FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGE SAND.
We were as usual assembled in the arbor. The evening was stormy, the air heavy and the sky charged with black clouds furrowed with frequent lightnings. We were keeping a melancholy silence, as if the gloom of the atmosphere had reached our hearts, disposing us involuntarily to tears. Beppa, particularly, seemed given up to sorrowful thoughts. In vain had the abbé, alarmed at the disposition of the company, tried several times and in every way to reanimate the gayety, usually so sparkling, of our friend. Neither questions, teasing nor entreaties succeeded in drawing her from her reverie: her eyes fixed on the sky, her fingers wandering carelessly over the trembling strings of her guitar, she seemed not to notice what was going on around her, and to be thinking of nothing but the plaintive sounds she caused her instrument to utter, and the capricious course of the clouds.
The good Panorio, disheartened by the ill success of his attempts, took the resolution of addressing himself to me. "Come, dear Zorze," said he, "try in thy turn the power of thy affection upon this capricious beauty. There exists between you two a sort of magnetic sympathy stronger than all my reasoning, and the sound of thy voice succeeds in drawing her from her deepest distraction."
"This magnetic sympathy of which thou speakest to me," I answered, "comes, dear abbé, from the identity of our feelings. We have suffered in the same way and thought the same things, and we know each other well enough, she and I, to know what sort of ideas external circumstances recall to each. I wager that I can guess, not the subject, but at least the nature, of her reverie." And turning toward Beppa, "Carissima," I said gently, "of which of our sisters art thou thinking?"
"Of the most beautiful," she answered without turning round, "of the proudest, the most unfortunate."
"When did she die?" I continued, already interested in her who lived in the memory of my noble friend, and desiring to associate myself by my regrets with a destiny which could not be strange to me.
"She died at the close of last winter, on the night of the ball at the palace Servilio. She had resisted many sorrows, she had come forth victorious from many dangers, had suffered, without succumbing, terrible agonies, and died suddenly without leaving any trace, as if carried off by a thunderbolt. Every one here knew her more or less, but no one so well as I, because none loved her so much, and she only let herself be known according as she was loved. Others do not believe in her death, although she has not appeared since the night of which I tell thee: they say it has often happened that she has disappeared thus for a long time, and returned again afterward. But I know that she will never come back any more, and that her part upon the earth is finished. If I wished to doubt it I could not: she took care to let me know the fatal truth through him who was the cause of her death. And what a misfortune was that! O God! the greatest misfortune of our unhappy age! Such a beautiful life was hers! so beautiful and so full of contrasts! so illustrious, so mysterious, so sad, so magnificent, so enthusiastic, so austere, so voluptuous, so complete in its resemblance to all human things! No: no life and no death were like hers. She had found means of suppressing all the pitiful realities of her existence, leaving only its poetry. Faithful to the old customs of the national aristocracy, she only showed herself after the close of the day, masked, but never followed by any one. There is not an inhabitant of the city who has not met her wandering in the squares or in the streets—not one who has not noticed her gondola moored in some canal, but no one ever saw it enter or go out. Although this gondola was watched by no one, it was never known to have been the object of an attempt at theft. It was painted and equipped like all other gondolas, yet every one knew it. Even the children said, on seeing it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask.' As to the way in which it moved, and the place from which it brought its mistress at night, and to which it carried her back in the morning, no one could even suspect it. The revenue-cruisers had, indeed, often seen a black shadow upon the lagoons, and, taking it for a contraband boat, had given chase to it as far as the open sea, but when morning came they never saw upon the waves anything resembling the object of their pursuit; and finally they fell into the way of not minding it, and of saying when they saw it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask again.'
"At night the Mask traversed the whole city, seeking no one knew what. She was seen by turns in the broadest squares and in the most crooked streets, on bridges and under the arches of tall palaces, in the most frequented places and the most deserted. She went sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, without appearing to notice the crowd or the solitude, but never stopping. She seemed to contemplate with passionate curiosity the houses, the monuments, the canals, and even the sky above the city, and to breathe with delight the air which circulated through it. When she met a friendly person, she signed to him to follow her, and soon disappeared with him. More than once she has led me thus from the midst of the crowd, and has conversed with me of the things we loved. I followed her with confidence, for I knew we were friends; but many of those to whom she signaled did not dare respond to her invitation. Strange stories circulated about her, and froze the courage of the most intrepid. It was said that several young men, thinking they discovered a woman beneath this mask and this black dress, became enamored of her, as much for the singularity and mystery of her life as for her beautiful form and noble appearance—that having had the imprudence to follow her, they had never reappeared. The police, having even noticed that these young men were all Austrians, had brought all their man[oe]uvres into use to discover them, and get possession of her who was accused as the cause of their disappearance. But the sbirri were not more fortunate than the revenue-officers, and were never able to learn anything about the young foreigners or to lay hands upon her. A strange incident had discouraged the most ardent spies of the Venetian Inquisition. Finding that it was impossible to seize the Mask by night in Venice, two of the most zealous of the police resolved to wait for her in her own gondola, so as to capture her when she should enter it to row away. One evening, when they saw it moored to the Quay dei Schiavi, they got into it and concealed themselves. They remained there all night without hearing or seeing any one, but an hour before day they thought they perceived that some one was untying the boat. They rose silently and prepared to fall upon their prey, but at the same instant a terrible push capsized the gondola and the unlucky agents of Austrian rule. One of them was drowned, and the other only owed his life to aid brought him by the smugglers. The next day there was no trace of the boat, and the police were forced to believe it submerged, but in the evening it was seen moored in the same place and in the same condition as the night before. Then a superstitious terror took possession of the police, and not one of them was willing to make the same attempt a second time. After that day they no longer sought to disturb the Mask, who continued her excursions as in the past.
"In the beginning of last autumn there came to the garrison here an Austrian officer named Count Franz Lichtenstein. He was an enthusiastic, passionate young man, who had within him the germ of all great sentiments and an instinct for noble thoughts. In spite of his bad education as a great lord, he had been able to preserve his mind from all prejudices, and to keep in his heart a reverence for liberty. His position forced him to dissimulate in public his ideas and tastes, but as soon as his duties were performed he hastened to throw off his uniform, which seemed to him a badge of all the vices of the government he served, and hurried to meet the friends whom his goodness and intelligence had procured for him in the city. We loved particularly to hear him speak of Venice. He had seen it as an artist, had deplored its servitude, and had come to love it as much as a Venetian. He never wearied of traversing it night and day, and of admiring it. He wished, he said, to know it better than those whose good fortune it was to have been born there. In his nocturnal rambles he encountered the Mask. At first he paid no great attention to her, but having soon noticed that she appeared to study the city with the same curiosity as himself, he was struck with this strange coincidence, and spoke of it to several persons. They related to him the stories which were afloat concerning the veiled woman, and advised him to beware of her. But, as he was brave even to rashness, these warnings, instead of frightening him, excited his curiosity, and inspired him with a mad desire to make the acquaintance of the mysterious personage who so terrified the vulgar. Wishing to keep toward the Mask the same incognito which she preserved toward him, he dressed himself as a citizen and continued his nocturnal excursions. He was not long in meeting what he sought. He saw under a beautiful moonlight the masked woman standing before the charming church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. She seemed to contemplate with adoration the delicate ornaments which decorated its portal. The count silently and slowly approached her. She did not appear to notice him, and did not stir. The count, who had stopped a moment to see if he were discovered, moved on again and came close to her. He heard her utter a profound sigh, and as he knew Venetian very badly, but Italian very well, he addressed her in pure Tuscan. 'Salutation,' said he—'salutation and happiness to those who love Venice.'
"'Who are you?' replied the Mask, with a voice full and sonorous as a man's, but sweet as a nightingale's.
"'I am a lover of beauty.'
"'Are you one of those whose brutal love does violence to free beauty, or of those who kneel before captive beauty and weep for its sorrows?'
"'When the king of the night sees the rose flourish joyously beneath the breath of the breeze, he flaps his wings and sings: when he sees her wither beneath the hurrying blast of the storm, he hides his head under his wing and shudders. Thus does my love.'
"'Follow me, then, for thou art one of the faithful.' And grasping the young man's hand, she drew him toward the church. When he felt the cold hand of the unknown press his, and saw her move with him toward the sombre depth of the portal, involuntarily he recalled the fearful stories he had heard, and, seized with a sudden terror, he stopped. The Mask turned, and fixing a scornful look on the pale face of her companion, said to him, 'You are afraid? Adieu.' Then loosing his arm she hastened away.
"The count was ashamed of his weakness, and rushing after her, in his turn seized her hand, saying, 'No, I am not afraid. Come!' Without answering, she continued her walk. But instead of going toward the church, as at first, she turned into one of the little streets which lead into the square. The moon was hidden, and the most complete obscurity reigned over the city. Franz hardly saw where he placed his foot, and could distinguish nothing in the deep shadows which enfolded him on all sides. He followed at random his guide, who seemed, on the contrary, to know her way perfectly well. From time to time a few beams gliding across the clouds came to show Franz the edge of a canal, a bridge, an arch or some unknown part of a labyrinth of deep and tortuous streets: then everything relapsed into darkness. Franz soon discovered that he was lost in Venice, and that he was at the mercy of his guide, but he resolved to brave everything. He showed no uneasiness, and let himself be led along without making an observation.
"At the end of a full hour the masked woman stopped. 'It is well,' she said to the count: 'you have courage. If you had shown the least sign of fear during our walk, I would never have spoken to you again. But you were calm: I am satisfied with you. To-morrow, then, on the square of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, at eleven o'clock. Do not seek to follow me: it would be useless. Turn down this street to the right and you will see the piazza of St. Mark's. Au revoir!' She quickly pressed the count's hand, and before he had time to answer disappeared behind the angle of the street.
"The count remained for some time motionless, still perfectly astounded at what had passed, and undecided what to do. But having reflected on his slight chance of finding the mysterious lady again, and the risk he ran of losing himself by pursuing her, he resolved to return home. He followed, therefore, the street to the right, found himself in a few moments in the piazza of St. Mark's, and thence easily regained his hotel.
"The next day he was faithful to the rendezvous. He arrived in the square as the church-clock was striking eleven. He saw the masked woman standing waiting for him on the steps of the entrance.
"'It is well,' said she. 'You are punctual: let us enter.' So speaking, she turned immediately toward the church.
"Franz, who saw that the door was shut, and knew that it was never opened at night, thought the woman was mad. But what was his surprise at seeing the door yield to her first effort! He mechanically followed his guide, who quickly reclosed the door after he had entered. They then found themselves in darkness, but Franz, remembering that a second door without a lock still separated them from the nave, felt no uneasiness, and prepared to push it before him in order to enter. But she stopped him by a pressure of the arm. 'Have you ever come into this church?' she asked him abruptly.
"'Twenty times,' he answered. 'I know it as well as the architect who built it.'
"'Say you think you know it, for you do not really know it yet. Enter!'
"Franz pushed the second door, and they penetrated into the interior of the church. It was magnificently lighted on all sides, but completely empty.
"'What ceremony is to be performed here?' asked Franz, stupefied.
"'None: the church expected me to-night: that is all. Follow me.'
"The count vainly tried to understand the meaning of the words the Mask addressed to him, but, subjugated by a mysterious power, he followed her obediently. She led him into the middle of the church, made him notice, understand and admire its general architecture; then, passing to the examination of each part, she explained to him in detail, by turns, the nave, the colonnades, the chapels, the altars, the statues, the pictures, all the ornaments; showed him the meaning of everything, disclosed to him the idea hidden beneath each form, made him feel all the beauties of the works which composed the whole, and caused him to penetrate, so to speak, into the very entrails of the church. Franz listened with religious attention to all the words of the eloquent mouth which was pleased to instruct him, and from minute to minute recognized how little he had comprehended this ensemble of works which had seemed to him so easy to understand. When she finished the rays of morning, penetrating through the window-panes, caused the light of the tapers to pale. Although she had spoken for several hours, and had not sat down for an instant during the whole night, neither her voice nor her body betrayed any fatigue. Only her head drooped upon her bosom, which was throbbing violently, and seemed to listen to the sighs exhaling from it. Suddenly she lifted up her head, and raising her arms toward heaven, cried, 'O servitude! servitude!' At these words tears, rolling from beneath her mask, fell among the folds of her black dress.
"'Why do you weep?' asked Franz, approaching her.
"'To-morrow,' she answered, 'at midnight, before the Arsenal;' and went out by the side door at the left, which closed again heavily. At the same moment the Angelus sounded.
"Franz, astonished by the unexpected noise of the bell, turned and saw that all the tapers were extinguished. He remained for some time motionless from surprise, then left the church by the great door which the sacristan had just opened, and returned slowly home, endeavoring to guess who this woman, so bold, so artistic, so powerful, with such charm in her speech, such majesty in her appearance, could be.
"The next night at midnight the count was before the Arsenal. He found the Mask, who was waiting for him as on the previous night, and who, without saying anything, began to walk rapidly before him. Arrived before one of the side doors on the right, she stopped, inserted in the keyhole a golden key, which Franz saw glitter in the moonbeams, opened the door without making any noise, and entered first, signing to Franz to follow her. The latter hesitated an instant. To penetrate into the Arsenal at night by the aid of a false key was to expose one's self to a trial by a court-martial, if one were discovered; and it was almost impossible to avoid discovery in a place guarded by sentinels. But seeing the Mask on the point of closing the door upon him, he suddenly decided to pursue the adventure to the close, and entered. The masked woman first led him across several courts, then through corridors and galleries, all the doors of which she opened with her golden key, and ended by bringing him into vast halls filled with arms of all kinds and times, which had served, in the wars of the republic, either its defenders or its enemies. These halls were lighted by ships' lanterns placed at equal distances between the trophies. She showed the count the most curious and celebrated arms, telling him the names of those to whom they had belonged and of the battles in which they had been used, and relating to him in detail the exploits of which they had been the instruments. Thus she revived before the eyes of Franz the whole history of Venice. After having visited the four halls consecrated to this exhibition, she led him into a last one, larger than all the others, and lighted like them, but containing wood for shipbuilding, the débris of vessels of different forms and sizes, and fragments of the last Bucentaur. She told her companion the properties of these woods, the use of the ships, the time at which they had been built and the expeditions in which they had taken part: then pointing to the balcony of the Bucentaur, 'There,' said she, in a sad voice, 'are the remains of a past royalty. That was the last ship which bore a doge of Venice to wed the sea. Now Venice is a slave, and slaves never marry. O servitude! servitude!'
"As upon the previous evening, she went away after having pronounced these words, but this time taking the count with her, as he could not, without danger, remain in the Arsenal. Arrived in the square, they agreed on a new rendezvous for the morrow and parted.
"The next night and many succeeding nights she took Franz to the principal monuments of the city, introducing him everywhere with incomprehensible facility, explaining to him with admirable lucidity everything presented to their view, displaying to him marvelous treasures of intelligence and sensibility. He did not know which to admire most, the mind that had investigated so deeply or the heart that displayed itself in such beautiful bursts of feeling. What had at first been with him only a fancy, soon changed to a real and profound sentiment. Curiosity had caused him to form a connection with the Mask, and astonishment had led him to continue it. But at length the habit which he had formed of seeing her every night became to him a veritable necessity. Although the words of the unknown were always grave and often sad, Franz found in them an indefinable charm which attached him to her more and more, and he could not have fallen asleep at the break of day if he had not at night heard her sighs and seen her tears. He had such a sincere and profound respect for the grandeur and sufferings of which he suspected her that he had not dared beg her to take off her mask or to tell him her name. As she had not asked his, he would have blushed to show himself more curious and less discreet than she; and he was resolved to hope everything from her good-will and nothing from his own importunity. She seemed to appreciate the delicacy of his conduct, and to be pleased with it, for at each succeeding interview she showed him more confidence and sympathy. Although not a single word of love had been uttered between them, Franz had reason to believe that she knew his passion and felt disposed to share it. His hopes almost sufficed for his happiness, and when he felt a deeper desire to know her whom he already named internally his mistress, his imagination, impressed and as if assured by the marvels which surrounded him, painted her so perfect and so beautiful that he almost feared the moment in which she should be unveiled to him.
"One night, as they were wandering together under the arcades of St. Mark's, the masked woman made Franz stop before a picture which represented a girl kneeling before the patron saint of the basilica and the city. 'What do you think of this woman?' said she to him, after having given him time to examine it well.
"'It is,' he answered, 'the most wonderful beauty that one could, not see, but imagine. The artist's inspired soul has been able to give us its image, but the model can only exist in heaven.'
"The masked woman warmly pressed the hand of Franz. 'I,' she replied, 'know a face more beautiful than that of the glorious Saint Mark, and I could love no other than that which is the living image of it.'
"On hearing these words Franz paled and trembled as if seized with vertigo. He had just perceived that the face of the saint offered the most exact resemblance to his own. He fell on his knees before the unknown, and seizing her hand bathed it with his tears, without being able to utter a word.
"'I know now that thou belongest to me,' she said in a voice full of emotion, 'and that thou art worthy to know me and possess me. To-morrow, at the ball of the palace Servilio.' Then she left him as before, but without pronouncing the sacramental words, so to speak, which had terminated the conversation of each previous night.
"Intoxicated with joy, Franz wandered through the whole city, without being able to stop anywhere. He admired the sky, smiled upon the lagoons, saluted the houses and spoke to the wind. All who met him took him for a madman, and singled him out by their glances. He perceived it, but only laughed at the madness of those who found amusement in his. When his friends asked him what he had been doing for a month in which he had not been visible, he answered, 'I am going to be happy,' and passed on.
"Evening having arrived, he bought a magnificent scarf and new epaulettes, returned home to dress, took the greatest pains with his toilette, and then went, adorned with his uniform, to the palace Servilio. The ball was magnificent: every one except the officers of the garrison had come disguised, according to the injunction in the cards of invitation; and this multitude of varied and elegant costumes, mingling and moving to the sound of a numerous orchestra, presented the most brilliant and animated appearance. Franz traversed all the halls, approached all the groups and cast his eyes upon all the women. Several were remarkably beautiful, but none seemed to him worthy to arrest his regard. 'She is not here,' he said to himself. 'I was sure of it: it is not yet her hour.' He placed himself behind a column near the principal entrance and waited, his eyes fixed on the door. Many times it opened, many women entered, without causing the heart of Franz to throb, but at the moment when the clock struck eleven he started and cried out, loud enough to be heard by his neighbors, 'There she is!'
"All eyes turned toward him, as if to ask the meaning of his exclamation. But at the same moment the doors opened abruptly, and a woman who entered attracted all attention toward herself. Franz recognized her immediately. It was the young girl of the picture, dressed like a dogess of the fifteenth century, and rendered still more beautiful by the magnificence of her costume. She advanced with a slow and majestic step, looking about her with assurance, and saluting nobody, as if she had been the queen of the ball. No one except Franz knew her, but every one, conquered by her marvelous beauty and her lofty air, stood respectfully aside, and almost bowed down before her passage. Franz, at once dazzled and enchanted, followed her at a sufficient distance. At the moment she arrived in the last hall a handsome young man wearing the costume of Tasso was singing, accompanying himself on the guitar, a romance in honor of Venice. She walked straight toward him, and looking; fixedly at him asked him who he was that dared to wear such a costume and to sing of Venice. The young man, overwhelmed by her look, turned pale, bent his head and handed her his guitar. She took it, and drawing her fingers, white as alabaster, across the strings, she intoned in her turn, with a harmonious and powerful voice, a strange and irregular song: 'Dance, laugh, sing, gay children of Venice! For you the winter has no frosts, the night no shadows, life no cares. You are the happy ones of the world, and Venice is the queen of nations. Who says No? Take care: eyes see, ears hear, tongues speak. Fear the Council of Ten if you are not good citizens. Good citizens dance, laugh and sing, but do not speak. Dance, laugh, sing, gay children of Venice!—Venice, only city not created by the hand, but by the mind, of man! thou who seemst made to serve as the passing dwelling of the souls of the just, placed as a step for them from earth to heaven; walls which fairies inhabited, and which a magic breath still animates; aërial colonnades which tremble in the mist; light spires which one confounds with the floating masts of ships; arcades which seem to contain a thousand voices to answer each passing voice; ye myriads of angels and saints, who seem to bound upon the cupolas and move your bronze and marble wings when the breeze blows upon your damp brows; city which liest not, like others, on a dark and filthy soil, but which floatest, like a troop of swans, upon the waves,—rejoice, rejoice, rejoice! A new destiny is opening for you as beautiful as the first! The black eagle floats over the lion of St. Mark's, and Teutonic feet waltz in the palaces of the doges. Be silent, harmony of the night! Die, insensate noises of the ball! Be no more heard, holy song of the fishermen! Cease to murmur, voice of the Adriatic! Pale lamp of the Madonna! hide thyself for ever, silver queen of the night! There are no more Venetians in Venice. Do we dream? are we at a fête? Yes, yes: let us dance, let us laugh, let us sing! It is the hour when Faliero's shade descends slowly the staircase of the Giants, and seats himself, immovable, upon the lowest step. Let us dance, let us laugh, let us sing, for presently the voice of the clock will say, Midnight! and the chorus of the dead will come to cry in our ears, Servitude! servitude!'
"With these words she let fall the guitar, which gave forth a funereal sound on striking against the marble floor. Every one listened for the twelve strokes in a horrible silence. Then the master of the palace advanced toward the unknown with an air half terrified, half angry. 'Madame,' said he in a troubled voice, 'who has done me the honor to bring you to my house?'
"'I,' cried Franz, advancing, 'and if any one finds it ill, let him speak.'
"The unknown, who had appeared to pay no attention to the host's question, quickly raised her head on hearing the count's voice. 'I live,' she cried with enthusiasm, 'I shall live!' and she turned toward him with a radiant face. But as she looked at him her cheeks paled and her brow darkened with a sombre cloud. 'Why have you taken this disguise?' she said in a severe tone, pointing to his uniform.
"'It is not a disguise,' he answered: 'it is—' He could say no more: a terrible look from the unknown had as if petrified him. She regarded him some seconds in silence, then let fall from her eyes two large tears. Franz would have rushed toward her, but she did not give him time.
"'Follow me,' she said in a hollow voice: then rapidly breaking through the astonished crowd, she left the hall, followed by Franz.
"Arrived at the foot of the palace steps, she leaped into her gondola, and told Franz to enter after her and be seated. When he had done so he looked about him, and seeing no gondolier, 'Who will row us?' he asked.
"'I,' she answered, seizing the oar with a vigorous hand.
"'Rather let me.'
"'No: Austrian hands do not know the oar of Venice;' and giving a powerful impulse to the gondola, she sent it like an arrow into the canal. In a few moments they were far from the palace. Franz, who expected from the unknown an explanation of her anger, was astonished and unhappy at seeing her keep silence. 'Where are we going?' he said after a moment's reflection.
"'Where destiny wills us to go,' she replied in a terrible voice, and as if these words had reanimated her anger she began to row still more vigorously. The gondola, obeying the impulse of her powerful hand, seemed to fly over the water. Franz saw the foam dash with dazzling rapidity along the sides of the boat, and the ships on their course flee behind them like clouds borne away by the whirlwind. Soon the darkness grew deeper, the wind rose, and the young man heard nothing but the seething of the waves and the hissing of the air through his hair, and saw nothing before him but the tall white figure of his companion in the midst of the shadows. Standing at the stern, her hands on the oar, her hair scattered over her shoulders, and her long, white garments abandoned in disorder to the wind, she less resembled a woman than the spirit of shipwrecks playing upon the stormy sea.
"'Where are we?' cried Franz in an agitated voice.
"'The captain is afraid?' answered the unknown with a disdainful laugh.
"Franz did not reply. He felt that she was right, and that fear was gaining him. Not being able to master it, he wished at least to disguise it, and resolved to remain silent. But at the end of a few moments, seized with a sort of vertigo, he rose and walked toward the unknown.
"'Sit down!' she cried to him. 'Sit down!' she repeated in a furious voice; and seeing that he continued to advance, she stamped with so much violence that the boat trembled as if it would capsize. Franz was thrown down by the shock, and fell fainting on the bottom of the boat. When he came to himself he saw the unknown lying weeping at his feet. Touched by her bitter sorrow, and forgetting all that had just passed, he seized her in his arms, raised her up and made her sit by him; but she did not cease to weep.
"'Oh, my love,' cried Franz, pressing her against his heart, 'why these tears?'
"'The Lion! the Lion!' she answered, raising toward heaven her arm white as marble.
"Franz raised his eyes to the part of the sky toward which she pointed, and saw indeed the constellation of the Lion shining solitary amid the clouds: 'What matters it? The planets have no power over our destinies, and if they had we would find favorable constellations to struggle against fatal stars.'
"'Venus is set, alas! and the Lion rises; and yonder, look yonder! Who can struggle against what comes yonder?' She uttered these words in a sort of delirium, lowering her arms toward the horizon.
"Franz turned his eyes in the direction she designated, and saw a black point traced upon the waves in the midst of an aureole of fire. 'What is that?' he asked with profound astonishment.
"'It is destiny,' she answered, 'who comes to seek its victim. Which of us? thou wilt ask. Whichever I will. Thou hast heard of the Austrian nobles who came with me in my gondola, and were never seen again?'
"'Yes, but that story is false.'
"'It is true. I must devour or be devoured. Every man of thy nation who loves me, and whom I do not love, dies. As long as I do not love one, I shall live and I shall cause to die; and if I love one, I shall die: it is my fate.'
"'Oh, my God, who art thou, then?'
"'How it advances! In a minute it will be upon us! Dost thou hear? dost thou hear?' The black point had approached with inconceivable rapidity, and had taken the form of an immense boat. A red light came from its sides and surrounded it with flame: tall phantoms stood motionless on the deck, and innumerable oars rose and fell in measure, striking the water with a dreadful noise, while hollow voices chanted the Dies Iræ, accompanying themselves with the noise of chains.
"'O Life! O Life!' continued the unknown in a tone of despair. 'Oh, Franz, here is the ship: dost thou recognize it?'
"'No: I tremble before this terrible apparition, but I do not know it.'
"'It is the Bucentaur: it is that which engulfed thy countrymen. They were here in this same place, at this same hour, seated by my side in this gondola. The ship approached as it is approaching now: a voice cried to me, "Who goes there?" I answered, "Austrian." The voice cried to me, "Dost thou hate or love?" I answered, "I hate;" and the voice said to me, "Live!" Then the ship passed over the gondola, engulfed thy compatriots, and bore me in triumph on the waves.'
"'And to-day?'
"'Alas! the voice is going to speak.'
"In fact, a lugubrious and solemn voice, imposing silence on the funereal equipage of the Bucentaur, cried, 'Who goes there?'
"'Austrian,' replied the trembling voice of the unknown.
"A chorus of malediction burst from the Bucentaur, which approached with ever-increasing rapidity. Then a new silence fell, and the voice continued, 'Dost thou hate or love?'
"The unknown hesitated a moment, then in a voice thrilling like thunder she cried out, 'I love.'
"Then the voice said, 'Thou hast accomplished thy destiny—thou lovest Austria. Die, Venice!'
"A great cry, a heartrending, desperate cry, clove the air, and Franz sank in the waves. On coming to the surface he saw nothing—neither the gondola, the Bucentaur nor his beloved. Only on the horizon shone some little lights: they were the famous lanterns of the fishermen of Murano. He swam in the direction of the little isle, and arrived there at the end of an hour. Poor Venice!"
Beppa had finished speaking: tears fell from her eyes. We watched them flow in silence without seeking to console her. But suddenly she dried them, and said to us with her capricious vivacity, "Well, what is the matter with you that you are so sad? Is that the effect fairy-stories produce upon you? Have you never heard of Orco, the Venetian Trilby? Have you never met her at evening in the churches or on the Lido? She is a good devil, who only does harm to oppressors and traitors. One may say that she is the real genius of Venice. But the viceroy, having heard indirectly and confusedly of Count Lichtenstein's perilous adventure, begged the patriarch to pronounce a great exorcism over the lagoons, and since then Orco has never reappeared."
L. W. J.
IN THE ISLE OF WIGHT.
The Solent Sea, the channel dividing the Isle of Wight from the mainland, varies in breadth from one to six miles. The island must at one time have formed a portion of the mainland, and so late as when the Greeks traded with Cornwall for tin the Solent is said to have been passable at low water by men and carts.
The circumference of the island is about sixty miles, the surface undulating, with a range of fine downs running through from east to west, having here and there points of considerable elevation. It is said to have been well wooded formerly, but no forests remain, and the hedge-rows, coppices and scattered trees are all it can now offer in the way of foliage. The scenery of the north side of the island is quiet, pleasing, here and there picturesque, but the southern side is full of the beauty of bold cliffs, chasms, irregular coast- and hill-lines, tumbled rocks, bare, wind-swept hills, and sheltered coves where flowers bloom and ivy climbs from the very verge of the sea. On this side lies the famous region known as the Undercliff—a series of terraces rising ambitiously from the sea up the steep sides of St. Boniface's Down—the tract being about seven miles long, and from a quarter to half a mile broad.
On the one hand, the bold promontories, the shell-like bays of the sea-line; on the other, the lofty, rounded down, with here and there its buttress of gray rock coming out in naked grandeur; between the two a lovely irregularity of soft slope, sinuous or dimple-like valleys, dark ravines, velvet-smooth laps of terrace, with now and again a sudden springing brook, and everywhere the thickets of holly and cedar clambered rampantly over by masses of ivy and traveler's joy—our Virgin's bower clematis—and such sunshine as falls not elsewhere in England over all.
Miss Sewell, the author of Amy Herbert, Ivors and Ursula, who resides at Bonchurch with her sisters, where they have a school, says of the Undercliff: "There is a verse spoken of a very different country which often comes to my mind when I think of it: 'It is a land which the Lord thy God careth for. The eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year, even unto the end of the year.' Sometimes it has even seemed to me that heaven itself can scarcely be more beautiful."
It was Sir James Clark who discovered the Undercliff to the public. Up to the time of the publication of his work On the Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Disease, only a few fishermen's huts marked the spot that is now populous Ventnor. But the sheltered, sunny spot, the soft air, the plants flourishing even in winter, the charming surroundings, at once caught the fancy of invalids: they came in numbers, both for a summer visit and a winter residence, and of course suitable accommodation had to be provided for them. The "plague of building" lighted on Ventnor: almost every possible and impossible spot has been used for lodging—houses, hotels, shops, villas, churches, situated with utter disregard to the natural lines of the place. The building still goes on. There are everywhere ugly scars in the chalk-banks that Nature has not had time to heal: in short, Ventnor is spoiled for those who remember it in its early days, and for aristocratic dwellers roundabout, but it is a case of the greatest good to the greatest number; and when the quick-springing green shall have kindly softened and folded in the crowded, incongruous buildings, and blended into rounded masses above them, Ventnor will be forgiven its railway that has made this region accessible to the many-headed, in consideration of the comforts and amenities of life brought to the doors of circumjacent dwellers, instead of being, as once, lacking, or brought laboriously from London at serious individual expense.
To say that Ventnor is dull, to American notions, is only to say that it is an English sea-side resort. People live mostly in lodgings, which is the most unsocial way possible of living: there are no reading-rooms, no cafés, no hops, no places of meeting and introduction. There is the rapprochement of proximity on the Esplanade and the bathing beach, where one gets a little of his fellow-creatures in a sort of spiritual endosmose and exosmose. But nothing more, and I am afraid our average youthful American specimen of Solomon's lilies would, at the end of two days, cause all her crisp, snowy and varicolored petals to be refolded within their calyx "ark," and indignantly withdraw herself for evermore from the "Fair Island." "Her own loss?" Doubtless, but it is the race's as well that any single creature should be deaf, blind, without heart to feel, intellect and culture to appreciate, or with any exquisite sense of apprehension wanting.
But there are Americans and Americans; and some of our countrymen and countrywomen who have been busiest at home, who have journeyed far and wide, seem to find it the most natural thing possible to linger for months in Capuan Ventnor—anywhere in the soft-aired, Sleepy-Hollow Undercliff; and to pluck themselves away from the sweet peace, the calm delights of sauntering and lying on the cliffs, watching "the wrinkled sea" that "beneath them crawls," breathing the air that has no suggestion of ocean in it save its freshness, so entirely is all odor of brine and sea-weed overborne by the fragrance of flowers, notably that of the mignonette, sweet-pea and nasturtium, making little excursions on foot or coach-top along the coast, or to the charming inland famous spots,—a thing very grievous to be borne patiently.
Just above Ventnor, where the down is steepest, and almost at its top, is a wishing well; but if one would have his wish fulfilled, made while drinking its waters, he must climb to the spring without casting one backward glance. A sure foot and a head not easily dizzied are imperative necessities, and then one may climb, as I did, with carefulest directions, scramble to the very brow and find no drop of water on the way, get a superb view of the Undercliff and the Channel for miles and miles, gather handfuls of the lovely heather that clothes the down's top, then, plunging downward again, almost set foot unawares in the milky little basin no bigger than a kneading-bowl, that on the upward way would have been a very Kohinoor, and is now only glanced at with spiteful aversion. The ancients were right: there is a malignity of matter.
At Ventnor died John Sterling, made known to the world through the biographies of Carlyle and Archdeacon Hare. He was buried in the churchyard of the old church at Bonchurch, a tiny Norman building, of date 1270, which has been for years deserted. Graves fill all the enclosure, ancient elms shade it, a noisy brook half winds about it, then dashes down the sudden slope to the restless sea, whose mighty murmur underlies the streamlet's plashes and gurgles and the ceaseless tender bird-notes, and makes for this little burial ground, that is only hidden, not widely removed from men, a wondrous sense of space and solemn solitude.
Bonchurch is perhaps a mile from Ventnor, and is the boskiest bit of loveliness in all the lovely island. By every approach you enter it under the interlacing arches of noble old trees; ivy and ferns mask all with tender and dark glossy green; the thatched cottages are masses of honeysuckle and jessamine, their tiny windows and gardens gay with old English flowers; you may stand beneath fuchsia trees so reddened with the profusion of blossoms that at a little distance they are like nothing so much as tall clumps of barberry bushes laden with the ripe berries; you may visit, by introduction or permission, gardens of the lovely villas nestled in dells here, perched on bold crags there, or backing against the abrupt gray cliff, which has here no turfy covering—gardens such as one could well dream away life in, with no wish to range beyond their bounds, had one in this work-filled world no conscience about long dalliance in an earthly paradise. In one of these gardens I wandered long one afternoon that was not sunny, and that was yet not sombre, the air of balmiest breath, all the earth and sky softened with the changing, tender tones one finds not out of England. The house was grandly placed against the cliff, and the garden, which was rather a succession of gardens, was all up and down on the scattered terraces provided by long-ago landslips. There were modern gardens with banks of color and mosaic parterres; old-fashioned gardens, clipt and quaint; a fernery brought bodily from Fairy-land; clematis, ivy, woodbine and jessamine clambering and flowering against the wall of crag, and fuchsias that seemed to have no foothold swinging long, jewel-hung branches from far overhead. In one place, from a broad low arch at the crag's base, a clear spring rushed forth. One could see some yards within the arch, discern rare ferns, a shimmer of ghostly lilies, and one vigorous tuft of maiden-hair that dropped a veil of tremulous green lace almost to the water's edge. Still, vines and vines, and in this little garden of the grot what a magnificent growth of canes, cannas and pampas-grass; with walks now dropping into densest shade, now climbing out upon a bare spur of rock or lap of smooth lawn; the musical rain of a fountain in the green depths below; the hamlet and neighboring villas so lost to sight that the very birds might well doubt where to pierce the leafy canopy to find home, wife and callow nestlings; beyond, and round all, the half ring of quiet-colored, placid sea—the emerald sea, rough with white caps; the blue sea, sparkling in sunshine; the moonlit sea, silver-gleaming, but melancholy, and terrible as eternity.
At Bonchurch lived the parents of the poet Swinburne, but they left some years since, because, it is affirmed, there was no church hereabouts sufficiently ritualistic to content their consciences. One cannot help thinking, with a little unmalicious amusement, what a cuckoo child the poet must have been to this pair. Here, too, lived a good old man and prolix poet, a friend of Tennyson. It is asserted, on authority, that the laureate, in his visits to the family, sometimes found himself so intolerably bored by his fellow-craftsman that he was fain to betake himself to a bathing-machine, dallying therein and over his bath for two or three hours to purchase the necessary respite.
Beyond Bonchurch are three lions—"the Landslip" and the Luccombe and Shanklin Chines. Many and many a rocky hillside pasture in New England is far finer than the Landslip, and the Chines (fissures or ravines—"He that in his day did chine the long-ribb'd Apennine," sings Dryden) are by no means impressive to American eyes. But the mixture of miniature wildernesses, tumbled rocks, stream, waterfall, airy little swells and falls of ground, elegant villas, charming walks where all is beautiful, finished, dainty, with incessant views of the really grand features of the scene—the sea and the down—forms an enchanting combination. The authoress who under the nom-de-plume "Holme Lee" has done so much for the readers of circulating libraries, resides at Shanklin, and here in 1819 came Keats and tarried while writing Lamia.
From Ventnor south-west through the Undercliff to St. Catherine's Hill, the western bulwark of the Elysium of suave airs, the scenery is perhaps even finer to Western hemisphere taste than that of the more noted northern region. It is, if not wilder, more solitary, unimproved by art, less pervaded with tourists and tourists' needs: one feels less suffocated, crowded, and very, very covetous of one or another of the lovely, lonely homes scattered here and there.
On this side of Ventnor is situated the National Consumptive Hospital projected by Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall. It is on the cottage plan. There are to be sixteen cottages, each to contain about six patients. Several of the buildings are already completed and in use. The hospital is partly self-supporting, partly dependent upon voluntary aid, and in all the places of resort one sees the little alms-box with its eloquent appeal, "For I was sick, and ye visited me not."
High up upon the hill above Ventnor is the seaside refuge of the London city missionaries. The block of buildings was erected as a series of model cottages for laborers. Whether these found their intended homes too fine, too phalansterian, or what not, I cannot tell, but the group of houses was made over to the tired workers in the London slums, and the laborers perch upon all sorts of inaccessible places upon the down, scratching great unsightly places in the chalk, erecting therein the tiniest houses of red brick; and though the one or two windows may be filled with flowers, the ugly gashes do not heal quickly high on the wind-swept hill.
The longest, and certainly the most interesting, excursions to be made from Ventnor are those to Carisbrooke and to Freshwater. The first leads you into the very heart of the island, through lanes that must be the boweriest in all England. Often the road-bed drops for a long way into a deep cutting. Ivies cover all the sides, ferns, vetches, campions and arums spring thickly amid them, and the tall, straggling hedges of dog-roses, brambles and hawthorn that top the banks are luxuriantly overrun with honeysuckle, filling the whole air with its spicy fragrance. On either side are blossoming fields of clover and beans, the larks are mounting and singing in ecstasy overhead, the road climbs a steep ascent, and we have miles and miles of finished landscape in view. There are timber-tied farm-houses here and there, or tiny hamlets whose straw thatches are simply glorious with their patches of velvet moss and the brilliant golden blossoms of a succulent whose name I do not know—houses and hamlets one would like to seize in one's arms and drop them down in America, in the midst of New England's hideous factory-villages, ornamentless, shadeless, unrestful, glaring with white-painted deal.
For the interior of the old English cottages there is not one word of defence to be uttered: the ugliest pine box of a house to be found anywhere in all the unlovely New England towns is more comfortable, more sanitary. The English cottage has a rheumatic floor of beaten earth or tile; its rooms are few and small, and very dark; the water-supply is scanty and most inconvenient; its chimney smokes; mice and rats find secure refuge in the thatch; the masses of clinging vines make it damp and earwiggy; but what a lovely bit it is in the landscape!—the neutral tints, the patches of color, the picturesque outlines, the pitch and curved border of its roof, the yellow ricks in the background, the little garden gorgeous with marigolds, wallflowers, stocks, pinks, balsams, or white and pure with stately ranks of the beautiful Virgin lily. For the interior, away with it! but can we get no hint from all the external beauty?
Of Carisbrooke too much might be said for the scope and limits of this paper: brief mention must suffice. It is the old capital of the island. The remains of a Roman villa were discovered about a dozen years since; the old church dates from the time of William the Conqueror; and the grand old castle, connected with almost every era of English history, had for its nucleus a Saxon stronghold, which succeeded a Roman fortress, as that in turn succeeded a Celtic camp. The ruin covers a large space of ground on a hill overlooking the old town. There is no majesty of beetling crags, no girdle of turbulent sea, but the dignity of its size, its age, its story, is all-satisfying. It is a good, a fitting spot for an American to make a pilgrimage to. A noble, eloquent, peaceful sadness pervades it, and generations shrink to dots. And Nature herself has had pity on these stones for the mirth, the heroism, the misery they have encompassed: she has propped up the tottering ramparts with forests of tall trees in the courts, balustraded the dizzy heights with a sturdy, bushy growth of ivy, and firmly bound together all the crumbling decay with a centuries-old cording of vine-stems.
A mile from Carisbrooke village lies Newport, the modern capital of the island—modern in its relation to Carisbrooke, but possessing some traces that it was formerly of Roman occupation also. It is pleasantly situated in a gentle valley, the temperature mild and damp like that of Devonshire, but is chiefly interesting to visitors for the attractions of the lovely region round about—stately Carisbrooke; Osborne, the royal manor of Her Majesty, and not far from thence the birthplace of Dr. Arnold; Godshill, a hamlet so beautiful one would like to wave over it an enchanter's wand that should fix for ever just the charm one sees in it to-day. The name of the village is accounted for by a tradition that is not uncommon. The builders of the church proposed to erect it at the foot of the hill, but each morning found the previous day's work undone and the materials carried to the top. After some days' perseverance they gave up the contest, and set up their beacon of the faith on the spot indicated by their invisible combatants.
Not far from Newport, by a way filled with delight, one reaches Shorwell, a little village beautifully placed, and with a curious old church full of interest. Upon one of the walls is an old fresco illustrating the life and adventures of St. Christopher, and there is a quaint memorial brass erected by Barnabas Leigh in honor of his two deceased wives, and with a flattering allusion to wife No. 3, then living! One wife is followed by a troop of children—the other is forlornly alone. There is also a memorial to Sir John Leigh and his grandson Barnabas, who died seven days after the grand-sire:
Inmate in grave he took his grandchild heire,
Whose soul did haste to make to him repaire;
And so to heaven along, as little page,
With him did poast to wait upon his age;
and to Lady Elizabeth Leigh—"Sixteene a maide, and fiftie yeares a wife."
In the opposite direction from Newport lies Arreton, where Legh Richmond found the heroine of a narrative we have all read—The Dairyman's Daughter. Her memorial is in the churchyard, which is unusually full of interesting inscriptions. Here is an early English one from a brass, dated 1430, within the church:
Here is yburied vnder this graue
Harry Hawles his soul God saue
Longe tyme steward of ye yle of Wyght
Have mercy on hym God ful of myght.
Legh Richmond was curate of two near-by villages, Brading and Yaverland, during the first years of the present century. Both villages are very old and full of interesting antiquities—churches, Jacobean manor- and farm-houses, parish stocks, a bull-ring where our enlightened forefathers amused themselves savagely as well as sadly.
The excursion to Freshwater, twenty-two miles from Ventnor, is sufficiently charming when made on top of a coach in the veiled yet warm friendliness of an English summer day; but the way of ways to make it, as indeed to see the whole island, is as a pedestrian. Freshwater is at the extreme western point of the island. In going thither from Ventnor one traverses all the western portion of the Undercliff, where every glimpse is a joy; then emerges into a wilder, solitary region, with a bold coast-line sharply indented with chines whose scenery varies from beautiful to savage and drear; finds always the little hamlets—this with its church, that with its inn, become a classic resort, another with its story of an old hermitage or tradition of gold-laden galleon foundered on its cruel rocks, the gold coins still now and then to be found in certain sands. Here a landslip has exposed the remains of a Romano-British pottery; there is a down with Pictish tumuli, and at long intervals one of the old farm-houses which it is impossible not to grudge to its possessor. The landscape has none of the exuberant luxuriance and variety of the Undercliff. Bare, lofty downs, shadeless fields, no coppices, great swampy pastures—an open, breezy country all swells and falls, with occasionally fine clumps and avenues of English elms, feathered to their roots. And so, at last, Freshwater, where downs are noblest, and the air, blown straight across the Atlantic, seems not less bracing and exhilarating than that of New England.
The old village of Freshwater is picturesque, but the new lodging-house portion, only lately sprung up because it has become a fashion with doctors to prescribe Freshwater as a holiday and sanitary place, is hideous in its newness of fiery red brick and freshly uptorn earth.
But it was not for Freshwater, old or new; not for its church, which has some very fine bits, and an epitaph celebrating "the most virtuous Mrs. Anne Toppe, in her widowhood, by a memorable providence, preserved out of the flames of the Irish rebellion;" not for the really superb character of the coast-cliffs, just here mined into caverns only accessible from the sea, with huge detached masses of chalk, one hollowed into a grand arch, through which the waters rush with magnificent music; not for "the Needles," the extreme western points of the middle range of downs, isolated masses of rock that are very fine seen from seaward, entering "the Race" between the Isle of Wight and Dorset; not for Alum Bay, whose gay sands we have all seen fantastically arranged in landscapes under glass, and whose cliffs have their vertical strata in brilliant stripes of deep, purplish-red, blue, yellow, gray that is almost white, and jet black, and contrast delightfully with the snowy sides of "the Needles;"—not for any or all the sublimity of sea and shore, did I make the pilgrimage to this out-of-the-way island corner. I went, as most lovers of our English tongue in its strength and poetry will go, because here for years was Tennyson's home—the home wherein most of his poems have been written—Farringford,
Where, far from noise of smoke and town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All round a careless-ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down.
You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous, under a roof of pine.
For groves of pine on either hand.
To break the blasts of winter, stand,
And farther on, the hoary Channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.
The house is by no means beautiful, but it is in the midst of such a network of peacefulest leafy lanes, the near-by surroundings are so grand, the "groves of pine" and the "careless-ordered garden" look so utterly fitted to be haunted by a poet's step and musings, the whole place must be so associated, so saturated with his reveries and fancies, so peopled with his creations, that it seems impossible any other spot could be home to him; and one feels a great pang of sadness that the only true master of Farringford should have felt himself driven to leave it, and to set up his household gods where he would be comparatively unknown and unhunted.
An un-famous person finds it however, a little difficult to sympathize with Tennyson's overpowering horror of the troublesomely affectionate curiosity of which he is the object. Even such extreme cases of hero-worship as that of the American who climbed the tree at Farringford to survey its master at his leisure, and that of the bevy of ladies at a London exhibition who, occupying a lounge before one of the special pictures of the season, and beholding Tennyson approach for a look, overwhelmed him with discomfiture by impressively ceding to him the entire sofa,—even these, and others of their kind, have a humorous side that might serve to qualify their impertinence and ill-breeding.
Neither Browning nor George Eliot is unknown by sight to the reading world of London: neither was Thackeray nor Dickens. Did either of these ever make outcry at the friendly if vulgar glances? Yet it is true that no one of them, save Dickens, has been so widely read, and it is probable that Browning, who looks like nothing so much as a hale, hearty business-man, oftenest escapes detection, while Tennyson's late photograph reproduces him so faithfully that he declares he can go nowhere without being known. Of the mischievous fidelity of the picture I am myself a witness, for having driven up one day to the Victoria station of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, by which Tennyson's new home is reached, and being busied with extricating from my purse the cabman's fare, my companion suddenly caught my arm, crying out, "Oh, S——, there's Tennyson!" The purse dropped in my lap: he was so near the cab I could have touched him, and of course he had heard the exclamation and knew why two ladies had so utterly forgotten their manners; but if he had also known that one of us had a certain shabby-through-use edition of all his earlier poems, which during a space of a dozen years had never been separated from her, traveling in a crowded trunk for even the shortest absences from home—that for months of that time she had been used to read therefrom to a precocious child who came every night in her night-gown to nestle in the reader's lap and listen to the music without which she declined to undertake the business of sleep,—I think the look bestowed upon the absorbed twain might well have been more amiable than the one which really fell upon them and blighted their innocent delight. It was all the photograph's fault, and, enthusiastic American sisters, be content with beholding the representation, for the original looks neither more patient, more gracious, nor more hopeful. So sensitive is he to looks which have in them any recognition, any stress, that a visitor at Farringford relates that, wandering about the cliffs and shores with his host, the latter would every now and then nervously cry out, "Come! let's walk on—I hear tourists!" and his companion, delaying a little, would be able to answer reassuringly, "Oh no: see! there's nothing in sight but a flock of sheep."
Perhaps I ought to confess that finding in one of the Farringford lanes a lovely little green gate opening into one of the "groves of pine," I did just try the latch. The door opened, and it looked all so still and shaded, whispery and ferny, so exactly as if Tennyson might any minute come pacing down between the tall trees, as if the "Talking Oak" was sure to stand just round a sun-lighted corner of the wood, that, incited thereto by a countrywoman of the poet's, who, herself a member of the guild, should know how poets' possessions may worthily be approached, I let my sacrilegious feet carry me a little way within that violated enclosure. But it was only a very tiny raid we made. We stood quietly for two or three minutes, just feeling the place, then scurried hastily away like two timorous hares; and as I have since lost a much prized little fern-leaf plucked within the enclosure, I think Mr. Tennyson should agree that this intrusive American has been quite severely enough punished, and that much ought to be forgiven one who has loved so much.
There really is one spot in England where "skies are blue and bright" uniformly, and, in the Undercliff, where no harsh winds come. And the whole island—with its smiling loveliness, its miniature sublimity, all its varying scenery, all its old landmarks, its rich story, its soft yet sparkling air, its dainty English culture, the sea that one never loses for long—is a honeymoon paradise. It can have been intended for nothing else. But it should be a pedestrian honeymoon. They should come to Ryde, leave all impedimenta to be sent forward to Ventnor by rail, and Madame in a serviceable walking-dress that need not be hideous, a sun-hat, with a strap holding her waterproof cloak, Monsieur with wraps, a bag containing the indispensable toilet necessaries, an umbrella and guide-book, should set gayly forth on their enchanted way. What a month in the romantic byways, over hill, down dale, in the old churches, churchyards, ivied ruins, through the ideal villages, resting amidst the heather on a down's summit, on the sands of a little scallop of a bay, stopping for food and sleep at the comfortable quaint inns or the sometimes "swell" hotels that are nowhere many miles asunder—seeing it, having it all together—the idyllic spot in the idyllic time!
And to American invalids it seems to me the Undercliff is far less known as a winter resort than it deserves to be. It is perfectly sheltered, yet has none of the dampness of Torquay and most of the other south-of-England health-resorts. And to invalids who speak no language save their own it must be infinitely pleasanter to abide where they hear their own tongue, where home comforts and home ways are joined to the other advantages they have come to seek. There is all the accessible beauty of walk and drive, ever-changing aspects of sea, shore, sky and crag, of which it would be difficult to tire, and a delicious languor in the mental atmosphere inexpressibly soothing to worn brain and nerves.
S. F. Hopkins.
SOLACE.
Thou art the last rose of the year,
By gusty breezes rudely fanned:
The dying Summer holds thee fast
In the hot hollow of her hand.
Thy face pales, as if looking back
Into the splendor of thy past
Had thrilled thee strangely, knowing that
This one long look must be the last.
Thine essence, that was heavenly sweet,
Has flown upon the tricksy air:
Fate's hand is on thee; drop thy leaves,
And go among the things that were.
Be must and mould, be trampled dust,
Be nothing that is fair to see:
One day, at least, of glorious life
Was thine of all eternity.
Be this a comfort: Crown and lyre,
And regal purple last not long:
Kings fall like leaves, but thy perfume
Strays through the years like royal song.
James Maurice Thompson.
A PRINCESS OF THULE.
BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON."
CHAPTER XIX.
A NEW DAY BREAKS.
Was this, then, the end of the fair and beautiful romance that had sprung up and blossomed so hopefully in the remote and bleak island, amid the silence of the hills and moors and the wild twilights of the North, and set round about, as it were, by the cold sea-winds and the sound of the Atlantic waves? Who could have fancied, looking at those two young folks as they wandered about the shores of the island, as they sailed on the still moonlight nights through the channels of Loch Roag, or as they sang together of an evening in the little parlor of the house at Borvabost, that all the delight and wonder of life then apparently opening out before them was so soon and so suddenly to collapse, leaving them in outer darkness and despair? All their difficulties had been got over. From one side and from another they had received generous help, friendly advice, self-sacrifice to start them on a path that seemed to be strewn with sweet-smelling flowers. And here was the end—a wretched girl, blinded and bewildered, flying from her husband's house and seeking refuge in the great world of London, careless whither she went.
Whose was the fault? Which of them had been mistaken up there in the North, laying the way open for a bitter disappointment? Or had either of them failed to carry out that unwritten contract entered into in the halcyon period of courtship, by which two young people promise to be and remain to each other all that they then appeared?
Lavender, at least, had no right to complain. If the real Sheila turned out to be something different from the Sheila of his fancy, he had been abundantly warned that such would be the case. He had even accepted it as probable, and said that as the Sheila whom he might come to know must doubtless be better than the Sheila whom he had imagined, there was little danger in store for either. He would love the true Sheila even better than the creature of his brain. Had he done so? He found beside him this proud and sensitive Highland girl, full of generous impulses that craved for the practical work of helping other people, longing, with the desire of a caged bird, for the free winds and light of heaven, the sight of hills and the sound of seas, and he could not understand why she should not conform to the usages of city life. He was disappointed that she did not do so. The imaginative Sheila, who was to appear as a wonderful sea-princess in London drawing-rooms, had disappeared now; and the real Sheila, who did not care to go with him into that society which he loved or affected to love, he had not learned to know.
And had she been mistaken in her estimate of Frank Lavender's character? At the very moment of her leaving her husband's house, if she had been asked the question, she would have turned and proudly answered, "No!" She had been disappointed—so grievously disappointed that her heart seemed to be breaking over it—but the manner in which Frank Lavender had fallen away from all the promise he had given was due not to himself, but to the influence of the society around him. Of that she was quite assured. He had shown himself careless, indifferent, inconsiderate to the verge of cruelty; but he was not, she had convinced herself, consciously cruel, nor yet selfish, nor radically bad-hearted in any way. In her opinion, at least, he was courageously sincere, to the verge of shocking people who mistook his frankness for impudence. He was recklessly generous: he would have given the coat off his back to a beggar at the instigation of a sudden impulse, provided he could have got into a cab before any of his friends saw him. He had rare abilities, and at times wildly ambitious dreams, not of his own glorification, but of what he would do to celebrate the beauty and the graces of the princess whom he fancied he had married. It may seem hard of belief that this man, judging him by his actions at this time, could have had anything of thorough self-forgetfulness and manliness in his nature. But when things were at their very worst, when he appeared to the world as a self-indulgent idler, careless of a noble woman's unbounded love; when his indifference, or worse, had actually driven from his house a young wife who had especial claims on his forbearance and consideration,—there were two people who still believed in Frank Lavender. They were Sheila Mackenzie and Edward Ingram; and a man's wife and his oldest friend generally know something about his real nature, its besetting temptations, its weakness, its strength and its possibilities.
Of course, Ingram was speedily made aware of all that had happened. Lavender went home at the appointed hour to luncheon, accompanied by his three acquaintances. He had met them accidentally in the forenoon, and as Mrs. Lorraine was most particular in her inquiries about Sheila, he thought he could not do better than ask her there and then, with her mother and Lord Arthur, to have luncheon at two. What followed on his carrying the announcement to Sheila we know. He left the house, taking it for granted that there would be no trouble when he returned. Perhaps he reproached himself for having spoken so sharply, but Sheila was really very thoughtless in such matters. At two o'clock everything would be right. Sheila must see how it would be impossible to introduce a young Highland serving-maid to two fastidious ladies and the son of a great Conservative peer.
Lavender met his three friends once more, and walked up to the house with them, letting them in, indeed, with his own latch-key. Passing the dining-room, he saw that the table was laid there. This was well. Sheila had been reasonable.
They went up stairs to the drawing-room. Sheila was not there. Lavender rang the bell, and bade the servant tell her mistress she was wanted.
"Mrs. Lavender has gone out, sir," said the servant.
"Oh, indeed!" he said, taking the matter quite coolly. "When?"
"A quarter of an hour ago, sir. She went out with the—the young lady who came this morning."
"Very well. Let me know when luncheon is ready."
Lavender turned to his guests, feeling a little awkward, but appearing to treat the matter in a light and humorous way. He imagined that Sheila, resenting what he had said, had resolved to take Mairi away and find her lodgings elsewhere. Perhaps that might be done in time to let Sheila come back to receive his guests.
Sheila did not appear, however, and luncheon was announced.
"I suppose we may as well go down," said Lavender with a shrug of his shoulders. "It is impossible to say when she may come back. She is such a good-hearted creature that she would never think of herself or her own affairs in looking after this girl from Lewis."
They went down stairs and took their places at the table.
"For my part," said Mrs. Lorraine, "I think it is very unkind not to wait for poor Mrs. Lavender. She may come in dreadfully tired and hungry."
"But that would not vex her so much as the notion that you had waited on her account," said Sheila's husband with a smile; and Mrs. Lorraine was pleased to hear him sometimes speak in a kindly way of the Highland girl whom he had married.
Lavender's guests were going somewhere after luncheon, and he had half promised to go with them, Mrs. Lorraine stipulating that Sheila should be induced to come also. But when luncheon was over and Sheila had not appeared, he changed his intention. He would remain at home. He saw his three friends depart, and went into the study and lit a cigar.
How odd the place seemed! Sheila had left no instructions about the removal of those barbaric decorations she had placed in the chamber; and here, around him, seemed to be the walls of the old fashioned little room at Borvabost, with its big shells, its peacocks' feathers, its skins and stuffed fish, and masses of crimson bell-heather. Was there not, too, an odor of peat-smoke in the air?—and then his eye caught sight of the plate that still stood on the window-sill, with the ashes of the burned peat on it.
"The odd child she is!" he thought with a smile, "to go playing at grotto-making, and trying to fancy she was up in Lewis again! I suppose she would like to let her hair down again, and take off her shoes and stockings, and go wading along the sand in search of shellfish."
And then, somehow, his fancies went back to the old time when he had first seen and admired her wild ways, her fearless occupations by sea and shore, and the delight of active work that shone on her bright face and in her beautiful eyes. How lithe and handsome her figure used to be in that blue dress, when she stood in the middle of the boat, her head bent back, her arms upstretched and pulling at some rope or other, and all the fine color of exertion in the bloom of her cheeks! Then the pride with which she saw her little vessel cutting through the water!—how she tightened her lips with a joyous determination as the sheets were hauled close, and the gunwale of the small boat heeled over so that it almost touched the hissing and gurgling foam!—how she laughed at Duncan's anxiety as she rounded some rocky point, and sent the boat spinning into the clear and smooth waters of the bay! Perhaps, after all, it was too bad to keep the poor child so long shut up in a city. She was evidently longing for a breath of sea-air, and for some brief dash of that brisk, fearless life on the sea-coast that she used to love. It was a happy life, after all; and he had himself enjoyed it when his hands and face got browned by the sun, when he grew to wonder how any human being could wear black garments and drink foreign wines and smoke cigars at eighteenpence apiece, so long as frieze coats, whisky and a brier-root pipe were procurable. How one slept up in that remote island, after all the laughing and drinking and singing of the evening were over! How sharp was the monition of hunger when the keen sea-air blew about your face on issuing out in the morning! and how fresh and cool and sweet was that early breeze, with the scent of Sheila's flowers in it! Then the long, bright day at the river-side, with the black pools rippling in the wind, and in the silence the rapid whistle of the silken line through the air, with now and again the "blob" of a big salmon rising to a fly farther down the pool! Where was there any rest like the rest of the mid-day luncheon, when Duncan had put the big fish, wrapped in rushes, under the shadow of the nearest rock, when you sat down on the warm heather and lit your pipe, and began to inquire where you had been bitten on hands and neck by the ferocious "clegs" while you were too busy in playing a fifteen-pounder to care? Then, perhaps, as you were sitting there in the warm sunlight, with all the fresh scents of the moorland around, you would hear a light footstep on the soft moss; and, turning round, here was Sheila herself, with a bright look in her pretty eyes, and a half blush on her cheek, and a friendly inquiry as to the way the fish had been behaving. Then the beautiful, strange, cool evenings on the shores of Loch Roag, with the wild, clear light still shining in the northern heavens, and the sound of the waves getting to be lonely and distant; or, still later, out in Sheila's boat, with the great yellow moon rising up over Suainabhal and Mealasabhal into a lambent vault of violet sky; a pathway of quivering gold lying across the loch; a mild radiance glittering here and there on the spars of the small vessel, and out there the great Atlantic lying still and distant as in a dream. As he sat in this little room and thought of all these things, he grew to think he had not acted quite fairly to Sheila. She was so fond of that beautiful island-life, and she had not even visited the Lewis since her marriage. She should go now. He would abandon the trip to the Tyrol, and as soon as arrangements could be made they would together start for the North, and some day find themselves going up the steep shore to Sheila's home, with the old King of Borva standing in the porch of the house, and endeavoring to conceal his nervousness by swearing at Duncan's method of carrying the luggage.
Had not Sheila's stratagem succeeded? That pretty trick of hers in decorating the room so as to resemble the house at Borvabost had done all that she could have desired. But where was she?
Lavender rose hastily and looked at his watch. Then he rang the bell, and a servant appeared. "Did not Mrs. Lavender say when she would return?" he asked.
"No, sir."
"You don't know where she went?"
"No, sir. The young lady's luggage was put into the cab, and they drove away without leaving any message."
He scarcely dared confess to himself what fears began to assail him. He went up stairs to Sheila's room, and there everything appeared to be in its usual place, even to the smallest articles on the dressing-table. They were all there, except one. That was a locket, too large and clumsy to be worn, which some one had given her years before she left Lewis, and in which her father's portrait had been somewhat rudely set. Just after their marriage Lavender had taken out this portrait, touched it up a bit into something of a better likeness, and put it back; and then she had persuaded him to have a photograph of himself colored and placed on the opposite side. This locket, open and showing both portraits, she had fixed on to a small stand, and in ordinary circumstances it always stood on one side of her dressing-table. The stand was there, the locket was gone.
He went down stairs again. The afternoon was drawing on. A servant came to ask him at what hour he wished to dine: he bade her wait till her mistress came home and consult her. Then he went out.
It was a beautiful, quiet afternoon, with a warm light from the west shining over the now yellowing trees of the squares and gardens. He walked down toward Netting Hill Gate Station, endeavoring to convince himself that he was not perturbed, and yet looking somewhat anxiously at the cabs that passed. People were now coming out from their business in the city by train and omnibus and hansom; and they seemed to be hurrying home in very good spirits, as if they were sure of the welcome awaiting them there. Now and again you would see a meeting—some demure young person, who had been furtively watching the railway-station, suddenly showing a brightness in her face as she went forward to shake hands with some new arrival, and then tripping briskly away with him, her hand on his arm. There were men carrying home fish in small bags, or baskets of fruit—presents to their wives, doubtless, from town. Occasionally an open carriage would go by, containing one grave and elderly gentleman and a group of small girls—probably his daughters, who had gone into the city to accompany their papa homeward. Why did these scenes and incidents, cheerful in themselves, seem to him to be somehow saddening as he walked vaguely on? He knew, at least, that there was little use in returning home. There was no one in that silent house in the square. The rooms would be dark in the twilight. Probably dinner would be laid, with no one to sit down at the table. He wished Sheila had left word where she was going.
Then he bethought him of the way in which they had parted, and of the sense of fear that had struck him the moment he left the house, that after all he had been too harsh with the child. Now, at least, he was ready to apologize to her. If only he could see Sheila coming along in one of those hansoms—if he could see, at any distance, the figure he knew so well walking toward him on the pavement—would he not instantly confess to her, that he had been wrong, even grievously wrong, and beg her to forgive him? She should have it all her own way about going up to Lewis. He would cast aside this society-life he had been living, and to please her would go in for any sort of work or amusement of which she approved. He was so anxious, indeed, to put these virtuous resolutions into force that he suddenly turned and walked rapidly back to the house, with the wild hope that Sheila might have already come back.
The windows were dark, the curtains were yet drawn, and by this time the evening had come on and the lamps in the square had been lit. He let himself into the house by his latch-key. He walked into all the rooms and up into Sheila's room: everything remained as he had left it. The white cloth glimmered in the dusk of the dining-room, and the light of the lamp outside in the street touched here and there the angles of the crystal and showed the pale colors of the glasses. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked in the silence. If Sheila had been lying dead in that small room up stairs, the house could not have appeared more silent and solemn.
He could not bear this horrible solitude. He called one of the servants and left a message for Sheila, if she came in in the interval, that he would be back at ten o'clock: then he went out, got into a hansom and drove down to his club in St. James's street.
Most of the men were dining: the other rooms were almost deserted. He did not care to dine just then. He went into the library: it was occupied by an old gentleman who was fast asleep in an easy-chair. He went into the billiard-rooms, in the vague hope that some exciting game might be going on: there was not a soul in the place, the gases were down, and an odor of stale smoke pervaded the dismal chambers. Should he go to the theatre? His sitting there would be a mockery while this vague and terrible fear was present to his heart. Or go down to see Ingram, as had been his wont in previous hours of trouble? He dared not go near Ingram without some more definite news about Sheila. In the end he went out into the open air, as if he were in danger of being stifled, and, walking indeterminately on, found himself once more at his own house.
The place was still quite dark: he knew before entering that Sheila had not returned, and he did not seem to be surprised. It was now long after their ordinary dinner-hour. When he went into the house he bade the servants light the gas and bring up dinner: he would himself sit down at this solitary table, if only for the purpose of finding occupation and passing this terrible time of suspense.
It never occurred to him, as it might have occurred to him at one time, that Sheila had made some blunder somewhere and been unavoidably detained. He did not think of any possible repetition of her adventures in Richmond Park. He was too conscious of the probable reason of Sheila's remaining away from her own home; and yet from minute to minute he fought with that consciousness, and sought to prove to himself that, after all, she would soon be heard driving up to the door. He ate his dinner in silence, and then drew a chair up to the fire and lit a cigar.
For the first time in his life he was driven to go over the events that had occurred since his marriage, and to ask himself how it had all come about that Sheila and he were not as they once had been. He recalled the early days of their friendship at Borva; the beautiful period of their courtship; the appearance of the young wife in London, and the close relegation of Sheila to the domestic affairs of the house, while he had chosen for himself other companions, other interests, other aims. There was no attempt at self-justification in those communings, but an effort, sincere enough in its way, to understand how all this had happened. He sat and dreamed there before the warmth of the fire, with the slow and monotonous ticking of the clock unconsciously acting on his brain. In time the silence, the warmth, the monotonous sound produced their natural effects, and he fell fast asleep.
He awoke with a start. The small silver-toned bell on the mantelpiece had struck the hour of twelve. He looked around, and knew that the evil had come upon him, for Sheila had not returned, and all his most dreadful fears of that evening were confirmed. Sheila had gone away and left him. Whither had she gone?
Now there was no more indecision in his actions. He got his hat, plunged into the cold night air, and, finding a hansom, bade the man drive as hard as he could go down to Sloane street. There was a light in Ingram's windows, which were on the ground floor: he tapped with his stick on one of the panes—an old signal that had been in constant use when he and Ingram were close companions and friends. Ingram came to the door and opened it: the light of a lamp glared in on his face. "Hillo, Lavender!" he said in a tone of surprise.
The other could not speak, but he went into the house, and Ingram, shutting the door and following him, found that the man's face was deadly pale.
"Sheila—" he said, and stopped.
"Well, what about her?" said Ingram, keeping quite calm, but with wild fancies about some terrible accident almost stopping the pulsation of his heart.
"Sheila has gone away."
Ingram did not seem to understand.
"Sheila has gone away, Ingram," said Lavender in an excited way. "You don't know anything about it? You don't know where she has gone? What am I to do, Ingram? how am I to find her? Good God! don't you understand what I tell you? And now it is past midnight, and my poor girl may be wandering about the streets!"
He was walking up and down the room, paying almost no attention, in his excitement, to the small, sallow-faced man who stood quite quiet, a trifle afraid, perhaps, but with his heart full of a blaze of anger.
"She has gone away from your house?" he said slowly. "What made her do that?"
"I did," said Lavender in a hurried way. "I have acted like a brute to her—that is true enough. You needn't say anything to me, Ingram: I feel myself far more guilty than anything you could say. You may heap reproaches on me afterward, but tell me. Ingram, what am I to do? You know what a proud spirit she has: who can tell what she might do? She wouldn't go home—she would be too proud: she may have gone and drowned herself."
"If you don't control yourself and tell me what has happened, how am I to help you?" said Ingram stiffly, and yet disposed somehow—perhaps for the sake of Sheila, perhaps because he saw that the young man's self-embarrassment and distress were genuine enough—not to be too rough with him.
"Well, you know, Mairi—" said Lavender, still walking up and down the room in an excited way. "Sheila had got the girl up here without telling me, some friends of mine were coming home to luncheon, we had some disagreement about Mairi being present, and then Sheila said something about not remaining in the house if Mairi did not: something of that sort. I don't know what it was, but I know it was all my fault, and if she has been driven from the house, I did it: that is true enough. And where do you think she has gone, Ingram? If I could only see her for three minutes I would explain everything: I would tell her how sorry I am for everything that has happened, and she would see, when she went back, how everything would be right again. I had no idea she would go away. It was mere peevishness that made me object to Mairi meeting those people; and I had no idea that Sheila would take it so much to heart. Now tell me what you think should be done, Ingram. All I want is to see her just for three minutes to tell her it was all a mistake, and that she will never have to fear anything like that again."
Ingram heard him out, and said with some precision, "Do you mean to say that you fancy all this trouble is to be got over that way? Do you know so little of Sheila, after the time you have been married to her, as to imagine that she has taken this step out of some momentary caprice, and that a few words of apology and promise will cause her to rescind it? You must be crazed, Lavender, or else you are actually as ignorant of the nature of that girl as you were up in the Highlands."
The young man seemed to calm down his excitement and impatience, but it was because of a new fear that had struck him, and that was visible in his face. "Do you think she will never come back, Ingram?" he said, looking aghast.
"I don't know: she may not. At all events, you may be quite sure that, once having resolved to leave your house, she is not to be pacified and cajoled by a few phrases and a promise of repentance on your part. That is quite sure. And what is quite as sure is this, that if you knew just now where she was, the most foolish thing you could do would be to go and see her."
"But I must go and see her—I must find her out, Ingram," he said passionately. "I don't care what becomes of me. If she won't go back home, so much the worse for me; but I must find her out, and know that she is safe. Think of it, Ingram! Perhaps she is walking about the streets somewhere at this moment; and you know her proud spirit. If she were to go near the river—"
"She won't go near the river," said Ingram quietly, "and she won't be walking about the streets. She is either in the Scotch mail-train, going up to Glasgow, or else she has got some lodgings somewhere, along with Mairi. Has she any money?"
"No," said Lavender. And then he thought for a minute. "There was some money her father gave her in case she might want it at a pinch: she may have that—I hope she has that. I was to have given her money to-morrow morning. But hadn't I better go to the police-stations, and see, just by way of precaution, that she has not been heard of? I may as well do that as nothing. I could not go home to that empty house—I could not sleep."
"Sheila is a sensible girl: she is safe enough," said Ingram. "And if you don't care about going home, you may as well remain here. I can give you a room up stairs when you want it. In the mean time, if you will pull a chair to the table and calm yourself, and take it for granted that you will soon be assured of Sheila's safety, I will tell you what I think you should do. Here is a cigar to keep you occupied: there are whisky and cold water back there if you like. You will do no good by punishing yourself in small matters, for your trouble is likely to be serious enough, I can tell you, before you get Sheila back, if ever you get her back. Take the chair with the cushion."
It was so like the old days when these two used to be companions! Many and many a time had the younger man come down to these lodgings, with all his troubles and wild impulses and pangs of contrition ready to be revealed; and then Ingram, concealing the liking he had for the lad's generous waywardness, his brilliant and facile cleverness and his dashes of honest self-depreciation, would gravely lecture him and put him right and send him off comforted. Frank Lavender had changed much since then. The handsome boy had grown into a man of the world; there was less self-revelation in his manner, and he was less sensitive to the opinions and criticisms of his old friend; but Ingram, who was not prone to idealism of any sort, had never ceased to believe that this change was but superficial, and that, in different circumstances and with different aims, Lavender might still fulfill the best promise of his youth.
"You have been a good friend to me, Ingram," he said with a hot blush, "and I have treated you as badly as I have treated—By Jove! what a chance I had at one time!"
He was looking back on all the fair pictures his imagination had drawn while yet Sheila and he were wandering about that island in the northern seas.
"You had," said Ingram decisively. "At one time I thought you the most fortunate man in the world. There was nothing left for you to desire, so far as I could see. You were young and strong, with plenty of good spirits and sufficient ability to earn yourself an honorable living, and you had won the love of the most beautiful and best-hearted woman I have known. You never seemed to me to know what that meant. Men marry women—there is no difficulty about that—and you can generally get an amiable sort of person to become your wife and have a sort of affection for you, and so on. But how many have bestowed on them the pure and exalted passion of a young and innocent girl, who is ready to worship with all the fervor of a warmly imaginative and emotional nature the man she has chosen to love? And suppose he is young too, and capable of understanding all the tender sentiments of a high-spirited, sensitive and loyal woman, and suppose that he fancies himself as much in love with her as she with him? These conditions are not often fulfilled, I can tell you. It is a happy fluke when they are. Many a day ago I told you that you should consider yourself more fortunate than if you had been made an emperor; and indeed it seemed to me that you had everything in the shape of worldly happiness easily within your reach. How you came to kick away the ball from your feet—Well, God only knows. The thing is inconceivable to me. You are sitting here as you used to sit two or three years ago, and in the interval you have had every chance in life; and now if you are not the most wretched man in London, you ought at least to be the most ashamed and repentant."
Lavender's head was buried in his hands: he did not speak.
"And it is not only your own happiness you have destroyed. When you saw that girl first she was as lighthearted and contented with her lot as any human being could be. From one week's end to the other not the slightest care disturbed her mind. And then, when she entrusted her whole life to you—when she staked her faith in human nature on you, and gave you all the treasures of hope and reverence and love that lay in her pure and innocent soul—my God! what have you done with these? It is not that you have shamed and insulted her as a wife, and driven her out of her home—there are other homes than yours where she would be welcome a thousand times over—but you have destroyed her belief in everything she had taught herself to trust, you have outraged the tenderest sentiments of her heart, you have killed her faith as well as ruined her life. I talk plainly: I cannot do otherwise. If I help you now, don't imagine I condone what you have done: I would cut my right hand off first. For Sheila's sake I will try to help you."
He stopped just then, however, and checked the indignation that had got the better of his ordinarily restrained manner and curt speech. The man before him was crying bitterly, his face hidden in his hands.
"Look here, Lavender," he said presently: "I don't want to be hard on you. I tell you plainly what I think of your conduct, so that no delusions may exist between us. And I will say this for you, that the only excuse you have—"
"There is no excuse," said the other, sadly enough. "I have no excuse, and I know it."
"The only thing, then, you can say in mitigation of what you have done is that you never seem to have understood the girl whom you married. You started with giving her a fancy character when first you went to the Lewis, and once you had got the bit in your teeth there was no stopping you. If you seek now to get Sheila back to you, the best thing you can do, I presume, would be to try to see her as she is, to win her regard that way, to abandon that operatic business, and learn to know her as a thoroughly good woman, who has her own ways and notions about things, and who has a very definite character underlying that extreme gentleness which she fancies to be one of her duties. The child did her dead best to accommodate herself to your idea of her, and failed. When she would rather have been living a brisk and active life in the country or by the seaside, running wild about a hillside, or reading strange stories in the evening, or nursing some fisherman's child that had got ill, you had her dragged into a sort of society with which she had no sympathy whatever. And the odd thing to me is that you yourself seemed to be making an effort that way. You did not always devote yourself to fashionable life. Where are all the old ambitions you used to talk about in the very chair you are now sitting in?"
"Is there any hope of my getting Sheila back?" he said, looking up at last. There was a vague and bewildered look in his eyes. He seemed incapable of thinking of anything but that.
"I don't know," said Ingram. "But one thing is certain: you will never get her back to repeat the experiment that has just ended in this desperate way."
"I should not ask that," he said hurriedly—"I should not ask that at all. If I could but see her for a moment, I would ask her to tell me everything she wanted, everything she demanded as conditions, and I would obey her. I will promise to do everything that she wishes."
"If you saw her you could give her nothing but promises," said Ingram. "Now, what if you were to try to do what you know she wishes, and then go to her?"
"You mean—" said Lavender, glancing up with another startled look on his face. "You don't mean that I am to remain away from her a long time—go into banishment as it were—and then some day come back to Sheila and beg her to forget all that happened long before?"
"I mean something very like that," said Ingram with composure. "I don't know that it would be successful. I have no means of ascertaining what Sheila would think of such a project—whether she would think that she could ever live with you again."
Lavender seemed fairly stunned by the possibility of Sheila's resolving never to see him again; and began to recall what Ingram had many a time said about the strength of purpose she could show when occasion needed.
"If her faith in you is wholly destroyed, your case is hopeless. A woman may cling to her belief in a man through good report and evil report, but if she once loses it she never recovers it. But there is this hope for you: I know very well that Sheila had a much more accurate notion of you than ever you had of her; and I happen to know, also, that at the very time when you were most deeply distressing her here in London she held the firm conviction that your conduct toward her—your habits, your very self—would alter if you could only be persuaded to get out of the life you have been leading. That was true, at least, up to the time of your leaving Brighton. She believed in you then. She believed that if you were to cut society altogether, and go and live a useful and hardworking life somewhere, you would soon become once more the man she fell in love with up in Lewis. Perhaps she was mistaken: I don't say anything about it myself."
The terribly cool way in which Ingram talked—separating, defining, exhibiting, so that he and his companion should get as near as possible to what he believed to be the truth of the situation—was oddly in contrast with the blind and passionate yearning of the other for some glimpse of hope. His whole nature seemed to go out in a cry to Sheila that she would come back and give him a chance of atoning for the past. At length he rose. He looked strangely haggard, and his eyes scarcely seemed to see the things around him. "I must go home," he said.
Ingram saw that he merely wanted to get outside and walk about in order to find some relief from this anxiety and unrest, and said, "You ought, I think, to stop here and go to bed. But if you would rather go home, I will walk up with you if you like."
When the two men went out the night-air smelt sweet and moist, for rain had fallen, and the city trees were still dripping with the wet and rustling in the wind. The weather had changed suddenly, and now, in the deep blue overhead, they knew the clouds were passing swiftly by. Was it the coming light of the morning that seemed to give depth and richness to that dark-blue vault, while the pavements of the streets and the houses grew vaguely distinct and gray? Suddenly, in turning the corner into Piccadilly, they saw the moon appear in a rift of those passing clouds, but it was not the moonlight that shed this pale and wan grayness down the lonely streets. It is just at this moment, when the dawn of the new day begins to tell, that a great city seems at its deadest; and in the profound silence and amid the strange transformations of the cold and growing light a man is thrown in upon himself, and holds communion with himself, as though he and his own thoughts were all that was left in the world. Not a word passed between the two men, and Lavender, keenly sensitive to all such impressions, and now and again shivering slightly, either from cold or nervous excitement, walked blindly along the deserted streets, seeing far other things than the tall houses and the drooping trees and the growing light of the sky.
It seemed to him at this moment that he was looking at Sheila's funeral. There was a great stillness in that small house at Borvabost. There was a boat—Sheila's own boat—down at the shore there, and there were two or three figures in black in it. The day was gray and rainy; the sea washed along the melancholy shores; the far hills were hidden in mist. And now he saw some people come out of the house into the rain, and the bronzed and bearded men had oars with them, and on the crossed oars there was a coffin placed. They went down the hillside. They put the coffin in the stern of the boat, and in absolute silence, except for the wailing of the women, they pulled away down the dreary Loch Roag till they came to the island where the burial-ground is. They carried the coffin up to that small enclosure, with its rank grass growing green and the rain falling on the rude stones and memorials. How often had he leaned on that low stone wall, and read the strange inscriptions in various tongues over the graves of mariners from distant countries who had met with their death on this rocky coast! Had not Sheila herself pointed out to him, with a sad air, how many of these memorials bore the words "who was drowned;" and that, too, was the burden of the rudely-spelt legends beginning "Hier rutt in Gott," or "Her under hviler stovit," and sometimes ending with the pathetic "Wunderschen ist unsre Hoffnung." The fishermen brought the coffin to the newly-made grave, the women standing back a bit, old Scarlett MacDonald stroking Mairi's hair and bidding the girl control her frantic grief, though the old woman herself could hardly speak for her tears and her lamentations. He could read the words "Sheila Mackenzie" on the small silver plate: she had been taken away from all association with him and his name. And who was this old man with the white hair and the white beard, whose hands were tightly clenched, and his lips firm, and a look as of death in the sunken and wild eyes? Mackenzie was gray a year before—
"Ingram," he said suddenly, and his voice startled his companion, "do you think it is possible to make Sheila happy again?"
"How can I tell?" said Ingram.
"You used to know everything she could wish—everything she was thinking about. If you find her out now, will you get to know? Will you see what I can do—not by asking her to come back, not by trying to get back my own happiness, but anything, it does not matter what it is, I can do for her? If she would rather not see me again, I will stay away. Will you ask her, Ingram?"
"We have got to find her first," said his companion.
"A young girl like that," said Lavender, taking no heed of the objection, "surely she cannot always be unhappy. She is so young and beautiful, and takes so much interest in many things: surely she may have a happy life."
"She might have had."
"I don't mean with me," said Lavender, with his haggard face looking still more haggard in the increasing light. "I mean anything that can be done—any way of life that will make her comfortable and contented again—anything that I can do for that. Will you try to find it out, Ingram?"
"Oh yes, I will," said the other, who had been thinking with much foreboding of all these possibilities ever since they left Sloane street, his only gleam of hope being a consciousness that this time at least there could be no doubt of Frank Lavender's absolute sincerity, of his remorse, and his almost morbid craving to make reparation if that were still possible.
They reached the house at last. There was a dim orange-colored light shining in the passage. Lavender went on and threw open the door of the small room which Sheila had adorned, asking Ingram to follow him. How wild and strange this chamber looked, with the wan glare of the dawn shining in on its barbaric decorations from the sea-coast—on the shells and skins and feathers that Sheila had placed around! That white light of the morning was now shining everywhere into the silent and desolate house. Lavender found Ingram a bedroom, and then he turned away, not knowing what to do. He looked into Sheila's room: there were dresses, bits of finery and what not that he knew so well, but there was no light breathing audible in the silent and empty chamber. He shut the door as reverently as though he were shutting it on the dead, and went down stairs and threw himself almost fainting with despair and fatigue on a sofa, while the world outside awoke to a new day with all its countless and joyous activities and duties.
CHAPTER XX.
A SURPRISE.
There was no letter from Sheila in the morning; and Lavender, so soon as the post had come and gone, went up to Ingram's room and woke him. "I am sorry to disturb you, Ingram," he said, "but I am going to Lewis. I shall catch the train to Glasgow at ten."
"And what do you want to get to Lewis for?" said Ingram, starting up. "Do you think Sheila would go straight back to her own people with all this humiliation upon her? And supposing she is not there, how do you propose to meet old Mackenzie?"
"I am not afraid of meeting any man," said Lavender: "I want to know where Sheila is. And if I see Mackenzie, I can only tell him frankly everything that has happened. He is not likely to say anything of me half as bad as what I think of myself."
"Now listen," said Ingram, sitting up in bed, with his brown beard and grayish hair in a considerably disheveled condition: "Sheila may have gone home, but it isn't likely. If she has not, your taking the story up there and spreading it abroad would prepare a great deal of pain for her when she might go back at some future time. But suppose you want to make sure that she has not gone to her father's house. She could not have got down to Glasgow sooner than this morning by last night's train, you know. It is to-morrow morning, not this morning, that the Stornoway steamer starts; and she would be certain to go direct to it at the Glasgow Broomielaw, and go round the Mull of Cantyre, instead of catching it up at Oban, because she knows the people in the boat, and she and Mairi would be among friends. If you really want to know whether she has gone north, perhaps you could do no better than run down to Glasgow to-day, and have a look at the boat that starts to-morrow morning. I would go with you myself, but I can't escape the office to-day."
Lavender agreed to do this, and was about to go. But before he bade his friend good-bye he lingered for a second or two in a hesitating way, and then he said, "Ingram, you were speaking the other night of your going up to Borva. If you should go—"
"Of course I sha'n't go," said the other promptly. "How could I face Mackenzie when he began to ask me about Sheila? No, I cannot go to Borva while this affair remains in its present condition; and, indeed, Lavender, I mean to stop in London till I see you out of your trouble somehow."
"You are heaping coals of fire on my head."
"Oh, don't look at it that way. If I can be of any help to you, I shall expect, this time, to have a return for it."
"What do you mean?"
"I will tell you when we get to know something of Sheila's intentions."
And so Frank Lavender found himself once more, as in the old times, in the Euston Station, with the Scotch mail ready to start, and all manner of folks bustling about with that unnecessary activity which betokens the excitement of a holiday. What a strange holiday was his! He got into a smoking-carriage in order to be alone, and he looked out on the people who were bidding their friends good-bye. Some of them were not very pretty, many of them were ordinary, insignificant, commonplace-looking folks, but it was clear that they had those about them who loved them and thought much of them. There was one man whom, in other circumstances, Lavender would have dismissed with contempt as an excellent specimen of the unmitigated cad. He wore a white waistcoat, purple gloves and a green sailor's knot with a diamond in it, and there was a cheery, vacuous, smiling expression on his round face as he industriously smoked a cheroot and made small jokes to the friends who had come to see him off. One of them was a young woman, not very good looking perhaps, who did not join in the general hilarity; and it occurred to Lavender that the jovial man with the cheroot was perhaps cracking his little jokes to keep up her spirits. At all events, he called her "my good lass" from time to time, and patted her on the shoulder, and was very kind to her. And when the guard came up and bade everybody get in, the man kissed the girl and shook hands with her and bade her good-bye; and then she, moved by some sudden impulse, caught his face in both her hands and kissed him once on each cheek. It was a ridiculous scene. People who wear green ties with diamond pins care nothing for decorum. And yet Lavender, when he averted his eyes from this parting, could not help recalling what Ingram had been saying the night before, and wondered whether this outrageous person, with his abominable decorations and his genial grin, might not be more fortunate than many a great statesman or warrior or monarch.
He turned round to find the cad beside him; and presently the man, with an abounding good-nature, began to converse with him, and explained that it was 'igh 'oliday with him, for that he had got a pass to travel first-class as far as Carlisle. He hoped they would have a jolly time of it together. He explained the object of his journey in the frankest possible fashion, made a kindly little joke upon the hardship of parting with one's sweetheart, said that a faint heart never won fair lady, and that it was no good crying over spilt milk. She would be all right, and precious glad to see him when he came back in three weeks' time, and he meant to bring her a present that would be good for sore eyes.
"Perhaps you're a married man, sir, and got past all them games?" said the cad cheerily.
"Yes, I am married," said Lavender coldly.
"And you're going farther than Carlisle, you say, sir? I'll be sworn the good lady is up somewhere in that direction, and she won't be disappointed when she sees you—oh no! Scotch, sir?"
"I am not Scotch," said Lavender curtly.
"And she?"
Should he have to throw the man out of the window? "Yes."
"The Scotch are a strange race—very," said the genial person, producing a brandy flask. "They drink a trifle, don't they? and yet they keep their wits about them if you've dealings with them. A very strange race of people, in my opinion—very. Know the story of the master who fancied his man was drunk? 'Donald, you're trunk,' says he. 'It's a tam lee,' says Donald. 'Donald, ye ken ye're trunk,' says the master. 'Ah ken ah wish to Kott ah was!' says Donald. Good story, ain't it, sir?"
Lavender had heard the remarkable old joke a hundred times, but just at this moment there was something odd in this vulgar person suddenly imitating, and imitating very well, the Highland accent. Had he been away up in the North? or had he merely heard the story related by one who had been? Lavender dared not ask, however, for fear of prolonging a conversation in which he had no wish to join. Indeed, to get rid of the man, he shoved a whole bundle of the morning papers into his hands.
"What's your opinion of politics at present, sir?" observed his friend in an off-hand way.
"I haven't any," said Lavender, compelled to take back one of the newspapers and open it.
"I think, myself, they're in a bad state: that's my opinion. There ain't a man among 'em who knows how to keep down those people: that's my opinion, sir. What do you think?"
"Oh, I think so too," said Lavender. "You'll find a good article in that paper on University Tests."
The cheery person looked rather blank. "I would like to hear your opinion about 'em, sir," he said. "It ain't much good reading only one side of a question, but when you can talk about it and discuss it, now—"
"I am sorry I can't oblige you," said Lavender, goaded into making some desperate effort to release himself. "I am suffering from relaxed throat at present. My doctor has warned me against talking too much."
"I beg your pardon, sir. You don't seem very well: perhaps the throat comes with a little feverishness, you see—a cold, in fact. Now if I was you I'd try tannin lozenges for the throat. They're uncommon good for the throat; and a little quinine for the general system—that would put you as right as a fiver. I tried it myself when I was down in 'Ampshire last year. And you wouldn't find a drop of this brandy a bad thing, either, if you don't mind rowing in the same boat as myself."
Lavender declined the proffered flask and subsided behind a newspaper. His fellow-traveler lit another cheroot, took up Bradshaw and settled himself in a corner.
Had Sheila come up this very line some dozen hours before? Lavender asked himself as he looked out on the hills and valleys and woods of Buckinghamshire. Had the throbbing of the engine and the rattle of the wheels kept the piteous eyes awake all through the dark night, until the pale dawn showed the girl a wild vision of northern hills and moors, telling her she was getting near to her own country? Not thus had Sheila proposed to herself to return home on the first holiday-time that should occur to them both. He began to think of his present journey as it might have been in other circumstances. Would she have remembered any of those pretty villages which she saw one early morning long ago when they were bathed in sunshine and scarcely awake to the new day? Would she be impatient at the delays at the stations, and anxious to hurry on to Westmoreland and Dumfries, to Glasgow, and Oban, and Skye, and then from Stornoway across the island to the little inn at Garra-na-hina? Here, as he looked out of the window, the first indication of the wilder country became visible in the distant Berkshire hills. Close at hand the country lay green and bright under a brilliant sun, but over there in the east some heavy clouds darkened the landscape, and the far hills seemed to be placed amid a gloomy stretch of moorland. Would not Sheila have been thrilled by this glimpse of the coming North? She would have fancied that greater mountains lay far behind these rounded slopes hidden in mist. She would have imagined that no human habitations were near those rising plains of sombre hue, where the red-deer and the fox ought to dwell. And in her delight at getting away from the fancied brightness of the South, would she not have been exceptionally grateful and affectionate toward himself, and striven to please him with her tender ways?
It was not a cheerful journey, this lonely trip to the North. Lavender got to Glasgow that night, and next morning he went down, long before any passengers could have thought of arriving, to the Clansman. He did not go near the big steamer, for he was known to the captain and the steward, but he hung about the quays, watching each person who went on board. Sheila certainly was not among the passengers by the Clansman.
But she might have gone to Greenock and waited for the steamer there. Accordingly, after the Clansman had started on her voyage, he went into a neighboring hotel and had some breakfast, after which he crossed the bridge to the station and took rail for Greenock, where he arrived some time before the Clansman made her appearance. He went down to the quay. It was yet early morning, and a cool fresh breeze was blowing in across the broad waters of the Frith, where the sunlight was shining on the white sails of the yachts and on the dipping and screaming sea gulls. Far away beyond the pale blue mountains opposite lay the wonderful network of sea-loch and island through which one had to pass to get to the distant Lewis. How gladly at this moment would he have stepped on board the steamer with Sheila, and put out on that gleaming plain of sea, knowing that by and by they would sail into Stornoway harbor and find the wagonette there! They would not hasten the voyage. She had never been round the Mull of Cantyre, and so he would sit by her side and show her the wild tides meeting there, and the long jets of white foam shooting up the great wall of rock. He would show her the pale coast of Ireland; and then they would see Islay, of which she had many a ballad and story. They would go through the narrow sound that is overlooked by the gloomy mountains of Jura. They would see the distant islands where the chief of Colonsay is still mourned for on the still evenings by the hapless mermaiden, who sings her wild song across the sea. They would keep wide of the dangerous currents of Corryvreckan, and by and by they would sail into the harbor of Oban, the beautiful sea-town where Sheila first got a notion of the greatness of the world lying outside of her native island.
What if she were to come down now from this busy little seaport, which lay under a pale blue smoke, and come out upon this pier to meet the free sunlight and the fresh sea-air blowing all about? Surely at a great distance he could recognize the proud, light step, and the proud, sad face. Would she speak to him, or go past him, with firm lips and piteous eyes, to wait for the great steamer that was now coming along out of the eastern mist? Lavender glanced vaguely around the quays and the thoroughfares leading to them, but there was no one like Sheila there. In the distance he could hear the throbbing of the Clansman's engines as the big steamer came on through the white plain. The sun was warmer now on the bright waters of the Frith, and the distant haze over the pale blue mountains beyond had grown more luminous. Small boats went by, and here and there a yachtsman, scarlet-capped and in white costume, was taking a leisurely breakfast on his deck. The sea-gulls circled about, or dipped down on the waters, or chased each other with screams and cries. Then the Clansman sailed into the quay, and there was a flinging of ropes and general hurry and bustle, while people came crowding round the gangways, calling out to each other in every variety of dialect and accent.
Sheila was not there. He lingered about, and patiently waited for the starting of the steamer, not knowing how long she ordinarily remained at Greenock. He was in no hurry, indeed, for after the vessel had gone he found himself with a whole day before him, and with no fixed notion as to how it could be passed.
In other circumstances he would have been in no difficulty as to the spending of a bright forenoon and afternoon by the side of the sea. Or he could have run through to Edinburgh and called on some artist-friends there. Or he could have crossed the Frith and had a day's ramble among the mountains. But now that he was satisfied that Sheila had not gone home all his fancies and hopes went back to London. She was in London. And while he was glad that she had not gone straight to her own people with a revelation of her wrongs, he scarcely dared speculate on what adventures and experiences might have befallen those two girls turned out into a great city of which they were about equally ignorant.
The day passed somehow, and at night he was on his way to London. Next morning he went down to Whitehall and saw Ingram.
"Sheila has not gone back to the Highlands, so far as I can make out," he said.
"So much the better," was the answer.
"What am I to do? She must be in London, and who knows what may befall her?"
"I cannot tell you what you should do. Of course you would like to know where she is; and I fancy she would have no objection herself to letting you know that she was all right, so long as she knew that you would not go near her. I don't think she has taken so decided a step merely for the purpose of being coaxed back again: that is not Sheila's way."
"I won't go near her," he said. "I only want to know that she is safe and well. I will do whatever she likes, but I must know where she is, and that she has come to no harm."
"Well," said Ingram slowly, "I was talking the matter over with Mrs. Lorraine last night—"
"Does she know?" said Lavender, wincing somewhat.
"Certainly," Ingram answered. "I did not tell her. I had promised to go up there about something quite different, when she immediately began to tell me the news. Of course it was impossible to conceal such a thing. Don't all the servants about know?"
"I don't care who knows," said Lavender moodily. "What does Mrs. Lorraine say about this affair?"
"Mrs. Lorraine says that it serves you right," said Ingram bluntly.
"Thank her very much! I like candor, especially in a fair-weather friend."
"Mrs. Lorraine is a better friend to you than you imagine," Ingram said, taking no notice of the sneer. "When she thought that your going to their house continually was annoying Sheila, she tried to put a stop to it for Sheila's sake. And now, at this very moment, she is doing her very best to find out where Sheila is; and if she succeeds she means to go and plead your cause with the girl."
"I will not have her do anything of the kind," said Lavender fiercely. "I will plead my own cause with Sheila. I will have forgiveness from Sheila herself alone—not brought to me by any intermeddling woman."
"You needn't call names," said Ingram coolly. "But I confess I think you are right; and I told Mrs. Lorraine that was what you would doubtless say. In any case, she can do no harm in trying to find out where Sheila is."
"And how does she propose to succeed? Pollaky, the 'Agony' column, placards, or a bellman? I tell you, Ingram, I won't have that woman meddle in my affairs—coming forward as a Sister of Mercy to heal the wounded, bestowing mock compassion, and laughing all the time."
"Lavender, you are beside yourself. That woman is one of the most good-natured, shrewd, clever and amiable women I have ever met. What has enraged you?"
"Bah! She has got hold of you too, has she? I tell you she is a rank impostor."
"An impostor!" said Ingram slowly. "I have heard a good many people called impostors. Did it ever occur to you that the blame of the imposture might possibly lie with the person imposed on? I have heard of people falling into the delusion that a certain modest and simple-minded man was a great politician or a great wit, although he had never claimed to be anything of the kind; and then, when they found out that in truth he was just what he had pretended to be, they called out against him as an impostor. I have heard, too, of young gentlemen accusing women of imposture whose only crime was that they did not possess qualities which they had never pretended to possess, but which the young gentlemen fancied they ought to possess. Mrs. Lorraine may be an impostor to you. I think she is a thoroughly good woman, and I know she is a very delightful companion. And if you want to know how she means to find Sheila out, I can tell you. She thinks that Sheila would probably go to a hotel, but that afterward she would try to find lodgings with some of the people whom she had got to know through her giving them assistance. Mrs. Lorraine would like to ask your servants about the women who used to come for this help. Then, she thinks, Sheila would probably get some one of these humble friends to call for her letters, for she would like to hear from her father, and she would not care to tell him that she had left your house. There is a great deal of supposition in all this, but Mrs. Lorraine is a shrewd woman, and I would trust her instinct in such matters a long way. She is quite sure that Sheila would be too proud to tell her father, and very much averse, also, to inflicting so severe a blow on him."
"But surely," Lavender said hastily, "if Sheila wishes to conceal this affair for a time, she must believe it to be only temporary? She cannot propose to make the separation final?"
"That I don't know anything about. I would advise you to go and see Mrs. Lorraine."
"I won't go and see Mrs. Lorraine."
"Now, this is unreasonable, Lavender. You begin to fancy that Sheila had some sort of dislike to Mrs. Lorraine, founded on ignorance, and straightway you think it is your duty to go and hate the woman. Whatever you may think of her, she is willing to do you a service."
"Will you go, Ingram, and take her to those servants?"
"Certainly I will, if you commission me to do so," said Ingram readily.
"I suppose they all know?"
"They do."
"And every one else?"
"I should think few of your friends would remain in ignorance of it."
"Ah, well," said Lavender, "if only I could get Sheila to overlook what is past, this once, I should not trouble my dear friends and acquaintances for their sympathy and condolence. By the time I saw them again I fancy they would have forgotten our names."
There was no doubt of the fact that the news of Sheila's flight from her husband's house had traveled very speedily round the circle of Lavender's friends, and doubtless in due time it reached the ears of his aunt. At all events, Mrs. Lavender sent a message to Ingram, asking him to come and see her. When he went he found the little, dry, hard-eyed woman in a terrible passion. She had forgotten all about Marcus Aurelius and the composure of a philosopher, and the effect of anger on the nervous system. She was bolstered up in bed, for she had had another bad fit, but she was brisk enough in her manner and fierce enough in her language.
"Mr. Ingram," she said the moment he had entered, "do you consider my nephew a beast?"
"I don't," he said.
"I do," she retorted.
"Then you are quite mistaken, Mrs. Lavender. Probably you have heard some exaggerated story of all this business. He has been very inconsiderate and thoughtless, certainly, but I don't believe he quite knew how sensitive his wife was; and he is very repentant now, and I know he will keep his promises."
"You would apologize for the devil," said the little old woman frowning.
"I would try to give him his due, at all events," said Ingram with a laugh. "I know Frank Lavender very well—I have known him for years—and I know there is good stuff in him, which may be developed in proper circumstances. After all, what is there more common than for a married man to neglect his wife? He only did unconsciously and thoughtlessly what heaps of men do deliberately."
"You are making me angry," said Mrs. Lavender in a severe voice.
"I don't think it fair to expect men to be demigods," Ingram said carelessly. "I never met any demigods myself: they don't live in my neighborhood. Perhaps if I had had some experience of a batch of them, I should be more censorious of other people. If you set up Frank for a Bayard, is it his fault or yours?"
"I am not going to be talked out of my common sense, and me on my death-bed," said the old lady impatiently, and yet with some secret hope that Ingram would go on talking and amuse her. "I won't have you say he is anything but a stupid and ungrateful boy, who married a wife far too good for him. He is worse than that—he is much worse than that; but as this may be my death-bed, I will keep a civil tongue in my head."
"I thought you didn't like his wife very much?" said Ingram.
"I am not bound to like her because I think badly of him, am I? She was not a bad sort of girl, after all—temper a little stiff, perhaps; but she was honest. It did one's eyes good to look at her bright face. Yes, she was a good sort of creature in her way. But when she ran off from him, why didn't she come to me?"
"Perhaps you never encouraged her."
"Encouragement! Where ought a married woman go to but to her husband's relatives? If she cannot stay with him, let her take the next best substitute. It was her duty to come to me."
"If Sheila had fancied it to be her duty, she would have come here at any cost."
"What do you mean, Mr. Ingram?" said Mrs. Lavender severely.
"Well, supposing she didn't like you—" he was beginning to say cautiously, when she sharply interrupted him:
"She didn't like me, eh?"
"I said nothing of the kind. I was about to say that if she had thought it her duty to come here, she would have come in any circumstances."
"She might have done worse. A young woman risks a great deal in running away from her husband's home. People will talk. Who is to make people believe just the version of the story that the husband or wife would prefer?"
"And what does Sheila care," said Ingram with a hot flush in his face, "for the belief of a lot of idle gossips and slanderers?"
"My dear Mr. Ingram," said the old lady, "you are not a woman, and you don't know the bother one has to look after one's reputation. But that is a question not likely to interest you. Let us talk of something else. Do you know why I wanted you to come and see me to-day?"
"I am sure I don't."
"I mean to leave you all my money."
He stared. She did not appear to be joking. Was it possible that her rage against her nephew had carried her to this extreme resolve?
"Oh!" he stammered, "but I won't have it, Mrs. Lavender."
"But you'll have to have it," said the little old woman severely. "You are a poor man. You could make good use of my money—better than a charity board that would starve the poor with a penny out of each shilling, and spend the other elevenpence in treating their friends to flower-shows and dinners. Do you think I mean to leave my money to such people? You shall have it. I think you would look very well driving a mail-phaeton in the Park; and I suppose you would give up your pipes and your philosophy and your bachelor walks into the country. You would marry, of course: every man is bound to make a fool of himself that way as soon as he gets enough money to do it with. But perhaps you might come across a clever and sensible woman, who would look after you and give you your own way while having her own. Only don't marry a fool. Whatever you do, don't marry a fool, or all your philosophers won't make the house bearable to you."
"I am not likely to marry anybody, Mrs. Lavender," said Ingram carelessly.
"Is there no woman you know whom you would care to marry?"
"Oh," he said, "there is one woman—yes—who seems to me about everything that a man could wish, but the notion of my marrying her is absurd. If I had known in time, don't you see, that I should ever think of such a thing, I should have begun years ago to dye my hair. I can't begin now. Gray hair inspires reverence, I believe, but it is a bad thing to go courting with."
"You must not talk foolishly," said the little old lady with a frown. "Do you think a sensible woman wants to marry a boy who will torment her with his folly and his empty head and his running after a dozen different women? Gray hair! If you think gray hair is a bad thing to go courting with, I will give you something better. I will put something in your hand that will make the young lady forget your gray hair. Oh, of course you will say that she cannot be tempted, that she despises money. If so, so much the better; but I have known more women than you, and my hair is grayer than yours, and you will find that a little money won't stand in the way of your being accepted."
He had made some gesture of protest, not against her speaking of his possible marriage, which scarcely interested him, so remote was the possibility, but against her returning to this other proposal. And when he saw the old woman really meant to do this thing, he found it necessary to declare himself explicitly on the point. "Oh, don't imagine, Mrs. Lavender," he said, "that I have any wild horror of money, or that I suppose anybody else would have. I should like to have five times or ten times as much as you seem generously disposed to give me. But here is the point, you see. I am a vain person. I am very proud of my own opinion of myself; and if I acceded to what you propose—if I took your money—I suppose I should be driving about in that fine phaeton you speak of. That is very good: I like driving, and I should be pleased with the appearance of the trap and the horses. But what do you fancy I should think of myself—what would be my opinion of my own nobleness and generosity and humanity—if I saw Sheila Mackenzie walking by on the pavement, without any carriage to drive in, perhaps without a notion as to where she was going to get her dinner? I should be a great hero to myself then, shouldn't I?"
"Oh, Sheila again!" said the old woman in a tone of vexation. "I can't imagine what there is in that girl to make men rave so about her. That Jew-boy is become a thorough nuisance: you would fancy she had just stepped down out of the clouds to present him with a gold harp, and that he couldn't look up to her face. And you are just as bad. You are worse, for you don't blow it off in steam. Well, there need be no difficulty. I meant to leave the girl in your charge. You take the money and look after her: I know she won't starve. Take it in trust for her, if you like."
"But that is a fearful responsibility, Mrs. Lavender," he said in dismay. "She is a married woman. Her husband is the proper person—"
"I tell you I won't give him a farthing!" she said with a sudden sharpness that startled him—"not a farthing! If he wants money, let him work for it, as other people do; and then, when he has done that, if he is to have any of my money, he must be beholden for it to his wife and to you."
"Do you think that Sheila would accept anything that she would not immediately hand over to him?"
"Then he must come first to you."
"I have no wish to inflict humiliation on any one," said Ingram stiffly. "I don't wish to play the part of a little Providence and mete out punishment in that way. I might have to begin with myself."
"Now, don't be foolish," said the old lady with a menacing composure. "I give you fair warning: the next fit will do for me. If you don't care to take my money, and keep it in trust for this girl you profess to care so much about, I will leave it to found an institution. And I have a good idea for an institution, mind you. I mean to teach people what they should eat and drink, and the various effects of food on various constitutions."
"It is an important subject," Ingram admitted.
"Is it not? What is the use of giving people laborious information about the idle fancies of generations that lived ages before they were born, while you are letting them poison their system, and lay up for themselves a fearfully painful old age, by the continuous use of unsuitable food? That book you gave me, Mr. Ingram, is a wonderful book, but it gives you little consolation if you know another fit is coming on. And what is the good of knowing about Epictetus and Zeno and the rest if you've got rheumatism? Now, I mean to have classes to teach people what they should eat and drink; and I'll do it if you won't assume the guardianship of my nephew's wife."
"But this is the wildest notion I ever heard of," Ingram protested again. "How can I take charge of her? If Sheila herself had shown any disposition to place herself under your care, it might have been different."
"Oh, it would have been different!" cried the old lady with a shrill laugh. "It would have been different! And what did you say about her sense of duty to her husband's relatives? Did you say anything about that?"
"Well—" Ingram was about to say, being lost in amazement at the odd glee of this withered old creature.
"Where do you think a young wife should go if she runs off from her husband's house?" cried Mrs. Lavender, apparently much amused by his perplexity. "Where can she best escape calumny? Poor man! I won't frighten you or disturb you any longer. Ring the bell, will you? I want Paterson."
Ingram rang.
"Paterson," said Mrs. Lavender when the tall and grave woman appeared, "ask Mrs. Lavender if she can come here for a few minutes."
Ingram looked at the old woman to see if she had gone mad, and then, somehow, he instinctively turned to the door. He fancied he knew that quick, light step. And then, before he well knew how, Sheila had come forward to him with her hands outstretched and with something like a smile on her pale face. She looked at him for a second, she tried to speak to him, but there was a dangerous quivering of the lips; and then she suddenly burst into tears, and let go his hands and turned away. In that brief moment he had seen what havoc had been wrought within the past two or three days. There were the same proud and handsome features, but they were pale and worn, and there was a piteous and weary look in the eyes that told of the trouble and heartrending of sleepless nights.
"Sheila," he said, following her and taking her hand, "does any one know of your being here?"
"No," she said, still holding her head aside and downcast—"no one. And I do not wish any one to know. I am going away."
"Where?"
"Don't you ask too much, Mr. Ingram," said the old lady from amid her cushions and curtains. "Give her that ammonia—the stopper only. Now, sit down, child, and dry your eyes. You need not be ashamed to show Mr. Ingram that you knew where you ought to come to when you left your husband's house. And if you won't stop here, of course I can't compel you, though Mr. Ingram will tell you you might do worse."
"Sheila, why do you wish to go away? Do you mean to go back to the Lewis?"
"Oh no, no!" she said, almost shuddering.
"Where do you wish to go?"
"Anywhere—it does not matter. But I cannot remain here. I should meet with—with many people I used to know. Mrs. Lavender, she is kind enough to say she will get me some place for Mairi and me: that is all as yet that is settled."
"Is Mairi with you?"
"Yes: I will go and bring her to you. It is not any one in London she will want to see as much as you."
Sheila left the room, and by and by came back, leading the young Highland girl by the hand. Mairi was greatly embarrassed, scarcely knowing whether she should show any gladness at meeting this old friend amid so much trouble. But when Ingram shook hands with her, and after she had blushed and looked shy and said, "And are you ferry well, sir?" she managed somehow to lift her eyes to his face; and then she said suddenly, "And it is a good day, this day, for Miss Sheila, that you will come to see her, Mr. Ingram, for she will hef a friend now."
"Yon silly girl," said Mrs. Lavender sharply, "why will you say 'Miss Sheila?' Don't you know she is a married woman?"
Mairi glanced in a nervous and timid manner toward the bed. She was evidently afraid of the little shriveled old woman with the staring black eyes and the harsh voice.
"Mairi hasn't forgotten her old habits, that is all," said Ingram, patting her good-naturedly on the head.
And then he sat down again, and it seemed so strange to him to see these two together again, and to hear the odd inflection of Mairi's voice, that he almost forgot that he had made a great discovery in learning of Sheila's whereabouts, and wholly forgot that he had just been offered, and had just refused, a fortune.
CHAPTER XXI.
MEETING AND PARTING.
The appearance of Sheila in Mrs. Lavender's house certainly surprised Ingram, but the motives which led her to go thither were simple enough. On the morning on which she had left her husband's house she and Mairi had been driven up to Euston Square Station before she seemed capable of coming to any decision. Mairi guessed at what had happened with a great fear at her heart, and did not dare to speak of it. She sat, mute and frightened, in a corner of the cab, and only glanced from time to time at her companion's pale face and troubled and distant eyes.
They were driven in to the station. Sheila got out, still seeming to know nothing of what was around her. The cabman took down Mairi's trunk and handed it to a porter.
"Where for, miss?" said the man. And she started.
"Where will you be going, Miss Sheila?" said Mairi timidly.
"It is no matter just now," said Sheila to the porter, "if you will be so kind as to take charge of the trunk. And how much must I pay the cabman from Notting Hill?"
She gave him the money and walked into the great stone-paved hall, with its lofty roof and sounding echoes.
"Mairi," she said, "I have gone away from my own home, and I have no home for you or myself either. What are we to do?"
"Are you quite sure, Miss Sheila," said the girl, dismayed beyond expression, "that you will not go back to your own house? It wass a bad day this day that I wass come to London to find you going away from your own house;" and Mairi began to cry. "Will we go back to the Lewis, Miss Sheila?" she said. "It is many a one there will be proud and pleased to see you again in sa Lewis, and there will be plenty of homes for you there—oh yes, ferry many that will be glad to see you! And it wass a bad day sa day you left the Lewis whatever; and if you will go back again, Miss Sheila, you will neffer hef to go away again, not any more."
Sheila looked at the girl—at the pretty pale face, the troubled light-blue eyes and the abundant fair-yellow hair. It was Mairi, sure enough, who was talking to her, and yet it was in a strange place. There was no sea dashing outside, no tide running in from the Atlantic. And where was old Scarlett, with her complaints and her petulance and her motherly kindness?
"It is a pity you have come to London, Mairi," Sheila said wistfully; "for I have no house to take you into; and we must go now and find one."
"You will not go back to sa Lewis, Miss Sheila?"
"They would not know me in the Lewis any more, Mairi. I have been too long away, and I am quite changed. It is many a time I will think of going back; but when I left the Lewis I was married, and now—How could I go back to the Lewis, Mairi? They would look at me. They would ask questions. My father would come down to the quay, and he would say, 'Sheila, have you come back alone?' And all the story of it would go about the island, and every one would say I had been a bad wife, and my husband had gone away from me."
"There is not any one," said Mairi, with the tears starting to her eyes again—"not from one end of sa island to sa other—would say that of you, Miss Sheila; and there is no one would not come to meet you, and be glad sat you will come again to your own home. And as for going back, I will be ferry glad to go back whatever, for it was you I was come to see, and not any town; and I do not like this town, what I hef seen of it, and I will be ferry glad to go away wis you, Miss Sheila."
Sheila did not answer. She felt that it was impossible she could go back to her own people with this disgrace upon her, and did not even argue the question with herself. All her trouble now was to find some harbor of refuge into which she could flee, so that she might have quiet and solitude, and an opportunity of studying all that had befallen her. The noise around her—the arrival of travelers, the transference of luggage, the screaming of trains—stunned and confused her; and she could only vaguely think of all the people she knew in London, to see to whom she could go for advice and direction. They were not many. One after the other she went over the acquaintances she had made, and not one of them appeared to her in the light of a friend. One friend she had who would have rejoiced to be of the least assistance to her, but her husband had forbidden her to hold communication with him, and she felt a strange sort of pride, even at this moment, in resolving to obey that injunction. In all this great city that lay around her there was no other to whom she could frankly and readily go. That one friend she had possessed before she came to London: in London she had not made another.
And yet it was necessary to do something, for who could tell but that her husband might come to this station in search of her? Mairi's anxiety, too, was increasing every moment, insomuch that she was fairly trembling with excitement and fatigue. Sheila resolved that she would go down and throw herself on the tender mercies of that terrible old lady in Kensington Gore. For one thing, she instinctively sought the help of a woman in her present plight; and perhaps this harshly-spoken old lady would be gentle to her when all her story was told. Another thing that prompted this decision was a sort of secret wish to identify herself even yet with her husband's family—to prove to herself, as it were, that they had not cast her off as being unworthy of him. Nothing was farther from her mind at this moment than any desire to pave the way for reconciliation and reunion with her husband. Her whole anxiety was to get away from him, to put an end to a state of things which she had found to be more than she could bear. And yet, if she had had friends in London called respectively Mackenzie and Lavender, and if she had been equally intimate with both, she would at this moment have preferred to go for help to those bearing the name of Lavender.
There was doubtless something strangely inconsistent in this instinct of wifely loyalty and duty in a woman who had just voluntarily left her husband's house. Lavender had desired her not to hold communication with Edward Ingram: even now she would respect his wish. Lavender would prefer that she should, in any great extremity, go to his aunt for assistance and counsel; and to his aunt, despite her own dislike of the woman, she would go. At this moment, when Sheila's proud spirit had risen up in revolt against a system of treatment that had become insufferable to her, when she had been forced to leave her home and incur the contemptuous compassion of friends and acquaintances, if Edward Ingram himself had happened to meet her, and had begun to say hard things of Lavender, she would have sharply recalled him to a sense of the discretion that one must use in speaking to a wife of her husband.
The two homeless girls got into another cab, and were driven down to Kensington Gore. Sheila asked if she could see Mrs. Lavender. She knew that the old lady had had another bad fit, but she was supposed to be recovering rapidly. Mrs. Lavender would see her in her bedroom, and so Sheila went up. The girl could not speak.
"Yes, I see it—something wrong about that precious husband of yours," said the old lady, watching her keenly. "I expected it. Go on. What is the matter?"
"I have left him," Sheila said with her face very pale, but no sign of emotion about the firm lips.
"Oh, good gracious, child! Left him? How many people know it?"
"No one but yourself and a young Highland girl who has come up to see me."
"You came to me first of all?"
"Yes."
"Have you no other friends to go to?"
"I considered that I ought to come to you."
There was no cunning in the speech: it was the simple truth. Mrs. Lavender looked at her hard for a second or two, and then said, in what she meant to be a kind way, "Come here and sit down, child, and tell me all about it. If no one else knows it there is no harm done. We can easily patch it up before it gets abroad."
"I did not come to you for that, Mrs. Lavender," said Sheila calmly. "That is impossible: that is all over. I have come to ask you where I may get lodgings for my friend and myself."
"Tell me all about it first, and then we'll see whether it can't be mended. Mind, I am ready to be on your side, though I am your husband's aunt. I think you're a good girl: a bit of a temper, you know, but you manage to keep it quiet ordinarily. You tell me all about it, and you'll see if I haven't means to bring him to reason. Oh yes, oh yes, I'm an old woman, but I can find some means to bring him to reason." And she laughed an odd, shrill laugh.
A hot flush came over Sheila's face. Had she come to this old woman only to make her husband's degradation more complete? Was he to be intimidated into making friends with her by a threat of the withdrawal of that money that Sheila had begun to detest? And this was what her notions of wifely duty had led to!
"Mrs. Lavender," she said, with the proud lips very proud indeed, "I must say this to you before I tell you anything. It is very good of you to say you will take my side, but I did not come to you to complain. And I would rather not have any sympathy from you if it only means that you will speak ill of my husband. And if you think you can make him do things because you give him money, perhaps that is true at present, but it may not always be true, and you cannot expect me to wish it to continue. I would rather have my present trouble twenty times over than see him being bought over to any woman's wishes."
Mrs. Lavender stared at her: "Why, you astonishing girl, I believe you are still in love with that man!"
Sheila said nothing.
"Is it true?" she said.
"I suppose a woman ought to love her husband," Sheila answered.
"Even if he turns her out of the house?"
"Perhaps it is she who is to blame," Sheila said humbly. "Perhaps her education was wrong, or she expects too much that is unreasonable, or perhaps she has a bad temper. You think I have a bad temper, Mrs. Lavender, and might it not be that?"
"Well, I think you want your own way, and doubtless you expect to have it now. I suppose I am to listen to all your story, and I must not say a word about my own nephew. But sit down and tell me all about it, and then you can justify him afterward, if you like."
It was probably, however, the notion that Sheila would try to justify Lavender all through that put the old lady on her guard, and made her, indeed, regard Lavender's conduct in an unfairly bad light. Sheila told the story as simply as she could, putting everything down to her husband's advantage that was possible, and asking for no sympathy whatsoever. She only wanted to remain away from his house; and by what means could she and this young cousin of hers find cheap lodgings where they could live quietly and without much fear of detection?
Mrs. Lavender was in a rage, and as she was not allowed to vent it on the proper object, she turned upon Sheila herself. "The Highlanders are a proud race," she said sharply. "I should have thought that rooms in this house, even with the society of a cantankerous old woman, would have been tolerated for a time."
"It is very kind of you to make the offer," Sheila said, "but I do not wish to have to meet my husband or any of his friends. There is enough trouble without that. If you could tell me where to get lodgings not far from this neighborhood, I would come to see you sometimes at such hours as I know he cannot be here."
"But I don't understand what you mean. You won't go back to your husband, although I could manage that for you directly—you won't hear of negotiations, or of any prospect of your going back—and yet you won't go home to your father."
"I cannot do either," Sheila said.
"Do you mean to live in those lodgings always?"
"How can I tell?" said the girl piteously. "I only wish to be away, and I cannot go back to my papa, with all this story to tell him."
"Well, I didn't want to distress you," said the old woman. "You know your own affairs best. I think you are mad. If you would calmly reason with yourself, and show to yourself that, in a hundred years, or less than that, it won't matter whether you gratified your pride or no, you would see that the wisest thing you can do now is to take an easy and comfortable course. You are in an excited and nervous state at present, for example; and that is destroying so much of the vital portion of your frame. If you go into these lodgings and live like a rat in a hole, you will have nothing to do but nurse these sorrows of yours, and find them grow bigger and bigger while you grow more and more wretched. All that is mere pride and sentiment and folly. On the other hand, look at this. Your husband is sorry you are away from him: you may take that for granted. You say he was merely thoughtless: now he has got something to make him think, and would without doubt come and beg your pardon if you gave him a chance. I write to him, he comes down here, you kiss and make good friends again, and to-morrow morning you are comfortable and happy again."
"To-morrow morning!" said Sheila sadly. "Do you know how we should be situated to-morrow morning? The story of my going away would become known to his friends: he would go among them as though he had suffered some disgrace, and I the cause of it. And though he is a man, and would soon be careless of that, how could I go with him amongst his friends, and feel that I had shamed him? It would be worse than ever between us; and I have no wish to begin again what ended this morning—none at all, Mrs. Lavender."
"And do you mean to say that you intend to live permanently apart from your husband?"
"I do not know," said Sheila in a despairing tone. "I cannot tell you. What I feel is that, with all this trouble, it is better that our life as it was in that house should come to an end."
Then she rose. There was a tired look about the face, as if she were too weary to care whether this old woman would help her or no. Mrs. Lavender regarded her for a moment, wondering, perhaps, that a girl so handsome, fine-colored and proud-eyed should be distressing herself with imaginary sentiments, instead of taking life cheerfully, enjoying the hour as it passed, and being quite assured of the interest and liking and homage of every one with whom she came in contact. Sheila turned to the bed once more, about to say that she had troubled Mrs. Lavender too much already, and that she would look after these lodgings. But the old woman apparently anticipated as much, and said with much deliberation that if Sheila and her companion would only remain one or two days in the house, proper rooms should be provided for them somewhere. Young girls could not venture into lodgings without strict inquiries being made. Sheila should have suitable rooms, and Mrs. Lavender would see that she was properly looked after and that she wanted for nothing. In the mean time she must have some money.
"It is kind of you," said the girl, blushing hotly, "but I do not require it."
"Oh, I suppose we are too proud," said the old woman. "If we disapprove of our husband taking money, we must not do it either. Why, child, you have learnt nothing in London. You are a savage yet. You must let me give you something for your pocket, or what are you to do? You say you have left everything at home: do you think hair-brushes, for example, grow on trees, that you can go into Kensington Gardens and stock your rooms?"
"I have some money—a few pounds—that my papa gave me," Sheila said.
"And when that is done?"
"He will give me more."
"And yet you don't wish him to know you have left your husband's house! What will he make of these repeated demands for money?"
"My papa will give me anything I want without asking any questions."
"Then he is a bigger fool than I expected. Oh, don't get into a temper again. Those sudden shocks of color, child, show me that your heart is out of order. How can you expect to have a regular pulsation if you flare up at anything any one may say? Now go and fetch me your Highland cousin."
Mairi came into the room in a very timid fashion, and stared with her big, light-blue eyes into the dusky recess in which the little old woman sat up in bed. Sheila took her forward: "This is my cousin Mairi, Mrs. Lavender."
"And are you ferry well, ma'am?" said Mairi, holding out her hand very much as a boy pretends to hold out his hand to a tiger in the Zoological Gardens.
"Well, young lady," said Mrs. Lavender, staring at her, "and a pretty mess you have got us into!"
"Me!" said Mairi, almost with a cry of pain: she had not imagined before that she had anything to do with Sheila's trouble.
"No, no, Mairi," her companion said, taking her hand, "it was not you. Mrs. Lavender, Mairi does not understand our way of joking in London. Perhaps she will learn before she goes back to the Highlands."
"There is one thing," said Mrs. Lavender, observing that Mairi's eyes had filled the moment she was charged with bringing trouble on Sheila—"there is one thing you people from the Highlands seem never disposed to learn, and that is to have a little control over your passions. If one speaks to you a couple of words, you either begin to cry or go off into a flash of rage. Don't you know how bad that is for the health?"
"And yet," said Sheila with a smile—and it seemed so strange to Mairi to see her smile—"we will not compare badly in health with the people about us here."
Mrs. Lavender dropped the question, and began to explain to Sheila what she advised her to do. In the mean time both the girls were to remain in her house. She would guarantee their being met by no one. When suitable rooms had been looked out by Paterson they were to remove thither. The whole situation of affairs was at once perceived by Mrs. Lavender's attendant, who was given to understand that no one was to know of young Mrs. Lavender's being in the house. Then the old woman, much contented with what she had done, resolved that she would reward herself with a joke, and sent for Edward Ingram.
When Sheila, as already described, came into the room, and found her old friend there, the resolution she had formed went clean out of her mind. She forgot entirely the ban that had been placed on Ingram by her husband. But after her first emotion on seeing him was over, and when he began to discuss what she ought to do, and even to advise her in a diffident sort of way, she remembered all that she had forgotten, and was ashamed to find herself sitting there and talking to him as if it were in her father's house at Borva. Indeed, when he proposed to take the management of her affairs into his own hands, and to go and look at certain apartments that Paterson had proposed, she was forced, with great heart-burning and pain, to hint to him that she could not avail herself of his kindness.
"But why?" he asked with a stare of surprise.
"You remember Brighton," she answered, looking down. "You had a bad return for your kindness to me then."
"Oh, I know," he said carelessly. "And I suppose Mr. Lavender wished you to cut me after my impertinent interference. But things are very much changed now. But for the time he went North, he has been with me nearly every hour since you left."
"Has Frank been to the Lewis?" she said suddenly, with a look of fear on her face.
"Oh no: he has only been to Glasgow to see if you had gone to catch the Clansman and go North from there."
"Did he take the trouble to do all that?" she asked slowly and wistfully.
"Trouble!" cried Ingram. "He appears to me neither to eat nor sleep day or night, but to go wandering about in search of you in every place where he fancies you may be. I never saw a man so beside himself with anxiety."
"I did not wish to make him anxious," said Sheila in a low voice. "Will you tell him that I am well?"
Mrs. Lavender began to smile. Were there not evident signs of softening? But Ingram, who knew the girl better, was not deceived by these appearances. He could see that Sheila merely wished that her husband should not suffer pain on her account: that was all.
"I was about to ask you," he said gently, "what I may say to him. He comes to me continually, for he has always fancied that you would communicate with me. What shall I say to him, Sheila?"
"You may tell him that I am well," she answered.
Mairi had by this time stepped out of the room. Sheila sat with her eyes fixed on the floor, her fingers working nervously with a paper-knife she held.
"Nothing more than that?" he said.
"Nothing more."
He saw by her face, and he could tell by the sound of her voice, that her decision was resolute.
"Don't be a fool, child!" said Mrs. Lavender emphatically. "Here is your husband's friend, who can make everything straight and comfortable for you in an hour or two, and you quietly put aside the chance of reconciliation and bring on yourself any amount of misery. I don't speak for Frank. Men can take care of themselves: they have clubs and friends, and amusements for the whole day long. But you!—what a pleasant life you would have, shut up in a couple of rooms, scarcely daring to show yourself at a window! Your fine sentiments are all very well, but they won't stand in the place of a husband to you; and you will soon find out the difference between living by yourself like that, and having some one in the house to look after you. Am I right, Mr. Ingram, or am I wrong?"
Ingram paused for a moment, and said, "I have not the same courage that you have, Mrs. Lavender. I dare not advise Sheila one way or the other just at present. But if she feels in her own heart that she would rather return now to her husband, I can safely say that she would find him deeply grateful to her, and that he would try to do everything that she desired. That I know. He wants to see you, Sheila, if only for five minutes, to beg your forgiveness."
"I cannot see him," she said with the same sad and settled air.
"I am not to tell him where you are?"
"Oh no!" she cried with a sudden and startled emphasis. "You must not do that, Mr. Ingram. Promise me you will not do that?"
"I do promise you; but you put a painful duty on me, Sheila, for you know how he will believe that a short interview with you would put everything right, and he will look on me as preventing that."
"Do you think a short interview at present would put everything right?" she said, suddenly looking up and regarding him with her clear and steadfast eyes.
He dared not answer. He felt in his inmost heart that it would not.
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Lavender, "young people have much satisfaction in being proud: when they come to my age, they may find they would have been happier if they had been less disdainful."
"It is not disdain, Mrs. Lavender," said Sheila gently.
"Whatever it is," said the old woman, "I must remind you two people that I am an invalid. Go away and have luncheon: Paterson will look after you. Mr. Ingram, give me that book, that I may read myself into a nap, and don't forget what I expect of you."
Ingram suddenly remembered. He and Sheila and Mairi sat down to luncheon in the dining-room, and while he strove to get them to talk about Borva he was thinking all the time of the extraordinary position he was expected to assume toward Sheila. Not only was he to be the repository of the secret of her place of residence, and the message-carrier between herself and her husband, but he was also to take Mrs. Lavender's fortune, in the event of her dying, and hold it in trust for the young wife. Surely this old woman, with her suspicious ways and her worldly wisdom, would not be so foolish as to hand him over all her property, free of conditions, on the simple understanding that when he chose he could give what he chose to Sheila? And yet that was what she had vowed she would do, to Ingram's profound dismay.
He labored hard to lighten the spirits of those two girls. He talked of John the Piper, and said he would invite him up to London, and described his probable appearance in the Park. He told them stories of his adventures while he was camping out with some young artists in the Western Highlands, and told them anecdotes, old, recent and of his own invention, about the people he had met. Had they heard of the steward on board one of the Clyde steamers who had a percentage on the drink consumed in the cabin, and who would call out to the captain, "Why wass you going so fast? Dinna put her into the quay so fast! There is a gran' company down below, and they are drinking fine!" Had he ever told them of the porter at Arran who had demanded sixpence for carrying up some luggage, but who, after being sent to get a sovereign changed, came back with only eighteen shillings, saying, "Oh yes, it iss sexpence! Oh, ay, it iss sexpence! But it iss two shullens ta you!" Or of the other, who after being paid hung about the cottage-door for nearly an hour, until Ingram, coming out, asked him why he had waited; whereupon he said, with an air of perfect indifference, "Oo, ay, there was something said about a dram; but hoot toots! it is of no consequence whatever!" And was it true that the sheriff of Stornoway was so kind-hearted a man that he remitted the punishment of certain culprits, ordained by the statute to be whipped with birch rods, on the ground that the island of Lewis produced no birch, and that he was not bound to import it? And had Mairi heard any more of the Black Horse of Loch Suainabhal? And where had she pulled those splendid bunches of bell-heather?
He suddenly stopped, and Sheila looked up with inquiring eyes. How did he know that Mairi had brought those things with her? Sheila saw that he must have gone up with her husband, and must have seen the room which she had decorated in imitation of the small parlor at Borvabost. She would rather not think of that room now.
"When are you going to the Lewis?" she asked of him with her eyes cast down.
"Well, I think I have changed my mind about that, Sheila. I don't think I shall go to the Lewis this autumn."
Her face became more and more embarrassed: how was she to thank him for his continued thoughtfulness and self-sacrifice?
"There is no necessity," he said lightly. "The man I am going with has no particular purpose in view. We shall merely go cruising about those wonderful lochs and islands, and I am sure to run against some of those young fellows I know, who are prowling about the fishing-villages with portable easels. They are good boys, those boys. They are very hospitable, if they have only a single bedroom in a small cottage as their studio and reception-room combined. I should not wonder, Sheila, if I went ashore somewhere, and put up my lot with those young fellows, and listened to their wicked stories, and lived on whisky and herrings for a month. Would you like to see me return to Whitehall in kilts? And I should go into the office and salute everybody with 'And are you ferry well?' just as Mairi does. But don't be downhearted, Mairi. You speak English a good deal better than many English folks I know; and by the time you go back to the Lewis we shall have you fit to become a school-mistress, not only in Borva, but in Stornoway itself."
"I wass told it is ferry good English they hef in Stornoway," said Mairi, not very sure whether Mr. Ingram was joking or not.
"My dear child," he cried, "I tell you it is the best English in the world. If the queen only knew, she would send her grandchildren to be educated there. But I must go now. Good-bye, Mairi. I mean to come and take you to a theatre some night soon."
Sheila accompanied him out into the hall. "When shall you see him?" she said with her eyes cast down.
"This evening," he answered.
"I should like you to tell him that I am well, and that he need not be anxious about me."
"And that is all?"
"Yes, that is all."
"Very well, Sheila. I wish you had given me a pleasanter message to carry, but when you think of doing that I shall be glad to take it."
Ingram left, and hastened in to his office. Sheila's affairs were considerably interfering with his attendance there—there could be no question of that—but he had the reputation of being able to get through his work thoroughly, whatever might be the hours he devoted to it, so that he did not greatly fear being rebuked for his present irregularities. Perhaps if a grave official warning had been probable, even that would not have interfered much with his determination to do what could be done for Sheila.
But this business of carrying a message to Lavender was the most serious he had as yet undertaken. He had to make sundry and solemn resolves to put a bold face on the matter at the outset, and declare that wild horses would not tear from him any further information. He feared the piteous appeals that might be made to him; the representations that, merely for the sake of an imprudent promise, he was delaying a reconciliation between these two until that might be impossible; the reasons that would be urged on him for considering Sheila's welfare as paramount to his own scruples. He went through the interview, as he foresaw it, a dozen times over, and constructed replies to each argument and entreaty. Of course it would be simple enough to meet all Lavender's demands with a simple "No," but there are circumstances in which the heroic method of solving difficulties becomes a trifle inhuman.
He had promised to dine with Lavender that evening at his club. When he went along to St. James's street at the appointed hour his host had not arrived. He walked for about ten minutes, and then Lavender appeared, haggard and wornout with fatigue. "I have heard nothing—I can hear nothing—I have been everywhere," he said, leading the way at once into the dining-room. "I am sorry I have kept you waiting, Ingram."
They sat down at a small side-table: there were few men in the club at this late season, so that they could talk freely enough when the waiter had come and gone.
"Well, I have some news for you, Lavender," Ingram said.
"Do you know where she is?" said the other eagerly.
"Yes."
"Where?" he almost called aloud in his anxiety.
"Well," Ingram said slowly, "she is in London, and she is very well; and you need have no anxiety about her."
"But where is she?" demanded Lavender, taking no heed of the waiter who was standing by and uncorking a bottle.
"I promised her not to tell you."
"You have spoken with her, then?"
"Yes."
"What did she say? Where has she been? Good Heavens, Ingram! you don't mean to say you are going to keep it a secret?"
"Oh no," said the other: "I will tell you everything she said to me, if you like. Only I will not tell you where she is."
"I will not ask you," said Lavender at once, "if she does not wish me to know. But you can tell me about herself. What did she say? What was she looking like? Is Mairi with her?"
"Yes, Mairi is with her. And of course she is looking a little troubled and pale, and so forth; but she is very well, I should think, and quite comfortably situated. She said I was to tell you that she was well, and that you need not be anxious."
"She sent a message to me?"
"That is it."
"By Jove, Ingram! how can I ever thank you enough? I feel as glad just now as if she had really come home again. And how did you manage it?"
Lavender, in his excitement and gratitude, kept filling up his friend's glass the moment the least quantity had been taken out of it: the wonder was he did not fill all the glasses on that side of the table, and beseech Ingram to have two or three dinners all at once.
"Oh, you needn't give me any credit about it," Ingram said. "I stumbled against her by accident: at least, I did not find her out myself."
"Did she send for you?"
"No. But look here, Lavender, this sort of cross-examination will lead to but one thing; and you say yourself you won't try to find out where she is."
"Not from you, any way. But how can I help wanting to know where she is? And my aunt was saying just now that very likely she had gone right away to the other end of London—to Peckham or some such place."
"You have seen Mrs. Lavender, then?"
"I have just come from there. The old heathen thinks the whole affair rather a good joke; but perhaps that was only her way of showing her temper, for she was in a bit of a rage, to be sure. And so Sheila sent me that message?"
"Yes."
"Does she want money? Would you take her some money from me?" he said eagerly. Any bond of union between him and Sheila would be of some value.
"I don't think she needs money; and in any case I know she wouldn't take it from you."
"Well, now, Ingram, you have seen her and talked with her, what do you think she intends to do? What do you think she would have me do?"
"These are very dangerous questions for me to answer," Ingram said. "I don't see how you can expect me to assume the responsibility."
"I don't ask you to do that at all. But I never found your advice to fail. And if you give me any hint as to what I should do, I will do it on my own responsibility."
"Then I won't. But this I will do: I will tell you as nearly as ever I can what she said, and you can judge for yourself."
Very cautiously indeed did Ingram set out on this perilous undertaking. It was no easy matter so to shut out all references to Sheila's surroundings that no hint should be given to this anxious listener as to her whereabouts. But Ingram got through it successfully; and when he had finished Lavender sat some time in silence, merely toying with his knife, for indeed he had eaten nothing. "If it is her wish," he said slowly, "that I should not go to see her, I will not try to do so. But I should like to know where she is. You say she is comfortable, and she has Mairi for a companion; and that is something. In the mean time, I suppose I must wait."
"I don't see, myself, how waiting is likely to do much good," said Ingram. "That won't alter your relations much."
"It may alter her determination. A woman is sure to soften into charity and forgiveness: she can't help it."
"If you were to ask Sheila now, she would say she had forgiven you already. But that is a different matter from getting her to resume her former method of life with you. To tell you the truth, I should strongly advise her, if I were to give advice at all, not to attempt anything of the sort. One failure is bad enough, and has wrought sufficient trouble."
"Then what am I to do, Ingram?"
"You must judge for yourself what is the most likely way of winning back Sheila's confidence in you, and the most likely conditions under which she might be induced to join you again. You need not expect to get her back into that square, I should fancy: that experiment has rather broken down."
"Well," said Lavender, "I sha'n't bore you any more just now about my affairs. Look after your dinner, old fellow: your starving yourself won't help me much."
"I don't mean to starve myself at all," said Ingram, steadily making his way through the abundant dishes his friend had ordered. "But I had a very good luncheon this morning with—"
"With Sheila," Lavender said quickly.
"Yes. Does it surprise you to find that she is in a place where she can get food? I wish the poor child had made better use of her opportunities."
"Ingram," he said after a minute, "could you take some money from me, without her knowing of it, and try to get her some of the little things she likes—some delicacies, you know: they might be smuggled in, as it were, without her knowing who had paid for them? There was ice-pudding, you know, with strawberries in it, that she was fond of—"
"My dear fellow, a woman in her position thinks of something else than ice-pudding in strawberries."
"But why shouldn't she have it all the same? I would give twenty pounds to get some little gratification of that sort conveyed to her; and if you could try, Ingram—"
"My dear fellow, she has got everything she can want: there was no ice-pudding at luncheon, but doubtless there will be at dinner."
So Sheila was staying in a house in which ices could be prepared? Lavender's suggestion had had no cunning intention in it, but here was an obvious piece of information. She was in no humble lodging-house, then. She was either staying with some friends—and she had no friends but Lavender's friends—or she was staying at a hotel. He remembered that she had once dined at the Langham, Mrs. Kavanagh having persuaded her to go to meet some American visitors. Might she have gone thither?
Lavender was somewhat silent during the rest of that meal, for he was thinking of other things besides the mere question as to where Sheila might be staying. He was trying to imagine what she might have felt before she was driven to this step. He was trying to recall all manner of incidents of their daily life that he now saw might have appeared to her in a very different light from that in which he saw them. He was wondering, too, how all this could be altered, and a new life begun for them both, if that were still possible.
They had gone up stairs into the smoking-room when a card was brought to Lavender.
"Young Mosenberg is below," he said to Ingram. "He will be a livelier companion for you than I could be. Waiter, ask this gentleman to come up."
The handsome Jew-boy came eagerly into the room, with much excitement visible on his face.
"Oh, do you know," he said to Lavender, "I have found out where Mrs. Lavender is—yes? She is at your aunt's house. I saw her this afternoon for one moment—" He stopped, for he saw by the vexation on Ingram's face that he had done something wrong. "Is it a mistake?" he said. "Is it a secret?"
"It is not likely to be a secret if you have got hold of it," said Ingram sharply.
"I am very sorry," said the boy. "I thought you were all anxious to know—"
"It does not matter in the least," said Lavender quietly to both of them. "I shall not seek to disturb her. I am about to leave London."
"Where are you going?" said the boy.
"I don't know yet."
That, at least, had been part of the result of his meditations; and Ingram, looking at him, wondered whether he meant to go away without trying to say one word to Sheila.
"Look here, Lavender," he said, "you must not fancy we were trying to play any useless and impertinent trick. To-morrow or next day Sheila will leave your aunt's house, and then I should have told you that she had been there, and how the old lady received her. It was Sheila's own wish that the lodgings she is going to should not be known. She fancies that would save both of you a great deal of unnecessary and fruitless pain, do you see? That really is her only object in wishing to have any concealment about the matter."
"But there is no need for any such concealment," he said. "You may tell Sheila that if she likes to stay on with my aunt, so much the better; and I take it very kind of her that she went there, instead of going home or to a strange house."
"Am I to tell her that you mean to leave London?"
"Yes."
They went into the billiard-room. Mosenberg was not permitted to play, as he had not dined in the club, but Ingram and Lavender proceeded to have a game, the former being content to accept something like thirty in a hundred. It was speedily very clear that Lavender's heart was not in the contest. He kept forgetting which ball he had been playing, missing easy shots, playing a perversely wrong game, and so forth. And yet his spirits were not much downcast.
"Is Peter Hewetson still at Tarbert, do you know?" he asked of Ingram.
"I believe so. I heard of him lately. He and one or two more are there."
"I suppose you'll look in on them if you go North?"
"Certainly. The place is badly perfumed, but picturesque, and there is generally plenty of whisky about."
"When do you go North?"
"I don't know. In a week or two."
That was all that Lavender hinted of his plans. He went home early that night, and spent an hour or two in packing up some things, and in writing a long letter to his aunt, which was destined considerably to astonish that lady. Then he lay down and had a few hours' rest.
In the early morning he went out and walked across Kensington Gardens down to the Gore. He wished to have one look at the house in which Sheila was, or perhaps he might, from a distance, see her come out on a simple errand? He knew, for example, that she had a superstitious liking for posting her letters herself: in wet weather or dry she invariably carried her own correspondence to the nearest pillar-post. Perhaps he might have one glimpse of her face, to see how she was looking, before he left London.
There were few people about: one or two well-known lawyers and merchants were riding by to have their morning canter in the Park; the shops were being opened. Over there was the house—with its dark front of bricks, its hard ivy, and its small windows with formal red curtains—in which Sheila was immured. That was certainly not the palace that a beautiful sea-princess should have inhabited. Where were the pine woods around it, and the lofty hills, and the wild beating of the waves on the sands below? And now it seemed strange and sad that just as he was about to go away to the North, and breathe the salt air again, and find the strong west winds blowing across the mountain-peaks and through the furze, Sheila, a daughter of the sea and the rocks, should be hiding herself in obscure lodgings in the heart of a great city. Perhaps—he could not but think at this time—if he had only the chance of speaking to her for a couple of moments, he could persuade her to forgive him everything that had happened, and go away with him—away from London and all the associations that had vexed her and almost broken her heart—to the free and open and joyous life on the far sea-coasts of the Hebrides.
Something caused him to turn his head for a second, and he knew that Sheila was coming along the pavement—not from, but toward the house. It was too late to think of getting out of her way, and yet he dared not go up to her and speak to her, as he had wished to do. She, too, had seen him. There was a quick, frightened look in her eyes, and then she came along, with her face pale and her head downcast. He did not seek to interrupt her. His eyes too were lowered as she passed him without taking any notice of his presence, although the sad face and the troubled lips told of the pain at her heart. He had hoped, perchance, for one word, for even a sign of recognition, but she went by him calmly, gravely and silently. She went into the house, and he turned away with a weight at his heart, as though the gates of heaven had been closed against him.