In other words, Lady Millicent’s children, albeit they did not openly either resist her authority or turn a cold shoulder to her tardy advances, were what is vulgarly called “no comfort” to her at this trying season of her life—a season when disappointment rendered still more unendurable to others a temper already none of the sweetest, and when consciousness of failure subdued a spirit that had hitherto risen proudly above the threatened ills of life.
Perhaps, had Lady Millicent’s children been enabled to look within the heart that had at last begun to melt beneath the influence of maternal tenderness, their feelings might have been softened, moved by the knowledge that, in spite of bygone proofs to the contrary, they were nevertheless beloved; but no such fairy-gift being bestowed upon them, and it being a boasted peculiarity of Lady Millicent’s idiosyncrasy that she never betrayed to others the feelings that were making havoc in her breast, it followed that not only the son whose grief for his brother’s departure had first aroused her maternal sympathies, but that the daughters—the sickly Rhoda and the more spirited Katherine—should have remained in ignorance of their mother’s yearnings after affection, while, in a silence full of reproachful meaning, they brooded over the events of the past.
Of the three who so often met together to talk in saddened whispers of their banished brother, of poor Sophy’s death, and, when Rhoda was not present, of her failing health, her broken spirits, she who was the most rebellious, the least willing to submit to the gloom which death and failure had cast around their home, was Kate—Kate, the gay-hearted and the insouciante—Kate who had expected to marry, and had hoped to be happy—Kate, to whom the idea of a return, in statu quo, to the dulness and monotony of Gillingham was as a sentence of banishment to a desert land beyond the seas. And after all they did not return, at least for the dead season, to Gillingham; for a medical opinion, demanded with an anxiety carefully hidden from her children, on the condition of Rhoda’s health pronounced that for the chance of life it was absolutely necessary that before the autumn should set in Miss Vavasour must be in the sunny island where so many victims to east winds and defective lungs retire to die.
They are at Madeira now, those three sad and silent women; sad and silent, for Lady Millicent was too old to change the habits of a life, and Rhoda—depressed not only by a blighted attachment but by the sickness which is unto death—makes no effort to seem the thing she is not. Only Kate still longs and pines to be happy, but it is hard to fight against reality, and very hard to kick against the pricks. She knows that the fiat has gone forth, and that her poor pale Rhoda—the Rhoda who might, so Katie thinks, have been the contented wife of stupid George Wallingford—is to die. She foresees a dismal future with the mother whom she believes to be the cause of all their various sorrows, and Katherine’s rosy face begins to lose its freshness, and her voice its joyous tone while dwelling on the sadness of the days to come.
Reader, there is no crime related in these volumes; no commandment has been ostensibly and boldly broken; and yet the consequences of hidden sins, of sins unwhipped of justice, have proved terribly disastrous both to the “living that now live, and to the dead that have been called to judgment.” It is not always, it is not even often, that the results of an indulgence in evil passions, in iniquitous desires, and in the hungering after the things that belong neither of our own peace nor to that of others, are brought immediately before us. It may be that while we, in a safe haven from the storms of life at the season when
“Age steals to its allotted nook,
Contented and serene,”
are ignorant of the fact that the errors of others may be visited on our heads, “some forlorn and shipwrecked brother,” some poor deluded sister may be rueing the consequences (indirectly) of our shortcomings. Even of our very words—our thoughtlessness and apparently unmeaning remarks—evil may arise. The French proverb says, “Oui et non sont bien courts à dire, mais avant que de les dire il y faut penser longtemps.” Alas, how few amongst us are there who think before they act, how fewer still before they speak! A precious life may be lost, a child may be rendered motherless, the hearth of the old may be made desolate, and all because of thoughtless words spoken to foolish ears; while the truth of the old historian’s words “Cupido dominandi cunctis affectibus flagrantior est,” is to a certain degree verified by the evils which a love of power and a mean jealousy of rule have entailed upon more than one deserving character in the foregoing pages. Truly, seeing that we are but links in the great chain of human events, it behoves us to take good heed, not only to our ways but to the seeing that we offend not with the unruly member, which, according to high authority, never has and never can be brought under subjection. The characters in my story, whose future is darkened, and whose past has been made miserable by the great mischief which their busy tongues, their truant fancies, have wrought, can hardly (at least in the world’s opinion) be stigmatised as desperate and grievous sinners. They had only not bridled the “little member, which boasteth great things,” had only listened when duty should have caused them to close their ears to words which were dangerous because either too tender or too hard! Such had been amongst the sins of those whose punishment would be life-long—life-long, because for them the past is embittered by vain regrets—life-long, for neither to the mother who was false to her trust, nor to the old, the middle-aged, or the young whose faults and follies have been cited in this story, can remorse be divorced from the sad paths of memory—life-long because, looking back upon the stream of life, they, with heavy hearts, could not fail to see, midst the soft rippling waves, the heavy stone that
“some devil threw
At their life’s mid-current, thwarting God!”
THE END.
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,
PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.