FAIR STILL, BUT FAIR FOR NO ONE SAVING ME.
CYRIL would have liked to follow the mysterious lady, but that would
have been too discourteous; so he wandered listlessly in the streets of
St. Malo for another hour or so, not knowing what to do with himself,
and finally came to a standstill at an office on the outskirts of the
town, whence a diligence started every afternoon for Dol.
‘Dol,’ he said. ‘What is Dol? I was never at Dol. I wonder if there is
anything worth seeing at Dol, and if it be possible that Beatrix can
have gone there?’
While he was wondering a hired fly drove up, containing the lady in
the gray mantle, and a number of parcels of different kinds and sizes.
The driver of the diligence went forward to receive the lady and her
parcels. She was evidently a frequent patron of his conveyance. He
took pains to instal her carefully in the wretched interior.
‘I’ll go to Dol,’ decided Cyril. ‘I am bent on finding out who and what
this woman is. It will be only the loss of a day, and I shall have time
to think out my plan for finding Beatrix.’
It was foolish, perhaps, he thought afterwards, to be so easily
diverted from his path; but then the fact was that he had no path
to take--he was fairly at a standstill. He could do no good by
perambulating the streets of St. Malo. Dol was a place to explore--the
chances against finding Beatrix there were as ninety-nine in a hundred
perhaps--but it would be one town checked off the map of Europe, and he
might be able to find out something about his mysterious sick nurse. So
Cyril mounted to the seat beside the driver, where he had the shelter
of an ancient leather hood to protect him from the wind, and where he
felt very easy in his mind about the lady in the gray mantle. She could
not escape him on the road.
He questioned the driver about his passenger, but the man could tell
him nothing except that the lady lived at Dol, and that she came into
St. Malo once a week to make her purchases. He could not say how long
she had lived there, as he had been only driving the diligence for a
month.
They drove through lanes and past fields and orchards which were
entirely Devonian in their aspect, halted at a village which was
quainter and more picturesque, and, sooth to say, a little dirtier
than a Devonshire village, and finally arrived, as the shades of
evening were falling, at Dol, which impressed Cyril at first sight
as the dullest town he had ever beheld. He knew Sandwich in Kent, he
had visited Stamford in Lincolnshire, he had even seen Southend out
of the Cockney season, but Dol had a more utterly deserted look than
any of these. There were some fine mediæval buildings, there was a
grand cathedral with two towers, one of which had been left unfinished
in the Middle Ages. There were interesting courts and crannies and
corners--but Melancholy had claimed Dol for her own. The country
round looked flat and depressing--the outskirts of the town were arid
and dusty--the modern houses had that intensely new and unfinished
aspect peculiar to French architecture; and all ambitious attempts at
improvement looked as if they had been nipped in the bud.
There was one rather pretty-looking house, in a small walled garden,
and before the door of this garden the diligence stopped, and the lady
in the gray mantle alighted. A French maid-servant opened the gate and
ran out to take the traveller’s parcels, and then mistress and maid
went in at the door, and the walled garden swallowed them up.
The diligence deposited Cyril at an old inn in a small square not far
from the cathedral, a good old house enough, where all things were
cleanly and comfortable, and where he found a good-natured landlady,
who was quite ready to answer his questions while he waited for the
_table d’hôte_ dinner.
He described the white house in the walled garden just outside the
town, and asked if she could tell him anything about its inmates.
It was a house which let itself garnished, she told him, the owner
being a merchant at Rennes, who only came to Dol occasionally, because
it was his birthplace. Of its present inmates Madame knew nothing. She
did not even know that it was let. It had been long unoccupied. She
excused herself for this ignorance on the ground that she went out so
seldom. The house, and then the kitchen occupied all her time, not to
speak of her two little angels, who were exacting, like all children.
Of the two little angels, one was then squalling lustily in the
adjoining kitchen, while the other hung to its mother’s gown and
scowled at the stranger.
‘Have you had many English visitors this season?’ Cyril inquired.
‘Oh yes, Monsieur, a crowd. The English love so much our Brittany--and
Dol is the first town in Brittany. It is interesting to the traveller
were it only for that reason.’
‘Naturally. Since September now--the end of September--can you recall
any English visitors, ladies, who have been with you?’
‘But no, Monsieur. After September our season is over. It is late. We
have had no English ladies since then.’
‘There are other hotels at Dol, I suppose?’
‘Yes, Monsieur, but this is the first.’
Cyril dined with a few sleepy-looking inhabitants, and a couple of
sub-lieutenants from the neighbouring barracks, and after his dinner
went to look at the cathedral, which had a shadowy grandeur by the
light of a few solitary lamps burning here and there before a shrine.
After this he was glad to go to bed, having slept very little on board
the St. Malo steamer. He put Christian Harefield’s letter under his
pillow.
He was up before daybreak next morning, and was out with the first
streak of pallid light in the east. He went first to look at the house
which had swallowed up the lady in the gray mantle. He made a circuit
of the garden-wall, but discovered nothing except that there were
poultry on the premises, a fact imparted to him shrilly by a peculiarly
energetic cock, apparently of the bantam breed, so eager was he, like
all small creatures, to assert his importance. There was no indication
of the life within to be drawn from the blank white wall, the closed
venetians of the upper windows, or the gilded vane upon the roof.
Neighbours there were none. So he left the spot no wiser than when he
had approached it.
The morning was lovely, the air balmy, despite the lateness of the
season. It was just that calm, delightful hour when earth seems as
fresh as if the Creator’s work were but newly finished. Cyril set out
on a perambulation of the neighbourhood of Dol. His hostess had talked
to him last night of a certain Mont Dol, as a thing to be seen, so he
went to see what this Mont Dol was like.
He walked for about a couple of miles through a level country, somewhat
Flemish in its character, a country that had only the charm of
rusticity to recommend it. Then he came all at once upon a raw-looking
church, of a commonplace order, a few straggling cottages, and a
steep rugged-looking hill, which rose out of the level plain with an
extraordinary suddenness. He climbed this hill by a rough road, which
dwindled by and by into a narrow winding track, and mounted in the
early sunlight to an undulating heathy hill-top looking wide over
the blue waters of the Channel. On this hill-top there was no human
habitation, only a votive chapel and the white statue of a saint,
looking down upon the quiet hillocks and hollows, the clumps of furze,
and tranquil sheep cropping the dewy grass in the sweet morning air.
He had never looked on a more pleasant scene. The world, life, and all
its cares lay far below him--the blue wood smoke was curling up from
the chimneys of many-gabled Dol, the church tower and its stunted twin
brother, the tower that had never been finished, rose darkly above all
meaner things on the level plain, white sails of passing vessels were
shining yonder against the blue horizon. He felt himself alone upon
this lonely hill, in a serener atmosphere than the air of every-day
life. A saintly hermit of old time might have passed his contemplative
days pleasantly enough in a cell adjoining the chapel yonder.
He rambled round the hill-top, lingering every now and then to look
landward or seaward, for on either side the prospect was full of
beauty. It was a spot where any man, with a genuine love of nature,
might feel that he could spend hours and days of life, alone with his
own thoughts and the peaceful beauty round him. The big bell of Dol
chimed nine, the bright autumn sun climbed higher in the blue clear
sky, a sheep-bell tinkled, an elderly lamb bleated, a little shepherd
boy sang his little nasal song, a late bumble-bee buzzed among late
furze bloom. There were no other sounds.
Cyril made the circuit of the chapel, which was closely locked against
intrusion. He looked at the statue, and turned his face idly seaward
for the twentieth time, thinking within himself how foolishly he was
wasting his day, and how little this perambulation of the Mont Dol
would help him towards the accomplishment of his mission; and as he was
thinking thus, and as he turned from the statue to the sea, he found
himself face to face with something sweeter than the glad blue sea,
dearer than all the wide bright earth, the face of the woman he loved.
She was standing before him, looking at him with a grave sad smile,
dressed in black, and thin and careworn, beautiful only for eyes that
loved her, since she had wasted the freshness of her youth and beauty
in tears and sleepless nights, and untimely cares.
‘Beatrix!’ he cried, with a rush of gladness that almost stifled him.
‘Beatrix, Providence has sent us to meet here. I had sworn to myself to
travel all over the world in search of you.’
‘Why should you want to find me?’ she asked. ‘I thought there were no
two persons on this earth with less reason to wish to meet than you and
I.’
‘I should not have presumed to follow you if I had not a motive strong
enough to excuse my audacity. I have brought you this.’
He took Christian Harefield’s last letter from his pocket, and gave it
her without a word of explanation.
‘From my father!’ she cried, looking at the address, and then tearing
open the envelope with trembling hands. ‘In heaven’s name how did you
come by this letter--from my dead father? You who suspected me----’
Tears choked her. She brushed the hot drops from her eyes, and began to
read the letter.
‘“Sunday night, December 23rd,”’ she began, falteringly.
‘Why, that was the night before his death,’ she cried. ‘Read it for me.
I cannot see the words. They swim before my eyes.’
Cyril stood by her side, reading the letter across her shoulder. He put
his arm round her to hold her up, and she leaned against him trembling,
hardly able to stand.
‘MY POOR CHILD,--When you open this letter you will be fatherless--a
little loss, for I have never been a father to you in anything save
the name. For the last ten years I have been a miserable man, too
miserable to care for my own flesh and blood, all that was good in me
turned to evil.
‘I loved your mother as women are not often loved, with an intense
and concentrated affection that goes hand in hand with intense
jealousy. I do not think it is possible for a man to love as I loved,
and endure the knowledge that his love was unrequited, without having
his nature perverted. My unrequited love engendered suspicion, evil
thoughts, hatred of myself and the thing I loved.
‘By a series of fatalities, which I need not set forth here, I was
led to believe your mother false and unworthy--a degraded woman--a
disgrace to you as she was a dishonour to me. To-night I learn that
she was innocent--that her only sin against me was a sin of my own
creation. She might have loved me, as the years went on, had I shown
myself worthy of her love by trusting her truth and honour. My
jealousy made her life miserable, and my groundless suspicion drove
her from me, to die alone, friendless, hidden in an Italian convent.
‘Knowing what I know, knowing how happiness--the purest and
deepest--was within my reach, and that I let it go, knowing that the
bitterest miseries of my life were engendered in my own perverted
mind, knowing that I made the misery of the being I fondly loved--I
feel that I can no longer support the burden of a life without hope.
Every chain must wear out in time. Mine was worn to attenuation
before to-night--this last blow snaps it. To-morrow, when the world
wakes to its petty round of cares and joys, my troubles will be
over. You will find me as calm as if my life had been all peace.
Saint and sinner are equal in death.
‘God bless you, poor child. May He be kinder to you than your earthly
father has been. Love I could not give you--but the wealth which is
mine to bestow I give you freely. Take warning from my miserable
fate, and do not marry without the certainty that you are beloved.
Your fortune will mark you out as a prey for every adventurer.
‘Should there be an inquiry about my death you can show this letter
to the coroner. Should things pass, as, for your sake, I hope they
may, without comment, let these last words of mine be sacred, the one
only confidence I have ever given to my only child.
‘Enclosed you will find a statement from the principal of the convent
where your ill-used mother spent her last days. It may please you
some day to visit her grave in that lonely spot, and to weep there
for the injuries my love inflicted on her, as I have wept for her
this night, tears of blood, wrung from a heart tortured by vain
remorse.
‘Your erring, unhappy father,
‘CHRISTIAN HAREFIELD.’
‘Do you believe now that I did not murder my father?’ cried Beatrix,
turning to Cyril, with eyes that flashed indignant scorn through her
tears.
‘I never believed otherwise, after we met face to face in the
churchyard. I needed but to see you to know that you were innocent,
and pure, and true. My suspicion was a monster of my own growth--the
offspring of too much thought--and the fear that in winning your love
I should seem a worshipper of mammon. Beatrix, I have been weak and
despicable in this matter. My love should have been strong enough
to withstand even a harder trial. I confess myself unworthy of your
forgiveness, and yet I ask you to forgive me.’
‘Forgive you!’ she said, that changeful face of hers melting from
scorn to tenderness. ‘There is no moment of the past in which you
were not forgiven. I was too ready to make excuses for you. I had no
womanly pride, where you were concerned. It was only when I was made
to believe that you had never cared for me--that from the first you
had liked Bella Scratchell better than me--it was only then that I was
weak enough to listen to Kenrick’s pleading. I thought it mattered so
little what became of me, that I might as well give way. And then, when
the time for our marriage drew near, I knew that I was going to commit
a great sin, and I began to look for some way of escape. I only waited
to arrange the release of Kenrick’s estate. I had made up my mind to
run away before I saw you in the churchyard. You might have spared me
some of your bitter speeches.’
‘Forgive me, beloved, forgive me.’
His arm was round her, her head lying on his breast, his lips bent down
to hers, unreproved. There was no need of many words between them. Both
knew that this chance meeting on the hill-top above the brightening sea
meant eternal reunion. Who should part them now--these twin souls that
had been parted and buffeted by the billows of fate, and had drifted
together again at last? They clung to each other in a silent rapture,
knowing that their hour of happiness had come.
‘I have never been angry with you,’ she faltered at last. ‘Fate has
seemed unkind, not you. I have always believed you good, and true, and
noble--even when you renounced me. Even when I thought that you had
cared for Bella----’
‘Who could have told you that utter falsehood?’
‘It was Bella herself who hinted----’
‘Poor child, don’t you know that people who hint things they dare not
assert are always liars? But Bella is gone, with all her sins upon her
head. I will tell you more of her by and by. It is by her act that
you have suffered. It was she who stole your father’s letter. On her
death-bed----but I will tell you all by and by. You have had too much
agitation already. How pale you are looking! And you are shivering too.
We have been standing too long in this keen air. Let me take you home,
dearest. Do you live far from here?’
‘A good way, but I shall be better presently.’
‘Lean on my arm, love.’
And so supported, Beatrix walked slowly down the narrow track, to the
village at the foot of the hill, and by and by a faint colour came back
to her cheeks, and a happy light shone in her lovely eyes. The clock
struck ten as they passed the church.
‘I came out only for a ramble before breakfast,’ said Beatrix. ‘Poor
Madame Leonard will be wondering what has become of me.’
‘Madame Leonard? Ah, that is your companion.’
‘Yes, the dearest creature in the world. I could never tell you what a
comfort she has been to me--indulging all my caprices--consoling me in
my sorrows--a second mother. And now she and I will go together to see
my own mother’s grave--the convent where she died. I have been already
to see the place of her birth.’
‘My Beatrix, do you think I will ever let you take any journey again
without my company? A man who has lost a jewel and found it again
knows how to guard his treasure. You are mine henceforward--mine till
death--unless you tell me I have forfeited your love.’
‘I could not say anything so false. I have never left off loving you,’
she answered gently. ‘Do not let us talk of the past. Let us forget
it, if we can. When I saw the announcement of poor Kenrick’s death in
the _Times_ I felt myself free--and--I thought--perhaps--some day I
should go back to Yorkshire to see the kind Dulcimers, and my good old
servants--and then--you and I might meet. But I never thought it would
be so soon.’
‘God has been good to us, love. And now tell me, Beatrix, can you bear
to give up your liberty and share the lot of a hard-working parish
priest? Could you bear even to go with me into a busy, smoky town, full
of foulest things--if I felt that duty constrained me to take up my
abode there? Could you endure to live in such a place as Bridford, for
instance? But, I forget, you do not know Bridford.’
‘I could endure life even at Bridford with you.’
‘Ah, but you have never seen the place, love.’
‘I repeat that I could share your life and labours even at Bridford,’
she said, smiling at him.
He gave a little sigh.
‘I am afraid you hardly know what you are promising. Know then,
dearest, that I am in treaty with the Vicar of Bridford, with a view
to getting his living transferred to me. It is a charge for which
he is eminently unfitted. I began some good work there, and left it
unfinished. As vicar I could do much that I vainly attempted as curate.
I should have larger scope, better opportunities. I could get a band of
hard-working young men round me. Yes, I believe I could transform the
place.’
‘I am like Ruth,’ said Beatrix, tenderly. ‘I follow where I love. Your
duties shall be my duties, and your home my home. It shall go hard with
me if I cannot make home pleasant to you, even at Bridford.’
‘And you will be content to see your wealth applied to doing good among
a rough and often ungrateful population?’
‘I can imagine no better use for my wealth.’
‘Would you not rather that we should live at Culverhouse, in that fine
old house, in the midst of that beautiful country? Poor Kenrick’s death
has made Culverhouse mine, you know.’
‘I had rather live where your life can be most useful--noblest--and
where I can help you.’
‘My own dear love, you make me happier than words can say!’
They came to the sleepy old town of Dol, and beyond it to a house half
hidden behind a high white wall. Beatrix opened a green door leading
into a garden, and Cyril followed her, full of wonder, into the very
garden which had swallowed up the lady in the gray mantle.
That very lady came out, through an open window, to receive Beatrix.
‘My love, how you have given me a beautiful fright!’ she cried, in
French; and then, seeing Cyril, stopped and looked confused.
‘Madame Leonard, let me present Mr. Culverhouse. He will stop to
breakfast with us, I dare say, if you ask him.’
‘I begin to understand something,’ said Cyril, looking at Beatrix.
‘Madame Leonard was one of my nurses, though she denied it yesterday.’
‘Pardon!’ exclaimed Madame Leonard. ‘I said that I did not belong to a
nursing sisterhood. I did not say that I had not nursed you.’
And then the little Frenchwoman gave a joyous laugh, out of pure
satisfaction at the new aspect of things, and ran back to the house
to order certain savoury additions to the breakfast, in honour of the
unexpected guest.
‘Madame Leonard was one of my nurses,’ repeated Cyril. ‘And you were
the other. Oh, Beatrix! how could I be so blind?’
‘Dear love, you were in the dark valley of death,’ said Beatrix.
‘It was my sweetest privilege to watch and succour you. I owed all
to Madame Leonard. When I read of your dangerous illness in the
Bridford paper I was wretched at the thought of your loneliness, your
helplessness, and I longed to come to you. Then this dear Madame
Leonard suggested that we should come, in the disguise of nursing
sisters, and take care of you. I should never have dared such a thing
without her help. She arranged all--managed everything--smoothed
away every difficulty. I can never be grateful enough to her for her
goodness in that sorrowful time.’
‘And to think that I should never have guessed! When you went from me
I yearned for you, not knowing why. Your shadowy eyes haunted me, your
image stayed with me like the memory of a dream. Oh, my dearest, my
truest, how can I love you well enough for such love as this?’
They stayed in the wintry garden, talking of the past and the future,
till poor Madame Leonard began to be unhappy about her carefully
arranged breakfast. And then, after she had summoned them three times,
they went in and sat at the snug round table drinking coffee, and
making believe to eat, and arranging what was to be done next.
They were all to go back to Little Yafford together. Cyril and Beatrix
were to be quietly married in the old village church, as soon as the
Bridford living was his. The Water House was to be kept up in all its
old comfort, and Madame Leonard was to be mistress there. It would
serve as a country retreat for the Vicar of Bridford and his wife.
EPILOGUE.
TEN years later, and Sir Cyril Culverhouse and his wife are still at
Bridford, in the good old Queen Anne parsonage, not five minutes’
walk from the lodging where the two nursing sisters came to tend the
fever-stricken curate. It is a fine old house, with red brick walls,
deep-set windows, oak wainscots, broad staircase, and spacious hall
paved with black and white marble, a house which, in the eyes of
previous vicars, had been some compensation for the general smokiness
and unpleasantness of the town. There is a good old garden too, at the
back, which one would hardly expect to find in Bridford--a garden where
the apple trees flourish, and the roses struggle into bloom somehow,
in spite of the smoke, and where the young Culverhouses learn their
lessons in summer, under the direction of Madame Leonard, whom they
adore.
Every July there is a migration to the Water House, much to the
delight of Mrs. Dulcimer, who spoils Beatrix’s children, and believes
religiously that she brought about the match between Cyril and Beatrix.
‘Did I not advise you to go to France after her, Cyril?’ demands the
old lady, triumphantly, ‘and did I not set my heart upon her being Lady
Culverhouse?’
Within the ten years that are gone Cyril has done a great work in
Bridford. That town is no longer a hotbed for the generation of vice,
drunkenness, and fever. Sanitary reform, being a thing within the
scope of human handiwork, has been done by line and rule, while other
reforms, more subtle and secret, have been going on quietly, side by
side with improvements in drainage and ventilation, water service and
cottage building. Large resources have enabled Cyril to do what many
a parish priest yearns in vain to accomplish. He has built streets of
cottages, a club-house, half a dozen reading-rooms, a cottage hospital
ten miles from the town, infant nurseries in every district. Instead of
the one hard-worked curate, employed by his predecessor, he has four
energetic young fellows going about all day long among the labouring
poor, so that there is no corner of the crowded town in which the
influence of the church is not daily felt, a protection against wrong,
a succour in calamity, an incentive to cleanly living.
Once in every year, when the spring flowers are bright in the
hedgerows, and the oaks are yellow with their unfolded leaves, Sir
Cyril and his wife go with their children to Culverhouse Castle. This
is the happiest time of all the year for Beatrix and her children,
the holiday of holidays. They know the country round Culverhouse by
heart. They ride in the forest, and sail on the bright river, and
make yachting excursions to the Wight, and go back to stony-hearted
Bridford refreshed and strengthened by these simple natural pleasures.
At Culverhouse, Beatrix is adored, as poor Kenrick prophesied she would
be--but she is not more honoured or beloved there than by the rough
factory hands of Bridford, where her name is a synonym for goodness.
Mr. Piper lives his life at Little Yafford Park, and spends unheard-of
sums on the improvement of his farm buildings and hothouses. He has
not married again, but has made for himself an idol in the shape of his
farm. He goes on fattening cattle, and sacrificing generation after
generation of pigs, in spite of the denunciations of Mr. Chumney, who
continues to protest that so long as prize cattle are martyred at
the shrine of human vanity the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals is a mockery. Poor Mr. Piper finds a consolation for
past sorrows in the fatness of his oxen and his pigs. His sons and
daughters have grown up. The sons are in different commercial houses,
learning to be merchant princes; the daughters are established at the
Park, in the rooms which Bella beautified. The chief result of an
expensive education at present to be perceived in these young ladies
is a self-sufficiency which makes them despise their father, whom
they publicly reprove for his faulty modes of speech, and his many
deviations from the strict laws of etiquette as laid down by the Misses
Turk. He is proud of his two tall, over-dressed girls, nevertheless,
though not so proud of them as of his pigs, and he endures their
youthful insolence with unvarying good temper. As the years go on he
gets stouter and more puffy, eats more, drinks more, sleeps more, and
more markedly assimilates the manners and customs of his prize porkers;
whereat Chumney shakes his head dolefully, and prognosticates that
Piper will go off some day like the snuff of a candle.
The school at Little Yafford has thriven under Emmanuel Joyce’s care,
and the widow and her son still live happily in the cottage adjoining
the school-house. Emmanuel is not solely dependent on his modest
stipend as parish schoolmaster. He has been successful in his literary
efforts. His books, all written for the young, have become immediately
popular. His style is natural and pleasing, full of life and colour.
That severe self-training he underwent in the days when he fancied
himself a poet has stood him in good stead. His reading has taken a
wider range, under the direction of Clement Dulcimer, and there is a
richness of illustration in his later books that has a charm even for
the unlearned. Mrs. Joyce’s pride in her son is boundless. She would
like to see him married, but has not yet discovered that paragon of
female excellence worthy to be his wife. While she is looking out for
that personification of all the virtues, Emmanuel grows more and more
wedded to his books, his chimney corner, his meerschaum pipe, and the
duties of that station which Providence has allotted to him.
Miss Coyle has departed this life, in the odour of sanctity, and her
memory lives in the minds of Yafford people as a highly genteel person,
who paid ready money for all her small requirements, was strict in her
attendance at the services of her church, never carried a parcel, and
was never seen out of doors without her gloves.
THE END.
J. AND W. RIDER, PRINTERS, LONDON
Corrections
The first line indicates the original, the second the correction.
p. 154
husband’s commercial allies of the past--the Wigzell’s,
husband’s commercial allies of the past--the Wigzells,
p. 192
a great many parties among the Wizgell, Timperley,
a great many parties among the Wigzell, Timperley,