"TOO LATE"
For a wounded campaigner on crutches, or a wasted convalescent slowly
recovering from an attack of Crimean fever, there are few better places
for the re-establishment of health than the hotel at Therapia. It is
refreshing to hear the ripple of the Bosphorus not ten feet distant from
one's bedroom window; it is life itself to inhale the invigorating
breeze that sweeps down, unchecked and uncontaminated, from the Black
Sea; it is inspiriting to gaze upon the gorgeous beauty of the Asiatic
coast, another continent not a mile away. And then the smaller
accessories of comfortable apartments, good dinners, civilised luxuries,
and European society, form no unwelcome contrast to the Crimean tent,
the soldier's rations, and the wearisome routine of daily and hourly
duty.
But a few days after the taking of Sebastopol, I was once more in
Turkey. Ropsley, the man of iron nerves and strong will--the man whom
danger had spared, and sickness had hitherto passed by, was struck down
by fever--that wasting, paralysing disease so common to our countrymen
in an Eastern climate--and was so reduced and helpless as to be utterly
incapable of moving without assistance. He had many friends, for
Ropsley was popular in his regiment and respected throughout the army;
but none were so thoroughly disengaged as I; it seemed as if I could now
be of little use in any capacity, and to my lot it fell to place my old
school-fellow on board ship, and accompany him to Therapia, _en route_
for England on sick leave.
My own affairs, too, required that I should revisit Somersetshire before
long. The wreck of my father's property, well nursed and taken care of
by a prudent man of business, had increased to no contemptible provision
for a nameless child. If I chose to return to England, I should find
myself a landed proprietor of no inconsiderable means, should be enabled
to assume a position such as many a man now fighting his way in the
world would esteem the acme of human felicity, and for me it would be
but dust and ashes! What cared I for broad acres, local influence, good
investments, and county respectability--all the outward show and empty
shadows for which people are so apt to sacrifice the real blessings of
life? What was it to me that I might look round from my own dining-room
on my own domain, with my own tenants waiting to see me in the hall? An
empty heart can have no possessions; a broken spirit is but a beggar in
the midst of wealth, whilst the whole universe, with all its glories,
belongs alone to him who is at peace with himself. I often think how
many a man there is who lives out his three-score years and ten, and
never knows what _real_ life is, after all. A boyhood passed in vain
aspirations--a manhood spent in struggling for the impossible--an old
age wasted in futile repinings, such is the use made by how many of our
fellow-creatures of that glorious streak of light which we call
existence, that intervenes between the eternity which hath been, and the
eternity which shall be? Oh! to lie down and rest, and look back upon
the day's hard labour, and feel that something has been wrought--that
something has been _won!_ and so to sleep--happy here--happy for
evermore. Well, on some natures happiness smiles even here on earth--God
forbid it should be otherwise!--and some must content themselves with
duty instead. Who knows which shall have the best of it when all is
over? For me, it was plain at this period that I must do my _devoir_,
and leave all to Time, the great restorer in the moral, as he is the
great destroyer in the physical, world. The years of excitement (none
know how strong) that I had lately passed, followed by a listless,
hopeless inactivity, had produced a reaction on my spirits which it was
necessary to conquer and shake off. I resolved to return to England, to
set my house in order--to do all the good in my power, and first of all,
strenuously to commence with that which lay nearest my hand, although it
was but the humble task of nursing my old school-fellow through an
attack of low fever.
My patient possessed one of those strong and yet elastic natures which
even sickness seems unable thoroughly to subdue. The Ropsley on a couch
of suffering and lassitude, was the same Ropsley that confronted the
enemy's fire so coolly in the Crimea, and sneered at the follies of his
friends so sarcastically in St. James's street. Ill as he was, and
utterly prostrated in body, he was clear-headed and ready-witted as
ever. With the help of a wretchedly bad grammar, he was rapidly picking
up Turkish, by no means an easy language for a beginner; and, taking
advantage of my society, was actually entering upon the rudiments of
Hungarian, a tongue which it is next to impossible for any one to
acquire who has not spoken it, as I had done, in earliest childhood. He
was good-humoured and patient, too, far more than I should have
expected, and was never anxious or irritable, save about his letters. I
have seen him, however, turn away from a negative to the eager inquiry
"Any letters for me?" with an expression of heart-sick longing that it
pained me to witness on that usually haughty and somewhat sneering
countenance.
But it came at last. Not many mornings after our arrival at Therapia
there was a letter for Ropsley, which seemed to afford him unconcealed
satisfaction, and from that day the Guardsman mended rapidly, and began
to talk of getting up and packing his things, and starting westward once
more.
So it came to pass that, with the help of his servant, I got him out of
bed and dressed him, and laid him on the sofa at the open window, where
he could see the light caiques dancing gaily on the waters, and the
restless sea-fowl flitting eternally to and fro, and could hear the
shouts of the Turkish boatmen, adjuring each other, very unnecessarily,
not to be too hasty; and the discordant cries of the Greek population
scolding, and cheating, and vociferating on the quay.
We talked of Hungary. I loved to talk of it now, for was it not _her_
country of whom I must think no more? And Ropsley's manner was kinder,
and his voice softer, than I had ever thought it before. Poor fellow!
he was weak with his illness, perhaps, yet hitherto I had remarked no
alteration in his cold, impassible demeanour.
At last he took my hand, and in a hollow voice he said--"Vere, you have
returned me good for evil. You have behaved to me like a brother.
Vere, I believe you really are a Christian!"
"I hope so," I replied quietly, for what had I but that?
"Yes," he resumed, "but I don't mean conventionally, because your
godfathers and godmothers at your baptism said you were--I mean
_really_. I don't believe there is a particle of _humbug_ about you.
Can you forgive your enemies?"
"I have already told you so," I answered; "don't you remember that night
in the trenches? besides, Ropsley, I shall never consider you my enemy."
"That is exactly what cuts me to the heart," he replied, flushing up
over his wan, wasted face. "I have injured you more deeply than any one
on earth, and I have received nothing but kindness in return. Often and
often I have longed to tell you all--how I had wronged you, and how I
had repented, but my pride forbade me till to-day. It is dreadful to
think that I might have died, and never confessed to you how hard and
how unfeeling I have been. Listen to me, and then forgive me if you
can. Oh, Vere, Vere! had it not been for me and my selfishness, you
might have married Constance Beverley!"
I felt I was trembling all over; I covered my face with my hands and
turned away, but I bade him go on.
"Her father was never averse to you from the first. He liked you, Vere,
personally, and still more for the sake of your father, his old friend.
There was but one objection. I need not dwell upon it; and even that he
could have got over, for he was most anxious to see his daughter
married, and to one with whom he could have made his own terms. He was
an unscrupulous man, Sir Harry, and dreadfully pressed for money. When
in that predicament people will do things that at other times they would
be ashamed of, as I know too well. And the girl too, Vere, she loved
you--I am sure of it--she loved you, poor girl, with all her heart and
soul."
I looked him straight in the face--"Not a word of _her_, Ropsley, as you
are a gentleman!" I said. Oh, the agony of that moment! and yet it was
not all pain.
"Well," he proceeded, "Sir Harry consulted me about the match. You know
how intimate we were, you know what confidence he had in my judgment.
If I had been generous and honourable, if I had been such a man as
_you_, Vere, how much happier we should all be now; but no, I had my own
ends in view, and I determined to work out my own purpose, without
looking to the right or left, without turning aside for friend or foe.
Besides, I hardly knew you then, Vere. I did not appreciate your good
qualities. I did not know your courage, and constancy, and patience,
and kindliness. I did not know yours was just the clinging, womanly
nature, that would never get over the crushing of its best
affections--and I know it now too well. Oh, Vere, you never can forgive
me! And yet," he added, musingly, more to himself than to me,--"and
yet, even had I known all this, had you been my own brother, I fear my
nature was then so hard, so pitiless, so uncompromising, that I should
have gone straight on towards my aim, and blasted your happiness without
scruple or remorse. _Remorse_," and the old look came over him, the old
sneering look, that wreathed those handsome features in the wicked smile
of a fallen angel--"if a man means to _repent_ of what he has done, he
had better not _do it_. My maxim has always been, 'never look
back,'--'_vestigia, nulla retrorsum_'--and yet to-day I cannot help
retracing, ay, and bitterly _regretting_, the past.
"I have told you I had my own ends in view. I wished to marry the
heiress myself. Not that I loved her, Vere--do not be angry with me for
the confession--I never loved her the least in the world. She was far
too placid, too conventional, too like other girls, to make the
slightest impression on me. My ideal of a woman is, a bold, strong
nature, a keen intellect, a daring mind, and a dazzling beauty that
others must fall down and worship. I never was one of your
sentimentalists. A violet may be a very pretty flower, and smell very
sweet, but I like a camellia best, and all the better because you
require a hothouse to raise it in. But, if I did not care for Miss
Beverley, I cared a good deal for Beverley Manor, and I resolved that,
come what might, Beverley Manor should one day be mine. The young lady
I looked upon as an encumbrance that must necessarily accompany the
estate. You know how intimate I became with her father, you know the
trust he reposed in me, and the habit into which he fell, of doing
nothing without my advice. That trust, I now acknowledge to you, I
abused shamefully; of that habit I took advantage, solely to further my
own ends, totally irrespective of my friend. He confided to me in very
early days his intention of marrying his daughter to the son of his old
friend. He talked it over with me as a scheme on which he had set his
heart, and, above all, insisted on the advantage to himself of making,
as he called it, his own terms with you about settlements, etc. I have
already told you he was involved in difficulties, from which his
daughter's marriage could alone free him, with the consent of her
husband. I need not enter into particulars. I have the deeds and law
papers at my fingers' ends, for I like to understand a business
thoroughly if I embark on it at all, but it is no question of such
matters now. Well, Vere, at first I was too prudent to object overtly
to the plan. Sir Harry, as you know, was an obstinate, wilful man, and
such a course would have been the one of all others most calculated to
wed him more firmly than ever to his original intention; but I weighed
the matter carefully with him day by day, now bringing forward arguments
in favour of it, now starting objections, till I had insensibly
accustomed him to consider it by no means as a settled affair. Then I
tried all my powers upon the young lady, and there, I confess to you
freely, Vere, I was completely foiled. She never liked me even as an
acquaintance, and she took no pains to conceal her aversion. How angry
she used to make me sometimes!--I _hated_ her so, that I longed to make
her mine, if it were only to humble her, as much as if I had loved her
with all my heart and soul. Many a time I used to grind my teeth and
mutter to myself, 'Ah! my fair enemy, I shall live to make you rue this
treatment;' and I swore a great oath that, come what might, she should
never belong to Vere Egerton. I even tried to create an interest in her
mind for Victor de Rohan, but the girl was as true as steel. I have
been accustomed to read characters all my life, women's as well as
men's, it is part of my profession;" and Ropsley laughed once more his
bitter laugh; "and many a trifling incident showed me that Constance
Beverley cared for nobody on earth but you. This only made me more
determined not to be beat; and little by little, with hints here and
whispers there, assisted by your own strange, solitary habits, and the
history of your poor father's life and death, I persuaded Sir Harry that
there was madness in your family, and that you had inherited the curse.
From the day on which he became convinced of this, I felt I had won my
race. No power on earth would then have induced him to let you marry
his daughter, and the excuse that he made you on that memorable
afternoon, when you had so gallantly rescued her from death, was but a
gentlemanlike way of getting out of his difficulty about telling you the
real truth. Vere, that girl's courage is wonderful. She came down to
dinner that night with the air of an empress, but with a face like
marble, and a dull, stony look in her eyes that made even me almost rue
what I had done. She kept her room for a fortnight afterwards, and I
cannot help feeling she has never looked as bright since.
"When you went away I acknowledge I thought the field was my own. In
consideration of my almost ruining myself to preserve him from shame,
Sir Harry promised me his daughter if I could win her consent, and you
may depend upon it I tried hard to do so. It was all in vain; the girl
hated me more and more, and when we all met so unexpectedly in Vienna, I
saw that my chance of Beverley Manor was indeed a hopeless one. Sir
Harry, too, was getting very infirm. Had he died before his daughter's
marriage, his bills for the money I had lent him were not worth the
stamps on which they were drawn. My only chance was her speedy union
with some one rich enough to make the necessary sacrifices, and again I
picked out Victor de Rohan as the man. We all thought then you were
engaged to his sister Valerie."
Ropsley blushed scarlet as he mentioned that name.
"And it was not my part to conceal the surmise from Miss Beverley. 'She
was _so_ glad, she was _so_ thankful,' she said, 'she was _so_ happy,
for Vere's sake'; and a month afterwards she was Countess de Rohan, with
the handsomest husband and the finest place in Hungary. It was a
_mariage de convenance_, I fear, on both sides. I know now, what I
allow I did not dream of then, that Victor himself was the victim of an
unfortunate attachment at the time, and that he married the beautiful
Miss Beverley out of pique. Sir Harry died, as you know, within three
months. I have saved myself from ruin, and I have destroyed the
happiness on earth of three people that never did me the slightest harm.
Vere, I do not deserve to be forgiven, I do not deserve ever to rise
again from this couch; and yet there is _one_ for whose sake I would
fain get well--_one_ whom I _must_ see yet again before I die."
He burst into tears as he spoke. Good heaven! this man was mortal after
all--an erring, sinful mortal, like the rest of us, with broken pride,
heartfelt repentance, thrilling hopes and fears. Another bruised reed,
though he had stood so defiant and erect, confronting the whirlwind and
the thunderbolt, but shivered up, and cowering at the whisper of the
"still small voice." Poor fellow! poor Ropsley! I pitied him from my
heart, while he hid his face in his hands, and the big tears forced
themselves through his wasted fingers; freely I forgave him, and freely
I told him so.
After a time he became more composed, and then, as if ashamed of his
weakness, assumed once more the cold satirical manner, half sarcasm,
half pleasantry, which has become the conventional disguise of the world
in which such men as Ropsley delight to live. Little by little he
confided to me the rise and progress of his attachment to Valerie--at
which I had already partly guessed--acknowledged how, for a long time,
he had imagined that I was again a favoured rival, destined ever to
stand in his way; how my sudden departure from Vienna and her
incomprehensible indifference to that hasty retreat had led him to
believe that she had entertained nothing but a girl's passing
inclination for her brother's comrade; and how, before he reached his
regiment in the Crimea, she had promised to be his on the conclusion of
the war. "I never cared for any other woman on earth," said Ropsley,
once more relapsing into the broken accents of real, deep feeling. "I
never reflected till I knew her, what a life mine has been. God forgive
me, Vere; if we had met earlier, I should have been a different man. I
have received a letter from her to-day. I shall be well enough to move
by the end of the week. Vere, I _must_ go through Hungary, and stop at
Edeldorf on my way to England!"
As I walked out to inhale the evening breeze and indulge my own thoughts
in solitude by the margin of the peaceful Bosphorus, I felt almost
stunned, like a man who has sustained a severe fall, or one who wakes
suddenly from an astounding dream. And yet I might have guessed long
ago at the purport of Ropsley's late revelations. Diffident as I was of
my own merits, there had been times when my heart told me, with a voice
there was no disputing, that I was beloved by Constance Beverley; and
now it was with something like a feeling of relief and exhilaration that
I recalled the assurance of that fact from one himself so interested and
so difficult to deceive as Ropsley. "And she loved me all along," I
thought, with a thrill of pleasure, sadly dashed with pain. "She was
true and pure, as I always thought her; and even now, though she is
wedded to another, though she never can be mine on earth, perhaps--"
And here I stopped, for the cold, sickening impossibility chilled me to
the marrow, and an insurmountable barrier seemed to rise up around me
and hem me in on every side. It was sin to love her, it was sin to
think of her now. Oh! misery! misery! and yet I would give my life to
see her once more! So my good angel whispered in my ear, "You must
never look on her again; for the rest of your time you must tread the
weary path alone, and learn to be kindly, and pure, and holy for _her_
sake." And self muttered, "Where would be the harm of seeing her just
once again?--of satisfying yourself with your own eyes that she is
happy?--of learning at once to be indifferent to her presence? You
_must_ go home. Edeldorf lies in your direct road to England; you
cannot abandon Ropsley in his present state, with no one to nurse and
take care of him. Victor is your oldest friend, he would be hurt if you
did not pay him a visit. It would be more courageous to face the
Countess at once, and get it over." And I listened now to one and now
to the other, and the struggle raged and tore within me the while I
paced sadly up and down "by the side of the sounding sea."
"Egerton! how goes it? Let me present to you my friends," exclaimed a
voice I recognised on the instant, as, with lowered head and dreamy
vision, I walked right into the centre of a particularly smart party,
and was "brought up," as the sailors say, "all standing," by a white
silk parasol and a mass of flounces that almost took my breath away.
When you most require solitude, it generally happens that you find
yourself forced into society, and with all my regard for our _ci-devant_
usher, I never met Manners, now a jolly Colonel of Bashi-Bazouks, with
so little gratification as at this moment. I am bound to admit,
however, that on his side all was cordiality and delight. Dressed out
to the utmost magnificence of his gorgeous uniform, spurs clanking, and
sabretasche jingling, his person stouter, his beard more exuberant, his
face more florid and prosperous than ever, surrounded, too, by a bevy of
ladies of French extraction and Pera manners, the "soldier of fortune,"
for such he might fairly be called, was indeed in his glory. With many
flourishes and compliments in bad French, I was presented successively
to Mesdemoiselles Philippine, and Josephine, and Seraphine, all
dark-eyed, black-haired, sallow-faced, but by no means bad-looking,
young ladies, all apparently bent upon the capture and destruction of
anything and everything that came within range of their artillery, and
all apparently belonging equally to my warlike and fortunate friend. He
then took me by the arm, and dropping behind the three graces aforesaid,
informed me, in tones of repressed exultation, how his fortune was made
at last, how he now commanded (the dearest object of his ambition) a
regiment of actual cavalry, and how he was on the eve of marriage with
one of the young ladies in front of us, with a dowry of a hundred
thousand francs, who loved him to distraction, and was willing to
accompany him to Shumla, there to take the lead in society, and help him
to civilise his regiment of Bashi-Bazouks.
"I always told you I was fit for something, Egerton," said
Lieutenant-Colonel Manners, with a glow of exultation on his simple
face; "and I have made my own way at last, in despite of all obstacles.
It's pluck, sir, that makes the man! pluck and _muscle_," doubling his
arm as he spoke, in the old Everdon manner. "I have done it at last,
and you'll see, my dear Egerton, I shall live to be a general."
"I hope from my heart you may," was my reply, as I bade him "farewell,"
and congratulated him on his position, his good fortune, and his bride;
though I never made out exactly whether it was Mademoiselle Josephine,
or Philippine, or Seraphine who was to enjoy the unspeakable felicity of
becoming Mrs. Colonel Manners.