ARE YOU MY WIFE?
BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.
CHAPTER VIII.
A STARTLING DISCLOSURE.
And how had things fared at The Lilies all this time? Sir Simon had behaved in the strangest way. Immediately after Clide’s departure, he came, according to his promise, and explained it after a plausible fashion to M. de la Bourbonais, who, unsuspecting as an infant, accepted the story without surprise or question.
At the end of a week Sir Simon knew that the worst fears were confirmed; the identity of the supposed Isabel had been disproved, and the existence of the real one ascertained beyond the possibility of doubt. Clide was on her track, but when or how he should find her was yet the secret of the future.
The one thing clear in it was, that it was a miserable business and could end in nothing but shame and sorrow for every one connected with it. Sir Simon was helpless and bewildered. He was always slow at taking in bad news, and when he succeeded in doing it, his first idea was, not to take the bull by the horns and face the facts manfully, but to stave off the evil day, to gain time, to trust to something turning up that would avert the inevitable. He had never in the whole course of his life felt so helpless in the face of evil tidings as on the present occasion. He foresaw, all too plainly, what the effect was likely to be on the innocent young creature on whom he had brought so terrible a share in the catastrophe. It was no comfort to him that it was not his fault. He would willingly have taken the fault on his own shoulders, if thereby he could have lifted the pain from hers. He was too generously absorbed in the thought of Franceline’s trouble to split hairs on the difference between remorse and regret; he cursed his own meddling as bitterly as if he had acted like a deliberate villain towards her; he felt there was nothing for him to do but blow his brains out. He passed the day he received the admiral’s letter in this suicidal and despairing state of mind. The next day his indignation against himself found some solace in vituperating Clide’s ill-luck, and the villainy of the woman who had led him such a devil’s-dance. This diversion soothed him; he slept better that night, and next morning he awoke refreshed; cheered up according to his happy matutinal habit, and took a brighter view of everything. It remained no doubt a most unfortunate affair, look at it as one might, but Franceline would get over it by and by. Why not? All the nicest girls he knew when he was a young fellow had been crossed in love, and they had all got over it, and married somebody else and lived happily ever after. Why should not Franceline do the same? De Winton was a very nice fellow, but there were other nice fellows in the world. There was Roxham, for instance. If he, Sir Simon, was a pretty girl, he was not sure but he should like Roxham best of the two; he was deuced good-looking, and the eldest son of a peer to boot; that counts with every girl, why shouldn’t it with Franceline? “But is she like every girl? Is she a butterfly to be caught by any candle?” whispered somebody at Sir Simon’s ear; but he pooh-poohed the unwelcome busybody, as he would have brushed away a buzzing fly. She must get over it; Roxham should come in and cut out this unlucky Clide. The worst of it was that conversation Sir Simon had had with Raymond before Franceline’s visit to London. If he had but had the wit to hold his tongue a little longer! Well, biting it off now would not mend matters. Roxham must come to the rescue. He had evidently been smitten the night of the ball. Sir Simon had intentionally brought him into the field to rouse Clide’s jealousy, and bring him to the point; he had invoked every species of anathema on himself for it ever since, but it was going to turn out the luckiest inspiration after all. While the baronet was performing his toilet, he arranged matters thus satisfactorily to his own mind, and by the time he came down to breakfast he was fully convinced that everything was going to be for the best. He read his letters, wished a few unpleasant little eventualities to the writers of most of them, and crammed them into a drawer where they were not likely to be disturbed for some time to come. The others he answered; then he read the newspapers, and that done, ordered his horse round, and rode to Rydal, Lady Anwyll’s place.
The conversation naturally fell on the recent ball at the Court, and from that to the acknowledged belle of the evening, Mlle. de la Bourbonais. In answer to the plump little dowager’s enthusiastic praises of his young friend’s beauty the baronet remarked that it was a pity she did not live nearer The Lilies. “It is dull for the little thing, you see,” he said; “Bourbonais is up to his eyes in books and study, and she has no society to speak of within reach; she and the Langrove girls don’t seem to take to each other much; she is a peculiar child, Franceline; you see she has never mixed with children, she has been like a companion to her father, and the result is that she has fallen into a dreamy kind of world of her own, and that’s not good for a girl; she is apt to prey upon herself. I wish you were a nearer neighbor of ours.”
“I am near enough for all intents and purposes,” said Lady Anwyll, promptly; “what is it but an hour’s drive? There’s nothing I should like better than to take her about, pretty creature, with her great gazelle eyes; but I dare say she would bore herself with me; they don’t care for old women’s society, those young things—why should they? I hated an old woman like a sour apple when I was her age.”
“Oh! but Franceline is not a bit like most girls of her age; she would enjoy you very much, I assure you she would,” protested Sir Simon warmly. “There is nothing she likes better than talking to me now, and I might be your father,” he added, with more gallantry than truth; but Lady Anwyll laughed a contemptuous, little, good-humored laugh without contradicting him. “She has seen very little and read a great deal—too much in fact; you would be surprised to see how much she has read about all sorts of things that most girls only know by name; her father was for teaching her Greek and Latin, but I bullied him out of that nonsense; it would have been a downright crime to spoil such a creature by making her blue. I’ve saved her from that, at any rate.”
“I dare say that is not the only good service she owes you,” observed the dowager, “nor is it likely to be the last. When is your young relation coming back?”
“De Winton, you mean? He’s hardly a relation—a connection at most. I don’t know when he is likely to turn up; I believe he’s on his way to the North Pole at present.”
“Really! I thought there was a magnet drawing him nearer home.”
“What! Franceline, eh? Well, I thought myself he was a trifle spooney in that quarter,” said the baronet, bending down to examine his boots, “but it would seem not, or he would not have decamped; he’s an odd fish, Clide—a capital fellow, but odd.”
“I thought him original, and liked him very much, what little I saw of him,” replied Lady Anwyll. “However, I am glad to hear it is not a case between him and your pretty friend; if there is a thing I hate”—with ten drops of vitriol in the monosyllable—“it’s chaperoning a girl in love. You have no satisfaction in her; nothing interests or amuses her; she is ready to bite the nose off any man that looks civil at her; she is a social nuisance in fact, and I make a point of having nothing to do with her.”
Sir Simon threw back his head and laughed.
“How about young Charlton?” resumed the dowager; “he is the match of the county. Has he gone in for the prize?”
“He’s too great an ass,” was the rejoinder.
“Humph! Asses are proof, then, against the power of a beautiful face? It’s the first time I’ve heard it.”
“The fact is, I don’t think he has had a chance yet,” said Sir Simon; “Bourbonais is peculiar, and does not encourage people to go and see him; he only admits a select circle of old fogies, and I think he fancies Charlton is a bit of a puppy.”
“Perhaps he’s not much out in that,” assented the lady.
“Roxham struck me as being rather smitten the other night; did you notice anything in that direction,” inquired Sir Simon carelessly, as he rose to go. “I was too busy to see much of what was going on in the way of flirtation, but I fancied he was rather assiduous!”
“Now, that would be a very nice thing!” And the mother who had made many matches brightened up with lively interest. “I should like to help on that; it would be quite an exciting amusement, and I have nothing to do just now.”
“Take care!” and Sir Simon raised his finger with a warning gesture; “you may have a social nuisance on your hands before you know where you are.”
“Oh! I don’t mind when it’s of my own making,” said the dowager; “that quite alters the case.”
“Then you will drive over to-morrow or next day and call at The Lilies?”
Sir Simon mounted Nero in high good humor; whistled a hunting air as he dashed through the stiff Wellingtonias that flanked the long avenue at Rydal, and never drew rein until he alighted at his own door.
M. de la Bourbonais greeted Lady Anwyll with the innate courtesy of a grand seignior, and never let her see by so much as a look that her visit was not an agreeable surprise. Yet it was not so. Since that conversation with Sir Simon about Franceline’s fortune, an uneasy feeling had possessed him, and he had shrunk back more sensitively than ever into his shell of reserve and isolation. He had been content, or rather compelled, to leave matters entirely in Sir Simon’s hands, or in the hands of fate, but he did not feel at rest, and he had no mind to launch out into new acquaintances just at a moment when his mind was disturbed by strange probabilities, and his habitual abstraction broken up by vague anxieties, that could not take any definite shape as yet. But Lady Anwyll saw nothing of this in the old gentleman’s courtly greeting; she saw that Franceline had welcomed her with a warmth that was unmistakable—childlike and gleeful, and fettered by no ice bands of conventional politeness.
The dowager’s visit was indeed welcome; the utter silence that had succeeded to the stir and agitation of the past few weeks had fallen upon Franceline like a snow-drift in the midst of summer; the return to the old stagnant life was dreadful—she felt chilled to death by it. The reaction was natural enough to one of her age and circumstances; but we know that there was a deeper reason for her sense of loneliness and weariness than the mere relapse into routine and dulness after a season of excitement. Where was Mr. de Winton, and why had he gone off in that strange way, without a sign or a word, leaving her trembling and expectant on the threshold of her awakened womanhood?
It was more than a week now since he went, and she had not heard his name once mentioned, and there was no prospect of her hearing any one speak of him; since neither her father nor Sir Simon did so. Lady Anwyll came like a messenger and a link; Lady Anwyll was in Clide’s world, the wide, wide world beyond her own small sphere where no one knew him. This was unconsciously the reason of Franceline’s joyous greeting. Sir Simon had come with the dowager; they had walked down through the park together, and it was the first time in her life that Franceline was not thoroughly glad to see him. He was not quite like his usual self either, to her, she fancied. He rattled on in his own way, telling stories and making jokes, and then catching up some chance words of Raymond’s and quarrelling with them, until their author waxed warm, and was drawn out into an elaborate refutation of some meaning that he never dreamed of giving them, but into which Sir Simon had purposely twisted them; and finally accomplishing his aim of keeping the conversation on abstract subjects and not letting it slip into the dangerous path of personal or local events.
“So you will let me come and take you out for a drive sometimes,” Lady Anwyll said, as she rose to take leave, “and by-and-by, when you get used to the old woman, perhaps you will come and spend a day or two with her in her big, lonely house? You will not be always afraid of her?”
“I am not afraid of her now,” protested Franceline, looking with her radiant dark eyes straight into the old lady’s face, “you don’t look wicked at all.”
“Don’t I? Then more shame for me; that shows I’m a hypocrite, a whitened sepulchre, my dear,” and she nodded emphatically at Franceline, and gave a little groan.
“For goodness’ sake don’t come Miss Bulpit over us!” cried Sir Simon, holding up his hands. “I’ll bolt at once if you take to that.” And with this pretence of alarm he hurried out of the room.
“Then, since you are not frightened at me, you will promise to come very soon. Let us settle it at once—for Thursday next?” and she held the young girl’s hand in both her own, and looked to M. de la Bourbonais for assent.
But Raymond began to settle his spectacles, and was for explaining how difficult it would be for him to part with his daughter even for a day, and how unaccustomed she was to going anywhere alone, when Sir Simon called out from the garden:
“Tut, tut, Bourbonais, that’s precisely why she must go; you must not mope the child in this way; she must gad about a bit, like other girls. It will do her good; it will do her good.”
The three came out and joined him, walking round to the back entrance through which the visitors were going to re-enter the park.
“I shall get a few young people together, so it will not be so very dull for you, my dear,” continued Lady Anwyll, as they walked four abreast on the grass; “and I can mount you; I know you ride.”
“Oh! I don’t think she would care—” began Raymond; but Sir Simon cut him short again.
“Is your son coming down for a shot at the partridges?”
“Not he; at least not that I know of; he is off fishing near Norway, or was the last time I heard of him; but for all I know he may have joined your friend young De Winton at the North Pole by this. Well, good-by, my dear. I should dearly like a kiss. Would you mind kissing the old woman?”
Franceline put her soft, vermilion lips to the wrinkled cheek. Neither Lady Anwyll nor Raymond saw how instantaneously the blood had forsaken them, leaving them white as her brow; but Sir Simon did, and it smote him to the heart. He walked on before the good-bys were over, ostensibly to give some order about the carriage that was drawn up at a turn in the avenue, but in reality to avoid meeting Raymond’s glance.
Late that evening a note came to The Lilies to say that he was obliged to start at a moment’s notice for the south of France, where his step-mother, Lady Rebecca, was dangerously ill. He was sorry to have to rush off without saying good-by, but he had not a moment to lose to catch the express.
Sir Simon did start by the express, and after a day or two in London, where he saw Admiral de Winton, and ascertained that nothing new had turned up in Clide’s affairs, he thought he might just as well go to the south of France, where he would be within reach of his interesting relative in case she should need him, or die, which the older she grew the less she seemed inclined to do, in spite of Mr. Simpson’s periodical tolling of her death-knell. Fate, that abstract divinity invoked by pagans and novelists, interfered with the fulfilment of Franceline’s engagement to Lady Anwyll. A letter—a real letter—awaited her at home from her son-in-law, saying that his wife was taken suddenly ill, and entreated her mother to come to her without delay. Franceline was rather glad than sorry when the note came to postpone her visit. The desire to go to Rydal was gone. She wanted to be left alone. She was not equal to the effort of seeming amused. And yet, again, in another way she regretted it. A day or two’s absence from her father would have been a relief; the strain of keeping up false appearances before him was worse than it need have been amongst strangers; it would have sufficed them to be calm; at home she must be gay. After the sudden shock which those words so carelessly uttered by Lady Anwyll had caused her, Franceline’s first thought was to screen her feelings from her father. She was helped in her effort to do this by her certainty that he had no key to them, that he had not for a moment connected her and Clide de Winton in his thoughts. If she had known how much had been disclosed to him, how closely he had watched her ever since that fatal conversation with Sir Simon, concealment would have been impossible. As it was, she found it hard enough; but there was an unsuspected strength of will, a vitality of power in her, that enabled her to act the part she had resolved upon. She called up all her love for her father and all her native woman’s pride and maiden delicacy to the effort, and she achieved it. Her father watched her with the jealous eye of anxious affection, but he could see nothing forced in her spirits; he heard no hollow note in her laugh; he saw no trace of sadness in her smile. She was merrier, brighter, more talkative for several days after Lady Anwyll’s visit than he remembered to have seen her. Raymond sighed with relief many times a day as he heard her singing to herself, or caressing her doves with new names of endearment and fresh delight. She succeeded perfectly in blinding him, but not in silencing the wild tumult of her own heart. It was all mystery yet; pain and wonder were predominant, but hope was not absent from the chaos of conflicting emotions, and there was nothing of wounded self-respect, no definite feeling of reproach towards Clide. It seemed as if everything were a mistake; no one had done anything wrong, and yet everything had gone wrong. Was it all a dream the life she had been living for those few blissful weeks? Was his devotion to her, his exclusive assiduity during all that time, nothing but the customary demeanor of a gentleman to a young girl in whose society chance had thrown him? Franceline asked herself this over and over again, and could only find one answer to it—the echo of her own heart. But what did she really know about such things—what standard had she to go by? What had she ever seen to guide her in forming a reasonable conclusion?—for she wanted to be reasonable: to judge calmly without listening to the longings and tyrannical affirmations of this heart. “He may have been so assiduous in attending me in my rides simply to please Sir Simon,” whispered reason; but the response came quickly: “Need he have looked and spoken as he did to please Sir Simon? And that night of the ball, was it to please Sir Simon that he was stung and angry when I deserted him for Lord Roxham? Was it for that that he spoke those words that had set my every fibre thrilling? ‘What does anything matter to us, Franceline, as long as we are not angry with each other?’ To what melting tenderness was his voice toned as he uttered them! How his glance sought mine and rested in it, completing all that the words had left unsaid! And I am to believe that he had meant no more than the customary gallantries of a man of the world to his partner in the dance?” She laughed to herself as the outrageous question rose in her thoughts. Then, apart from this unanswerable testimony, there was evidence of Clide’s feelings and motives towards herself in his conduct towards her father. How anxious he had shown himself to please M. de la Bourbonais, to secure his advice and follow it, and make her aware that he did so! No; she had not assuredly been won unsought. This certainty supported and cheered her. If she had been sought, she would be sought again. Clide would return and claim what he had won. It was impossible to doubt but that he would. Whenever Franceline arrived at this point in her cogitations her spirits rose to singing pitch, and she would break out into carol and song, like a bird, and run down to Angélique and tease her to exasperation, pulling out her knitting-needles and playing tricks like a kitten, till she drove her nearly frantic, and sent her complaining to M. le Comte that la petite was grown as full of mischief as a squirrel; there was no being safe a minute from her tricks once your back was turned. And Raymond would look up with a beaming face, and beg pardon for the culprit. “She keeps life in our old veins, ma bonne,” he would say; “what should we do without our singing bird?”
But there were days when the singing bird was silent, when there was no music in her, and when she could have broken into passionate tears if they had not been restrained by a strong effort of will. These alternations, however, passed unobserved by the two who might have noticed them. Raymond had made up his mind that Sir Simon’s brilliant scheme had failed, and that as the failure had dealt no blow at Franceline’s happiness, it was not to be regretted. It had been altogether too brilliant to be practicable; he felt that from the first, and his instinct served him better than Sir Simon’s experience, shrewd man of the world though he was. “Kind, foolish friend, his affection blinded him and made him see everything as he desired it for Franceline, and now he is vexed with himself, and ashamed very likely, and so he keeps away from me. Perhaps he imagines I would reproach him. This poor, dear Simon has more heart than head.”
And with these indulgent reflections, Raymond sank back into his dreamy historical world, and left off watching the changeful aspects of his child. She was safe; things were just as they used to be.
A month went by; during that time one letter had come from the baronet, affectionate as ever, but evidently written under some feeling of restraint. He talked of the annoyances he had had on the road, and the loss of some of his luggage, and about French politics. M. de le Bourbonais fancied he saw through the awkwardness; he answered the letter in a more than usually affectionate strain; was very communicative about himself and Franceline, who was growing quite beyond Angélique’s and his control, he assured his friend, and required Sir Simon’s hand to keep her within bounds, so he had better hasten home as quickly as possible if he had any pity for the two victims of her tyranny and numberless caprices. This letter had the effect intended; it brought another without many days’ delay, and written with all the abandon and spirit of the writer’s most cheerful mood.
Lady Anwyll returned at the end of the month, and bore down on The Lilies the very next day. Franceline would have fought off if she could have done so with any chance of success; but the dowager was peremptory in claiming what had been distinctly promised, and she agreed to be ready the next day to accompany the old lady to Rydal.
Angélique put her biggest irons in the fire, and smoothed out her young mistress’s prettiest white muslin dress, and set her sashes and ribbons in order, and was as full of bustle as if the quiet visit a few miles off had been a wedding.
“I am glad the petite is going; it will do her good,” she observed, complacently, as she brought in the lamp and set it down on the count’s table that evening.
“Why do you think it will do her good? Is she suffering in any way?” said the father, a sudden sting of the old fear giving sharpness to his voice.
“Bonté divine! How monsieur takes the word out of one’s mouth!” ejaculated Angélique, throwing up her hands like an aggrieved woman; “why, a little distraction always does good at mamselle’s age; look at me: it would put new blood into my old veins if I could go somewhere and distract myself.”
“You find it very dull, my good Angélique?” And the master turned a kindly, almost penitent glance on the nut-brown face.
“Hé! listen to him again! One does not want to be dying of ennui to enjoy a little distraction; one does not think of it, but when it comes one may like it!” She gave the shade a jerk that made it spin round the lamp, and walked off in high dudgeon.
Franceline was conscious of a pleasurable flutter next day, when she heard the carriage crunching the gravel, and presently Lady Anwyll came round on foot, followed by the footman, who carried off her box and secured it in some mysterious part of the vehicle. She was flushed when she kissed her father and said good-by; he thought it was the pleasure of the “little distraction” that heightened her color, and that took away the pang of the short parting.
“Yes, decidedly, a change does her good,” he mentally remarked; “I must let her take advantage of any pleasant one that offers.”
It was an event in Franceline’s life, going to stay at a strange house. The Court was too much like her own home, and she had known it too long and too early to feel like a visitor there, or to be overpowered by its splendors. Rydal was not to be compared to it either for architectural beauty or magnitude, or for the extent and beauty of the grounds and surrounding scenery. The Court was a grand baronial hall; Rydal was an old-fashioned manor house; low-roofed, straggling, and picturesque outside; spacious and comfortable inside; with enough of the marks of time on the furniture and decorations to stamp it as the abode of many generations of gentlemen. A low-ceiled square hall, with sitting-rooms opening into it on either side, and quaint pictures and arms ornamenting its walls, received you with a hospitable hearth, where a huge log was blazing cheerily under a high, carved oak mantel-piece. It was not flagged with marble, nor supported by majestic columns like the Gothic hall of the Court, but it had a charm of its own that Franceline felt, and expressed by a bright exclamation as she alighted in it.
“Come in and sit down for a moment in the drawing-room,” said Lady Anwyll. “I always rest before toiling up-stairs, my dear; and you must fancy yourself an old woman and do so too.”
Franceline followed her into the handsome square room. Two projecting windows thrust themselves out to the west to catch the last rays of the setting sun at one end, and another bulged out southward to sun itself in the noon-tide warmth; an old-fashioned sofa was drawn close to the fire. Franceline fancied she saw the soles of two boots resting on the arm facing the door; and was beginning to wonder where the body was that they might belong to, when the dowager suddenly cried out in tones of amazement rather than delight:
“Good gracious, Ponce! what brought you back, and when did you come? I verily believe you have got some talisman like Riquet with the Tuft for flying about the world like a bird! Where have you come from now?”
She stooped down to kiss the invisible head that lay at the other end of the figure, and a voice from the cushions answered: “I pledged my word I would be back in a day and a month; did you ever know me break my word, lady mother?”
“You so seldom commit yourself by pledging it to me that I hardly remember; however, now that you are here, I am glad to see you, and to be able to offer you a reward for your punctuality. Come here, my dear, and let me introduce my son Ponsonby to you.”
The recumbent giant was on his feet in an instant, with an involuntary “Hollo!” as Franceline advanced at his mother’s bidding.
“This is Mlle. de la Bourbonais, Ponce; my son, Captain Anwyll.”
“It is not often punishment overtakes the guilty so fast,” said the gentleman, with a very low bow, and an awkward laugh; “I so seldom indulge in the laziness of stretching my long legs on a sofa, that it’s rather hard on me that I should be caught in the act by a lady. Mother, you ought to have given me notice in time.”
“Served you right! I’m glad you were caught; and, my dear, don’t you mind his seldom; when he is not flying through the air or over the water, this big son of mine is stretching himself somewhere. Come, now, and get your things off.” As they were leaving the room, she looked back to ask her son if he “had brought the regiment down with him,” and on hearing that he had left that appendage in Yorkshire, his mother observed that it was like him to leave it behind just when it might have been useful.
There are some people who, though inert and quiet themselves, have a faculty for putting everybody about them in a commotion. Ponsonby Anwyll was one of these. When he came down to Rydal it was as if an earthquake shook the place. He wanted next to no waiting on, yet somehow every servant in the house was busied about him. He was like a baby in a house, exacting nothing, but occupying everybody.
He was constantly either overturning something, or on the point of doing it. Like so many men of the giant type, he was as gentle as a woman and as easily cowed; and like a woman, he always wanted somebody at his elbow to look after him. If he attempted to light a lamp, ten to one he upset it and spoiled a table-cover or a carpet, or he let the chimney fall, and cut his fingers picking up the bits to prevent some one else’s being cut. He took next to no interest practically in the estate; yet his tenantry were very fond of him; he never bothered them about improvements or abuses, and they were more obliged to him for letting them alone than for benefiting them against their will. Whenever he interfered it was to take their part against the agent, who could not see why the tenants were to be let off paying full rents because the harvest happened to be a failure one year, when it had been good so many preceding ones. Lady Anwyll would bully and storm and protest that he was ruining the property, and that they would all end in the Union; but Ponsonby soon petted her into good humor. In her heart of hearts she was proud of her big, easy-going son, who cared so little for money, and she was as pleased to be patronized by him as a little kitten is when the powerful Newfoundland condescends to a game of romps with it.
When Franceline, in her white muslin dress, floated into the drawing-room, like a summer cloud, the Newfoundland was standing on the hearth-rug, with its eyes fixed expectantly on the door. Lady Anwyll was generally down long before her son. Ponce took an age to get out of one set of clothes and into another; but he had the start of her to-day.
“You have had a nice drive from Dullerton,” he began; how else could he begin? “But I fear the weather is on the turn; those clouds over the common look mischievous.”
“Are you weatherwise?” inquired Franceline, following his eyes to the window.
“Not he, my dear! He’s not wise in anything!” answered a voice from behind her.
“Mother, this is positively too bad of you! I protest against your taking away my character in this fashion, before I have a chance of making one with Miss Franceline. You begin by making me out the laziest dog in Christendom, and now you would rob me of my one intellectual quality! You know I am weatherwise! They call me Girouette in the 10th, because I can tell to a feather how the wind is blowing; ’pon my honor they do, Miss Franceline!”
Franceline was going to assure him of her entire faith in this assertion when dinner was announced, and they crossed the hall into the dining-room.
“Now, tell us something about where you’ve been and what you’ve seen and done,” said the dowager; “and try and be as entertaining as you can, for you see there is no one else to amuse my young friend.”
“I’m sure I should be very proud; I wish I could remember something amusing to tell; but that’s the deuce of it, the more a fellow wants to be pleasant the less he can. Do you care to hear about fishing?” This was addressed to Franceline. There was something so boyish in his manner, such an entire absence of conceit or affectation, that, in spite of other deficiencies, she liked the shy hussar, and felt at ease with him.
“I dare say I should if I understood it at all; but I do not. But I am always curious to know about foreign places and people,” she said.
“Oh! I’m glad of that; I can tell you plenty about no end of places,” answered the traveller promptly; “but I dare say you’ve seen them all yourself; everybody goes everywhere nowadays.”
“I have never been out of Dullerton since I came here as a child, but once for a few days to London,” said Franceline; “so you can hardly go wrong in telling me about any foreign place.”
“How odd! Well, its rather refreshing too. I suppose you are nervous, afraid of the water, or the railway?”
“Not the least. I am too poor to travel.” She said it as simply as if she had stated that the rain had prevented her going for a walk.
“Oh, indeed! That is a hindrance to be sure,” blundered out Ponsonby; “but people are better off that stay at home. One is always within an inch of getting one’s neck broken, or one’s eye put out; and people very often do come to grief travelling. I dare say you wouldn’t like it at all.”
“Getting her eyes put out? I should think not!” chimed in his mother, with a mocking chuckle.
“I meant the whole thing,” pursued Ponce. “The only chance one has is to go straight through like a letter in the post, from one place to another, and stick there, and not go posting about from place to place, as we did in Rome, now. That is a pleasant place to go to. I bet anything you’d enjoy Rome awfully; everybody does; and now they’ve got good hotels, and you can get as good a dinner as any fellow need care to eat. Only you would not like the popish ways of the place. That’s the deuce of it, you can’t get out of the way of that sort of thing; it’s in the air, you see; but one grows used to it after a while, as one does to the bad smells.”
“I should not suffer from that. I am a Catholic,” said Franceline, her color rising slightly.
“Oh, indeed! I beg your pardon; I had no idea; of course that makes all the difference,” stammered the hussar, mentally comparing himself to Patrick, who could never open his mouth without putting his foot in it.
Lady Anwyll had now despatched her dinner, or as much of the long meal as she ever partook of. Feeling that the conversation was not progressing very favorably between her son and her guest, she took the reins in her own hand, and by dint of direct questions and an occasional touch of the spur she managed to make time trot on in a straggling but on the whole amusing style of talk, half narrative, half anecdote, until dinner was ended, and she and Franceline migrated to the drawing-room, leaving the captain to discuss the claret in solitary state.
The next morning at breakfast Lady Anwyll proposed that the two young people should go for a ride after lunch. Franceline demurred, on the plea that she had never ridden but one horse and was afraid to trust herself on any other. The captain, however, settled this difficulty, by volunteering to send a man over to Dullerton for Rosebud. She would come at an easy pace, and after an hour’s rest be ready for the road. On seeing the point so satisfactorily arranged, Franceline immediately dismissed her terrors, and thought it would be rather desirable to try how she could manage on a strange horse. She could not plead that she had forgotten her riding habit, for Angélique had remembered it, as well as the hat and gloves and whip, all of which had been packed up with her other clothes.
The weather was fine, a bright sun beamed from a stainless sky; the furze on the common was yellow enough still to illuminate the flat expanse of the country round Rydal, and as Franceline dashed through the golden bushes on her spirited steed, her youth vindicated itself, the young blood coursed joyously through her veins, her spirits rose, and soon the exercise that she begun reluctantly became one of keen enjoyment. Capt. Anwyll was not a very interesting companion, but he was natural and good-natured, and anxious to please; he knew now what ground he was treading, too, and made no more blunders, but chatted on without shyness or effort, and was pleasant enough.
“Roxham is coming to dinner. You know Roxham? A capital fellow; a dead shot; a clever fellow too; goes in strong for politics and philanthropy and so forth. He’ll be in the ministry one of these days I dare say, and setting the country by the ears with his reform crochets, and that sort of thing: his head is full of them.”
“Not a bad sort of furniture either. Why don’t you follow his example?” demanded Franceline.
“Me! How satirical you are! That’s not my line at all. I don’t go in for politics—only for soldiering, if there were any to do. They set me up as liberal candidate for the last elections, but when I found it was not to be a walk-over, and that I was to contest it, I backed out. My mother was dreadfully savage. But bless her! she does not understand it a bit. I’m no hand at making speeches and addressing constituents. Now, Roxham can hold forth by the hour to a mob, or to any set of fellows; it’s wonderful to see how he spins out the palaver—and first-rate palaver it is, I can tell you. You should hear him on the hustings! We’ll make him describe a great row he and the liberal candidate had at the last elections, when Roxham beat him out of the field in grand style; he was no match for Roxham anyhow, and besides he had a stutter, and when he was in a passion he couldn’t get a word out without stamping like a vicious horse. It’s great fun to hear Roxham tell it; we’ll make him do so this evening. It will amuse you.”
Franceline laughed. The name of Lord Roxham and the mention of his electioneering feats recalled a scene that was seldom absent from her memory now. Every trifling detail of that scene rose vividly before her as she listened to Captain Anwyll. Would he never allude to one figure in it that overshadowed every other? If she could but lead him to speak of Clide! Perhaps he could tell her something of his present movements; throw some light on her perplexity.
“Lord Roxham has a very handsome cousin, Lady Emily Fitznorman; do you know her?” she asked, carelessly.
“Yes. A very nice girl as well as handsome.”
“I wonder she’s not married already.”
“You think she’s on the wane! Wait a while; you won’t think three-and-twenty so antique by and by.”
“I did not mean that; I thought she was about my own age,” protested Franceline with vivacity; “but when one is so much admired as Lady Emily seemed to be that night at Dullerton, one wonders she is not carried off by some devoted admirer.”
“Then you noticed that she had a great many? Would it be unfair to ask a few names?”
“Mr. de Winton for one seemed very devoted.”
“De Winton! Humph! Who else?”
“Why do you say ‘humph’? Is there reason why he should not be amongst the number?”
“Rather—that is to say perhaps—in fact, thereby hangs a tale.” His face wore a quizzical expression as he spoke.
“What tale?” She looked round with a quick, curious glance.
“Oh! it’s not fair to tell tales out of school, is it?”
“Certainly not; I had no idea there was a secret in the way,” said Franceline, bridling.
Ponsonby was not gifted with the knack of calm irrelevance; instead of dropping the subject and turning to something else, he resumed presently:
“De Winton is a capital shot too—better than Roxham; I went boar-hunting with him in Germany three years ago, and then black-cock shooting in Prussia, and I never knew him to miss his aim once.”
“He will come home laden with bears this time no doubt,” she remarked with affected coolness.
“Bears! not he. He has other game to follow now. Are you up to taking that fence, or shall we go round by the bridle-path? It makes it a good bit longer?”
“I don’t care to take the fence. Let us go round.”
She put her horse at a canter, and they scarcely spoke again until they reached Rydal.
Lady Anwyll’s voice sounded from the drawing-room, summoning her to come in before going upstairs, but Franceline did not heed it. She went straight to her room; she must have a few moments alone; she could not talk or listen just now. While she was flying through the air, it seemed as if motion suspended thought, and kept her poised above the mental whirlwind that Capt. Anwyll’s words had evoked; but once standing with the ground firm under her feet, thought resumed its power, and shook off the temporary torpor. She closed her door, and proceeded quietly to take off her habit. As she did so a voice kept repeating distinctly in her ears, “He has other game to follow now!” What did it, could it mean? Why, since he had said so much, could he not in mercy have said something more? But what did Capt. Anwyll know about mercy in the matter? What was Mr. de Winton to her in his eyes? Nothing, thank heaven! Nor in any one else’s. It was from mystery to mystery; she could make nothing out of it. One fact alone grew clearer and clearer to her amidst the dim chaos—Clide de Winton was the loadstar that was drawing her thoughts, her longings, her life after him wherever he was. Everything else was vague and undefined. She could not blame any one; she could not grieve or lament; she could only lose herself in torturing conjecture. It wanted more than an hour to dinner-time. Franceline had not the courage to spend it in the drawing-room, where she would be the object of Lady Anwyll’s motherly petting, and Ponsonby’s flat gossip; she must have the interval to school herself for the effort that was before her for the rest of the evening. There were steps on the landing; she opened her door; one of the maids was passing.
“Please tell her ladyship that I am a little tired, and shall lie down for half an hour before I dress.” The servant took the message.
Franceline did not lie down, however; she seated herself before the window, and thought. The exercise was not soothing, but it was a respite; and when she made her appearance in the drawing-room, there was so little trace of fatigue about her that Lady Anwyll rallied her good-naturedly on the cruelty of having stayed away under false pretences.
Lord Roxham met her with the frankness of an old acquaintance, and had many pretty speeches to make about their last meeting. Franceline responded with sprightly grace, and hoped he had come prepared to complete her education in parliamentary matters. The evening passed off gaily. Lord Roxham was a fluent if not a brilliant talker, and under the animating influence of his lively rattle, Franceline’s spirits rose, and her hosts, who had hitherto seen her rather willing to be amused than amusing, were surprised to see with what graceful spirit she kept the ball going, bandying light repartee with Lord Roxham, and pricking Ponsonby into joining in the game with a liveliness that astonished him and enchanted his mother. The dowager chuckled inwardly, and applauded herself on the success of her little matrimonial scheme; she already saw Franceline a peeress, and happily settled as a near neighbor of her own. None of the party were musical, but they did not miss this delightful element of sociability, so unflagging was the flow of talk and anecdote; and when Lord Roxham started up at eleven o’clock to ring for his horse, every one protested he must have heard the clock strike one too many.
“Come and lunch to-morrow, and join these two in their ride,” said Lady Anwyll, as she shook hands with him.
“Am I going to ride home?” inquired Franceline, surprised.
“Certainly not! Nor drive either. You don’t suppose I’m going to let you off with one day’s penance?”
“O dear Lady Anwyll! papa will expect me to-morrow, and he will be uneasy if he does not see me; I assure you he will,” pleaded Franceline.
“I can remove that obstacle,” said Lord Roxham promptly. “I must ride over to Dullerton early to-morrow morning, and I can have the honor of calling at M. de la Bourbonais’, and setting his mind at rest about you.”
“The very thing!” cried Lady Anwyll, shutting up Franceline, who had an excuse ready; “you can call at The Lilies on your way back, and tell the count he is to expect this young lady when he sees her.”
Luckily Franceline was ignorant of the juxtaposition of the various seats round Dullerton, or it might have struck her as odd that Lady Anwyll should propose the messenger’s going a round of fifteen miles to call at The Lilies “on his way back.” But she suspected nothing, and when Lord Roxham alighted at Rydal next day punctually as the clock struck two P.M. she greeted him with unabashed cordiality, and was all eagerness to know if he had seen her father, and what the latter had said.
She had slept restlessly, but she had slept; her anxiety had not as yet the sting in it that destroys sleep. She did not fail to notice with renewed wonder that Lord Roxham had studiously avoided mentioning Mr. de Winton’s name. Studiously it must have been; for what more natural than to have mentioned him when discussing the fairy festa where they had first met? She felt certain there must be a motive for so palpable a reticence, and the thought did not tend to reassure her. She had dressed herself before luncheon, so when the horses came round, they mounted at once. Franceline, on starting, had mentally resolved to make Lord Roxham speak on the subject that was uppermost in her mind—to put a direct question in fact, if everything else failed—but, strive as she might, he would not be lured into the trap, and her courage sank so much on seeing this that she dared not venture on a direct interrogation.
They stayed out until near sundown; the day was breezy and bright, and Franceline looked radiant with the excitement and exercise.
“Let us ride up to the knoll and see the sun go down behind the common,” proposed Capt. Anwyll, as they were about to pass the park gate; “the sunset is the only thing we have worth showing at Rydal, and I’d like Mlle. de la Bourbonais to see it.”
His companions gladly assented, and the party turned off the road into a bridle-path across the fields which led to the elevation commanding an unbroken view of the spectacle. It seemed as if everything had been purposely cleared away from the landscape that could divert attention for an instant from the glorious pageant of the western skies. Not a house was visible, and scarcely a habitation; the cottages were hid in the flanks of the valley, and only reminded you of their existence by a thin vapor that curled up from a solitary chimney and quickly lost itself in the trees. Nothing gave any sign of life but the sheep browsing on the gilded emerald of the shorn meadows. The red and gold waves flooded the vast expanse of the horizon, flowing further and higher as the spectators gazed, until half heaven was on fire with a conflagration of rainbows. Swiftly the colors changed, crimson and orange first, then deep and tender shades of purple and green, until all melted into uniform violet, the herald of the gathering darkness. They stood watching it in silence, Franceline with bated breath. The sunset always had a solemn charm for her, and she had never seen so vast and gorgeous a one as this. It was like watching the dying throes of a divinity.
“The play is over, the audience may retire!” said Ponsonby, breaking the pause; even he had been subdued by the sublimity of the scene.
“If I were a pagan I should be a fire-worshipper,” said Franceline, as they moved away. “I think the worship of the sun is the most natural as well as the most poetic of all forms of idolatry.”
“That’s just what De Winton said the first time he saw the sun set from here!” exclaimed Capt. Anwyll triumphantly; “how comical that you should have hit on the very same idea! He said, by the way, that it was the finest sunset he had ever seen in England; it’s so wide and low, you see; he showed me a sketch he made of a sunset somewhere in the Vosges that he said it reminded him of. I forget the name of the valley; but it was uncommonly like; do you know the Vosges?”
“No; I have never been to that part of France.”
Lord Roxham glanced at her as she said this in a clear, low voice. He saw nothing in her countenance that afforded a clew to whatever he was looking for.
It had grown chilly now that the sun had set, and they had been standing several minutes on the knoll. Of one accord the three riders broke into a gallop as they entered the park, and dashed along between the pollard Wellingtonias, standing stiff and stark as tumuli on either side of the long avenue.
Lady Anwyll had gone to visit some poor sick woman in the neighborhood, and had not yet returned. The gentlemen went round to the stables, and Franceline to her room. She dressed herself quickly, wrote a short letter to her father according to her promise of writing to him every day during her absence, and then threw the window wide open and sat down beside it. It was fresh enough, and she wore only her muslin dress, but she did not feel the freshness of the air—she was too excited to be conscious of any external influence of the kind. She sat as motionless as a statue, gazing abstractedly over the empurpled sky where the moon appeared like a shred of white cloud. She had not sat there long when the fragrant fumes of a cigar came floating in through her window, followed soon by a sound of footsteps and voices. Ponsonby and his guest were coming in. Franceline did not close the window or move away, though the voices were now audible; the speakers had not entered the house; they were walking under the veranda that ran round the front. What matter? They were not likely to be talking secrets; she was welcome to listen, no doubt, to whatever they might have to say.
“There is the carriage coming,” said Ponsonby; “my mother is out too late with her rheumatism; I’ll pitch into her for it.”
“Yes; it doesn’t do to stay out after sunset when one has any chronic ailment of that sort. By the way, you mentioned De Winton just now; have you heard of him lately?”
“No; not since he left Berlin. It seems he was very near kicking the bucket there; he was awfully bad, and nobody with him but his man Stanton.”
“How did you hear about it?”
“Through Parker, a fellow in our regiment whose brother is attaché at Berlin; the story made a sensation there, but no one knew of it until De Winton had left.”
The speakers passed on to the end of the veranda, and Franceline could catch nothing more until they drew near again. Lord Roxham was speaking.
“Poor fellow! It’s tremendously hard on him, and I believe there is no redress; nothing to make out a case for divorce.”
“I fancy not; but even if there were it would not be available, since he’s a Romanist.”
“Ah! to be sure; I forgot that; but what a mystification the whole business is! I’ve known De Winton since we were both boys—we were Eton chums, you know—but he never breathed a word of it to me. Yet he’s not a close fellow; quite the contrary. And who the deuce is the woman? Where did he come across her?”
They passed out of hearing again, and when they returned the tramping of horses and the crunching of wheels overtopped their voices. The sounds all died away; Lady Anwyll had come in, and gone to her room—every one was waiting in the drawing-room, but Franceline did not appear. Her hostess, thinking she had not heard the dinner-bell, sent for her. Presently the maid came rushing down the stairs and into the forbidden precincts of the drawing-room with a scared face.
“Please, my lady, she’s in a dead faint! I found her all in a heap on the floor, ready dressed. I lifted her on to the bed, but she don’t move!”
An exclamation burst simultaneously from the three listeners. In a moment they were all in Franceline’s room; there she lay stretched on the bed, as the woman had said, white and still as death, one hand hanging, and her hair, that had been loosened in the fall, dropping on her shoulder. The usual restoratives were applied, and in about a quarter of an hour she gave signs of awakening—the veined lids quivered, the mouth twitched convulsively, and a short sigh escaped her. Lady Anwyll signed to her son and Lord Roxham to withdraw; they had scarcely left the room when Franceline opened her eyes and stared about her with the blank gaze of returning consciousness. She swallowed some wine at Lady Anwyll’s request, but soon put the glass away with a gesture of disgust. In answer to her hostess’ anxious entreaties to say where she suffered, and why she had swooned, the young girl could only say she had felt tired and weary, and that she longed to be left alone and go to sleep. Lady Anwyll agreed that sleep would be the best restorative, and insisted on staying till she saw her settled in bed; then she kissed her, and promising to come soon and see if she was asleep, she left the room with a noiseless step.
“What is it? Is there anything much amiss, mother?” was the captain’s exclamation. Lord Roxham was equally concerned.
“Nothing, except you have nearly killed her, both of you. You have ridden the child to death; she is not accustomed to it, and she has overdone herself; but she will be all right I hope in the morning. There’s nothing the matter but fatigue, she assures me.”
Ponsonby rated himself soundly for being such a brute as to have let her tire herself; he ought to have remembered that she was done up the day before after a much shorter ride. He was awfully sorry. His remorse was no doubt quite genuine, but when they sat down to dinner he proved to demonstration that that feeling is compatible with an unimpaired appetite. Lady Anwyll left them before they had finished to see how Franceline was going on; she found her awake, but quite well, and going to sleep very soon, she assured the kind old lady.
“Then, my dear child, I will not have you disturbed again; if you wake and want anything, strike this gong, and Trinner will come at once. I will make her sleep in the room next yours to-night.”
Franceline protested, but the dowager silenced her with a kiss; put out the light, and left her.
She lay very still, but there was no chance of sleep for her. Sleep had fled from her eyes as peace had fled from her heart. She longed to get up, and find relief from the intolerable strain of immobility, but she dared not; her room was over a part of the drawing-room, and she might be heard. The evening seemed to drag on with preternatural slowness. She could hear the low hum of voices through the ceiling. Once there was a clatter of porcelain—probably Ponce overturning the tea-tray. At last the stable-clock struck eleven; there was opening and shutting of doors for a while, and then silence. Franceline sat up and listened until not a sound was anywhere to be heard. Every soul in the house had gone to bed. Trinner had come last of all to her room. The star made by her candle gleamed through the key-hole for a long time; at last it disappeared, and soon the loud, regular breathing told that she was fast asleep. Franceline rose, threw her dressing-wrapper round her, and drew back the curtain from the window. It was a relief to let the night-lights in upon her solitude; the glorious gaze of the moon seemed to chase away phantoms with the darkness. She felt awake now. All this time, lying there in the utter darkness, it seemed as if she were still in a swoon, or held in the grip of a nightmare; she shook herself free from the benumbing clutch, and sat down close by the window, and tried to collect her thoughts. There was one phantom which the moonlight could not dispel; it stood out now distinctly as she looked at it with revived consciousness. Clide de Winton was a married man. It was to the husband of another that she had given her heart with its first pure vintage of impassioned love. He who had looked at her with those ardent eyes, penetrating her soul like flame, had all along been another woman’s husband. There was no more room for hope, even for doubt; suspense was at an end; the period of dark conjecture was gone. It was clear enough, all that had been so inexplicable,—clear as when the lightning flashes out of a lurid sky, and illuminates the scene of an earthquake; a sea lashed to fury by winds that have lost their current, ships sinking in billows that break before they heave, the land gaping and groaning, trees uprooted, habitations falling with a crash of thunder, all live things clinging and flying in wild disorder. Franceline considered it all as she sat, still and white as a stone, without missing a single detail in the scene.
Violent demonstration was not in her nature. In pain or in joy it was her habit to be self-contained. She had as yet been called upon but for very slight trials of strength and self-control; but such as the experience was it had left behind it an innate though unconscious sense of power that rose instinctively to her aid now. She had fainted away under the first shock of the discovery; but that tribute of weakness paid to nature, she would yield no more. Tears might come later; but now she would not indulge in them. She must face the worst without flinching. What was the worst? Clide was a married man. That was bad enough in all conscience; yet there might be worse behind. Circumstances might cast a blacker dye even on this. Lord Roxham had spoken in a tone of sympathy: “Poor fellow! It’s tremendously hard on him.…” He would have spoken differently if there were any villany in question. But if Lord Roxham had not thus indirectly acquitted him, Franceline would have done so spontaneously. Yes, even in the first moment of despair, while the flood was sweeping over her, she acquitted him. He had dragged her down into unsounded depths of agony and shame, but he had not done it deliberately; he was neither a liar nor a traitor. Had he not been brought to the jaws of death himself only a month ago? There was an indescribable comfort in the pang those words had inflicted. He too, then, was suffering; they were both victims. Clide had never meant to deceive her; she would have sworn it on the altar of her unshaken faith in him; she wanted no stronger evidence than the promptings of her own heart. She was confident there would be some adequate explanation of whatever now seemed ambiguous, when she should have learned all. No; she need not separate the attribute of truth and honor from his image; she could no more do it than she could separate the idea of light from the pure maiden moon that was looking down on her from heaven; she would see darkness in light before she would believe Clide de Winton false.
This irrepressible need of her heart once satisfied—Clide judged and acquitted—what then? Granted that he was innocent as yonder stars, how did it affect her? What did it signify to her henceforth whether he was innocent or guilty, true or false? He was the husband of another woman; as good as dead to Franceline de la Bourbonais; parted from her by a more impassable barrier than death. If he were only dead she might love him still, hold him enshrined in her heart’s core with a clasp that death could not sever—only strengthen. But he was worse than dead; he was married. She must banish him even from her thoughts; his memory must henceforth be as far from her as the thought of murder, or any other crime that her crystal conscience shuddered even to name. She might acquit him, crown him with the noblest attributes of manhood; but that done, she must dismiss him from her remembrance, and forget him as if he had never lived.
Franceline had remained seated, her hands locked passively in her lap, while these thoughts shaped themselves in her mind. When they reached the climax, expressed in these words: “I must forget him as if he had never lived!” she rose to her feet, clasped her forehead in both hands, and an inarticulate cry broke from her: “It would be easier to die!… If I had anything to forgive, that would help me! But I have nothing to forgive!” It would not have helped her, though she fancied so; it would have turned the bitterness of the cup into poison. But she could not realize this now. It seemed harder to renounce what was good and beautiful than to cast away what was unworthy. If the idol had uttered one false oracle, demanded anything base, betrayed itself before betraying her, it would have been easier, she thought, to overturn it. Indignation would have nerved her to the deed, and she would have dealt the blow without compunction. But it had done nothing to forfeit her love and trust, and nevertheless she must dash it down and cast the fragments into the fire, and not preserve even the dust as a precious thing. What a merciful doom his death would have been compared to this!
How was she to do it? Who would help her to so ruthless a demolition? Did any one speak in the silence, or was it only the unspoken cry of her own soul that answered? She had fancied herself alone; she had forgotten that a Presence was close to her, waiting to be invoked, patient, faithful, and protecting even while forgotten. The voice sounded sweet in its warning solemnity, and filled the lonely chamber with a more benign ray than ever shone from midnight sky or blazing noon. Franceline stretched out her arms to meet it, and with a loud sob fell upon her knees. “O my God! forgive me! Forgive me, and help me! I have sinned, but my punishment is greater than I can bear!” The floodgates were thrown back; the tears fell in hot showers, the sobs shook her as the storm shakes the sapling. She knelt there crouching in the darkness, her head leaning on her folded arms, and gave herself up to the passionate outburst, like a child weeping itself to sleep on its mother’s breast. But this could not last. It was only a truce. The real battle, the decisive one, had only now begun; what had gone before were but the preliminaries. Hitherto she had thought only of her grief and humiliation; she was now brought face to face with her sin—the sin of idolatry. She had made unto herself an idol of clay, and placed it on the altar of her heart, and burned incense before it with every breath she drew; the smoke had made a mist before her eyes, but it was dissolving. She looked into the desecrated sanctuary, and struck her breast with humility and self-abasement. Her tears were flowing copiously, but they were not all brine; she was drawing strength from their bitterness. Victory was not for “the days of peace,” but for such an hour as this. She had been trained from childhood in the hope of heaven, in the firm belief that this life was but the transitory passage to the true home; that its sorrows and joys were too evanescent, too unreal to be counted of more importance than the rain and wind that scatter the sunshine of a summer’s day; she had been taught, too, that the bliss of that immortal home is purchased by suffering—a thing to be taken by violence, a crown to be grasped through thorns. Hitherto her adherence to this creed had been entirely theoretical; she accepted it, but in some vague way felt that she, personally, was beyond its action. Her father had suffered; her mother, too, cut off in her happy bloom, had won the crown by a lingering illness and an early death; but she, Franceline, enjoyed, it would seem, some privileged immunity from the stern law. Such had unawares been her reasoning. But now she was undeceived; her hour had come, and she must meet it as a Christian. Now was the time to prove the sincerity of her faith, the strength of her principles; if they failed her, they were no better than stubble and brass that dissolve at the first breath of the furnace.
A duel to the death is always brief: the foes close in mortal conflict; the thrusts come fast and sharp; one or other falls. When Franceline lifted her head from her arms, the expression of the tear-stained face showed which way the battle had gone: the victor stood erect with his foot upon the victim’s neck, unscathed, serene, and pitiless. Love lay bleeding and maimed, but Conscience smiled in triumph. “I will not let thee go until thou hast blessed me,” the wrestler had said, and the angel had blessed her before he fled.
The night was nearly spent when Franceline rose up from her knees, numbed and shivering, although the weather was not cold. She walked rapidly up and down for a few moments to warm herself; there was a spring in her step, a light in her eyes, that told of recovered energy and unshaken purpose; her nerves might tingle, her heart might grieve, but they would neither faint nor quail. She dropped on her knees again for one moment and uttered a prayer, more of thanksgiving this time than supplication, and then lay down and soon fell asleep.
When Franceline came down next morning, after breakfasting in her room as if she had been ailing, there was scarcely any trace in her aspect of the conflict of the night. Eyes do not retain the stains of tears very long at eighteen, and if she was a trifle paler than usual, it was accounted for by the over-exertion which had brought the fainting fit. She expressed a wish to go home as early as was convenient to her hosts, and they consented with reluctance, but without offering any resistance. Lady Anwyll said the child was weary and dull, and that the next time she came to Rydal they should make it livelier for her.
With what a feeling of regaining a haven of rest did Franceline enter the little garden at The Lilies, where her father, warned by the sound of the wheels, hastened out and stood waiting to clasp her!—Angélique graciously letting him have the first kiss, before she claimed her turn.
“We have been like fishes out of water without thee!—have we not, ma bonne?” was Raymond’s joyful exclamation, as he gathered his child to his heart, and then held her from him to look wistfully into the sweet, smiling face.
“Yes, we were dull enough without our singing bird, though I dare say she didn’t miss us much!” was Angélique’s rejoinder. Franceline declared she would go away very soon again to teach them to value her more.
But the singing bird was not the same after this. The spirit that had found utterance in its joyous voice was dead. A lark rises from the clover-field, and pours out its sweet, “harmonious madness” over the earth; swiftly it soars away—away—into fathomless space, and while, spell-bound, we strain after the fading notes, lo! the sportsman’s arrow hisses by, a cry rends the welkin, the songster is struck—he will never sing again.
Perhaps you despise Franceline for allowing the loss of an imaginary possession to put the light out of her life in this way. As if our lives were not made desolate half the time by the loss of what we never had! You will say that self-respect and pride ought to have come to her aid, and enabled her to quench in blood, if needs be, the fire that her conscience pronounced guilty. But is the process so quickly accomplished, think you? Franceline was doing her best; she was concentrating all the energies of her mind and soul in the struggle, but it was not to be done in a day; the very purity of her love constituted its strength. If there had been the smallest element of corruption in it, it would have died quicker; but its fibres were enduring because they were pure.
Yet she was not forgetful of her father and of all that he had hitherto been to her, and she to him; far from it. The effort to conceal her sufferings from him was a great help to her in controlling them, though it often taxed her strength severely. Sometimes, when the feeling of isolation pressed on her almost beyond endurance, when she felt that she must have the solace of his sympathy, cost what it might, she would steal into his study, determined to speak and let the murder out; but the sight of the venerable head bowed over his books, absorbed, and happy in his unconsciousness, would arrest her words and choke them back into silence. The strain was hard, but was it not a mercy that she had as yet only her own burden to bear? What a price would she not have to pay for the momentary relief of leaning it on him! What might not be dreaded from the effect of the revelation on his sensitive pride, and still more sensitive love? And then the inevitable breach between him and his oldest, almost his only friend, Sir Simon! They would leave The Lilies and go forth she knew not where. No; silence indubitably was best. To speak might be to kill her father.
This state of things lasted for a week, and then there was granted an alleviation. Father Henwick had been called to a distance to see his mother, who was dying; he arrived in time to assist her with his filial ministry in the last passage; remained to settle all that followed, and then came back to resume the even tenor of his life at Dullerton.
Father Henwick was one of those men whom you may know for a lifetime, and never find out until some special circumstance reveals them. There was no sign in his outward man of anything remarkable in the inner man. He had not acquired, or at any rate retained, any French polish or grace from his early sojourn at the French seminary. His manners were very homely, and abrupt almost to brusqueness; he was neither tall nor small, but of that height which steers between the two, and so escapes notice; his voice had the unmistakable ring of refinement and early education, yet he seldom associated with his equals, his intercourse being confined chiefly to the poor. These and their children were his familiars at Dullerton. The latter looked on him as their especial property, and took all manner of liberties with him unrebuked—hanging on to his coat-tails, and plunging their audacious little paws into the sacred precincts of his pockets, whence experience had taught them something might turn up to their advantage: penny whistles, Dutch dolls, buns, lollypops, and crackers were continually issuing from those mysterious depths which the small fry sounded behind Father Henwick’s back, and apparently unbeknown to him, while he administered comfort of another description to their elders.
The fact of his having been educated in France, and speaking French like a Frenchman, accounted to the general mind of Dullerton for the eccentric habits and unconventional manners of the Catholic priest, especially for his shyness with his own class, and undue familiarity with those in the humbler ranks. It ought to have established him on the footing of close intimacy at The Lilies; and yet it had not done so. M. de le Bourbonais professed and felt the greatest esteem for him, and made him welcome in his gracious way; but Father Henwick was too shrewd an observer of human nature not to see exactly how far this was meant to go. Franceline’s early instruction had been confided to him, and the remembrance of the pains he had taken with the little catechumen, the fondness with which he had planted and fostered the good seed in her heart, made a claim on Raymond’s gratitude; but it did not remove an intangible barrier between the father in the flesh and the father in the spirit. M. de la Bourbonais was a Catholic; if anybody had dared to impugn by one word the stanchness of his Catholicity, he would have felt it his painful duty to run that person through the body; but, as with so many of his countrymen, his faith ended here; it was altogether theoretical; he was ready at a moment’s notice to fight or die for it; but it did not enter into his views to live for it. For Franceline, however, it was a different thing. Religion was made for women, and women for religion. With that tender reverence for his child’s faith, which in France is so often the last bulwark of the father’s, Raymond had been at considerable pains to hide from Franceline the inconsistency that existed between his own practice and teaching. When the great event was approaching which, in the life of a French child especially, is surrounded by such touching solemnity, he made it his delight to assist Father Henwick in preparing her for it, making her rehearse his instructions between times, or teaching her the catechism himself. Then, to anticipate awkward questions and impossible explanations, he made a point of rising early on Sundays and festivals and going to first Mass before Franceline was out of bed. The habit once contracted, he continued it; so it came about naturally that she took for granted her father did at a different hour what he attached so much importance to her doing. In conversation with Father Henwick she had more than once incidentally let this belief transpire; but he was not the one to undeceive her, or tear away the veil that parental sensitiveness had drawn between itself and those childlike eyes. Neither was he one to broach the subject indiscreetly to M. de la Bourbonais. A day might come for speaking; meanwhile he was content to be silent and to wait.
The day Father Henwick returned to Dullerton after his mother’s funeral, his confessional was surrounded by a greater crowd than usual; his parishioners had a whole week’s arrears of troubles and questions, spiritual and temporal, to settle with him, and it was late when he was able to speak to Franceline. The conference was a long one; by the time it was over the church was nearly empty; only a few figures were still kneeling in the shadows as the young girl, coming out through a side-door, walked through the graves with a quick, light step and proceeded homewards. Tears were falling under her veil, and a sob every now and then showed that the source was still full to overflowing; but her heart was lighter than it had been for many days, her will was strengthened and her purpose fixed. She was bent on being courageous, on walking forward bravely and never looking back. She blessed God for the comfort she had received and the strength that had been imparted to her. Oh! she was glad now that she had resisted the first impulse to speak to her father, and had been silent.
That evening M. de la Bourbonais and Angélique remarked how cheerful she was. She stayed up later than usual reading to Raymond, and commenting spiritedly on what she read; then bade him good-night with almost a rejoicing heart, and slept soundly until long past daybreak.
TO BE CONTINUED.