Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

Nothing could be done, of course. Hand in hand, husband and wife visited the chamber of death, hand in hand they left it, with saddened faces and slow, reverential step. But Sir George never forgot the lesson of that night; never again doubted the woman who had given him her whole heart; nor joined in the sneer of those who protest that purity and self-sacrifice are incompatible with earthly love.

But for the snow, Madame de Montmirail would have left Hamilton Hill next day. It was delightful, no doubt, to witness the perfect understanding, the mutual confidence, that had been re-established between Cerise and her husband; but it was not amusing. “Gratifying, but a little wearisome,” said the Marquise to herself, while she looked from her window on the smooth undulating expanse of white that forbade the prospect of travelling till there should come a thaw. Never perhaps in her whole life had this lady so much felt the want of excitement, intrigue, business, dissipation, even danger, to take her out of herself, as she expressed it, and preserve the blood from stagnating in her veins. It is only doing her justice also to state that she was somewhat anxious about Malletort. With half a yard of snow on the ground, however, not to mention drifts, it was hopeless to speculate on any subject out of doors till the weather changed.

For Slap-Jack, nevertheless, whose whole life had been passed in conflict with the elements, even a heavy fall of snow seemed but a trifling obstacle, easily to be overcome, and on no account to interfere with so important a ceremony as a seaman’s wedding. Assisted by his shipmate, who had consented to officiate as “best man” on the occasion, he set to work, “with a will,” so he expressed it, and cleared away a path four feet broad from the Hill to the “Hamilton Arms.” Down this path he proceeded in great state to be married, on the very day the thaw set in, attended by Sir George and Lady Hamilton, the Marquise, Smoke-Jack, and all the servants of the establishment. Ere the ceremony was accomplished, the wind blew high and the rain fell in torrents, omens to which the old foretopman paid not the slightest attention, but of which his best man skilfully availed himself to congratulate the bridegroom on his choice.

“It looks dirty to windward,” he proclaimed, in a confidential whisper, heard by the whole company; “and a chap ain’t got overmuch sea-room when he’s spliced. But she’s weatherly, mate; that’s what she is—wholesome and weatherly. I knows the trim on ’em.”

At a later period in the afternoon, however, when I am sorry to say, he had become more than slightly inebriated, Smoke-Jack was heard to express an equally flattering opinion as to the qualities, “wholesome and weatherly,” of Mrs. Dodge, not concealing his intention of making a return voyage, “in ballast o’ coorse,” as he strongly insisted, to these latitudes, when he had delivered a cargo in London. Shrewd observers were of opinion, from these compromising remarks and other trifling incidents of the day, that it was possible the hostess of the “Hamilton Arms” might be induced to change her name once more, under the irresistible temptation of subjugating so consistent a woman-hater as Smoke-Jack.

But in the last century, as in the present, death and marriage trod close on each other’s heels. The customers at the “Hamilton Arms” had not done carousing to the health of bride and bridegroom, the wintry day had not yet closed in with a mild, continuous rain, and Smoke-Jack was in the middle of an interminable forecastle yarn, when a couple of labouring men brought in the body of a darkly-clad foreign gentleman, who had lately been lodging at this roadside hostelry. They had found him half covered by a waning snow-wreath just under the wall in the “stell,” said these honest dalesmen, below Borrodaile Rise. He must have been dead for days, but there was no difficulty in identifying the Abbé, for the frozen element in which he was wrapped had kept off the very taint of death, and preserved him, to use their own language, “in uncommon fettle, to be sure!” Except the Marquise, I doubt if any one regretted him, and yet it seemed a strange and piteous fate for the gifted scholar, the able churchman, the polished courtier, thus to perish by breaking his neck off a Yorkshire mare on a Yorkshire moor.

“Men are so different!” observed Cerise, as she and George discussed the Abbé’s death, and, indeed, his character, walking together through the park, after the snow was gone, in the soft air of a mild winter’s day, nowhere so calm and peaceful as in our English climate.

“And women, too,” replied George, looking fondly in the dear face he had loved all his life, and thinking that her like could only be found amongst the angels in heaven.

Cerise shook her head.