“Fairoaks to let”
Our poor widow (with the assistance of her faithful Martha of Fairoaks,
who laughed and wondered at the German ways, and superintended the
affairs of the simple household) had made a little feast in honour of
Major Pendennis’s arrival, of which, however, only the Major and his
two younger friends partook, for Helen sent to say that she was too
unwell to dine at their table, and Laura bore her company. The Major
talked for the party, and did not perceive, or choose to perceive, what
a gloom and silence pervaded the other two sharers of the modest
dinner. It was evening before Helen and Laura came into the
sitting-room to join the company there. She came in leaning on Laura,
with her back to the waning light, so that Arthur could not see how
pallid and woe-stricken her face was, and as she went up to Pen, whom
she had not seen during the day, and placed her fond arms on his
shoulders and kissed him tenderly, Laura left her, and moved away to
another part of the room. Pen remarked that his mother’s voice and her
whole frame trembled, her hand was clammy cold as she put it up to his
forehead, piteously embracing him. The spectacle of her misery only
added, somehow, to the wrath and testiness of the young man. He
scarcely returned the kiss which the suffering lady gave him: and the
countenance with which he met the appeal of her look was hard and
cruel. “She persecutes me,” he thought within himself, “and she comes
to me with the air of a martyr!” “You look very ill, my child,” she
said. “I don’t like to see you look in that way.” And she tottered to a
sofa, still holding one of his passive hands in her thin cold clinging
fingers.
“I have had much to annoy me, mother,” Pen said, with a throbbing
breast: and as he spoke Helen’s heart began to beat so, that she sate
almost dead and speechless with terror.
Warrington, Laura, and Major Pendennis, all remained breathless, aware
that the storm was about to break.
“I have had letters from London,” Arthur continued, “and one that has
given me more pain than I ever had in my life. It tells me that former
letters of mine have been intercepted and purloined away from
me;—that—that a young creature who has shown the greatest love and care
for me, has been most cruelly used by—by you, mother.”
“For God’s sake stop,” cried out Warrington. “She’s ill—don’t you see
she is ill?”
“Let him go on,” said the widow, faintly.
“Let him go on and kill her,” said Laura, rushing up to her mother’s
side. “Speak on, sir, and see her die.”
“It is you who are cruel,” cried Pen, more exasperated and more savage,
because his own heart, naturally soft and weak, revolted indignantly at
the injustice of the very suffering which was laid at his door. “It is
you that are cruel, who attribute all this pain to me: it is you who
are cruel with your wicked reproaches, your wicked doubts of me, your
wicked persecutions of those who love me,—yes, those who love me, and
who brave everything for me, and whom you despise and trample upon
because they are of lower degree than you. Shall I tell you what I will
do,—what I am resolved to do, now that I know what your conduct has
been?—I will go back to this poor girl whom you turned out of my doors,
and ask her to come back and share my home with me. I’ll defy the pride
which persecutes her, and the pitiless suspicion which insults her and
me.”
“Do you mean, Pen, that you——” here the widow, with eager eyes and
outstretched hands, was breaking out, but Laura stopped her: “Silence,
hush, dear mother,” she cried, and the widow hushed. Savagely as Pen
spoke, she was only too eager to hear what more he had to say. “Go on,
Arthur, go on, Arthur,” was all she said, almost swooning away as she
spoke.
“By Gad, I say he shan’t go on, or I won’t hear him, by Gad,” the Major
said, trembling too in his wrath. “If you choose, sir, after all we’ve
done for you, after all I’ve done for you myself, to insult your mother
and disgrace your name, by allying yourself with a low-born
kitchen-girl, go and do it, by Gad,—but let us, ma’am, have no more to
do with him. I wash my hands of you, sir,—I wash my hands of you. I’m
an old fellow,—I ain’t long for this world. I come of as ancient and
honourable a family as any in England, by Gad, and I did hope, before I
went off the hooks, by Gad, that the fellow that I’d liked, and brought
up, and nursed through life, by Jove, would do something to show me
that our name—yes, the name of Pendennis, by Gad, was left
undishonoured behind us, but if he won’t, dammy, I say, amen. By G—,
both my father and my brother Jack were the proudest men in England,
and I never would have thought that there would come this disgrace to
my name,—never—and—and I’m ashamed that it’s Arthur Pendennis.” The old
fellow’s voice here broke off into a sob: it was the second time that
Arthur had brought tears from those wrinkled lids.
The sound of his breaking voice stayed Pen’s anger instantly, and he
stopped pacing the room, as he had been doing until that moment. Laura
was by Helen’s sofa; and Warrington had remained hitherto an almost
silent, but not uninterested spectator of the family storm. As the
parties were talking, it had grown almost dark; and after the lull
which succeeded the passionate outbreak of the Major, George’s deep
voice, as it here broke trembling into the twilight room, was heard
with no small emotion by all.
“Will you let me tell you something about myself, my kind friends?” he
said,—“you have been so good to me, ma’am, you have been so kind to me,
Laura—I hope I may call you so sometimes—my dear Pen and I have been
such friends that I have long wanted to tell you my story such as it
is, and would have told it to you earlier but that it is a sad one and
contains another’s secret. However, it may do good for Arthur to know
it—it is right that every one here should. It will divert you from
thinking about a subject, which, out of a fatal misconception, has
caused a great deal of pain to all of you. May I please tell you, Mrs.
Pendennis?”
“Pray speak,” was all Helen said; and indeed she was not much heeding;
her mind was full of another idea with which Pen’s words had supplied
her, and she was in a terror of hope that what he had hinted might be
as she wished.
George filled himself a bumper of wine and emptied it, and began to
speak. “You all of you know how you see me,” he said, “a man without a
desire to make an advance in the world: careless about reputation; and
living in a garret and from hand to mouth, though I have friends and a
name, and I daresay capabilities of my own, that would serve me if I
had a mind. But mind I have none. I shall die in that garret most
likely, and alone. I nailed myself to that doom in early life. Shall I
tell you what it was that interested me about Arthur years ago, and
made me inclined towards him when first I saw him? The men from our
college at Oxbridge brought up accounts of that early affair with the
Chatteris actress, about whom Pen has talked to me since; and who, but
for the Major’s generalship, might have been your daughter-in-law,
ma’am. I can’t see Pen in the dark, but he blushes, I’m sure; and I
dare say Miss Bell does; and my friend Major Pendennis, I dare say,
laughs as he ought to do—for he won. What would have been Arthur’s lot
now had he been tied at nineteen to an illiterate woman older than
himself, with no qualities in common between them to make one a
companion for the other, no equality, no confidence, and no love
speedily? What could he have been but most miserable? And when he spoke
just now and threatened a similar union, be sure it was but a threat
occasioned by anger, which you must give me leave to say, ma’am, was
very natural on his part, for after a generous and manly conduct—let me
say who know the circumstances well—most generous and manly and
self-denying (which is rare with him),—he has met from some friends of
his with a most unkind suspicion, and has had to complain of the unfair
treatment of another innocent person, towards whom he and you all are
under much obligation.”
The widow was going to get up here, and Warrington, seeing her attempt
to rise, said, “Do I tire you, ma’am?”
“Oh no—go on—go on,” said Helen, delighted, and he continued.
“I liked him, you see, because of that early history of his, which had
come to my ears in college gossip, and because I like a man, if you
will pardon me for saying so, Miss Laura, who shows that he can have a
great unreasonable attachment for a woman. That was why we became
friends—and are all friends here—for always, aren’t we?” he added, in a
lower voice, leaning over to her, “and Pen has been a great comfort and
companion to a lonely and unfortunate man.
“I am not complaining of my lot, you see; for no man’s is what he would
have it; and up in my garret, where you left the flowers, and with my
old books and my pipe for a wife, I am pretty contented, and only
occasionally envy other men, whose careers in life are more brilliant,
or who can solace their ill fortune by what Fate and my own fault has
deprived me of—the affection of a woman or a child.” Here there came a
sigh from somewhere near Warrington in the dark, and a hand was held
out in his direction, which, however, was instantly, withdrawn, for the
prudery of our females is such, that before all expression of feeling,
or natural kindness and regard, a woman is ‘taught to think of herself
and the proprieties, and to be ready to blush at the very slightest
notice;’ and checking, as, of course, it ought, this spontaneous
motion, modesty drew up again, kindly friendship shrank back ashamed of
itself, and Warrington resumed his history. “My fate is such as I made
it, and not lucky for me or for others involved in it.
“I, too, had an adventure before I went to college; and there was no
one to save me as Major Pendennis saved Pen. Pardon me, Miss Laura, if
I tell this story before you. It is as well that you all of you should
hear my confession. Before I went to college, as a boy of eighteen, I
was at a private tutor’s, and there, like Arthur, I became attached, or
fancied I was attached, to a woman of a much lower degree and a greater
age than my own. You shrink from me——”
“No, I don’t,” Laura said, and here the hand went out resolutely, and
laid itself in Warrington’s. She had divined his story from some
previous hints let fall by him, and his first words at its
commencement.
“She was a yeoman’s daughter in the neighbourhood,” Warrington said,
with rather a faltering voice, “and I fancied—what all young men fancy.
Her parents knew who my father was, and encouraged me, with all sorts
of coarse artifices and scoundrel flatteries, which I see now, about
their house. To do her justice, I own she never cared for me, but was
forced into what happened by the threats and compulsion of her family.
Would to God that I had not been deceived: but in these matters we are
deceived because we wish to be so, and I thought I loved that poor
woman.
“What could come of such a marriage? I found, before long, that I was
married to a boor. She could not comprehend one subject that interested
me. Her dulness palled upon me till I grew to loathe it. And after some
time of a wretched, furtive union—I must tell you all—I found letters
somewhere (and such letters they were!) which showed me that her heart,
such as it was, had never been mine, but had always belonged to a
person of her own degree.
“At my father’s death, I paid what debts I had contracted at college,
and settled every shilling which remained to me in an annuity upon—upon
those who bore my name, on condition that they should hide themselves
away, and not assume it. They have kept that condition, as they would
break it, for more money. If I had earned fame or reputation, that
woman would have come to claim it: if I had made a name for myself
those who had no right to it would have borne it; and I entered life at
twenty, God help me—hopeless and ruined beyond remission. I was the
boyish victim of vulgar cheats, and, perhaps, it is only of late I have
found out how hard—ah, how hard—it is to forgive them. I told you the
moral before, Pen; and now I have told you the fable. Beware how you
marry out of your degree. I was made for a better lot than this, I
think: but God has awarded me this one—and so, you see, it is for me to
look on, and see others successful and others happy, with a heart that
shall be as little bitter as possible.”
“By Gad, sir,” cried the Major, in high good-humour, “I intended you to
marry Miss Laura here.”
“And, by Gad, Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,” Warrington
said.
“How d’ye mean a thousand? it was only a pony, sir,” replied the Major
simply, at which the other laughed.
As for Helen, she was so delighted, that she started up, and said, “God
bless you—God for ever bless you, Mr. Warrington;” and kissed both his
hands, and ran up to Pen, and fell into his arms.
“Yes, dearest mother,” he said as he held her to him, and with a noble
tenderness and emotion, embraced and forgave her. “I am innocent, and
my dear, dear mother has done me a wrong.”
“Oh yes, my child, I have wronged you, thank God, I have wronged you!”
Helen whispered. “Come away, Arthur—not here—I want to ask my child to
forgive me—and—and my God, to forgive me; and to bless you, and love
you, my son.”
He led her, tottering, into her room, and closed the door, as the three
touched spectators of the reconciliation looked on in pleased silence.
Ever after, ever after, the tender accents of that voice faltering
sweetly at his ear—the look of the sacred eyes beaming with an
affection unutterable—the quiver of the fond lips smiling
mournfully—were remembered by the young man. And at his best moments,
and at his hours of trial and grief, and at his times of success or
well-doing, the mother’s face looked down upon him, and blessed him
with its gaze of pity and purity, as he saw it in that night when she
yet lingered with him; and when she seemed, ere she quite left him, an
angel, transfigured and glorified with love—for which love, as for the
greatest of the bounties and wonders of God’s provision for us, let us
kneel and thank Our Father.
The moon had risen by this time; Arthur recollected well afterwards how
it lighted up his mother’s sweet pale face. Their talk, or his rather,
for she scarcely could speak, was more tender and confidential than it
had been for years before. He was the frank and generous boy of her
early days and love. He told her the story, the mistake regarding which
had caused her so much pain—his struggles to fly from temptation, and
his thankfulness that he had been able to overcome it. He never would
do the girl wrong, never; or wound his own honour or his mother’s pure
heart. The threat that he would return was uttered in a moment of
exasperation, of which he repented. He never would see her again. But
his mother said yes he should; and it was she who had been proud and
culpable—and she would like to give Fanny Bolton something—and she
begged her dear boy’s pardon for opening the letter—and she would write
to the young girl, if,—if she had time. Poor thing! was it not natural
that she should love her Arthur? And again she kissed him, and she
blessed him.
As they were talking the clock struck nine, and Helen reminded him how,
when he was a little boy, she used to go up to his bedroom at that
hour, and hear him say Our Father. And once more, oh, once more, the
young man fell down at his mother’s sacred knees, and sobbed out the
prayer which the Divine Tenderness uttered for us, and which has been
echoed by twenty ages since by millions of sinful and humbled men. And
as he spoke the last words of the supplication, the mother’s head fell
down on her boy’s, and her arms closed round him, and together they
repeated the words “for ever and ever” and “Amen.”
A little time after, it might have been a quarter of an hour, Laura
heard Arthur’s voice call from within, “Laura! Laura!” She rushed into
the room instantly and found the young man still on his knees, and
holding his mother’s hand. Helen’s head had sunk back and was quite
pale in the room. Pen looked round, scared with a ghastly terror.
“Help, Laura, help!” he said, “she’s fainted—she’s——”
Laura screamed, and fell by the side of Helen. The shriek brought
Warrington and Major Pendennis and the servants to the room. The
sainted woman was dead. The last emotion of her soul here was joy to be
henceforth unchequered and eternal. The tender heart beat no more; it
was to have no more pangs, no more doubts, no more griefs and trials.
Its last throb was love; and Helen’s last breath was a benediction.
The melancholy party bent their way speedily homewards, and Helen was
laid by her husband’s side at Clavering, in the old church where she
had prayed so often. For a while Laura went to stay with Dr. Portman,
who read the service over his dear departed sister, amidst his own sobs
and those of the little congregation which assembled round Helen’s
tomb. There were not many who cared for her, or who spoke of her when
gone. Scarcely more than of a nun in a cloister did people know of that
pious and gentle lady. A few words among the cottagers whom her bounty
was accustomed to relieve, a little talk from house to house at
Clavering, where this lady told how their neighbour died of a complaint
in the heart; whilst that speculated upon the amount of a property
which the widow had left; and a third wondered whether Arthur would let
Fairoaks or live in it, and expected that he would not be long getting
through his property,—this was all, and except with one or two who
cherished her, the kind soul was forgotten by the next market-day.
Would you desire that grief for you should last for a few more weeks?
and does after-life seem less solitary, provided that our names, when
we “go down into silence,” are echoing on this side of the grave yet
for a little while, and human voices are still talking about us? She
was gone, the pure soul, whom only two or three loved and knew. The
great blank she left was in Laura’s heart, to whom her love had been
everything, and who had now but to worship her memory. “I am glad that
she gave me her blessing before she went away,” Warrington said to Pen;
and as for Arthur, with a humble acknowledgment and wonder at so much
affection, he hardly dared to ask of Heaven to make him worthy of it,
though he felt that a saint there was interceding for him.
All the lady’s affairs were found in perfect order, and her little
property ready for transmission to her son, in trust for whom she held
it. Papers in her desk showed that she had long been aware of the
complaint, one of the heart, under which she laboured, and knew that it
would suddenly remove her: and a prayer was found in her handwriting,
asking that her end might be, as it was, in the arms of her son.
Laura and Arthur talked over her sayings, all of which the former most
fondly remembered, to the young man’s shame somewhat, who thought how
much greater her love had been for Helen than his own. He referred
himself entirely to Laura to know what Helen would have wished should
be done; what poor persons she would have liked to relieve; what
legacies or remembrances she would have wished to transmit. They packed
up the vase which Helen in her gratitude had destined to Dr.
Goodenough, and duly sent it to the kind Doctor; a silver coffee-pot,
which she used, was sent off to Portman: a diamond ring, with her hair,
was given with affectionate greeting to Warrington.
It must have been a hard day for poor Laura when she went over to
Fairoaks first and to the little room which she had occupied, and which
was hers no more, and to the widow’s own blank chamber in which those
two had passed so many beloved hours. There, of course, were the
clothes in the wardrobe, the cushion on which she prayed, the chair at
the toilette: the glass that was no more to reflect her dear sad face.
After she had been here a while Pen knocked and led her downstairs to
the parlour again, and made her drink a little wine, and said, “God
bless you,” as she touched the glass. “Nothing shall ever be changed in
your room,” he said—“it is always your room—it is always my sister’s
room. Shall it not be so, Laura?” and Laura said, “Yes!”
Among the widow’s papers was found a packet, marked by the widow,
“Letters from Laura’s father,” and which Arthur gave to her. They were
the letters which had passed between the cousins in the early days
before the marriage of either of them. The ink was faded in which they
were written: the tears dried out that both perhaps had shed over them:
the grief healed now whose bitterness they chronicled: the friends
doubtless united whose parting on earth had caused to both pangs so
cruel. And Laura learned fully now for the first time what the tie was
which had bound her so tenderly to Helen: how faithfully her more than
mother had cherished her father’s memory, how truly she had loved him,
how meekly resigned him.
One legacy of his mother’s Pen remembered, of which Laura could have no
cognisance. It was that wish of Helen’s to make some present to Fanny
Bolton; and Pen wrote to her, putting his letter under an envelope to
Mr. Bows, and requesting that gentleman to read it before he delivered
it to Fanny. “Dear Fanny,” Pen said, “I have to acknowledge two letters
from you, one of which was delayed in my illness” (Pen found the first
letter in his mother’s desk after her decease and the reading it gave
him a strange pang), “and to thank you, my kind nurse and friend, who
watched me so tenderly during my fever. And I have to tell you that the
last words of my dear mother who is no more, were words of goodwill and
gratitude to you for nursing me: and she said she would have written to
you, had she had time—that she would like to ask your pardon if she had
harshly treated you—and that she would beg you to show your forgiveness
by accepting some token of friendship and regard from her.” Pen
concluded by saying that his friend, George Warrington, Esq., of Lamb
Court, Temple, was trustee of a little sum of money, of which the
interest would be paid to her until she became of age, or changed her
name, which would always be affectionately remembered by her grateful
friend, A. Pendennis. The sum was in truth but small, although enough
to make a little heiress of Fanny Bolton, whose parents were appeased,
and whose father said Mr. P. had acted quite as the gentleman—though
Bows growled out that to plaster a wounded heart with a banknote was an
easy kind of sympathy; and poor Fanny felt only too clearly that Pen’s
letter was one of farewell.
“Sending hundred-pound notes to porters’ daughters is all dev’lish
well,” old Major Pendennis said to his nephew (whom, as the proprietor
of Fairoaks and the head of the family, he now treated with marked
deference and civility), “and as there was a little ready money at the
bank, and your poor mother wished it, there’s perhaps no harm done.
But, my good lad, I’d have you to remember that you’ve not above five
hundred a year, though, thanks to me the world gives you credit for
being a doosid deal better off; and, on my knees, I beg you, my boy,
don’t break into your capital: Stick to it, sir; don’t speculate with
it, sir; keep your land, and don’t borrow on it. Tatham tells me that
the Chatteris branch of the railway may—will almost certainly pass
through Chatteris, and of it can be brought on this side of the Brawl,
sir, and through your fields, they’ll be worth a dev’lish deal of
money, and your five hundred a year will jump up to eight or nine.
Whatever it is, keep it, I implore you keep it. And I say, Pen, I think
you should give up living in those dirty chambers in the Temple and let
a decent lodging. And I should have a man, sir, to wait upon me; and a
horse or two in town in the season. All this will pretty well swallow
up your income, and I know you must live close. But remember you have a
certain place in society, and you can’t afford to cut a poor figure in
the world. What are you going to do in the winter? You don’t intend to
stay down here, or, I suppose, to go on writing for
that—what-d’ye-call-’em—that newspaper?”
“Warrington and I are going abroad again, sir, for a little, and then
we shall see what is to be done,” Arthur replied.
“And you’ll let Fairoaks, of course? Good school in the neighbourhood;
cheap country: dev’lish nice place for East India Colonels, or families
wanting to retire. I’ll speak about it at the club; there are lots of
fellows at the club want a place of that sort.”
“I hope Laura will live in it for the winter, at least, and will make
it her home,” Arthur replied: at which the Major pish’d and psha’d, and
said that there ought to be convents, begad, for English ladies, and
wished that Miss Bell had not been there to interfere with the
arrangements of the family, and that she would mope herself to death
alone in that place.
Indeed, it would have been a very dismal abode for poor Laura, who was
not too happy either in Dr. Portman’s household, and in the town where
too many things reminded her of the dear parent whom she had lost. But
old Lady Rockminster, who adored her young friend Laura, as soon as she
read in the paper of her loss, and of her presence in the country,
rushed over from Baymouth, where the old lady was staying, and insisted
that Laura should remain six months, twelve months, all her life with
her; and to her ladyship’s house, Martha from Fairoaks, as femme de
chambre, accompanied her young mistress.
Pen and Warrington saw her depart. It was difficult to say which of the
young men seemed to regard her the most tenderly. “Your cousin is pert
and rather vulgar, my dear, but he seems to have a good heart,” little
Lady Rockminster said, who said her say about everybody—“but I like
Bluebeard best. Tell me, is he touche au coeur?”
“Mr. Warrington has been long—engaged,” Laura said, dropping her eyes.
“Nonsense, child! And good heavens, my dear! that’s a pretty diamond
cross. What do you mean by wearing it in the morning?”
“Arthur—my brother, gave it me just now. It was—it was——”
She could not finish the sentence. The carriage passed over the bridge,
and by the dear, dear gate of Fairoaks—home no more.