THE SUMMONS.
When Charles Fairfield came into the wainscoted dining-room a few
minutes later it looked very cosy. The sun had broken the pile of
western clouds, and sent low and level a red light flecked with
trembling leaves on the dark panels that faced the windows.
Outside in that farewell glory of the day the cawing crows were heard
returning to the sombre woods of Carwell, and the small birds whistled
and warbled pleasantly in the clear air, and chatty sparrows in the
ivy round gossiped and fluttered merrily before the little community
betook themselves to their leafy nooks and couched their busy little
heads for the night under their brown wings.
He looked through the window towards the gloriously-stained sky and
darkening trees, and he thought,--
“A fellow like me, who has seen out his foolish days and got to value
better things, who likes a pretty view, and a cigar, and a stroll by a
trout-brook, and a song now and then, and a book, and a friendly
guest, and a quiet glass of wine, and who has a creature like Alice to
love and be loved by, might be devilish happy in this queer lonely
corner, if only the load were off his heart.”
He sighed; but something of that load was for the moment removed; and
as pretty Alice came in at the open door, he went to meet her, and
drew her fondly to his heart.
“We must be very happy this evening, Alice. Somehow I feel that
everything will go well with us yet. If just a few little hitches and
annoyances were got over, I should be the happiest fellow, I think,
that ever bore the name of Fairfield; and you, darling creature, are
the light of that happiness. My crown and my life--my beautiful Alice,
my joy and my glory--I wish you knew half how I love you, and how
proud I am of you.”
“Oh, Charlie, Charlie, this is delightful. Oh, Ry, my darling! I’m too
happy.”
And with these words, in the strain of her slender embrace, she clung
to him as he held her locked to his heart.
The affection was there; the love was true. In the indolent nature of
Charles Fairfield capabilities of good were not wanting. That dreadful
interval in the soul’s history, between the weak and comparatively
noble state of childhood and that later period when experience saddens
and illuminates and begins to turn our looks regretfully backward, was
long past with him. The period when women “come out” and see the
world, and men in the old-fashioned phrase “sow their wild oats”--that
glorious summer-time of self-love, sin, and folly--that bleak and
bitter winter of the soul, through which the mercy of God alone
preserves for us alive the dormant germs of good, was past for him,
without killing, as it sometimes does, all the tenderness and truth of
the nursery. In this man, Charles Fairfield, were the trodden-down but
still living affections which now, in this season, unfolded themselves
anew--simplicity unkilled, and the purity not of Eden, not of
childhood, but of _recoil_. Altogether a man who had not lost
himself--capable of being happy--capable of being regenerated.
I know not exactly what had evoked this sudden glow and effervescence.
Perhaps it needs some manifold confluence of internal and external
conditions, trifling and unnoticed, except for such unexplained
results, to evolve these tremblings and lightings up that surprise us
like the fiercer analogies of volcanic chemistry.
It is sad to see what appear capabilities and opportunities of a great
happiness so nearly secured, and yet by reason of some inflexible
caprice of circumstance quite unattainable.
It was not for some hours, and until after his wife had gone to her
room, that the darkness and chill that portended the return of his
worst care crept over him as he sat and turned over the leaves of his
book.
He got up and loitered discontentedly about the room. Stopping now
before the little bookshelves between the windows and adjusting
unconsciously their contents; now at the little oak table, and
fiddling with the flowers which Alice had arranged in a tall old
glass, one of the relics of other days of Carwell; and so on,
listless, irresolute.
“So here I am once more--back again among my enemies! Happiness for
me, a momentary illusion--hope a cheat. My _reality_ is the blackness
of the abyss. God help me!”
He turned up his eyes, and he groaned this prayer, unconscious that it
was a prayer.
“I will,” he thought, “extract the sting from this miserable mystery.
Between me and Alice it shall be a secret no longer. I’ll tell her
to-morrow. I’ll look out an opportunity; I will by----”
And to nail himself to his promise this irresolute man repeated the
same passionate oath, and he struck his hand on the table.
Next day, therefore, when Alice was again among the flowers in the
garden he entered that antique and solemn shade with a strange
sensation at his heart of fear and grief. How would Alice look on him
after it was over? How would she bear it?
Pale as the man who walks after the coffin of his darling, between the
tall gray piers he entered that wild and umbrageous enclosure.
His heart seemed to stop still as he saw little Alice, all
unsuspicious of his dreadful message, working with her tiny trowel at
the one sunny spot of the garden.
She stood up--how pretty she was!--looking on her work; and as she
stood with one tiny foot advanced, and her arms folded, with her
garden-gloves on, and the little diamond-shaped trowel glittering in
her hand, she sang low to herself an air which he remembered her
singing when she was quite a little thing long ago at Wyvern--when he
never dreamed she would be anything to him--just a picture of a little
brown-haired girl and nothing dearer.
Then she saw him, and--
“Oh, Ry, darling!” she cried, as making a diagonal from the distant
point, she ran towards him through tall trees and old raspberries, and
under the boughs of over-grown fruit trees, which now-a-days bore more
moss and lichen than pears or cherries upon them.
“Ry, how delightful! You so seldom come here, and now I have you, you
shall see all I’m doing, and how industrious I have been; and we are
going to have such a happy little ramble. Has anything happened,
darling?” she said, suddenly stopping and looking in his face.
Here was an opportunity; but if his resolution was still there,
presence of mind failed him, and forcing a smile, he instantly
answered--
“Nothing, darling--nothing whatever. Come, let us look at your work;
you are so industrious, and you have such wonderful taste.”
And as, reassured, and holding his hand, she prattled and laughed,
leading him round by the grass-grown walks to her garden, as she
called that favoured bit of ground on which the sun shone, he hardly
saw the old currant bushes or gray trunks of the rugged trees; his
sight seemed dazzled; his hearing seemed confused; and he thought to
himself--
“Where am I--what is this--and can it be true that I am so weak or so
mad as to be turned from the purpose over which I have been brooding
for a day and a night, and to which I had screwed my courage so
resolutely, by a smile and a question--What is this? Black currant;
and this is groundsel; and little Alice, your glove wants a stitch or
two,” he added aloud; “and oh! here we are. Now you must enlighten me;
and what a grove of little sticks, and little inscriptions. These are
your annuals, I suppose?”
And so they talked, and she laughed and chatted very merrily, and he
had not the heart--perhaps the courage--to deliver his detested
message; and again it was postponed.
The next day Charles Fairfield fell into his old gloom and anxieties;
the temporary relief was felt no more, and the usual reaction
followed.
It is something to have adopted a resolution. The anguish of suspense,
at least, is ended, and even if it be to undergo an operation, and to
blow one’s own brains out, men will become composed, and sometimes
even cheerful, as the coroner’s inquest discovers, when once the way
and the end are known.
But this melancholy serenity now failed Charles Fairfield, for without
acknowledging it, he began a little to recede from his resolution.
Then was the dreadful question, how will she bear it, and even worse,
how will she view the position? Is she not just the person to leave
forthwith a husband thus ambiguously placed, and to insist that this
frightful claim, however shadowy, should be met and determined in the
light of day?
“I know very well what an idol she makes of me, poor little thing; but
she would not stay here an hour after she heard it; she would go
straight to Lady Wyndale. It would break her heart, but she would do
it.”
It was this fear that restrained him. Impelling him, however, was the
thought that, sooner or later, if Harry’s story were true, his enemy
would find him out, and his last state be worse than his first.
Again and again he cursed his own folly for not having consulted his
shrewd brother before his marriage. How horribly were his words
justified. How easy it would have been comparatively to disclose all
to Alice before leading her into such a position. He did not believe
that there was actual danger in this claim. He could swear that he
meant no villainy. Weak and irresolute, in a trying situation, he had
been--that was all. But could he be sure that the world would not
stigmatize him as a villain?
Another day passed, and he could not tell what a day might bring--a
day of feverish melancholy, of abstraction, of agitation.
She had gone to her room. It was twelve o’clock at night, when, having
made up his mind to make his agitating shrift, he mounted the old oak
stairs, with his candle in his hand.
“Who’s there?” said his wife’s voice from the room.
“I, darling.”
And at the door she met him in her dressing-gown. Her face was pale
and miserable, and her eyes swollen with crying.
“Oh, Ry, darling, I’m so miserable; I think I shall go mad.”
And she hugged him fast in trembling arms, and sobbed convulsively on
his breast.
Charles Fairfield froze with a kind of terror. He thought, “she has
found out the whole story.” She looked up in his face, and that was
the face of a ghost.
“Oh, Ry, darling, for God’s sake tell me--is there anything very
bad--is it debt only that makes you so wretched? I am in such dreadful
uncertainty. Have mercy on your poor little miserable wife, and tell
me whatever it is--tell me all!”
Here you would have said was something more urgent than the
opportunity which he coveted; but the sight of that gaze of wildest
misery smote and terrified him, it looked in reality so near despair,
so near insanity.
“To tell her will be to kill her,” something seemed to whisper, and he
drew her closer to him, and kissed her and laughed.
“Nothing on earth but money--the want of money--debt. Upon my soul
you frightened me, Alice, you looked so, so piteous. I thought you had
something dreadful to tell me; but, thank God, you are quite well, and
haven’t even seen a ghost. You must not always be such a foolish
little creature. I’m afraid this place will turn our heads. Here we
are safe and sound, and nothing wrong but my abominable debts. You
would not wonder at my moping if you knew what debt is; but I won’t
look, if I can help it, quite so miserable for the future; for, after
all, we must have money soon, and you know they can’t hang me for
owing them a few hundreds; and I’m quite angry with myself for having
annoyed you so, you poor little thing.”
“My noble Ry, it is so good of you, you make me so happy, I did not
know what to think, but you have made me quite cheerful again, and I
really do think it is being so much alone, I watch your looks so much,
and everything preys on me so, and that seems so odious when I have my
darling along with me; but Ry will forgive his foolish little wife, I
know he will, he’s always so good and kind.”
Then followed more reassuring speeches from Charles, and more raptures
from poor Alice. And the end was that for a time Charles was quite
turned away from his purpose. I don’t know, however, that he was able
to keep his promise about more cheerful looks, certainly not beyond a
day or two.
A few days later he heard a tragic bit of news. Tom related to him
that the miller’s young wife, down at Raxleigh, hearing on a sudden
that her husband was drowned in the mill-stream, though ’twas nothing
after all but a ducking, was “took wi’ fits, and died in three days’
time.”
So much for surprising young wives with alarming stories! Charles
Fairfield listened, and made the application for himself.
A few days later a letter was brought into the room where rather
silently Charles and his wife were at breakfast. It came when he had
almost given up the idea of receiving one for some days, perhaps
weeks, and he had begun to please himself with the idea that the delay
augured well, and Harry’s silence was a sign that the alarm was
subsiding.
Here, however, was a letter addressed to him in Harry’s bold hand. His
poor little wife sitting next the tea-things, eyed her husband as he
opened it, with breathless alarm; she saw him grow pale as he glanced
at it; he lowered it to the tablecloth, and bit his lip, his eye still
fixed on it.
As he did not turn over the leaf, she saw it could not be a long one,
and must all be comprised within one page.
“Ry, darling,” she asked, also very pale, in a timid voice, “it’s
nothing very bad. Oh, darling, what is it?”
He got up and walked to the window silently.
“What do you say, darling?” he asked, suddenly, after a little pause.
She repeated her question.
“No, darling, nothing, but--but possibly we may have to leave this.
You can read it, darling.”
He laid the letter gently on the tablecloth beside her, and she picked
it up, and read--
“My dear Charlie,
“The old soldier means business. I think you must go up to London, but
be sure to meet me to-morrow at Hatherton, say the Commercial Hotel,
at four o’clock, P.M.
“Your affectionate brother,
“Harry Fairfield.”
“Who does he mean by the old soldier?” asked Alice, very much
frightened, after a silence.
“One of those d----d people who are plaguing me,” said Charles, who
had returned to the window, and answered, still looking out.
“And what is his real name, darling?”
“I’m ashamed to say that Harry knows ten times as well as I all about
my affairs. I pay interest through his hands, and he watches those
people’s movements; he’s a rough diamond, but he has been very kind,
and you see his note--where is it? Oh, thanks. I must be off in half
an hour, to meet the coach at the ‘Pied Horse.’”
“Let me go up, darling, and help you to pack, I know where all your
things are,” said poor little Alice, who looked as if she was going to
faint.
“Thank you, darling, you are such a good little creature, and never
think of yourself--never, never--_half enough_.”
His hands were on her shoulders, and he was looking in her face, with
sad strange eyes, as he said this, slowly, like a man spelling out an
inscription.
“I wish--I wish a thousand things. God knows how heavy my heart is. If
you cared for yourself, Alice, like other women, or that I weren’t a
fool--but--but you, poor little thing, it was such a venture, such a
sea, such a crazy boat to sail in.”
“I would not give up my Ry, my darling, my husband, my handsome,
clever, noble Ry--I’d lose a thousand lives if I had them, one by one,
for you, Charlie; and oh, if you left me, I should die.”
“Poor little thing,” he said, drawing her to him with a trembling
strain, and in his eyes, unseen by her, tears were standing.
“If you leave this, won’t you take me, Charlie? won’t you let me go
wherever you go? and oh, if they take my man--I’m to go with you,
Charlie, promise that, and oh, my darling, you’re not sorry you
married your poor little Alley.”
“Come, darling, come up; you shall hear from me in a day or two, or
see me. This will blow over, as so many other troubles have done,” he
said, kissing her fondly.
And now began the short fuss and confusion of a packing on brief
notice, while Tom harnessed the horse, and put him to the dogcart.
And the moment having arrived, down came Charles Fairfield, and Tom
swung his portmanteau into its place, and poor little Alice was there
with, as Old Dulcibella said, “her poor little face all cried,” to
have a last look, and a last word, her tiny feet on the big unequal
paving stones, and her eyes following Charlie’s face, as he stepped up
and arranged his rug and coat on the seat, and then jumped down for
the last hug; and the wild, close, hurried whisperings, last words of
love and cheer from laden hearts, and pale smiles, and the last,
_really_ the last look, and the dog-cart and Tom, and the portmanteau
and Charlie, and the sun’s blessed light, disappear together through
the old gateway under the wide stone arch, with tufted ivy and
careless sparrows, and little Alice stands alone on the pavement for a
moment, and runs out to have one last wild look at the disappearing
“trap,” under the old trees, as it rattled swiftly down to the narrow
road of Carwell Valley.
It vanished--it was gone--the tinkling of the wheels was heard no
more. The parting, for the present, was quite over, and poor little
Alice turned at last, and threw her arms about the neck of kind old
Dulcibella, who had held her when a baby in her arms in the little
room at Wyvern Vicarage, and saw her now a young wife, “wooed and
married, and a’,” in the beauty and the sorrows of life; and the light
air of autumn rustled in the foliage above her, and a withered leaf or
two fell from the sunlit summits to the shadow at her feet; and the
old woman’s kind eyes filled with tears, and she whispered homely
comfort, and told her she would have him back again in a day or two,
and not to take on so; and with her gentle hand, as she embraced her,
patted her on the shoulder, as she used in other years--that seemed
like yesterday--to comfort her in nursery troubles. But our sorrows
outgrow their simple consolations, and turn us in their gigantic
maturity to the sympathy and wisdom that is sublime and eternal.
Days passed away, and a precious note from Charlie came. It told her
where to write to him in London, and very little more.
The hasty scrawl added, indeed emphatically, that she was to tell his
address to no one. So she shut it up in the drawer of the
old-fashioned dressing-table, the key of which she always kept with
her.
Other days passed. The hour was dull at Carwell Grange for Alice. But
things moved on in their dull routine without event or alarm.
Old Mildred Tarnley was sour and hard as of old, and up to a certain
time neither darker nor brighter than customary. Upon a day, however,
there came a shadow and a fear upon her.
Two or three times on that day and the next, was Mrs. Tarnley
gliding, when old Dulcibella with her mistress was in the garden,
about Alice’s bedroom, noiselessly as a shadow. The little girl
downstairs did not know where she was. It was known but to
herself--and what she was about. Coming down those dark stairs, and
going up, she went on tiptoe, and looked black and stern as if she was
“laying out” a corpse upstairs.
Accidentally old Dulcibella, coming into the room on a message from
the garden, surprised lean, straight Mrs. Tarnley, feloniously trying
to turn a key, from a bunch in her hand, in the lock of the
dressing-table drawer.
“Oh, la! Mrs. Tarnley,” cried old Dulcibella, very much startled.
The two women stood perfectly still, staring at one another. Each
looked scared. Stiff Mildred Tarnley, without, I think, being the
least aware of it, dropped a stiff short courtesy, and for some
seconds more the silence continued.
“What _be_ you a-doing here, Mrs. Tarnley?” at length demanded
Dulcibella Crane.
“No occasion to tell _you_,” replied Mildred, intrepidly. “Another
one, that owed her as little as I’m like ever to do, would tell your
young mistress. But I don’t want to break her heart--what for should
I? There’s dark stories enough about the Grange without no one hangin’
theirself in their garters. What I want is where to direct a letter to
Master Charles--that’s all.”
“I can’t say, I’m sure,” said old Dulcibella.
“She got a letter from him o’ Thursday last; ’twill be in it no doubt,
and that I take it, ma’am, is in this drawer, for she used not to lock
it; and I expect you, if ye love your young mistress, to help me to
get at it,” said Mrs. Tarnley, firmly.
“Lor, Mrs. Tarnley, ma’am! _me_ to pick a lock, ma’am! I’d die first.
Ye can’t mean it?”
“I knowd ye was a fool. I shouldn’t ’a said nothing to ye about it,”
said Mildred, with sharp disdain.
“Lawk! I never was so frightened in my life!” responded Dulcibella.
“Ye’ll be more so, mayhap. I wash my hands o’ ye,” said Mrs. Tarnley,
with a furious look, and a sharp little stamp on the floor. “I thought
o’ nothing but your mistress’s good, and if ye tell her I was here,
I’ll explain all, for I won’t lie under no surmises, and I think
’twill be the death of her.”
“Oh, this place, this hawful place! I never was so frightened in my
days,” said Dulcibella, looking very white.
“She’s in the garden now, I do suppose,” said Mildred, “and if ye mean
to tell her what I was about, ’taint a pin’s head to me, but I’ll go
out and tell her myself, and even if she lives through it, she’ll
never hold up her head more, and that’s all _you’ll_ hear from Mildred
Tarnley.”
“Oh, dear! dear! dear! my heart, how it goes!”
“Come, come, woman, you’re nothin’ so squeamish, I dare say.”
“Well,” said Dulcibella; “it may be all as you say, ma’am, and I’ll
say ye this justice, I ha’n’t missed to the value of a pennypiece
since we come here, but if ye promise me, only ye won’t come up here
no more while we’re out, Mrs. Tarnley, I won’t say nothing about it.”
“That settles it, keep your word, Mrs. Crane, and I’ll keep mine; I’ll
burn my fingers no more in other people’s messes;” and she shook the
key with a considerable gingle of the whole bunch from the keyhole,
and popped it grimly into her pocket.
“Your sarvant, Mrs. Crane.”
“Yours, Mrs. Tarnley, ma’am,” replied Dulcibella.
And the interview which had commenced so brusquely, ended with
ceremony, as Mildred Tarnley withdrew.
That old woman was in a sort of fever that afternoon and the next day,
and her temper, Lilly Dogger thought, grew more and more savage as
night approached. She had in her pocket a friendly fulsome little
letter, which had reached her through the post, announcing an arrival
for the night that was now approaching. The coach that changed horses
at the “Pied Horse,” was due there at half-past eleven, P.M., but
might not be there till twelve, and then there was a long drive to
Carwell Grange.
“I’m wore out wi’ them, I’m tired to death; I’m wore off my feet wi’
them; I’m worked like a hoss. ’Twould be well for Mildred Tarnley, I’m
thinkin’, she was under the mould wi’ a stone at her head, and shut o’
them all.”