The first words that Elizabeth spoke, as she embraced Lady Cecil, "You
are come, then all is well," seemed to confirm her belief that the
offered protection of Mrs. Raby would sound to the poor orphan as a
hospitable shore to the wrecked mariner. She pressed her fondly to her
heart, repeating her own words, "All is well--dear, dear Elizabeth, you
are restored to us, after I believed you lost for ever."
"What, then, has happened?" asked Elizabeth, "and where is my dear
father?"
"Your father! Miss Raby," repeated a deep, serious, but melodious voice;
"whom do you call your father?"
Elizabeth, in her agitation, had not caught her aunt's name, and turned
with surprise to the questioner, whom Lady Cecil introduced as one who
had known and loved her real father; as her aunt, come to offer a happy
and honourable home--and the affection of a relative to one so long
lost, so gladly found.
"We have come to carry you off with us," said Lady Cecil; "your position
here is altogether disagreeable; but everything is changed now, and you
will come with us."
"But my father," cried Elizabeth; "for what other name can I give to my
benefactor? Dear Lady Cecil, where is he?"
"Do you not then know?" asked Lady Cecil, hesitatingly.
"This very morning I heard something frightful, heart-breaking; but
since you are here, it must be all a fiction, or at least the dreadful
mistake is put right. Tell me, where is Mr. Falkner?"
"I know less than you, I believe," replied her friend; "my information
is only gathered from the hasty letters of my brother, which explain
nothing."
"But Mr. Neville has told you," said Elizabeth, "that my dear father is
accused of murder; accused by him who possesses the best proof of his
innocence. I had thought Mr. Neville generous, unsuspicious--"
"Nor is it he," interrupted Lady Cecil, "who brings this accusation. I
tell you I know little; but Sir Boyvill is the origin of Mr. Falkner's
arrest. The account he read seemed to him unsatisfactory, and the
remains of poor Mrs. Neville. Indeed, dear Elizabeth, you must not
question me, for I know nothing; much less than you. Gerard puts much
faith in the innocence of Mr. Falkner."
"Bless him for that!" cried Elizabeth, tears gushing into her eyes. "Oh
yes, I knew that he would be just and generous. My poor, poor father! by
what fatal mistake is your cause judged by one incapable of
understanding or appreciating you?"
"Yet," said Lady Cecil, "he cannot be wholly innocent; the flight, the
catastrophe, the concealment of his victim's death; is there not guilt
in these events?"
"Much, much; I will not excuse or extenuate. If ever you read his
narrative, which, at his desire, I gave Mr. Neville, you will learn from
that every exculpation he can allege. It is not for me to speak, nor to
hear even of his past errors; never was remorse more bitter, contrition
more sincere. But for me, he had not survived the unhappy lady a week;
but for me, he had died in Greece, to expiate his fault. Will not this
satisfy his angry accusers?
"I must act from higher motives. Gratitude, duty, every human obligation
bind me to him. He took me, a deserted orphan, from a state of miserable
dependance on a grudging, vulgar woman; he brought me up as his child;
he was more to me than father ever was. He has nursed me as my own
mother would in sickness; in perilous voyages he has carried me in his
arms, and sheltered me from the storm, while he exposed himself for my
sake; year after year, while none else have cared for, have thought, of
me, I have been the object of his solicitude. He has consented to endure
life, that I might not be left desolate, when I knew not that one of my
father's family would acknowledge me. Shall I desert him now? Never!"
"But you cannot help him," said Lady Cecil; "he must be tried by the
laws of his country. I hope he has not in truth offended against them;
but you cannot serve him."
"Where is he, dear Lady Cecil? tell me where he is."
"I fear there can be no doubt he is in prison at Carlisle."
"And do you think that I cannot serve him there? in prison as a
criminal! Miserable as his fate makes me, miserable as I too well know
that he is, it is some compensation to my selfish heart to know that I
can serve him, that I can be all in all of happiness and comfort to him.
Even now he pines for me; he knows that I never leave his side when in
sorrow; he wonders I am not already there. Yes, in prison, in shame, he
will be happy when he sees me again. I shall go to him, and then, too, I
shall have comfort."
She spoke with a generous animation, while yet her eyes glistened, and
her voice trembled with emotion. Lady Cecil was moved, while she
deplored; she caressed her; she praised, while Mrs. Raby said, "It is
impossible not to honour your intentions, which spring from so pure and
noble a source. I think, indeed, that you overrate your obligations to
Mr. Falkner. Had he restored you to us after your mother's death, you
would have found, I trust, a happy home with me. He adopted you, because
it best pleased him so to do. He disregarded the evil he brought upon us
by so doing; and only restored you to us when the consequence of his
crimes prevented him from being any longer a protection."
"Pardon me," said Elizabeth, "if I interrupt you. Mr. Falkner is a
suffering, he believed himself to be a dying, man; he lived in anguish
till he could declare his error, to clear the name of his unhappy
victim; he wished first to secure my future lot, before he dared fate
for himself; chance altered his designs; such were his motives, generous
towards me as they ever were."
"And you, dear Elizabeth," said Lady Cecil, "must act in obedience to
them and to his wishes. He anticipated disgrace from his disclosures--a
disgrace which you must not share. You speak like a romantic girl of
serving him in prison. You cannot guess what a modern jail is, its
vulgar and shocking inhabitants: the hideous language and squalid sights
are such that their very existence should be a secret to the innocent:
be assured that Mr. Falkner, if he be, as I believe him, a man of honour
and delicacy, will shudder at the very thought of your approaching such
contamination; he will be best pleased to know you safe and happy with
your family."
"What a picture do you draw!" cried Elizabeth, trying to suppress her
tears; "my poor, poor father, whose life hangs by a thread! how can he
survive the accumulation of evil? But he will forget all these horrors
when I am with him. I know, thank God, I do indeed know, that I have
power to cheer and support him, even at the worst."
"This is madness!" observed Lady Cecil, in a tone of distress.
Mrs. Raby interposed with her suggestions. She spoke of her own desire,
the desire of all the family, to welcome Elizabeth; she told her that
with them, belonging to them, she had new duties; her obedience was due
to her relatives; she must not act so as to injure them. She alluded to
their oppressed religion; to the malicious joy their enemies would have
in divulging such a tale as that would be, if their niece's conduct made
the whole course of events public. And, as well as she could, she
intimated that if she mixed up her name in a tale so full of horror and
guilt, her father's family could never after receive her.
Elizabeth heard all this with considerable coldness. "It grieves me,"
she said, "to repay intended kindness with something like repulse. I
have no wish to speak of the past; nor to remind you that if I was not
brought up in obedience to you all, it was because my father was
disowned, my mother abandoned; and I, a little child, an orphan, was
left to live and die in dependance. I, who then bore your name, had
become a subject of niggard and degrading charity. Then, young as I was,
I felt gratitude, obedience, duty, all due to the generous benefactor
who raised me from this depth of want, and made me the child of his
heart. It is a lesson I have been learning many years; I cannot unlearn
it now. I am his; bought by his kindness; earned by his unceasing care
for me, I belong to him--his child--if you will, his servant--I do not
quarrel with names--a child's duty I pay him, and will ever. Do not be
angry with me, dear aunt, if I may give you that name--dearest Lady
Cecil, do not look so imploringly on me--I am very unhappy. Mr. Falkner
a prisoner, accused of the most hideous crime--treated with ignominy--he
whose nerves are agonized by a touch--whose frame is even now decaying
through sickness and sorrow--and I, and every hope, away. I am very
unhappy. Do not urge me to what is impossible, and thrice, thrice
wicked. I must go to him; day and night I shall have no peace till I am
at his side; do not, for my sake do not, dispute this sacred duty."
It was not thus that the two ladies could be led to desist; they soothed
her, but again returned to the charge. Lady Cecil brought a thousand
arguments of worldly wisdom, of feminine delicacy. Mrs. Raby insinuated
the duty owed to her family, to shield it from the disgrace she was
bringing on it. They both insisted on the impossibility, on the foolish
romance of her notions. Had she been really his daughter, her joining
him in prison was impracticable--out of all propriety. But Elizabeth had
been brought up to regard feelings, rather than conventional
observances; duties, not proprieties. All her life Falkner had been her
law, rule, every tie to her; she knew and felt nothing beyond. When she
had followed him to Greece--when she had visited the Morea, to bear him,
dying, away--when at Zante she had watched by his sick couch, the world,
and all the Rabys it contained, were nothing to her; and now, when he
was visited by a far heavier calamity, when, in solitude and misery, he
had, besides her, no one comfort under heaven, was she to adopt a new
system of conduct, become a timid, home--bred young lady, tied by the
most frivolous rules, impeded by fictitious notions of propriety and
false delicacy? Whether they were right and she were wrong--whether,
indeed, such submission to society--such useless, degrading dereliction
of nobler duties, was adapted for feminine conduct, and whether she,
despising such bonds, sought a bold and dangerous freedom, she could not
tell; she only knew and felt, that for her, educated, as she had been,
beyond the narrow paling of boarding-school ideas, or the refinements of
a lady's boudoir, that, where her benefactor was, there she ought, to
be; and that to prove her gratitude, to preserve her faithful attachment
to him amid dire adversity, was her sacred duty--a virtue before which
every minor moral faded and disappeared.
The discussion was long; and, even when they found her proof against
every attack, they would not give up. They entreated her to go home with
them for that day. A wild light beamed from her eyes. "I am going home,"
she cried; "an hour hence, and I shall be gone to where my true home is.
How strange it is that you should imagine that I could linger here!
"Be not afraid for me, dear Lady Cecil," she continued; "all will go
well with me; and you will, after a little reflection, acknowledge that
I could not act other than I do. And will you, Mrs. Raby, forgive my
seeming ingratitude? I acknowledge the justice of your demands. I thank
you for your proposed kindness. The name of Raby shall receive no
injury; it shall never escape my lips. My father will preserve the same
silence. Be not angry with me; but--except that I remember my dear
parents with affection--I would say, I take more joy and pride in being
his daughter, his friend at this need, than in the distinction and
prosperity your kindness offers. I give up every claim on my family; the
name of Raby shall not be tainted: but Elizabeth Falkner, with all her
wilfulness and faults, shall, at least, prove her gratitude to him who
bestowed that appellation on her."
And thus they parted. Lady Cecil veiling her distress in sullenness;
while Mrs. Raby was struck and moved by her niece's generosity, which
was in accordance with her own noble mind. But she felt that other
judges would sit upon the cause, and decide from other motives. She
parted from her as a pagan relative might from a young Christian
martyr--admiring, while she deplored her sacrifice, and feeling herself
wholly incapable of saving.