WHAT THE WAVES WHISPERED.
There is no sadder sound in nature than the plashing of the waves on a
lonely shore in the twilight of a calm evening. As nothing more mournful
can well be seen than an expanse of sand stretching away to the far-out
tide under the first glimpse of light, so there is something melancholy
beyond expression in that perpetually recurring sob with which the sea
flings itself upon the land.
The sound is not soothing because it is intermittent, and the ear aches
with waiting for its return. It lacks the fury of tempest, and
consequently fails to kindle the imagination. Not even the soughing of
autumn winds amongst the trees is so plaintive and depressing as the
moaning of the sea. One could almost fancy that spirits haunted the
shore, and kept weeping and making lamentations bitter, though low. The
cry of the bittern cutting through the night is weird and sorrowful
enough, but it does not sink the soul with such a burden of utter
depression as that caused by the long drawn-out sigh of the quiet sea.
There are special times and particular moods of mind when, even to those
who love the ocean best, the monotonous lament I have tried to describe
becomes almost unendurable. It recalls unpleasant memories of the past,
it awakens dismal forebodings concerning the future, it shadows the
present with a mantle of gloom, and it tinges every thought and
recollection with a touch of involuntary superstition. In darkness and
loneliness people grow fanciful and imaginative. Provide melancholy with
a calm evening, a quiet shore, and the sea lapping in upon the sands,
and the solitary muser becomes her victim with scarce a struggle.
Melancholy, at all events, held Grace Moffat captive as she walked
slowly back from the Lone Rock, thinking as she went.
Given youth, beauty, health, fortune, should not her thoughts have been
pleasant? To all outward appearance Grace Moffat had not a care; and, in
reality, any trouble she might feel arose principally, if not entirely,
from her high ideal of life’s responsibilities, from her intense
sympathy with the sins, sorrows, and perplexities of her
fellow-creatures.
Through the gathering darkness she sauntered slowly homeward, and her
thoughts brooded thus: “Beauty! what does it profit? Has it won for me a
single true heart? Wealth! what use have I made of it hitherto, of what
avail shall it prove in the future? Youth! it passes away, it is gone in
an hour; whilst the soft green buds of April open into leaf, behold May
comes on us unawares; and almost ere we can scent the perfume of the
hawthorn, June’s roses are blooming, have bloomed, are dead. Friends!
they die, they change, they leave us. The plans and the projects of
life, they are either incapable of fulfilment, or our power is not
competent to perfect them. The hopes, the dreams, the aspirations of
early spring are chilled, dispelled, disappointed, ere the first breath
of winter has frosted over the fair landscape. And what is left?” the
girl reflected, pausing as she asked the question.
Slowly and solemnly the waves swept in upon the shore, and then,
flinging out a wreath of foam, retreated with a sob.
“The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together,” Grace
murmured.
She was not free from the vice of quoting half-texts of Scripture and
fancifully adapting them to personal impressions, which is the
speciality of young people, but from which persons who are older and
ought to know better are often unable altogether to excuse themselves.
Even the sea seemed to her imagination to be in pain.
“What is the matter with me to-night, I wonder?” she marvelled. It was
not altogether the long, slow sweep of the tide; it was not the
remembrance of an ideal existence still unfulfilled, destined possibly
never to be fulfilled, it was something conceived by regret and
repentance which struggled within her for expression.
The tones of Nettie’s voice, full at times of the bitterness of
suppressed grief, at others of the pathetic tenderness of unshed tears,
of unspoken suffering, had pierced Grace’s heart; and, mingling with the
feelings of impotent regret which she expressed for the sorrow
golden-haired Annette had wrought for herself, came other memories, of a
man who had loved her very dearly, in whose voice she had once heard the
same agony of repressed emotion, who, in the gathering twilight, with
the scent of the flowers floating on the evening air, and the sound of
the waters creeping in upon the shore, had received his final answer,
and said “Good-bye” and “God bless you, Grace!” in the same breath.
Yes, he had loved her; Grace felt Nettie was right in this. Let her
fortune have exercised as large an influence as it might, he must have
entertained perhaps as true an affection for her as she had ever
inspired.
“But he has got over that long, long ago,” she said to herself, with a
faint, cynical smile which the darkness concealed. “How will it be with
them all, though, if his father loses Woodbrook?”
How, indeed! Grace had already traced the outlines of a picture, the
grouped figures in which and the grim accessories whereof filled her
with dismay. She had not evolved it altogether out of the intricacies of
her imagination, for once upon a time she chanced to behold a family
party who might well enough have sat for the Rileys of the possible
future.
This was before Mrs. Hartley left Kingslough, when it struck that lady
duty required a visit to be paid to a certain Mrs. Wallace, of whose
hospitality she and the late Mr. Hartley had partaken when the Wallaces
lived near Glenwellan. With that curious fancy for returning to the
scenes of bygone greatness which is characteristic of those whose
greatness has been of a limited and local description, the family one
summer decided on reuniting and “taking the sea” at Kilcurragh. Thither
Mrs. Hartley invited Grace to accompany her; and Grace, though she hated
a covered car, and that covered car a hired one, with a hatred which can
only be appreciated by those who loathe that species of conveyance,
consented.
Mrs. Hartley, who would neither make use of her friends’ carriages, nor
keep one herself, hired a car for the expedition, and on the way
entertained Grace with the exposition of those practical ideas for which
she was famous.
First, she recited the glories of the Wallace family. She rehearsed the
horses they rode, the carriages they drove, the servants they employed,
the hangers-on they maintained. She described the dinners, where nothing
was lacking save solvency; the open house, which provided everything for
every one save peace of mind for the owners.
Nor were the glories of “The Castle” forgotten; the attire of Mrs.
Wallace when she attended successive parties at the absurd little Dublin
Court, more ridiculous in its way than the courts of petty states abroad
which have only about five pounds a week of revenue to maintain their
magnificence, was duly described. As beads and rum to the Indian squaws
and chiefs, so Dublin Castle to those Irish ladies and gentlemen who
could never hope to enter Buckingham Palace; and the analogy had not
failed to strike so keen and bitter an observer of Hibernian character
as Mrs. Hartley.
“But how did the ruin come about?” asked Grace, wearying of the
detestable sideway motion of the car and her companion’s satire. “What
had these unhappy people done or left undone that they should be poor as
you say?”
“How did the ruin come about?” Mrs. Hartley repeated, putting on her
judicial look and her black cap before pronouncing sentence upon the
sins and shortcomings of those “misguided Irish Wallaces.” “My dear, how
does ruin come about? It comes through folly or misfortune, or
carelessness or thoughtlessness, which are in England synonymous terms
for reckless hospitality, mad dissipation, unwarrantable expenditure,
and utter selfishness. In this country, which may some day be a great
and wonderful country, but not till it is repeopled, re-religioned,
recropped, rebuilt, and remodelled, you have a somewhat coarse proverb
about foolish people who eat the calf out of a cow. Grace, child, in
Ireland everybody is either starving the cow or eating the calf. The
Wallaces ate the calf, as the Somerfords ate theirs, as fifty others I
could name devoured it, feet, head, and tail.”
“And they lost everything,” said Grace sorrowfully.
“They ate the calf, and then the cow, and then the cow’s pasture,” Mrs.
Hartley replied. “They kept open house till after the bailiffs came;
they danced, feasted, dressed, kept up an appearance to the last with a
courage worthy of a better cause; then came the collapse; the girls were
invited to stay ‘with friends;’ the young men ‘got appointments;’ the
father and mother went away for the benefit of Mr. Wallace’s health.
Then the place was sold; Lord Ardmorne bought it; then we knew Mr.
Wallace was living on his wife’s small fortune; then we heard the boys
had gone to the bad, as all such boys do; then we understood the young
ladies were governesses and companions, _voilà tout_.”
“Do you think they will like to see you?” Grace asked, feeling that if
she were in the Wallaces’ position her spirits would not be particularly
elated by the visit.
“I cannot tell whether they will care to see me,” answered Mrs. Hartley,
“but I know they will be glad to say I have called. The
twelve-and-sixpence this expedition must cost me would have been better
in their pockets, no doubt, but there is a difficulty about suggesting
an idea of that kind. The young ladies occasionally send me purses and
useless articles of a similar description to dispose of amongst my
friends, but as I have no friends who would buy them—at least, as I
should be very sorry to ask my friends to do anything of the sort—I send
my own money to the fair sellers and the goods to the next bazaar held
for charitable or religious purposes. It is always a pity for the
children of the last owner in such a case as this; for them all the
harass, all the mortification, all the petty shifts, all the
contemptible meannesses which genteel poverty is forced to practise; for
them no cakes and ale, other people have had all that before they were
thought of.”
“It is very hard for them,” Grace agreed; and she thought it eminently
hard for the Wallaces when she found them “taking holiday” in poor
lodgings, where they could have only one sitting-room, filled at low
water with a fine odour of wholesome tar, and unwholesome sea and land
waif and decaying fish; when she beheld the once burly, reckless squire,
who had ridden after the hounds so long as he could feed a hunter; who
had sung the best song, told the best story, been the most jovial
companion of any man in the county, sitting drearily in an easy-chair by
the window, dressed in old clothes that hung about his body, amusing
himself by looking through a telescope little bigger then a child’s
plaything at the vessels in the offing.
And then there was the mother, careworn and prematurely old, dispensing
tea, the last hospitable offer possible for her to make in their altered
circumstances, too genuine a gentle-woman to apologize for the poverty
of their surroundings, too absolutely a woman not to feel the change of
position bitterly; the girls making the best of things and their
holidays at the same time; talking of the kindness of the friends with
whom they had been “staying,” of the pleasant places they had seen, of
the great people, far enough away from Kilcurragh and their real life
you may be sure—they had met.
But there were gray streaks in Miss Wallace’s hair, though any one, to
have heard her talk, might readily have imagined she had really spent
the years since her father left Glenwellan in travelling about for her
own pleasure, and visiting on equal terms the nobility and gentry of the
United Kingdom; whilst the beauty, the youngest, had lost her looks, and
it was hopeless that even the size and colour of her once celebrated
eyes should yet win her a husband rich enough and foolish enough to try
to reinstate her family in their former rank.
Pitiful—yes, indeed it was—to see the struggle those people waged
between trying to forget the privations of their actual present
and striving to remember the adventitious glories of their
best-to-be-forgotten past.
Terrible! ay, truly, the fight to preserve appearances, to keep up a
semblance of their old position by means of that rank impostor called
genteel poverty; as if poverty could ever be genteel, as though the
moment it tried to be any thing besides respectable, it did not stand a
good chance of becoming disreputable.
All the depth of this reverse Grace had seen with her own eyes, all the
comments which friends, enemies, and acquaintances could make upon it
she had heard with her own ears, and though none of the Rileys,
excepting John and the General, had ever been prime favourites with this
favoured one of fortune, still there was something dreadful in the bare
idea of people who had once held up their heads in the land exchanging
the anxieties of how to keep a fine estate for the worse trouble of
considering how to provide daily bread. John would have to maintain
them; but then, unless he was doing remarkably well, how could he
compass that if he were ever to marry? Perhaps he never would marry,
though that seemed an unlikely solution of the difficulty. Perhaps some
of his sisters might marry, which, considering the state of Ireland and
their fortunes, and the extreme disproportion of marriageable girls and
marrying men, seemed more unlikely still.
Suddenly a fresh idea struck Grace. The girls would go to India. Why had
not they gone before? All girls who had no money and any relations in
India went there, and they all married well, and came home, according to
Mrs. Hartley, lazy and delicate.
But then perhaps John, who had peculiar and straitlaced notions
concerning women, would object to engage with his sisters in a
matrimonial speculation of that description; and indeed Grace felt no
doubt he would. Well, then, so long as he remained single, if the worst
came to the worst, in other words, supposing Woodbrook were lost, he
would be able to contribute to the support of his family; and when he
married, his wife would ask one of the girls to go and live with them.
Then, supposing that one girl married well, she could invite another to
stay with her, and so the whole family would in due time be provided
for.
It was not a nice way, perhaps, of getting over the difficulty; but
still, when people get very poor, and the choice lies between marrying a
stranger and entering a strange family as governess, people generally
choose, when practicable, to marry the strange man.
Grace had seen such cases, and had heard of many others, which set her
wondering whether, in the event of her fortune making wings for itself,
she could bring herself to contemplate a _mariage de convenance_.
No, she decided. She would rather go out as a governess or seek a
situation as companion. Some people may say this showed she knew rather
less of governesses and companions even than of marriage, but I think it
was true for all that.
Spite of her money, her apparent worldliness, her determination to have
no man for lover or husband who should not be able to bring as much in
the way of fortune at least as she, Grace Moffat was really made of that
sort of flesh and blood to whom the idea of being sold, or selling
itself, is utterly and totally repugnant, impossible of achievement. She
could, had reverses come, have earned her living as a governess, for she
was very fond of children, loved them in the abstract, loved them
practically; or she might have tried to humour the whims of sickness,
and lighten the cares and ailments of age, for she had a high sense of
duty, a keen comprehension of an often forgotten truth that when
anything is given much has frequently to be returned, but she could not
have married for a home.
There is not much praise perhaps due to her for this. Marriage and love,
like many other things, are to a great extent matters of feeling. Her
feeling concerning them was strong. For instance, when once she found
Mr. Robert Somerford had been playing at fast and loose with her, not
all the titles in England, not all the money in the Bank of Ireland,
could have reconciled her to his suit.
It was quite on the cards she might make an insane match some day, and
repent it to the last hour of her life; but at all events she would not
make it with her eyes open.
For these and other reasons the notion of John Riley’s sisters going out
to India to establish themselves as he had done, to seek his fortune,
did not recommend itself to her sentiments, but it did to her common
sense. After all, there was nothing so exceptionally refined about the
Misses Riley as to render the idea repugnant to them. Why, then, did
they not, had they not gone? Grace could only solve the problem in one
way. John did not wish them to go—poor John—dear old plain-featured
John? why could he not have been content and liked her as she liked him?
Why had he gone away and left his father in the hands of the
Philistines? Of course she should write to Mrs. Hartley. What could Mrs.
Hartley do, what would she say?
Altogether it was so astounding a thing to contemplate, even the
possibility of Mr. Brady ousting out the Rileys and ensconcing himself
in the Woodbrook nest, that Grace’s mind refused to accept it as a
possibility. Nevertheless she could not help wondering whether, in the
event of the Rileys leaving, the next tenant would paint the entrance
gates and repair the lodge.
“If John were at home, I should ask him to have the trelliswork on the
West Lodge nailed up,” thought Grace; “but of course, as he is not, I
dare not mention the matter to any one.”
People who have plenty of money are able to attend to details which to
people who have only plenty of worry seem maddeningly small.
The latter, under the pressure of great trouble, consider trifles as of
no importance, never thinking that trifles to the world are as straws,
showing which quarter the winds of fortune blow from.
Spite of these incongruities of thought, however, the very idea of Mr.
Brady taking possession of Woodbrook seemed like a hideous nightmare.
That he should step into the Castle Farm was bad enough, but that he
should also annex Woodbrook appeared impossible.
Nevertheless Nettie had assured her such a change of owners was not
merely possible, but probable; and if this were really the case, and
Grace’s common sense saw no reason to doubt the fact, steps ought
immediately to be taken to avert such a calamity.
But how were they to be taken, and by whom? If, next day, Mrs. Hartley
were put in possession of the facts, what would she do? what could she
do if she would?
It was Nettie who had suggested Mrs. Hartley, but the result of Grace’s
musings tended towards consulting her father.
He was a man, and, spite of her anti-matrimonial views, Grace had more
faith in the capabilities of men than of women; of late she and her
father had been much more together than was hitherto the case; her
cousin was gone, and neither Mr. Moffat nor his daughter strove to fill
her place with another companion.
They were happier alone. People said Grace was growing like her father,
and that as she got older she would feel as great a distaste for general
society as he; but this was not quite true; Grace loved long quiet
walks, but the company of her fellows had its charms for her as well.
Still she and her father had dovetailed into companionship. Her
enthusiasm had fitted itself somehow naturally into his indifference.
She was content he should laugh at her. He was more than content perhaps
to tolerate her impetuosity, her indiscriminate charity, her wide
sympathy with, and ready inclination to help, the poor.
If study had taught him as little as it usually does most scholars of
things likely to be useful in daily life, it had at least imbued him
with toleration towards his own daughter.
It enabled him to draw inferences about her which a less educated man
would have arrived at by means of intuition.
Had she been more selfish, less unsophisticated, would she have loved
him so much, herself so little? He had but one trouble about her, she
was a very lonely maiden. Before he went he would like to have seen her
married.
To whom? That was the difficulty. After Robert Somerford’s defection, he
could not, looking around on the various men who aspired to his
daughter’s hand, look upon one of them with favour.
“Well,” he reflected, “single happiness is better than double misery,
nevertheless I could wish to have seen my Grace the wife of some honest
gentleman ere this.”
Honest gentlemen, however, are always a little shy about trying to win
heiresses, and so father and daughter, having been thrown much together
of late, had learned to understand each other better and love each other
more.
For which reason Grace resolved to take Mr. Moffat into her confidence.
If she told him she was not at liberty to name her informant, he would
trouble her with no questions, and his daughter had an instinctive
feeling that, if by any means Woodbrook could be preserved to the
Rileys, he would find that means.
He had been willing to help her in the matter of the Scotts, and only
failed to do so because it was a matter in which no help could be given.
He would be able perhaps to make some useful suggestions, at any rate
she would talk the matter over with him.