REPENTANT.
Miss Ross, as we may still continue to call her, had indeed expected a
visit from a gentleman, and warned the maid-of-all-work she would be at
home; but it was with a heavy heart, nevertheless, she heard the
street-door close on Frank's retreating steps, while, smoothing her hair
and drying her eyes, she prepared to meet her husband. Picard, at his
wits' end for money, hunted from place to place by writ and summons,
with debts unpaid and bills coming due, could yet find time to answer in
person a written request for an interview, made by the woman whose evil
genius he seemed to have been through life. She asked to see him once
more, for reasons to be explained in person, and was actually waiting
his arrival, when Kate drove to the door with Frank Vanguard. The latter
had hardly been gone five minutes, ere Picard made his appearance, and
this ill-assorted couple met once more, with less surprise indeed, but
scarcely more cordiality than they had shown during their strange
ill-omened companionship on the river at Windsor.
Each thought the other looking faded, worn, altered; each wondered where
had lain the attraction, once so fatally powerful; each, I think, was
resolved at heart this interview should be the last.
"How's the boy?" said Picard, glancing round the room in search of his
child.
For answer, she opened a door into the adjoining apartment, signing to
him, wearily and sadly, to go in.
On a neat, snowy little bed, drawn near the open window, lay the child,
wan, wasted, scarcely conscious; his large eyes wandering vaguely here
and there, his small, fragile hands limp and helpless on the
counterpane. He gave his mother a feeble glance of recognition; but of
the other visitor he took no notice whatever.
Picard's mouth was dry, and a knot seemed to rise in his throat.
"How's this?" he muttered, in a fierce, husky voice, trying to keep down
his tears by making himself angry. "The child is fearfully ill! It is
too bad! I ought never to have trusted you with him! I should have
thought his mother would have taken better care!"
The taunt was unfelt, unheeded. She showed no displeasure; but turned
her large eyes on him with a plaintive, solemn sadness that spoke
volumes, that told of dreary, waking nights, of anxious, sorrowing days,
of cruel alternations between hope and despair, of piteous, calm
resignation, that comes only when the last chance has faded gradually
away. Picard went to the window, and looked out. A harder-hearted man
probably did not walk the streets of London that day; but the one thing
on earth he cared for was his child, and he saw the humble, dirty little
street through a mist of tears.
"It is the only link between us _now_," said Jin, in a measured,
mournful voice. "If it should part, God help us both! I do believe you
care for that poor, pale, suffering darling. For _his_ sake, let us
forgive one another!"
He was touched, penitent, and for the moment a better man.
"Virginie," he said, "I have deceived you--doubly deceived you! Our
marriage was valid enough."
Her heart sank within her.
"Then I am really your wife?" she faltered; but glancing at the boy,
added bravely, "I will try to be a good one from this day forth."
A man's whole nature is not to be changed by a few tears and a minute's
emotion. Dashing his hand across his eyes, Picard reviewed the position,
and was his own bad self again. Less than ever would it suit him now to
be hampered with the incumbrance of a family. He could scarce keep his
head above water. To provide for mother and child would swamp him
completely. While doing ample justice to his wife's sense of duty, he
resolved by no means to imitate her; and with an assumption of great
frankness, thus delivered himself:
"Your resolution is most creditable, Virginie, and I know to-day that I
have never done you justice. But I have met lately with reverses,
misfortunes, and at present it is impossible to make any arrangement by
which you and I can be together as much as I might wish."
An expression of intense relief came over her weary face, yet she drew
near the child's bed, suspiciously, instinctively, like an animal
protecting its young.
He observed and understood the action.
"Our poor boy cannot be moved," said he. "You will be a good mother,
Virginie, if I leave him to you? Perhaps I may never see him again."
Once more he betrayed real emotion; while Jin, from an impulse she could
neither resist nor explain, raised the feeble little form on its bed,
and supported the wan brow to which Picard's lips clung in a long
farewell kiss. He would have blessed the child had he dared; but with
the half-formed prayer came a sense of shameful unworthiness and a
bitter hopeless remorse that he had been so bad a man.
In true womanly unselfishness, and with a certain readiness of immediate
resource peculiar to her sex, Jin made a mental calculation of her
humble little store, reserving the small sum she thought would suffice
till her boy's recovery, and offered the remainder ungrudgingly to her
husband.
No doubt his excuses to himself were valid and unanswerable. He accepted
it without hesitation, accepted, though he must have known it had been
given her by another, and was all she had in the world.
To Jin, it seemed as if she had thus bought back the unquestioned
possession of her child.
He wished her good-bye calmly and kindly enough, resolving, no doubt,
that they should never meet on earth again; but, bad as he was, he cut a
lock off that cluster of black curls tumbled on the pillow, and many a
day afterwards would he take it out of his pocket-book to look on it for
minutes at a time, with sad, repentant longing, that yet produced no
good result. Sentiment is not affection. There may be much romance, with
very little attachment; and many a man believes he is extremely fond of
a woman or a child, for whom he will not sacrifice a momentary
gratification or an hour's amusement.
When Picard went his way, Jin clasped the boy in her arms, as if he had
just been rescued from some imminent danger; nor could all Kate
Cremorne's persuasions, calling an hour afterwards in the pony-carriage,
induce her to leave him during the rest of the afternoon.
It was for no want of nursing, from no lack of care and culture, that
this poor little flower faded and withered away.
August waned into September, and still the child drooped with the
drooping leaves. To the doctor, to the landlady, to the weeping
maid-of-all-work, to every one, save only a mother, it was evident that
his Christmas carols would be sung to him by the angels in heaven.
But though here a poor little violet may be trampled into earth, is that
a reason why the fairest garden flowers should fail to bloom, fragrant
and splendid, over yonder? Never a red rose in all the garlands of the
house of Lancaster blushed so becomingly, to Goldthred's taste, as did
his own affianced bride when she ordered him to ask her whether she had
not better think about naming the day of their marriage.
It was fixed for the middle of the month, the lady arranging to spend
her honeymoon at a farm-house of her own, far off in the West of
England, where there was excellent partridge-shooting. She explained her
arrangements to Helen with characteristic frankness.
"You see, my dear, I've been married before, and I know what it is. When
Mr. Lascelles and I were alone together, the first week, it was _awful_!
I wouldn't have believed man or woman could be so bored, and live. He
must have hated it, and, I'm sure, so did I. Now, I don't want my
goldfinch to be bored with _me_, particularly at first; so I shall send
him out shooting. He'll come home tired and hungry, and we shall make no
fuss, but feel as if we'd been married for years. 'Pon my word, dear,
he's such a good fellow, I wish we had!"
To all which wisdom, gathered from experience, Helen turned an attentive
ear, because of the pleadings urged by a certain young officer, who felt
and owned himself unworthy of the happiness he implored day by day, hour
by hour, till she contradicted him flatly, out of the fulness of her own
heart. Frank Vanguard succeeded in justifying himself before an
exceedingly lenient tribunal; and although, in my opinion, the
unaccountable silence of one woman is no valid excuse for transferring
allegiance incontinently to another, I do not imagine ladies themselves
are equally exclusive in their notions of property. They affect a very
stringent law of trespass, no doubt; yet appear sufficiently merciful
to habitual and hardened offenders.
The most jealous of them seem to appreciate an admirer none the less
that he has offered incense at many foreign shrines. If he should have
tumbled a goddess or two off her pedestal, they profess themselves
shocked indeed, and are loud in reproof, but seem to like him all the
better for his infidelity.
So Frank and Helen were to be married, Sir Henry giving them his
blessing and the bride's _trousseaux_, for which tasteful and
magnificent outfit the bills were eventually sent in to Frank; but this
has nothing to do with our story. The cavalry officer, I venture to
pronounce, had better luck than he deserved; but so exemplary a daughter
as Helen had proved herself was pretty sure to make an exemplary wife.
And, for my own part, I believe that a good woman, with good sense, and
a _really_ good temper, especially if gifted also with good looks, is
capable of reclaiming the whole Household Brigade, horse and foot,
bands, trumpeters, drummers, officers, non-commissioned officers, and
men.
Sir Henry Hallaton, however, with gross injustice, laid his ruin on that
sex, to which he had devoted what he was pleased to call the _best_
years of his life, majestically ignoring all such deteriorating
influences as extravagant habits, dissipated company, gambling,
mortgages, second-rate race-horses, and protested bills.
It needed no syren to lure the baronet on the rocks; and, indeed, the
tide of fortune, whether it ebbed or flowed, seemed alike to waft this
reckless, easy-going mariner to certain shipwreck. His was a sadly
shattered bark now, and he had abandoned all idea of making safe
anchorage at last. He came back to England, rescued from ruin by the
timely aid of a friend, and thought himself ill-used because that friend
was on the eve of marriage with a woman whom he had neglected while he
thought she liked him, to whose heartlessness, he now told himself, he
was a martyr, because she had not waited for an uncertainty, but made a
wise choice in pleasing herself.
The daughter he loved so dearly was about to settle happily in life; yet
he could complain that he was deserted, bewailing his loneliness, though
he saw the light in her eye, the peace on her brow, that told of
heart's-ease and content. In the restless, dissatisfied longings of a
confirmed selfishness, he tried hard to reestablish his former intimacy
with Miss Ross, whose retreat he had found means to discover; and,
failing to obtain an interview with that anxious and afflicted woman,
found himself driven for solace and comfort to the society of Kate
Cremorne.
This young person, whose knowledge of the world was drawn from men, not
books, seeing through the weary, worn-out pleasure-seeker at a glance,
fooled him with considerable dexterity, and no little mischievous
amusement.
Of all his reckless moods, perhaps none had been so reckless as that in
which he offered to make so free-spoken a damsel his wife; of all his
humiliations none, perhaps, so galling as to accept a kindly, courteous,
and dignified refusal from the wild, wayward girl, who bade him
understand clearly that she respected herself too much to affect an
attachment it was impossible to feel for a man old enough to be her
father!
Mrs. Battersea was provoked, and opined Kate would never grow wiser, but
Sir Henry, while to the outward world his good humour and good spirits
remained unchanged, took the rebuff sorely to heart, and though he told
his doctor he had been drinking sweet champagne, which never agreed with
him, my own belief is that a fit of gout, which attacked him at this
juncture more sharply than usual, was the effect of love rather than
wine. When we begin twinges at the extremities, it is time to have done
with pains of the heart.
So his doctor ordered him to Buxton, where, soothed by the bubble of
those health-restoring springs, he forgot his sorrows in the
unintermittent attention to self, required by the constant ablutions and
daily discipline of the cure, deriving at the same time no small comfort
from the contemplation of many sufferers more crippled, more peevish,
more egotistical than himself.
There is no particular season at Buxton, as there is no forgiveness or
immunity from Podagra, goddess of sloth, and luxury, and excess. Its
waters are drunk, its baths are heated, its lodging-houses are occupied,
its parade populous, during every month of the year. Nevertheless its
frequenters are necessarily migratory. Those who get better go away,
those who get worse die; but disease sends in a continuous supply of
fresh afflictions, and the residence of a very few weeks causes a
patient to be looked on as an old inhabitant and high authority in the
place. The head of the _table-d'hôte_, the easiest chair on the parade,
the newest books from the library, the choicest game from the poulterer,
the sweetest smile from landlady, the lowest bow from landlord, are the
advantages to be attained by six weeks' tenure of an obstinate case; and
thus it came to pass that Sir Henry, though a far greater man in St.
James's Street, found he could not hold a candle to Uncle Joseph at
Buxton.
Like two veterans in Chelsea, like two old man-of-war's men in Greenwich
Hospital, these campaigners of a less honourable warfare found
themselves stranded in sadly shattered plight amongst the bare knolls
and grey boulders of the Derbyshire Peak; but between them there was
this important difference,--that whereas Sir Henry, still almost
handsome, still gentleman-like, amusing, pleasant to women, had loved
his love, gamed his gaming, and retired beaten from the strife; Uncle
Joseph, older in years, ruder in speech, rounder of form, and stouter of
heart, had refitted his shattered bark, and with favouring gales, backed
by an energy that cannot be too highly commended, was prosecuting his
suit with a widow almost as old, as round, and as gouty as himself.
There had been a time when Sir Henry would have laughed heartily at the
confidential communications made by the respectable Mr. Groves, as the
two drove out in a one-horse fly and halted to enjoy the mellow warmth
of an autumn sun under a chasm, which takes from its impossible legend
the name of the Lover's Leap; but he did not laugh to-day, listening
with attention, interest, something akin to envy, at his heart. What
would he not have given could he, too, take pleasure in a woman's smile,
even though the woman were old and fat; could he, too, feel his blood
course quicker at a woman's voice, even though it had a provincial
accent, and an occasional confusion of the rules by which the aspirate
is applied in our language?
"I congratulate you," said Sir Henry, lying languidly back in the
carriage with a plaintive air of resignation, and a sad conviction that
for him most pleasures were indeed over, since his doctor had even
forbidden him to smoke. "You have retained the best faculties of youth,
since you have still courage to hope, still energy to be vexed and
disappointed. It is not so with me. Look here, my dear fellow; I have
been ruined twice since I began, and twice set on my legs by a miracle.
I would willingly be ruined a third time, and never be set up at all, if
I could only take a real interest in any earthly thing, even in what I
am going to have for dinner."
Uncle Joseph stared. "It's not so with me," he answered; "far from it. I
wish I didn't care so much. I'm a desperate fidget sometimes, I know,
and often I can't enjoy things just for fear of what _might_ happen.
Perhaps it's because I'm an old bachelor, as they say. It's a great
drawback to a man in middle-age to have passed all his youth out of the
society of women."
Sir Henry smiled and shook his head.
"I haven't found the _other_ plan a good one," said he. "You and I have
been a goodish time in the world now, and I begin to think we have both
wasted our lives."