Jane Lennox, who complained of a headache, departed early for her
room. The Baronet's passion for whist returned, and he played with more
than his usual spirit and hilarity; Monsieur Varbarriere, his partner,
was also in great force, and made some very creditable sallies between
the deals. All went, in fact, merry as a marriage-bell. But in that
marriage-bell booms unmarked the selfsame tone which thrills in the
funeral-knell. There was its somewhat of bitter rising probably in each
merry soul in that gay room. Black care walked silently among those
smiling guests, and on an unseen salver presented to each his sprig of
rue or rosemary. Another figure also, lank, obsequious, smirking
dolorously, arrayed in the Marlowe livery, came in with a bow, and stood
with an hour-glass in his long yellow claw at the back of Sir Jekyl's
chair; you might see the faint lights of his hollow eyes reflected on
the Baronet's cards.
"A little chilly to-night, is not it?" said Sir Jekyl, and shook his
shoulders. "Have we quite light enough, do you think?"
In that serene company there were two hearts specially sore, each with a
totally different anguish.
In Lady Alice's old ears continually beat these words, "Your son
is"----ending, like an interrupted dream, in nothing. Before her eyes
was Varbarriere's disturbed countenance as he dropped the curtain over
his meaning, and affected to have forgotten the death of Guy Deverell.
"Your son is"----Merciful Heaven! could he have meant living?
Could that shape she had seen in its coffin, with the small blue mark in
its serene forehead, where the bullet had entered, been a
simulacrum--not her son--a cast--a fraud?
Her reason told her loudly such a thought was mere insanity; and yet
what could that sudden break in Varbarriere's sentence have been meant
to conceal, and what did that recoiling look imply?
"Your son is"----It was for ever going on. She knew there was
something to tell, something of which M. Varbarriere was thoroughly
cognisant, and about which nothing could ever induce him to open his
lips.
If it was not "your son is living," she cared not what else it might be,
and _that_--could it?--no, it could not be. A slight hectic touched each
thin cheek, otherwise she looked as usual. But as she gazed dreamily
over the fender, with clouded eyes, her temples were throbbing, and she
felt sometimes quite wild, and ready to start to her feet and adjure
that awful whist-player to disclose all he knew about her dead boy.
Beatrix was that evening seated near the fireplace, and Drayton making
himself agreeable, with as small trouble as possible to himself.
Drayton! Well, he was rather amusing--cleverish--well enough up upon
those subjects which are generally supposed to interest young ladies;
and, with an affectation of not caring, really exerting himself to be
entertaining. Did he succeed? If you were to judge by her animated looks
and tones, you would have said very decidedly. Drayton's self-love was
in a state of comfort, even of luxury, that evening. But was there
anything in the triumph?
A pale face, at the farther end of the room, with a pair of large, dark,
romantic eyes, a face that had grown melancholy of late, she saw every
moment, though she had not once looked in that direction all the
evening.
As Drayton saw her smile at his sallies, with bright eyes and heightened
colour, leaning back in her cushioned chair, and looking under her long
lashes into the empty palm of her pretty hand, he could not see that
little portrait--painted on air with the colours of memory--that lay
there like a locket;--neither his nor any other eyes, but hers alone.
Guy Strangways was at the farther end of the room, where were
congregated Lady Blunket and her charming daughter, and that pretty Mrs.
Maberly of whom we have spoken; and little Linnett, mounted straddlewise
on his chair, leaning with his elbows on the back, and his chin on his
knuckles, helped to entertain them with his inexhaustible
agreeabilities. Guy Strangways had indeed very little cast upon him, for
Linnett was garrulous and cheerful, and reinforced beside by help from
other cheery spirits.
Here was Guy Strangways undergoing the isolation to which he had
condemned himself; and over there, engrossed by Drayton, the lady whose
peer he had never seen. Had she missed him? He saw no sign. Not once
even casually had she looked in his direction; and how often, though she
could not know it, had his eyes wandered toward her! Dull to him was the
hour without her, and she was engrossed by another, who, selfish and
shallow, was merely amusing himself and pleasing his vanity.
How is it that people in love see so well without eyes? Beatrix saw,
without a glance, exactly where Guy Strangways was. She was piqued and
proud, and chose perhaps to show him how little he was missed. It was
his presence, though he suspected it so little, that sustained that
animation which he resented; and had _he_ left the room, Drayton would
have found, all at once, that she was tired.
Next day was genial and warm, one of those days that bygone summer
sometimes gives us back from the past to the wintry close of autumn, as
in an old face that we love we sometimes see a look, transitory and how
pathetic, of the youth we remember. Such days, howsoever pleasant, come
touched with the melancholy of a souvenir. And perhaps the slanting
amber light nowhere touched two figures more in harmony with its tone
than those who now sat side by side on the rustic seat, under the two
beech trees at the farther end of the pleasure-ground of Marlowe.
Old Lady Alice, with her cushions disposed about her, and her cloaks and
shawls, had one arm of the seat; and the Bishop, gaitered and prudently
buttoned up in a surtout of the finest black cloth, and with that
grotesque (bequeathed of course by the Apostles) shovel-hat upon his
silvery head, leaned back upon the other, and, with his dapper leg
crossed, and showing the neat sole of his shoe to Lady Alice, stroked
and patted, after his wont, the side of his calf.
"Upwards of three-and-thirty years," said the Bishop.
"Yes, about that--about three-and-thirty years; and what did you think
of him? A very bad man, I'm sure."
"Madam, _de mortuis_. We have a saying, 'concerning the dead, nothing but
good.'"
"Nothing but _truth_, say I," answered Lady Alice. "Praise can do them
no good, and falsehood will do us a great deal of harm."
"You put the point strongly, Lady Alice; but when it is said, 'nothing
but good,' we mean, of course, nothing but the good we may _truly_ speak
of them."
"And that, as you know, my lord, in his case was not much. You were with
him to the moment of his death--nearly a week, was it not?"
"Three days precisely."
"Did he know from the first he was dying?" inquired Lady Alice.
"He was not aware that his situation was desperate until the end of the
second day. Nor was it; but he knew he was in danger, and was very much
agitated, poor man; very anxious to live and lead a better life."
"And you prayed with him?"
"Yes, yes; he was very much agitated, though; and it was not easy to fix
his thoughts, poor Sir Harry! It was very sad. He held my hand in
his--my hand--all the time I sat by the bed, saying, 'Don't you think
I'll get over it?--I feel that I shall--I feel quite safe while I hold
your hand.' I never felt a hand tremble as his did."
"You prayed for him, and read with him?" said Lady Alice. "And you
acted, beside, as his confessor, did not you, and heard some revelation
he had to make?"
"You forget, my dear Lady Alice, that the office of confessor is unknown
to the Church. It is not according to our theory to extract a specific
declaration of particular sins."
"H'm! I remember they told me that you refused at school to read the
Absolution to the boys of your house until they had made confession and
pointed out an offender they were concealing."
The Bishop hemmed and slightly coloured. It might have amused an
indifferent auditor to see that eminent and ancient divine taken to
task, and made even to look a little foolish, by this old woman, and
pushed into a corner, as a wild young curate might be by him on a
question of Church doctrine.
"Why, as to that, the fact may be so; but it was under very special
circumstances, Lady Alice. The Church refuses even the Sacrament of the
Lord's Supper to an intending communicant who is known to be living in
wilful sin; and here was a wilful concealment of a grave offence, to
which all had thus made themselves, and were continuing to make
themselves, accessory. It is, I allow, a doubtful question, and I do not
say I should be prepared to adopt that measure now. The great Martin
Luther has spoken well and luminously on the fallacy of taking his
convictions at any one period of his life as the measure of his doctrine
at a later one. The grain of mustard-seed, the law of perpetual
expansion and development, applies to faith as well as to motive and
action, to the Christian as a spiritual individual as well as to the
Church as an aggregate."
This apology for his faith did the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of
Queen's Copely urge in his citation before old Lady Alice Redcliffe,
whom one would have thought he might have afforded to despise in a
Christian way; but for wise purposes the instincts of self-defence and
self-esteem, and a jealousy of even our smallest neighbour's opinion, is
so deeply implanted, that we are ready to say a good word for ourselves
to anyone who misconceives the perfect wisdom of our words, or the
equally perfect purity of our motives.
END OF VOL. I.
PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER.
End of Project Gutenberg's Guy Deverell, v. 1 of 2, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu