MARGARET'S HAPPY DESTINY.
"By gar! mon camarade, and do you call yourself a man, prying into Madam Fortune's good graces? Why, she has starved you, the jade, she has given you the prison fare, she has been a vampire to you, mon colonel. What for you wear that face of parchment when I come to preside over the hand-grip, and to bless, and to be the good fairy? Ah, bah! Your future may be very good, but your past has been execrably bad. I drop the tear of friendship to your mal-de-grain."
Monsieur, the chevalier, had just arrived from New York per steamer, breezy, brisk, jocund as a stage harlequin, and rushed in upon our colonel to congratulate him after having hunted up all particulars connected with him in the little town, and had the gratification of finding affairs so much better than he feared.
"Ah, Calembours, it's some time since we met. You look so flourishing that I need scarcely express a hope that you are well. Thanks for your sympathy. Don't waste it, though. I'll soon be all right, if I'm not done brown in Fortune's frying-pan. But what brings you to Key West? A consignment of tough beef?"
"Ma foi! you take a man up sharp, mon ami. I have not the affliction to see the last of the Brand spirit, gone out of you, for all the sugars and panadas of this illness. Do you suppose a consignment of anything could bring me to this inferno of yellow fever and negroes? Why not sooner suggest pleasure, duty, or what say you to friendship for you, mon camarade?"
"Pshaw! Calembours, you and I know that your capabilities of friendship could be bought at a ransom of five shillings."
"Mon Dieu! but you are hard on your Ludovic. Did I not squander all my little gains for to get your rights in England? Did I not give up the grand demoiselle. Marguerite, to you, when she might have been the countess, when she might have loved me? Ah, mon colonel, you have me to thank for all your good fortune, and yet you will not lift the eyes to thank me."
"Brag was an impudent dog; still, there's my hand, comrade, and in virtue of my present happiness, which you helped to bring about, take a hearty squeeze."
The chevalier squeezed it, and declared, with tears in his eyes, that he was the luckiest dog out of Paris in possessing such a fine camarade.
"You shall now hear my little plan in having ventured to this infectious place," he cried. "Your glorious mademoiselle had struck such frenzy of admiration into my soul that the instant Madame Hesslein released me from attending upon her—curse Madame Hesslein"—his visage grew pale with uncontrollable rage—"I determined to follow Mademoiselle Walsingham here, and to find if the plague had spared her, and if she was left without protection, (for I must tell you, mon ami, that I had no hope of seeing you alive again), to offer her my poor help and escort back to her home and friends in Surrey, and to be the friend in need to her until she turned me away.
"I come full of these glorious plans of benevolence which might well ennoble any man, and find—hey, presto! the romance has turned the other way! My colonel still lives, being conjured back to life by undiluted fidelity; the lawyer with the knotty head has argued the plague out of conceit of him, and the glorious mademoiselle is a fiancee; so I bury my too fond plans for mademoiselle's welfare, and I crucify the flesh, and say to myself:
"'I will be the good fairy for these two people; will be the mason to build the steps to their summit of bliss; I will be the porter to carry them thence.'
"So I fly to you—behold me—I am here to act as manager—I glow with the eagerness of friendship."
"And in return, what do you expect?"
Calembours shrugged his shoulders and grinned.
"Vive l'Anglais!" he cried, "they can make a good bull's-eye can the John Bulls. You see this bourse? Bah! how wrinkled are its sides, how flattened under hard pressure of poverty! Mon Dieu! did not the jade, Madame Hesslein, take the bread out of my mouth in the amplitude of her revenge? Very well. You who offer me the hand of friendship in return for that leetle favor, and also for the other not leetle favor of sending your Marguerite to save your life, shall take her fingers in yours, kiss them, and say: "Have you forgotten the small souvenir which you promised to my friend, the chevalier?" Ma Mignonette, now is the time to remember it. And she will remember it—my word upon it, she will, and will also urge upon you to let her souvenir me with a leetle more of her pin-money. And with the proceeds of your joint munificence I shall float again on the ascending tide of fortune, in my tight little bark, in spite of the grande she devil who has ruined me."
"Ah, your funds have run low, and you are here to replenish them?"
"By gar! that is so, mon ami."
The two men eyed each other; St Udo with raised eyebrows and slightly scornful amusement; the ex-tailor of Szegedin with an ingratiating impudence which showed that monsieur knew his man very well.
"I have told you often that you are a greedy dog," said the colonel; "but I have no wish to see you under the feet of your favourite goddess, though I had much rather you had left your services to speak for themselves to our pockets. How much did Miss Walsingham agree to give you? Davenport, it seems to me, mentioned something of this to me."
"Only one thousand of your pounds, cher ami, only one thousand; she was going to insist upon doubling it, but I implored her: 'Admirable lady, press no more upon me. At that time I little dreamed the days were coming when necessity should compel me to accept."
"You shall have fifteen hundred to give you a start. I think you will manage upon that, you are such a man of resource." Said the colonel, admiringly, who had heard Davenport's grumbling account of the money arrangement with the chevalier, and remembered it very well.
Whereupon monsieur got up, flung his arms around St. Udo, gave him a French embrace, vowed he was a lord, and then coolly announced himself the attache of the little party, he rushed off to hunt up his quondam antagonist, Davenport, and discuss the management of affairs, with much impudent triumph, over that worthy gentleman for his former suspicions of the honor of a French chevalier.
The white moonbeams poured brilliant as diamond lights into the porch of the old church of Key West.
The spicy odor of the citron trees and of the orange groves filled each passing breath; the boom of the far-off surf against the reefs made endless sounding, like the dull roar of a conch-shell at the ear.
The robed figure of a clergyman stood in the low-browed church doorway, and his hands gently chafed each other as he gazed down the white road after a quiet cortege, which was gliding slowly toward the town.
Into the flickering shades of a branching palm-tree out to the vivid moonbeams, bright as day, quietly moving farther and farther from the man who had bound them together, for a peaceful or a turbulent life.
And the good pastor, softly chafing his hands, and thinking of the bride's soft, holy face, and of the bridegroom's beauty, which had reminded him of Antinous, grave, yet not severe, breathes a blessing upon these strangers, who this night will leave forever behind them his fairy isle.
"May their wedded life be as serene and smooth as these shades are light, and these bursts of moonlight translucent. May the sky ever be clear for them—the sea of life ever be unruffled, as yonder crystal channel, to which they are hastening."
Then he, also, leaves the glistening temple behind him, and goes his way among the down-dropping shrubs and spicy blossoms to his home among the bananas.
Standing on the deck of the steamer, which was to convey him to his long-forsaken home, with his arm around the Venus-like figure of his wife, and his eyes upon the swiftly vanishing roof of the isle, St. Udo Brand, who had spoken but little since repeating the vows which had made his darling by his side his own, now found speech, and half playfully apostrophized the dreamlike scene before him thus:
"Farewell ye coral isles, wherein I found my Pearl and happiness. Blessed be your coraline foundations, your lazy inhabitants, and your fever-breeding climate. You have been to me a world of passion, of hope, of purity. Oh, my Lost Good, who has been sent to me in mercy"—his playful accents changed to the gravity of deep emotion, as he drew yet closer to him his "Perdita"—"I turn to you henceforth to be what you would wish me, and to study your secret of how to live. I have been wandering on the burning sands, and pressing forever onward to reach a glittering lake of the desert, which, ever rippling and vanishing, beckoned me farther from the cool, calm shades of rest. Now I come, a wearied pilgrim to your pure heart, my wife, for you have opened it to let a weary, dusty wanderer in. Your purity, my simple Margaret, reminds me of the immaculate heights of snow-capped Gaurisankar—serene, majestic, while I, a lava-crusted, thunderous, calcined volcano, lashed by the fires of many passions, come to cool my fevered blood by your chill radiance."
"Hush, St. Udo! If you knew how intensely happy I am with my destiny——"
She paused, for her glad eyes were filling fast, her fond tones faltering.
"Oh, my soft-souled Perdita! my simple darling!"
And then sweetly swooped the rush of joy to them, and they were dumb, for some one who has read the human heart says, "The most exquisite of all emotions is utter silence, with a being in whom we feel entire sympathy."
"Ah, par ma foi! but I am the good fairy, after all!" muttered the chevalier, hugging his fancy little self, and pacing about near them, with a protecting air, as if they were his especial proteges. "I feel like Guardian Angel of their fortunes. Saint Ludovic—par la messe, it sounds well!"
"Thank Heaven! Ethel Brand's incomprehensible will has explained itself at last!" mused Davenport, laying down his crumpled Times, "and it has proved itself to be the wisest will ever the Brands made. Married in spite of themselves, and as happy as love can make them in spite of a plain face, on the one side, and a reputation that the dogs wouldn't pick up once, on the other. He's a saved man, and she's a happy woman—dear, faithful Margaret. What glorious news for old Gay."
When Mrs. St. Udo Brand came home to Seven-Oak Waaste, she found a letter awaiting her, and in its many pages she found at last the true history of the man who had been the Sleuth-Hound of Castle Brand:
Convict Ship Fearless, March —, '63.
"Miss Walsingham:—As you are a remarkably clever woman, and I have always been an admirer of fair play, I will give you your dues, and own that in our little game you had the best of it, and deserved to have.
"I don't bear you malice for this cursed mess which you've pushed me into, although I have you only to blame for it, for perhaps I didn't go the right way to work with you and I was a confounded fool for my pains.
"Yes I've been a lover of fair play all through my dodging life, ever since I was big enough to run at my father with a knife for making my mother cry; and since in our desperate little game together you won, I think it but fair play to own it, and to show you the few trumps with which I fought against your full hand.
"I'm sent back to banishment for life, and you are, I hear, a happy bride, coming home with St. Udo Brand; but if I know the practical good sense you possess, you won't toss this into the fire till you've read it all, and wasted a few good-hearted regrets on the wretch whose luck was so infernally poor.
"Forty years ago, Colonel Cathcart Brand, only son of Ethel Brand, Dowager of Seven-Oak Waaste, went to Cuba, which was a military station then as now, and fell in with a splendid-looking Cuban girl called Zerlini Barelli.
"Of course, the man took her in, and ruined all her worldly prospects through her love of him. In five years he was ordered back to England again, and coolly proceeded to take leave of the girl who had been more to him than many a wife is to her husband, and had nursed him through more than one, almost fatal attack, of fever. In vain she pleaded that he would take her with him, and own her boy as his legal heir. The colonel swore he couldn't, and offered her any money if she would not follow him.
"She agreed to this, and when I was four years old, they parted, never to meet again.
"I inherited all my mother's deep, patient ferocity, added to my father's outward appearance; and was called Brand Bareilli, at St. Kitts, where I was sent to school, I not having the remotest idea of my parentage.
"When I was ten years of age I was sent to England, probably at the colonel's instigation, and I was put into a training academy to fit me for the army.
"At twenty-one I received my commission as lieutenant in the artillery, through the influence of Colonel Brand, who from time to time took a certain care of my fortunes.
"About this time, noticing a great resemblance between the colonel and myself, a suspicion seized me that I had found my father.
"I once hinted as much to him, and was furiously ordered to hold my tongue, and to beware how I insulted my benefactor.
"From that day I lost favor with him; he treated me when we met with such cold contempt that my blood boiled; and all the while he was raising a fiend of hatred in my heart against him, he continued to pay over to me an annuity, which kept my suspicions on the alert.
"At last I wrote to my mother, who sent me the whole story, asking me whether I had ever seen the colonel's son, St. Udo Brand, who was five years younger than I.
"Colonel Brand, upon returning from Cuba to England, had married a lady of birth, whose one son had absorbed all the affection which was truly mine by priority or birth, and from the moment in which I heard of his existence, I hated him with furious hatred, and longed to visit my wrongs upon him.
"Three years after this I first saw St. Udo Brand, then just twenty. He was an ensign in the Guards, and mightily admired for his good humor and wit. He, too, was extremely like his father, which made me chary of his acquaintance for fear he would make me out what I was, and taunt me with it before my companions; so we never knew each other in the slightest.
"But a devil of envy possessed me, for I knew that this chap had no more business to be happy, rich, and respected than I had—nor so much, for I was his elder brother; and I was neither happy, nor rich, nor respected—everybody giving me the name of a sullen dog, etc., which was scarce fair play.
"So I watched my man till I saw an opening for spoiling his smiling fortunes, and then I cut in cleverly.
"I found out that St. Udo was madly in love with a young lady of fashion, and that some had it they were to be married whenever he attained his majority. I knew the girl myself, as luck would have it, and was rather fond of her, too; so, rather than let him, of all others in the world, cut me out of anything more which was mine by rights, I set myself cunningly to winning her affections.
"How often I've watched till the coast was clear of the dashing young ensign, and then got in for my visit to Genevieve Carlisle. So cleverly did I manage the thing, that not once did St. Udo contrive to meet me, although I was there every day as regularly as he himself was.
"At last I induced her to fly with me, and we went to Paris, and they lost all trace of us, for I was always good at a dodge, and had been bred to it for many a year.
"She was discontented and moping as might have been expected, after a few months; she had been used to luxury and fashion, and plenty of approving friends, and now she hadn't enough to eat or wear, nor a friend in the world; for, of course, when I was in hiding, my father couldn't send me my annuity; and as for her family, they cut her dead when she eloped with a nameless adventurer, as they were pleased to call me.
"She also took into her head to repent of her bargain, and to take a dislike to me, and I consider that this wasn't exactly fair play, seeing that she had been ready enough to fall in love with me when I was fawning about her in London.
"Well, we got on miserably enough, until her continual reproaches sent me off to hunt up some money, and I had the misfortune to be caught in a forgery, which had it succeeded, might have left me a prosperous man to-day.
"But the sharp dogs detected me, and had me convicted and booked for twelve years penal service in Tasmania, and the news killed the woman; she never held her head up after she found out what company her treachery to St. Udo Brand had brought her into.
"I can't blame myself for anything in the affair; was it my fault that I was born with a wrong to avenge? Was it my fault that my father gave me opportunity to hate him and his, by his unjust treatment of me? And was it my fault that St. Udo chose to fall in love with a girl whom I had my eye on, or that she should be false to him, and prefer me, after all her vows to him?
"As for the forgery business, if either of us were to blame, it was she, who should have stood in my chains, for her eternal harping and carping sent me oft in a fury to do anything I could for funds.
"Still, it was I that suffered, all throughout; strive as I might, my cursed ill-luck met me at every turn, and balked me.
"As we went out in the beastly convict ship, we took on board an old sea-captain and his daughter, who were going part of the way with us.
"I used to see the little girl walking the deck, and peering down into the hatch at us poor devils, each chained like a dog to his log, and her great eyes used to brim over with tears whenever she looked up; and she would sit at the mouth of the hatch, crying for us, till we began to watch for her.
"Do you remember all that, Margaret Walsingham?
"You were the little girl, and I was that half-crazy convict who always tried to drive you away with curses, and to frighten you with beastly threats. But back you would come next day, with your solemn eyes beaming with pity, and drop an apple, or an orange, or even a little book down among us, and sit watching us for hours, like a spirit, as if our misery burdened you so that you could not rest without sharing it with us.
"Once when I took fever, and could not speak for thirst, you climbed down the ladder, and fearlessly approached me with a cup of pure, cold water.
"How eagerly I drank it you may well remember, and also how ill I repaid it by a fierce oath the instant my tongue was loosened.
"But you only flitted away with a sorrowful face, and great tears standing on your lashes; and I felt such a queer, wrenching pain about my heart whenever I thought of it afterward that I vowed I would repay you, if I ever had the chance, for that little act of kindness.
"When I had been ten years out, I and a comrade of mine, O'Grady, got home on a ticket of leave.
"We were bound to have our freedom, and not many months passed after our return before we had it. Doubling, and dodging, and slipping through their fingers like eels, at last we slipped the chain, and came out, I as a gentlemanly gambler, he as the keeper of a gambling saloon, and we soon filled our pockets.
"Then I took a trip over the Continent for the purpose of perfecting myself in my profession; and then, coming back to England, circumstances sent Calembours in my way, and we joined in partnership.
"Then came my good luck, as I thought, and drove me against St. Udo Brand once more, and I wondered night and day whether I couldn't get any of the fortune which he so confidentially expected from his grandmother.
"The colonel, my father, was dead, so was his wife, and my brother was the only one living to whom I owed a grudge for my downfall: so I soon found out a way to make him pay up old scores.
"No sooner did Calembours suggest to me that I was like enough to St. Udo to pass for him, than I thought out the whole plot which it has been the business of Margaret Walsingham to explode.
"I compliment you on your infernal cleverness, and only blame myself for giving way to the only weak sentiment I have ever felt in my life, namely, mercy toward you for the sake of your kindness to me twenty years ago. If it hadn't been for that mistaken feeling, I could have wiped you out in the beginning of the game, and not a soul been the wiser.
"But I didn't and I heartily regret it now.
"With this sincere assertion, I close, remaining yours, humbly, Brand Bareilli."
Before we bid our friends good-by, let us cast a farewell glance on each whose fortunes yet do hang in the balance.
Do you wish your picture taken?
Step into this magnificent establishment in Picadilly, London, whose excellencies appeal to you from placards on every wall within three miles of London Bridge.
You will enter an apartment carpeted with a web of Turkish loom, and strewn with ottomans of Oriental gorgeousness, and blazing with the splendid framings of fine paintings.
Ladies of rank and fashion throng here, gentlemen of taste and purse, artists of cynical aspect, diletantes of enthusiasm, and all the world wags its tongue about the prodigies of art to be viewed in that salon.
You will presently be conducted by a deferential man in elegant livery up two flights of marble steps into a studio, where you will meet the great French artist, Ludovic, the Chevalier de Calembours.
His bright eyes beam pleasantly, his handsome face glows with welcome, his white, shapely hand waves you gracefully into a velvet chair.
You look at the little man in the black velvet Hungarian dolman, embellished with those glittering badges, which catch the eye so much; you mark the glossy beard and mustache, trimmed to the last degree of Parisian taste, and as retentive memory suggests to you the once wretched little tailor, toiling over his small clothes on the banks of the Theiss, you feel that you are in the presence of a great man.
And when he has, with that charming smile of naivete and indifference, shown you his cases of photographs, and his paintings colored and executed by ten of the first living artists in the world—all of whom are in his employ—you follow him into the crystal dome, and are photographed at eight guineas a dozen, with much the feeling you might experience were you one of those honored old women who have their feet washed once a year by the Empress of the French.
"The world likes to be gulled, then let us gull it."
In due time Madame Hesslein, of happy memory, married Vice-Admiral Oldright, who, as she had shrewdly calculated upon, soon got the post of admiral, and she was able to take precedence of all haughty ladies of her set, let them be ever so bitterly proud—she the blacksmith's daughter, a little tailor's wife.
I do not know whether she has yet quite forgotten that dying boy in the wretched shed, or those simple happy days by the river Theiss, but I hear that it is still her favorite waltz:
"Have no heart and a good digestion!"
Knowing the simple soul of my heroine; having a vague conception of the possible grandeur of my hero, feebly, but earnestly portrayed, need I assure you that happiness shed its golden light upon their future path, and that, hand clasped in hand, they paced through each small grief or joy, fanning in each other that bright and Heaven-born spark which leads us at last to Heaven?
Thus, gentle companions of these tortuous wanderings. I release you from your patient chaperonage. I think we part friends, and gratefully I press your hands, and say au revoir!