CHAPTER XIII
They were married abroad as it happened. Jim had exchanged; but his regiment, before going on to India, had been appointed to the garrison at Malta. There the family had joined him for the winter.
Fate had spared Sir Harry his last disappointment in life. Jim had not told him about Eleanor. There was no hurry. It could be done at any time. And he had died, after a few days illness, early in the spring. He had been busy, unknown to the others, fixing up with his sister Mary for Eleanor to come out in London during the season, and had built great hopes upon the result. Thus, so far as that matter was concerned, the poor old gentleman had died happy. Eleanor and her mother stopped on at a little place up in the hills. Anthony came out at the end of the summer; and they had been married in the English church. It was arranged that Lady Coomber should remain at Malta till Jim left for India; it might be the next year or the year after. Then she would come back to England and live with them at The Abbey. Anthony had not hoped to be able to take Eleanor back to The Abbey, but the summer had brought him unusual good fortune. As a matter of fact, everything seemed to be prospering with him just now. He was getting nervous about it, wondering how long it would last. He was glad that he had been able to pay Jim a good price for the place; beyond that, when everything was cleared up and Lady Coomber’s annuity provided for, there would not be much left.
Mrs. Strong’nth’arm would not come to live at The Abbey, though Eleanor was anxious that she should and tried to persuade her. Whether she thought Eleanor did not really want her or whether the reasons she gave him were genuine Anthony could not be sure.
“I should be wandering, without knowing it, into the kitchen,” she explained; “or be jumping up suddenly to answer a bell. Or maybe,” she added with a smile, “I’d be slipping out of the back door of an evening to the little gate behind the stables, and thinking I saw your father under the shadow of the elms, where he used to be always waiting for me. I’ll be happier in the old square. There are no ghosts there—leastways, not for my eyes to see.”
Besides, there was his aunt to be considered. He had thought that she might find a home with one or another of her chapel friends. But Mrs. Newt had fallen away from grace, as it was termed, and was no longer in touch with her former circle. She had given back her fine tombstone to old Batson the stonemason who, not knowing what else to do with it, had used it to replace a broken doorstep leading to his office. She had come to picture her safe arrival at the gates of Endless Bliss with less complacency. She no longer felt sure of her welcome.
“Don’t see what I’ve done to deserve it,” she said. “All that I’ve ever tried to do has been to make myself comfortable in this world and to take good care, as I thought, to be on the right road for the next. I used to think it all depended upon faith: that all you had to do was to believe. But your poor uncle used to say it sounded a bit too cheap to be true. And if he was right and the Lord demands works, guess I’ll cut a poor figure.”
The idea had come to her to replace the optimism of her discarded tombstone by a simple statement of facts with underneath: “Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.” But the head sexton, on being consulted as a friend, had objected to the quotation as one calculated to let down the tone of the cemetery, and had urged something less committal.