THE USES OF ADVERSITY.
Two more days and nights sped by--a time passed almost literally by
Honor in tears and fasting--when the anxiously-looked-for crisis came at
last; came in fear, and passed away in tearful hope, and the joyful news
went forth that John Beacham was out of danger. Out of danger, and
certain (humanly speaking) to walk forth again amongst his fellows;
certain too--ay, of that there could be no doubt--that his duty to God
and to his neighbours would be, to the best of his powers, as simply and
faithfully performed by this honest, simple-hearted man as it had been
in the days before sorrow came, and shame had visited his house. Shame,
but not guilt. Ah, in that lay John’s best consolation, when, with his
head a little lower than had been his wont, he for the first time, with
languid step and sadly altered face, sauntered in his garden between the
lines of fragrant roses, leaning upon Honor’s arm.
They were serious, as well as sad, those two, between whom there had
been so perfect a reconciliation, and on one side a forgiveness so
entire and unqualified. Honor’s sweet young face looked older, paler,
and far more thoughtful than of yore. She could not forget, neither
could the chastened man beside her, that through _their_ faults
tribulation had fallen upon the innocent, and that a motherless infant,
a bereaved father, were left to bear witness to the terrible fact that
they had failed, grievously failed, in their duty to God and to their
neighbour. Through all their lives the memory of these calamities would
darken their joys, and cast a cloud even while the sun shone brightest,
and the sky was bluest above their heads. Never again would Honor be the
bright, light-hearted girl who had first won John’s love when she played
with the merry children in the woods, laughing and shouting in their
joyous mirth. Never again would he, secure in his home happiness, and
with a conscience not only void of offence towards God and towards man,
but with a heart unburdened by a sense of wrong done to any soul that
lived, wear upon his kindly face the genial smile which gladdened his
many acquaintances, men as well as women, young as well as old, when he
waved them a cordial greeting on his onward way. The zest, the freshness
which makes life a thing to be enjoyed as well as endured, was over for
ever; over, not only for the man verging on middle-age, but for the
woman who, on the very threshold of existence, had looked out on coming
storms, and had learned to dread the distant warning of the tempest.
But if not happy--happy, that is to say, with the bliss which, like the
joys of childhood, is simply the result of ignorance, and sometimes the
consequence of want of feeling or want of sense--there were yet
sufficient elements of happiness remaining in John Beacham’s home for
hope to crop out greenly from the arid sands of past regret. Not yet had
the time, the dreary time when no pleasure is taken in any created
thing, arrived for them; not yet had the hour struck when in the voice
of Nature there is no joyful sound, when the opening spring, the song of
birds, the murmur of the rippling water, appeal to the heart in vain,
and when the man who has striven through life to do his duty, and has
failed to reap the reward of peace and the fruition of content, tells
himself, in bitterness of spirit, that from the first step in life he
had chosen the wrong path, and whispers sadly to his heart that it is
all too late, alas, to retrace his steps.
“He writes very unhappily, John,” Honor was saying. Her husband had a
letter that they had been reading in his hand--a letter to John from
Arthur Vavasour. It was the second that they had received from him; the
first having been one so touchingly penitent that John Beacham for a
long while after reading it was more than usually silent, keeping its
contents to himself, and not alluding afterwards, in any way whatsoever,
to the young man’s letter. But, if possible, he was after receiving it
still more tender to Honor than he had been before; watching her, as she
flitted about his sickroom, with eyes that glistened as they looked on
her.
As soon as he was equal to the exertion, John answered the humble
letter, which, coming as it did from the son of one whose memory was
very dear to him, and whose good works were embalmed with the myrrh,
aloes, and cassia of deep respect in the righteous man’s heart, gave
deep and sincere pain to its recipient; and in his reply to the penitent
effusion poor John took, as such an unselfish man was certain to do, a
great portion of the blame, the guilt indeed, of all that had occurred
upon himself. Had a stranger read John’s simple letter, he would very
naturally have believed that the writer was guilty of other and worse
offences than that of an impulsive yielding to first impressions, and of
speaking hasty words with his tongue.
“I shall never forgive myself,” he wrote. “I was a brute and a
fool, and don’t deserve the happiness of having _my_ poor wife at
home with me. Would to God, dear Mr. Arthur, that any prayers of
mine and Honor’s could bring back _yours_; but it was God’s will
that she should be taken, poor young lady; but I don’t understand
how you can make things better by leaving your little one as well.
I hope you will excuse my advising you; but I loved your father
well, dear Mr. Arthur, as you know; and it grieves me to think that
his son is going into banishment like for my fault. Surely the old
gentleman would be best pleased for you to stay at home; and
besides, from all that I can hear, America is not the best place
for a young gentleman to live in. The young ladies, too, at the
Castle would find it hard to lose you; and I should be always
remembering, seeing your empty place at church, that it was me that
was the cause you went. No, no, dear Mr. Arthur, you will think
better of it still, I hope; and we shall see you riding with the
young ladies about the Chace this summer, not exactly as if nothing
had happened--for that could not be, even if it was right--but as
your late lamented father would approve of, and as your ancestors
did before you. I hope that you will be so good as excuse my
boldness, and will believe me, with respect and affection,
“Your obedient servant,
“JOHN BEACHAM.”
“P.S. There is one of the beautifullest foals ever dropped, out of
Mad Flora by the Old Shekarry, in the five-bar paddock. I should
like you to see her, so I should. You’d say you never saw a neater
nor a cleaner made one. The stock is good, and no mistake.”
This letter--a letter written from the fulness of a kind and
sympathising heart--found Arthur Vavasour at Liverpool, to which city he
had resorted for the purpose of taking steam to the great republic--the
land of _soi-disant_ liberty--the land of the “stars and stripes,”
“unwhipped and unwhippable for ever.” (I wonder, writing of that
self-same flag, that some zealous descendant of the Pilgrim
Fathers--some red-hot Yankee, friend and supporter of his black-bodied
brethren--has not ere this voted for the suppression of the ruled,
gingham-suggestive portion of the “glorious flag,” for now that the
negro back is free from suffering, and the weary “son of Afric” need no
longer toil, the stripes would seem, one might suppose, a worse than
unnecessary, because a painful, reminder of the disgraceful past.) But
to return to Arthur Vavasour in the half-Americanised city, and in the
big hotel to which the love of the turtle has drawn many a man who, like
me and, perhaps, you, O gentle reader, has no thought whatever of
crossing the broad Atlantic in a Cunard steamer. Had those afflicted
ones, who so deeply commiserated the forlorn lot of this poor widower,
been enabled at that moment (Asmodeus-like) to look upon his saddened
face, and form their own opinions, unbiassed either by prejudice or
pity, they could hardly have decided that the events of the past month
had told very severely upon this young British Sybarite. At twenty-two
it is very easy to forget, and with the world (a considerable portion of
it, that is to say) untried and unexplored before him, a young man of
good birth, the eventual possessor of such an estate as Gillingham (for
even Lady Millicent could not prevent the family property from
descending after her death to her eldest son)--with, I repeat, such
prospects as these, to say nothing of good health and a handsome person,
it is hardly surprising that Arthur Vavasour should have felt very far
from utterly cast down by the changes and chances of this mortal life,
of which he had lately had such painful as well as mortifying
experience. He was not alone, for, seated by the open window in a
rocking-chair, and reading the last number of the _Field_, then a new
publication, sat a young man whose name was Godfrey Tremlett, and who,
having been a college friend--the _fidus Achates_ of his semi-boyish
days--had kindly consented to share the wanderings of the disappointed
man in the lands beyond the sea, where the heavy foot of the buffalo
tramples the silent prairie, and where, flying slowly but surely before
civilisation, the red Indian (baptised with the baptism of the
Christian’s “fire-water”) endures his lot with patience, looking, with
stolid face and all a wild man’s stupid singleness of heart, to a
better, that is, a more sporting country in the happy hunting-grounds
where a good savage meets his due reward; in other words, Arthur and his
companion’s point was Fort Jasper, and their intentions were to witch
the world at home with accounts of their adventures, with details of
their narrow escapes, and with the counting over daily of the head of
game which they with their bow and spear had bagged.
It was exciting work that talking over their plans, examining maps of
the country (rather vague ones, it is true, but not on that account the
less interesting to the travellers), and slaying in anticipation
countless numbers of harmless animals then roaming unsuspectingly over
their native wilds.
Mr. Godfrey Tremlett was a rather heavily-built young man,
fresh-complexioned, with a fat, beardless, good-humoured face. His
appearance was not precisely that of a sportsman; indeed, that very
morning, when he had tried on a certain hunting-suit, very short in the
skirts and slightly eccentric in fashion (he had invented it himself,
and took much credit to himself for the idea), Arthur, forgetful for the
moment of his recent affliction, went off into roars of laughter at the
singularity of his friend’s appearance. Neither abashed nor affronted by
this proof of intimacy, Godfrey spun round before the glass in an
_accès_ of self-satisfaction, which no friendly ridicule had power to
check. He was essentially and invariably good-tempered. His high spirits
were proof against the normal ills, the daily worries, the hourly
_contretemps_ of existence. He had no taste for what is generally called
society. Ladies, as a rule, he considered a bore, and “fine ladies” he
held in absolute, nay almost physical, dread and horror. He was not
extravagant; on the contrary, he made the most of a small patrimony
which had descended to him from his deceased father, and contrived to
save yearly out of an income of something less than five hundred per
annum a sufficient sum to enable him to enjoy in some sporting-fields or
other--in Scotland, Norway, or wherever the fancy led him--a few months
of excitement and variety.
To Mr. Godfrey Tremlett the idea of accompanying such a “real good
fellow” as Arthur Vavasour in the search of the latter after change and
a forgetfulness of his troubles was simply delightful. He pitied his
poor friend immensely, and did not at all intend that Arthur should give
way to the low spirits which are generally supposed to be incidental to
his situation. Neither, it must be owned, did the young widower himself
betray any signs that the task of consolation would be either an
impossible or a difficult one. Already change of scene, of projects, and
of mode of life had produced their normal effects (as regards the young,
at least) on Arthur Vavasour; and, judging by his frequent laugh, the
zest with which he entered into the arrangements for his approaching
campaign, and, more than all, his evident enjoyment of the good things
that were set before him (namely, the _calipash_ and _calipee_, which
were pronounced by these two young _gourmands_ to be as the nectar and
ambrosia of the gods), it would have been easy for the least observant
of lookers-on to convince himself that the affliction with which (for
his own selfishness, his own want of moral principle, his own vanity and
folly) Arthur Vavasour had been visited was but for a season, and only
lightly felt by this voluntary exile.
“He does not recover his spirits,” Honor said to her husband, after
reading the short farewell letter in which Arthur had recapitulated his
reasons for leaving England, and had dwelt in touching terms on his
loneliness and his repentance. They little thought, that husband and
wife, whose peace had been blighted, and whose mutual confidence shaken,
if not destroyed, by this man’s indulgence in vile and selfish passions,
how little call there really existed in this case for compassion, and
how easy it had been for Arthur Vavasour to feign a sorrow he had ceased
to feel.
But while the man who had been the chief cause (humanly speaking) of
this one amongst the thousand tragedies wrought by human selfishness and
frailty bore his burden with such a light and unreflecting spirit, the
chief sufferer by the calamity was he who was in no way--as far, that
is, as short-sighted mortal eyes can see--deserving of punishment. The
grief of poor Sophy’s bereaved father was _for life_. For him, for the
aged man, who could no longer look to new ties, new hopes to bind him to
this earthly tabernacle, the loss of his child was a blow from the
effects of which he never could recover. He was a Christian in thought
as well as in outward belief and conduct, and he strove earnestly not
only _to forgive_, but to manifest the forgiveness which he tried, not
with entire success, to feel not only towards Arthur Vavasour, but
towards the beautiful woman whom he ever considered, with the tenacity
of faith that is characteristic of old age, as the fellow-culprit of
poor Sophy’s faithless husband. It is a hard thing even for the young to
have their belief in all human excellence, in all human honesty,
destroyed; but it is harder still upon the old, when faith and trust,
the _virginities of the soul_, are for ever taken away, and when in
loneliness of heart, with mistrust and suspicion usurping the place of
former confidence and unquestioning credulity, they wend their weary way
towards the grave in silence and in gloom. Nor was that unhappy father
the only one who, mourning for the child who would not return to him,
became a changed and saddened character. Mrs. Beacham, though, as might
have been supposed, rather too old to learn, had yet, during the anxious
days and nights when John lay between life and death, laid her
shortcomings to heart, and, making some allowance for a
stiff-neckedness, which had become a chronic evil of her idiosyncrasy,
had reviewed the past without a certain proper sense of her own sins
regarding her daughter-in-law. To confess those sins was more than could
be expected of one who had arrived at the age of seventy with the
conviction that all she said and did was right, beyond the possibility
of question; but Mrs. Beacham did endeavour, as much as in her lay, to
make amends for the past; and although she could not wholly overcome her
former jealousy of Honor’s influence over her son, she kept her temper
in tolerable subjection, and instead of (as was the case with Arthur)
throwing the occurrences of the painful past into the waste-basket of
memory, she--it was the woman’s nature so to do--kept them alive with
persevering industry in her breast, knowing well that with forgetfulness
might come a relaxation of her constant efforts to obliterate the evil
she had wrought--evil to the son she loved, and to the woman with whom,
come what come might, the happiness of his future life was bound up.
Happily, both for the peace--such peace as they could henceforth hope
for--of John Beacham and his wife, the little world of Sandyshire
remained in ignorance of the main facts attendant on the death of young
Mrs. Vavasour. She had died in childbed it was reported, and unhappily
such deaths are of too common occurrence for especial wonder to be
created thereby. Any reports of a close connection between John
Beacham’s domestic affairs and those of Arthur Vavasour and his dead
wife were put a stop to by Honor’s return, and by the restored affection
and trust which, after John’s recovery, were seen to exist, not only
between the husband and wife, but between Honor and her hitherto
implacable mother-in-law. They left the Paddocks for a time, a few not
unhappy weeks, change of air and scene having been recommended by the
doctors for the perfecting of John’s recovery; and during that absence
from their home the bonds of affection, strengthened by the ties of a
great sorrow shared between them, were knit very closely together. The
dawn of their wedded life had been overcast with clouds; the morning had
been dull, and doubts of whether fine weather would even come at noon
had strengthened as the day grew older. But the “morning gray,”
according to the old shepherd’s adage, will not, let us hope, fail to
end in the “fine day” that ofttimes follows. The grieving over love’s
decay is of all griefs the gloomiest. To be shedding--I speak of a wife
now (men’s eyes are not formed for weeping)--to be shedding secret tears
over the memory of an affection passed away is a very hopeless form of
sorrow. The
“Distilling bitter, bitter drops
From sweets of former years”
formed, however, no part of the trials to which Honor Beacham was
henceforth exposed. _Her_ duty was, by undying efforts to efface the
memory of past error, and to strive by every act and word to render
herself worthy of a good man’s love. The memory of the bitter past--of
the past, unconnected by any lack of love on John’s part--could never,
never be washed away; but to “redeem the time,” the present that was
left to her, became, because of the evil of the days that were past, a
still more sacred duty. Sorrow had done good service in forming while it
humbled the character of our poor little impulsive heroine, for “la
vertù è simile ai perfumi, che rendono più grato odore quando-riturati.”
Heaviness had indeed endured for the morning, but content, if not joy,
had come to her and hers with the quiet evening light.
CONCLUSION.
If the reader of this half-true story has followed with any portion of
just indignation the tortuous ways through which an insane craving after
power has lead the nominal heroine of these pages, he or she will not
regret to learn that, in consequence of a high legal opinion--_the_
highest, indeed, in the land--having been given, at the eleventh hour,
against the possibility of setting aside Earl Gillingham’s last will and
testament, Lady Millicent was forced, with a reluctance comparable only
to the pang of plucking out a right eye or wrenching out a wrong tooth,
to abandon the unfilial as well as unmotherly intention which she had so
long secretly as well as avowedly harboured.
The intense though silent wrath of Lady Millicent when she found that
the great law-lords were not to be led--albeit the forceps or chain,
call it what you will, was held and drawn by a lady of great estate,
strong courage, and ancient name--by the nose may be better imagined
than described. Misfortunes never, according to the old adage, come
singly, and this autocratic lady found the proof of the proverb to her
cost. In her youth she had never cared to provide herself with friends,
and, when it was too late, she made the unwelcome discovery that there
are certain manufactures of which the art cannot be learned save in the
freshness and elasticity of early womanhood. The world, too, which had
interested itself a good deal in Lady Millicent’s efforts, and which was
hesitating as to its decision from a laudable desire to side with the
strongest, bore rather hardly in her discomfiture on the baffled and
indignant woman. That she had been unmotherly, grasping,
avaricious--everything that was least feminine and most odious--everyone
was more than willing to allow; whereas Arthur--regarding whom heads had
been ominously shaken, and of whose scampishness so many (while the
great affair was in abeyance) had a word, more or less severe, to
say--became once more the popular “young fellow,” the idol of fair
women’s hearts, and the object of future attacks from prudent mammas and
half-despairing _demoiselles à marier_.
It was while smarting under the first wounds inflicted by disappointed
ambition and frustrated love of power that Lady Millicent discovered the
bitter truth that as we sow so we must reap, and that there can be no
harvest of affection where the seeds of tenderness have been neglected
to be sown. The news--very melancholy intelligence it was to his brother
and his sisters--that Arthur Vavasour had, for an indefinite period,
bade farewell to home and country, child and kindred, was communicated
to Lady Millicent by her son Horace. He, the younger brother, who had
always been in secret very impatient of parental control, and whose
strong affection for his elder brother had ever been a marked and
amiable feature of his character, was roused by the departure of Arthur
to the strongest feelings of displeasure against the mother whose
unfeeling conduct had, in his opinion, been the cause of her son’s
expatriation. Walking one morning unannounced into the dull morning-room
in which Lady Millicent, now that the occupation of her life was over,
sat brooding over the turpitude and cowardice of lawyers, and the
general injustice and stupidity of all connected with wills and
will-making, Horace Vavasour took the liberty of giving his mother a
piece of his mind.
“So, ma’am,” he began, his lips pale with agitation, and his voice
(Horace was a little shaken by a year’s dissipation) a trifle difficult
to steady,--“so, ma’am, Arthur’s off--gone--bolted. This confounded
law-business put the finishing-stroke to his affairs, poor fellow! I
knew how it would be. He never had a chance of doing well--never, by
G--!” and Horace, who was standing near some greenhouse plants in full
flower, whirled his light riding-whip lasso-like over their heads,
thereby ruthlessly severing some half-dozen from their parent stems.
Lady Millicent looked up in mute dismay. The outbreak was so unexpected,
and disrespect to her person and authority an occurrence so entirely
new, that for a moment she found no words either sufficiently powerful
or cutting for the expression of her indignation. At last she said,
drawing herself up haughtily:
“You forget yourself strangely. What have I to do with Arthur’s--with
your brother’s--eccentricities? Gone, is he? And where, pray? On some
self-indulgent freak or other, I suppose, to escape the sight of that
poor old man’s miserable face; but what this ‘law-business,’ as you call
it, has to do with the matter, is more than I either understand, or wish
to have explained.”
She rose from the sofa as she spoke, but was arrested by her son’s hand
laid lightly on her shoulder.
“Mother,” he said almost sternly, “for once in my life I will speak to
you openly. It will be the first time and the last; for you are not
one, or I am greatly mistaken, to forgive the words that I shall use.
From our childhood you never, _never_ treated us as if you loved us. As
a little fellow, so little, I remember, that I could scarcely reach the
table with my hand--as a small boy--troublesome, I daresay, as all young
children are, but not _more_ depraved and wicked than others--I
longed--O, _how_ I used to long!--for love and tenderness from you. When
I saw other mothers kiss and pet their children, holding them upon their
knees, and looking with delight and pride upon their play and laughter,
I can never describe to you the bitter envy that I felt, and with what a
sore, sad heart I thought upon the difference between them and me! And
it was the same with all of us. We have compared notes many times since
those days, and have told each other--we four children, whom my father
left a legacy to you; ah, shall I ever forget his dying words?--that we
only wanted love, only the common tenderness shown by all God’s
creatures to their young, and that, having it, we would return it fifty,
ay, a hundredfold! But--and well you know it, mother--we had it not,
that love we yearned for; and failing the boon we craved, we all
went”--and he smiled bitterly--“more or less, and in different ways,
according to our respective powers and sexes, to the bad. There is
Arthur, poor dear Atty,” and his lip quivered painfully, “gone, without
a word--excepting that he confessed some things to that poor
broken-hearted old man which would make your cheek, ma’am, grow red with
shame, although you love him not, to hear of. It seems, he was
reduced--I and some others think that the fault was not _quite_ all his
own--to do some ugly thing which, but for the law-business of which you
speak so lightly, need never have been known, and--”
“Ah, I understand,” put in Lady Millicent, endeavouring to hide her
confusion and annoyance under a mask of carelessness and sarcasm.
“Difficulties in the way of raising money, eh? But that is over now,”
she added bitterly, “and I suppose that your brother need not, as
matters now stand, fly the country because he does not happen to be able
to pay his bills.”
“No, ma’am, you are right there,” rejoined her son; “but, unfortunately,
poor Arthur, almost maddened by grief and worry, and believing, as so
many did, that the ‘high legal opinion’ (on which depended your
continuance or otherwise in the disputing of my grandfather’s will)
would be, when given, adverse to his interests, had not moral courage,
or rather his pecuniary embarrassments were too great to admit of any
longer delay; so he has gone, poor dear fellow.” And Horace drew a long
troubled breath, for, like many others, he believed in the reality as
well as the endurance of Arthur’s grief. “He has gone away, poor old
boy, for years, he says; and--and old Dub told me this morning that
Arthur was--a villain!”
He was very young, that warm-hearted Horace, whose admiration of and
love for his elder brother had truly grown with his growth and
strengthened with his strength. For a long hour that morning he had
stoutly fought Arthur’s battles with the old man, who, embittered by
misfortune, and rendered thereby callous to the feelings of others, had
dilated in no measured terms on his son-in-law’s utter want of
principle, his selfishness, his mendacity, and his general and
irretrievable unworthiness. It was in vain that Horace endeavoured to
convince the obstinate and sorely-tried millionaire--the wealthy
merchant-prince, whose gold had been unavailing to purchase an hour of
life for the child of his old age--that Arthur’s offences were less dark
than they appeared, and that excuses might, if sought for _with a will_,
be found even for this self-exiled sinner. To all the arguments, all the
recapitulations of the affectionate brother tending to throw a light on
the manifest disadvantages attendant on poor Arthur’s “raising,” “old
Dub” would only shake his gray head with the mournfullest of dismal
gestures, and with a “Well, well,” which betokened alike a weariness of
spirit and an absence of conviction that irritated Horace, while filling
his heart with a pity beyond the reach of words.
He was very young, as I before said, or not only would these things not
have taken such a strong effect upon his temper and his mind, but it may
be that, after the utterance of the last terrible word, he would not--an
act which he was weak enough to commit--have flung himself upon a
lounging-chair near him, and, burying his face in his hands, have
striven hard, yet ineffectually, to conceal his emotion.
Lady Millicent meanwhile looked on in silence; but, although apparently
unmoved, she was, perhaps, nearer to giving way to a burst of sorrow
than she had ever been in all her life before. It had, indeed, been a
shock to her to learn that one of the ugliest of accusing words had been
applied by a person on whom she looked down as the dust beneath her
feet, to son of hers. The sight, also, of Horace--his face buried in his
hands, and the tears trickling between his clenched fingers--acted, if
not upon her heart, upon her nerves; and even as the melting of the
winter’s snow tears up the stones most deeply buried in the torrent’s
bed, Lady Millicent, moved by those hard-wrung drops to pity and to
grief, could, had she yielded to one of the best and purest impulses she
had ever known, have fallen on her son’s neck and wept aloud.
For everything--turn which way she would, to the right hand or the
left--everything at which she looked, whether in the past, the present,
or the future, seemed against the unhappy woman who had so long hardened
her heart and stiffened her neck against reproof. Her children--the sons
and daughters whom, strange to say, she now, in the days of her defeat
and in the hour of her humiliation discovered _were_ of some value in
her sight--became to her as instruments of punishment. It was surprising
to what extent the love of power, and the dread of abdicating to another
the sceptre of her rule, had blinded this woman to a sense not only of
her duties, but of her affections. The hope, the aim that she had so
long in view, of still retaining within her grasp the dominion that she
so dearly loved, had absorbed every faculty, both of mind and heart; but
when that hope had vanished, and when the purpose of her life was at an
end, then--when, with the natural yearning of every woman who still
retains some of the characteristics of her sex, for an object on which
to expend the hopes and fears, the energies and anticipations of a still
vigorous mind, she turned with almost a passionately longing heart to
the children whom God had given her--they in their turn refused the
tardy boon thrown _faute de mieux_ for their acceptance.
The children of Cecil Vavasour refused--tacitly, it is true, and with
the firm protest of silent apathy--the offering of a mother’s interest
in their affairs, a parent’s sympathy with their sorrows. Many a year
too late there sounded, for those neglected children of a good and
Christian father, the cry of nature in the breast of that world-hardened
and power-loving woman. They could not--_could_ not love her. Like
stunted trees, blighted by long exposure to cold winds and nipping
frosts, the feeble sap within had ceased to rise, and no new shoots, no
tender buds of love and tenderness, had opened beneath the warmth of
maternal love, even as in the joyous spring the young leaves turn
towards the sun their grateful tribute.
In other words, Lady Millicent’s children, albeit they did not openly
either resist her authority or turn a cold shoulder to her tardy
advances, were what is vulgarly called “no comfort” to her at this
trying season of her life--a season when disappointment rendered still
more unendurable to others a temper already none of the sweetest, and
when consciousness of failure subdued a spirit that had hitherto risen
proudly above the threatened ills of life.
Perhaps, had Lady Millicent’s children been enabled to look within the
heart that had at last begun to melt beneath the influence of maternal
tenderness, their feelings might have been softened, moved by the
knowledge that, in spite of bygone proofs to the contrary, they were
nevertheless beloved; but no such fairy-gift being bestowed upon them,
and it being a boasted peculiarity of Lady Millicent’s idiosyncrasy that
she never betrayed to others the feelings that were making havoc in her
breast, it followed that not only the son whose grief for his brother’s
departure had first aroused her maternal sympathies, but that the
daughters--the sickly Rhoda and the more spirited Katherine--should have
remained in ignorance of their mother’s yearnings after affection,
while, in a silence full of reproachful meaning, they brooded over the
events of the past.
Of the three who so often met together to talk in saddened whispers of
their banished brother, of poor Sophy’s death, and, when Rhoda was not
present, of _her_ failing health, her broken spirits, she who was the
most rebellious, the least willing to submit to the gloom which death
and failure had cast around their home, was Kate--Kate, the gay-hearted
and the _insouciante_--Kate who had expected to marry, and had hoped to
be happy--Kate, to whom the idea of a return, _in statu quo_, to the
dulness and monotony of Gillingham was as a sentence of banishment to a
desert land beyond the seas. And after all they did not return, at least
for the _dead_ season, to Gillingham; for a medical opinion, demanded
with an anxiety carefully hidden from her children, on the condition of
Rhoda’s health pronounced that for the _chance_ of life it was
absolutely necessary that before the autumn should set in Miss Vavasour
must be in the sunny island where so many victims to east winds and
defective lungs retire to die.
They are at Madeira now, those three sad and silent women; sad and
silent, for Lady Millicent was too old to change the habits of a life,
and Rhoda--depressed not only by a blighted attachment but by the
sickness which is unto death--makes no effort to seem the thing she is
not. Only Kate still longs and pines to be happy, but it is hard to
fight against reality, and very hard to kick against the pricks. She
_knows_ that the fiat has gone forth, and that her poor pale Rhoda--the
Rhoda who might, so Katie thinks, have been the contented wife of stupid
George Wallingford--is to die. She foresees a dismal future with the
mother whom she believes to be the cause of all their various sorrows,
and Katherine’s rosy face begins to lose its freshness, and her voice
its joyous tone while dwelling on the sadness of the days to come.
* * * * *
Reader, there is no crime related in these volumes; no commandment has
been ostensibly and boldly broken; and yet the consequences of hidden
sins, of sins unwhipped of justice, have proved terribly disastrous both
to the “living that now live, and to the dead that have been called to
judgment.” It is not always, it is not even often, that the results of
an indulgence in evil passions, in iniquitous desires, and in the
hungering after the things that belong neither of our own peace nor to
that of others, are brought immediately before us. It may be that while
we, in a safe haven from the storms of life at the season when
“Age steals to its allotted nook,
Contented and serene,”
are ignorant of the fact that the errors of others may be visited on our
heads, “some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,” some poor deluded sister
may be rueing the consequences (indirectly) of our shortcomings. Even of
our very words--our thoughtlessness and apparently unmeaning
remarks--evil may arise. The French proverb says, “_Oui et non sont
bien courts à dire, mais avant que de les dire il y faut penser
longtemps._” Alas, how few amongst us are there who think before they
_act_, how fewer still before they speak! A precious life may be lost, a
child may be rendered motherless, the hearth of the old may be made
desolate, and all because of thoughtless words spoken to foolish ears;
while the truth of the old historian’s words “Cupido dominandi cunctis
affectibus flagrantior est,” is to a certain degree verified by the
evils which a love of power and a mean jealousy of rule have entailed
upon more than one deserving character in the foregoing pages. Truly,
seeing that we are but links in the great chain of human events, it
behoves us to take good heed, not only to our _ways_ but to the seeing
that we offend not with the unruly member, which, according to high
authority, never has and never can be brought under subjection. The
characters in my story, whose future is darkened, and whose past has
been made miserable by the great mischief which their busy tongues,
their truant fancies, have wrought, can hardly (at least in the world’s
opinion) be stigmatised as desperate and grievous sinners. They had
_only_ not bridled the “little member, which boasteth great things,” had
only _listened_ when duty should have caused them to close their ears
to words which were dangerous because either too tender or too hard!
Such had been amongst the sins of those whose punishment would be
life-long--life-long, because for them the past is embittered by vain
regrets--life-long, for neither to the mother who was false to her
trust, nor to the old, the middle-aged, or the young whose faults and
follies have been cited in this story, can _remorse_ be divorced from
the sad paths of memory--life-long because, looking back upon the stream
of life, they, with heavy hearts, could not fail to see, midst the soft
rippling waves, the heavy stone that
“some devil threw
At their life’s mid-current, thwarting God!”
THE END.
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,
PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
the precess=> the process {pg 10}
John Beachman=> John Beacham {pg 99}
Mr. Duberley=> Mr. Duberly {pg 155}
suppposing them=> supposing them {pg 166}
In was nearly noon=> It was nearly noon {pg 208}
said Honour, answering=> said Honor, answering {pg 252}
faults tribulalation=> faults tribulation {pg 260}