MR. MARSTON GOES TO CHURCH.
The affairs of Mr. John Adrian having been thoroughly investigated, it
was found that the tremendous call already made by the liquidators of
the Great Blankshire Bank would sweep away so much of his capital that,
after clearing off other outstanding liabilities, he would have an
income of about £200 a year from all sources wherewith to enjoy himself
for the remainder of his days, support his wife, maintain his daughter,
and keep a little girl and a dog, that daughter’s _protégés._ Since the
crash, however, one item in this catalogue had been removed. Mr. Edward
Marston had very generously offered to take Ruth off her father’s
hands.
Marston and Ruth were discussing the future together one morning, and
naturally Gertie’s unfortunate position had to be considered.
‘Whatever shall I do about Gertie, Ned?’ said Ruth. ‘I can’t leave her
a burden upon poor papa now, and I can’t turn her out and desert her,
for it was really my fault that she lost her home.’
‘A pretty home!’ answered Marston. ‘But I have no cause to speak
against it, for it was there I met you, Ruth. I often wonder if things
would have turned out as they have but for that chance meeting.’
‘I wonder,’ said Ruth, with a far-away look in her beautiful eyes. ‘Oh,
Ned, do you know I often think how strange it was that poor Gertie
should be the means of bringing us together again! I never thought,
when I took pity on a poor neglected little girl in the Dials, that my
reward was to be so great. We owe a good deal to Gertie.’
‘Of course we do, my darling, and so we won’t be ungrateful. I tell you
what, Ruth, if you wish it, Gertie and Lion shall come and live with
us.’
‘Oh, you dear, good boy, do you really mean it?’
‘Of course I do. Do you think I couldn’t see that you were worried
about the child?’
Ruth was delighted at Marston’s plan, for she really had been troubled
about Josh Heckett’s grand-daughter. She knew that her mother and
father were to make their home with them, but she had not dared to
broach the subject of Girtie. It seemed like trespassing on Marston’s
generosity.
John Adrian had accepted Marston’s offer very gratefully, but it had
been somewhat difficult to explain matters to Mrs. Adrian, or to
persuade her to consent to the arrangement.
Ruth had put it in a very nice filial way. She had pleaded that she
could not bear to be separated from her parents or to leave them in
their old age, and that, as Ned was agreeable, it would be so nice for
them all to live together.
‘And besides, mamma,’ she added, ‘look what a saving it will be to us
all to have a nice large house between us.’
‘Ah, yes, that’s all very well,’ answered Mrs. Adrian; ‘but who’s to be
mistress? You know, my dear, I have my little fancies, and so have you.
It won’t do for me to tell the servants one thing and you to tell them
another. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, and perhaps cause
words between you and your husband.’
‘Oh, nonsense, mamma!’ said Ruth, with a little laugh. ‘You shall have
your own apartments, and one day I’ll be mistress and the next day you
shall. There—won’t it be fun!’
‘I don’t know, my dear. I’m too old to play at keeping house.’
Ruth persisted in her attempts to make the old lady enter into her
plans, and at last she succeeded.
Mrs. Adrian was secretly gratified by her daughter’s unwillingness to
be separated from her, and she was flattered by Marston’s plea that she
would be so useful to two young housekeepers.
A new house was to be taken, and she was asked to fix the locality. She
was to help choose the furniture, and her voice was to be paramount in
everything.
Their plan succeeded admirably. In about a fortnight the old lady was
heard to talk about ‘my new house,’ and in three weeks it was Ruth and
Marston who were to be specially favoured by being allowed to live in
it.
Marston was delighted. He was positively enthusiastic over curtains and
carpets, and he ran about with long lists of domestic requirements in
his pockets with the glee of a child who is buying ornaments for a
Christmas-tree.
He was in the first glow of a new happiness—the happiness of doing
something to benefit his fellow-creatures. He was secretly delighted
that the Adrians were ruined. It would be a pleasure to him to support
them, to make their later days happy.
As to Ruth, he worshipped her. Never had damsel more devoted swain; and
she, thinking of his many deeds of kindness to her and hers, would
often lift up her eyes with thankfulness to heaven and thank God for
giving her the love of so loyal and devoted a man. And to think she had
once doubted him, believed him a bad, wicked man at the very time when
he was nobly atoning for the follies of his neglected, over-tempted
youth!
Marston saw a good deal of Gertie now, and he took a new interest in
the child. Now and then she would talk of the old life in Little Queer
Street, and of her grandfather, and the animals, and of the strange
gentlemen who used to come there.
Seeing the child so constantly, Marston’s thoughts often reverted to
her strange career and the life histories bound up in it.
What he knew of Gertie he had never breathed to Ruth. His shot at Gurth
Egerton had been a chance one, but it had evidently hit home.
When he found that Gurth had gone away and left the coast clear, he
felt sure that something he had said had seriously alarmed him.
As Gertie grew more and more into the young lady, Marston recognised
more than ever the likeness to the man who had come to a violent end in
Josh Heckett’s gambling den.
Intuitively he felt that Gertie was a thorn in Gurth’s side. For her to
be living in his (Marston’s) house, his ward, as it were, would be a
strange revolution of the wheel of fate. He felt, moreover, that it
would be galling to Gurth. He did not forget that Gurth had once
expressed a desire to do something for Gertie himself.
He determined as soon as he was married and had settled down that he
would try and find out a little more than he knew at present of the
child’s antecedents and of the circumstances of Ralph’s death.
Birnie undoubtedly knew a good deal more than he pretended to and
Birnie was not so thick with Gurth for nothing.
Marston remembered that Gurth had confessed it was he who had paid the
five hundred pounds Birnie had given him on his return from America.
‘Birnie knows something,’ he said to himself, and I’m not at all sure
that Gertie s name wouldn’t figure in his secret if it were revealed.
I’m not only doing the right thing in taking care of the child, but
‘believe I’m doing a very judicious thing. She may be a capital buffer
one of these days if Mr. Gurth Egerton should come running on to my
line in defiance of the danger signals.’
So it was finally settled that Gertie, and Lion should be figures in
Ruth’ s new home.
Apart from all other selfish consideration, Marston comforted himself
with the idea that if he had driven the child’s natural guardian out of
the country, he was with poetic justice providing for her himself.
The more he thought of Gertie, the more it seemed to him that she was
to be a central figure in his future.
Heckett, Gurth, Ruth—the new life and the old, both were bound up with
this pretty blue-eyed girl of eleven, who had come to gentle Ruth
Adrian to save Edward Marston from peril, and who was to find her
future home beneath Edward Marston’s roof.
The arrangements for the wedding progressed rapidly, the new house was
taken and furnished, and gradually the day approached when Ruth’s old
home would be broken up and a new life would commence for them all.
Marston was happy when he was with Ruth, but at home by himself he had
occasional fits of despondency. The gold robbery kept cropping up in
various shapes and forms. Now and again there was a paragraph in the
papers stating that the detectives were on the track, and that the deed
was ascribed to a gang of accomplished swindlers who had long defied
detection.
Marston never read these rumours without experiencing a feeling of
terror which it took him some time to banish. It was not for his own
fate he trembled—it was the idea of Ruth finding herself mated to a
felon.
He banished the thought with a supreme effort. He flung the vision of
the future from him with an oath.
‘I _will_ be happy!’ he cried. ‘I can’t think what’s come to me. I
never knew what fear was till now.’
Ruth wished to be married quietly, and Marston was quite agreeable.
They had no friends they wished to invite. Gertie was to be the only
bridesmaid. Marston was asked whom he should have for best man. That
puzzled him. He hadn’t a friend in the world he would care to stand by
his side when he took sweet Ruth Adrian to be his partner in the
journey that lay before him.
No link should be there to connect the old life with the new.
He said he would think about it, and he did. After much cogitation he
came to the conclusion that he couldn’t have one at all.
The idea worried him. He knew then that all his life long he had never
made a friend whom he dare introduce into the little family circle from
which he was taking the chief ornament.
‘We’ll have the wedding very quiet, my darling,’ he said. ‘I won’t have
a best man. Gertie can be your bridesmaid, and with your father to give
you away, and your mother to say the responses loud, that’s all the
company we shall want. We shall be happy enough by ourselves.’
Ruth was quite willing. But there was one point which Marston didn’t
care about, but on which Mrs. Adrian was firm. He wanted to be married
by license, but Mrs. Adrian insisted that they should be asked in
church, and Marston could not offer any determined opposition.
On the first Sunday that the banns were published, Ruth made Marston
promise to go to church with her.
He went.
As he passed into the sacred edifice a strange chill came to his
heart—a sensation of dread stole over him.
He could not account for it. Something in the quiet of the place, in
the reverent attitude of the worshippers, in the sonorous and musical
voice of the officiating priest, pleading to an unseen power in the
poetic and soul-stirring language of the Prayer-book; indeed, the whole
service impressed and pained him.
He had been a scoffer all his life. He had lived in an atmosphere not
so much of unbelief as of indifference. Sitting by the side of Ruth
Adrian, bowing his head mechanically with the rest, he found himself
repeating the cry for mercy of the Litany, ‘Lord have mercy upon us,
miserable sinners,’ and he felt awe-stricken as he thought of the
ghastly reality of such a prayer upon his lips.
He sat dreamily and moodily through the after part of the service. He
heard his name given out coupled with Ruth’s, and he almost expected
some one to leap up from among the congregation and cry aloud that
there was indeed just cause and impediment why these two should not be
joined together in holy matrimony.
He would have rushed out of the building had he dared, for he felt that
he was challenging Heaven.
When the clergyman ascended the pulpit and gave out the text for the
sermon, he singled out Marston by the merest accident in the world, and
preached straight at him. The text was from Proverbs, ‘The way of
transgressors is hard.’
The preacher was earnest and eloquent. He drew a powerful picture of
the life of the evildoer here below. He showed how amid a show of
outward happiness the canker-worm was always present to prey upon the
heart of the evildoer. He painted in vivid colours the fate of men who
transgressed in their desire for wealth and pleasure; and he concluded
a powerful sermon by declaring that often, in attaining the prize for
which he had steeped his soul in sin, the transgressor did but grasp
the instrument of his own undoing, and find his bitterest punishment
where he had looked for his greatest happiness.
Every word fell upon Edward Marston’s heart with cruel force. His eyes
were riveted on the preacher, and it seemed to him as though he had
been singled out and denounced—as though in this sacred edifice, on the
very threshold of his new life, the voice of offended Heaven had
uttered his condemnation.
He gave a deep sigh of regret when he found himself once more in the
open air. Ruth took his arm, and they walked home together, for Marston
was to dine with them.
He shook off the feeling of despondency and dread that had come upon
him, and managed, with a great effort, to hide his low spirits from the
company.
But when Ruth sat with him by the window that evening as the shadows
deepened, and the holy calmness of a Sabbath eve crept over the quiet
streets, and talked to him lovingly and hopefully of the future, his
thoughts were far away. He was thinking of the preachers words, and
wondering what punishment fate held for him in the days to come.