‘Yes, my dear,’ said Mrs. Renton, in perfect good faith, ‘a great deal better. You always have the sense to see things. If I were you, I would reflect a little longer before I announced it, or did anything more in the matter, Ben.’
The answer Ben made to this proposal was to draw his betrothed close to his mother’s bedside within his own supporting arms. ‘Give her a kiss, mamma, and say God bless you,’ he said, bending down his own face close to Mary’s. And the mother, quite confused and bewildered, did as she was told, crying a little, and not knowing what to think. And before any one knew, Ben was gone again, off by express to join the steamer which sailed from Liverpool that night. He had just time; everything belonging to him having gone on before with poor Hillyard, who knew nothing about this morning’s expedition. And before noon the episode was all over, and the Frank Rentons once more in the foreground, and Mary reading the newspaper as if such a wild inroad of romance into the midst of reality had never been.
‘My dear, it is not that I am not as fond of you,—fonder of you than of anybody,’ Mrs. Renton said, when poor Mary, for one moment, owing to a paragraph about a shipwreck, fairly broke down; ‘but it does not seem somehow as if it were quite proper. And we can’t shut our eyes to it that he might have done better. It feels as if there was never to be any satisfaction in the boys’ marriages. I had a fortune of my own, and so had your grandmother; but everything now is going to sixes and sevens——’
‘Don’t say anything more about it, godmamma,’ said Mary, with an outburst of pent-up agitation, and the nervous panic that seizes a weakened mind. ‘Oh, how can we tell what may happen in the meantime? Let us say nothing more till he comes home.’
‘Well, to be sure, he might change his mind,’ said Mrs. Renton, as Davison came in with her arrowroot. And for half-an-hour or so that satisfactory conclusion, and the adding of another teaspoonful of port, on account of the excitement she had been going through, put a stop to the conversation, and gave Mary time to draw breath in peace.
But if the reader of this history hopes to be humoured by a shipwreck at this late period of the narrative, it is a vain expectation. The winds blew, and the sea rose, but Ben Renton got safely out to Canada, and came safely home. I am sorry to have to say that his last great piece of work did not pay nearly so well as he had expected it to do; and the business, which he made over to Hillyard, was, owing to the state of the colony at that moment, of less value than had been anticipated; but at the same time patience alone was wanted to realise all possible hopes. I have been obliged to ask the reader to take Ben’s success for granted all along, as it would have been simply impossible to introduce details of engineering enterprise into a work of this description; and, indeed, to tell the truth, I fear I should not have sufficiently understood them to set them forth with any distinctness. But whether Hillyard will have patience, and keep up the energy which Ben put into the business, is a very doubtful matter; and it is just as likely as not that he may turn up again at the old club, which is the only luxury he keeps up, as rough, as insouciant, as careless what becomes of him, as on the first day Ben met him, after the weird of the Rentons had begun. Mary might have made another man of him perhaps; but who knows? Temperament is stronger than circumstance,—stronger than fortune,—stronger even than love.
Ben Renton came home, as I have said, as safely as most men come home from Canada. And everything occurred as it ought to have occurred. I would add that they lived happy ever after, if there had been time to make such a record. But the fact is, that it is too early yet to be historical on that point; and for anything anybody can tell, the Rentons may yet come to be very wretched, and give occasion for other chapters of history; though, in common with all their friends, I sincerely hope not. Benedict Renton of Renton stood for the county of Berks, in the late election, with politics perhaps slightly tinged by his life in the other world, but failed by a few votes, notwithstanding the interest attaching to him,—Berks, like many other counties, being of the opinion that a good, steady, reliable bumpkin, who will do whatever he is told, is a more satisfactory legislator than a man who has spent his youth in objectionable exercises, such as writing, and thinking, and moving about the world. Frank Renton, true soldier and constitutional Tory, is one of those who hold this opinion. But I do not despair of seeing Ben in Parliament yet.
And thus the story ends; being like all stories, no history of life, but only of a bit out of life,—the most amiable bit, the section of existence which the world has accepted as its conventional type of life, leaving all the profounder glooms and the higher lights apart. As in heaven there can be no story-telling of the present, for happiness has no story,—there, perhaps, for the first time, the mouth of the minstrel may be opened to say or sing what is untellable by the frankest voice on earth. But till then we must be content to break off after the fairy chapter of life’s beginning, the history of Youth.
THE END.
LONDON:
Printed by Strangeways & Walden, Castle St. Leicester Sq.