H.B.M.’s Consul.--Conclusion.
Clare carried out her intentions, unmoved by all the entreaties
addressed to her. She heard everything that was said with perfect calm;
either her capabilities of emotion were altogether exhausted, or her
passionate sense of wrong was too deep to show at the surface, and she
was calm as a marble statue; but she was equally inflexible. Edgar
turned, in spite of himself, into Arthur Arden’s advocate; pleaded with
her, setting forth every reason he could think of, partly against his
own judgment--and failed. Her husband, against whom she did not
absolutely close her door, threw himself at her feet, and entreated, for
the children’s sake, for the sake of all that was most important to them
both--the credit of their house, the good name of their boy. These were
arguments which with Clare, in her natural mind, would have been
unanswerable; but that had happened to Clare which warps the mind from
its natural modes of thought. The idea of disgrace had got into her very
soul, like a canker. She was unable to examine her reasons--unable to
resist, even in herself, this overwhelming influence; it overcame her
principles, and even her prejudices, which are more difficult to
overcome. The fear of scandal, which those who knew Clare would have
supposed sufficient to make her endure anything, failed totally here.
She knew that her behaviour would make the world talk, and she even felt
that, with this clue to some profound disagreement between her husband
and herself, the whole story might be more easily revealed, and her
boy’s heirship made impossible; but even with this argument she could
not subdue herself, nor suffer herself to be subdued. The sense of
outrage had taken possession of her; she could not forget it--could not
realize the possibility of ever forgetting it. It was not that she had
been brought within the reach of possible disgrace. She _was_ disgraced;
the very formality of the new marriage, though she consented to it
without question, as a necessity, was a new outrage. In short, Clare,
though she acted with a determination and steadiness which seemed to add
force to her character, and showed her natural powers as nothing else
had ever done, was not, for the first time in her life, a free agent.
She had been taken possession of by a passionate sense of injury, which
seized upon her as an evil spirit might seize upon its victim. In the
very fierceness of her individual resentment, she ceased to be an
individual, and became an abstraction, a woman wronged, capable of
feeling, knowing, thinking of nothing but her wrong. This made all
arguments powerless, all pleas foolish. She could not admit any
alternative into her mind; her powers of reasoning failed her altogether
on this subject; on all others she was sane and sensible, but on this
had all the onesidedness, the narrowness of madness--or of the
twin-sister of madness--irrepressible and irrepressed passion.
Without knowing anything of the real facts of the story, the Thornleighs
were admitted to see her, on Clare’s own suggestion; for her warped mind
was cunning to see where an advantage could be drawn from partial
publicity. They found her on her sofa, looking, in the paleness which
had now become habitual to her, like a creature vanishing out of the
living world.
“Why did you not let us know you were ill? You must have been suffering
long, and never complained!” cried Lady Augusta, moved almost to tears.
“Not very long,” said Clare.
She had permitted her husband to be present at this interview, to keep
up appearances to the last; and Arthur felt as if every word was a dart
aimed at him, though I do not think she meant it so.
“Not long! My dear child, you are quite thin and wasted; this cannot
have come on all at once. But Italy will do you all the good in the
world,” Lady Augusta added, trying to be cheerful. “_They_, you know,
are going to Italy too.”
“But not near where I shall be,” said Clare.
“You must go further south? I am very sorry. Gussy and you would have
been company for each other. You are not strong enough for company? My
poor child! But once out of these cold spring winds, you will do well,”
said kind Lady Augusta.
But though she thus took the matter on the surface, she felt that there
was more below. Her looks grew more and more perplexed as they discussed
Edgar’s appointment, and the humble beginning which the young couple
would make in the world.
“It is very imprudent--very imprudent,” Lady Augusta said, shaking her
head. “I have said all I can, Mrs. Arden, and so has Mr. Thornleigh. I
don’t know how they are to get on. It is the most imprudent thing I ever
heard of.”
“Nothing is imprudent,” said Clare, with a hard, dry intonation, which
took all pleasant meaning out of the words, “when you can trust fully
for life or death; and my brother Edgar is one whom everybody can
trust.”
“At all events, we are both of us old enough to know our own minds,”
said Gussy, hastily, trying to laugh off this impression. “If we choose
to starve together, who should prevent us?”
Arthur Arden took them to their carriage, but Lady Augusta remarked that
he did not go upstairs again. “There is something in all this more than
meets the eye,” she said, oracularly.
Many people suspected this, after Lady Augusta, when Clare was gone, and
when it came out that Mr. Arden was not with her, but passing most of
his time in London, knocking about from club to club, through all the
dreary winter. He made an effort to spend his time as virtuously as
possible that first year; but the second year he was more restless and
less virtuous, having fallen into despair. Then everybody talked of the
breach between them, and a great deal crept out that they had thought
buried in silence. Even the real facts of the case were guessed at,
though never fully established, and the empty house became the subject
of many a tale. People remarked that there were many strange stories
about the Ardens; that they had behaved very strangely to the last
proprietor before Arthur; that nobody had ever heard the rights of that
story, and that Edgar had been badly used.
Whilst all this went on, Clare lived gloomy and retired by herself, in a
little village on the Neapolitan coast. She saw nobody, avoiding the
wandering English, and everybody who could have known her in better
times; and I don’t know how long her reason could have stood the wear
and tear, but for the illness and death of the poor little heir, whose
hapless position had given the worst pang to her shame and horror.
Little Arthur died, his mother scarcely believing it, refusing to think
such a thing possible. Her husband had heard incidentally of the child’s
illness, and had hurried to the neighbourhood, scarcely hoping to be
admitted. But Clare neither welcomed him nor refused him admission, but
permitted his presence, and ignored it. When the child was gone,
however, it was Arthur’s vehement grief which first roused her out of
her stupor.
“It is you who have done it!” she cried, turning upon him with eyes full
of tearless passion. But she did not send him out of her house. She felt
ill, worn out in body and mind, and left everything in his hands. And
by-and-by, when she came to herself, Clare allowed herself to be taken
home, and fled from her duties no longer.
This was the end of their story. They were more united in the later
portion of their lives than in the beginning, but they have no heir to
come after them. The history of the Ardens will end with them, for the
heir-at-law is distant in blood, and has a different name.
As for the other personages mentioned in this story, Mr. Tottenham still
governs his shop as if it were an empire, and still comes to a
periodical crisis in the shape of an Entertainment, which threatens to
fail up to the last moment, and then is turned into a great success. The
last thing I have heard of Tottenham’s was, that it had set up a little
daily newspaper of its own, written and printed on the establishment,
which Mr. Tottenham thought very likely to bring forward some latent
talent which otherwise might have been lost in dissertations on the
prices of cotton, or the risings and fallings of silks. After Gussy’s
departure, I hear the daily services fell off in the chapel; flowers
were no longer placed fresh and fragrant on the temporary altar, there
was no one to play the harmonium, and the attendance gradually
decreased. It fell from a daily to a weekly service, and then came to an
end altogether, for it was found that the young ladies and the gentlemen
preferred to go out on Sunday, and to choose their own preachers after
their differing tastes. How many of them strayed off to chapel instead
of church, it would have broken Gussy’s heart to hear. I do not think,
however, that this disturbed Mr. Tottenham much, who was too viewy not
to be very tolerant, and who liked himself to hear what every new
opinion had to say for itself. Lady Mary was very successful with her
lectures, and I hope improved the feminine mind very much at Harbour
Green. She thought she improved her own mind, which was of course a
satisfaction; and did her best to transmit to little Molly very high
ideas of intellectual training; but Molly was a dunce, as providentially
happens often in the families of very clever people; and distinguished
herself by a curious untractableness, which did not hinder her from
being her mother’s pride, and the sweetest of all the cousins--or so at
least Lady Mary thought.
The marriage of “the Grantons” took place in April, with the greatest
_éclat_. It was at Easter, when everybody was in the country; and was
one of the prettiest of weddings, as well as the most magnificent, which
Thornleigh ever saw. Mary’s presents filled a large room to overflowing.
She got everything possible and impossible that ever bride was blessed
with; and the young couple went off with a maid, and a valet and a
courier, and introductions to every personage in Europe. Their movements
were chronicled in the newspapers; their letters went and came in
ambassadorial despatch boxes. Short of royalty, there could have been
nothing more splendid, more “perfectly satisfactory,” as Lady Augusta
said. The only drawback was that Harry would not come to his sister’s
wedding; but to make up for that everybody else came--all the great
Hauteville connections, and Lady Augusta’s illustrious family, and all
the Thornleighs, to the third and fourth generations. Not only
Thornleigh itself, but every house within a radius of ten miles was
crowded with fine people and their servants; and the bells were rung in
half a dozen parish churches in honour of the wedding. It was described
fully in the _Morning Post_, with details of all the dresses, and of the
bride’s ornaments and _coiffure_.
“We shall have none of these fine things, I suppose,” Gussy said, when
it was all over, turning to Edgar with a mock sigh.
“No, my dear; and I don’t see how you could expect them,” said Lady
Augusta. “Instead of spending our money vainly on making a great show
for you, we had much better save it, to buy some useful necessary things
for your housekeeping. Mary is in quite a different case.”
“Buy us pots and pans, mamma,” said Gussy, laughing; “though perhaps
earthen pipkins would do just as well in Italy. We shall not be such a
credit to you, but we shall be much cheaper. There is always something
in that.”
“Ah! Gussy, it is easy to speak now; but wait till you are buried in the
cares of life,” said her mother, going away to superintend the
arrangements for the ball in the evening. So grand a wedding was
certainly very expensive; she never liked to tell anyone how much that
great ceremonial cost.
A little later, the little church dressed itself in a few modest spring
flowers, and the school-children, with baskets full of primroses--the
last primroses of the season--made a carpet under Gussy’s feet as she,
in her turn, went along the familiar path between the village
gravestones, a bride. There were not more than a dozen people at the
breakfast, and Lady Augusta’s little brougham took them to the station
afterwards, where they set out quite humbly and cheerily by an ordinary
train.
“Quite good enough for a Consul,” Gussy said, always the first to laugh
at her own humbleness. She wore a grey gown to go away in, which did not
cost a tenth part so much as Lady Granton’s, and the _Post_ took no
notice of them. They wandered about their own country for a week or two,
like the Babes in the Wood, Gussy said, expected in no great country
house, retiring into no stately seclusion, but into the far more
complete retirement of common life and common ways. Gussy, as she was
proud to tell, had learned to do many things in her apprenticeship to
the sisters of the Charity-house as associate of the order; and I think
the pleasure to her of this going forth unattended, unsuspected, in the
freedom of a young wife--the first smack of absolute freedom which women
ever taste--had something far more exquisite in it to Gussy than any
delight her sister could have in her more splendid honeymoon. Lord and
Lady Granton were limited, and kept in curb by their own very greatness;
they were watched over by their servants, and kept by public opinion in
the right way; but Edgar and Gassy went where they would, as free as
the winds, and thought of nobody’s opinion. The Consul in this had an
unspeakable advantage over the Earl.
They got to their home at last on a May evening, when Italy is indeed
Paradise; they had driven all day long from the Genoa side along the
lovely Riviera di Levante, tracing the gracious curves from village to
village along that enchanting way. The sun was setting when they came in
sight of Spezzia, and before they reached the house which had been taken
for them, the Angelus was sounding from the church, and the soft
dilating stars of Italian skies had come out to hear the homely litany
sung shrilly in side-chapels, and out of doors, among the old nooks of
the town, of the angelic song, “Hail, Mary, full of grace!” The women
were singing in an old three-cornered piazzetta, close under the loggia
of the Consul’s house, which looked upon the sea. On the sea itself the
magical sky was shining with all those listening stars. In Italy the
stars take more interest in human life than they do in this colder
sphere. Those that were proper to that space of heaven, crowded
together, Edgar thought to himself, to see his bride. On the horizon the
sea and sky blended in one infinite softness and blueness; the lights
began to twinkle in the harbour and in its ships; the far-off villages
among the woods lent other starry tapers to make the whole landscape
kind and human. Heaven and earth were softly illuminated, not for
them--for the dear common uses and ends of existence; yet unconsciously
with a softer and fuller lustre, because of the eyes that looked upon
them so newly, as if earth and heaven, and the kindly light, and all the
tender bonds of humanity, had been created fresh that very day.
THE END.
PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER.