CHAPTER XXVI.
It fell out on this wise. In the hope of lightening the weight of depression under which I laboured, I took to riding again so many afternoons a week—an indulgence which I could now afford. True, a hack from a livery stable was but a sorry exchange for the horses upon which Warcop had been wont to mount me; but if love of horse-flesh takes you that way—and take me that way it did—the veriest crock is better to bestride than nought.
The day was fine, with sunshine and white fleets of blithely sailing cloud. Hedges and trees thickened with bud, and the rooks were nesting. I had made a long round by Madingley and Trumpington, and was walking my horse back slowly over the cobbles of King’s Parade—admiring, as how many times before, the matchless Chapel, springing from the greensward, its slender towers, pinnacles and lace-work of open parapet rising against spaces of mild blue sky—when, amid groups upon the pavement wearing cap and gown, or less ceremonial boating and football gear, a tall heavily built figure, clothed in a coat with bulging skirt-pockets to it, breeches and gaiters of pepper-and-salt-mixture, attracted my eye. The man halted now and again to stare at the fine buildings; and at last, crossing where the side street runs from King’s Parade to the Market Place, turned into the big bookseller’s at the corner.
I thought I could hardly be mistaken as to his identity; and, calling a down-at-heels idler to hold my horse, I dismounted and followed him into the shop. If I had made a mistake, it would be easy to ask for some book or pamphlet and so cover my discomfiture.
But I had made no mistake. Though older and greyer, his strong intellectual face more deeply lined by thought, and, as I feared, by care, Braithwaite himself confronted me.
‘Thou hast found me, O mine enemy,’ he exclaimed, while the clasp of his hand gave the lie to this doubtful form of greeting. ‘And, to tell the truth, I hoped you might do so; though I was in two minds about seeking you out and calling on you myself.’
I returned the clasp of his hand; but, for the moment, my heart was almost too full for speech.
‘Enemy, neither now nor at any time in our acquaintance,’ I faltered.
‘I know, I know,’ he answered. ‘But until you were your own master, and had finally cut adrift from certain high folks in high places, I reckoned we were best apart.’
‘And you were right. Now, for good or evil, all that is over and done with’—and truly and honestly I believed what I said.
‘So much the better,’ he replied heartily. ‘Then we can start our friendship afresh—that is, of course, if an ornament of this ancient seat of learning, a full-fledged don like yourself, is not too fine and fastidious a person to associate with a plain middle-class man such as me.’
I bade him not be foolish—he had a better opinion of me, I hoped, than that—asked what of ‘the pride which apes humility,’ and so forth; and all the while questions about Nellie, her health, her well-being, her present whereabouts, scorched my tongue. I invited him to my rooms—which I think pleased him—so that we might talk more at our ease; but he told me he had the better part of a twenty-mile drive before him, back to Westrea, a farm which he had lately bought on the Suffolk border. We therefore agreed that, when I had sent my horse back to the stable, I should join him at the inn, just off the Market Place, where his gig was put up.
And in the dingy inn parlour, some quarter of an hour later, I at last found courage and voice to enquire for Nellie. His face clouded, I thought.
‘In answering you frankly, I give you the strongest proof of friendship which I can give,’ he said.
I thanked him.
‘It went hard with her at first, poor lass,’ he continued, ‘brave and dutiful though she is. And that’s what has brought me further south. I judged it best to get her right away from the Yorkshire country and sound of Yorkshire speech. So I threw up my tenancy of the place I had taken on leaving Mere Ban. I may tell you I came into some little money through the death of a relative, last year, which enabled me to buy this Westrea farm. I took Nellie with me to view it, and the house caught her fancy. ’Tis a pretty old red-brick place, and my gift to her. I want her to make a home of it, and interest herself in the development of the property—about nine hundred acres in all. She has an excellent head for business; and, in my opinion, there’s no better medicine than keeping hands and brain occupied in such a case as hers.’
He broke off abruptly, as though unwilling to pursue the subject further, adding:
‘But there, come and see for yourself what our new quarters are like, Brownlow. No purple wind-swept fells piled up to high heaven behind it, truly; still, a pleasant enough spot in its way, and fine corn-land too. I can offer you a comfortable bed and a good plain dinner; and a horse you needn’t be ashamed to ride, notwithstanding your free run of his Lordship’s stud at Hover. Come during the vacation. Easter falls late this year; and the orchard trees should be in blossom, supposing we get a fine spring, as I believe we shall. It’ll do you no harm to drop your classics and mathematics, part company with your scandalous old heathen poets and divinities and take the living world of to-day by the hand for forty-eight hours or so. I’ll be bound your radicalism has deteriorated in this academic dry-as-dust atmosphere too, and will be none the worse for a little wholesome rubbing up.’
So to Westrea I promised to go, his invitation having been given so spontaneously and kindly. A dangerous experiment perhaps, but the temptation was too strong for me. At last I should see Nellie again, and learn how matters really stood with her. That thought threw me into a fever of excitement.
To go in to hall, with the chance of meeting Halidane and having the fellow saddle his unctuous, not to say oily, presence upon me for the rest of the evening, was intolerable. So, after starting Braithwaite upon his homeward journey, I got a scratch meal at the inn, and then made my way to The Backs across bridge, and wandered in the softly deepening twilight under the trees beside the river. I tried—but alas how vainly!—to calm my excitement, and school myself into rejection alike of the wild hopes and dark forebodings which assailed me. I lost count of time, and wandered thus until the lamps were lit and the moonlight touched the stately masses of college buildings, rising pale from their lawns and gardens, on the other side of the placid slow-flowing stream. Hence it was comparatively late when, at length, I climbed the creaking, foot-worn oaken stairs leading to my rooms.
Immediately on entering I saw that a letter lay upon the table. It was in Hartover’s handwriting. Trembling, I tore it open.
Why should he write to me after so long a silence? Had he heard of my visit to St. James’s Palace? Of my visit to Church Lane? About Fédore surely it must be; and when I began to read I found that so indeed it was.
‘Dearest Brownlow,’—it ran—‘I have news to tell you which will astonish and at first, I am afraid, shock you. But, after a little, you will see it is right enough; and that, in honour, I could not do otherwise than I have done. For nearly two months now I have been married to Fédore.’
My head fairly spun round. Faint and dizzy, I sank into the nearest chair, and read on with staring eyes.
‘My reasons were very simple. I do not ask you to approve them; but to weigh and judge them fairly. You know the circumstances under which I came to town and joined my regiment. Parted from Her whom I loved—and whom I shall never forget, the thought of Her will always be sweet and sacred to me—I became utterly reckless. She was gone. You were gone.’
Was that a reproach, and a merited one? Whether or not, it cut me to the quick.
‘There was no one to care what I did, no one for me to care for. Nothing seemed to matter. I plunged into all the follies—and worse—of a young man about town. I will not disgust you by describing them—suffice it that I found plenty both of men and women to share them with me. I tried to drown remembrance of Her, of you, of everything noble and good, in pleasure. And at last, you will hardly be surprised to hear, I fell into my old madness of drink. I was horribly, quite horribly, you understand, hopeless and unhappy. About my own people I say nothing—to their own Master they stand or fall. I do not want to talk, or even think about them. But by last autumn I had pretty well ruined my health. I had, so the doctors told me, delirium tremens. I know my nerves were shattered, and life seemed a perfect hell. As I lay ill and mad, Fédore came to me. She nursed me, controlled me, pulled me through. She was most true to me when others wished her to be most false. There were those, she has told me since—as I suspected all along, even in the old days at Hover—who would be glad enough for me to kill myself with debauchery. She talked to me, reasoned with me. You yourself could not have spoken more wisely. But I felt, Brownlow, I felt I could not stand alone. I must have some one to lean on, to be loved by and to love. It is a necessity of my nature, and I obeyed it. Fédore saved me, and I paid her by marrying her. She refused at first, warned me of my seeming folly, of what the world would say; told me there were difficulties, that she, too, had enemies. But I insisted.—Remember she had compromised herself, endangered her reputation by coming to me.—At last she gave way, confessing, dear creature, she had loved me all along, loved me from a boy.
‘You will say, what about the future? I defy it, snap my fingers at it. It must take care of itself. It can’t, in any case, be more hateful than the past.
‘And so good-bye, dear old man. Judge me fairly at least; and keep my secret—for secret our marriage must be as long as my father is alive. Fédore sends kind remembrances, and bids me say when you know all—and there is more behind—you will not think of her too harshly.’
Should I not? The woman had greater faith in my leniency—or stupidity, which?—than I myself had. No harshness was too great, surely, in face of the wrong she had done the boy by marrying him. Yet two things were true. For that she loved him—according to her own conception of love—I did not doubt; and that she had rescued him from the demon of drink—for the time being—I did not doubt either. And this last—let me try to be just—this last must be counted to her, in some degree at all events, for righteousness whatever her ulterior object in so rescuing him might have been.
But admitting that much, I had admitted all that was possible in her favour. She had hunted the boy, trapped him, pinned him down, making his extremity her own opportunity; cleverly laying him under an obligation, moreover, which could not but evoke all his native sensibility and chivalry.
The more I thought of it, the more disastrous, the more abominable did the position appear. So much so that, going back to his letter, I read it over and over to see if I could make it belie itself and find any loop-hole of escape. But what was written was written. In Hartover’s belief he had made Fédore, and done right in making her, his wife.
And there were those, then, who would gladly compass his death! The last scene with Colonel Esdaile flashed across me; and other scenes, words, gestures, both of his and of her ladyship’s. Was the boy really and actually the victim of some shameful conspiracy? Only one life stood between the Colonel and the title, the great estates, the great wealth. Was her ladyship playing some desperate game to secure these for him and—for herself, and for her children as his wife? She was still young enough to bear children.—In this ugly coil that cardinal point must never be forgotten. But how could Fédore’s marrying Hartover forward this? Had the woman been set on as her ladyship’s tool, and then betrayed her employer and intrigued on her own account?
Good Heavens! and Nellie was free now. At that thought I sprang up; but only to sink back into my chair again, broken by the vast perplexity, the vast complexity, of it all. Free? Did I not know better than that? Had not her father’s tone, her father’s words in speaking of her, told me her heart was very far from free? Should I so fall from grace as to trade on her despair, and tempt her to engage herself to me while she still loved Hartover? Would not that be to follow Fédore’s example—almost; and take a leaf out of her very questionably virtuous or high-minded book? Besides, how did I know Nellie would ever be willing to engage herself to me? Vain dream—for, after all, what did the whole thing amount to?—Hartover was not of age. His marriage was null—if he so chose. He could find means to dissolve it himself, surely, when he found out Fédore, and saw her in her true colours.—And he should see. My temper rose. I would expose her. I would appeal to Lord ⸺. I would move heaven and earth till I could prove her complicity in Marsigli’s felony—and her connection with him, her real marriage. I would⸺
But alas! what could I do, with so many persons—powerful, rich, unscrupulous—arrayed against me?—Hartover himself, more than likely, protecting, in a spirit of chivalry, the woman who had nursed and befriended him, and to whom—as he believed—he had given his name in wedlock. I, on the other hand, armed but with light and broken threads of suspicion and of theory. For so far, as the Colonel had reminded me, I possessed no actual evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, against her.
No; it was impossible to break the web in which she and others—to their shame—had entangled him. I would put the whole deplorable business from me, and go quietly to Westrea for the Easter vacation. And Nellie?—I would never tell her. If she hoped still, I would never undeceive her. The dark cloud might blow over, the foul bubble burst—and then!—Meanwhile I would be to her as a brother. I would help her, strengthen her; in a sense, educate her. For what? For whom?—God knew⸺
But, just there, I was startled out of my painful reverie by shouts, confused tumult in the usually silent court below, and rush of feet upon the stair.
(To be continued.)
FROM FRIEND TO FRIEND.
BY LADY RITCHIE.