Running the Gauntlet: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

The occasion was too solemn to admit of so trivial a feeling as curiosity; but had it not been so, that feminine sentiment would undoubtedly have predominated among the emotions with which Mrs. Chisholm and Helen Manningtree received Colonel Alsager, when, after a lengthened interval, he made his appearance in the long drawing-room. As it was, their mutual greetings were kindly but subdued. The presence of illness and danger in the house superseded all minor considerations, and Colonel Alsager might have been a guest as familiar as he was in reality strange, for all the emotion his presence excited. Mrs. Chisholm introduced Cuthbert Farleigh, and added to the usual formula a few words to the effect that he was a favoured guest with Sir Peregrine, which led Alsager to receive the introduction warmly, and to prosecute the acquaintance with zeal. The curate thawed under the influence of the Colonel's genial manner,--so warm and attractive, with all its solemn impress of regret, fear, and uncertainty. After a little while the women went away again to resume their dreary watch; and Dr. Galton came down to make his report, and to join Alsager at his late and much-needed dinner. A telegraphic message had been sent to London to seek further medical assistance; but the great man, who could do so little, could not reach Knockholt before the morning. In the mean time there was little change in the state of the patient; but Dr. Galton adhered to the hopeful opinion he had formed at sunset. Cuthbert Farleigh went away from the Park, and sat down to the preparation of his Sunday's sermon with a troubled mind. "What a capital good fellow Alsager is," he thought, "with all his faults! What a number of questions he asked about her! He takes a great interest in her. Well, it would be a very natural and a very nice thing." It is granted, is it not, on all hands, that the abandonment of proper names and the substitution of pronouns--which, whether personal or impersonal, are at all events demonstrative--is a very suspicious circumstance in certain cases?

Sir Peregrine Alsager did not die, as Laurence had thought, and dreaded that he was to die, with the silence between them unbroken, the estrangement unremoved. Nothing could undo the past, indeed; but the present was given to the father and son; and its preciousness was valued duly by them both. In a few days after Laurence's arrival the paralysis loosened its grasp of his father's faculties; and though he still lay in his bed shrunk, shrivelled, and helpless, he could see, and hear, and speak. Sometimes his words were a little confused, and a slight but distressing lapse of memory caused him to pause and try painfully first to recall the word he wanted, and next to accomplish its utterance; but gradually this difficulty wore away, and the old man spoke freely, though little. He was greatly changed by his illness--was most pathetically patient; and his face, a little distorted by the shock, and never more to wear the healthy hue of his vigorous age, assumed an expression of tranquil waiting. The supremacy of his will was gone with the practical abolition of his authority. He let it slip unnoticed. He cared little for anything now but the presence of his son and the progress of the mornings and the evenings which were making the week-days of his life, and wearing towards the dawn of the eternal Sabbath. He loved to have Helen with him, and would regard her with unwonted interest and tenderness,--keenest when she and Laurence met beside his couch, and talked together, as they came gradually to do, very often at first for his sake, and afterwards, as he hoped, as he never doubted, for their own. Yes, the keen anxiety, the foresight, the intensifying of former mental attributes which characterize some kinds of physical decay in persons of a certain intellectual and moral constitution and calibre, showed themselves strongly in Sir Peregrine Alsager, and centred themselves in his son. He had asked nothing, and had heard little of his wandering and purposeless life; but that little had made the old man--held back now, on the brink of the eternal verity, by no scruples of coldness, of pride, of pique, or of scrupulosity--very anxious that his son should marry, and settle down to live at Knockholt Park at least a fair proportion of the year. With that considerate, but perhaps, after all, beautiful, simplicity which restores to age the faith of youth, and builds her shrines for all the long-shattered idols, Sir Peregrine reasoned of his own life and his own experience, and applied his deductions to his son's far different case. He was, however, too wise to put his wishes into words, or even to make them evident without words, to their objects. But there were two persons in the small group who tenanted Knockholt Park who knew that the dearest wish of Sir Peregrine's heart, that desire which overpassed the present and projected itself into the inscrutable future, when its fruition might perchance never be known to him, was that Laurence Alsager, his son, should marry Helen Manningtree, his ward. The two who had penetrated the inmost feelings of the old man were Cuthbert Farleigh and Mrs. Chisholm.

How sped the days with Colonel Alsager in the old home? Heavily, to say the least of it. He had undergone strong excitement of various kinds; and now reaction had set in, with the unspeakable relief of his father's reprieve from immediate death. During his journey from Redmoor to Knockholt he had been an unresisting prey to bitter and confused regrets; so bitter, they seemed almost like remorse; so unavailing, they touched the confines of despair. The scenes in which he had lately played a part, the problems he had been endeavouring to solve, rushed from his view, and retired to the recesses of his memory,--to come out again, and occupy him more closely, more anxiously than ever, when the cruel grasp of suspense and terror was removed from his heart; when the monotony of the quiet house, and the life regulated by the exigencies of that of an invalid, had fairly settled down upon him; when all the past seemed distant, and all the future had more than the ordinary uncertainty of human existence. There was no estrangement between Laurence and his father now; but the son knew that there was no more similarity than before. Their relative positions had altered, and with the change old things had passed away. The pale and shrunken old man who lay patiently on his couch beside the large window of the library at Knockholt, at which the peacocks had now learned to tap and the dogs to sniff, was not the silent though urbane, the hale and arriéré country gentleman to whom his Guardsman's life had been an unattractive mystery, and all his ways distasteful. That Guardsman's life, those London ways, the shibboleth of his set, even the distinctive peculiarities of his own individuality, had all been laid aside, almost obliterated, by the dread reality which had drawn so near, and still, as they both knew, was unobtrusively ever nigh at hand. Father and son were much together at certain regulated times; and Laurence was unfailing in his scrupulous observance of all the wishes, his intuitive perception of all the fancies, of the invalid. Still there were many hours of solitude to be got through in every day; and Laurence Alsager held stricter and truer commune with his own heart, while they passed over the dial, than he had ever been used to hold. The quiet of the house; the seclusion of the park in which he walked and rode; the formal beauty of the garden, where he strolled with Helen Manningtree, and listened to her enthusiastic expectations of what its appearance would be when the time of flowers should have fully arrived; the regularity of the household; the few and trivial interruptions from without;--all these things had a strong influence on the sensitive temperament of Laurence Alsager, and gradually isolated him within himself. There was nothing to disturb the retrospective and introspective current of his thoughts; and in those quiet weeks of waiting he learned much of himself, of life, and of truth--knowledge which otherwise might never have come to him. It was not very long before his mind recurred painfully to Redmoor and its mistress, whom he had left in a position of difficulty and danger. He remembered the counsel he had given her, and he wondered whether it might avail. He pondered on all the eventualities which the triste sagesse of a man of the world taught him to anticipate, and longed for power to avert them or to alter their character. He learned some wholesome lessons in these vain aspirations, and looked deeper into the stream of life than he had ever looked before.

He looked at Lady Mitford's position from every point of view; he weighed and measured her trials, and then he began to speculate upon her temptations. All at once it struck him that he had ceased to fear Lord Dollamore; that that distinguished personage had somehow dropped out of his calculations; that he was occupying himself rather with her sentimental griefs than with the serious danger which he had believed, a little while ago, menaced her reputation and her position. He feared Laura Hammond, and he ardently desired to penetrate the full meaning of Miss Gillespie's warning. He perfectly understood the difficulty of conveying to a mind so innocent as that of Lady Mitford the full force and meaning of the counsel he had given her, the hopelessness of inducing her to arm herself with a woman's legitimate weapon--the strong desire to please,--and getting her to use it against her husband. She did not lack intelligence, but she did not possess tact; and her nature was too refined and straightforward to give her any chance in so unequal a contest as that into which her husband's worthlessness had forced her.

And now another truth came steadily up from the abyss into which Alsager was always gazing, and confronted him. That truth was the motive which animated his thoughts and inspired his perceptions; which gave him so clear an insight into Lady Mitford's position, and enabled him to read her heart with more distinctness than she herself could have interpreted it. One day Laurence Alsager knew, and acknowledged to himself, what this motive was, whence came this intuition. He loved Georgie Mitford. Yes; the idle speculation, the indignation of a true gentleman at beholding the innocent wronged and the trusting deceived; the loyal instinct of protection; the contemptuous anger which had led him to detest Laura Hammond and to desire her discomfiture; the tender and true sympathy of a world-worn man with a pure and simple woman, to whom the world and its ways are all unknown and unsuspected; the shrinking from beholding the suffering which experience must inflict,--all these had been evident--they had existed in utter integrity and vitality. Alsager had not deceived himself then, neither did he deceive himself now; and though they still existed, they had receded from their prominence,--they did but supplement another, a more powerful, a more vital reality. He loved her--he never doubted the fact, never questioned it more. He loved with a love as much superior to, as much stronger, holier, truer, and more vital than, any love which he had ever before felt or fancied--as his present self-commune was more candid, searching, and complete than any counsel ever previously held in the secret chambers of his brain and heart. He had settled this point with himself, and was moodily pondering on the possible consequences of the fact, and on the alteration in his own position towards Lady Mitford which it implied, when he received a letter from Georgie. It was not the first,--several notes had passed between them in the easy intimacy of their acquaintance; but it was the first since that acquaintance had strengthened into friendship. And now, for him, friendship too had passed away, and in its place stood love--dangerous, delicious, entrancing, bewildering love. So Georgie's letter had altogether a different value and significance for him now. This was the letter:

"Redmoor, -- March 18--.

"Dear Colonel Alsager,--Sir Charles received your kind note, but has been too busy to write; so he has asked me to do so, and I comply with very great pleasure. I need hardly say how truly glad we were to hear of the improvement in Sir Peregrine's state, and how earnestly we hope he may completely rally. All things are going on here much as usual. Poor Mr. Hammond is very ill,--failing rapidly, I am sure; this week he is suffering fearfully from bronchitis. They talked of going away, but that is of course impossible. I am a good deal with him, and I think he likes me. Lord Dollamore has come back from town, and is staying here,--doing nothing but lounge about and watch everybody. Is there any chance that we shall have the pleasure of seeing you again if we are detained here much longer? I hoped Charley would have taken me to see my father, who has been ailing this cold spring weather; but I fear the long delay here will prevent that,--he will be impatient to get to town as soon as possible. Pray let us hear from you how Sir Peregrine is. Charley is out, but I know I may add his kindest regards to my own.--Yours, dear Colonel Alsager, always sincerely,

"Georgina Mitford.

"P.S. I have not forgotten your advice for a minute, nor ceased to act upon it, and to thank you for it from my heart. But--it is so difficult to write upon this subject--difficult to me to write on any, for, as you know, I am not clever, unfortunately for me. Could you not come?"

Laurence read and re-read this simple letter with unspeakable pain and keen irrepressible delight. She trusted him; she thought of him; she wished for his presence! Could he not come? she asked. No; he could not. But supposing he could--ought he? Well, he was a brave man and a true, and he faced that question also. How he answered it remains to be seen.