He found his way to a handsome marble monument, surrounded by railings; the tomb of his wife. He had refused to lay her in the dismal family vault, below the church. Here he could come and be with her, so to speak; could imagine her close by; could hold converse with her in thought. Not a week passed that he did not come. He would stand and gaze at the solid carved mass of marble, surmounted by an exquisitely beautiful marble figure of an angel, modelled after the form and features which he had loved so passionately. Nobody ever came near this part of the churchyard, when he was seen to go there. His lifelong sorrow was deeply respected.
And generally the spot soothed him. To-day it brought only keener memories,—more intense realisation of his present position.
His true position. Not as men saw it,—the admired and beloved Squire, looked up to by all the country round; handsome, rich, popular, distinguished. In very truth his was a poverty-stricken spirit. His "cupboard" held a "skeleton" which none guessed at.
It was his own doing, and he knew this. None the easier to bear for that! The troubles which we have brought upon ourselves, through wrong-doing, are harder far to endure than those which come straight from the Hand of our Heavenly Father.
If he had been brave, if he had spoken out at the time, if he had accepted with courage and patience, a trying condition of things, he would, no doubt, long before this have lived down all that was unpleasant, have recovered completely from the nine-days' wonder.
Ah, but in so doing he might have lost her, his Mary! There was the crucial point! For when the truth came out, he had not won her. He had only been on the verge of proposing; full indeed of hope and joy, confident that she would be his. But, if this had become known, just at the critical moment, it might have turned the scale against him. Not perhaps by Lady Mary's own will, but by her parents' decision. And she, always gentle and yielding, would have submitted.
Except for that one possibility, he did see now how infinitely better and wiser it would have been to accept the inevitable, to let things take their natural course, much as he would have disliked that course. But — how could he?— when it might have meant—when at the time he believed that it did mean—the loss of her who was to him more than life itself!
Standing thus, deep in thought, he went through the past, recalling dates and events.
His mind reverted to boyish days, when he and his only brother were as one; a joyous, inseparable pair. Recollections leaped up of the gentle dreamy lad, always ready to follow his stronger guidance, always winning and easily led. Never a shadow had come between them when—thirty-two years before this date—the younger brother married, only to lose his wife less than two years later. A year later still the widower went abroad, seemingly still broken-hearted, taking with him his tiny fragile Katherine, and a trained nurse to look after her; Nurse Molly of the farm.
Then came long intervals of silence on the part of the younger brother, and constrained short letters, perplexing the elder. Once and once only the two met for a few days in Paris. Something of a drifting apart had come about between the two. Stirling, not understanding, would have been sorely troubled, but for the engrossing claims of his own love-affair, his intense devotion to the fair and sweet Lady Mary, at whose heart he was laying persistent siege. Wrapped up in this one aim, he hardly realised that his brother's absence from England had lasted between four and five years.