CLEAR SKY--AND A THUNDERBOLT.
'Has any one,' asks George Eliot, in 'Middlemarch,' 'ever pinched into
its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintance?'
And, to press the metaphor, the cobweb, as far as Mark and Mabel were
concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence,
would have rolled up into a particularly small pill. Mark was anxious
that his engagement should be as short as possible, chiefly from an
uneasy fear that his great happiness might elude him after all. The
idea of losing Mabel became day by day, as he knew her better, a more
intolerable torture, and he could not rest until all danger of that
was at an end. Mabel had no fears of a future in which Mark would be
by her side; and if she was not blind to some little weaknesses in his
character, they did not affect her love and admiration in the
least--she was well content that her hero should not be unpleasantly
perfect. And the weeks slipped by, until Easter, which fell early that
year, had come and gone; the arrangements for the wedding were all
completed, and Mark began to breathe more freely as he saw his
suspense drawing to a happy end.
It was a bleak day towards the end of March, and Mark was walking
across the Park and Gardens from his rooms in South Audley Street to
Malakoff Terrace, charged with a little note from Mabel to Trixie, to
which he was to bring back an answer; for, although Mabel had not made
much progress in the affections of the rest of the Ashburn household,
a warm friendship had sprung up already between herself and Mark's
youngest sister--the only one of them who seemed to appreciate and
love him as he deserved. He felt buoyant and happy as he walked
briskly on, with the blustering north-easter at his back seeming to
clear his horizon of the last clouds which had darkened it. A very
few days more and Mabel would be his own--beyond the power of man to
sunder! and soon, too, he would be able to salve the wound which still
rankled in his conscience--he would have a book of his own. 'Sweet
Bells Jangled' was to appear almost immediately, and he had come to
have high hopes of it; it looked most imposing in proof--it was so
much longer than 'Illusion;' he had worked up a series of such
overwhelming effects in it; its pages contained matter to please every
variety of taste--flippancy and learning, sensation and sentiment,
careful dissection of character and audacious definition and
epigram--failure seemed to him almost impossible. And when he could
feel able to lay claim legitimately to the title of genius, surely
then the memory of his fraud would cease to reproach him--the means
would be justified by the result. He amused himself by composing
various critiques on the book (all of course highly eulogistic), and
thus pleasantly occupied the way until he gained the cheerful
Kensington High Street, the first half of which seems to belong to
some bright little market town many miles further from Charing Cross.
In the road by the kerbstone he passed a street singer, a poor old
creature in a sun-bonnet, with sharp features that had been handsome
once, and brilliant dark eyes, who was standing there unregarded,
singing some long-forgotten song with the remnants of a voice. Mark's
happiness impelled him to put some silver into her hand, and he felt a
half-superstitious satisfaction as he heard the blessing she called
down on him--as if she might have influence.
No one was at home at Malakoff Terrace but Trixie, whom he found
busily engaged in copying an immense plaster nose. 'Jack says I must
practise harder at features before I try the antique,' she explained,
'and so he gave me this nose; it's his first present, and considered a
very fine cast, Jack says.'
'Never saw a finer nose anywhere,' said Mark--'looks as if it had been
forced, eh, Trixie?'
'Mark, don't!' cried Trixie, shocked at this irreverence; 'it's
_David's_--Michael Angelo's David!' He gave her Mabel's note. 'I
can't write back because my hands are all charcoaly,' she explained;
'but you can say, "My love, and I will if I possibly can;" and, oh
yes, tell her I had a letter from _him_ this morning.'
'Meaning Jack?' said Mark. 'All right, and--oh, I say, Trixie, why
won't the governor and mater come to my wedding?'
'It's all ma,' said Trixie; 'she says she should only feel herself out
of place at a fashionable wedding, and she's better away.'
'It's to be a very quiet affair, though, thank Heaven!' observed Mark.
'Yes, but don't you see what she really wants is to be able to feel
injured by being out of it all--if she can, she'll persuade herself in
time that she never was invited at all; you know what dear ma is!'
'Well,' said Mark, with considerable resignation, 'she must do as she
pleases, of course. Have you got anything else to tell me, Trixie,
because I shall have to be going soon?'
'You mustn't go till I've given you something that came for you--oh, a
long time ago, when ma was ill. You see, it was like this: ma had her
breakfast in bed, and there was a tray put down on the slab where it
was, and it was sticky underneath or something, and so it stuck to the
bottom, and the tray wasn't wanted again, and Ann, of course, didn't
choose to wash it, so she only found it yesterday and brought it to
me.'
'Trixie,' said Mark, 'I can't follow all those "its." I gather that
I'm entitled to something sticky, but I haven't a notion what. Hadn't
you better get it, whatever it happens to be?'
'Why, it's a letter of course, goose!' said Trixie. 'I told you _that_
the very first thing: wait here, and I'll bring it to you.'
So Mark waited patiently in the homely little back parlour, where he
had prepared his work as a schoolboy in the old days, where he had
smoked his first cigar in his first Cambridge vacation. He smiled as
he thought how purely intellectual his enjoyment of that cigar had
been, and how for the first time he had appreciated the meaning of
'the bitter end;' he was smiling still when Trixie returned.
'Whom do you know in India, Mark?' she said curiously; 'perhaps it's
some admirer who's read the book. I hope it's nothing really
important; if it is, it wasn't our fault that--Mark, you're not _ill_,
are you?'
'No,' said Mark, placing himself with his back to the light, and
stuffing the letter, after one hasty glance at the direction, unopened
into his pocket. 'Of course not--why should I be?'
'Is there anything in the letter to worry you?' persisted Trixie. 'It
can't be a bill, can it?'
'Never mind what it is,' said Mark; 'have you got the keys? I--I
should like a glass of wine.'
'Ma left the keys in the cupboard,' said Trixie; 'how lucky! port or
sherry, Mark?'
'Brandy, if there is any,' he said, with an effort.
'Brandy! oh, Mark, have you taken to drinking spirits, and so early in
the morning?' she asked, with an anxious misgiving that perhaps that
was _de rigueur_ with all literary men.
'No, no, don't be absurd. I want some just now, and quick, do you
hear? I caught a chill walking across,' he explained.
'You had better try to eat something with it, then,' she advised;
'have some cake?'
'Do you want to make me ill in earnest?' he retorted peevishly,
thrusting away the brown cake, with a stale flavour of cupboard about
it, with which Trixie tried to tempt him; 'there, it's all
right--there's nothing the matter, I tell you.' And he poured out the
brandy and drank it. There was a kind of comfort, or rather
distraction, in the mere physical sensation to his palate; he thought
he understood why some men took to drinking. 'Ha!' and he made a
melancholy attempt at the sigh of satisfaction which some people think
expected of them after spirits. 'Now I'm a man again, Trixie; that
has driven off the chill. I'll be off now.'
'Are you _sure_ you're quite well again?' she said anxiously. 'Very
well, then I shan't see you again till you're in church next Tuesday;
and oh, Mark, I do so hope you'll be very, very happy!' He was on the
door-step by this time, and made no reply, while he kept his face
turned from her.
'Good-bye, then,' she said; 'you won't forget my message to Mabel,
will you?'
'Let me see, what was it?' he said. 'Ah, I remember; your love, and
you will if you can, eh?'
'Yes, and say I've had a letter from him this morning,' she added.
He gave a strange laugh, and then, as he turned, she saw how ghastly
and drawn his face looked.
'Have you though?' he said wildly; 'so have I, Trixie, so have I!' And
before she could ask any further questions he was gone.
He walked blindly up the little street and into the main road again,
unable at first to think with any clearness: he had not read the
letter; the stamp and handwriting on the envelope were enough for him.
The bolt had fallen from a clear sky, the thing he had only thought of
as a nightmare had really happened--the sea had given up its dead! He
went on; there was the same old woman in the sun-bonnet, still
crooning the same song; he laughed bitterly to think of the difference
in his own life since he had last seen her--only a short half-hour
ago. He passed the parish church, from which a wedding party was just
driving, while the bells clashed merrily under the graceful spire--no
wedding bells would ever clash for him now. But he must read that
letter and know the worst. Holroyd was alive--that he knew; but had he
found him out? did that envelope contain bitter denunciations of his
treachery? Perhaps he had already exposed him! he could not rest until
he knew how this might be, and yet he dared not read his letter in the
street. He thought he would find out a quiet spot in Kensington
Gardens and read it there; alone--quite alone. He hurried on, with a
dull irritation that the High Street should be so long and so crowded,
and that everybody should make such a point of getting in the way; the
shock had affected his body as well as his mind; he was cold to the
bones, and felt a dull numbing pressure on the top of his head; and
yet he welcomed these symptoms, too, with an odd satisfaction; they
seemed to entitle him to some sympathy. He reached the Gardens at
last, but when he had turned in at the little postern door near the
'King's Arms,' he could not prevail upon himself to open the
letter--he tore it half open and put it back irresolutely; he must
find a seat and sit down. He struck up the hill, with the wind in his
teeth now, until he came to the Round Pond, where there was quite a
miniature sea breaking on the southwestern rim of the basin; a small
boy was watching a solitary ship labouring far out in the centre, and
Mark stood and watched it too, mechanically, till he turned away at
last with a nervous start of impatience. Once he had sailed ships on
those waters; what would he not give if those days could come back to
him again, or if even he could go back these past few months to the
time when his conscience was clear and he feared no man! But the past
was irrevocable; he had been guilty of this reckless, foolish fraud,
and now the consequences were upon him! He walked restlessly on under
the bare tossing branches, looking through the black trunks and across
the paths glimmering white in the blue-grey distance for a seat where
he might be safe from interruption, until at last he discovered a
clumsy wooden bench, scored and slashed with the sand-ingrained
initials of a quarter of a century's idleness, a seat of the old
uncomfortable pattern gradually dying out from the walks. He could
wait no longer, and was hurrying forward to secure it, when he was
hailed by some one approaching by one of the Bayswater paths, and
found that he had been recognised by Harold Caffyn.