ATRA CURA
There are few more attractive houses near London than one that shall be
nameless in these pages: enough that it lends the beauty of mellow brick
and sunken tile to a hill-top already picturesquely wooded, but a dozen
miles from the Marble Arch, yet in the country's very heart, on a main
road where the inquisitive may still discover it for themselves. They
will have to choose, it is true, between several old houses of rosy
brick, all of them overrun with the rose itself, and all standing rather
too near the road. The house in question is the one that has no other
fault. It is the house with the plate-glass porch, the wide bay on
either side, the luniform bay behind; at the back also are a noble lawn,
several meadows, and a singular avenue, so narrow that the tall trees
meet overhead as one. Other features are a rose garden, enclosed in the
ripest of all the old red walls, and a model farm.
To this pleasant English home Mr. Merridew and his daughter returned in
the month of February, after a wearisome but uneventful voyage and a
week or two at the St. George's Hotel as a corrective. A distinguished
physician had prescribed a month; but in ten days Nan had all the new
clothes she needed, had seen all the plays she cared to see, and went in
such fear of a certain topic of conversation, forced upon her by the
heedless, that it was anguish to her to go about. So one of the
carriages came up from Hertfordshire, and on a clear but chilly
afternoon father and daughter drove home together.
It was not a hearty homecoming. John Merridew had been many years a
widower, whose only other child had died in infancy. But the old red
house looked warm and kindly; the servants stood weeping through their
smiles; the firelit rooms were all unchanged, save in their new promise
of perfect privacy; and in her home it was grasped from the first that
Miss Merridew could not bear to speak about the wreck of the _North
Foreland_ and her own romantic rescue by one of the officers. Thus she
had no occasion to explain that she was engaged to him; and Mr. Merridew
left the announcement to Nan.
"She has nothing on her mind, has she?" inquired old Dr. Stone after an
early call as physician and friend.
"She has the wreck on her mind," replied Mr. Merridew promptly. "She
can't even speak of it, as you may have noticed."
"I did notice, and that's why I ask. I saw the child into this world, my
dear Merridew, and I want to dance at her wedding before I move on to
the next. She didn't give her heart for her life, I suppose?"
"You must ask her that yourself, doctor," the discreet father replied,
meeting a penetrating look with a laugh. And a firm old friend retired
dissatisfied and rather hurt. But so the engagement was kept a secret
from the first.
It is none the less safe to assert that there was not a waking hour of
these early days in which the girl was oblivious of her new estate. It
weighed on her mind far more than it had done at sea, though there she
had missed Denis dreadfully, and sometimes with a resentment which she
could not help. She had formed a habit of thinking in these moods of her
last conversation with Ralph Devenish; it was the only cure. But fresh
cause for displeasure awaited her in London. The voyage had been so long
that certain Australian packets had given the _Memnon_ a start and a
beating; when Nan learned this she counted on a letter, but there was
none. She studied the shipping news in the _Times_. More vessels arrived
from Melbourne, but from Denis never a word. Sometimes the
disappointment made her positively ill; always it left her tossing
between the Scylla and Charybdis of terrible alternatives. Either he was
indifferent, or else he was dead. And when she deemed him indifferent,
there were things unforgettable that made her almost wish him dead; but
when the terror of his death came over her in its turn, then she prayed
less for his love than for his life.
So the days passed, and the sea-bronze soon faded from the piquant face,
leaving it pale but petulant. Nan had not lost her spirit; she was one
to chafe rather than to fret, but to do neither more openly than she
could help. She kept herself up by exercise and fresh air. It was hard,
bright weather, a little wintry still, yet with that promise of spring
inseparable from the longer day and the lighter sky. There were even
twigs with green tips to them, and the chestnut branches ended in sticky
cones. But Nan thought of the spring before, when she had met with no
adventures and had not become engaged; her obsession followed her to all
her favourite places; and in her daily ride along the hard, clean roads,
the black imp kept its perch.
Mr. Merridew was not the man to note all this and hold his peace, for he
had small tact where his feelings were engaged; but he was so little at
home that it was easy to deceive him; and his first conversation with
Nan on the subject was really started in the city, where his partner,
Ralph's father, had been inveighing against the Dents with the unbridled
bitterness begotten of a family feud.
"To think of the son of that marriage sneaking into our line, under his
own accursed name! It's so common; and I had no idea the fellow was at
sea; but now I know how we lost our ship. You may shake your head,
Merridew; wasn't she lost in his watch? You don't know the breed as I
know it, and I suppose you're grateful to the fellow. But what good
object could he have had in choosing our line of all others?"
"To rise in it," replied Merridew with some warmth: "to be revenged on
you that way, not the other. And I happen to know, because he told Nan."
"Told her that, did he? After the wreck, I take it, when decency obliged
you all to listen to the fellow? By the Lord, but you were lucky if
that's all he told her! His father would have taken advantage of the
situation, and married himself into the family before you knew where you
were!"
It was no mere lack of moral courage that deterred John Merridew from
the admission which rose naturally to his lips. He no longer regarded as
inevitable the marriage to which he had consented in his agitation after
the wreck, and to mention it to Ralph's father, when Ralph himself had
evidently not done so in his letters, seemed an altogether needless
indiscretion. He was, however, a peculiarly conscientious man, who would
have much preferred to have stated the fact; not having done so, he had
a curious desire to alter the fact to suit his silence; and so struck
his first blow at Denis, more heavily than he intended, that very night.
"No," said Nan in answer to his question. "No, I have not heard from him
yet."
"Not a word?"
"Not yet, papa. Surely you knew? You may be certain I shall not keep it
to myself when I do hear."
There was a double reproach, of which her father felt his share, in the
sudden bitterness with which the girl spoke. But John Merridew had now
convinced himself that he had a parental duty to perform, that cruelty
was the only kindness, and some little exaggeration justifiable to that
end.
"It is most extraordinary," he murmured. "I never heard of a more
extraordinary thing!"
"I don't see that at all," replied Nan, hotly. "You know what he is
doing, and I know he is doing it with all his might. What time can he
have for letters--digging all day--and what opportunity--living in a
hut?"
"But that's what is so extraordinary," pursued Mr. Merridew. "That he
should have elected to stay behind to do all that!"
"You know it was for my sake!" exclaimed the girl, tears in her eyes.
"Oh, you are unkind to us both! He would not marry until he had
something to marry on, something of his own; and there he was where
people were making fortunes in a day! Whatever I may feel, you ought to
respect him for doing what he has done. But it shouldn't have been
necessary for him to do it, and you were the one to make it
unnecessary."
"I?" cried Mr. Merridew, quite taken aback. "Why, my dear child, what
more could I have done?"
"You might have taken him into the office; you might have promised him a
partnership one day. If he doesn't deserve well of you, I don't know who
does; and you know how clever he is, and how he would have worked to
deserve all the more! It might have been an unusual thing to do," Nan
added, with a sudden sense that she was talking wildly. "Nevertheless, I
have always thought it a thing you might have done."
She had, indeed, thought it for some time; but, after all, the notion
had first occurred to Mr. Merridew himself; and in all the circumstances
he was not disposed to suppress the fact another moment.
"My dearest Nan," said he, gently, "it is the very thing I did!"
She looked at him with blank, unseeing eyes.
"What do you mean, papa?"
"I actually offered him that very opening, with every prospect of
partnership that single partner could hold out."
"When?" asked Nan after a further pause. Her voice had changed.
"The first time I saw him after the wreck. It was too late. He had heard
of the diggings, and he would hear of nothing else."
"Why did you never tell me before?"
"My dear child, need you ask? I thought it would hurt you," said Mr.
Merridew; and the tender compassion in his voice was not unmingled with
remorse, for Nan had turned very pale, and her lip quivered.
"It does," she said, simply. "No doubt that was why he did not tell me
either," she added, and the quivering lip curled. In a minute she
crossed over to her father's chair and kissed him without emotion. "I am
afraid I have been very rude, besides misjudging you so strangely.
But--but don't let us misjudge anybody else until we must--or speak of
him again until we hear."
But it was harder now to believe the best, harder yet to look back
without a passionate shame and indignation which in their intensity
surpassed all that the girl had yet endured. She came down paler and
paler in the mornings. It was because she had lain such a fiery red half
the night--in the ti-tree thicket of her waking nightmare. She could not
know how her feelings had been foreseen, nay, endured from the first on
her behalf. She only knew that never in the morning was there the letter
for which she looked--and almost loathed herself for looking--nor yet
ever toward evening, when the postman came again, and Nan watched for
him, openly or in hiding as pride or passion might prevail.
All this time, but now more than ever, the girl filled her life with a
resolution which declared her calibre. She regained touch with her
friends throughout the countryside. She visited the villagers, managed
her father's house with increased capability, and no longer discouraged
him from entertaining, as her inclination had been for a time. People
who stayed in the house found its young mistress brighter in a way than
they had ever known her. But that was the form of hospitality Nan
relished least. As spring advanced she was more and more out of doors,
on horseback or afoot; but in the open air she still preferred to be
alone, and would advertise the fact by carrying a book on all her walks.
She had taken to reading as she had never read before, in a way at once
desultory and omnivorous. And it was in a tome from her father's
shelves, to wit Southey's "Early British Poets," that a sudden beam of
comfort and enlightenment shot into her soul from the immortal lines of
Lovelace to Lucasta:--
"Yet this inconstancy is such,
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Lov'd I not honour more."
Nan knew the lines as a quotation. Why, why had she ever forgotten them?
Why had she never once thought of them in all these weeks of doubt and
pain? They put the case for Denis in a nutshell; and the quatrains
before the quotation were hardly less poignant in their appeal, though
Denis's "new mistress" was not war but wealth. Ah, if it had been war!
And war was already in the whole air of England; but on the gold-fields
there was no reason to think him other than safe and sound.
So powerfully was she affected and inspired that Nan showed the lines to
her father that night. It had often troubled her that he must think ill
of Denis; that was a more hurtful thing than thinking ill of him
herself--who had the right. So she showed the open book to Mr. Merridew,
counting unconsciously on his sentimental side, and not in vain.
"There," she said, "that is what I have been wanting to say for him all
these weeks. There speaks Denis himself. He has called to me from the
other end of the world. I was thinking of him when I went for a book,
and I put my hand on this one, and I opened it at this place!"
Mr. Merridew was full of sympathy--a quality in which he was rarely
deficient when there was trouble in the air; besides, he cherished the
most genuine desire for his daughter's happiness. If she could be happy
believing in Dent, well and good, and it might all come right yet. The
great thing was that despite her energies she had been pensive and wan
for many a day, but that now she was flushed and bright.
"Believe in him, dear!" she whispered in her father's ear, her arm round
his neck.
"I always did, Nan," he answered, stroking her hair.
"No, not always; but you did once, and you will again."
"Very well, Nan."
"From this moment!"
"No; not from this moment," said Mr. Merridew, characteristically
seeking to justify his former asseveration, "when not for a single
moment have I ceased to bless him for preserving my darling's life. How
could I disbelieve in him in my heart after that? If I have ever done so
it has been when I have seen you sad and sorry. But when I think of all
he did for you----"
"Don't; please don't!"
Her face was hidden against him. He might have felt its heat. But it was
in the plain troubles only that he was a sympathetic man.
"But I must," he rejoined cheerily. "We must not forget all he did, and
I am afraid we have. Why, Nan, what is it?"
"I am going."
"But why? What have I said?"
"Nothing--nothing--only I wish he had let me drown--I wish that!"
And with this hard saying the girl was gone, with tears that puzzled
John Merridew to his dying day, and flaming cheeks that dried them as
they ran.