THE SOUL'S AWAKENING
Two people did not sleep at all that night. Pain kept Rufus Sterne
awake--an active brain banished slumber from the eyes of Madeline
Grover. Possibly some subtle and intractable current of sympathy ran
between the cottage and the mansion--some occult and undiscovered
movement of the air between brain and brain or heart and heart, some
telepathic communication that science had not scheduled yet. Be that as
it may, neither Rufus nor Madeline could woo a wink of sleep. All
through the long hours of the night they lay with wide-open eyes--the
one weaving the threads of fancy into all imaginable shapes, the other
fighting for the most part the twin demons of pain and fear.
Madeline lived through that fateful afternoon a thousand times. She
recalled every incident, however trivial it might be. Memory would let
nothing escape. Things that she scarcely noticed at the time became
hugely significant. Simple words and gestures seemed to glow with new
meanings.
She was not superstitious--at least she believed she was not. Neither
was she a fatalist, and yet she had a feeling that for good or ill, her
life was in some way or other bound up with this stranger. It was not
his fault that he had come into her life. He had not sought her. The
beginning of the acquaintanceship was all on her side. She had made the
first advance, and the whirligig of chance or the workings of an
inscrutable providence had done all the rest.
In some respects it was scarcely pleasant to feel that she was so much
in debt to a stranger. Whatever might happen in the future, or wherever
her lot was cast, she would never be able to get away from the feeling
that she owed her life to this Rufus Sterne. To make matters all the
worse, he was suffering considerable pain and loss on her account. How
much this accident might mean to him she had no means of knowing. All
his immediate prospects might be wrecked in consequence. For a young man
dependent on his own exertions to be incapacitated for two or three
months might be a more serious matter than she could guess.
Sometimes she wished that some homely fisherman or ignorant ploughboy
had rescued her. She might in such a case have given material
compensation, and it would have been accepted with gratitude, and her
obligation would be at an end.
But Rufus Sterne was a gentleman--that fact was beyond all dispute--and
doubtless he had all the pride that generally attaches to genteel
poverty. The obligation, therefore, would have to remain. There was, as
far as she could see, no possible way of discharging it. To speak of
compensation would be to insult him.
Behind all this there was another feeling: What did he think of her? Did
he resent her intrusion into the quiet sanctuary of his life? Did he
wish that she had never crossed his path? Was his thought of her at that
moment such as her cheeks would redden to hear? She wished she knew what
he thought of her--what in his heart he felt. It would be humiliating if
he regarded her with contempt, or even with mild dislike.
She would not live to be regarded by him even with indifference. Her
cheeks grew hot when she made this confession to herself. If he had been
a fisherman or a ploughboy it would not have mattered, and she would not
have cared. But he was one of the most noticeable men she had ever seen.
A man who would win a second look in any crowd. A man who--given a fair
chance--would make his mark in the world.
She hoped that he was not very angry with her, that he was not writing
her down in his mind as a foolish and headstrong girl. She would like,
after all, to have his good opinion--like him to think that in saving
her he had saved a life that was worth saving. It might not be true in
fact, but she would like him to think so all the same.
To what end had he saved her? As she looked at her life stretching
forward into the future she saw nothing great or heroic in it. It had
all been mapped out for her, and mapped out in a very excellent way. The
exhortation "take no thought for the morrow," was not needed in her
case. Everything was being settled to everyone's satisfaction, her own
included. She had only to fall in with the drift and current of events
and all would be as she would like it to be.
Other women might have to plan and struggle, and labour and contrive;
but in the scheme of her life such unpleasant things had no place. All
contingencies had been provided against. She did not need to take any
thought for to-morrow.
"I'm not sure that my life was worth saving after all," she said to
herself, a little bit fretfully. "It seems an aimless, selfish kind of
thing as I look at it now. A poor woman who inspires her husband to do
some great deed, even if she is incapable of any great deed herself,
surely lives a nobler life than that which seems marked out for me."
Her cheeks grew red again. How proud she would be if she could be the
inspiration of some great achievement! To give hope to some great soul
struggling amid adverse circumstances would be an end worth living for.
To stand by the side of a man she could look up to, and help him to win
in the hard battle of life--that would be the crown of all existence.
She began to wonder, after a while, why such thoughts came to her. Why
the future should look different from what it had always done. Why a
thread of a different hue should show itself in the pattern that had
been woven for her. Why a doubt should arise in her heart as to whether
the absolutely best had been marked out for her.
Until to-night she had been quite content to take things as she found
them. Of course, she had had her troubles, like other girls. It was a
trouble to her that she had never known the love of her mother, a
trouble that she had never been able to get on with her step-mother, a
trouble when her father died--though, as she had seen very little of him
for seven years previously, the sense of loss was not so keen as it
might have been. It was a trouble to her to say good-bye to her
schoolfellows and friends, and cross the seas to a new home in England.
Of course, the last trouble had its compensations. To an American girl
whose forebears were English, "The Old Country," as it is affectionately
termed, is the land of romance, the home of chivalry, the cradle of
heroes and of history. To see the things she had read about in her
childhood, to visit spots made sacred by the blood of the heroic dead,
to tread on the ground where kings have stood, to pay homage at the
shrine of poets and seers--that would be worth crossing a thousand
oceans for.
It is true she had been more than a little disappointed. Trewinion Hall
was so far away from everywhere, and the people who visited it from time
to time were very little to her taste. She would have liked to live in
London always. Life and colour and movement were there. Its very streets
were historic. Many of its public buildings were hoary with antiquity,
and "rich with the spoils of time." The men and women of rank and name
and power moved in and out amongst the crowd. History was being made
from day to day in its Halls of Assembly.
St. Gaved seemed to her like a little place that had got stranded in the
dim and distant past. The rest of the world had run away from it. It
lived on its traditions because it had no hope of a future. Like the
granite cliffs that stretched north and south, it never changed. Its
business, its politics, its morals, its religion, were what they had
been from time immemorial. A man who said anything new, or advanced an
opinion that was not strictly orthodox, was regarded with suspicion.
St. Gaved had its charm, no doubt. The charm of antiquity, the charm of
leisureliness, the charm of immobility. Moreover, it was beautiful for
situation. The cliffs were magnificent beyond anything she had ever
dreamed. The great ocean was a never-failing source of interest. The
valleys that cleft their way inland, the streams that lost themselves in
tangled brakes of undergrowth, the hillsides rich in timber, the
hedgerows that were masses of wild flowers, the moorlands yellow with
gorse--all these things were a set off against its dull and slow-moving
life.
Then, besides all that, life would not always be dull. Gervase was
returning from India in the spring, and a great many things might happen
then.
Gervase was Sir Charles' only son, and heir to the title and estates. He
was a handsome soldier of the genuine military type, tall and straight,
and not over-burdened with flesh. His hair was pale, his complexion
ruddy, his voice harsh, his manner that of one born to command.
Madeline had met him three years before at Washington, and as he was in
some far-off and round-about way related to her, he had escorted her to
any number of receptions, and danced with her more times than she could
count. She thought him then the most handsome man she had ever seen,
especially in his uniform. She liked him, too, because he was so
dogmatic and masterful; there was nothing timid, or feeble, or retiring
about him. He was a man who meant to have his own way, and generally got
it.
His courage and daring also touched her heart and imagination. His talk
had been mainly about shooting dervishes in Egypt and hunting tigers in
India, and some of his exploits had thrilled her to the finger-tips. It
puzzled her that he could talk so light-heartedly about the slaughter of
human beings, even though they were Arabs and Hindoos, but then he was
trained to be a soldier, and soldiers were trained to kill.
It was one of those things she had looked forward to with the greatest
interest in coming to England. She would see Gervase Tregony again. It
seemed to her like a special providence that Sir Charles Tregony should
be her trustee until she was twenty-one, and of course nothing could be
kinder than that he should invite her to stay at the Hall as long as she
liked--to make her permanent abode there if she chose to do so.
She was glad to accept the invitation for several reasons. In the first
place, it was impossible to live with her step-mother, who for some
reason appeared to resent her very existence. In the second place, she
longed, with all a school-girl's longing, for change, and to see England
and Europe had been the very height of her ambition. And in the third
place--and this was a secret that she safely guarded in her own
bosom--she would the sooner see Captain Tregony; for if she were in
England she would be among the first to give him welcome on his return
from India, and she imagined with a little thrill at her heart how his
face would light up and his eyes sparkle when he saw her standing behind
the rest, waiting to give him the warmest welcome of all.
This little secret added a peculiar charm and zest to life, and all the
more so because every arrangement had been made respecting her future,
as though Captain Tregony had no existence. She imagined sometimes that
her father had been under the guidance of a special providence when he
made Sir Charles Tregony her trustee, that Sir Charles was under the
same kindly influence when he accepted the responsibility and took her
to the shelter of his own home.
Had she known the scheming and man[oe]uvering that went on at an earlier
date, her faith in providence would have been rudely shaken. But she had
no idea that she was only a pawn in a game that was being played by
others. It was some solace to John Grover, even when dying, that his
only child would mix with the English aristocracy and probably become
"my lady" before she had finished her earthly course.
To John Grover, who had started life with empty pockets, who had
struggled through years of grinding poverty, who had "struck oil," as he
termed it, in middle life and made a huge fortune before he was
fifty--to such a man the thought of his daughter marrying an English
officer who was also heir to a baronetcy was a distinction almost too
great to be shaped into words.
To have married the President of the United States would have been
nothing comparable to it. It was a proud day for John Grover when he
discovered that his first wife, the mother of Madeline, was remotely
connected with the Tregonys of Trewinion Hall, Cornwall. He wrote
claiming relationship with Sir Charles on the strength of it, much to
the Baronet's annoyance and disgust. But several years later, when John
Grover had become a millionaire, Sir Charles decided to hunt him up. A
penniless man was one thing, a man with a million was another.
Sir Charles himself was as poor as a church mouse, that is taking his
position into account. His son and heir, Gervase, was a young man of
very expensive tastes and very lax notions of economy. Hence if their
ancestral hall could be refurnished by American dollars, and Gervase's
debts paid off out of the savings of this John Grover, it would be a
happy and an ingenious stroke of business.
Of course, diplomacy would be needed, and diplomacy of the most delicate
and subtle kind. Sir Charles took Gervase into his confidence, and
Gervase confided to his father that he was prepared to marry anybody in
reason so long as she had plenty of the needful.
Sir Charles took a voyage to the United States and interviewed his
relatives. A few months later Gervase went across and paid court to
Madeline, and with remarkable success. Madeline was in her seventeenth
year at the time, romantic, inexperienced and impressionable. Then came
the death of her father, the discovery that Sir Charles Tregony was her
trustee, and the option of spending her minority in Trewinion Hall.
So far everything had happened as anticipated. There had been no hitch
anywhere, and to all appearances the little scheme would be brought to a
successful issue.
Sir Charles kept Gervase well posted up as to the course of events.
"She has not the remotest idea that we have any designs upon her," he
said, in one of his early letters. "If she got the smallest hint I fear
she might jib. She has grown to be a remarkably handsome girl, high
spirited and intelligent. There is nobody here to whom she will lose her
heart, and I am keeping her as secluded as possible till you return. I
trust to you to put as much warmth in your letters to her as you think
advisable. At present she thinks the world of you. I am sure of it. You
impressed her mightily when you were in the States. She regards you as a
sort of saint and hero rolled into one. She thinks also that you are
immensely clever. Hence it is rather a difficult _role_ you will have to
play. By letter you can do a great deal between now and the new year.
Keep up the idealism. She is very puritanic in some of her notions.
Don't shock her, for the world. If you can arrange an engagement before
you return so much the better. A long courtship, I fear, might spoil
everything. She has sharp eyes; and yet you have to guard against being
too precipitate. So far, I flatter myself we have both handled the
matter with great delicacy. A few months more, and--with care and
judgment, you may snap your fingers at the world."
Sir Charles had rightly estimated her character in one respect. If
Madeline had had the smallest suspicion that he and his son had designs
upon her--that a deliberate plot was being hatched--her indignation
would have known no bounds.
But her own little secret had been, perhaps, the best safeguard against
any such suspicion. To her ingenuous mind the world was the best of all
possible places. Her friends had so arranged her life and her lot that
everything appeared to be working together for the best. She had not to
worry about anything. The Captain's letters had as much warmth in them
as she could desire. Her future, shaped for her without any contriving
of her own--shaped by friends and by Providence, left nothing to be
desired.
It was clear what the Captain wished. It would have pleased her father
had he been alive, it would be satisfactory to Sir Charles, it would fit
in with her own conception of life. So she would dance along the
primrose way without a want, without a care, without a responsibility.
There would be gaiety, and mirth, and music, balls and crushes, and
social functions of all sorts and kinds. She would get into social
circles she had never known before, and be "Lady" Tregony before she
died.
It was all as straight as a rule, and as clear as a sunbeam.
Why had it never seemed empty and sordid and selfish until to-night? Why
did her inward eyes look for a sterner and more heroic way? Why did
pleasure look so uninviting and duty wear such a noble mien? Why was all
her future outlook changed as in a flash?
These were questions she was debating with herself when a new day stole
into the room.