It was a task which Everard accomplished to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. Of the meeting between Ethel and the sisters, when at length the latter had been persuaded into accepting Sir Gilbert’s hospitality, and of the genuine welcome accorded them, we have not space left to speak. It will be enough to say that, a little later, at Sir Gilbert’s earnest persuasion, they agreed to leave Rose Mount and St. Oswyth’s and make their future home at Maylings (of which they were to become the tenants at a nominal rent), where they would be next door, as one might say, to their “dear girl.” That Tamsin should accompany them to their new home was a foregone conclusion; indeed, it would not have seemed like home without her.
John Clare’s Christmas present to the sisters, to whom he felt himself so deeply indebted, took the form of a pony and basket carriage. It was a luxury which they had denied themselves ever since the break in their fortunes, but with Vale View House let on a seven years’ lease the need for their doing so no longer existed.
In the course of the winter Mrs. Tew was married, the man of her choice being none other than Dr. Mallory, the most popular of the Mapleford medicos. As Lady Pell said, the affair was quite a little romance. It appeared that the canon’s widow and the doctor had been in love with each other thirty years before when they were young folk living in quite a different part of the country. As is often the case, something had happened to separate them, and for a quarter of a century or more they had wholly lost touch of each other; so much so that for aught either of them knew the other might be dead. Chance, or accident, one day brought them together, and to their mutual surprise they discovered that the ashes on the altar of their early love which they had believed to be long extinct, still smouldered, and needed nothing but propinquity and favouring circumstances to fan them into a flame which one might pretty safely assume would expire only with life itself.
If the canon’s widow believed—which she did firmly—that Dr. Mallory had lived unmarried all these years because he had never got over his early disappointment, it was a charming belief, and certainly the doctor himself would have been the last man to undeceive her.
Little now remains to be done save to furnish the reader with a few brief particulars of the after fortunes of sundry of the characters with one or more episodes of whose life-history the foregoing pages have been concerned.
First, then, as regards the Keymers, father and son.
With Launce Keymer it was the case of the trickster being tricked. Always on the lookout for a woman with money, he met and was introduced to a widow, still young and pretty, whose husband had died two years before, leaving her a fortune of twenty-five thousand pounds. After having obtained a copy of the late Mr. Witley’s will from Somerset House, and so satisfied himself as to the genuineness of the bequest, Keymer proposed and was accepted. Not till after his marriage did he discover that nearly the whole of his wife’s fortune had been swallowed up in a huge banking failure which had occurred only a few weeks prior to his introduction to her. So extreme was his disgust and disappointment that, after having scraped together every shilling he could lay hands on, he quietly levanted, presumably to the land of the stars and stripes, and his newly married wife saw him no more.
Of Mr. Keymer, senior, it is enough to state that, partly as a consequence of his second wife’s extravagance, which he was morally too weak to curb; partly owing to a growing neglect of his business, combined with, or the result of, an increasing fondness for the cup which, whether it cheers or no, does inebriate; and, lastly, because he found himself powerless to compete against the new brewery which a wealthy London syndicate had lately established in St. Oswyth’s, he gradually drifted into the bankruptcy court, in the dreary morasses of which we will leave him floundering.
It was scarcely likely that Ethel, in her good fortune, should forget the existence of Miss Hetty Blair, the pretty nursery governess of Dulminster, who once on a time had rendered her such an important service. And when she heard that she was about to be married to a rising young lawyer of a distant town, a very substantial proof of her regard accompanied her wishes for her happiness and welfare.
Of Captain Verinder there is nothing pleasant to report. With such men as he it seems almost inevitable that as they advance in years their failings and vices should become accentuated, and that whatever virtues or good qualities they may originally have been possessed of, should grow “finer by degrees and beautifully less.” In point of fact, the Captain began to deteriorate and go down-hill from the date of the collapse of his vile plot. He had built so much on it that its failure thoroughly disheartened him, and afterwards he scarcely seemed to care what became of him. His end was a sad one even for such as he. His body was fished out of the river-ooze down Deptford way. An ugly wound at the back of his head and his turned-out pockets told unequivocally how he had come by his death.