Running the Gauntlet: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

"What on earth can Laurence be writing to me about that requires such precaution?" thought Helen anxiously; and then she rang the bell, handed over the other letters to the footman for proper distribution, and retired to her own room, where she read the following:

"Dover.

"My Dear Helen,--I am devoting the last evening which I shall pass in England for an indefinite period, to writing to you a letter, which I shall take the precaution of sending so that its existence may be known to none but you, at the present time. A certain portion of its contents must necessarily be communicated to others; but you will use your discretion, upon which in this, and all other things, I rely with absolute confidence.

"You must not let this preamble alarm you; there is nothing to occasion you any trouble or sorrow in what I am about to say to you. It will be a long story, and, I daresay, a clumsily--told one, for I am eminently unready with my pen; but it will interest you, Helen, for my sake and for your own. When I tell you that this story is not a new one,-that it does not include anything that has occurred after I left Knockholt, though I am indirectly impelled to write it to you by circumstances which have happened since then,--you will wonder why I did not tell it to you in person, during the period when our companionship was so close and easy,--so delightful to me, and I am quite sure I may add, so pleasant to you. I could not tell you then, because I was not sufficiently sure of myself. I had an experiment to try--an experience to undergo--before I could be certain, even in the limited sense of human security, of my own future; and until these were over and done with, all was vague for me. They are over and done with now: and I am going to tell you all about yourself, and a good deal about myself.

"You know that among the sorrows of my life there is one which must be life-long. It is the remembrance of my conduct to my father, and of the long tacit estrangement which preceded our last meeting, and which, but for a providential interposition, might never have been even so far atoned for and mitigated as it was before his death. It would be difficult to account for this estrangement; it is impossible to excuse it; there never was any reproach on either side,--indeed there could not have been on mine, for the fault was all my own,--and there never was any explanation. My father doubtless believed, as he was justified in believing, that any wish of his would have little weight with me;--he seldom expressed one; and I am convinced that one thing on which he had set his heart very strongly, one paramount desire, he cautiously abstained from expressing, that he might, by keeping me ignorant of it during his lifetime, give it the additional chance of realization which it might derive from the sanctity of a posthumous appeal to the feelings of an undutiful and careless son, when those feelings should be intensified by unavailing regret. I did learn, dear Helen, after the barrier of eternal silence had been placed between my father and me, that he had cherished one paramount desire, and that he had resorted to such an expedient in order to induce me to respect and to fulfil it.

"My amazement and discomfiture when I found that my father's will was of so far distant a date that it made no mention of you were great. I could not understand why he had not supplemented the will which existed by another, in which you would be amply provided for, and his wishes concerning your future fully explained. My long and wilful absence from my father had prevented my having any real acquaintance with you. To me you were merely a name, seldom heard, hardly remembered. Had I not gone to Knockholt when I did, you would have remained so; and there was no one else who could be supposed to take an obligatory interest in you. How came it, I thought, that my father had taken no precaution against such a contingency--which, in fact, had so nearly been a reality? You will say he trusted to the honour and the gentlemanly feeling of his son; and so I read the riddle also; but reflection showed me that I was wrong. A more strictly just man never lived than my father; and he must have been strictly unjust had he allowed the future fortunes of a young girl whom he had reared and educated--who had been to him as a daughter for years--to depend upon the caprice or the generosity of a man to whom she was an utter stranger, and between whom and herself the tie of blood was of the slightest description. Nor was delicacy less characteristic of my father than justice. (Ah, Helen, how keenly I can see all these things now that he is gone!) He would have shrunk as sensitively as you would from anything that would have obliged you and me to meet for the first time in the characters of pensioned and pensioner. I knew all this; and I was utterly confounded at the absence of any later will. I had the most complete and diligent search made; but in vain. There was no will, Helen, but there was a letter. In the drawer of the desk which my father always used, there was a letter. How do you think it was addressed? Not to 'my son'--not to 'Colonel Alsager;' but to 'Sir Laurence Alsager, Bart.'! It was a painful letter--painful and precious; painful because a tone of sadness, of disappointment, of content in feeling that the writer had nearly reached his term of life, pervaded it; precious because it was full of pardon and peace, of the fulness of love for his only son. I cannot let you see the letter,--it is too sacred for any eyes but those for which it was intended; but I can tell you some of its contents, and I can make you understand its tone. As a mother speaks to her son going forth into the arena of life, the night before their parting, in the dark, on her knees, by his bedside, with her head upon his pillow; as she speaks of the time to come, when she will watch and wait for him, of the time that is past, whose memories are so precious, which she bids him remember and be brave and true; as she makes light of all his faults and shortcomings,--so did my dear old father--my father who had grown gray and old; alone, when I might have been with him, and was not--write to me. God bless him, and God forgive me! He never reproached me, living; what punishment he has inflicted upon me, dead! The letter was long; and it varied, I think, through every key in which human tenderness can be sung. But enough of this.

"A portion of the contents concerned you nearly, my dear Helen. I can repeat them to you briefly. I knew, and you know, that your father and my father--very distant relatives--had been playmates in boyhood, and attached friends in manhood. We knew that your father died on his voyage home from India, and just after he had consigned you and your black nurse to the care of the captain of the ship, to be sent, on landing, to Knockholt Park. I believe you have your father's letter to my father, in which he solemnly, but fearlessly, entreats his protection for the orphan child, whose credentials it is to form. He had left your mother and her baby in an alien grave at Barrackpore, and I suppose he had not the strength to live for you only, 'little Nelly,' as they called you then. At all events, he died; and I knew in a vague kind of way about that, and my father's care of you, and how you grew up with him, and made his home cheerful and happy, which his only son left carelessly, and forsook for long. The letter recapitulated all this, and told me besides, that your mother had been my father's first love. Perhaps she was also his only love--God knows. He was a good husband to my mother during their brief married life, I am sure; for I remember her well; and she was always smiling and happy. But the girl he loved had preferred Robert Manningtree with nothing but his commission, to Peregrine Alsager with a large estate and a baronetcy for his fortunate future. My father, preux chevalier that he was, did not forget to tell me that she never repented or had reason to regret that preference. Thus, Helen, you were a legacy to him, bequeathed not alone by friendship, but by love. As such he accepted you; as such he prized you, calm and undemonstrative as he was; as such it was the cherished purpose of his life to intrust you to me--not that I was to be your guardian in his place, but that I was to be your husband. He thought well of me, in spite of all, you see; he did not despair of his ungracious son, or he never would have dreamed of conferring so great a privilege on me, of suffering you to incur so great a risk. He had had this darling project so strongly in his mind, and yet had been so convinced that any betrayal of it to me would only prevent my seeking you, that my persistent neglect of the old home had a double bitterness for him; and at length, two years ago, hearing a rumour that I was about to marry one of the beauties of the season, he relinquished it, and determined to make a will, bequeathing to you the larger portion of his unentailed property. The rumour was true as to my intentions, but false as to my success. The lady in question jilted me for a richer marriage, thank God! I don't say this from pique, but from conviction; for I have seen her and her husband, and I have seen her since her husband's death. She did not hold her perjured state long; nor did she win the prize for which she jilted me. I am a much richer man than her husband ever was, and he has left her comparatively poor. In a storm of rage and disgust I left England, without going to Knockholt--without having seen you since your childhood--without bidding my father farewell. This grieved him much: but I was free; I was not married. I was labouring under angry and bitter feelings towards all womankind. I should come home again, my father thought, still unmarried, and his hope would be fulfilled. He did not make the will. I remained away much longer than he supposed I should have done, and not nearly so long as in my anger and mortification I had determined to remain. You know the rest, dear Helen--you know that I lingered and dallied with time and duty, and did not go to Knockholt until it was all but too late. A little while before he met with the accident, my father had written a letter somewhat similar in purport; but he had not seen me then, and I suppose it was not warmly affectionate enough for the old man's liking, and he wrote that which I now mention at many, and, I fear, painful, intervals of his brief convalescence. It was finished just a week before he died.

"You will have read all this with emotion, Helen; and I daresay at this point your feelings will be very painful. Mine are little less so, and the task of fully explaining them to you is delicate and difficult. The truthfulness, the candour of your nature will come to my assistance when you read, as their remembrance aids me while I write. My first impulse on reading my father's letter was to exult in the thought that there was anything possible to me by which his wishes could be respected. My second--and it came speedily--was to feel that the marriage he desired between us never could take place. Are you reassured, Helen? Have you been frightened at the image your fancy has created, of a debt of gratitude to be discharged to Sir Peregrine at the cost of your own happiness, or disavowed at the cost of seeming cold, ungrateful, and undutiful? Have you had a vision of me in the character of an importunate suitor, half imploring a concession, half pressing a right, and wholly distasteful to you? If you have, dismiss it, for it is only a vision, and never will be realized to distress you. Why do I say this? Because I know that not only do you not love me, but that you do love Cuthbert Farleigh. Forgive the plainness and directness with which I allude to a fact yet perhaps unavowed to him, but perfectly well known by and acknowledged to yourself. No betrothal could make you more truly his than you have been by the tacit promise of your own heart--I know not for how long, but before I came to Knockholt Park, I am sure. If I had not seen the man, I should equally have discerned the fact, for I am observant; and though I have, I hope, outlived the first exuberance of masculine conceit, I did not err in imputing the tranquil, ladylike indifference with which you received me to a preoccupied mind, rather than to an absence of interest or curiosity about the almost unknown son of your guardian. Life at Knockholt Park has little variety or excitement to offer; and the advent of a Guardsman, a demi-semi-cousin, and an heir-apparent, would have made a little more impression, would it not, had not the Church secured its proper precedence of the Army? I perceived the state of things with satisfaction; for I liked you very much from the first, and I thought Cuthbert a very good fellow; just the man to hold your respect all his life long and to make you happy. In my reflections on your share, then, in the impossibility of the fulfilment of my father's request, I experienced little pain. My own was not so easily disposed of after his death as during his life. I was destined to frustrate his wishes. Had you and I met, as we ought to have done, long before; had I had the good fortune to have seen you and learned to contrast you with the meretricious and heartless of your sex, who had frittered away my heart and soured my temper, perhaps, Helen, I might have won you, and the old man might have been made happy.

"We met under circumstances which made any such destiny for us impossible, for reasons which equally affected both. My preoccupation was of a different sort from yours; it had neither present happiness nor future hope in it,--it had much of the elements of doubt and fear; but it was powerful, far more powerful than I then thought, and powerful it will always be. All this is enigmatical to you, dear Helen, and it must remain so. I would not have said anything about it, but that I owed it to you, to the friendship which I trust will never know a chill, to prevent your supposing that your share in the frustration of my father's wishes is disproportionate to mine. I would not have you think--as without this explanation you might justly think--that I magnanimously renounce my claims, my pretensions to your love in favour of the actual possessor. No, Helen; for us both our meeting was too late. We were not to love each other; I was not to be suffered to win the heart of a true and priceless woman, such as you are, when I had not a heart to give her in exchange. But though we were not to love each other, we were destined to be friends--friends in the fullest and firmest sense; and believe me, friendship between a man and woman, with its keen sympathy, its unrestrained, confidence, and its perfect toleration, is a tie as valuable as it is rare.

"Now I have told you almost all I have to tell about my father's letter. I suppose we shall both feel, and continue always to feel, that there was something hard, something almost cruel in the fate which marked him out for disappointment, and you and me for its ministers. But this must be; and we must leave it so, and turn to the present and vital interests of our lives. We shall think of him and mourn for him none the less that we will speak of this no more.