A True Friend: A Novel

by Adeline Sergeant

RETROSPECT.

For my part, I am inclined to think that Margaret was more right than she knew. There was really no inherent fitness between her temperament and that of Wyvis Brand; and his position in the County was one which would have fretted her inexpressibly. She, who had been the petted favorite of a brilliant circle in town and country, to take rank as the wife of a ploughman's son! It would not have suited her at all; and her discontent would have ended in making Wyvis miserable.

He was, he considered, miserable enough already. He was sore all over—sore and injured and angry. He had been deceived in a manner which seemed to him unjustifiable from beginning to end. The disclosure of his parentage explained many little things which had been puzzling to him in his previous life, but it brought with it a baffling, passionate sense of having been fooled and duped—not a condition of things which was easy for him to support. Little by little the whole story became clear to him. For, when he flung out of the Red House after Margaret's departure, in a tumult of rage and shame, announcing his determination to go to the devil, he did not immediately seek out the Prince of Darkness: he only went to his lawyer. His lawyer told him a good deal, and Mrs. Brand, in a letter dictated to Janetta, told him more.

Mary Wyvis, the daughter of the village inn-keeper at Roxby, was brought up to act as his barmaid, and early became engaged to marry her cousin, John Wyvis, ploughman. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, when Mark Brand appeared upon the scene, and fell desperately in love with the handsome barmaid. She returned his love, but was too conscientious to elope with him and forget her cousin, as he wished her to do. Her father supported John's claim, and threatened to horsewhip the fine gentleman if he visited the Roxby Arms again. By way of change, Mary then went into domestic service for a few weeks at Helmsley Manor. It was not expected that she would remain there, and it was thought by her friends that she distinctly "lowered herself" by accepting this position, for her father was a well-to-do man in his way; but Mary Wyvis made the break with Mark Brand by this new departure which she considered it essential for her to make; and she was thereby delivered from his attentions for a time. At Helmsley Manor she was treated with much consideration, being considered a superior young person for her class; and although only a scullery maid in name, she was allowed a good deal of liberty, and promoted to attend on Lady Caroline Bertie, who, as a girl of fourteen, was then visiting Mrs. Adair, the mother of the man whom she afterward married. Mary Wyvis was lured into confiding one or two of her little secrets to Lady Caroline; and when she left Helmsley Court to marry John Wyvis, that young lady took so much interest in the affair that she attended the wedding and gave the bride a wedding-present. And as she often visited the Adairs, she seldom failed to asked after Mary, until that consummation of Mary's fate which effectually destroyed Lady Caroline's interest in her.

Wyvis the ploughman was accidentally killed, and Mary's child, named John after his father, was born shortly after the ploughman's death. It was then that Mark Brand sought out his old love, and to better purpose than before. His passion for her had been strengthened by what he was pleased to call her desertion of him. He proposed marriage, and offered to adopt the boy. Mary Wyvis accepted both propositions, and left England with him almost immediately, in order to escape mocking and slanderous tongues.

It was inevitable that evil should be said of her. Mark Brand's pursuit of her before her marriage to Wyvis had been well known. That she should marry him so soon after her first husband's death seemed to point to some continued understanding between the two, and caused much gossip in the neighborhood. Such gossip was really unfounded, for Mary was a good woman in her way, though not a very wise one; but the charges against her were believed in many places, and never disproved. It was even whispered that the little boy was Mark Brand's own son, and that John Wyvis had met his death through some foul play. Rumors of this kind died down in course of time. But they were certainly sufficient to account for the disfavor with which the County eyed the Brands in general, and Mrs. Brand in particular. Mark Brand lived very little at the Red House after his marriage. He knew what a storm of indignation had been spent upon his conduct, and he was well aware of the aspersions on his wife's character. He was too reckless by nature to try to set things straight: he considered that he did his best for his family when he left England behind him, and trained the boys, Wyvis and Cuthbert, to love a foreign land better than their own.

He grew very fond of Mary's boy during the first few years of his married life. This fondness led him to wish that the boy were his own, and the appearance of Cuthbert did not alter this odd liking for another man's son. He never cared very much for Cuthbert, who was delicate and lame from babyhood; but Wyvis was the apple of his eye. The boy was called John Wyvis: it was easy enough in a foreign country to let him slip into the position of the eldest of the family as Wyvis Brand. A baby son was born before Cuthbert, and dying a month old, gave Mark all the opportunity that he needed. He sent word to old Wyvis at Roxby that John's boy was dead; and he then quietly substituted Wyvis in place of his own son. Every year, he argued, would make the real difference of age between John's boy and the dead child less apparent: it would save trouble to speak of Wyvis as his own, and troublesome inquiries were not likely to be made. Time and use made him almost forget that Wyvis did not really belong to him; and but for his wife's insistence he would not even have made the will which secured the Red House to his adopted son. Cuthbert was of course treated with scandalous injustice by this will; but the secret had been well kept, and the story was fully known to nobody save the Brands' lawyer and Mary Brand herself.

The way in which Lady Caroline had ferreted out the secret remained a mystery to the Brands. But they never gave her half enough credit for her remarkable cleverness. When she saw Wyvis Brand, she had been struck almost at once by his likeness to John Wyvis, the man who married her old favorite, Mary. She leaped quickly to the conviction that he was not Mark Brand's son. And when Margaret's infatuation for him declared itself, she went straight to her husband's man of business, and commissioned him to find out all that could be found out about the Brands during the period of their early married life in Italy. The task was surprisingly easy. Mark Brand had taken few precautions, for he had drifted rather than deliberately steered towards the substitution of Wyvis for his own eldest son. A very few inquiries elicited all that Lady Caroline wanted to know. But she had not been quite sure of her facts when she entered the Red House, and, if Mrs. Brand had been a little cooler and a little braver, she might have defeated her enemy's ends, and carried her secret inviolate to her grave.

But courage and coolness were the last things that could be expected from Mrs. Brand. She had never possessed a strong mind and the various chances and changes of her life had enfeebled instead of strengthening it. Mark Brand had proved by no means a loving or faithful husband, and did not scruple to taunt her with her inferiority of position, and to threaten that he would mortify Wyvis' pride some day by a revelation of his true name and descent. He was too fond of Wyvis to carry his threat into effect but he made the poor woman, his wife, suffer an infinity of torture, the greater part of which might have been avoided if she had chanced to be gifted with a higher spirit and a firmer will.

Wyvis Brand went immediately to London after the interview with his lawyer in Beaminster, and from London, in a few days, he wrote to Cuthbert. The letter was curt, but not unfriendly. He wished, he said, to repair the injustice that had been done, and to restore to Cuthbert the inheritance that was his by right. He had already instructed his lawyers to take the necessary steps, and he was glad to think that Cuthbert and Nora would now be able to make the Red House what it ought to be. He hoped that they would be very happy. For himself, he thought of immigrating: he was heartily sick of modern civilization, and believed that he would more easily find friends and fellow-workers amongst the Red Skins of the Choctaw Indians than in "County" drawing-rooms. And only by this touch did Wyvis betray the bitterness that filled his heart.