WEDDED.
While baffled in her attempts to bring about an explanation between
Allan and Olive, and to smooth matters over with that wilful young
lady (as she deemed her) and her naturally irritated _fiancé_, Lady
Aberfeldie pushed on vigorously all the arrangements for the marriage
of Sir Paget and the ill-starred Eveline--a marriage for which there
seemed then no other reason than an avaricious desire of grand
settlements and so forth.
All Olive's old pride and petulance (with much of irritation that was
new) seemed to have come back to her, and, until the matter was
cleared up regarding that mysterious visit of Holcroft to Maviswood,
Allan had ceased to speak of marriage, and thus her spirit took fire
at being doubted and humbled.
She shrank, unwisely, from a simple confession that might have
obviated all this, and from revealing the shame and affront to which
this man possessed the power of exposing her.
'I detest riddles, and care not to read them; but the mask she is
wearing--if a mask it be--may prove a costly one for herself and us
all,' thought Lord Aberfeldie and his son too.
'Be content, Allan, to know that I gave that money--a trifle to
me--to Mr. Holcroft in the hope to save us all--especially
myself--from a probable public affront which might destroy me,' said
Olive on one occasion, her eyes flashing through her tears.
'What mystery is this?--what can you have done? how be in his power?
The assertion is absurd!'
'Allan, cannot you trust me?' she asked, fondly and sadly, yet
proudly.
'I know not what to think, but the whole affair looks--looks to
me----'
'How.'
'Well, devilish queer,' said he, as he cut the matter short, and rode
away, on which Olive dried her tears, crested up her head, and looked
defiant.
'If this tiresome couple, Olive and Allan, continue to pout and sulk
at each other,' said Lady Aberfeldie; 'and he should decline to marry
her, her money may be lost to us by her twenty-fifth birthday.'
'Unless----' the lord twisted his moustache and paused.
'Unless what?'
'Allan gets himself killed in Egypt,' replied Lord Aberfeldie, grimly.
'Good heavens, do not say such a thing, even in jest!'
And now, perforce of their present situation, a change had come over
the two cousins, Olive and Eveline--they never read, studied, sung,
rode, or walked together, as they had been wont to do; a blight had
come over both their lives apparently.
Eveline only felt a little at ease when Sir Paget was absent from
her, and even then she was pestered by his love-letters, which, like
those written usually by men of advanced years, were of a grotesquely
impassioned nature. 'Attachments at that age are deeper, and less
anxiety not to compromise oneself is shown and felt,' says an
essayist. 'After fifty, men are often wise enough to vote the
writing of love-letters a bore, but some carry on the practice to a
very advanced age. Their protestations are then ingeniously
flavoured with touches of the paternal, which sometimes entirely
mislead the unsophisticated recipients.'
But the mere sight of Sir Paget's caligraphy, and of his heraldic
note-paper, having a shield with some mysterious design thereon, and
the motto _Puddicombe petit alta!_ (Puddicombe seeks lofty objects),
proved always enough for Eveline, who tossed it into the waste-paper
basket unread, but torn into minute fragments, while a sigh of
weariness and repugnance escaped her.
Evan Cameron loved Allan Graham dearly as a friend, and had naturally
a desire to be on the best terms with him as the brother of the girl
to whom he had given all his heart. Thus, while meeting him daily on
parade and at mess, he was sorely puzzled to account for the change
he felt in Allan's manner to himself, as he knew not that the latter
resented the 'Mrs. Cameron' episode as an insult to Eveline, his
sister.
'I presume you know that my sister is on the point of
marriage--indeed, that the day is fixed?' said Allan, rather grimly,
to him one day as he recalled the circumstance of how Evan greatly
admired, to say the least of it, Eveline, and how her heart had
responded thereto.
Cameron made no reply, but a sudden pallor overspread his handsome,
bronzed face, and all his studied calmness forsook him, while the
memory of past hopes and joys shook his heart as if with a tempest of
remembrance; but, stooping and half turning away to conceal the
expression of his face, he attempted to light a cigar.
'What a sly fellow--a cunning dog--you are!' said Allan, with
irritation of tone.
'In what way do you mean, Allan?' asked Cameron.
'Mean! How dare you ask, after your open admiration of my sister,
Miss Graham, in a man in your position?'
Cameron mistook his meaning; but the mistake failed to rouse any
pride, as his heart was too crushed and sore just then.
'Allan!' he exclaimed, as tears almost welled up in his honest eyes,
'I loved her--I love her still--God alone knows how well, how
desperately, and how hopelessly.'
'Hopelessly indeed,' responded Allan, his cheek now aflame with
anger; 'and you dare to tell me this after all that we know of
yourself and Mrs. Cameron?'
It was now Cameron's turn to look indignant and astonished; but in a
few words he explained all.
'Poor Evan!' said Allan, as he wrung the hand of Cameron, whose head
sank forward, so much was he overcome by emotion; 'I am glad of this
explanation, but it comes too late--if indeed it could ever have
served any purpose so far as your hopes with Eveline are concerned.
In three days she is to be married--and now, let us talk of the
subject no more.'
But for a time black fury gathered in the heart of Cameron at Sir
Paget Puddicombe, whose deductions, however, from all that he saw at
the railway station, were most natural.
'In three days,' he muttered again and again, 'in three days, and she
will be lost to me for ever!'
Eveline as yet was ignorant of her lover's purity and innocence, nor
would the knowledge of it have availed her much. There was a meek
abandonment of her own will--of her own judgment, and Lady Aberfeldie
caressed her more than she had ever done before, glad to find that
she had become--my lady cared not why or how--compliant at last.
She seemed quite passive and supine--resigned, Olive phrased it--and
ready to do her mother's bidding, for Evan Cameron seemed to have
quite passed out of her life, though the name 'Alice' he had uttered
seemed to be ever in her ears.
She heard her mother speaking, and felt her caresses, but her eyes
were suffused by a kind of mist. Yet more than once she had started
amid her apathy, and thought, 'Why am I still here--why don't I run
away to where they will never find me?'
But she had no determining motive to decide her choice of place or
scheme of life, though she felt that ere long, when these last three
days were past, she would have to reconstruct her entire future, and
from that future her heart recoiled and shrank. Her temples throbbed
as she thought of this; her heart seemed alternately to thunder in
her breast, and then to become unnaturally still.
Again and again her mother told her that she would be surrounded by
such wealth as falls to the lot of few; but she cared not for wealth,
nor would it ever remove her gloomy and bitter reflections, and at
the very name of her intended husband, though she evinced no emotion,
a secret and involuntary shudder came over her.
Society was intolerable just then, and she had much of it at
Maviswood. How intolerable seemed lawn-tennis amid the bright
sunshine, the soft thud of the balls upon the racquets, as they were
shot over the nettings from court to court, the laughter of young and
sweet voices, and the cries ever and anon of 'fifteen,' 'thirty,'
'fault,' and so on, as the jovial game progressed; and with evening
came the inevitable dinner-party, and at night the dance.
Allan, fearing to lacerate his sister's heart, knew not how to
undeceive her in the matter of Cameron's supposed duplicity, though
the truth or falsehood thereof could not affect her fate or her
relations with Sir Paget now; but the true story escaped Carslogie
quite casually when in conversation with Olive, who in due time
related it to Eveline, in whose breast it created some very mingled
emotions.
So Evan was innocent, while she had been feeling in her heart all the
passion and pain--yea, a sentiment of vengeance--which women will
feel, when they believe they have been loving unworthily.
Early on her marriage morning she left her bed to think over all
this. Wrapped in a snow-white _peignoir_ (or dressing-robe), with
all her undressed hair floating about her shoulders and blown back by
the warm summer breeze, she sat at the open window of her room, and
looked dreamily out with sad, sad eyes on the sunny landscape and the
lovely hills all steeped in golden haze.
How changed seemed its beauty now, and how she longed to be away from
it--to be dead, in fact! Yet she was at an age when even to live,
ought to be in itself a joy.
The fragrance of the dewy summer morning seemed to fill the outer
world, and amid the intense stillness she heard only the voices of a
lark high in the air and of a cushat dove in the coppice.
Her marriage morning--what a morning of woe to her! Her cheeks were
pale--very, very pale; but with her parted scarlet lips, and her
tangled waves of rich brown hair, she was beautiful as ever.
The knowledge that her lover had not deceived her, but was true,
roused her for a time, and filled her soul with a tempest of
unexpected sorrow, compunction, and joy--sorrow that she had wronged
him, compunction for the cruel mode in which she had treated him, and
joy that his honour was unstained, and that he still was true; but
oh! what must he think of her?
Burying her face in her tremulous white hands, she wept like a
child---wept as we are told 'only women weep when their hearts break
over the grave of a dead love,' and threw herself across her bed.
'God forgive me--God forgive me, and bless and comfort you, my love,'
she murmured. 'Oh, Evan, I have wronged you--wronged you; but what
does it avail us after all--after all?'
And she lay there crouched and gathered in a heap, as it were, till
Olive and others who were to be her bridesmaids roused her and lifted
her up and summoned Clairette.
So her marriage-day had come, and, unless she fell ill or died, the
ceremony was to go inexorably on.
Olive was far from well; every day she expected to hear of Holcroft's
photo being seen; her sole protection against that catastrophe as
yet, was the fear that ere it came to pass, he would seek her
presence at least once again, on an errand of extortion. But ill or
well, she had to bear her part in the ceremony as a bridesmaid, and a
charming one she looked.
Allan, of course, was there too, but not as groomsman--a 'fogie'
friend of Sir Paget officiated in that capacity, and more than once
did the head of the latter jerk about in a way that was quite
alarming as he entered the church, which was _en fête_ for the
occasion.
To the tortured mind of his bride, she thought it would be a relief
when the ceremony was over, and the phantasmagoria that seemed to
surround her had all passed away. 'Is not certainty better than
suspense?' asks Rhoda Broughton; 'night better than twilight? despair
than the sickly flicker of an extinguishing hope?'
'In marrying in this compulsory fashion, I do this poor man a great
wrong,' thought Eveline, 'and condemn myself to a life-long sorrow.'
And amid the sacrifice Lady Aberfeldie, calm and aristocratic, stood
with a great air of dignity and grace peculiarly her own.
'She will love Sir Paget in time, if love is necessary,' she was
thinking; 'he is so good, so generous, and _so_ rich.'
So rich--yes, with her--there lay the magnet and the secret of it all!
The bridesmaids, all handsome girls, were uniformly costumed; among
them amber-haired Ruby Logan, quite jubilant with reviving hopes of
Allan.
Eveline's cold and now white lips murmured almost inaudibly the words
she was bidden to say--the few but terrible words that made her a
wedded wife--while her pallid face was but half seen amid the bridal
veil, that seemed to float like filmy mist around her. Allan alone,
who knew the real secret of her heart, looked pityingly, darkly, and
gravely on, for it was a union of which--however his father and
mother desired it--he did not approve.
For a time Eveline had actually schooled herself to think that
marriage would give her a species of vengeance on the man who, she
thought, had wronged and oppressed her. But now, oh, heaven! she
loved the lost one more than ever, while death alone could unforge
the fetters her lips were riveting.
Was it ominous of evil that the ring dropped from her wedding finger
as Sir Paget placed it there?
At last all was over. The great organ pealed forth the
wedding-march. The bells rang joyously in the great spire overhead,
and she was led forth by Sir Paget, leaning on his arm, a wedded wife.
So time would pass on--days dawn and nights close; the moon would
shine amid the fleecy clouds on the quiet pastoral hills, on the
great castellated mass of Dundargue, the woods and waters of her old
home; but never would she be as she had been--as a happy, thoughtless
girl--the Eveline Graham of the past years; never more could joy be
hers, or would she know again the love she had lost, the tenderness
she had tasted; and times there were when, amid her general passive
appearance of numbness and indifference, hot, scorching tears of
utter despair escaped her, and a passionate longing seized her to
take to flight, whither she knew not, and to rend asunder the meshes
of the marriage net that bound her now; and in this frame of mind she
departed on her honeymoon!
On that morning, there lingered long on one of the western batteries
of the old castle an officer who--if he was noticed at all--seemed to
be solely intent on enjoying a cigar, and who seemed to avoid the
society of all.
This was poor Evan Cameron, listening to the wedding bells in the
distant spire, and well he knew for what a tragedy they were ringing;
and, each time their clangour came upon the wind, they seemed to find
an echo in his heart.
So she was married at last, and more than ever lost to him!
Cards came to him in due course, and he tore them into minute
fragments.
Evan did all his regimental duties and daily work like a man--but as
one in a dream--all that was required of him, with more than ever, if
possible, strict punctilio; yet he felt himself a mere machine,
without heart or soul; and had only one longing, for the time when he
might turn his back upon his native country, and find himself face to
face with the enemy, no matter who, or where, that enemy might be.