“Well,” Mr. Babington continued, “it’s all comfortably settled at the last. I had my eye on this solution all along. I may say it was my doing all along, for I carefully refrained from pointing out to him what of course, in an ordinary way, it would have been my duty to point out—that in case of Miss Winifred’s refusal there was no after settlement. You don’t understand our law terms, perhaps? Well, it was just this, that if she refused to accept, there was no provision for what was to follow. I knew all along she would never accept to cut out her brothers—so here we come to a dead stop. He had not prepared for that contingency. I don’t believe he ever thought of it. She had obeyed him all her life, and he thought she would obey him after he was dead. She refused the condition, and here we are in face of a totally different state of affairs. The other wills were destroyed, and this was as good as destroyed by her refusal. What is to be done then but to return to the primitive condition of the matter? He dies intestate, the property is divided, and everybody, with the exception of that scamp Tom, is content.”

“I don’t understand,” Langton said: it was true so far, that the words were like an incoherent murmur in his ears—but even while he spoke, the meaning came to his mind like a flash of light. He had put aside all such (as he said to himself) degrading imaginations, and had made up his mind that his work was his life, and that a country doctor he was, and should remain; but, all the same, the sensation of knowing that Bedloe had become unattainable in fact and certainty, not only by the temporary alienation of a misunderstanding, went through his heart like a sudden knife.

“I can make you understand in a moment,” said Mr. Babington. “Miss Winifred made the will void by refusing to fulfil its condition, and no provision had been made for that emergency; therefore, in fact, it is as if poor Chester had never made a will at all: in which case the landed property goes to the eldest son. The personalty is divided. They will all be very well off,” the lawyer added. “There is nothing to complain of, though Tom is wild that he is not the heir, and Miss Winifred, poor girl—she was very anxious to do justice, but when it came to giving over her house to that pink-and-white creature, much too solid for her age, George’s wife—Well, it was her own doing; but she could not bear it, you know. Her going off like that left them all very much confused and bewildered, but I think on the whole it was the wisest thing she could do.”

“How going off?” cried Langton, starting to his feet.

“My dear fellow, didn’t you know? Come now, come now,” said the old lawyer, patting him on the arm, “this is carrying things too far. You should not have left her when she wanted all the support that was possible. And she should not have gone away without letting you know—but poor thing, poor thing! I don’t think she knew whether she was on her head or her heels. She couldn’t bear it. She just turned and fled and took no time to think.”

“Turned and fled? Do you mean to say—do you mean to tell me”—The young man, though he was no weakling, changed colour like a girl: his sunburnt, manly countenance showed a sudden pallor under the brown, something rose in his throat. He took a turn about the room in his sudden excitement, then came back, mastering himself as best he could. “I beg your pardon; this news is so unexpected, and everything is so strange. Of course,” he added, forcing himself into composure, “I shall hear.”

“Yes, of course you’ll hear; but if I were you, I should not wait to hear, I should insist on knowing, my young friend. Don’t let pride spoil your whole existence, as I’ve seen some things do with boys and girls. She is well enough off, to be sure. I wish my girls had the half or quarter of what she will have; but still it’s a come-down from Bedloe. And to give it up to Mrs. George, that was harder than she thought. She thought only of her brothers, you know, till she saw the wife. What the wife did to disgust her, I can’t tell, but I’ve always noticed that when there are two women in a case like this, they always feel themselves pitted against each other, and the men count for nothing with them. As soon as the thing was done, Miss Winnie forgot her brother: she saw only Mrs. George, and to give up to her was a bitter pill. She is a good girl, and meant everything that was good, but Mrs. George is a bitter pill: when it came to that, she felt that she could not put up with it. And you were not there, excuse me for reminding you. And she took it into her head that everything was against her, as girls do—and fled. That is the worst of girls, they are so hasty. You will know when you have daughters of your own.”

Thus the good man went on maundering, quite unconscious that his companion could have risen and slain him every time that he mentioned those daughters of his own. What had his daughters to do with Winnie? Mr. Babington talked a great deal more on that and every branch of the subject, until it seemed to him that it was time “to be driving on,” as he said. And then Edward had leisure for the first time to contemplate the situation in which he found himself. Self-reproach, anger, disappointment, coursed through his veins. He was wroth with the woman he loved, wroth with himself: one moment attributing to her a desire to cast him off, a want of confidence in him which it was unendurable to think of; the next, bitterly blaming his own selfish pride, which had driven him from her at the moment of her need. The high tide of conflicting sentiments was so hot within him that he went out to walk off his excitement, returning, to the consternation of his household, an hour or more after midnight, the most unhallowed of all promenadings in the opinion of the country folk. When he got back again to his dim little surgery and study, returning, as it seemed, to a dull life deprived of her and of all things, and to the overmastering consciousness that she was gone from him, perhaps by his own fault, the young doctor had a moment of despair: then he rose up and struck his hand upon the table, and laughed aloud at himself. “Bah!” he said to himself; “nobody disappears at this time of day. What a fool one is! as if these were the middle ages! Wherever she has gone, she must have left an address!” He laughed loud and long, though his laugh was not mirthful, at this bringing down of his despair to the easy possibilities of modern life. That makes all the difference between tragedy, which is mediæval, and comedy, which is of our days: though the comedy of common living involves a great many tragedies in every age, and even in our own.

CHAPTER XXI

AN address is not everything: there must be the will and the power to write, there must be the letter produced, and the address obtained. The very first step was hard. To go up to Bedloe and ascertain from the brother, who was “that cad” to Langton, where Winifred had gone, and thus betray his ignorance and the separation between them—the idea of this was such a mortification and annoyance to him as it is difficult to describe. He could not bear to expose himself to their remarks, to perhaps their laughter, perhaps, worse still, their pity. A few days elapsed before he could screw up his courage to this point, and when at last he did so, his brief and cold note was answered by George in person, whose dejected aspect bore none of the signs of triumph which Langton had expected.