Chapter Forty Six.
My Dear!
“But still be a woman to you.”
Early the next morning Virginia received a letter from Alvar, written at intervals during his night watch in Cheriton’s room. Perhaps it was the first real communication she had ever received from him, and in it he made a sort of confession of his shortcomings, as far as he himself understood them. He told her that he had been “revengeful” towards his father, and that in the affair of the Flemings he had allowed “the passion of jealousy” to overcome him. He recounted his promise to Cheriton, and with the simplicity that was at once so strange and so engaging a part of his character, assured her “that he was no longer indifferent to religion,” but would follow the instructions of Mr Ellesmere. “I think,” he added, “that this will give you pleasure.”
There was a great deal about Cheriton, Alvar declaring that he could not now despair of anything, but that he should have written to her at such a time, and about himself, was enough to mark the change in his former relations with Virginia.
The change in himself she was ready to take for granted. All must be right where there was such humility and power of repentance; and perhaps she did him more justice than even Cheriton could have done. For Alvar had undergone no change of intellectual conviction, that element was wanting, both in his former carelessness, and in his present acceptance of a new obligation, and in the excitement of feeling under which he was acting love and remorse towards his brother had the largest share. But he had recognised himself as erring, and intended to amend, and such a resolution must bring a blessing. But as his brothers would only have altered any settled line of conduct, after infinite heart-searchings and perplexities, they could not have conceived how simple the matter appeared to Alvar, when he had once made up his mind that he could possibly have been in fault.
Virginia had said nothing the night before of her changed prospects; she knew that the Lesters could have no thought to spare for her; but when her aunt suggested sending over to inquire, she could not pretend ignorance, and her blush and few words of explanation were enough for Miss Seyton.
“Ah, well,” she said, “you might have saved yourselves a great deal of trouble if you had found this out a little sooner.”
“We cannot speak of it just now, auntie.”
“No; but you say, don’t you, that everything happens for good? Now this good has come out of Cherry’s illness; perhaps he’ll get well.”
After these characteristic congratulations Virginia took her way to the vicarage. She found her uncle in his “study,” a room which was sufficiently well lined with ancient and orthodox divinity to merit the name, though the highly respectable volumes, descended from some unwontedly learned Seyton vicar, did not often see the light.
The parson was looking out of the window down the road.
“Ah, how d’ye do, my dear?” he said, in unwontedly quiet accents. “I was just looking out, for I sent over to Oakby to inquire how that poor lad is to-day.”
“We have heard,” said Virginia. “I don’t think he is any worse. And, uncle, I saw him yesterday; he sent for me to give me a message for you.”
“A message! Well, my lassie, what did he say?”
Virginia came and stood behind the chair in which her uncle had seated himself.
“He wished me to tell you that he had been making up his mind to take orders, and that he loved Elderthwaite so much that he meant to ask you if you would let him come and be your curate, that you and he together might set things right here. But he said that now that will never be. And he sent his love, and I was to ask you to reform Elderthwaite for his sake. He said, ‘Tell him I know he can, better than any one, if he will.’”
Virginia paused, as her voice faltered.
“Why, bless my soul,” cried the parson, “what does the lad mean? Why, I’m one of the old abuses myself.”
“Yes—yes—uncle. But that is what he said. You must not be one of the abuses. He said you might do it all, if you would, because you love the place more than any one can.”
There was a silence. The parson sat still.
“He is a good lad—he always was a good lad,” he said, after a pause. “And did he think to come here, to spend his time over a parcel of scamps and drunkards? Eh! I shouldn’t have believed it. He had heard that they want me to have a curate, I suppose,” he added, quickly.
“Oh, yes, uncle; but he was afraid that you would not like it.”
“Look here, my lassie, I like the old methody in his proper place; but I’ll have no psalm-singers in my church. I’m a sound Churchman, and I don’t approve of it.”
Virginia, finding an objection to psalm-singing in church rather difficult to reply to, was silent, and her uncle went on rapidly,—
“I hate the whole tribe of your earnest, hard-working, ‘self-devoted’ young fellows—find it pay, and bring them into the society of gentlemen—write letters in trumpery newspapers, and despise their elders. Newspapers have nothing to do with religion. The Prayer-book’s the Prayer-book, and a paper’s a paper. Give me Bell’s Life. Bless you, my dear, do you think I keep my eyes shut?”
“You are not just, uncle,” said Virginia. “But Cheriton would not have been like that.”
Mr Seyton’s twinkling eyes softened, and the angry resistance to a higher standard, that mingled with the half-shrewd, half-scornful malice of his words, subsided, as he said, in quite a different tone,—
“I would have had Cheriton for my curate, my dear.”
He said no more, and Virginia could not press him; and when he spoke it was only to question her about Cheriton’s condition.
But when she went away he took his hat and walked out through his bit of garden towards the church, and sitting down on the low stone wall, looked over the churchyard, where a fine growth of nettles half smothered the broken gravestones; and as he sat there he thought of his past life, of his dissipated, godless youth, of the sense of desperation with which, to pay his debts, he had “gone into the Church,” of the horrible evils he had never tried to check, and yet of the certain kindliness he had entertained towards his own people. How he had defied censure and resisted example till his fellow-clergy looked askance at him, and though he might affect to despise them, he did not like their contempt. He thought of the family crash that was coming, and he was keen enough to know how he would be regarded by new comers—“as an old abuse.” And he thought of Cheriton’s faith in him, and the project inspired as much by love for him as by the zeal for reform. He thought of the first time he had read the service, the sense of incongruity, of shame-facedness; how a sort of accustomedness had grown upon him till he had felt himself a parson after a sort, and how, on a low level, he had in a way adapted his life to the requirements of his profession.
Then he thought of the way Cheriton had proposed such a step to himself, and, without entering into any of those higher feelings which might have repelled rather than attracted him, he contrasted with his his own the unselfishness of the motive that prompted Cheriton.
He made no resolutions, drew no conclusions, but unconsciously he was looking at life from a new standpoint.
Virginia did not see Alvar, nor hear directly from him all that day; and but for the letter in her possession, her interview with him would have seemed like a dream.
The next morning was sunny and still. She stood on the steps at the garden door, looking over the lawn, now glistening with thick autumn dew. The sky was clear and blue, the wild overgrown shrubberies that shut out the landscape were tinted with brown and gold, an “autumn blackbird” sang low and sweet. All was so peaceful that it seemed as if ill news could not break in upon it; yet, as the old church clock chimed the hour, and through the still air that of Oakby sounded in the distance, Virginia started lest it should be the beginning of the knell. As the sound of the clock died away, the gate in the shrubbery clicked, a quick step sounded, and Alvar came up the path.
Virginia could wait no longer. She ran to meet him, gathering hope from his face as she approached.
“Yes, he is better. There is hope now; but all yesterday he grew weaker every moment. I thought he would die.”
Alvar’s voice trembled, and he spoke with more abandonment than was usual with him; he looked very pale, and had evidently gone through much. He added details of their suspense, and of Cherry’s condition, “as if,” Virginia thought, “he wanted to talk to me.”
“You are very tired,” she said. “Come in and have some breakfast. Auntie and I always have it here.”
She took him into the drawing-room, where there was a little table near the fire, and made him sit down, while she waited on him, and poured out the tea. She did not feel a bit afraid of him now, and, spite of his punctilious gallantry, he submitted to her attentions without any of the forms and ceremonies with which he had previously made a distance between them.
“You have been up all night. I think you ought to have gone to bed, instead of coming here,” she said, sure of a contradiction.
“It is a great deal better than going to sleep to see you, my dear!” said Alvar, quaintly; and Virginia thought she liked the homely English better than the magnificent Spanish in which he had been wont to term her his lady and his queen.
“I am getting very hungry, Virginia,” said Miss Seyton, opening the door. “May I come in to breakfast?”
“Oh, but that is shocking!” cried Alvar, springing up and advancing to meet her. “Miss Seyton, I have brought good news of my brother. But I must go home now, he may want me. Perhaps if he is still better I can come again by-and-by.”
“Only think,” said Virginia, as she went with him through the garden on her way to the vicarage to tell the good news to her uncle, “only think, when the clock struck just before you came, I was afraid it was the beginning of the knell!”
“Ah, I trust we shall not hear that terrible sound now!” said Alvar, gravely.
And yet before that day closed the old bell of Elderthwaite church was tolling, startling every one with the sudden conviction that that morning’s hope had proved delusory. It frightened Mr Ellesmere as he came home from a distant part of his parish, though a moment’s reflection showed him that his own church tower was silent. What could be the matter elsewhere?
There was a rush of people to the lodge gates at Oakby, to be met there by eager questions as to what was the matter at Elderthwaite?
“It must be old Mr Seyton, took off on a sudden,” they said. “Well, so long as Mr Cherry was getting better—”
But before curiosity could take any one down the lane to verify this opinion, up came the parson’s man from Elderthwaite with a letter for Mr Lester, and the news that a telegram had been received two hours before at the hall, to say that Mr Roland had been killed out tiger-hunting in India.
There was more consternation than grief. Roland had not felt nor inspired affection in his own family; in the neighbourhood his character was regarded with disapproval, and his sarcastic tongue remembered with dislike. He had intensified all the worst characteristics of the family.
Virginia had scarcely ever seen him; his father and uncle had so resented his determination to sell the estate, though it had perhaps been the wisest resolve he had ever come to, that he had been to them as an enemy.
But still the chief sense in all their minds was that the definite, if distasteful, prospect, to which they had been beginning to look forward, had melted away, and that all the future was chaos.
Dick, suddenly became a person of importance, and now within a month or two of coming of age, was sent for from London. He had improved in looks and manner, and seemed duly impressed with the gravity of the situation. He was told what Roland’s intentions had been, and that his father’s life could not be prolonged for many months; listened to Mr Seyton’s faltering and confused explanations of the state of affairs, and to his uncle’s more vigorous, but not much more lucid, denunciation of it. Dick said not a word in reply, he asked a few questions, and at last went down into the drawing-room where his sister was sitting alone. He walked over to the window and stood looking out of it.
“Virginia,” he said, “I don’t wish to sell Elderthwaite.”
“Do you think it can be helped, Dick?” she said, eagerly.
“I don’t know. I’m not in debt like Roland—that is, anything to speak of. I don’t want to wipe the family out of the county for good and all. Why couldn’t the place be let for a term of years?”
“But—it is so much out of repair!”
“Yes,” said Dick, shrewdly, “but it’s an awfully gentlemanly-looking place yet. Fellows who have made a fortune in trade want to get their position settled before they buy an estate, or to make a little more money first. I heard Mr Stanforth talking about some old place in the south where there were fine pictures, which had been let in that way. Well then, of course, some sacrifices must be made; something was done with the money Cheriton Lester paid for Uplands. Then there’s all that part out Ashrigg way—Cuddiwell, you know, and High Ashrigg. Those two farms have always paid rent. If they were sold—they’re handy either for the Lesters or the Hubbards—we might put things to rights a little in that way.”
“I am glad you care about Elderthwaite, Dick,” said Virginia, impetuously.
“Oh, as to that,” returned Dick, “I don’t know that I go in for any sentiment about it. Of course, I couldn’t live here for years to come. I’m not quite such a fool as I was once, Virginia, thanks to you and some others I could name; and I should go on as I am for the present. But it makes a difference in a man’s position to have a place like this in the background, even if it is tumbling to pieces. A girl with money might think twice whether she wouldn’t be Mrs Seyton of Elderthwaite.”
“Oh, Dick! don’t marry a girl for her money,” said Virginia, half laughing; but she could never have imagined herself listening with so much respect to Dick’s sentiments.
In truth, want of sense and insight had never been the cause of the Seytons’ errors; but just as in some men a warm heart and tender conscience fail to make head against violent passion, so that they feel their sins while they commit them, so in the Seytons a shrewd mental sense of their own folly had always co-existed with the headstrong self-will which had overridden it. Dick had a less passionate nature, and was, moreover, less at the mercy of circumstances than if he had been brought up as the heir, and his friends in London were sensible people.
“Perhaps,” said his sister, “you might ask Alvar what he thinks of it.”
“Alvar? Oh, ho! is that come to pass again? So, you’ve made it up. Well, it is a good thing that you have some one to take care of you,” said Dick, sententiously.
Alvar was taken into counsel, and the results of much discussion and consideration may be briefly told.
Dick’s plans were hailed by his father and uncle as an escape from a prospect, which had made death doubly bitter to the one, and the rest of life distasteful to the other. And an unexpected purchaser of the two farms was found in Judge Cheriton, who had been talking for some time of buying a small property which might be a home for him when his public career was over, and a holiday retreat for the present. There was a farm-house at High Ashrigg which might be improved into a modern antique of the style at present admired. The two farms were therefore purchased at once of Mr Seyton himself, and with his full consent and approval.
The rest of Dick’s plan could not be carried out in his father’s lifetime, but it was agreed to by Mr Seyton as the best thing his heir could do.
All this time Cheriton was mending slowly, but with much uncertainty as to how far his recovery would be complete. He very soon detected the turn that Alvar’s affairs had taken, much to his satisfaction; but Jack, guessing that the news of Roland’s death would be a shock to him, it was not till he had begun to insist that his own state must not again delay Alvar’s marriage, that he heard the story of which it might have been said “that nothing in Roland Seyton’s life became him like the leaving of it;” for it proved that he had met his death by an act of considerable bravery, which had saved the lives of others of the party. Perhaps Cheriton, unable to be untender to the memory of his boyish ideal, gave him a truer regret than any of his own family.
He listened with great interest to all the future arrangements, and was the first to suggest that his old acquaintance, Mr Wilson’s son, was to be married to a young lady of fortune, and might form a possible future tenant for Elderthwaite.
As for the rest, even setting her deep mourning aside, Virginia would not hear of marrying while her father grew daily weaker; nor was Cheriton at all equal to the inevitable excitement and difficulty of arranging plans for the winter which must have ensued.
It ended, as soon as he was able to bear the journey, in his going to Torquay with Alvar, to stay for the present. Mrs Lester went back to Ashrigg, and Oakby was once more left solitary.