Mrs Clifford had not much time to think that night, and the impression
went off her when she was in her lover’s company—which was very nearly
always; for, long before this had been thought of, Tom Summerhayes had
been the soul of everything at Fontanel. She had come so gradually to
consult him about everything—to take his counsel upon small and great
that happened—that it seemed only natural now that he should belong to
her; but after Loo’s little scene a variety of annoyances came upon
Mary—indications of the world’s opinion—evidences that it did not seem
so natural to other people as to herself. Even Charley’s schoolboy
letter was rather dreadful to his mother. The boy bestowed his
approbation upon her match, and was to stand by her, too, in Loo’s very
vein; and the mother felt more humbled by thus obtaining the consent of
her children than she would have been by the sacrifice of all she had in
the world. Still it never came into her head to give up her
marriage—never, perhaps, till a day or two before, when things were much
too far advanced for any drawing back, and when she sat alone by her
fire, with her desk open before her, late at night when all the
household were asleep. In her desk were various little matters which had
been treasures to Mary Clifford. She took them out with trembling
hands—a withered flower, given to her, oh, so long ago, when she was
little more than a child, and preserved with girlish romance; a little
ring made of hair, which she had worn in her days of betrothal; a little
faded drawing, made by herself at the same period, of her early lover;
and last and most important of all, some letters—not many, but very
tender—the love-letters of her youth. How she had cried over them many a
sad day after her Harry died; how she had gradually forgotten them again
and left them in their safe concealment; how of late she had rather
avoided the place where they were, and shrank from touching the little
desk that contained them; and now, at last, upon the eve of her second
wedding, here they were all spread out before her, to be disposed of
somehow. Mary’s treasures! she had heard them called so—had called them
so herself. What were they now?
Poor, little, soft, tender-hearted woman! There was no passion in her.
She was in love with all her heart, but it was affectionately, not
passionately, or else she never could have opened that desk. She took
out the flower, and cried, and looked at it; then, with a hasty impulse,
put it softly on the fire, and watched it blaze into sudden ashes, and
cried again, and felt guilty to her heart. “I was such a child,” she
said to herself in her tears, and took a kind of melancholy comfort from
thinking how young she had been when she was first a bride. Then she
looked at her own drawing, which was not the least like him, and thought
with a compunction of her Harry. Poor Harry! All this bright house, all
these dear children, were his as well as hers; but he was put away in
the family vault, poor fellow, and nothing was henceforward to belong to
him in this living world—not even the name he had given her, not her
thoughts, not any of her heart. She cried over that too like the rest.
She put up the ring in a little parcel for Loo—she laid aside the
portrait for little Harry. She tried to indemnify him by making over all
those little mementoes, which it troubled her to look at, to his
children. Then she took up the bundle of yellow letters and timidly
opened one of them, and read a few sentences. There she read of the
young love that was never to die, never to know change. Poor Mary put
them away again with a sob almost of terror, and hastily locked up the
desk, and resolved to put it away somewhere out of sight. She could not
examine any further into those “treasures” which had become ghosts. She
drew her chair to the fire, and shivered in her thoughts. She was a
simple-minded woman, not wise, but moved by every wind of feeling. It
came to her mind just then to recollect how, in her first widowhood, she
had taken comfort from the thought that Harry was near and saw her tears
for him, and knew how faithful her poor heart was. Now that thought was
too much for Mary’s strength. She gave a cry of helpless terror when it
occurred to her. Alas, for that immortality of union which comforts the
heart of grief! What if Harry met her at the very gates of heaven when
she got there, and claimed her, she who was going to be another man’s
bride? Sitting alone in the night, with all the household asleep, and
such thoughts for companions, it was not wonderful if a panic seized
upon Mrs Clifford’s heart. Poor Harry, who had loved her so well,
appeared like a pursuing spectre to the soft little woman. If it was
true that she belonged to him for ever and ever, how could she dare to
love Tom Summerhayes? and if she did not belong to him for ever and
ever—he who had loved her to the end, and had never done anything to
forfeit her affection—what was the hereafter, the heaven where love, it
appeared, could not be immortal? These fancies wrung poor Mary’s heart.
She did not know any answer to make to them. The question put by the
Sadducees nohow answered her case. She who blushed before her children,
how could she ever look Harry in the face? She felt herself an infidel,
trembling and crying over that everlastingness which had once given her
such consolation. That Harry could ever cease to love her, nature
contradicted as impossible. He was in heaven, far off, unseen, fixed in
solemn unchangeableness in all the elevation of love and grief he died
in, never to alter; and she?—— Step by step unconsciously that elevation
of grief and love had died away from her in the changing human days, and
now here she sat weeping, trembling, thinking with awe of Harry,
wondering how he would claim her hereafter, how she could dare name his
name when she was another man’s wife. Poor little trembling soul! She
stole away to bed when she could bear it no longer, and sought refuge in
sleep with the tears still in her eyes, some grand and desperate
resolution of making a sacrifice of herself being in her mind, as was
natural. She had troubled dreams, and woke up quite unrefreshed in the
morning, which was very unlucky that day of all others, because the
lawyers were coming, and all her business affairs were to be settled
before her marriage. However, Mrs Clifford could not remember at her
first waking what it was which had thrown such a cloud upon her; and
when her thoughts of the previous night did return to her mind, they
were neither so intolerable nor so urgent as they had been. In the
daylight, somehow, those gates of heaven, at which Harry might be
standing to claim her, looked a very far way off to the bride of Tom
Summerhayes—there was no such immediate certainty of Harry’s existence
anyhow, or of the kind of interest he might take in her proceedings; and
the philosophy of the question did not recur to her mind with those
puzzling and hopeless speculations. She was a great deal more content to
accept the present and to postpone the future—to let hereafter take care
of itself—than she had been at night. She put away the desk with Harry’s
letters in a dark vacant upper shelf of a bookcase in her own
dressing-room; there, where she could not even see it, it would no
longer witness against her. It was a sunny morning, and the children
came in all fresh and rosy to say their prayers, and there was a note
from Mr Summerhayes on the breakfast-table, naming the hour at which the
law people were to arrive. Mrs Clifford had recovered her colour and her
spirits before they came; she was a little agitated, and looked very
pretty in the commotion of her heart. Hers was a position very peculiar
and interesting, as Mr Gateshead himself, the old family solicitor,
suggested, as he read over the deed she was to sign. He was perfectly
pleased with the arrangements altogether, and said that Mr Summerhayes
had behaved most honourably and in the most gentlemanly way. It was very
clear that _his_ motives were not mercenary. The deed Mrs Clifford had
to sign was one by which Fontanel and all its dependencies was settled
upon her eldest son, she retaining the life-interest in it which her
husband had meant her to have. Mr Summerhayes, who had been brought up
for the bar, had himself advised Mr Gateshead in the drawing up of this
important document. The new bridegroom was anxiously solicitous that the
children should be portioned and the property distributed exactly as the
family agent, who knew poor Clifford’s mind, would have advised him to
settle it; and the deed was irrevocable and framed in the most careful
manner, so that no ingenuity of the law could make it assailable
hereafter. It was so rigid in all its provisions that poor Mary wavered
a little over it. She thought it scarcely fair that _he_ should be shut
out entirely from every interest in all this wealth, which, at the
present moment, belonged absolutely to herself. It was Mr Summerhayes
himself who put, with a certain gentle force, the pen into her hands,
and pointed exactly to the spot where she was to sign. “I have _you_,
Mary,” he said in her ear, as he leant over her to keep the parchment
steady; and Mary Clifford signed away all her power and secured her
children’s rights, with “a smile on her lip and a tear in her eye,”
feeling to her heart the delicious flattery. What she possessed was
nothing to him—he had _her_, and a kingdom could not make him happier.
So said the tone of his whisper, the glance of his eye, and the echo of
her heart. This living Love which stood by her side, securing so
carefully that Harry Clifford’s wealth should go to Harry Clifford’s
heirs, and seeking only herself for its own, completely swallowed up
poor Clifford’s ghost, if that forlorn spirit might by chance be
cognisant of what was passing. Mary remembered no more her qualms and
misgivings; and the prospect before her—now that the very children had
got used to it, had ceased either to oppose or to stand by her, and had
fallen into natural excitement about the approaching festivities, the
guests who were to be at Fontanel, the new dresses, the great event
about to happen—looked as bright as the glowing day.