II
Fred Luffington had once had the misfortune to see ‘an impossible brute’ preferred to his elegant self by an old love of Antwerp, hence he had long given up pondering the oddnesses of women’s love-fancies. He was a gentleman as well, and kept that sharply incorrect picture to himself. He met the countess again, and dropped his eyes, ashamed of his knowledge. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy he eyed with a droll smile, and the more he looked at him, the more incomprehensible the matter appeared.
But he was good company, that Fred admitted heartily, and shook his hand with a cordial hope of meeting him again, now that their little difference was settled, and had led to such cheery results. He counselled him to take to claret, and to himself remarked that his domestic ethics seemed none the better for the drinking of port, which evidently had not taught him to let his neighbour’s wife alone. He had met Lord Harborough once crossing the Park, and perfectly understood the countess’s sobs. That was all he did understand. He could fancy himself sobbing if he were a woman condemned to live his days with that hard-featured, red-haired little man, bearing himself so primly and so distractingly respectable.
‘Yes, that explains her odd choice,’ said Luffington, turning his back upon Fendon, after a last grasp of the Flemish priest’s hand. ‘There’s a taint of disreputableness about the local hero, who looks as if he had rolled so much in the dust in infancy, that neither soap nor brush has been able to give him a respectable head ever since.’
Fred Luffington went abroad again, and forgot all about the Flemish priest and the half revealed drama of Fendon. A couple of years later he had engaged to meet some friends at Lugano and, travelling from Basle, decided to leave the train at the entrance to the St. Gothard tunnel, and walk over the mountain. The weather was glorious, and such scenery is enough to make a saint of the biggest sinner. The flush of roseate snows, whose white from very purity is driven to flame; the crystal splendours above, the shadows of the valleys revealed in the twisted gaps like flakes of blue cloud softening the sunny whiteness, wooded depths and sparkling water, with the ineffable beauty of the turquoise stillness of the grand lake below: combined to make even the breathing of a worldly young man a prayer of thanksgiving. Fred Luffington never could gaze on the Alps without feeling his sins drop from him like a garment, and his soul stand out, naked and innocent before the majesty of creation.
He had been walking since mid-day, with rests in craggy nooks, and now at sundown it behoved him to look out for shelter. He waited until he had seen the last effects of an Alpine sunset before branching into a narrow wooded path, which he was informed led to a little village. At the first châlet, he knocked for admittance, and a fat woman came to the door, in a state of evident perturbation. Her face cleared when she discovered that he spoke Italian.
‘There is a sick man here. We think he must be an Englishman, but we do not understand him, and he neither knows French nor Italian. If the gentleman would but look at him. The doctor says he will not recover,’ she burst out, without stopping for breath.
Luffington followed her upstairs, and entered a tolerably clean little room, where the sick man lay, either asleep or unconscious. Luffington stood, and looked at him long and musingly. Where ever had he seen that thin, sharp, foreign face, the curls of dust-hued black, the oddly beautiful brow and full lips? A small brown hand lay upon the coverlet, and it sprang a gush of sympathy to his eyes. Suddenly the closed lids opened and revealed eyes of the sombre dead blackness of the sloe, without the red and yellow flames he now so vividly remembered. So this was the end of that sorry drama of Fendon! Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy was dying in a far-off Swiss village on the top of St. Gothard. And the countess? Fred bent, and whispered his name, and begged to be used as a friend. A gleam of recognition broke the dark blankness of the dying man’s glance, and he made a feeble movement of his hand, which Luffington caught and held in a gentle clasp. The sick man’s eyes filled gratefully. He knew he was dying, and he was comforted by the presence of Luffington.
All through the night Fred sat and nursed him. He was melted in kindness and gratitude that this chance of redeeming some unworthy hours had fallen to him. He held the dying man’s hand, listened to his babble, and promised to destroy a packet of letters in a certain ebony box, into which he was to place poor Fitzroy’s watch and pocket book, and a copy of the Spanish Gypsy, the only book he possessed, and deliver it into the hands of the Countess of Harborough. In the presence of death, Fred could hear her name without any squeamishness.
‘Take from under my pillow a locket, and open it for me. I want to see her face again.’
Fred did so, and could not help recognising the features of the countess. He asked if Mr. Fitzroy had any other friends to whom he could carry messages.
‘Friends? I have none,’ he said, in a toneless way, empty of all bitterness or pain. ‘I neither sought friendship nor offered it. I have loved but one being on this earth, and it has been my duty to stand by and see her suffer, and now I must go, while she remains behind unhappy, with none to comfort her. There is no comfort on earth for miserable wives. When I think of them, I am wroth to hear men complain. What do we know about pain compared with them? And yet they bear it. The God that made them alone can explain how. But this last blow! How will she bear that? Mary, Mary, my poor unhappy girl!’
He closed his eyes, and seemed to dose, then opened them, and clutched Luffington’s fingers, like a startled child.
‘Don’t leave me,’ he breathed, through shut teeth. ‘It is so lonely among strangers. Ah, if I were only back in my room in the ‘St. George and the Dragon,’ with good Mrs. Matcham! Poor Mary! The worst of it is, I have never been able to punch that rascal’s head. Never. For her sake, I have had to “my Lord” him, when I wanted to be at his throat. Well, I played the game gallantly. Nobody can deny that. It’s for her now to continue it alone. The locket! Where’s the locket? Let it go with me. It contains all I have loved on earth, and I’ll lie all the quieter underground for having it with me.’
The dawn found him lifeless, and Luffington sitting with his stiff cold hand clasped in his own. The locket, containing the likeness of the Countess of Harborough and a thick twist of blonde hair, was buried, along with the remains of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy, in a little Alpine churchyard.
One summer evening, the Flemish priest of Fendon was reading his breviary in the garden, not so intent upon prayer that he had no eye for his flower-beds, which he had just watered. He turned hastily as the garden gate swung back, and recognised Fred Luffington, who approached with an air of unwonted gravity. He carried a square parcel under his arm.
‘My dear young friend,’ cried the enchanted priest, keeping, while he spoke, a finger between the leaves of his breviary.
‘I have a painful commission for you. You must take this box at once to the Countess of Harborough, and acquaint her with the news that Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy is dead. I buried him in Switzerland a month ago.’
The priest shook his head sadly. He scrutinised Luffington’s features sharply, and said—
‘Thank God, she knows that already—that is, the death. But I suspect this box will open old wounds.’
‘Poor woman! Tell her Mr. Fitzroy sent this by a trusted friend. I destroyed her letters. For her sake, I wish I were not in the secret, but unhappily, by accident, I learnt it long before I found the poor fellow dying in a Swiss châlet.’
‘Ah,’ muttered the priest, and felt for his pipe. ‘It’s unfortunate. Not a soul but myself has known it for years—not even the earl, and such a secret has cost me many an uncomfortable moment.’
Luffington cast a strange glance upon him. His words were inexplicable. Known it for years! Secret unshared by the earl! Was the ground solid beneath his feet, that a virtuous priest should contemplate the likelihood of such a secret being shared with the earl?
‘It’s not to be feared I should betray a lady. God knows, I am no saint myself, to blame anybody.’
‘I don’t blame her much myself. I deplore the need for duplicity, but it was not her doing. They placed her in a false position. But while I cannot but admire the tenacity of her affections and her loyalty to a natural claim, I have ever been urging her to make a clean breast of it to her husband. It was not her business to expiate the wrong of others, but confession would have placed her and the unfortunate man now in his grave upon a proper footing, and lent the dignity of candour to their relations.’
Luffington felt mercilessly mystified. Even suppose the lovers not altogether criminal, how could the earl’s recognition of their irregular situation lend dignity to it? He spoke his perplexity, and cast the good priest into a panic.
‘What did you mean by telling me you knew everything?’ he cried, wrathfully. ‘Malcolm Fitzroy her ladyship’s lover! Poor woman, poor woman! I thought you knew, and now I must break confidence, to clear her, and tell you the wretched story.’
He drew Fred into his study, carefully closed the door, and there laid bare a situation as odd as the personality of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy. A titled lady in Northumberland lost a new-born infant, and was herself pronounced in danger unless a child could be found to take its place. A gypsy outcast was discovered to have given birth to twins on the same day, and was glad enough to resign the baby girl to the bereaved aristocrat. The twins were the result of an intrigue between an English gentleman and a handsome gypsy. The little girl blossomed into youth, as English and refined as could be, and her foster-mother, whose life she had saved, could not bring herself to part with her. As no other children came, she grew up the daughter of the house, adored by her self-made parents. The boy was his mother’s son, an intractable vagrant, incapable of control, with the saving grace of a passionate attachment to his sister.
When the Earl of Harborough came forward as a suitor, the old lord and his wife debated long upon their duty to him and to his house, and their desire for their darling’s advancement. The latter instinct prevailed, and the earl believed himself the husband of a well-born English maiden. The adopted parents were both dead, and the countess, unhappy in her marriage, had nobody to turn to in her troubles but her gypsy brother. To make good his dubious footing at the Hall, Fitzroy had cast himself in the way of the earl, and secured an extraordinary popularity in the village and upon the estate. The earl thought him a droll fellow, unbent patronisingly to him, and enjoyed his odd vagabond habits.
This was the secret of Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy and the Countess of Harborough.
THE LITTLE MARQUIS
To Alice Cockran