SOPHY, DARRELL, AND THE FLUTE-PLAYER. DARRELL. PREPARES A SURPRISE
FOR WAIFE.
Sophy is come. She has crossed that inexorable threshold. She is a
guest in the house which rejects her as a daughter. She has been there
some days. Waife revived at the first sight of her tender face. He has
left his bed; can move for some hours a day into an adjoining chamber,
which has been hastily arranged for his private sitting-room; and can
walk its floors with a step that grows daily firmer in the delight of
leaning on Sophy's arm.
Since the girl's arrival, Darrell has relaxed his watch over the patient.
He never now enters his guest's apartment without previous notice; and,
by that incommunicable instinct which passes in households between one
silent breast and another, as by a law equally strong to attract or repel
--here drawing together, there keeping apart--though no rule in either
case has been laid down;--by virtue, I say, of that strange intelligence,
Sophy is not in the old man's room when Darrell enters. Rarely in the
twenty-four hours do the host and the fair young guest encounter. But
Dar rell is a quick and keen observer. He has seen enough of Sophy to be
sensible of her charms--to penetrate into her simple natural loveliness
of character--to feel a deep interest in her, and a still deeper pity for
Lionel. Secluding himself as much as possible in his private room, or in
his leafless woods, his reveries increase in gloom. Nothing unbends his
moody brow like Fairthorn's flute or Fairthorn's familiar converse.
It has been said before that Fairthorn knew his secrets. Fairthorn had
idolised Caroline Lyndsay. Fairthorn was the only being in the world to
when Guy Darrell could speak of Caroline Lyndsay--to whom he could own
the unconquerable but unforgiving love which had twice driven him from
the social world. Even to Fairthorn, of course, all could not be told.
Darrell could not speak of the letter he had received at Malta, nor of
Caroline's visit to him at Fawley; for to do so, even to Fairthorn, was
like a treason to the dignity of the Beloved. And Guy Darrell might rail
at her inconstancy--her heartlessness; but to boast that she had lowered
herself by the proffers that were dictated by repentance, Guy Darrell
could not do that;--he was a gentleman. Still there was much left to
say. He could own that he thought she would now accept his hand; and
when Fairthorn looked happy at that thought, and hinted at excuses for
her former fickleness, it was a great relief to Darrell to fly into a
rage; but if the flute-player meanly turned round and became himself
Caroline's accuser, then poor Fairthorn was indeed frightened; for
Darrell's trembling lip or melancholy manner overwhelmed the assailant
with self-reproach, and sent him sidelong into one of his hidden coverts.
But at this moment Fairthorn was a support to him under other trials--
Fairthorn, who respects as he does, as no one else ever can, the sanctity
of the Darrell line--who would shrink like himself from the thought that
the daughter of Jasper Losely, and in all probability not a daughter of
Matilda Darrell, should ever be mistress of that ancestral hall, lowly
and obscure and mouldering though it be--and that the child of a sharper,
a thief, a midnight assassin, should carry on the lineage of knights and
warriors in whose stainless scutcheons, on many a Gothic tomb or over the
portals of ruined castles, was impaled the heraldry of Brides sprung from
the loins of Lion Kings! Darrell, then, doing full justice to all
Sophy's beauty and grace, purity and goodness, was more and more tortured
by the conviction that she could never be wife to the man on whom, for
want of all nearer kindred, would devolve the heritage of the Darrell
name.
On the other hand, Sophy's feelings towards her host were almost equally
painful and embittered. The tenderness and reverence that he had showed
to her beloved grandfather, the affecting gratitude with which Waife
spoke of him, necessarily deepened her prepossessions in his favour as
Lionel's kinsman; and though she saw him so sparingly, still, when they
did meet, she had no right to coimplain of his manner. It might be
distant, taciturn; but it was gentle, courteous--the manner which might
be expected, in a host of secluded habits, to a young guest from whose
sympathies he was removed by years, but to whose comforts he was
unobtrusively considerate--whose wishes were delicately forestalled. Yet
was this all that her imagination had dared to picture on entering those
grey walls? Where was the evidence of the relationship of which she had
dreamed?--where a single sign that she was more in that house than a mere
guest?--where, alas! a token that even Lionel had named her to his
kinsman, and that for Lionel's sake that kinsman bade her welcome? And
Lionel too--gone the very day before she arrived! That she learned
incidentally from the servant who showed her into the room. Gone, and
not addressed a line to herself, though but to condole with her on her
grandfather's illness, or congratulate her that the illness had spared
the life! She felt wounded to the very core. As Waife's progressive
restoration allowed her thoughts more to revert to so many causes for
pain and perplexity, the mystery of all connected with her own and
Waife's sojourn under that roof baffled her at tempts at conjecture. The
old man did not volunteer explanations. Timidly she questioned him; but
his nerves yet were so unstrung, and her questions so evidently harassed
him, that she only once made that attempt to satisfy her own
bewilderment, and smiled as if contented when he said, after a long
pause: "Patience yet, my child; let me get a little stronger. You see
Mr. Darrell will not suffer me to talk with him on matters that must be
discussed with him before I go; and then--and then--Patience till then,
Sophhy."
Neither George nor his wife gave her any clue to the inquiries that
preyed upon her mind. The latter, a kind, excellent woman, meekly
devoted to her husband, either was, or affected to be, in ignorance of
the causes that had led. Waife to Fawley, save very generally that
Darrell had once wronged him by an erring judgment, and had hastened to
efface that wrong. And then she kissed Sophy fondly, and told her that
brighter days were in store for the old man and herself. George said
with more authority--the authority of the priest: "Ask no questions.
Time, that solves all riddles, is hurrying on, and Heaven directs its
movements."
Her very heart was shut up, except where it could gush forth--nor even
then with full tide--in letters to Lady Montfort. Caroline had heard
from George's wife, with intense emotion, that Sophy was summoned to
Darrell's house, the gravity of Waife's illness being considerately
suppressed. Lady Montfort could but suppose that Darrell's convictions
had been shaken--his resolutions softened; that he sought an excuse to
see Sophy, and judge of her himself. Under this impression, in parting
with her young charge, Caroline besought Sophy to write to her constantly
and frankly. Sophy felt all inexpressible relief in this correspondence.
But Lady Montfort in her replies was not more communicative than Waife or
the Morleys; only she seemed more thoughtfully anxious that Sophy should
devote her self to the task of propitiating her host's affections. She
urged her to try and break through his reserve--see more of him; as if
that were possible! And her letters were more filled with questions
about Darrell than even with admonitions and soothings to Sophy. The
letters that arrived at Fawley were brought in a bag, which Darrell
opened; but Sophy noticed that it was with a peculiar compression of lip,
and a marked change of colour, that he had noticed the handwriting on
Lady Montfort's first letter to her, and that after that first time her
letters were not enclosed in the bag, but came apart, and were never
again given to her by her host.
Thus passed days in which Sophy's time was spent chiefly in Waife's sick-
room. But now he is regaining strength hourly. To his sitting-room
comes George frequently to relieve Sophy's watch. There, once a day,
comes Guy Darrell, and what then passed between the two men none
witnessed. In these hours Waife insisted upon Sophy's going forth for
air and exercise. She is glad to steal out alone-steal down by the banks
of the calm lake, or into the gloom of the mournful woods. Here she not
unfrequently encounters Fairthorn, who, having taken more than ever to
the flute, is driven more than ever to outdoor rambles, for he has been
cautioned not to indulge in his melodious resource within doors lest he
disturb the patient.
Fairthorn and Sophy thus made acquaintance, distant and shy at first on
both sides; but it gradually became more frank and cordial. Fairthorn
had an object not altogether friendly in encouraging this intimacy. He
thought, poor man, that he should be enabled to extract from Sophy some
revelations of her early life, which would elucidate, not in favour of
her asserted claims, the mystery that hung upon her parentage. But had
Dick Fairthorn been the astutest of diplomatists, in this hope he would
have been equally disappointed. Sophy had nothing to communicate. Her
ingenuousness utterly baffled the poor flute-player. Out of an innocent,
unconscious kind of spite, on ceasing to pry into Sophy's descent, he
began to enlarge upon the dignity of Darrell's. He inflicted on her the
long-winded genealogical memoir, the recital of which had, on a previous
occasion, so nearly driven Lionel Haughton from Fawley. He took her to
see the antiquary's grave; he spoke to her, as they stood there, of
Darrell's ambitious boyhood--his arid, laborious manhood--his
determination to restore the fallen line--the very vow he had made to
the father he had so pityingly revered. He sought to impress on her the
consciousness that she was the guest of one who belonged to a race with
whom spotless honour was the all in all; and who had gone through life
with bitter sorrows, but reverencing that race, and vindicating that
honour; Fairthorn's eye would tremble--his eyes flash on her while he
talked. She, poor child, could not divine why; but she felt that he was
angry with her--speaking at her. In fact, Fairthorn's prickly tongue was
on the barbed point of exclaiming: "And how dare you foist yourself into
this unsullied lineage--how dare you think that the dead would not turn
in their graves, ere they would make room in the vault of the Darrells
for the daughter of a Jasper Losely!" But though she could not conceive
the musician's covert meaning in these heraldic discourses, Sophy, with a
justness of discrimination that must have been intuitive, separated from
the more fantastic declamations of the grotesque genealogist that which
was genuine and pathetic in the single image of the last descendant in a
long and gradually falling race, lifting it up once more into power and
note on toiling shoulders, and standing on the verge of age, with the
melancholy consciousness that the effort was successful only for his
fleeting life; that, with all his gold, with all his fame, the hope which
had achieved alike the gold and the fame was a lying mockery, and that
name and race would perish with himself, when the earth yawned for him
beside the antiquary's grave.
And these recitals made her conceive a more soft and tender interest in
Guy Darrell than she had before admitted; they accounted for the
mournfulness on his brow; they lessened her involuntary awe of that
stateliness of bearing which before had only chilled her as the evidence
of pride.
While Fairthorn and Sophy thus matured acquaintance, Darrell and Waife
were drawing closer and closer to each other. Certainly no one would be
predisposed to suspect any congeniality of taste, intellect, experience,
or emotion, between two men whose lives had been so widely different--in
whose faults or merits the ordinary observer would have seen nothing but
antagonism and contrast. Unquestionably their characters were strikingly
dissimilar, yet there was that in each which the other recognised as
familiar to his own nature. Each had been the victim of his heart; each
had passed over the ploughshare of self-sacrifice. Darrell had offered
up his youth--Waife his age; Darrell to a Father and the unrequiting
Dead--Waife to a Son whose life had become his terror. To one man, NAME
had been an idol; to the other, NAME had been a weed cast away into the
mire. To the one man, unjoyous, evanescent glory--to the other, a shame
that had been borne with a sportive cheerfulness, dashed into sorrow only
when the world's contumely threatened to despoil Affection of its food.
But there was something akin in their joint experience of earthly
vanities;--so little solace in worldly honours to the triumphant Orator
--so little of misery to the vagrant Mime while his conscience mutely
appealed to Heaven from the verdict of his kind. And as beneath all the
levity and whim of the man reared and nurtured, and fitted by his
characteristic tendencies, to view life through its humours, not through
its passions, there still ran a deep undercurrent of grave and earnest
intellect and feeling--so too, amidst the severer and statelier texture
of the once ambitious, laborious mind, which had conducted Darrell to
renown--amidst all that gathered-up intensity of passion, which admitted
no comedy into Sorrow, and saw in Love but the aspect of Fate--amidst all
this lofty seriousness of soul, there was yet a vivid capacity of
enjoyment--those fine sensibilities to the pleasurable sun-rays of life,
which are constitutional to all GENIUS, no matter how grave its
vocations. True, affliction at last may dull them, as it dulls all else
that we took from Nature when she equipped us for life. Yet, in the mind
of Darrell, affliction had shattered the things most gravely coveted,
even more than it had marred its perceptive acknowledgment of the
sympathies between fancies that move to smiles, and thoughts that
bequeath solemn lessons, or melt to no idle tears. Had Darrell been
placed amidst the circumstances that make happy the homes of earnest men,
Darrell would have been mirthful; had Waife been placed amongst the
circumstances that concentrate talent, and hedge round life with trained
thicksets and belting laurels, Waife would have been grave.
It was not in the earlier conferences that took place in Waife's
apartment that the subject which had led the old man to Fawley was
brought into discussion. When Waife had sought to introduce it--when,
after Sophy's arrival, he had looked wistfully into Darrell's face,
striving to read there the impression she had created, and, unable to
discover, had begun, with tremulous accents, to reopen the cause that
weighed on him--Darrell stopped him at once. "Hush--not yet; remember
that it was in the very moment you first broached this sorrowful topic,
on arriving here, and perceived how different the point of view from
which we two must regard it, that your nerves gave way--your illness
rushed on you. Wait, not only till you are stronger, but till we know
each other better. This subject is one that it becomes us to treat with
all the strength of our reason--with all the calm which either can impose
upon the feelings that ruffle judgment. At present, talk we of all
matters except that, which I promise you shall be fairly discussed at
last."
Darrell found, however, that his most effective diversion from the
subject connected with Sophy was through another channel in the old
man's affections, hopes, and fears. George Morley, in repeating the
conversation he had overheard between Waife and Jasper, had naturally,
while clearing the father, somewhat softened the bravado and cynicism of
the son's language, and more than somewhat brightened the touches of
natural feeling by which the bravado and cynicism had been alternated.
And Darrell had sufficient magnanimity to conquer the repugnance with
which he approached a name associated with so many dark and hateful
memories, and, avoiding as much as possible distinct reference to
Jasper's past life, to court a consultation on the chances of saving from
the worst the life that yet remained. With whom else, indeed, than
Jasper's father could Darrell so properly and so unreservedly discuss a
matter in which their interest and their fear were in common?--As though
he were rendering some compensation to Waife for the disappointment he
would experience when Sophy's claims came to be discussed--if he could
assist in relieving the old man's mind as to the ultimate fate of the son
for whom he had made so grand a sacrifice, Darrell spoke to Waife
somewhat in detail of the views with which he had instructed Colonel
Morley to find out and to treat with Jasper. He heard from the Colonel
almost daily. Alban had not yet discovered Jasper, nor even succeeded in
tracing Mrs. Crane! But an account of Jasper's farewell visit to that
den of thieves, from which he had issued safe and triumphant, had reached
the ears of a detective employed by the Colonel, and on tolerably good
terms with Cutts; and it was no small comfort to know that Jasper had
finally broken with those miscreant comrades, and had never again been
seen in their haunts. As Arabella had introduced herself to Alban by her
former name, and neither he nor Darrell was acquainted with that she now
bore, and as no questions on the subject could be put to Waife during the
earlier stages of his illness, so it was several days before the Colonel
had succeeded in tracing her out as Mrs. Crane of Podden Place--a
discovery effected by a distant relation to whom he had been referred at
the famous school of which Arabella had been the pride, and who was no
doubt the owner of those sheepskin account-books by which the poor grim
woman had once vainly sought to bribe Jasper into honest work. But the
house in Podden Place was shut up--not a soul in charge of it. The
houses immediately adjoining it were tenantless. The Colonel learned,
however, from a female servant in an opposite house, that several days
ago she had seen a tall, powerful-looking man enter Mrs. Crane's street-
door; that she had not seen him quit it; and that some evenings
afterwards, as this servant was closing up the house in which she served,
she had remarked a large private carriage driving away from Mrs. Crane's
door; that it was too dark to see who were in the carriage, but she had
noticed a woman whom she felt fully sure was Mrs. Crane's servant,
Bridgett Greggs, on the box beside the coachman.
Alban had been to the agent employed by Mrs. Crane in the letting of her
houses, but had not there gained any information. The Colonel believed
that Mrs. Crane had succeeded in removing Jasper from London--had,
perhaps, accompanied him abroad. If with her, at all events for the
present he was safe from the stings of want, and with one who had sworn
to save him from his own guilty self. If, however, still in England,
Alban had no doubt, sooner or later, to hunt him up.
Upon the whole, this conjectural information, though unsatisfactory,
allayed much anxiety. Darrell made the most of it in his representations
to Waife. And the old man, as we know, was one not hard to comfort,
never quarrelling irrevocably with Hope.
And now Waife is rapidly recovering. Darrell, after spending the greater
part of several days, intent upon a kind of study from which he had been
estranged for many years, takes to frequent absences for the whole day;
goes up to London by the earliest train, comes back by the latest.
George Morley also goes to London for a few hours. Darrell, on
returning, does not allude to the business which took him to the
metropolis; neither does George, but the latter seems unusually animated
and excited. At length, after one of these excursions, so foreign to his
habits, he and George enter together the old man's apartment not long
before the early hour at which the convalescent retires to rest. Sophy
was seated on the footstool at Waife's knee, reading the Bible to him,
his hand resting lightly on her bended head. The sight touched both
George and Darrell; but Darrell of the two was the more affected. What
young, pure voice shall read to HIM the Book of Hope in the evening of
lonely age? Sophy started in some confusion, and as, in quitting the
room, she passed by Darrell, he took her hand gently, and scanned her
features more deliberately, more earnestly than he had ever yet seemed to
do; then he sighed, and dropped the hand, murinuring, "Pardon me." Was
he seeking to read in that fair face some likeness to the Darrell
lineaments? If he had found it, what then? But when Sophy was gone,
Darrell came straight to Waife with a cheerful brow--with a kindling eye.
"William Losely," said he.
"Waife, if you please, sir," interrupted the old man. William Losely,"
repeated Darrell, "justice seeks to repair, so far as, alas! it now can,
the wrongs inflicted on the name of William Losely. Your old friend
Alban Morley supplying me with the notes he had made in the matter of
your trial, I arranged the evidence they furnished. The Secretary for
the Home Department is one of my most intimate political friends--a man
of humanity--of sense. I placed that evidence before him. I, George,
and Mr. Hartopp, saw him after he had perused it--"
"My--son--Lizzy's son!"
"His secret will be kept. The question was not who committed the act for
which you suffered, but whether you were clearly, incontestably, innocent
of the act, and, in pleading guilty, did but sublimely bear the penalty
of another. There will be no new trial--there are none who would
prosecute. I bring back to you the Queen's free pardon under the Great
Seal. I should explain to you that this form of the royal grace is so
rarely given that it needed all the strength and affecting circumstance
of your peculiar case to justify the Home Secretary in listening, not
only to the interest I could bring to bear in your favour, but to his own
humane inclinations. The pardon under the Great Seal differs from an
ordinary pardon. It purges the blood from the taint of felony--it remits
all the civil disabilities which the mere expiry of a penal sentence does
not remove. In short, as applicable to your case, it becomes virtually a
complete and formal attestation of your innocence. Alban Morley will
take care to apprise those of your old friends who may yet survive, of
that revocation of unjust obloquy, which this royal deed implies--Alban
Morley, who would turn his back on the highest noble in Britain if but
guilty of some jockey trick on the turf! Live henceforth openly, and in
broad daylight if you please; and trust to us three--the Soldier, the
Lawyer, the Churchman--to give to this paper that value which your
Sovereign's advisers intend it to receive."
"Your hand now, dear old friend!" cried George. "You remember I
commanded you once to take mine as man and gentleman--as man and
gentleman, now honour me with yours."
"Is it possible?" faltered Waife, one hand in George's, the other
extended in imploring appeal to Darrell--"is it possible? I vindicated--
I cleared--and yet no felon's dock for Jasper!--the son not criminated by
the father's acquittal! Tell me that! again--again!"
"It is so, believe me. All that rests is to force on that son, if he
have a human heart, the conviction that he will be worse than a parricide
if he will not save himself."
"And he will--he shall. Oh, that I could but get at him!" exclaimed the
preacher.
"And now," said Darrell--"now, George, leave us; for now, upon equal
terms, we two fathers can discuss family differences."