XX

However, being a skillful diplomat, Bertham gave no sign: though Lord

Walmerston, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the Pretender to the

Throne-Imperial of France, were to spend in the Persian smoking-room

over the ground-floor billiard-room of Wraye House--a half-hour that

would change every card in the poor hand held by that last-named

gamester to a trump.

“Who is good enough for you, Ada?” he said, with his hazel glance

softening as he turned it upon her, and sincerity in his sweet, courtly

tones. “No one I ever met!”

Her rare and lovely smile illuminated her.

“Has it never struck you, Robert, how curious it is that the demand

for entire possession of a woman’s hand, fortune and person, should

invariably be prefaced by the candid statement that the suitor is not

good enough to tie her shoes? As for being good enough for me, any man

would be, provided he were honest, sincere, chivalrous in word and

deed----”

“And not the present Head of the House of Bonaparte?” ended Bertham.

“You are right,” she said quickly. “Were I compelled to make choice

between them, I should infinitely prefer the butcher!”

“‘_The butcher!_’” Bertham’s face of utter consternation mingled with

incredulity drew her laugh from her. And it was so round and sweet and

mellow that the crystal lusters of the Sèvres and ormolu candlesticks

upon the mantel-shelf rang a little tinkling echo when it had stopped.

“The butcher who supplies us here,” she explained.

Bertham said, speaking between his teeth and with the knuckles showing

white in the strong slender hand he clenched and shook at an imaginary

vendor of chops and sirloins:

“What consummate and confounded insolence!”

“No, no!” she cried, for his tall, slight, athletic figure was striding

up and down the little parlor, and the fierce grind of his heel each

time he turned within the limit of the hearthrug threatened the cat’s

repose. “You shall not fume, and say hard things of him! He knows

nothing of me except that I am the matron here. And he thinks that I

should be better off in the sitting-room behind his shop in Oxford

Street, keeping his books of accounts and ‘ordering any nice little

delicate joint’ I ‘happened to fancy for dinner....’ And possibly I

should be better off, from his point of view?”

Bertham’s heel came sharply down upon the hearthrug. The outraged cat

rent the air with a feline squall, and sought refuge under the sofa.

“Come out, Mr. Bright!” coaxed his mistress, kneeling by the injured

one’s retreat. “He is very sorry! He didn’t mean it! He will never do

it again!” She added, rising, with Mr. Bright, already soothed and

purring, in her arms, “And he is going away now, regretful as we are to

have to send him. For it is my night on duty, Robert, and I must rest.”

“You will always send me away,” said he, “when you choose. And I shall

always come back again, until you show me that I am not wanted.”

“That will be never, dear friend!”

She gave him her true, pure hand, and he stooped and left a reverent

kiss upon it, and said, as he lifted a brighter face:

“Do you remember three years ago, before you went to

Kaiserswerke--when you sent me away, and forbade me to come back until

I had sought and found my Fate in Mary?”

“A beautiful and loving Fate, dear Robert.”

“She is, God bless her!” he answered, with a warm flush upon his face

and a thrill of tenderness in the charming voice that so many men and

women loved him for.

She went with him into the hall then, and said as he threw on his long

dark cloak lined with Russian sables:

“Those Berlin and Paris papers of Wednesday last.... It would interest

me to glance through them in a spare moment, if you did not object to

lend?”

“One of my ‘liveried menials with buttons on his crests,’ as a

denunciatory Chartist orator put it the other day--shall bring them to

you within half an hour. I wish you had asked me for something less

easy to give you, Ada!”

She answered with her gentle eyes on his, as her hand drew back the

latch of the hall door:

“Give me assurance you will never help to forge the link that shall

unite Great Britain’s interests with her enemy’s.”

“Why, that of course!” He answered without heartiness, and his eyes did

not meet hers. “I am not the master blacksmith, dear Ada. There are

other hands more cunning in the welding-craft than mine!”

He bent his handsome head to her and threw on his hat and passed out

into the rimy February fog. But he walked slowly, pondering as he

went, and his face wore a moody frown. For Lord Walmerston’s influence

and weight upon that pressing question, separate accommodation for

married soldiers, and Military Schools for the men and their wives and

children, was not to be had for nothing, he well knew....

She shut the door, and then the tea-bell rang, and she passed on to

the dining-room, and took her place before the capacious tray at the

matron’s end of the long, plainly-appointed, wholesomely-furnished

table.

She had declined to dine in the society of a Prince because she doubted

his motives and disapproved of his character. She played the hostess

now to her staff of nurses and probationers, dispensing the household

tea from the stout family teapot with a liberal hand, and leading the

conversation with a gentle grace and an infectious gayety that drew

sparks from the homeliest minds about the board and made bright wits

shine brighter.

The Berlin and Paris papers came by Bertham’s servant as she went to

her room to prepare, by some hours of rest, for the night-watch by

a dying patient. She gave half-an hour of the time to reading the

articles and paragraphs Bertham had considerately marked in red ink for

her.

When she set about preparing for repose came a gentle knock at

her door, and in answer to her soft “Come in!” the gray-haired,

olive-skinned, pleasant-faced woman, who had admitted Dunoisse and

shown him out again, appeared, saying:

“You never rang, Miss Ada, love, but I made bold to come.”... She added

in tones of dismay, “And to find you brushing your beautiful hair

yourself when your old Husnuggle’s in the house and asking nothing

better than to do it for you!...”

“Thank you, dear!” She surrendered the brush, and sat down and

submitted to the deft hands that set about their accustomed task, as

though it were soothing to be so ministered to. Even as she said: “For

this once, kind Husnuggle, but you must not do it again!”

“Don’t say that, Miss Ada! when night’s the only time of all the

livelong day that I get my Wraye Rest talk with you.”

Entreated thus, she reached up a hand and patted the plump matronly

cheek of the good soul, and said, with soft, considerate gentleness:

“Let it be so, since it will make you happy. But those who have chosen

for their life’s task the duty of serving others should do without

service themselves. Try to understand!”

The woman kissed the hand with a fervor contrasting incongruously with

her staid demeanor and homely simple face, as she answered:

“I’ll try, my dear. Though to see you in this bare, plainly-furnished

room, with scarce a bit of comfort in it beyond the fire in the grate,

and not a stick of furniture beyond the bed and the wardrobe, and

washstand and bath, and the chintz-covered armchair you’re sitting

in, and a bookshelf of grave books, scalds my heart--that it do! And

your sitting-room nigh as skimping. When either at Wraye Rest or at

Oakenwode, or at the house in Park Lane, you have everything beautiful

about you, as you ought; with paintings and statues and music, and

carpets like velvet for you to tread upon, and flowers everywhere for

you that love them so to take pleasure in them, and your dogs and

horses, and cats and birds!... Eh! deary me! But I promised I’d never

breathe a murmur, not if you let me come, and here I am forgetting!....”

“We will overlook it this time. And I will help you to understand why

I am happier here, and more at peace than at Wraye or Oakenwode, or

at the Park Lane house, dear to me as all three are. It is because,

wherever I am, and whether I am walking or sleeping, I seem to hear

voices that call to me for help. Chiefly the voices of women, weak,

and faint, and imploring.... And they appeal to me, not because I am

any wiser, or better, or stronger than others of my sex, but because

I am able, through circumstances,--and have the wish and the will to

aid them, I humbly believe, from God! And if I stayed at home and

yielded to the desire for pleasant, easy, delightful ways of living,

and bathed my eyes and ears in lovely sights and sounds, I should hear

those voices over all, and see with the eyes of my mind the pale, wan,

wistful faces that belong to them. And I should know no peace!... But

here, even if the work I do be insignificant and ineffective, I am

working for and with my poor sisters, sick and well. And on the day

when I turn back and leave my plow in the furrow, then those voices

will have a right to cry to me without ceasing: ‘_Oh, woman! why have

you deserted us?--you who might have done so much_!’”

She ceased, but the rush and thrill of the words as they had come

pouring from her, vibrated yet on the quiet atmosphere of the room.

“You had a pleasant talk, Miss Ada, with Master Robert?” the woman

asked her, turning down the snowy sheet from the pillows, and preparing

to leave the room.

“A long, grave talk, Husnuggle, even a little sad in places, but

pleasant nevertheless. Now go down to supper, for it is eight o’clock.”

Husnuggle went, having bound up the wealth of hair into a great silken

twist, and her mistress knelt at a _prie-Dieu_ beneath an ebony and

olive-wood crucifix that hung upon the wall, and said her prayers,

and sought her rest. When she slept, less easily and less soundly

than usual, she dreamed; and the figure and face of the slight,

ruddy-skinned, black-eyed man who had visited the Hospice that day,

moved with others across the stage of her vision, and his voice echoed

with other voices in the chambers of her sleeping brain.

* * * * *

The Havre packet had not sailed that evening, by reason of a boisterous

gale and a great sea, and Dunoisse was spending the evening dismally

enough at the T. R. Southampton, where “As you Like It” was being

given for the benefit of Miss Arabella Smallsopp, advertised as of the

“principal London theaters,” upon the last night of a Stock Season

which had been “a supreme artistic success.”

Mr. Hawkington Bulph and a Full Company--which collectively and

individually looked anything but that,--supported the star; and to

the fatal sprightliness of the hapless Smallsopp, disguised as the

immortal page, in a lace collar, drop-earrings, and a short green

cotton-velvet ulster, dadoed with catskin, and adorned down the front

with rows of brass buttons not distantly resembling coffin-nails (worn

in combination with a Spanish hair-comb and yellow leather top-boots),

must be ascribed the violent distaste which one member of the audience

did then and there conceive for England’s immortal Bard. But ere long

his attention strayed from the dingy, ill-lit Forest Scene, with

a cork-and-quill nightingale warbling away in the flies, as Miss

Smallsopp interpolated the pleasing ditty, “O Sing Again, Sweet Bird of

Eve!” and he ceased to see the dirty boards, where underpaid, underfed,

and illiterate actors gesticulated and strutted, and he went back in

thought to Ada Merling, and her pure earnest face rose up before his

mental vision, and the very sound of her crystal voice was in his ears.

* * * * *

Even as in her troubled dreams, she saw Hector Dunoisse standing before

her, with that swift play of his emotions vividly passing in his face;

and heard him passionately saying that the hour that saw him broach

those tainted stored-up thousands should be for him an hour of branding

shame; and that he prayed the dawning of the day that should break upon

his completed barter of Honor for Wealth, and Rank and Power, might

find him lying in his coffin.

And then he yielded--or so it seemed to her, and took the shining

money, and the princely diadem offered him by smooth strangers with

persuasive courtly voices, and she saw the fateful gold scattered

from his reckless hands like yellow dust of pollen from the ripe

mimosa-bloom when the thorny trees are bowed and shaken by the gusty

winds of Spring.

And then she saw him going to his Coronation, and no nobler or more

stately figure moved onwards in the solemn procession of Powers and

Dignities, accompanying him through laurel-arched and flower-wreathed

and flag-bedecked streets to the Cathedral, where vested and coped and

mitered prelates waited to anoint and crown him Prince. And where,

amidst the solemn strains of the great organ, the chanting of many

voices, and the pealing of silver trumpets, the ceremony had nearly

reached its stately close, when the jeweled circlet that should have

crowned his temples slipped from the aged Archbishop’s venerable,

trembling hands and rolled upon the inlaid pavement, shedding diamonds

and pearls like dewdrops or tears.... And then she saw him lying,

amidst wreaths of flowers and tall burning tapers, in a black-draped

coffin in the black-hung nave. And a tall man and a beautiful woman

leaned over the death-white face with the sealed, sunk eyes, smiling

lustfully in each other’s. And she awakened at the chime of her silver

clock in her quiet room; and it was dark, and the lamp-lighter was

kindling the street-lamps, and she must rise and prepare for her

night’s vigil.

It taxed her, for her dream-fraught sleep had not refreshed. But she

ministered to her fevered, pain-racked patient with gentle unwearying

patience and swift, noiseless tenderness, through the hours that moved

in slow procession on to the throning of another day....

Her patient slept at last, and woke as the dawn was breaking, and the

watcher refreshed the parched lips with tea, and stirred the banked-up

fire to a bright flame, and went to the window and drew up the blinds.

Drab London was mantled white with snow that had fallen in the

night-time. And above her roofs and chimneys, wrapped in swansdown

mantles, glittering with icicles, the dawn came up all livid and

wild and bloody, with tattered banners streaming through the shining

lances of a blizzard from the East that shook the window-panes like

a desperate charge of cavalry, and screamed as wounded horses do,

frenzied with pain and terror amidst the sounds and sights of dreadful

War.