The Farringdons

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

Then Elisabeth told him, as briefly as she could, the story of George Farringdon's son; and, as she spoke, she watched the sulkiness in his face give place to interest, and the interest to hope, and the hope to triumph, until the naughty child gradually grew once more into the similitude of a Greek god.

"You are right—I am sure you are right," he said when she had finished; "it all fits in—the date and place of my birth, my parents' poverty and friendlessness, and the mystery concerning them. Oh! you can not think what this means to me. To be forever beyond the reach of poverty—to be able to do whatever I like for the rest of my life—to be counted among the great of the earth! It is wonderful—wonderful!" And he walked up and down the room in his excitement, while his voice shook with emotion.

"I shall have such a glorious time," he went on—"the most glorious time man ever had! Of course, I shall not live in that horrid Black Country—nobody could expect me to make such a sacrifice as that; but I shall spend my winters in Italy and my summers in Mayfair, and I shall forget that the world was ever cold and hard and cruel to me."

Elisabeth watched him curiously. So he never even thought of her and of what she was giving up. That his gain was her loss was a matter of no moment to him—it did not enter into his calculations. She wondered if he even remembered Quenelda, and what this would mean to her; she thought not. And this was the man Elisabeth had once delighted to honour! She could have laughed aloud as she realized what a blind fool she had been. Were all men like this? she asked herself; for, if so, she was glad she was too cold to fall in love. It would be terrible indeed to lay down one's life at the feet of a creature such as this; it was bad enough to have to lay down one's fortune there!

Throughout the rest of the interview Cecil lived up to the estimate that Elisabeth had just formed of his character: he never once remembered her—never once forgot himself. She explained to him that Christopher Thornley was the man who would manage all the business part of the affair for him, and give up the papers, and establish his identity; and she promised to communicate with Cecil as soon as she received an answer to the letter she had written to Christopher informing the latter that she believed she had at last discovered George Farringdon's son.

Amidst all her sorrow at the anticipation of giving up her kingdom into the hands of so unfitting a ruler as Cecil, there lurked a pleasurable consciousness that at last Christopher would recognise her worth, when he found how inferior her successor was to herself. It was strange how this desire to compel the regard which she had voluntarily forfeited, had haunted Elisabeth for so many years. Christopher had offended her past all pardon, she said to herself; nevertheless it annoyed her to feel that the friendship, which she had taken from him for punitive purposes, was but a secondary consideration in his eyes after all. She had long ago succeeded in convincing herself that the grapes of his affection were too sour to be worth fretting after; but she still wanted to make him admire her in spite of himself, and to realize that Miss Elisabeth Farringdon of the Osierfield was a more important personage than he had considered her to be. Half the pleasure of her success as an artist had lain in the thought that this at last would convince Christopher of her right to be admired and obeyed; but she was never sure that it had actually done so. Through all her triumphal progress he had been the Mordecai at her gates. She did not often see him, it is true; but when she did, she was acutely conscious that his attitude toward her was different from the attitude of the rest of the world, and that—instead of offering her unlimited praise and adulation—he saw her weaknesses as clearly now she was a great lady as he had done when she was a little girl.

And herein Elisabeth's intuition was not at fault; her failings were actually more patent to Christopher than to the world at large. But here her perception ended; and she did not see, further, that it was because Christopher had formed such a high ideal of her, that he minded so much when she fell short of it. She had not yet grasped the truth that whereas the more a woman loves a man the easier she finds it to forgive his faults, the more a man loves a woman the harder he finds it to overlook her shortcomings. A woman merely requires the man she loves to be true to her; while a man demands that the woman he loves shall be true to herself—or, rather, to that ideal of her which in his own mind he has set up and worshipped.

Her consciousness of Christopher's disapproval of the easy-going, Bohemian fashion in which she had chosen to walk through life, made Elisabeth intensely angry; though she would have died rather than let him know it. How dared this one man show himself superior to her, when she had the world at her feet? It was insupportable! She said but little to him, and he said still less to her, and what they did say was usually limited to the affairs of the Osierfield; nevertheless Elisabeth persistently weighed herself in Christopher's balances, and measured herself according to Christopher's measures; and, as she did so, wrote Tekel opposite her own name. And for this she refused to forgive him. She assured herself that his balances were false, and his measures impossible, and his judgments hard in the extreme; and when she had done so, she began to try herself thereby again, and hated him afresh because she fell so far short of them.

But now he was going to see her in a new light; if he declined to admire her in prosperity, he should be compelled to respect her in adversity; for she made up her mind she would bear her reverses like a Spartan, if only for the sake of proving to him that she was made of better material than he, in his calm superiority, had supposed. When he saw for himself how plucky she could be, and how little she really cared for outside things, he might at last discover that she was not as unworthy of his regard as he had once assumed, and might even want to be friends with her again; and then she would throw his friendship back again in his face, as he had once thrown hers, and teach him that it was possible even for self-righteous people to make mistakes which were past repairing. It would do him a world of good, Elisabeth thought, to find out—too late—that he had misjudged her, and that other people besides himself had virtues and excellences; and it comforted her, in the midst of her adversities, to contemplate the punishment which was being reserved for Christopher, when George Farringdon's son came into his own. And she never guessed—how could she?—that when at last George Farringdon's son did come into his own, there would be no Christopher Thornley serving under him at the Osierfield; and that the cup of remorse, which she was so busily preparing, was for her own drinking and not for Christopher's.

Christopher's expected answer to her epistle was, however, not forthcoming. The following morning Elisabeth received a letter from one of the clerks at the Osierfield, informing her that Mr. Thornley returned from his tour in Germany a week ago; and that immediately on his return he was seized with a severe attack of pneumonia—the result of a neglected cold—and was now lying seriously ill at his house in Sedgehill. In order to complete the purchase of a piece of land for the enlargement of the works, which Mr. Thornley had arranged to buy before he went away, it was necessary (the clerk went on to say) to see the plans of the Osierfield; and these were locked up in the private safe at the manager's house, to which only Christopher and Elisabeth possessed keys. Therefore, as the manager was delirious and quite incapable of attending to business of any kind, the clerk begged Miss Farringdon to come down at once and take the plans out of the safe; as the negotiations could not be completed until this was done.