Chapter Fifty One.
Broken with the Fight.
“Better stop where you are, man,” said Uncle Luke.
“No,” said Leslie, as he stood gazing straight before him, as one who tries to see right on into the future along the vista of one’s own life.
“But it is nearly one o’clock. Sit down there and get a nap.”
“No. I must go home,” said Leslie slowly, and in a measured way, as if he were trying to frame his sentences correctly in carrying on the conversation while thinking of something else.
“Well, you are your own master.”
“Yes,” said Leslie. “How is he?”
“Calmer now. He was half mad when he came to, and Knatchbull was afraid of brain fever, but he gave him something to quiet the excitement. Better have given you something too.”
“What are you going to do?” said Leslie, turning upon the old man suddenly, and with a wild look in his eyes.
“Do nothing rashly,” said Uncle Luke.
“But time is flying, man.”
“Yes. Always is,” said Uncle Luke, coolly, as he watched his companion with half-closed eyes.
“But—”
“That will do. I cannot discuss the matter to-night, my head’s in a whirl. Do nothing rashly is a capital maxim.”
“But we are wasting time.”
“Look here, young man,” said Uncle Luke, taking Leslie by the lappet of the coat. “I’m not blind. I daresay I can see as far through you as most people can. I am an old man, and at my time of life I can be calm and dispassionate, and look on at things judicially.”
“Judicially?” said Leslie bitterly; “any child could judge here.”
“Oh, no,” said the old man; “big child as you are, you can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you are only a big stupid boy, Duncan Leslie.”
“Don’t insult me in my misery, man.”
“Not I, my lad. I like you too well. I am only playing the surgeon, hurting you to do you good. Look here, Leslie, you are in pain, and you are madly jealous.”
“Jealous!” cried the young man scornfully, “of whom?”
“My niece—that man—both of them.”
“Not I. Angry with myself, that’s all, for being an idiot.”
“And because you are angry with yourself, you want to follow and rend that man who knocked you down; and because you call yourself an idiot for being deeply attached to Louise, you are chafing to go after her, and at any cost bring her back to throw yourself at her feet, and say, ‘Don’t have him, have me.’”
“Ah!” cried Leslie furiously. “There, you are an old man and licensed.”
“Yes, I am the licensed master of our family, Leslie, and I always speak my mind.”
“Yes, you sit there talking, when your duty is to follow and bring your niece back from disgrace,” cried the young man furiously.
“Thank you for teaching me my duty, my lad. You have had so much more experience than I. All the same, Duncan Leslie, my hot-headed Scot, I am going to sleep on it, and that’s what I advise you to do. There; be reasonable, man. You know you are not in a condition for dispassionate judgment.”
“I tell you any one could judge this case,” said Leslie hotly.
“And I tell you, my dear boy, that it would have puzzled Solomon.”
“Will you go in search of her directly?”
“Will I go out in the dark, and run my head against the first granite wall? No, my boy, I will not.”
“Then I must.”
“What, run your head against a wall?”
“Bah!”
“Look here, Leslie, I’ve watched you, my lad, for long enough past. I saw you take a fancy to my darling niece Louy; and I felt as if I should like to come behind and pitch you off the cliff. Then I grew more reasonable, for I found by careful watching that you were not such a bad fellow after all, and what was worse, it seemed to me that, in spite of her aunt’s teaching, Louy was growing up into a clever sensible girl, with only one weakness, and that a disposition to think a little of you.”
Leslie made an angry gesture.
“Come, my lad, I’ll speak plainly and put aside all cynical nonsense. Answer me this: How long have you known my niece?”
“What does that matter?”
“Much. I’ll tell you. About a year, and at a distance. And yet you presume, in your hot-headed, mad, and passionate way, to sit in judgment upon her and to treat my advice with contempt.”
“You cannot see it all as I do.”
“Thank goodness!” muttered Uncle Luke.
“You did not witness what I did to-night.”
“No. I wish I had been there.”
“I wish you had,” said Leslie, bitterly.
“Now you are growing wild again. Be calm, and listen. Now I say you have known our child a few months at a distance, and you presume to judge her. I have known her ever since she was the little pink baby which I held in these hands, and saw smile up in my face. I have known her as the patient, loving, unwearying daughter, the forbearing niece to her eccentric aunt—and uncle, my lad. You ought to have said that. I have known her these twenty years as the gentle sister who fought hard to make a sensible man of my unfortunate nephew. Moreover, I have known her in every phase, and while I have openly snarled and sneered at her, I have in my heart groaned and said to myself, what a different life might mine have been had I known and won the love of such a woman as that.”
“Oh, yes, I grant all that,” said Leslie, hurriedly; “but there was the vein of natural sin within.”
“Natural nonsense, sir!” cried Uncle Luke, angrily. “How dare you! A holier, truer woman never breathed.”
“Till that scoundrel got hold of her and cursed her life,” groaned Leslie. “Yes, trample on me. I suppose I deserve it.”
“Yes,” cried the old man, “if only for daring to judge her, when I tell you, that with all my knowledge of her and her life, I dare not. No, my lad, I’m going to sleep on it, and in the morning see if I can’t find out the end of the thread, of the clue which will lead us to the truth.”
“There is no need,” groaned Leslie. “We know the truth.”
“And don’t even know who this man is. No, indeed, we do not know the truth. All right, my lad, I can read your looks. I’m a trusting, blind, old fool, am I? Very well, jealous pate but I warn you, I’m right and you’re wrong.”
“Would to heaven I were! I’d give ten years of my life that it could be proved.”
“Give ten years of nonsense. How generous people are at making gifts of the impossible! But look here, Duncan Leslie, I’ll have you on your knees for this when we have found out the mystery; and what looks so black and blind is as simple as A B C. Trash! bolt with some French adventurer? Our Louy! Rubbish, sir! Everything will be proved by-and-by. She couldn’t do it. Loves her poor old father too well. There, once more take my advice, lie down there and have a nap, and set your brain to work in the sunshine not in the dark.”
“No.”
“Going?”
“Yes, I am going. Good night, sir.”
“Good night, you great stupid, obstinate, thick-headed Scotchman,” growled Uncle Luke, as he let him out, and stood listening to his retiring steps. “I hope you’ll slip over the cliff and half kill yourself. There’s something about Duncan Leslie that I like after all,” he muttered, as he went back to the dining-room, and after a few minutes’ thought, went softly up to his brother’s chamber, to find him sleeping heavily from the effect of the sedative given by the doctor.
Uncle Luke stole out quietly, shook his fist at his sister’s door, and then went below to sit for a while studying Louise’s letter, before lying down to think, and dropping off to sleep with the comforting self-assurance that all would come right in the end.
Meanwhile Duncan Leslie had gone down the steep descent, and made his way to the foot of the cliff path, up which, with brain and heart throbbing painfully, he slowly tramped. The night was dull and cold, and as he ascended toward Luke Vine’s rough cottage, he thought of how often he had met Louise on her way up there to her uncle’s; and how he had often remained at a distance watching from his own place up at the mine the graceful form in its simple attire, and the sweet, earnest face, whose eyes used once to meet his so kindly, and with so trusting a look.
“Sleep on it!” he said, as he recalled the old man’s words. “No sleep will ever make me think differently. I must have been mad—I must have been mad.”
He had reached the old man’s cottage, and almost unconsciously stopped and seated himself on the rough block of granite which was Uncle Luke’s favourite spot when the sun shone.
Before him lay the sea spreading out deep and black, and as impenetrable as to its mysteries as the blank future he sought to fathom, and as he looked ahead, the sea, the sky, the future all seemed to grow more black.
His had been a busy life; school, where he had been ambitious to excel; college, where he had worked still more hard for honours, with the intention of studying afterwards for the bar; but fate had directed his steps in another direction, and through an uncle’s wish and suggestions, backed by the fact that he held the mine, Duncan Leslie found himself, when he should have been eating his dinners at the Temple, partaking of them in the far West of England, with a better appetite, and perhaps with better prospects from a monetary point of view.
His had been so busy a life that the love-idleness complaint of a young man was long in getting a hold, but when it did seize him, the malady was the more intense.
He sat there upon the old, worn piece of granite, making no effort to go farther, but letting his memory drift back to those halcyon days when he had first begun to know that he possessed a heart disposed to turn from its ordinary force-pump work to the playing of a sentimental part such as had stranded him where he was, desolate and despairing, a wreck with his future for ever spoiled.
He argued on like that, sometimes with tender recollections of happy days when he had gone back home from some encounter, with accelerated pulses and a sensation of hope and joy altogether new.
He dwelt upon one particular day when he had come down from the mine to find Louise seated where he then was; and as he recalled the whole scene, he uttered a groan of misery, and swept it away by the interposition of that of the previous evening; and here his wrath once more grew hot against the man who had come between them, for without vanity he could feel that Louise had turned toward him at one time, and that after a while the memory of the trouble which had come upon them would have grown more faint, and then she would once more have listened to his suit.
But for that man—He ground his teeth as he recalled Aunt Marguerite’s hints and smiles; the allusions to the member of the French haute noblesse; their own connection with the blue blood of Gaul, and his own plebeian descent in Aunt Marguerite’s eyes. And now that the French noble had arrived, how noble he was in presence and in act! Stealing clandestinely into the house during the father’s absence, forcing the woman he professed to love into obedience by threats, till she knelt at his feet as one who pleads for mercy.
“And this is the haute noblesse!” cried Leslie, with a mocking laugh. “Thank heaven, I am only a commoner after all.”
He sat trying to compress his head with his hands, for it ached as if it would split apart. The cool night breeze came off the sea, moist and bearing refreshment on its wings; but Duncan Leslie found no comfort in the deep draught he drank. His head burned, his heart felt on fire, and he gazed straight before him into the blackness trying to make out his path. What should he do? Act like a man and cast her off as unworthy of a second thought, or rouse himself to the manly and forgiving part of seeking her out, dragging her from this scoundrel, and placing her back in her stricken father’s arms?
It was a hard fight, fought through the darkness of that terrible night, as he sat there on the rock, with the wind sighing from off the sea, and the dull, low boom of the waves as they broke at the foot of the cliff far below.
It was a fight between love and despair, between love and hate, between the spirit of a true, honest man who loved once in his life, and the cruel spirits of suspicion, jealousy, and malignity, which tortured him with their suggestions of Louise’s love for one who had tempted her to leave her father’s home.
As the day approached the air grew colder, but Duncan Leslie’s brow still burned, and his heart seemed on fire. The darkness grew more dense, and the fight still raged.
What should he do? The worse side of his fallible human nature was growing the stronger; and as he felt himself yielding, the greater grew his misery and despair.
“My darling!” he groaned aloud, “I loved you—I loved you with all my heart.”
He started, alarmed at his own words, and gazed wildly round as if expecting that some one might have heard. But he was quite alone, and all was so dark right away ahead. Was there no such thing as hope for one stricken as he? The answer to his wild, mental appeal seemed to come from the far east, for he suddenly became conscious of a pale, pearly light which came from far down where sea and sky were mingled to the sight. That pale, soft light grew and grew, seeming to slowly suffuse the eastern sky, till all at once he caught sight of a fiery flake far on high, of another, and another, till the whole arc of heaven was ablaze with splendour from which the sea borrowed glistening dyes.
And as he gazed the tears rose to his eyes, and seemed to quench the burning fire in his brain, as a fragment which he had read floated through his memory:—
“Joy cometh in the morning—joy cometh in the morning.”
Could joy ever again come to such a one as he? He asked the question half-bitterly, as he confessed that the dense blackness had passed away, and that hope might still rise upon his life, as he now saw that glittering orb of light rise slowly above the sea, and transform the glorious world with its golden touch.
“No, no,” he groaned, as he rose to go on at last to his desolate home. “I am broken with the fight. I can do no more, and there is no cure for such a blow as mine. Where could I look for help?”
“Yes; there,” he said resignedly. “I’ll bear it like a man,” and as he turned he rested his hand upon the rough granite wall to gaze down the path, and drew back with a curious catching of the breath, as he saw the light garments of a woman pass a great patch of the black shaley rock.
Madelaine Van Heldre was hurrying up the cliff path towards where he had passed those long hours of despair.