CHAPTER I
"Is it to-night he is coming, Winnie?"
"Yes, father. I have sent the dog-cart to the station."
"It was unnecessary, quite unnecessary. What has he to do with dog-carts
or any luxury? He should have been left to find his way as best he
could. It is not many dog-carts he will find waiting at his beck and
call. That sort of indulgence, it is only putting nonsense in his head,
and making him think I don't mean what I say."
"But, father"--
"Don't father me. Why don't you speak like other girls in your
position? You have always been brought up to be a lady; you ought to use
the same words that ladies use. And mind you, Winifred, don't make any
mistake, I mean what I say. Tom can talk, none better, but he will not
get over me; I have washed my hands of him. So long as I thought these
boys were going to do me credit I spared nothing on them; but now that I
know better--Don't let him try to get over me, for it is no use."
"Oh, papa, he is still so young; he has done nothing very bad, only
foolishness, only what you used to say all young men did."
"Things are come to a pretty pass," said the father, "when girls like
you, who call themselves modest girls, take up the defence of a
blackguard like Tom."
"He is not a blackguard," cried the girl colouring to her hair.
"You are an authority on the subject, I suppose? But perhaps I know a
little better. He and his brother have taken me in--me, a man that never
was taken in in my life before! but now I wash my hands of them both.
There's the money for his journey and the letter to Stafford. No--on
second thoughts I'll not give him the money for his journey; he'd stay
in London and spend it, and then think there was more where that came
from. Write down the office of the Cable Line in Liverpool--he'll get
his ticket there."
"But you'll see him, papa?"
"Why should I see him? I know what would happen--you and he together
would fling yourselves at my feet, or some of that nonsense. Yes, you're
right--on the whole, I think I will see him, and then you'll know once
for all how little is to be looked for from me."
"Oh, papa! you do yourself injustice; your heart is kinder than you
think," cried Winifred, with tears.
Mr. Chester got up and walked from one end to the other of the long
room. It was lighted up as if for a great entertainment, though the
father and daughter were alone in it. He drew aside the curtains at the
farther end and looked out into the night.
"Raining," he said. "He would have liked a fly from the station much
better than the dog-cart. These puppies with their spoiled
constitutions, they can't support a shower. I am kinder than I think, am
I? Don't let Tom presume on that. If I'm better than I think myself, I'm
a deal worse than you think me. And he's cut me to the heart, he's cut
me to the heart!" This was said with a little vehemence which looked
like feeling. He resumed, a few minutes after: "What a fine thing it
seemed for a man like me, that began in a small way, to have two sons to
be educated with the best, just as good as dukes, that would know how to
make a figure in the world and do me credit. Credit! two broken-down
young profligates, two cads that have never held up their heads, never
made friends, never done anything but spend money all their lives! What
have I done that this should happen to me? Your mother was but a poor
creature, and her family no great things; but that my boys, my sons,
should take after the Robinsons and not after me! Hold your tongue and
let me speak. It should be a warning to you whom you marry; for, mind
you, it's not only your husband he'll be, but the father of your
children, taking after him, perhaps, to wring your heart." He had been
walking about the room all this time, growing more and more vehement.
Now he flung himself heavily into his chair. "Yes," he said, "it will be
better that I should see him. He'll know then, once for all, how much he
has to expect from me."
"Papa," cried Winifred, drying her eyes, "if my mother had lived"--
"If she had lived!" he said, with a tone in which it was difficult to
distinguish whether regret or contempt most predominated. Perhaps it was
because he was taken by surprise that there was any conflict of feeling.
"We should have had some fine scenes in that case," he added, with a
laugh. "She would have stuck to the boys through thick and thin; and
perhaps you would have been more on my side, Winnie; they say the girls
go with their father. True enough, you are the only one that takes after
me."
"Oh, papa! George is the image of you."
He got up again from his chair as if stung by some intolerable touch.
"Hold your tongue, child!" he said hoarsely; then, seating himself with
a forced laugh, "Kin in face, sworn enemies in everything else," he
said.
The room in which this conversation went on was large but not lofty,
occupying the whole width of the house, which was an old country house
of the composite character, so usual in England, where generation after
generation adds and remodels to its fancy. It had been two rooms
according to the natural construction of the house, and the separation
between the two was marked by two pillars, one at either side, of
marble, which had been brought from some ruinous Italian palace, and
were as much out of place as could be conceived in their present
situation. The room, in general, bore the same contradictory character;
florid ornament and gilt work of the most baroque character
alternating with articles of the latest fashion, and with pieces of
antiquity such as have become the test of taste in recent years. Mr.
Chester preferred cost above all other qualifications in the decoration
of his house, and his magnificence was bought dearly at the expense not
only of much money, but of every rule of harmony. He did not himself
mind this. It need scarcely be added that he was not the natural
proprietor of the manor-house which he had thus made gorgeous. He was a
man of great ambition who had made his fortune in trade, and whom the
desire, so universal and often so tragically foolish, though so natural,
of founding a family, had seized in a somewhat unusual way. His two sons
had received "the best education"; that is, they had been sent to a
public school and afterwards to Oxford in the most approved way. They
had not been used to much literature nor to a very refined atmosphere
at home, and it is possible that the very ordinary blood of the
Robinsons, their mother's family, had more influence in their
constitutions than that fluid which their father thought of so much more
excellent quality, which came to them from the Chester fountain.
The Chesters had been pushing men for at least two generations. From the
fact that their name was the same as that of their native place, it was
uncharitably reported that Mr. Chester's grandfather had been a
foundling picked up in the streets. But as he figured in the pedigree
which hung in the hall as George Chester, Esq., of the Cloisters,
Chester, strangers at least had no right to lend an ear to any such
tale, nor to inquire whether, as report said, it was as a lay clerk that
he had found a place in that venerable locality. William Chester, the
link between this mythical personage and Mr. Chester of Bedloe Manor,
had begun the family fortunes in Liverpool half a century before, and
his son, whose education was that of a choir boy in Chester Cathedral,
as his father's had been, established upon that foundation a solid and,
indeed, large fortune, which he had fondly hoped by means of George and
Tom to hand down to a whole prosperous family of Chesters, transformed
into landowners, great proprietors, perhaps--who could tell?--Lord
Chancellors and Prime Ministers. The disappointment which comes upon
such a man when his children, instead of doing him honour, turn out the
proverbial spendthrifts and consumers of the newly-made fortune, does
not meet with any great degree of sympathy in the world. A tacit "serve
him right" is in the minds of most people. Much righteous indignation
has been expended upon a very different matter, upon the ambition even
of such a man as Scott to found a family: the moralist has been almost
glad that it came to nothing, that the children of the great man were
nobodies, that his hope was a mere dream. And how much more when the man
had, like George Chester, nothing but his money and a certain strenuous
determination and force of character to recommend him!
But the disappointment was not less bitter to the new man than if he had
been a monarch mourning over a degenerate son. Neither George nor Tom
did anything but get into scrapes at the University. They had no heads
for books, and they had the habit of rash expenditure, of
self-indulgence, of considering themselves masters of everything that
could be bought. Mr. Chester would have taken their extravagance in
perfectly good part, he would have winked at their peccadilloes and
forgiven everything had they done him credit as he said: nor was he
very particular as to the nature of the credit; had either manifested
any capacity for taking university prizes, or a good degree, that,
though he would have understood it little, would have delighted him. Had
they rowed in the eight or played in the eleven, he would have been
doubly proud of the distinction. Failing those legitimate paths to
honour, had they brought a rabble of the young aristocracy to Bedloe,
had they gone visiting to great houses, had they found a place even
among the train of any young duke or conspicuous person, he was so
easily pleased that he would have been content. But they did none of
these things. George, with the beautiful voice, of which his father was
not proud, since it awakened memories of hereditary talent which he did
not wish to keep before men's minds, had not used this gift as a way of
making entrance into select circles, but roared it out in undergraduate
parties made up of clergymen's sons, of young schoolmasters, of people,
as he said bitterly, no better, nay, not so good as himself; and made
friends with the lower class of the musical people, the lay clerks at
the Cathedral, the people who gave local concerts. He was quite ready to
join them, to sing with them, to take his pleasure among them, with a
return to all the old habits of the singing men at Chester, which was
bitterness to the father's soul. It scarcely made it any worse that
George fell into ways of dissipation and went wrong as well. That his
father, perhaps, might have forgiven him had it been done in better
company; but as it was, the sin was unpardonable. When news came to
Bedloe that George was about to marry a poor organist's daughter, the
proceedings Mr. Chester took were very summary; he stopped his son's
allowance instantly, provided him with a clerkship at Sydney, and sent
him off to the end of the world, requesting only that he might see him
no more.
Then Tom became his hope. Tom had aspirations higher than George's, but
he went, if possible, more hopelessly astray. Tom had, or seemed to
have, something more of fancy and imagination than belonged to the rest
of his family. He was the clever one, bound, or so at least his father
hoped, to make a figure in the world; but he was idle, he was sarcastic
and hot-tempered, he quarrelled with everybody whom he ought to have
conciliated, and supported the company only of those who flattered and
agreed with him, and helped him to gratify his various tastes and
inclinations, which were not virtuous. If George had fallen among the
lower class of professionals, Tom's company was, his father declared,
composed of the out-scourings of the earth. And when the inevitable
moment came in which Tom was plucked (or ploughed, as the word varies),
his father's bitter disappointment and disgust came to the same result
as in his brother's case. The civil letter in which his tutor lamented
Tom's foolishness exasperated Mr. Chester almost to madness. No doubt he
had bragged in his day of his two boys who were to carry all before
them, and his humiliation was all the more hard to bear. He was
uncompromising and remorseless in the revenge he took. According to his
code, he who failed was the most criminal of mankind. Whatever a man
might do, so long as he attained something, if it were no more than
notoriety, there were hopes of him; but failure was insupportable to the
man of business--the self-made, and self-sustaining.
It was with a pang that he gave up the idea of all possibility as
regarded his sons; but he did so with the same decision and promptitude
with which he would have rejected a bad investment. He had still a
child, who was, indeed, one of the inferior sex, a mere girl, not for a
moment to be considered in the same light as a son, had the sons been
worthy, but something to fall back upon when they failed. Winifred, so
long as the boys were in the foreground of their father's life, had cost
him little trouble. She had been so fortunate as to be provided with a
good governess when her mother died; and, unnoticed, unthought of, had
grown up into fair and graceful womanhood--in mind and manners the child
of the poor gentlewoman who had trained her, and who still remained in
the house as her companion and friend. Insensibly it had become apparent
to Mr. Chester that Winnie was the one member of his family who was not
a failure. The society around, the people whom he reverenced as county
people, but despised as not so rich as himself, received her with
genuine regard and friendship, even when they received himself with but
formal civility. As for George and Tom, not even their prospective
wealth during their time of favour had commended them to the county
neighbours, whose pride Mr. Chester cursed, yet regarded with
superstitious admiration. Winifred had broken through the stiffness of
these exclusive circles, but no one else; and even while he fumed over
the downfall of Tom, he had begun to console himself with the success of
Winnie. At the recent county ball she had been, if not the beauty, at
least the favourite of the evening. Lord Eden himself had complimented
her father upon her looks. He had tasted the sweetness of social success
for the first time by her means. All was not then lost. He condemned
Tom, as he had condemned George, by attainder and confiscation of all
his rights; and Winifred was elected to the post of heir and
representative of the Chesters. Perhaps the decision gave the father
himself a pang. It was coming down in the world. A man with his sons
about him has something of which to be glorious--but a mere girl! At the
best it was a humiliation. But in default of anything better it was
still a mode of triumph, after all. It secured his revenge upon the
worthless boys who had done nothing for his name, and a place among
those who recognised in Winnie, if not in any other member of the
family, their equal in one way, their superior in another.
He was a man of rapid conclusions, and he had made up his mind on this
point on the evening of the day on which he had heard of Tom's
disgrace--for disgrace he had felt it to be, accepting no consolation
from the fact that many young men not thereafter to be despised met
with the same fate. He would not allow his son to return home, but had
his fate intimated to him at once by the solicitor whom Mr. Chester
chose to employ in business of this sort. It was to New Zealand this
time that the unfortunate was to be sent. His passage-money and fifty
pounds, and a desk in an office when he reached his destination--this
was the fate of the unhappy youth, fresh from all indulgences and
follies. No hope even was held out to him of ever retrieving his lost
position; and Tom knew with what remorseless decision George had already
been cut off. Perhaps he had not lamented as he might have done his
brother's punishment, which left such admirable prospects to himself,
but it left no doubt on his mind as to his own fate. He had asked, what
George had not had the courage to ask, that he might come home and take
farewell of his sister, at least. And this had been granted to him. If
any forlorn hope was in his mind of being able to touch the heart of his
father, it was a very forlorn hope indeed, and one which he scarcely
ventured to whisper even to himself.
He had arrived at the country station which was nearest Bedloe while his
father and sister were talking of him, and had been received by the
groom with that somewhat ostentatious sympathy and regard for his
comfort with which servants are wont to show a consciousness of the
situation. The groom was very anxious that Mr. Tom should be protected
from the rain, the soft, continuous drizzle of a spring night. "I've
brought your waterproof, sir; the roads is heavy, and we'll be a long
time getting home"--
"Never mind the waterproof," said Tom; "I like the rain."
"It's cooling, sir; but after a while, when you're soaked through--if
you get a chill, sir?"
"It don't matter much," said Tom. "How are they all at home?"
"Pretty nicely," said the man, "though Mrs. Pierce do say that she don't
like master's looks, and Miss Winifred is that pale except when she
flushes up"--
"How's Bayleaf?" This was Tom's hunter which he never mounted, yet felt
a certain property in all the same.
"Nothing to brag of, sir. That poor animal, he's like a Christian. He
knows as well when there's something up"--
"You had better drive on," said Tom. "How dark it is!"
"It's all the rain, sir, like as if the skies themselves--But we're glad
as the equinoctials is over, and you'll have a good season for your
voyage. Shall you see Mr. George, sir, where you are going?"
At this Tom laughed, with a most unmirthful outburst. "No," he said;
"that's the fun of the thing--he in one country and I in another. It's
all very nicely settled for us."
"Let's hope, sir," said the man, "that when things get a little more
civilised there will be a railway or something. We should all like to
send our respects and duty to Mr. George."
To this Tom made no reply. He was not in a very cheerful mood, nor did
this conversation tend to elevate his spirits. There was nothing
adventurous in his disposition. The distant voyage, the new world, the
banishment from all those haunts in which he could find his favourite
enjoyments, with an occasional compunction, indeed, but nothing strong
enough to disturb the tenor of his way, were terrible anticipations to
him. Some lurking hope there was still in his mind that his fate was
impossible; that such a catastrophe could not really be about to happen;
that his father would relent at the sight of him or at Winnie's prayers.
It did not enter into Tom's thoughts that Winnie would ever forsake him.
The thought of her own advantage would not move her. He was aware that,
in the question of George, it had more or less moved himself, and that
he had not, perhaps, thrown all that energy into his intercession for
his brother which he hoped and believed Winnie would employ for himself.
But then he had feared to irritate his father, who would bear more from
Winnie than from any one. At this moment, while he drove shivering
through the rain,--shivering with nervous depression rather than with
cold, for the evening was mild enough,--he had no doubt that she was
doing her best for him. And was it possible that his father could hold
out, that he could see the last of his sons go away to the ends of the
earth without emotion? The very groom was sorry for him, Bayleaf was
drooping in sympathy, the skies themselves weeping over his fate. When
the fate is our own, it is wonderful how natural it seems that heaven
and earth should be moved for us. In George's case he had seen the other
side of the question. In his own the pity of it was far the most
powerful. His mind was almost overwhelmed by the prospect before him,
but as he drove along in the rain, with the groom's compassionate voice
by his side in the dark, expressing now and then a respectful and veiled
sympathy, there flickered before Tom's eyes a faint little light of
hope. Surely, surely, this, though it had happened to his brother, could
not happen to him? Surely the father's heart was not hard enough, or
fate terrible enough, to inflict such a punishment upon him? Others,
perhaps, might deserve it, might be able to bear it; but he--how could
he bear it? Tom said to himself that in his case it was impossible, and
could not be.
CHAPTER II
In family troubles such as that which we have indicated, it is generally
a woman who is the chief sufferer. She stands between the conflicting
parties, and, whether she is mother or sister, suffers for both, unable
to soften judgment on one hand, or to reduce rebellion on the other; or
else securing a ground of reconciliation by entreaties and tears which
she would not use on her own behalf, and often by the sacrifice of her
own reason and power of judging, and conscious humiliation to all the
imbecilities of peace-making. A woman in such circumstances has to
pledge herself for reformations in which, alas! her heart has but
little faith. She has to persuade the angry father that his son has
erred less than appears, to invent a thousand excuses, to exhaust
herself in palliation of offences which are far more offensive and
terrible to her than to him whose wrath she deprecates; and she has to
convince the impatient and resentful son that his father is acting
rather in love than in anger, and that his sins have wounded as much as
they have exasperated. Those women who have no judgment of their own to
exercise, and who can believe everything, are the happiest in this
ever-returning necessity: and indeed in many complications of life it is
much better for all parties that the woman should be without judgment,
the soft and boneless angel of conventional romance. Winifred Chester
was not of this kind. She was a just and tender-hearted woman, full of
affection and compassion, to whom nature gave the hard task of
mediating between two parties whose conflicting errors she was, alas!
but too well able to estimate--the father, whose indignation and rage
were in fact sufficiently just, yet so little righteous, and her
brothers, of whom she knew that they neither felt any real compunction
nor intended any amendment. There is, let us hope, some special
indulgence for those luckless advocates of erring men who have to
promise amendment which they can put no faith in, and plead excuses
which to their own minds have no validity.
After the conversation which had been held in the great drawing-room,
when Mr. Chester settled himself to a study of the evening papers which
had just been brought in, Winifred left the room softly, and stole
upstairs to the window of her brother's room, which commanded the
avenue, and from which she could see his approach. The room was faintly
lit with firelight and full of all the luxurious contrivances for
comfort to which a rich man's sons are accustomed. Poor Tom! what would
he do without them all, without the means of procuring them? Poor
George! what was he doing, he who now had some years' experience of work
and poverty? She stole behind the drawn curtains and looked out upon the
darkness and the falling rain. There was little light in the wild
landscape, and no sound but that of the rain pattering upon the thick
ivy which clothed the older part of the house, and streaming silently
down upon the trees, which were still bare, though swelling at every
point with the sap of spring. The air was soft and warm; the rain and
the darkness full of a wild sense of fertility and growth. Winifred's
imagination depicted to her only too clearly the state of half-despair,
yet unconviction, in which her brother's mind would be. He would not
believe it was possible, and yet he would know. He was very well aware
that his father was remorseless, yet he would not be able to understand
how ruin could overtake him. The circumstances brought back before her
vividly the other occasion on which she had implored in vain the
reversal of the sentence on her elder brother. George, too, had been
taken by surprise. He had not believed it, and when at last he was
convinced, had burst forth into wild defiance and consuming wrath. But
Tom would probably be less simple, and not manly at all: he would never
believe that all was over, that it was not possible to make another and
another appeal.
Winifred stood and watched for his coming, feeling that if by any will
of hers she could bring about an accident, either to delay her brother's
arrival, or even to bring him into the house in a condition which would
compel a prolonged stay, she would have done it. Tom would have
arrived, it is to be feared, with a broken leg, or the beginnings of a
fever, could his sister have procured it or he would not have come at
all. Railway accidents occur in many cases when they do harm without
doing any good, but a railway accident which should awake some natural
movement in her father's mind, which should perhaps make him anxious,
which would force him to exert himself on Tom's behalf--what an
advantage that would be! Alas! such things do not come when people wish
for them. A broken arm or leg, what a small price to pay for the moral
advantages of reawakened interest, anxiety, the softening charm of an
illness and convalescence! No father could turn out of his house the
wounded boy who was brought home to be cured.
But Winifred's wishes, it need not be said, were quite unavailing. By
and by she heard the steady tread of the horse, the roll of the wheels
over those little heaps of gravel with which the avenue was being
mended. Evidently Tom was coming, without any interposition of
Providence, to his fate. She ran softly down the stairs to meet him and
prevent any unnecessary sound or attempt to usher the returning prodigal
into his father's presence. The door was open, the waterproof of the
groom glistening in the light, and Tom scrambling down from the dog-cart
with that drenched and dejected look which is the result of a long drive
through steady and persistent rain. He scarcely looked at the butler as
he stepped past, saying, "Is my father in?" in a voice as despondent as
his appearance, and not pausing to listen as the man began to explain--
"Master is at home, sir, but"--
"Tom! Oh, how wet you are! You must run upstairs and change first of
all."
"I shall do nothing of the kind. I suppose there is a fire somewhere,"
said Tom. "Where are you sitting? in the dining-room? No supper for me.
I don't want any supper. To arrive like this is calculated to give a
fellow an appetite, don't you think?"
Winifred put her arm through her brother's, wet though he was. She
whispered, "Don't say anything before the servants," as she led him
towards the open door of the room in which the table was laid for him
before the shining fire. Tom was mollified by the second glance at its
comfort and brightness.
"It looks warm here," he said, suffering her to guide him. "Though why I
should mind warm or cold I don't know. Look here, Winnie. There is this
interview with the governor; I'd better get it over, don't you think?"
"Oh, Tom, come in and get warmed and eat something."
"Is it going to be very bad, then?" the young man said.
"I think," said Winifred anxiously, "you had much better change those
wet clothes; your room is ready."
"Look here!" he cried; "all that about New Zealand, that's all nonsense,
of course?" He watched the changes of her countenance as he spoke.
Winifred shook her head. "Oh, Tom, I told you long ago you must never
take what my father says as nonsense. He is not that sort of man. Come
to the fire, then, if you will not change your clothes. And here is
Hopkins coming with the tray. Don't say anything before Hopkins, Tom."
"Why shouldn't I? If he means that, they'll know soon enough. I don't
believe he means it. The governor--the governor"--Tom's voice died away
in his throat, partly because it trembled, partly because of Hopkins'
presence. "Yes, yes, that'll do," he said fretfully, as the butler
placed a chair for him, and stood waiting. "I don't want anything to
eat, thank you. I'll have a drink if you like. The governor," he
resumed, with a sort of laugh, as Hopkins, knowing the nature of the
drink required, went off to fetch it, "would never repeat himself,
Winnie. He is not such a duffer as that. All very well once perhaps; but
to send George to Sydney and me to New Zealand--oh, that's too much of a
good thing! I can't believe he means it. Thank you, that's more to the
purpose," he added, as he took a large fizzing glass out of Hopkins'
hand.
"You need not wait. We have everything my brother will want," said
Winifred. "Oh, Tom, what can I say to you? You know how my father had
set his heart on your success--success anyhow, he did not mind what
kind."
"Well, well," said Tom sulkily; "you women are always harping on what is
past. I know very well I have been an ass. But there is no such dreadful
harm done after all. I'm not fifty, if you come to that, and this time
I'll work, I really will, and get through."
Winifred said no more for the moment. She persuaded him to seat himself
at the table, to fortify himself with food. "We can talk it all over
when you have had your supper. There is plenty of time; and what a
wretched journey you must have had, Tom!"
"Wretched enough, but nothing so bad as the drive from the station, with
the rain pouring down upon one, and that fellow Short pitying one all
the way. Talk of not speaking before the servants--he knew as well as I
did I was in disgrace with the governor, and was sorry for me--my own
groom! Why didn't you let me get a fly from the station? It would have
been twenty times more comfortable."
"That is what my father said," said Winifred, with a smile.
"Oh, he thought of that, did he? The governor has a great deal of
sense," said Tom, brightening a little. "He understands a fellow better
than you can. I don't say anything against you, Win; you are always as
good as you know how."
Winifred looked at her brother with a tremulous smile of wonder and
pity. Nothing could be more forlorn than his appearance; the steam
rising from his wet coat, his hair limp on his forehead, his colourless
face more eloquent of anxiety and suspense than his words were. He
swallowed with difficulty the dainty food, the dish he specially liked,
and pushed his chair from the table with relief.
"Am I to see him to-night?" he said. "If it's got to be, the sooner the
better. It will be a thing well over."
"Tom,"--Winifred's voice faltered, she could hardly say what she had to
say,--"I am afraid it is all a great deal worse than you think. He did
not want to see you at all, and if he has consented at last, it is
chiefly because he thinks you will then be convinced how little you have
to expect."
Tom's countenance fell, and then he made an effort to recover himself,
and laughed. "Nobody ever was so hard as the governor looks," he said;
"he wants to frighten me, I know that."
He looked anxiously in her eyes, and Winifred's eyes were not
encouraging. Her brother broke out again with a stifled oath. "You can't
mean me to suppose that that about New Zealand is true, Winnie? You
don't mean that?"
"Dear Tom!" Winifred said, with tears in her eyes.
"Don't dear Tom me! That's not natural, you don't mean it. Good heavens!
I'd sooner you were taking your fun out of me, if it was a moment for
that. I won't go! I'm not a child to be ordered about like that. I tell
you I won't go!"
"Oh, Tom! if you could but do anything at home; if you would but let him
see that you could manage for yourself! That might be of some use, if
you could do it, Tom."
"I won't go," he repeated hoarsely, "to the other end of the world, away
from everything I care for! There is a limit to everything. You can tell
him I won't do that. And all for what? For having been unlucky about my
books, as half the men in the university have been one time or the
other. What does it matter being ploughed? It happens every day.
Winnie, I swear to you I'll work like--like a navvy, if I can only have
another chance."
"Oh, Tom, I have said everything, I have tried every way. I think if you
were to do as you said just now, say to him that you won't go to New
Zealand, that you can manage for yourself at home, that would be your
best chance. Show him that you can maintain yourself, do something,
write something, it does not matter what it is"--
"Maintain myself?" said Tom. He had left his seat, and was standing in
front of the fire, his pale face and dishevelled, damp hair showing
against the black marble of the mantelpiece; his eyes had a bewildered
and discomfited look. "Do something? It is so easy to talk. What am I to
do? Write? I am not one of the fellows that can write. I have never been
used to that sort of thing. I say, Winnie, for God's sake speak to my
father! I can't, I can't go to that dreadful place."
"Oh, Tom!" she cried, turning her head away.
To see him standing there, helpless, feeble, sure only of one thing, and
that that he himself was good for nothing, was like a sword in this
young woman's heart. It is the most horrible of all the tortures that
women have to bear, to see the men belonging to them, whom they would so
fain look up to, breaking down into ruinous failure. He gave her a
distracted look, and when she withdrew her eyes, went and plucked her by
the sleeve. "Winnie, for Heaven's sake tell my father! It's all dreadful
to me: I can't work in an office; I can't go a long voyage. I hate the
sea, I am not strong, not a man that can rough it and knock about.
George was different, he was always that sort of fellow; and then he's
married. Winnie, speak for me. You can do it if you like."
"I have done nothing else ever since he told me, Tom, and I dare not say
any more. He will not listen, he says he will send me away too. I
shouldn't care for that if I could help you, but I can't--I can't. It is
almost worse for me, for I can do nothing--nothing!"
"Oh no," said Tom; "don't make believe, Winnie. Worse for you?--Why,
what does it matter to you? While I am out at sea, perhaps in danger of
my life, you'll be snug at home, with everything that heart can desire.
And who is he going to leave his money to, if he casts me off? You? Oh,
I see it all now! Why should you speak for me? It's against your own
interests. I see it all now."
She could only look at him with an appeal for pity in her eyes. She
could not protest that her own interests were little in her mind. There
are some things which it is impossible to say, as it ought to be
needless to say them. Tom for his part worked himself up to an outburst
of miserable, artificial rage which it is to be supposed was a relief to
his excitement.
"Oh, it is you that are to be his heir?" he cried. "A girl! I might have
known. No wonder you don't speak up for me, when it's all in your own
favour. I'm to be cut off, and George is to be cut off, all for you! Oh,
I might have known! A girl is always at home, wriggling and wriggling
into favour, cutting out the lawful heirs. And what does he think he's
going to make of you, that haven't even a name of your own, that are no
more good for the family than a stranger? George wasn't enough, I might
have had the sense to see that--there was me that had to be got rid of
too, and now you've done it; now you have succeeded. Yes, yes! and this
is Winnie!" he cried in a burst of despairing rage. "Winnie! I thought
Winnie was my friend whoever failed me; and all this time you were
plotting to get rid of me too!"
Tom had been advancing towards her, gesticulating with fury, his hand
raised, his blood-shot eyes gleaming, when the door opened suddenly. In
a moment he fell back, his hand dropped by his side, the look as of a
beaten hound came into his eyes. Mr. Chester had come in, and set his
back against the door.
CHAPTER III
They were little, and he was tall; they were slight of form, and he was
massive and big--a vigorous man with a great "wind of going" about him,
like one who could push through every difficulty, and make his way. He
stood against the door, and looked at them; a man who felt more life in
him than was in both put together, to whom they were nobodies,
insignificant creatures whom he could make or unmake at his pleasure. He
looked at his son with contempt unmixed with pity. He was not touched by
Tom's miserable looks, his air of hopeless dejection, or furtive,
trembling hope. And for the moment Winifred's want of size and
importance struck him more than the fact which had been forced upon him,
that she had done him credit. He despised them both, the products of a
smaller race than his own, taking after their mother, like the
Robinsons. The Chesters were a better race in point of thews and sinews,
though nobody knew very well from what illegitimate source these sinews
came.
"Look here!" he said; "I don't permit you to bully your sister. What's
she done to you? She has always stood up for you a deal more than you
deserve. If I let you come here at all, it was because she insisted upon
it. I never could see what was the use of it, for my part."
Tom's rage had been subdued in a moment. He was supposed to be a being
of small will, unable to restrain himself; but he was capable of an
effort of the will when it was necessary, as most people are. He looked
at his father with a piteous desire to conciliate and touch his heart.
"I thought," he said, "papa,--I hope you'll forgive me,--that I had a
right to come here."
"Don't call me papa, sir. I like her to do it, since others do it; but
when do you ever find a man with such a word in his mouth? Not that I
have to learn for the first time to-day that you are no man, and nothing
manlike is to be expected from you. No, I don't see what right you have
here. If it had been your great-grandfather's house, as many people
think, you might have had a certain right; but it's my house, bought
with my money--and I have washed my hands of you." He had been a little
vehement at first, but now was perfectly calm, delivering his sentences
with his hands in his pockets, looking down contemptuously upon his
son.
"I know, sir, that you have a right to be angry"--Tom began.
"I am not angry. I don't care enough about it. So long as there was some
hope of you, I might be angry, but now that you've gone and made a fool
of me--the rich man that tried to make a gentleman of his son!--I might
as well have tried to make a gentleman of Winnie. As soon as I
understand it, that's enough, and I've learned my lesson, thank you. You
are no good, and I have washed my hands of you."
"Father, I know I have been an ass. You can't say more to me than I have
said to myself. And I've learned my lesson too. Give me another chance,
and I'll do all you wish," he cried, holding up his hands, almost
falling on his knees.
"Come, I'm not going to have a scene out of the theatre," said Mr.
Chester roughly. "I've given you all you have a right to ask of me--a
start in the world. When I was your age, fifty pounds in my pocket would
have seemed a fortune to me. And if you like,--there's no better field
for a young man than New Zealand,--you may come home in twenty years
with as many thousands as you have pounds to take with you, or hundreds
of thousands if you have luck. The only thing is to exert yourself.
You'd thank me for the chance if you had any spirit. That's all, I
think, there is to say. Winnie will tell you the rest. Cable Line,
Liverpool--I've taken you a first-class cabin, though on principle I
should have sent you in the steerage. Good luck to you, my boy! Work and
you'll do well. Winnie will tell you the rest."
"Father, you are not going to throw me overboard like this?" cried the
miserable young man, rushing forward as Mr. Chester turned round to open
the door.
"You are going to the bottom as fast as you can, and I throw you into
the lifeboat, which is a very different matter. You'll find a decent
salary and an honest way of getting your living on the other side. Only
don't think any more of Bedloe and that sort of thing. Good-bye. If you
do well, you can send Winnie word; if not"--He gave a shrug of his
shoulders. "Farewell to you, once for all: don't think I am either to be
coaxed or bullied. What's done is done, and I make no new beginnings.
Get him up in time once in his life, and let him leave to-morrow by the
first train, Winnie. I shall have to speak to Hopkins if I cannot trust
you."
"Let him stay to-morrow. Oh, papa! don't you see how ill he is
looking--how miserable he is? Let him stay to-morrow; let him get used
to the idea, papa."
"I must speak to Hopkins, I see," Mr. Chester said. "Hopkins, Mr. Tom
is going off to-morrow by the first train--see that he is not late. If
he misses that, he will lose his ship; and if you let him miss it, it
will be the worse for you. That's enough, I hope. Tom, good-bye."
"I can't--I can't get ready at a day's notice. I have got no outfit--I
have nothing"--
"All that's been thought of," said Mr. Chester, waving his hand. "Winnie
will tell you. Good-bye!"
He left the brother and sister alone with a light step and a hard heart.
They could hear him whistling to himself as he went away. When Mr.
Chester whistled, the household trembled. The sound convinced Tom more
than anything that had been said. He threw himself down in the great
easy-chair by the fire, and covered his face with his hands. What the
sounds were that misery brought from his convulsed bosom we need not
pause to describe. Sobs or curses, what does it matter? He was in the
lowest deep of wretchedness--wretchedness which he had never believed
in, which had seemed to him impossible. He could not say that it was
impossible any longer, but still it seemed incredible, beyond all powers
of belief. His sister flew to him to comfort him, and wept over him,
notwithstanding the insult he had offered her; and he himself forgot,
which was more wonderful, and clung to her as to his only consolation.
Misery of this kind which has no nobleness in it, but only weakness,
cowardice--compunction in which is no repentance--are of all things in
the world the most terrible to witness. And Winnie loved her brother,
and felt everything that was unworthy in him to the bottom of her heart.
Next morning he went away with red eyes and a pallid face and quivering
lips. It was all he could do to keep up the ordinary forms of composure
as he crossed the threshold of his father's house. He was sorry for
himself with an acute and miserable anguish, broken down, without any
higher thought to support him. He never believed it would have come to
this. He could not believe it now, though it had come. He feared the
voyage, the unknown world, the unaccustomed confinement, every thing
that was before him; that he should be no longer the young master, but a
mere clerk; that he should have to work for his living; that all his
little false importance was gone; that he should be presently, he who
could not endure the sea, sick and miserable on a long voyage. All these
details drifted across his mind in the midst of the current of miserable
consciousness that all was over with him, and the impulse of frenzied
resistance that now and then rose in his mind, resistance that meant
nothing, that could make no stand against inexorable fact.
Winifred stood at the door as long as he was in sight; but the horse was
fresh and went fast, which was a relief. She stood there still with the
fresh damp morning air in her face, after the wheels had ceased to sound
in the avenue. It was a dull morning after the rain, but the air was
full of the sensation of spring, the grass growing visibly, the buds
loosening from their brown husks on the trees, the birds twittering
multitudinous, all full of hope in the outside world, all dismal in that
which was within. Many people envied Winifred Chester--and if her father
carried out his intention, and made her the heir of all his wealth, many
more would envy and many court the young mistress of Bedloe; but Winnie
felt there was scarcely any woman she knew with whom she might not
profitably change places at this moment of her life. There was old Miss
Farrell, sitting serenely among her wools and silks, anxious about
nothing but a new pattern, amusing herself with the recollections of the
past which she recounted to her favourite and best pupil, day after day,
as they sat together. Winifred knew them all, yet was never tired of
these chapters in life. Though Miss Farrell was sixty and Winnie only
twenty-three, she thought she would gladly change places with her
companion--or with the woman at the lodge who had sick children for whom
to work and mend. No one in the world, she thought, had at that moment a
burden so heavy as her own. She was called in after a while to Mr.
Chester's room, which was a large and well-filled library, though its
books were little touched except by herself. He was seated there as
usual surrounded by local papers,--attending the moment when the Times
should arrive with its more authoritative views,--with many letters and
telegrams on his table; for though he went seldom to business, he still
kept the threads in his hand. He demanded from her an account of Tom's
departure, listening with an appearance of enjoyment.
"It is the best thing that could happen to him," he said, "if there is
anything in him at all. If there isn't, of course he will go to the
wall--but so he would do anyhow."
"Oh, papa! He is your son."
"And what of that? He's no more like me than Hopkins is. You are the
only one that is like me. I have sent for Babington to make another
will."
"I do not want your money, papa."
"Softly, young woman; nobody is offering it to you. I don't mean to be
like King Lear. Indeed, for anything I know, I may marry, and put all
your noses out of joint. But in the meantime"--
"I will never supplant my brother," said Winifred. "I will never take
what does not belong to me. I wish you would dispose of it otherwise,
father. It is yours to do what you like with it; but I have a will of my
own too."
"That you have," he said with a smile; "that's one of the things I like
in you. Not like that cur, that could do nothing but shiver and cringe
and cry."
"Tom did not cry," she exclaimed indignantly. "He did not think you
could have the heart. And how could you have the heart? Your own son! I
ask myself sometimes whether you have any heart at all."
"Ask away; you are at liberty to form your own opinion," he said
good-humouredly. "If that fellow had faced me as you do, now--but mind
you, Winnie, if you go against me, I am not so partial to you but that I
shall take means to have my own way. What I have, nobody in this world
has any right to but myself. I have made it every penny, and I shall
dispose of it as I please. If you think you will be able to do what you
like with it after I am gone, you're mistaken; take care--there are ways
in which you can displease me now, as much as Tom has done. So you had
better think a little of your own affairs."
She looked at him with startled eyes.
"I don't wish to displease you, papa--I don't know"--
"Not what I mean perhaps? Remember that the sort of match which might be
good enough for Winnie with two brothers over her head, might not be fit
for Miss Chester of Bedloe. I don't want to say any more."
This silenced Winifred, whatever it might mean. She said no more, but
withdrew hastily, with a paleness and discomfiture which was little
like the grief and indignation with which she entered the room. Her
father looked after her with a chuckle.
"That has settled her, I hope," he said to himself.
CHAPTER IV
Miss Farrell came home next day from her visit. She was a little old
lady of the period when people became old early, and assumed the dress
and the habits of age before it was at all necessary. She was about
sixty, but she had been distinctly an old lady for ten years. She wore a
cap coming close round her face, and tied under her chin. Whenever she
had the least excuse for doing so, she wore a shawl, an article the
putting on of which she considered to afford one of many proofs whether
or not the wearer was "a lady," which was to Miss Farrell something more
than a mere question of birth. She was very neat, very small, very
light-hearted, seeing the best in everything. Even Mr. Chester, though
she saw as little of him as possible, she was able to talk about as
"your dear father" to her pupil; for, to be sure, whatever might be the
opinion of other people, every father ought to be dear to his own child.
Miss Farrell had gone on living at Bedloe since Winifred's education was
finished, for no particular reason,--at least, for no reason but love.
She was a person full of prejudices in favour of aristocracy and against
persons of low birth, but she was sufficiently natural to be quite
inconsistent, and contradict herself whenever it pleased her--for, as a
matter of fact, she preferred Winifred Chester, who was of no family at
all, to several young ladies of the caste of Vere de Vere, whom she had
formerly had under her care. How she had managed to "get on" with Mr.
Chester was a problem to many people, and why she could choose to stay
in the house of an individual so little congenial. As a matter of fact,
it was not so difficult as people supposed. She was a woman who
systematically put the best interpretation upon everything, moved
thereto not only by natural inclination, but by profound policy; for it
did not consist with Miss Farrell's dignity ever to suppose, or to allow
any one to suppose, that it was possible for her to be slighted. She
would permit no possibility of offence to herself. It occasionally
happened that people had bad manners, which was so very much worse for
themselves than for any one else. Miss Farrell had made up her mind from
the beginning of her career never to accept a slight, nor to look upon
herself as a dependant. If offence was so thrust upon her that she could
not refuse to be aware of it, she left the house at once; but on less
serious occasions presented a serene obtuseness, apologising to others
for the peculiarities which were "such a pity," or the "want of tact"
which was so unfortunate. In this way she had overawed persons more
confident in their own savoir faire than Mr. Chester. She had always
been admirable in her own sphere, and the alarm of an anxious mother who
had obtained such a treasure, lest the peace of the house should be
endangered by the sudden departure of the governess, may be supposed.
Once it had occurred to her in her life to be compelled to take this
strong step. She never required to do it again. As for Winifred, it was
long since the relation of pupil and teacher had been over between them;
but the motherless girl of the parvenu, to whom she went with
reluctance, and chiefly out of compassion, had entirely gained the heart
of the proud and tender little woman. She did not hesitate to say that
Winifred was beyond all rules.
"It does not matter who her father was--I have always thought the mother
must have been a lady," Miss Farrell said, with a conception of the case
very different from that of the master of the house. "But at all events
Winifred is--born. I never said I insisted upon a number of quarterings.
I don't care who was her great-grandfather--nothing could be worse than
the father, if you come to that; but she is a lady--as good as the
Queen."
"You have made her so," said the wife of the Rector, who was her
confidante.
"No one can make a lady, except the Almighty. It is a thing that has to
be born," was the prompt reply.
But, notwithstanding, Miss Farrell was able to speak to Winifred about
"your dear father," and to look upon all the proceedings of the boys
with an indulgence which sometimes almost exasperated their sister, yet
was an unspeakable consolation and support to her in the troubles of
the past years. For to have some one who will not believe any evil, who
will never appear conscious of the existence of anything that needs
concealing, who will know exactly how not to ask too many questions, yet
not to refrain from questions altogether, is, in the midst of family
trouble, a help and comfort unspeakable. Winifred's mind was full to
overflowing when her friend came back. She had felt that it was almost
impossible to exist without speaking to some one, delivering herself of
the burden that weighed upon her. It had been a relief to have Miss
Farrell away at the moment of Tom's visit, and to feel that no eye but
her own had looked upon her brother's discomfiture, but it was a relief
now to meet her frank look and unhesitating question--
"Well, my dear, and how about poor Tom?"
"He is gone," Winifred said, the tears coming to her eyes. "He is to
sail from Liverpool to-day."
"My dear," said Miss Farrell, "it is very natural for you to feel it,
but do you know it is the very best thing that could have happened for
him? It will no doubt be the making of him. He has never had any need to
rely on himself, he has always felt his father behind him. Now that he
is sent into the world on his own account, it will rouse all his
strength. Yes, cry, my dear, it will do you good. But I approve, for my
part. Your dear father has been very wise. He has done what was the best
for Tom."
"Do you think so? Perhaps if that were all--But it does not seem to have
been the best thing for George, and how can we tell if it will answer
with Tom?"
"George, you see, has married, which brings in a new element--a great
deal more comfortable for him, but still what the gentlemen call a new
factor, you know, that we are not acquainted with. Besides, he is a
different kind of boy. But Tom wants to be thrown on his own resources.
Depend upon it, my dear, it is the very best thing for him. I should
have thought that you would have seen that with your good sense."
"Oh, Miss Farrell, if that were all!"
"And is there something more? Don't tell me unless you like; but you
know you take a darker view than I do."
"There is but one view to take," Winifred said. "It makes me miserable.
My father--I hope he does not intend it to be known, but I cannot
tell--anyhow you must know everything. My father says he has made up his
mind to cut off both the boys, and to leave everything to me."
Miss Farrell grew a little pale. She was old-fashioned and strong upon
the rights of sons and the inferior importance of girls. She paused
before she spoke, and then said, with a little catching of her breath,
"If it is because you are the most worthy, my dear, I can't say but he
is right. A girl of your age is always more worthy than the boys. You
have never been exposed to any temptation."
"But that is no virtue of mine. Think what it is for me--the boys that
were brought up to think everything was theirs--and now cast away, one
after another, and everything fixed upon me."
"My dear," said Miss Farrell, recovering her courage, "you must not
disturb yourself too soon. Your father will live to change the
disposition of his property a hundred times. It is a sort of thing that
only wants a beginning."
"But don't you see," said Winifred, with great seriousness, "that is
poor comfort; for he may be displeased with me next, and leave it all
to some stranger. And then, who would care for George and Tom?"
"I see what you mean--you are going to share with them, Winnie. My dear,
you may take my word for it, that will be better for them, far better
than if they got your father's immense fortune into their hands."
"But injustice can never be best," she said.
They were in Miss Farrell's pretty sitting-room, seated together upon
the sofa, and here Winifred, losing courage altogether, threw her arms
round her old friend, and put her head down upon the breast that had
always sympathy for her in all her troubles.
"I am very unhappy," she said. "I do not see any end to it. My brothers
both gone and I alone left, and nothing but difficulty before me
wherever I move. How can I tell how my father's mind may change in other
ways, now that he has made up his mind to put me in this changed
position--and how can I tell--even if that were not so"--
These broken expressions would have conveyed little enlightenment to any
stranger, but Miss Farrell understood them well enough. She pressed
Winifred in her arms, and kissed the cheek which was so near her own.
"Has anything been said about Edward?" she asked in a low tone.
"Nothing yet; but how can I tell? Oh yes! there was something. I can't
remember exactly what--only a sort of hint; but enough to show--Miss
Farrell, you always think the best of every one. What can make him do
it? He must love us--a little--I suppose?"
The doubt in her tone was full of pathos and wondering bewilderment.
Winnie, though she had already many experiences, had not reached the
length of understanding that love itself can sometimes torture.
"Love you, my dear? why, of course he loves you! Whom has he else to
love? You must not let such foolish thoughts get into your mind. Thank
Heaven, since you were a child you have never had any doubt that I loved
you, Winnie, and yet I often made you do things you didn't like, and
refused to let you do things you did like. Don't you remember? Oh, I
could tell you a hundred instances. A man like your dear father, who has
been a great deal in the world, naturally forms his own ideas. And I can
tell you, Winnie, it is very, very difficult when one has the power, and
when one sees that young people are silly, not to take matters into
one's own hand, and do for them what one knows to be best. But,
unfortunately, one never can get the young people to see it--they prefer
their own way. If they went according to the ideas of their fathers and
mothers, perhaps there would be less trouble in the world."
"You don't really think so," cried Winnie, indignant. "You would never
have one go against one's own heart."
"I say perhaps, my dear," said Miss Farrell mildly,--"only perhaps. It
is a thing no one can be arbitrary about. To have one's own way is the
most satisfactory thing, so long as it lasts, but often 'thereof comes
in the end perplexity and madness.' Then one thinks, if one had but
taken the other turn! Nobody knows, till time shows, which is for the
best."
"Is that a proverb?" asked Winnie, with some youthful scorn.
"It sounds a little like it," said the cheerful old lady, with a little
laugh, "but, the rhyme was quite unintentional; and, as a matter of
fact, we know that whatever happens to us in God's providence is for the
best."
"Is my father's hardheartedness God's providence?" said Winifred, her
face becoming almost severe in youthful gravity.
It was not a question easy to answer. She scarcely listened to the
little lecture Miss Farrell gave, as to the wickedness of condemning her
father, or calling that hardheartedness which probably was the highest
exercise of watchful tenderness. "I don't know that I should have had
the strength of mind to carry it out; but, my dear," she said, "I have
not the very slightest doubt that this is by far the best thing for Tom.
He will come home a better man; he will have found out that life is
different from what he thinks. It may be the making of him. Your dear
father, who is stronger-minded than we are, does it, you may be sure,
for the best."
"And if I am ordered to give up everything I care for, perhaps you will
think that for the best too," said the girl, withdrawing, half
sorrowful, half indignant. The elder woman gave her a look full of love
and sorrow. Behind the smiling of her cheerful little countenance there
was that consciousness which belongs to experience, that teaching of a
long life which at her age throws confusing lights upon much that is
plain and simple to the uninstructed. Miss Farrell in her heart answered
this last indignant question in a manner which would have confounded
Winifred; but she said nothing. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil
thereof."
CHAPTER V
Winifred, it will be divined, was not without affairs of her own, which
were indeed kept in the background by the more urgent complications of
her family life, but yet were always there; and in every moment of
repose came in to fill up with sweetness mingled with pain all the
intervals of her thoughts. A few years before, when Mr. Chester had
retired from business and had come to live permanently at Bedloe, he had
begun his life of ease by a long illness, an illness at once dangerous
and tedious, which he had been "pulled through" by a young doctor, still
quite unknown to fame, who had devoted himself to the case of his
patient with an absorbing attention such as elderly gentlemen of
mercantile connections rarely call forth. Mr. Chester was a man who was
always sensible of services rendered personally to himself, and as young
Dr. Langton gave up both time and ease to him, watched by his bedside at
the crisis of the disease, and never grudged to be called out of bed or
disturbed at any moment of the day or night, it was natural that a
grateful patient should form the highest idea of the man who had saved
his life.
It did not detract from the merits of the young doctor that he belonged,
though remotely, to a county family, the ancient owners of Bedloe, and
that he held a higher place in the general estimation than the new
millionaire himself, whose advent had not been received with enthusiasm.
Dr. Langton, indeed, was of considerable use to the new-established
household. He decided several important people to call who had no
immediate intention of calling, and described with so much fervour the
sweetness and good manners of the young lady of the house, that the way
had thus been smoothed for that universal acceptance of Winifred which
had opened her father's eyes to the fact that she alone of all the
family did him credit. Unfortunately, Dr. Langton went a little farther
than this. He was young, and Winifred was but just taking upon her the
independent position of mistress of her father's house. They saw each
other every day, watched together at the sick-bed, and met in the most
unrestrained intimacy--and the natural result followed. Had Winifred
been poor, all his friends would have protested that she was a very bad
match for Edward Langton, who was believed to have what is called a fine
career before him; but as she was, instead, the daughter of a very rich
man, it was permissible that on her side of the question Edward Langton
should be supposed a very poor match for Winifred. It had been
accordingly with very doubtful feelings and a great screwing up of his
courage that the young doctor had presented himself before the rich man
and asked him for his daughter. The reception he received was less
terrible than he feared, but more embarrassing. Mr. Chester had received
the proposal as a joke, a strange but extremely amusing pleasantry.
"Marry Winnie?" he had said; "you must wait till she is out of long
clothes--or of short frocks, is it?" And this had been the utmost that
could be extracted from him. But, at the same time, he had taken no
steps to discourage or separate the lovers. They had gone on seeing each
other constantly, and had been sufficiently confident that no serious
obstacle was to be placed in their way--but never had been able to
extract a more definite decision or anything that could be called
consent. For some time, in the freshness of their mutual enchantment,
the two young people had gone on very gaily with this imperfect
sanction; but there had then come a time when Edward, impatient, yet not
venturing to risk a definite negative by using pressure upon the father,
had filled Winifred's life with agitation, urging upon her the claims of
his faithful love, and even now and then proposing to carry her off, and
trust to the chance of pardon afterwards, rather than bear that
tantalising, unnecessary delay. Winifred, with mingled happiness and
distress, had spent many an hour in curbing this impetuosity, and it was
strange to her, a relief, but yet a surprise and wonder, when he
suddenly ceased all instances of the kind, and assumed the aspect of a
man quite satisfied with the present state of affairs, though very
watchful of all that happened, and curious to know the details of
everything. The change in him filled her with surprise, and at first
with a vague uneasiness. But there was no appearance of any failure in
his devotion to herself, and it was in many respects less embarrassing
than the constant entreaties which she had found it so difficult to
resist. Still she would wonder sometimes, accepting, as women so often
accept, the unexplained decision of the men who are most near to them,
with that silent despair of ever understanding the motives of the other
half of humanity which men too so often feel in respect to women.
As for Miss Farrell, who had seen so much both of men and women, she
divined, or thought she divined, what Dr. Langton meant. But she said
not a word to her pupil of her divinations. She said, "What a good thing
that Edward has made up his mind to it. You never would have given in
to him, Winnie?"
"Oh, never!" said the girl, with a silent, unexpressed sense that
perhaps it might have been better if she could.
"No, you never would have done it; it is against your nature, and it
would have been the worst policy. Your dear father is a man of very
strong principles, and he never would have forgiven you. It would have
been quite past all hoping for. It is such a good thing Edward perceives
that at last."
Winifred did not receive this explanation with all the satisfaction that
her friend hoped. She felt uneasily the existence of some other with
which she was not acquainted; but so long as there was no doubt of
Edward's love, what did it matter? And she was not herself impatient.
She saw him every day; she knew (or supposed she knew) all his
thoughts; she had his confidence, his full trust, his unbroken devotion;
what more can a woman want? It is sometimes aggravating in the highest
degree to a man that she should want no more, that she should be content
with relations which stop so far short of his wishes, and Edward had
often expressed this fond exasperation. But now he took it quietly
enough, seeing possibilities which Winifred had not begun to see.
Now, however, the calm of this unexpected content was interrupted from
the other side. Tom was scarcely gone, shaking off the dust from his
shoes as he crossed for the last time the threshold of his father's
house, when Winifred learned all that was involved in the disastrous
promotion which had already made her so miserable--not only to supplant
her brothers (which yet it might be possible to turn to their
advantage), but to expose herself to risks which were worse than theirs,
to fall perhaps in her turn and make herself incapable of helping them,
or for their sake to resign all that was to herself best in life.
Winifred had retired from her father's presence with this sword in her
heart. And Miss Farrell's consolations, though they soothed her for the
moment, did not draw it out. She felt the pang and quivering anguish
through all her being. It was now her turn: she was about to be called
upon to act the heroic part which is so admirable to hear about, so
terrible to perform: to give up love and life for the sake of family
affection lightly returned, or not returned at all, rewarded with
suspicions and unkindness by those for whom she sacrificed everything.
To give up her love, her husband, for her brothers! She did what those
who are disturbed in mind instinctively learn to do. She went out by
herself into the park, and took a long solitary walk, communing with
herself. She had looked forward to Miss Farrell's return as to something
which would help and strengthen her. And for the moment that new event,
and all the gentle philosophies that had come from her old friend's
lips, had helped her a little. But at the end every one must bear his
own burden. She went out into the park, which, though the sun had come
out, was still wet and sodden with last night's rain. The half-opened
leaves were all sparkling with wet, the sky had that clear and keen
sweetness of light which is like the serenity which comes into a human
face after many tears. The sod was soft and spongy under her feet; but
Winifred was not in a mood to observe anything. She walked fast and far,
carrying her thoughts with her, passing everything in review with the
simplicity and frankness which is impossible when we have to clothe our
thoughts in words. She would not have said, even to herself, that George
and Tom would never understand her motives, never believe in her
affection; but she knew it very well, just as she knew that the grass
was damp and that she was wetting her feet, a consciousness that neither
in one case nor the other meant any blame. She knew, too, that her
feelings and her happiness would matter little more to her father than
did to herself the feelings, if they had any, of the thorns which she
put out of her way. To put these consciousnesses into words is to
condemn; but in one's thoughts one takes such known facts for granted
without any opinion.
To leap into the midst of such complications all at once is very hard
for a young soul. Ordinarily, the girl to whom it suddenly becomes
apparent that she may be called upon to give up her love, has at least
something to rest upon in the way of compensation; when it is in
fiction, she has to save her father from ruin, and often it happens in
real life that the delight of all her friends, the approbation of her
parents, the satisfaction of all who love her, is the reward for her
sacrifice. But poor Winifred was without any such consolation. If she
gave up her happiness for the sake of retaining and restoring their
inheritance to her brothers, they would revile her in the meantime, and
take it as the mere restitution of something stolen from them, in the
future. Or she might find that the inheritance came to her under
restrictions which made her sacrifice useless, and her desire to do
justice impossible. What was she then to do? There came into her mind a
sudden wish that Edward was still as he was six months ago, vehement,
impatient, almost desperate. Oh, if he would but take the matter into
his own hands, risk everything, carry her away, make it impossible once
for all that she should be the one who had to set all right! She said to
herself that she ought to have consented when he had urged this upon
her. Why should she have hesitated? They had been held in suspense for
two years, a long time in which to exercise patience, to linger on the
threshold of life. And it was not as if her father wanted her love, or
would feel his house vacant and miserable without her. He who could cut
off his sons without a compunction had never shown any particular love
for his daughter. His thoughts were concentrated upon himself. She was
not so necessary to him as old Hopkins was, who understood all his
tastes.
When Winifred suffered herself for a moment to think of herself, to leap
in imagination from Bedloe, with all its luxuries, from the sombre life
at home, undisturbed now by any joyous expectation of the boys, with no
hope even of family letters that would afford anything but pain--to the
doctor's little house full of sunshine and pleasantness, the life of two
which is the perfection of individual existence--her heart, too, seemed
to leap out of her bosom towards that other world. Oh, if she could but
be liberated without any action of her own, carried away, transported
from her own dim life to that of him to whom above all others she
belonged! This flight of fancy lifted her up in a momentary exaltation
above all her troubles. Then she tumbled down, down to the dust. She
knew very well it would not be. He could not, even if he wished it,
which now it seemed he did not, carry her away without consulting her,
without her consent. And she could never give that consent. She could
not abandon her home, her duties, the possibility of serving her
brothers, the necessity of serving her father. One must act according
to one's nature, however clearly one may see a happier way, however
certain one may be of the inefficiency of self-denial. Sometimes even
duty becomes a kind of immorality, a servile consent to the tyranny of
others; but still to the dutiful it is a bond which cannot be broken.
Winifred felt herself look on like a spectator, and sadly assent to the
possible destruction of her own life and all her hopes. It might be
delayed, it might not come at all, but still it was impending over her,
and she did not know how she was to escape, even in that one impossible
way.
She had reached the edge of the park without knowing it in the fulness
of her preoccupation, when the sound of a dog-cart coming along the road
awoke her attention. It was no wonderful thing that Edward should be
passing at that moment, though she had not thought of it. Neither was
it extraordinary that he should throw the reins to his servant and join
her. "I have just time to walk back with you," he said.
CHAPTER VI
It was scarcely in nature that the appearance of her betrothed, coming
so suddenly in the midst of her thoughts, should be disagreeable to
Winifred, but it was an embarrassment to her, and rather added to than
lessened the trouble on her mind. He led her back into the park, which
she had been coming out of, scarcely knowing where she wandered. As was
his way when they were beyond the reach of curious eyes, he took her arm
instead of offering her his. There was something more caressing, more
close in this manner of contact. When they were safe beyond all
interruption, he bent over her tenderly.
"Something is the matter," he said.
"Nothing new, Edward."
"Only the trouble of yesterday, Tom's going away?"
"It is not the trouble of yesterday. It is a trouble which lasts, which
is going on, which may never come to an end. I don't think you can say
of any trouble that it is only of yesterday."
"That is very true; still, you and I are not given to philosophising,
Winnie, and I thought there might be some new incident. I suppose he
sails to-day?"
"Yes, he sails to-day: and when will he come back again? Will he ever
come back? The two of them? Oh, Edward, life is very hard, very
different from what one thought."
"At your age people are seldom so much mixed up in it. But there is the
good as well as the bad."
"Perhaps," said the girl, faltering, "I am looking through spectacles,
not rose-coloured, all the other way. I don't see very much of the
good."
He pressed her arm close to his side.
"Am not I a little bit of good; is not our life all good if it were only
once begun?"
"But what if it never begins?"
"Winnie!" he cried, startled, standing still and drawing her suddenly in
front of him so that he could look into her face.
"Oh, Edward, don't add to my troubles; I don't see how it is ever to
begin. My father means to put me in Tom's place, as he put Tom in
George's place, and already he has said"--
"What has he said?"
"Perhaps it means nothing," she went on after a pause; "I should have
kept it to myself."
"Winnie, that is worse than anything he can have said. What he says I
can bear, but not that you should keep anything to yourself."
"It was not much. It was a sort of a threat. He said the match that was
good enough for Winnie might not be good enough for"--
"His heiress. He is right enough," young Langton said.
At this, Winifred, who had been anticipating in her own mind all that
was involved, trembled as if it had never occurred to her before, and
turned upon him with an air, and indeed with the most real sentiment of
grieved surprise.
"Right?" she said, with wonder and reproach in her voice.
"A country doctor," said the young man, "a fellow with nothing, is not a
match for the heiress of Bedloe. He is right enough. We cannot
contradict him. You ought to make an alliance like a princess with some
one like yourself."
"I did not think," said Winnie, raising her head with a flush of anger,
"that you would have been the one to make it all worse."
He smiled upon her, still holding her closely by the arm. "Did you think
I had not thought of that before now? Of course, from his point of view,
and, of course, from all points of view except our own, Winnie"--
"I am glad you make that exception."
"It is very magnanimous of me to do so, and you will have to be all the
more good to me. I am not blind, and I have seen it all coming, from the
moment of Tom's failure. Why was he so silly as to fail, when a hundred
boobies get through every year?"
"Poor Tom!" she said, with a little gush of tears.
"Yes; poor Tom! I suppose he never for a moment thought--But, for my
part, I have seen it coming. I have seen for a long time what way the
tide was turning. At first there was not much thought of you; you were
only the little girl in the house. If it had not been so, I should have
run away, I should not have run my head into the net, and exposed myself
to certain contempt and rejection. But I saw that nobody knew there was
in the house an angel unawares."
"Edward, you make me ashamed! You know how far I am"--
"From being an angel? I hope so, Winnie. If I saw the wings budding, I
should get out my instruments and clip them: it would be a novel sort
of an operation. I thought their ignorance was my opportunity."
She was partly mollified, partly alarmed. "You did not think all this
before you let yourself--care for me, Edward?"
"I did before I allowed myself to tell you that I--cared for you, as you
say. One does not do such a thing without thinking. There was a time
when I thought that I must give up the splendid practice of Bedloe, with
Shippington into the bargain; the rich appointment of parish doctor, the
fat fees of the Union"--
"You can laugh at it," she said, "but it is very, very serious to me."
"And so it is very, very serious to me. So much so that six months ago I
wanted to throw everything up, if you would only have consented to come
with me, and seek our fortune, I did not mind where"--
"Ah!" she said. There was in the exclamation a world of wistful meaning.
What an escape it would have been from all after peril! Winifred said
this with the slight shiver of one who sees the means of safety which
she could never have taken advantage of.
"But now," he said, "it is too late for that."
His tone of conviction went to Winifred's heart like a stone. She would
never have consented to it; but yet why did he say it was too late? She
gave him a wistful glance, but asked no question. To do so would have
been contrary to her pride and every feeling. They went on for a few
minutes in silence, she more cast down than she could explain--he adding
nothing to what he had said. Why did he add nothing? Things could not be
left now as they were, without mutual explanation and decision what they
were to do. Too late? She felt in her heart, on the contrary, that now
was the only moment in which it could have been done, in which she could
have wound herself up to the possibility--if it were not for other
possibilities, which, alas! would thrust themselves into the way.
"I have something to tell you," he said, "something which you will think
makes everything worse. I might have kept you in ignorance of it, as I
have been doing; but the knowledge must come some time, and it will
explain what I have said"--
She withdrew a little from him, and drew herself up to all the height
she possessed, which was not very much. There went to her heart a quick
dart like the stab of a knife. She thought he was about to tell her that
his own mind had changed, or that her coming wealth and importance had
made it incompatible with his pride to continue their engagement.
Something of this kind it seemed certain that it must be. In the sudden
conviction of the moment it did not occur to Winifred that such a new
thing could scarcely be told while he held her so closely to him, and
clasped her hand and arm so firmly. But it was not a moment for the
exercise of reason. She did not look up, but she raised her head
instinctively and made an effort to loosen her hand from his clasp. But
of these half-involuntary movements he took no note, being fully
occupied with what was in his mind.
"Winnie," he said in a serious voice, "your father talks at his ease of
making wills and changing the disposition of his property. I don't
suppose he thinks for a moment how near he may be--how soon these
changes may come into effect."
A little start, a little tremor ran through her frame. Her attitude of
preparation for a blow relaxed. She did not understand what he meant in
the relief of perceiving that it was not what she thought.
"My father? I don't understand you, Edward."
"No, I scarcely expected you would. He looks what people call the
picture of health."
She started now violently and drew her arm out of his in the shock of
the first suggestion. "My father!" she stammered--"the picture of
health--you do not mean, you cannot mean"--
"I have been cruel," he said, drawing tenderly her arm into his. "I have
given you a great shock. My darling, it had to be done sooner or later.
Your father, though he looks so well, is not well, Winnie. I never was
satisfied that he got over that illness as he thought he did. But even I
was not alarmed for a long time. Now for several months I have been
watching him closely. If he does not make this new will at once, he may
never do it. If he does, it will not be long before you are called on to
assume your place."
"Edward! you do not mean that my father--You don't mean that there is
absolute danger--to his life--soon--now? Edward! you do not think"--
"Dear, you must show no alarm. You must learn to be quite calm. You must
not betray your knowledge. It may be at any moment--to-day, to-morrow,
no one can tell. It is not certain--nothing is certain--he may go on for
a year."
The light seemed to fail in Winifred's eyes. She leant against her lover
with a rush and whirl of hurrying thoughts that seemed to carry away her
very life. It was not the awful sensation of a calamity from which there
is no escape, such as often overwhelms the tender soul when first
brought face to face with death; but rather a horrible sense of what
that doom would be to him, the cutting off of everything in which, so
far as she knew, he took any pleasure or ever thought of. The idea of a
spiritual life beyond would not come into any accordance with her
consciousness of him. Mr. Chester was one of those men whom it is
impossible to think of as entering into rest, or attaining immediate
felicity by the sudden step of death. There are some people whom the
imagination refuses to connect with any surroundings but those of
prosaic humanity. They must die, too, like the most spiritually-minded;
but there comes upon the soul a sensation of moral vertigo when we think
of them as entering the life of an unseen world. This, though it may
seem unnatural to say so, was the first sensation of Winifred, a sense
of horror and alarm, an immediate realisation of the terrible
inappropriateness of such a removal. What would become of him when
removed from earth, the only state of existence with which he had any
affinities? It sent a shiver over her, a chill sense of the unknown and
unimaginable which seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. It was only
when she recovered from this that natural feeling gained utterance. She
had leant against her lover in that first giddiness, with her head
swimming, her strength giving way. She came slowly back to herself,
feeling his arm which supported her with a curious beatific sense that
everything was explained between him and her, mingled with the sensation
of natural grief and dismay.
"I do not feel as if it could be possible," she said faintly. Then, with
trembling lips, "My father?" and melted into tears.
"My dearest, it is right you should know. It is for this reason I have
tried to persuade you not to go against him in anything. The more
tranquillity he has, the better are his chances for life. Let him do as
he threatens. Perhaps if you withdraw all opposition he will delay the
making of another will, as almost all men do--for there seems time
enough for such an operation, and nothing to hurry for. Get him into
this state of mind if you can, Winnie. Don't oppose him; let it be
believed that you see the justice of his intention, that you are willing
to do what he pleases."
"Even"--she said, and looked up at him, pausing, unable to say more.
He took both her hands in his, and looked at her, smiling. "Even," he
said, "to the length of allowing him to believe that you have given up a
man that was never half good enough for you; but who believes in you
all the same like heaven."
"Believes in me--when I pretend to give up what I don't give up, and
pretend to accept what I don't accept? Is that the kind of woman you
believe in?" she cried, drawing away her hands. "How can I do so? How
can I consent to cheat my father, and he perhaps--perhaps"--
She stood faltering, trembling, crying, but detaching herself with
nervous force from his support, in a passion of indignation and trouble
and dismay.
He answered her with a line in which is the climax of heart-rending
tragedy, holding out to her the hands from which she had escaped--
"Faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."
"That may do for poetry," she said; "but for me, I am not great enough
or grand enough to--to--to be able to brave it. Edward, do not ask me.
I must tell the truth. If I tried to do anything else, my face, my looks
would betray me. Oh, don't be so hard on me. Ask me something less than
this, ask me now to"--
She stopped terror-stricken, not knowing what she had said; but he only
looked at her tenderly, shaking his head. "If I had ever persuaded you
to that," he said, "I should have been a cad and a rascal, for it would
have broken your heart. But now I should be worse--I might be a
murderer. Winnie, you must yield for his sake. You must let him live as
long as God permits."
"And deceive him?" she said, almost inaudibly. "Oh, you don't know what
you are asking of me! You are asking too much cleverness, too much
power. I can only say one thing or another. I cannot be falsely true."
"You can do everything that is necessary, whatever it may be, for those
you love," he said.
She stood faltering before him for a moment, turning her eyes from one
side to the other, as if in search of help. But there was nothing that
could give her any aid. The heavens seemed to close in above her, and
the earth to disappear from under her feet. If she had ever consented to
an untruth in her life, it had been to shield and excuse her brothers,
for whom there were always apologies to be made. And how to deceive she
knew not.
They went on together across the park, not noticing the wetness of the
grass or the threatening of the sky, upon which clouds were once more
blowing up for rain, so much absorbed in their consultation that they
were close to the house before they were aware, and started like guilty
things surprised when Mr. Chester came sharply upon them round a corner,
buttoned up to the chin, and with an umbrella in his hand.
CHAPTER VII
"Why don't you come to the house and have your talk out? She has got her
feet wet, and if she does not look sharp, we shall all be caught in the
rain--a doctor should know better than to expose a young lady to
bronchitis. Besides, her life is more important than it ever was
before."
"We forgot how the skies were looking. You should not be out of doors
either; it is worse for you than for her. I told you this morning you
had a cold."
"You are always telling me I have a cold. I shan't live a day the less
for that," said Mr. Chester, with a jauntiness which made Winifred's
heart sick.
"I hope not, but we must take care," said young Langton. "Come back
now--don't go any farther. I hope you were coming only to bring Miss
Chester back."
"I was coming to bring Miss Chester back--and for other things," said
her father significantly. He put a little emphasis on the name, and
Winifred had already been painfully affected by hearing her name
pronounced so formally by her lover. He had never addressed her
familiarly in her father's presence, but now there seemed a meaning in
everything, and as her father repeated it, there seemed in it a whole
new world and new disposition of affairs. "But as it is going to be a
wet night," he added, "and we shall have a dull time of it, nothing but
myself and two females at dinner, you had better come and dine with us,
doctor, if you have nothing better to do."
"I will come with pleasure," Langton said. He had perfect command of
himself, and yet he could not refrain from a momentary glance at
Winifred, which said much.
She, too, divined, with a sinking of her heart, that it was not merely
for dinner, or to relieve himself from the society of "two females,"
that her father gave the invitation. He was unusually gracious and
smiling.
"You know you're always welcome," he said. "The ladies spoil you. A
young doctor is something like a curate, he is always spoiled by the
ladies; but they shan't have so much of your company as they expect, for
I have got several things to talk to you about."
"As many as you like," said Langton, "but let me entreat you to go in
now."
"You see how anxious our friend is about my health, Winnie; he does not
care half so much for yours, and you are a deal more liable to take cold
than ever I was. You take that from your mother, who was always a feeble
creature. The stamina is on the Chester side. Very well, doctor, very
well. I don't like the wet any more than you do. I'm going in, don't be
afraid. Dinner at seven, sharp, and don't keep us waiting."
Mr. Chester's laugh seemed to the young pair to mean much; the very wave
of his hand as he turned away, his insistance upon the hour of dinner,
all breathed of fate. The two young people exchanged one look as they
shook hands; on his side it was a look at once of encouragement and
entreaty--on hers of terror and wistfulness. She was afraid and yet
anxious to be left alone with her father. It seemed to Winifred that she
could bear what he said to herself, however painful it might be, but
that an insulting dismissal of Edward was more than she could bear. She
could not linger, however, nor say a word to him beyond what ordinary
civility required. Even the momentary pause did not pass without remark.
"Some last words?" Mr. Chester said; "one would think you had seen
enough of each other. You should make your appointments a little earlier
in the day."
"It was no appointment, papa. I was walking, and Dr. Langton came up in
his dog-cart."
"Oh, very likely; these things fall in so pat, don't they? I suppose I
am past the age for encountering people in dog-carts just when I want
them. But you must not calculate too much on that," he said with a
laugh. "There's no reason why I shouldn't marry and provide myself with
another family, that might be more to my mind than you."
To this Winnie made no reply. The threat had offended her on other
occasions; now it affected her with that dreadful sense of the
intolerable to which words can give no expression; it brought the blood
in a rush to her face, and she looked at him in spite of herself with
eyes in which pity and horror were mingled. He met her look with a
laugh.
"You are horrified, are you? That's all very well for you; but let me
tell you, many an older man than I, and less pleasing, perhaps, has got
a pretty young wife before now. It has to be paid for, like every other
luxury; but women are plenty, my dear, though you mayn't think so."
"Papa, do you think this is a subject to discuss with me?"
"Why not? You are the only one except myself that would be much affected
by it. It might interfere with your comforts, and it would interfere
very much with your importance, I can tell you, Miss Winnie."
"Then, father," the girl said, "for Heaven's sake do it, and don't talk
of it any more. Rather that a thousand times than to be forced to agree
to what I abhor, than to be put in another's place, than to have to give
up"--
He turned round and looked at her somewhat sternly. "What do you expect
to be obliged to give up?" he said.
Between her fear of doing harm to him, whose tranquillity she had been
charged to preserve, and her fear of precipitating matters and bringing
upon herself at once the prohibition she feared--and that natural
nervous desire to forestall a catastrophe which was entirely
contradictory of the other sentiments, Winifred paused and replied to
him with troubled looks rather than with speech. When she found her
voice, she answered, faltering--
"What you said to me yesterday, meant giving up the truth and all I have
ever cared for in my life. I have always wanted, desired, more than my
life, to be of use to--the boys--and to be made to appear as if I were
against them"--
Her voice was interrupted with sobs. Ah, but was not this the beginning
of treachery? It was the truth, but not the whole truth; the boys were
much, but there was something which was still more. Already in the first
outset and beginning she was but falsely true.
"This is all about the boys, is it?" he said coldly--"as you call them.
I should say the men--who have taken their own way, and had their own
will, and like it, I hope. If it comes to a bargain between you and me,
Winnie, there must be something more than that."
"There can be no bargain between you and me," said Winifred. In the
meantime, looking at him, she had thought his colour varied, and that a
slight stumble he made over a stone was a sign of weakness; and her
heart sank with sudden compunction. "Oh, no bargain, papa! It is yours
to tell me what to do, and mine to--to obey you." Her voice weakened and
grew low as she said these words. She felt as if it were a solemn
promise she was making, instead of the most ordinary of dutiful
speeches. He nodded his head repeatedly as she spoke.
"That's as it should be, Winnie,--that's as it should be; continue like
that, my dear, and you shall hear no more of the new wife. So long as
you are reasonable, I am quite content with my daughter, who does me
credit. It is your duty to do me credit. I am going to do a great deal
for you, and I have more claim than just the ordinary claim. Go in now,
the rain's coming. As for me, for all that young fellow says, I don't
believe it matters. I feel as fit as ever I did in my life. Still,
bronchitis is a nuisance," he added, coughing a little, as he followed
her indoors.
Winifred did not appear again till the hour of dinner. She was, like
every one who hears a sentence of death for the first time, apprehensive
that the event which seemed at one moment incredible might happen the
next, and she stole along the corridor at least half a dozen times, to
make sure that her father was in the room called the library, in which
he read his newspapers. If any sound was heard in the silence of the
house, she conjured up terrible visions of a sudden fall and
catastrophe.
How was it possible to oppose him in anything? If he told her to abandon
Edward, she would have to reply--as if he had asked her to go out for a
walk, or drive with him in his carriage--"Yes, papa." It would not
matter what he asked, she must make the same answer, conventional,
meaning as little as if it had been a request for a cup of tea. And
about his will the same assent would have to be necessary. She must
appear to him and to the world to be very willing to supplant her
brothers; she must appear to give up her lover because now she was too
great and too rich to marry a poor man. This was the charge her lover
himself had laid upon her. She must consent to everything. The true
feelings of her mind, and all her intentions and hopes, must be laid
aside, and she must appear as if she were another woman, a creature
influenced by the will of others without any of her own.
Even that was a possible position. A girl might give up all natural will
and impulse. She might be a passive instrument in other people's hands.
She might take passively what was given to her, and passively allow
something else to be taken away: that might be weak, miserable, and
unworthy--but it need not be false. What was required of her was more
than this. It was required of her that she should pretend to be all this
till her father should die, and then turn round and deceive him in his
grave. The thought made Winifred shiver with a chill which penetrated
her very heart. After, could she undo all she had done, baulk him after
he was dead, proclaim to all the world that she had deceived him? Was
that what Edward meant by being falsely true? She said to herself that
she could not do it, that it would be impossible. In the case of her
brothers, perhaps, where only renunciation was necessary, she might do
it; but to gain happiness for herself she could not do it. "I cannot, I
cannot!" she cried to herself under her breath; and then lower still,
with an anguish of resolution and determination, "I will not!" If she
gave him up, it should be for ever. She would not play a part, and
pretend submission, and deceive.
But, to the astonishment of both these young people, Mr. Chester that
evening did not say a word on the subject. During dinner he was more
agreeable than usual; but when the ladies went out of the room, young
Langton, as he met the eyes of his betrothed, gave her a look which told
that he knew what was coming. He was so nervous when he was left behind
that for the first few minutes he hardly knew what was being said to
him; but when he calmed down and came to himself, an astonished sense
that nothing was being said took the place of his dread, and bewildered
him altogether. All that Mr. Chester had to say was to ask for some
information about a small estate which was to be sold in another part of
the country which was better known to the doctor than to himself. He
asked his advice, indeed, as to whether he should or should not become
its purchaser, in a way which made young Langton's head go round, for it
was the manner of a man who was consulting one of those who were
concerned, an intimate friend, perhaps a son-in-law. He said to himself,
after a moment, when this subject was exhausted, that now it must be
coming. But, on the contrary, there was not a word.
When the two gentlemen went into the drawing-room, Winifred asked him
with her eyes a question which was full of the anguish of suspense. He
managed behind the cover of a book to say to her, "Nothing has been
said;" but this was so wonderful that the relief was too much, and
neither could she believe in that. They both felt that the pause, though
almost miraculous, could not be real, and that the coming storm was all
the more certain because of this delay.
Late that night Mr. Chester felt unwell, and sent into the village for
the doctor just as he was going to bed. Langton put on his coat, and
jumped into the dog-cart which had been sent for him, with a sudden
quickening of all his pulses, and the sense of a miraculous escape more
distinctly in his mind than solicitude for his patient. Winifred met him
at the door with wild anxiety and terror, and followed him to her
father's room, with all her nerves strung for the great and terrible
event of which she had been warned. She thought nothing less than that
the hour of calamity had come, and the whole house was moved with a
vague horror of anticipation, although no one knew that there was
anything to fear. The doctor's practised eye, however, saw in a moment
that it was a false alarm, and it was with a pang almost of
disappointment that he reassured her. He could only appear glad, but
there was no doubt in his own mind that it was a distinct mistake of
Providence. Had Mr. Chester died then, he would have left the world with
one or two sins the less on his conscience, and a great deal of human
misery would have been spared.
"You think I should not have roused you out of your comfortable bed
without the excuse of dying, or at least something more in it?" the
patient said; "but you will find I am a tough customer, and likely to
give you more trouble before you are done with me."
"It is no trouble," the doctor said, with a grave face; "but you must
learn to be careful."
"Pshaw!" said the rich man. "I tell you I am a tough customer. It is not
a bit of an evening walk that will free you of me."
"We will do our best to fortify you for evening walks; but you must be
careful," Langton said.
Upon which his patient gave a chuckle, and turned round in his bed and
went to sleep like a two-years child.
CHAPTER VIII
A threatened life is said to last long. Winifred Chester lived in great
alarm and misery for a week or two, watching every movement and every
look of her father, expecting almost to see him fall and die before her
very eyes. The horror of a catastrophe which she could not avert, which
nothing could be done to stave off, intensified the natural feeling
which makes the prospect of another's death, even of an indifferent
person, overawing and terrible. And though it was impossible to believe
that a man like Mr. Chester could inspire his daughter with that
impassioned filial love which many daughters bear to their parents, yet
he was her father, and all the habits of her life were associated with
him: so that the idea of his sudden removal conveyed almost as great a
shock to her mind as if the warmest bonds of love, instead of a natural
affection much fretted by involuntary judgments given in her heart
against him, had been the bond between them.
And there can be nothing in the world more dreadful to the mind than to
watch the life and actions of a human creature whom we know to be on the
brink of the grave, but who neither suspects nor anticipates any danger,
and lives every day as though he were to live for ever. To hear him say
what he was going to do in the time to come, the changes he meant to
make, the improvements, the new furnishings, the plantings, all that was
to be done during the next ten years, filled Winifred with a thrill of
misery which was not unmingled with compunction. Could she say nothing
to him, give him no hint, whisper in his ear no intimation that his days
were numbered? She shrank within herself at the thought of presuming to
do so; and yet to be with him and walk by him, and listen to all his
anticipations, and never do it, seemed horrible. All his thoughts were
of the world in which he had, as he did not know, so precarious a
footing. He was a man who wanted no other, whose horizon was bounded by
the actual, whose aspirations did not exceed what human life could give
him. He had met with disappointments and probably had felt them as
bitterly as other men, but his active spirit had never been arrested, he
had turned to something else in which he expected compensation. The
something else at present was Winifred; she had done him credit, and
might do so still in a higher degree than had been possible to her
brothers. She might marry anybody. As for the doctor, when the moment
came, Mr. Chester knew very well how to make short work of the doctor.
And Winnie, of whom there could be no doubt that she was a lady, should
marry a lord and satisfy her father's pride, and make up for everything.
His mind had taken refuge in this with an elasticity which minds of
higher tone and better inspirations do not always possess; and those
plans which to her were so frightful, those arrangements of years which
he should never see, were all with a view to this satisfaction which he
had promised himself. He was going to preserve the game strictly, a duty
which he had not much thought of hitherto: he was going to enlarge the
house--to build a new wing for my lord, as he began within himself to
name his unknown son-in-law. In these arrangements he forgot his own
sons, putting them aside altogether, as if they had never existed, and
forgot also, or at least never took into consideration, any uncertainty
in life, any thought of consolations less positive.
To see a man so terribly off his guard is always a spectacle very
terrible and surprising when the mind of the spectator is roused to it,
just as the sight of any indifferent passer-by going lightly along a
road on which death awaits him round the next corner, is almost more
appalling than the sight of death itself, especially if we cannot warn
him or do anything to save. And how could he die? A man who cared for
nothing that was not in the life he knew, how was he to adapt himself to
another, to anything so different? Winifred's brain swam, the light
faded before her as she sat watching him, unable to take her eyes from
him, full of terror, compassion, pity.
"What are you staring at so?" he asked on more than one occasion.
"Nothing, papa," Winifred replied incoherently, consciousness suddenly
coming back to her as his voice broke the giddiness and throng of
intolerable thoughts.
"One would think you saw a ghost behind me," he said, with a laugh.
"That's the new sthetic fashion of absent-mindedness, I suppose;" and
this explanation satisfied and even pleased him, for he wished Winnie to
be of the latest fashion and "up to everything" with the best.
Miss Farrell, on the other hand, scolded her pupil, as much as she could
scold any one, for this sudden alarm which had seized her. "It is just a
fad," the old lady said. "Edward has his fads like other people: doctors
have; they are fond of a discovery that leads to nothing. I never saw
your dear father look better in his life."
"He does not look ill," Winifred allowed, with a faint movement of
relief.
"Ill? he looks strong, younger than he did five years ago, and such a
colour, and an excellent appetite. But I am glad to hear that is what
Edward thinks, for it explains everything."
"Glad?" it was Winifred's turn to exclaim.
"My dear, when you are my age you will know that one is sometimes glad
of an explanation of things that have puzzled one, even though the
explanation itself is not cheerful. I think this fright of Edward's is a
piece of folly, but yet it explains many things. As for your dear
father, if he were a little unwell from time to time, that would be
nothing to wonder at. Gout, for instance--one is always prepared for
gout in a man of his age. But he is up early and late, he has the
complexion of a ploughboy, and can eat everything without even a thought
of his digestion. I envy him," she said, with fervour. Then, giving
Winifred a kiss as she leant over her, "You are seeing everything en
noir, my dear, and Edward is giving in to you. Don't think any more
about it for three days; in the meantime I will watch him; give me three
days, and promise me to be happy in the meantime."
This time Winifred did not repeat the inappropriate expression, but only
looked at her old friend with tears in her eyes. "I don't think I have
very much to be happy about," she said.
"You have life before you, and youth and hope; and you have Edward; and
your dear father, so far as I can see, in perfect health; and the
others--in the hands of Providence Winnie."
"Are we not all in the hands of Providence," said the girl; "those who
live and those who die, those who do well and those who do ill? and it
does not seem to make any difference."
"That is because we see such a little way, such a little way--never what
to-morrow is going to bring forth," Miss Farrell said.
But this conversation did not do very much to reassure Winifred, and at
the end of the three days the old lady said nothing. Her experienced
eyes saw, after a close investigation, certain trifles which brought her
to the young doctor's opinion, or at least made her acknowledge to
herself that he might possibly be right. It is to be feared that Miss
Farrell did not look upon this possibility with horror. She was calmer,
not so much interested, and less full of that instinctive horror and awe
of death which is most strong in the young. She had seen a great many
people die; perhaps she was not for that more reconciled to the idea of
it in her own person than others; but she had come to look upon it with
composure where others were concerned. She thought it likely enough that
Edward might be right; and she thought that, perhaps, this was not the
conclusion which would be most regrettable. It would leave Winifred
free. If he did not alter his will, it would restore the boys to their
rights; and if he did alter his will, Winifred would restore them to
their rights. On making a balance of the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, no doubt it would be for the best that Mr. Chester
should end his career.
After these three days, at the end of which Winifred asked no
explanation from her friend, many other days followed, with nothing
happening. The force of the impression was softened in her mind, and
though the appearance of Mr. Chester's man of business on two or three
several occasions gave her a renewed thrill of terror, yet her father
said nothing on the subject of his will, and she was glad on her side to
ignore it, feeling that nothing she could say or do would have any
effect upon his resolution. On the last evening, when Mr. Babington,
after a long afternoon with Mr. Chester in the library, stayed to
dinner, the cheerfulness and satisfaction of the master of the house
were visible to everybody. He had the best wine in his cellar out for
his old friend, and talked to him all the evening of "old days," as he
said, days when he himself had little expectation of ever being the
Squire of Bedloe.
"But many things have changed since that time," he added, "and the last
is first and the first last, eh, Babington, in more senses than one."
"Yes, in more senses than one," the lawyer said gravely, sipping the old
port which had been disinterred for him with an aspect not half so
jovial as that of his patron, though it was wine such as seldom appears
at any table in these degenerate days.
"In more senses than one," Mr. Chester repeated. "Fill your glass again,
old Bab; and, Miss Farrell, stay a moment, and let me give you a little
wine, for I am going to propose a toast."
"I am not in the habit of drinking toasts," said Miss Farrell, who had
risen from her chair; "but as I am sure it is one which a lady need not
hesitate about, since you propose it"--
"No lady need hesitate," said Mr. Chester, "for it is to one that is a
true lady, as good a lady as if she had royal blood in her veins. You
would not better her, I can tell you, if you were to search far and
wide; and as you have had some share in making her what she is, Miss
Farrell, it stands to reason you should have a share in her advancement.
I have a great mind to call in all the servants and make them drink it
too."
"Don't," said the lawyer hurriedly; "a thing is well enough among
friends that is not fit for strangers, or servants either. For my part,
I wish everything that is good to Miss Winifred; but yet"--
"Hold your tongue, Babington; it is none of your business. Here's the
very good health of the heiress of Bedloe, and good luck to her, and a
fine title and a handsome husband, and everything that heart can
desire."
The two ladies had risen, and still stood, Miss Farrell with the glass
of wine which Mr. Chester had given her in her hand, Winifred standing
very straight by the table, and white as the dress she wore. Miss
Farrell grew pale too, gazing from one to the other of the two
gentlemen, who drank their wine, one with a flushed and triumphant
countenance, the other in little thoughtful gulps. "I can't refuse to
drink the health of Winifred, however it is put," she said tremulously.
"But if this is what you mean, Mr. Chester"--
"Yes, my old girl," cried Mr. Chester, "this is what I mean; and I don't
know what anybody can have to say against it--you, in particular, that
have brought her up, and done your duty by her, I must say. She has
always been a good friend to you, and always will be, I can answer for
her, and you shall never want a home as long as she has one. But if you
have anything to say against my arrangements, or what I mean to do for
her"--
Miss Farrell put down the wine with a hand that trembled slightly. She
towered into tremulous height, or so it seemed to the lookers-on. "I say
nothing about the term which you have permitted yourself to apply to me,
Mr. Chester," she said. "I can make allowance for bad breeding; but if
you think you can prevent me from forming an opinion, and expressing
it"--
"Be quiet, Chester," cried the lawyer, kicking him under the table; but
in the height of his triumph he was not to be kept down.
"You may form your opinions as you please, and express them too; but, by
George! if you express anything about my affairs, or take it upon you to
criticise, it will have to be in some one else's house."
"That is quite enough," said the old lady. "I am not in the habit of
receiving affronts. This day is the last I shall spend in your house. I
bid you good evening, Mr. Babington." She waved her hand majestically as
she went away. As for Winnie, who had endeavoured to stop him with an
indignant cry of "Father!" she turned upon Mr. Chester a pair of eyes,
large and full of woe, which blazed out of her pale face in passionate
protestation as she hurried after her friend. The exit of the ladies was
so sudden after this swift and hot interchange of hostilities that it
left the two men confounded. Mr. Chester gave vent to an exclamation or
two, and turned to his supporter on the other side.
"What did I say?" he cried. "I haven't said anything, have I, to make a
tragedy about?"
"It would have been a great deal better to say nothing at all," was all
the comfort Babington gave him. The lawyer went on with the port, which
was very good. He thought quarrels were always a nuisance, but that
Chester did indeed--there could be no doubt of it--want some one to take
him down a peg or two.
"If your daughter does not much like it herself, as seems to be the
case, it's a pity to set the old lady on to make her worse. And Miss
Winifred wants a lady with her," he said between the gulps.
He gave no support to the angry man, hot with excitement and triumph, to
whom this sudden check had come in the midst of his outburst of angry
satisfaction.
Mr. Chester's countenance fell.
"You don't mean," he cried, "that she will be such a fool as to go away?
Pshaw! she's not such a fool as that. She knows on what side her
bread's buttered. She's lived at Bedloe these dozen years."
"Everybody knows Miss Farrell," said the lawyer. "She's as proud as
Lucifer, and as fiery, if she is set ablaze."
"Pooh!" said the other; "it is nothing but a breeze; we'll be all right
again to-morrow. She knows me, and I know her. She is not such a fool as
to throw away a comfortable home, because I called her old girl. Are you
determined, after all, that you won't stay the night?"
"I must get home--I must indeed. To-morrow early I have half a dozen
appointments."
"Then, if you will go," said Mr. Chester,--"which I take unkind of you,
for, of course, the appointments could stand, if you chose;--but if you
must go, it's time for your train."
"Thank you for telling me," said Mr. Babington. He jumped up with a
slight resentment, though he had been quite determined about going away
that night; but then he had not known that there would be this quarrel,
which he should have liked to see the end of, or that the port would be
so good.
CHAPTER IX
The sound of the brougham rolling along down the avenue, and of the
closing of the great door upon the departing guest, came to Winifred, as
she sat alone, with a dreary sound. Mr. Babington was no particular ally
of hers, and yet it felt like the going away of a friend. Presently her
father came into the room, talking over his shoulder to old Hopkins
about the hot water and lemons which were to be placed in the library
ready for him. "Ten o'clock will do," he said. It was only about nine,
and Winifred felt, not with transport, that she was to have her father's
society for the next hour. It was by this time too warm to have a fire
in the evening, but yet they sat habitually, when the lamp was lighted,
near the fireplace. Mr. Chester came up to this central spot, and drew a
chair near to his daughter and sat down. He brought a smell of wine with
him, and a sensation of heat and excitement. "Why are you sitting by
yourself," he said, "like a sparrow on the housetop? It seems to me you
are always alone."
"I shall have to be alone in future, papa. Miss Farrell"--Winifred could
not say any more for the sob in her throat.
"Oh, this is too much!" said Mr. Chester. "Couldn't she or any one see
that I was a little excited? She must know I don't mean any harm. That
is all nonsense, Winnie. You shall say something pretty to her from me,
and make an end of it. Why, what's all this fuss about a hasty word? She
is an old girl if you come to that--But I don't want any botheration
now. I want everything to be straight and pleasant. We are going to have
company, people staying in the house, and you can't do without her, that
is clear."
"Oh, papa," said Winifred, "I wish you would not have any one staying in
the house. I don't know what you meant to-night, but if it is anything
about me, I--I don't feel able for company. It is so short a time since
poor Tom"--
"You had better let poor Tom alone. I want to hear nothing more of him,"
said the father. "Mind what I say. I mean to make a lady of you, Winnie;
but if you turn upon me like the rest, I am just as fit to do the same
to you."
"I would rather you did than have what should be theirs," said Winifred.
Her heart was beating wildly in her breast with apprehension and dismay,
and she could not be prudent as she had been bidden to be, nor consent
to be what was so odious to her; but even in the warmth of her protest
Edward's words occurred to her, and she faltered and stopped, with an
alarmed look at her father. He was flushed, and his eyes were fiery and
red.
"You are going a little too fast," he said. "It is neither theirs nor
yours, but mine; and I should like to know who has any right to take it
from me. Now that we've begun on this subject, we'll have it out,
Winnie. You've been having your own way more than was good for you.
Perhaps, after all, Miss Farrell, who has let you do as you pleased, can
go, and somebody else be got who knows better what is suitable to a
young lady like you. I can have no more flirtations with doctors, or
curates, or that sort. You are old enough to be married, and I want no
more nonsense. That sort of thing, though it means nothing, is bad for
a girl settling in life."
Winifred had turned from white to red, sitting gazing at him, yet
shrinking from his eyes. "Papa," she said, "I don't know what you mean,"
in a voice so low and troubled that he curved his hand over his ear,
half in pretence, half in sincerity, to hear what she had to say.
"What I mean?--oh, that is very easy--you are not a child any longer,
and you must throw aside childish things. I have asked a few people for
the week after next. It's too early for the country, but I know some
that are soon tired of town; and there is a young fellow among them
who--well, who is very well disposed towards you, and well worth your
catching were you twenty times an heiress. So I hope you'll mind what
you're about, and play your cards well, and make me father-in-law to an
earl. That's all that I require of you, my dear; and it's more for your
own advantage than mine, when all is said."
He was very much flushed, she thought, and his eyes almost starting from
his head. Terror seized her, as though some dreadful catastrophe might
happen before her eyes. "Papa," she said, with an effort, "this is all
very new, and there is so much to think of. Please let it be for
to-morrow. There has been so much to-night--my head is quite confused,
and I don't seem to understand what you say."
"You shall understand what I say, and it is better to be clear about it
once for all. Here is the young Earl coming, as I tell you. He would
suit me very well, and I mean him to suit you, so let us have no
nonsense. If Miss Farrell thinks fit to leave you just when you want
her, she is an ungrateful old-- But we'll find another woman. I mean
everything to be on a right footing when these people turn up."
"Papa, of course I shall do all I can to--please your friends."
"Well, that's the first step," he said. "And it's very much for your own
advantage. You would not be my daughter if you did not think of that."
She made no reply. If this was all, she was pledging herself to nothing,
she thought, with natural inconsistency. But Mr. Chester was not
satisfied. He drew his chair close, so that the odour of his wine and
the excitement in his mind seemed to make a haze in the air around.
"And look here, Winnie. It doesn't suit me to send Edward Langton away.
He's been a fool in respect to you, and you've been a fool, and so have
I, for not putting a stop to it at once. But the fellow knows what's
what better than most. And he knows my constitution. I am not going to
part with him as a doctor because he's been a presuming prig, and
thought himself good enough for my daughter. It's for you to let him see
that that's all over. Come, a word is as good as a wink."
"Father," Winnie said: she looked at him piteously, clasping her hands
with the unconscious gesture of anguish--"oh, don't take everything from
me in a moment!" she cried.
"What am I taking from you? I am giving you a fortune, a title probably,
a husband far above anything you could have looked for."
"I want no one, papa, but you. Let me take care of you. I will ask for
nothing but only to stay at home quietly and make you comfortable."
Mr. Chester pushed back his chair noisily with a loud exclamation. "Do
you take me for a fool?" he said. "Have I ever asked you to stay at
home and make me comfortable? I can make myself comfortable, thank you.
What I want is that you should do me credit. Your confounded humility
and domesticity, and all that, may be very fine in a woman's novel.
Taking care of her old father, the sweet girl! a ministering angel, and
so forth. Do you think I go in for that sort of rubbish? I can make
myself a deuced deal more comfortable than you could ever make me. Come,
Winnie, no more of this folly. You can make me father-in-law to a
British peer, and that is the sort of comfort I want."
His eyes were red with heat and excitement, the blood boiling in his
veins. The girl's spirit was cowed as she looked at him, not by his
violence, but by the signs of physical disturbance, which took all power
from her.
"Oh, papa," she said, "don't say anything more to-night! I am very
unhappy. I will do anything rather than make you angry, rather
than--disturb you. Have a little pity upon me, papa, and let me off for
to-night."
"To-night?" he said; "to-night ought to be the proudest day of your
life. Who could ever have expected that you would be the heiress of
Bedloe, a little chit of a girl? Most fathers would have married you off
to the first comer that would take you and your little bit of fortune.
But I have behaved very different. I have made you as good as an eldest
son--not that I can't take it all away again, as easily as I gave it, if
you don't do your best for me."
He swayed forward a little as he spoke, in his excitement, and Winifred,
whose terrified eyes were quite prepared to see him fall down at her
feet, rose up hastily, with a little cry. She put out her hands
unconsciously to support him.
"Oh, papa, I will do whatever you please!" she cried.
Mr. Chester pushed the outstretched hands away. "You think, perhaps, I
want something to steady me," he said. "That's a delusion. I am as
steady as you are, and more so, and know quite as well what I am saying.
However, as long as you have come to your senses and obey me, that's all
I care for. Look here, Winnie!" he said, again sitting down suddenly and
pushing her back into her chair; "I don't want to be hard upon you. If
old Farrell wants an apology I'll make it--to a certain extent. I meant
no offence. She's very useful in her way. She's a lady, I always said
so; and she's made you a lady, and I am grateful to her--more or less.
You can say whatever's pretty on my part; or I'll even say a word
myself, if you insist upon it. To have her go now would be deuced
awkward. Tell her I meant no offence. I was a little elevated, if you
like. You may take away my character, if that will please her," he
added, with a laugh. "Say what you like, I can bear it. Getting
everything done as I wished had gone to my head."
"Oh, papa, if you had but wished something else! I am not--good enough.
I am not--strong enough."
"Hold your tongue. I hope I'm the best judge of my own affairs," her
father said. Then he yawned largely in her face. "I think I'll go and
have my whisky and water. It is getting near bedtime, and I've had an
exciting day, what with old Bab, and old Farrell, and you. I've been on
the go from morning to night. But you've all got to knock under at the
last," he added, nodding his head, "and the sooner the better, you'll
find, my dear, if you have any sense."
Winifred sat and listened to his heavy step as he went across the hall
to the library and down the long corridor. It seemed to be irregular and
heavier than its wont, and it was an effort of self-restraint not to
follow him, to see that all was safe. When the door of his room closed
behind him, which it did with a louder clang than usual, rousing all the
echoes in the silent house, another terror seized her. Shut into that
library, with no one near him, what might happen? He might fall and die
without any one being the wiser; he might call with no one within
hearing. She started to her feet, then sat down again trembling, not
knowing what to do. She dared say nothing to him of the terror in her
mind. She dared not set the servants to watch over him or take them into
her confidence--even Hopkins, what could she say to him? But she could
not go to her own room, which would be entirely out of the way of either
sight or hearing. Sometimes Mr. Chester would sit up late, after even
Hopkins had gone to bed. The terror in her mind was so great that
Winifred watched half the night, leaving the door of the drawing-room
ajar, and sometimes starting out into the darkness of the hall, at one
end of which a feeble light was kept burning. The hours went by very
slowly while she thus watched and waited, trembling at all the creakings
and rustlings of the night. She forgot the pledge she had given, the new
life that was opening upon her in the midst of these terrors. Visions
flitted before her mind, things which she had read in books of dead men
sitting motionless, with the morning light coming in upon their pallid
faces, or lying where they had fallen till some unthinking servant
stumbled in the morning over the ghastly figure. It was long past
midnight when the library door opened, and, shrinking back into the
darkness, she saw her father come out with his candle. He had probably
fallen asleep in his chair, and the light glowing upon his face showed
it pallid and wan after the flush and heat of the evening. He came
slowly, she thought unsteadily, along the passages, and climbed the
stairs towards his room with an effort. It seemed to her excited
imagination almost a miracle when the door of his bedroom closed upon
him, and the pale blueness of dawn stealing through the high staircase
window proved to her that this night of watching was almost past. But
what might the morning bring forth?
The morning brought nothing except the ordinary routine of household
life at Bedloe. Mr. Chester got up at his usual hour, in his usual
health. He sent for the doctor, however, in the course of the day,
partly because he wanted him, partly to see how Winnie would behave.
"I have the stomach of an ostrich," he said, "but still that port was a
little too much. To drink port with impunity, one should drink it every
day."
"It is a great deal better never to drink it at all," said the doctor;
but Mr. Chester patted him on the back, and assured him that good port
was a very good thing, and much better worth drinking than thin claret.
"I believe it is that sour French stuff that takes all the spirit out of
you young fellows," he said.
Winifred was compelled to be present during this interview. She heard
her father give an account to Edward of the expected guests.
"You shall come up and dine one evening," he said. "You must make
acquaintance with the Earl, who may be of use to you. I shouldn't wonder
if we had him often about here."
To Winifred, looking on, saying nothing, but vividly alive to her
father's offensive tone of patronage, and to the significance of this
intimation, there was torture in every word. But Edward looked at her
with an unclouded countenance, and laughingly assured her father that he
had known the Earl all his life.
"He is a very good fellow; but he is not very bright," he said.
"He may not be very bright, but he is a peer of the realm, and that is
the sort of society that is going to be cultivated at Bedloe. I have had
enough of the little people," Mr. Chester replied.
Edward Langton laughed, with the slightest, but only the very slightest,
tinge of colouring in his face. "The little people must take the hint,
and disappear," he said.
"But, of course, present company is always excepted. That has nothing to
do with you. You're professional; you're indispensable."
Young Langton gave Winifred a look. It was swift as lightning, but it
told her more than a volume could have done. The indignation and
forbearance and pity that were in it made a whole drama in themselves.
"I hope I shall prove myself worthy of the exception in my favour," was
all he said.
"I have no doubt you will; you were always one that knew your own
place," said Mr. Chester.
"Father!" cried Winnie, crimson with shame and indignation.
"Hold your tongue!" he cried. "The doctor knows what I mean, and I know
what he means; we want no interference from you."
It was the first trial of the new state of affairs. She had to shake
hands with him in her father's presence, with nothing but a look to
express all the trouble in her mind. But Edward on his part was
entirely calm, with a shade of additional colour, but no more. He played
his part more thoroughly than she did--upon which, with the usual
self-torture of women, a cold thought arose in her that perhaps it was
not entirely an assumed part. From every side she had much to bear.
CHAPTER X
Miss Farrell did not add to her pupil's trouble. When she heard the
state of affairs, she gave up with noble magnanimity her intention of
going away. "You must not ask me to meet any one--till the visitors
come," she said. "I shall remain to give you what help I can; but you
know my rule. When I am treated with rudeness, I make no complaint, I
take no offence, but I go away."
"You would not have the heart to desert me," Winifred said.
"No, that is just how it is--I have not the heart; but I will take my
meals in my room, my dear. Your dear father"--habit was too strong in
Miss Farrell's mind even for resentment--"no doubt his meaning was quite
innocent; but we can't meet again--at all events for the present," she
added, with much dignity.
"So long as you do not forsake me," cried Winnie, and Miss Farrell,
touched, declared "I will never forsake you!" with fervour.
This added an element which was tragi-comic to Winifred's distress. With
all the grave and terrible things that surrounded her, the misery of her
new position, the sense of falsehood in her tacit acceptance of all her
father was doing, her fears for him, the chill of alarm of another kind
with which Edward's composure filled her--there was something ludicrous
in having to provide for Miss Farrell's retirement into her own rooms,
and the two different spheres thus established in the house. Perhaps it
gave her a little relief in the more serious miseries that were always
so near. It threw a slight aspect of the fictitious into the sombre air
of the house, which seemed charged with trouble.
But in the meantime the preparations went on for the expected guests.
Mr. Chester meant that they should be received magnificently. Some of
the rooms were entirely refurnished with a luxury and wealth of
upholstering enough to fill even a millionaire with envy. Nothing so
fine existed in the county as the two rooms which were being ornamented
for the use of the very active-minded and energetic woman who was the
young Earl's mother. To describe the sensation with which Winifred saw
all this is well-nigh impossible. She had been made to consent in
consequence of the arguments used by the very man whose interests were
assailed. But for Edward she would have refused to be any party to the
proposed arrangement--and now she asked herself how far it was to go?
Was she to be forced to consent if a further proposal were made to her?
Was she to be driven to the very church door, in order to avert an evil
which began, to her, every day to appear more visionary? Could it be
that Edward--Edward himself, who had always been the soul of honour in
her eyes--had lent himself to the conspiracy against her? Her heart
cried out so against the coil of falsehood in which her feet seemed to
be caught that life truly became a misery to her--false to her brothers,
false to her father, false to herself. She could not say false to
Edward, since it was Edward himself who exacted this extraordinary proof
of devotion. Every principle in her being rose up against it as it went
on from day to day. She asked herself whether it was doing a less wrong
to her father thus to deceive him by pretended submission than to tell
him the truth even at the risk of an illness. And he had not to her the
least air of being ill. He was a strong man, stronger than almost any
other man of his age, more ruddy, more active. Her head swam with the
multitude of her thoughts. Winifred's mind was too simple and
straightforward to accept that idea of faith unfaithful. It became like
a yoke of iron upon her shoulders. Mr. Chester grew stronger and more
active, and louder and gayer every day; while she faded and shrank
visibly, unable to make any head against that sea of troubles that
carried her soul away.
The eve of the appointed visit had arrived, and all the preparations
were complete. Mr. Chester insisted that his daughter should go with him
over all the redecorated rooms to see the effect. "You think perhaps
that this is all for my lady's gratification," he said; "that's a
mistake. It's for the gratification of Winifred, the new Countess, when
she comes home."
"If you mean me, papa"--
"Oh no, of course not! how could I mean you?" cried her father, rubbing
his hands. "I mean Miss Chester, who is going to marry the Earl. Perhaps
you don't know that young lady? She will bring her husband a pretty
estate and a pretty bit of money in her apron, and please her father
down to the ground."
"But, papa-- Oh, I cannot, I cannot deceive you! It is deceiving you even
to seem to--even to pretend to"--
"You had better hold your tongue, Winnie," he said sternly. "You had
better not go any farther or you may be sorry for it. You should know
very well by this time what I'm capable of when I'm crossed. But I don't
mean to be crossed this time, I can tell you. It would be hard if a man
couldn't do what he likes with his own daughter. Go along with you, and
don't speak back to me."
"But, papa"--
"Go, I tell you, before you put me in a passion," her father cried. And
Winifred was terrified by the glare in his eyes, and the quick recurring
fear that she might harm him took all power from her. She hurried away,
leaving him to admire his upholstery by himself. And that afternoon and
evening her distress reached its climax. She would not consult Miss
Farrell. She would not see Edward. Things had gone too far indeed to be
talked of, or submitted to any other decision than that of her own
heart. Once or twice, nay a hundred times, the desire of the coward, to
run away, occurred to her. But how could she, to think of nothing more,
leave her father in the lurch, and expose him to all the comments of
the recent unfriendly acquaintances whom he thought friends? Winifred
was one of those to whom the abandonment of a post was impossible; but
such was the confusion of her misery, that flight, now or at another
moment,--flight alone, hopeless, without leaving any trace behind
her,--seemed to be the only way of escape. At dinner her father seemed
to have forgotten her attempt at rebellion. He talked incessantly of the
guests, rolling their titles with an enjoyment which was half ludicrous,
half pitiful. "You must try and persuade old Farrell to show," he said.
"She's very well thought of by all these grandees, and she can talk to
them of people they know--besides, there's her music, Winnie, that's
first rate. I'll come and apologise if she pleases, but we must take
care my lady's not dull of an evening, and she must show." He was in
such good spirits that after dinner, with much clearing of his throat,
and something like a blush, he made her sit down to the piano and
accompany him in one of the old songs for which he had been famous
before he began to fear the memory of the singing man at Chester
Cathedral. He had the remains of a beautiful voice, and still sang well
in the old-fashioned style which he had learned when a boy. To hear him
carolling forth a love-song of that period when Moore was monarch, was
to Winnie a wonder and portent which took away her very breath. She
trembled so in her part of the performance that the piano became
inaudible in competition with the fine roll of Mr. Chester's
grace-notes. "Why, I thought you could play at least," he said roughly.
"I'll have old Farrell--she knows what she's about--to-morrow night."
"Well, my dear," Miss Farrell said, when this conversation was reported
to her, "you know what my feelings are; but I am not dull to the credit
of the family. It being fully understood what my motive is, I shall
certainly appear to-morrow evening, and do my very best to make things
go off well. I will play your dear father's accompaniment with the
greatest pleasure. He has the remains of a very fine voice, and he has
science, too, though it is old-fashioned. So has your brother George a
beautiful voice; I always wished him to cultivate it. We must do
everything, Winnie, both you and I, to make things go off well. You are
not in good spirits, it is true,--neither am I,--but we must forget all
that for the credit of the house. And how do you think he is himself?"
she added after a pause.
"He looks very well," said Winnie. "I see no signs of illness.
Edward"--she paused a little with a faint smile,--"I think I should say
Dr. Langton, for I never see him"--
"Oh, my dear, don't judge him unjustly!--he thinks that is necessary."
"You all think it is necessary," cried Winnie, with a little outburst of
feeling, "to make me as unhappy as possible. I mean to say that I
think--I hope he is mistaken. Even doctors," she said, with a smile,
"have been mistaken before now."
"That is very true," said Miss Farrell gravely, and then she rose and
kissed the pale face opposite to her. "Anyhow, my dear, you and I will
do our best for him as long as there are strangers in the house."
Winifred was worn out by the strain of these troubled days, and by the
self-controversy that had been going on within her. She fell asleep
early in profound exhaustion, the dead sleep of forces overstrained and
heart stupefied with trouble. She woke suddenly in the early dawn of
the morning, while as yet everything was indistinct. What had woke her,
or if it was any external incident at all that had done so, she could
not tell at first; there seemed a tingle and vibration in the pale air.
Was it the early twittering which had begun faintly among the thick
foliage outside? She listened, rising up in her bed, with an intensity
for which there seemed no reason, for no definite alarm occurred to her
mind. Everything was still, not a sound audible but those first faint
chirpings, interrogative, tentative, from the trees. She was about to
compose herself to rest again, when suddenly there sounded tingling
through the silence the sound of a bell, a little angry, impatient
jingle repeated, tearing the stillness. Winifred was too much startled
and confused to realise what it was, but she got up hastily, and,
throwing her dressing-gown round her, opened her door to hear better.
The thought that came first to her mind was, that the summons was at the
door, and that it meant one of the boys coming home. Her heart leaped to
her throat with excitement. The boys had come home at all sorts of hours
in the time which was past, but now, what could this summons be? It came
again while she stood trembling, wondering; and then, with a cry,
Winifred flew along the corridor. Mr. Chester's room was in the wing, at
some distance from the other sleeping-rooms of the house. Everything was
silent, an atmosphere of profound sleep, calm tranquillity in the dim
air, through which the night-lamp in the hall below burned with a weird
glimmer. The blueness of the dawn in its faint pervasion seemed more
ghostly than the night.
As Winifred hurried along, another door opened with a hasty sound, and
old Hopkins stumbled forth. "What is it, Miss Winifred?"
She had no breath to reply. She put him before her, trembling as they
reached Mr. Chester's door. She was terrified by the thoughts of what
she might see. But there was nothing that was terrible to see. A voice
came out of the curtains, querulous, with an outburst of abuse at old
Hopkins, who never could be made to hear.
"Send for Langton," Mr. Chester said.
"It's the middle of the night, please sir," old Hopkins replied.
"Send for Langton," repeated the voice. It had a curious stammer in it;
a sibilant sound. "S--s--send for Langton," with another torrent of
exclamations.
The old butler hurried out of the room, muttering to himself, "It will
be half an hour before I can wake one of those grooms, and he'll take
the skin off me before that. Miss Winifred, oh, it's only the doctor he
wants; it's nothing out of the common!"
"I will go," she said.
"You? But it's the middle of the night, and not a soul awake."
"Is he very ill? Tell me the truth. I will go quicker than any one
else."
"Miss Winifred, you've no call to be frightened. He's been the same
fifty times. He don't want the doctor no more than I do. Oh, goodness,
there he is at it again!"
Then the bell sent a wild, irritated peal into the air, which evidently
ended abruptly in the breaking of the bell-rope.
"I will go!" Winifred said, and the old man, relieved, hurried back to
his master. She put on quickly a long ulster, which covered her from
head to foot, and hurried out into the strange coolness and freshness of
the unawakened world. There was no need, she said to herself, but it
was a relief and almost pleasure to do something. The great stillness,
the feeling of the dawn, the faint blue-tinted atmosphere, a something
which came before the light, all breathed peace about her. It was like a
disembodied world, another state of existence in which nothing real or
tangible was. She flew along, the only creature moving save those too
early, questioning birds, and felt in herself a curious elevation above
mortal boundaries, as if she too was disembodied and could move like a
spirit. The strange abstractedness of the atmosphere, the keen yet soft
coolness, the unimaginable solitude possessed her like a vision. She
felt no sensation of anxiety or fear, but seemed carried along upon her
errand like a creature of the air, unfamiliar with the emotions of the
world. As it happened, Langton's groom was already preparing his
master's horse for some early visit. He stared at Winifred as if she
had dropped from the skies, but made no remark, except that his master
would be ready instantly; and she turned back through the sleeping
village, still wrapped in the same abstraction, walking along as in a
dream. One labourer, setting out to work at distant fields, passed, and
stared dumb and awe-stricken at her, as if she had been a ghost. His was
the only figure save her own that was visible. When she was half-way
home, Edward galloped past, waving his hand to her as he hastened on.
For her part, Winifred felt that there was no longer any need to hurry.
She wandered on under the trees, where now all the birds were awake,
chatting to each other--forming their little plans for the endless
August day, the age of sunshine and sweet air before them, now that
night once more was over--before they began to sing. She was
unspeakably eased, consoled, rested by that universal tranquillity. The
dew fell upon her very heart. She lingered to look at a hundred things
which she had seen every day all her life, which she had never noticed
before. It was not sunrise as yet; the world was still a land of dreams,
waiting the revelation of the reality to come. Thus it was some time
before she reached the house, and yet she was surprised when she reached
it, having got so far away from that centre of human life with all its
throbbings, into the great quiet of the morning world.
Something, an indefinable disturbance, a change of a kind which made
itself felt, was in the place. The door stood wide open, a scared groom
was walking Langton's horse up and down, the windows were still closed,
except one, at which two or three indistinct figures seemed looking out.
There arose a flutter, she could not tell why, in Winifred's breast.
She almost smiled at herself for the involuntary sensation which marked
her return from a world of visions to that of real life. Then Edward
Langton appeared coming out, as if to meet her in the open door.
CHAPTER XI
Edward came out to meet her, and took her hand and drew it through his
arm. He led her in tenderly, holding that hand in his, without a vestige
of the reserve and restraint in which they had been living of late.
Winifred was greatly surprised. She drew away her hand, half-angry,
half-astonished. "Why is this?" she said. "Is it because it is so early
that you forget"--
"It is because there is no longer any need of precaution," he said very
gravely, pressing her arm close to his side.
She gazed at him with an incapacity to understand, which would have
been incredible did it not happen so often at the great crises of life.
"I don't know what you mean; nothing is changed," she said. "But you
have not come to talk of you and me. Edward, how is my father?" She
asked the question with scarcely a fear. Then suddenly looked in his
face, flung his support from her, and flew upstairs without a word.
The door of her father's room was closed; she rushed at it breathless.
It was half-opened after a little interval by old Hopkins, who barred
the entrance.
"You can't come in yet, Miss Winifred, not yet," he said, shaking his
head. Hopkins was full of the solemn importance and excitement of one
who has suddenly become an actor in a great event. He closed the door
upon her as he spoke, and there she stood, gazing at it blankly, her
brain swimming, her heart beating. That door had closed not only upon
her father dead, but upon a completed chapter of her own life.
Edward had hurried upstairs after her, and was now close by to console
her. But she would not give him her hand, which he sought. She walked
before him to the door of her own sitting-room, which stood wide open,
with an early glow of the newly-risen sun showing from the open windows.
Then she sat down and motioned him to a chair, but not beside her. A
more woeful countenance never lamented the most beloved of fathers. Her
dark outer garment was wet with dew, and clung closely about her; her
hair had a few drops of the same dew glimmering upon it; her face was
entirely destitute of colour.
"Tell me how it was," she said.
"It was as I told you it would be. We must be thankful that no act of
ours, no contention of ours, quickened the catastrophe. He was in
perfectly good spirits last night, I hear. By the time I arrived, all
was over. Winifred"--
"Oh, do not touch me!" she said. "We deceived him, we lied to him! if
not in words, yet in deeds. And now you are glad that he is dead."
"Not glad," said the young man.
"Not glad! and I?" she cried, with an exclamation of despair.
"Winnie, do not make yourself more miserable than you need be; you are
not glad. And you will reproach yourself and be wretched for many a day,
without reason. I declare before Heaven without reason, Winnie! All that
you have done has been for his sake. And there is nothing for which you
can justly blame yourself. All that has been done has been sacrifice on
your part." He came to her side and put his arm round her to console
her. But his touch was more than she could bear. She put out her hand
and put his away. He looked at her for a moment without saying anything,
and then asked, with a little bitterness, "Do you mean to cast me off
then, Winnie, because I denied myself for his sake?"
"Oh, Edward!" she said, giving him her hand; "don't say a word of you
and me. I cannot tell you what I mean, or what I feel, not now. To be as
strangers while he lived, and the moment--the very moment he is gone"--
She rose up and began to walk about the room in a feverish misery which
was more like personal despair than the grief of a child for a father;
angry, miserable even because of the very sense of deliverance which
mingled with the anguish. The painful interview was broken by the rush
into the room of Miss Farrell, her white locks all disordered about her
pretty old head, stumbling over her long dressing-gown, and throwing
herself with tears and caresses upon Winifred's shoulder.
"Oh, my darling, your dear father! Oh, my child, come to me and let me
comfort you!" she said.
Edward Langton withdrew without a word. There were a thousand ways in
which he could serve Winifred without insisting upon the office of
consoler, which indeed he gave up with a pang, yet heroically. A man,
when he makes a sacrifice, perhaps does it more entirely, more silently
than a woman. He made no stand for his rights, but gave up without a
word, and went forth to the external matters which there was no one but
he to manage. Mr. Chester had died as his young physician had known he
would do. He had forgotten the rules of life which had been prescribed
to him in his triumph and satisfaction on the previous night. He had
said to himself, "Soul, take thine ease," and the catastrophe had been
as prompt as that of the parable. The alarmed and startled household was
all up and about by this time, the maids huddled in a corner discussing
the dreadful event, and comparing notes, now all was over, as to their
respective apprehensions and judgment of master's looks. The men
wandered about, sometimes paying a fitful attention to their ordinary
work, but most frequently going up and downstairs to see if Mr. Hopkins
wanted anything, or if something new to report could be gleaned
anywhere. Dr. Langton took command of the household with instant
authority, awakening at once a new interest in the bosoms of the little
eager crowd. He was the new master, they all felt, some with a desire to
oppose, and some to conciliate. He sent off telegrams with a sort of
savage pleasure to the Dowager Countess and the other expected guests,
and he summoned Mr. Babington, who was the official authority, under
whose directions all immediate steps had to be taken. But Langton had no
idea of abnegation in respect to his own rights, any more than he had
any sense of guilt in respect to the dead man, out of consideration for
whom he had temporarily ignored them. He had made a great sacrifice to
preserve Mr. Chester's health and life, but now that this life was over,
without any blame to any one, he did not deny that the relief was great.
Alas! even to Winifred, whose sensations of self-reproach were so
poignant, the smart was intensified while it was relieved, by a sense of
deliverance too.
When she came a little to herself, she insisted that her brothers should
be telegraphed for instantly. This was before Mr. Babington's arrival,
and it is possible that Edward would have objected had he been able to
do so. He was not entirely above consideration of his own interests, and
he had believed that Mr. Chester from his point of view had not behaved
unwisely, nor even perhaps unkindly, in sending his sons away. That
Winifred should relinquish all the advantages which her father's will
had secured cost him perhaps a pang. It would not have been unpleasant
to Edward Langton to find himself master of Bedloe. He knew he would
have filled the post better than either of the two thoughtless and
unintelligent young men whom their father himself had sent off, and who
probably would have sold it before the year was out. For his own part,
he should have liked to compromise, to give to each of them a sufficient
compensation and keep the estate, and replace in Bedloe the old name
that had been associated with it so long. That he should have had this
dazzling possibility before him, and yet have obeyed her wishes and sent
off these telegrams, said much for Edward's self-denial. He knew that
Mr. Babington when he came would probably have objected strongly to such
a proceeding, and with reason. The doctor saw all the danger of it as he
rode into the little town to carry out Winifred's instructions. The two
brothers would hurry home, each with the conviction that he was the
heir, and rage and disappointment would follow. Nevertheless, it seemed
to him that the very objections that rose in his own mind pledged him
all the more to carry out Winifred's wishes. He was not disinterested as
she was. He did not feel any tie of affection to her brothers. He
thought them much more supportable at the other side of the world than
he had ever found them near. And there were few things he would not
have done, in honour, to secure Bedloe. All these arguments, however,
made it more necessary that he should do without hesitation or delay
what she wished. This was his part in the meantime, whether he entirely
approved or not. Afterwards, when they were man and wife, he might have
a more authoritative word to say. He telegraphed not only to George and
Tom, but through the banker, that money should be provided for their
return; and having done so, went back again with a mind full of anxiety,
the sense of deliverance of which his heart had been full clouding over
with this sudden return of the complications and embarrassments of life.
Mr. Babington did not arrive till next day. And he looked very grave
when he heard what had been done.
"Of what use is it?" he said; "the poor young fellows will find
themselves out of it altogether. They will come thinking that the
inheritance is theirs, and there is not a penny for them. Why did not
you wait till I came?"
"I should have preferred to do so," said Langton; "but at such a moment
Miss Chester's wish was above all."
"Miss Chester's wish?" said the lawyer, with a doubtful glance. "Perhaps
you think Miss Chester can do what she pleases? Poor thing, it is very
natural she should wish to do something for her brothers. But what if
she were making a mistake?"
"If you mean that after all the money is not to be hers"--said Langton,
with a slight change of colour.
"Before we go farther I ought to know--perhaps her father's death has
brought about some change--between her and you?"
"No change at all. We were pledged to each other two years ago without
any opposition from him. I cannot say that he ever gave his formal
consent."
"But it was all broken off--I heard as much from him--by mutual
consent."
"It was never broken off. I saw what was coming, and I remained
perfectly quiet on the subject, and advised Miss Chester to do the
same."
"Ah! and he was taken in!" the lawyer said.
This brought the colour to Langton's face.
"I am not aware that there was any taking in in the case. I knew that
agitation was dangerous for him. It was better for us to wait, at our
age, than to have the self-reproach afterwards." This was all true, yet
it was embarrassing to say.
"I see," said Mr. Babington; "a waiting game doesn't always recommend
itself to the lookers-on, Dr. Langton. It might have lasted for years."
"I did not think," said Langton hastily, "that it could have lasted for
weeks. He has lived longer than I expected."
"And you were there at one side of him, and his daughter at the other,
waiting. I think I'd rather not have my daughter engaged to a doctor,
meaning no disrespect to you."
"It sounds like something more than disrespect," said Langton, with
offence. "If you think I did not do my duty by my patient"--
"Oh no, I don't think that; but I think you will be disappointed, Dr.
Langton. I don't quite see why you have sent for the boys. If the one
was for your interest, the other was dead against it. It is a
disagreeable business altogether. If they were to set up a plea against
you of undue influence"--
"I think," said Langton, "that this is not a subject to be discussed
between us. You know very well that my influence with Mr. Chester was"--
"About the same as every other man's, and that was nothing at all," said
the lawyer, with a laugh. It is unseemly to laugh in a house all draped
and shrouded in mourning, and the sound seemed to produce a little stir
of horror in the silent place, all the more that Winifred came in at the
moment, as white as a spectre, in her black dress. Her look of
astonished reproach made the lawyer in his turn change countenance.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Winifred, I beg you a thousand pardons. It was
not any jest, I assure you, it was in very sober earnest. My dear young
lady, I need not say how shocked I was and distressed"--
The sudden change of aspect, the gloom which came over Mr. Babington's
cheerful countenance, would have been more comical than melancholy to
an unconcerned spectator; but Winifred accepted it without criticism.
She said, "Did you know how ill he was?" with tears in her eyes.
"I--well, I cannot say that I thought he was strong; but a stroke like
this is always unexpected. In the midst of life"--said Mr. Babington
solemnly. But here he caught Langton's eye and was silenced. "I hear you
have sent for your brothers."
"Oh, at once! What could I do else? I am sure now that he would have
wished me to do it."
Mr. Babington shook his head. "I don't think he would have wished it,
Miss Winifred. I don't think they would care to come if they knew the
property is all left away from them."
"He said it was left to me. But what could that be for? only to be given
back to them," said Winifred, with a faint smile. "My father knew very
well what I should do. He will know now, and I know that he will
approve," she said, with that exaltation which the wearied body and
excited soul attain to by times, a kind of ecstasy. "Even," she cried,
"if he did not see what was best in this life, he will see it now."
Mr. Babington looked on with a blank countenance. He did not realise
easily this instant conversion of the man he knew so well to higher
views. He could not indeed conceive of Mr. Chester at all except in the
most ordinary human conditions; but he knew that it was right to speak
and think in an exalted manner of those whom death had removed.
"We will hope so," he said; "but in the meantime, my dear young lady,
you will find he has made it very difficult for you, as he had not then
attained to these enlightened views. Couldn't you send another
telegram? They're expensive, but in the circumstances"--
"We have made up our minds," said Winifred, with a certain solemnity;
"do you know what we had to do, Mr. Babington? We had to deceive him, to
pretend that I would do as he wished. Oh, Edward, I cannot bear to think
of it. I never said it in so many words. I did not exactly tell a lie,
but I let him suppose--I wonder--do you think he hears what I say?
surely he knows;" and here, worn out as she was, the tears which had
been so near her eyes burst forth.
Langton brought her a chair, and made her sit down and soothed her; but
his face was blank like that of the lawyer, who was altogether taken
aback by this sudden spiritualising of his old friend.
"I daresay it will all come right," Mr. Babington said.
CHAPTER XII
Mr. Babington remained in the house, or at least returned to it
constantly, passing most of his time there till the funeral was over;
after which he read the will to the little company, consisting only of
Winifred, Edward, and Miss Farrell, who remained in the house. It was a
will which excited much agitation and distress, and awoke very different
sentiments in the minds of the two who were chiefly concerned. Winifred
received its stipulations like so many blows, while in the mind of her
lover they raised a sort of involuntary elation, an ambition and
eagerness of which he had not been hitherto sensible. The condition
under which Winifred inherited her father's fortune was, that she was
not to divide or share it with her brothers; that Mr. Chester had meant
to add many other bonds and directions which would have left her without
any freedom of individual action at all, mattered little; but this one
stipulation had been appended at once to the will, and was not to be
avoided or ignored. In case she attempted to divide or share her
inheritance, or alienate any part of it, she was to forfeit the whole.
No latitude was allowed to her, no power of compromise. This information
crushed Winifred's courage and spirits altogether. It made the gloom of
the moment tenfold darker, and subdued in her the rising tide of life.
That tide had begun to rise involuntarily even in the first week, while
the windows were still shrouded and the house full of crape and
darkness. She had shed those few natural tears, which are all that in
many cases the best parents have to look for, and, though moved by
times with a compunction equally natural, was yet prepared to dry them
and go on to the sunshine that awaited her, and the setting of all
things right which had seemed to her the chief object in life. But when
she saw this great barrier standing up before her, and knew that her
brothers were both on their way, hoping great things, to be met on their
arrival only by this impossibility, her heart failed her altogether. She
had no courage to meet the situation. She felt ill, worn out by the
agitations of the previous period and the blank despair of this, and for
a time turned away from the light, and would not be comforted.
Upon Edward Langton a very different effect was produced; while
Winifred's heart sank in her bosom, his rose with a boundless
exhilaration and hope. What he saw before him was something so entirely
unhoped for, so unthought of, that it was no wonder if it turned his
head, as the vulgar say. Mr. Chester, who had acquired the property of
his ancestors in their moment of need, unrighteously as he believed,
trading upon their necessities, seemed to him now, with all the force of
a dead hand, to thrust compensation upon him. It was not to Winifred but
to him that the fortune seemed to be given. That this was the reverse of
the testator's intention, that he had meant something totally different,
did not affect Langton's mind. It gave him even an additional grim
satisfaction, as the jewels of gold and of silver borrowed from his
Egyptian master might have satisfied the mind of a fierce Hebrew,
defrauded for a lifetime of the recompense of his toil. The
millionaire's plunder, his gain which had been extracted from the sweat
of other men, was to return into the hands of one of the families at
least of which he had taken advantage. For once the revenges of time
were fully just and satisfactory. He went about his parish work and
visited his poor patients with this elation in his mind, instinctively
making notes as to things which he would have done and improvements
made. Mr. Chester, who had the practical instincts of a man whose first
thought has always been to make money, had, indeed, done a great deal
for the estate; but he had spent nothing, neither thought nor money,
upon the condition of the poor, for whom he cared much less than for
their cattle. Langton's interests were strong in the other way. He
thought of sanitary miracles to be performed, of disease to be
extirpated, of wholesome houses and wholesome faces in the little
clusters of human habitation that were dotted here and there round the
enclosure of the park. Different minds take their pleasures in different
ways. He was not dull to the delights of a well-preserved cover; but
with a more lively impulse he anticipated a grand battue of smells and
miasmas, draining of stagnant ponds, and destruction to the agues and
fevers which haunted the surrounding country. This idea blended with the
intense subdued pleasure of anticipation with which he thought of the
estate returning to the old name, and himself to the house of his
fathers: there was nothing ignoble in the elation that filled his mind.
Perhaps, according to the sentiment of romance, it would have been a
more lofty position had he endured tortures from the idea of owing this
elevation to his marriage; or even had he refused, at the cost of her
happiness and his own, to accept so much from his wife; but Langton was
of a robust kind, and not easily affected by those prejudices, which
after all are not very respectful to women. He would have married
Winifred with nothing. Why should he withdraw from her when she had
much? So far as this went, he accepted the good fortune which she
seemed about to bring him without a question, with a satisfaction which
filled his whole being. Bedloe had not been the better of the Chesters
hitherto, but it should be the better for him.
And if there came over him a little chill occasionally when he thought
of the two helpless prodigals whom he despised, coming over the sea,
each from his different quarter, full of hopes which were never to be
realised, Langton found it possible to push them aside out of his mind,
as it is always possible to put aside an unpleasant subject. Sometimes
there would come over him a chill less momentary when the thought that
Winifred might hold by her decision on this subject crossed his mind.
But she was very gentle, very easily influenced, not the sort of woman
to assert herself. She had yielded to him in respect to her father,
even when the course of conduct he recommended had been odious to her.
That she should have felt so strongly on the subject had seemed somewhat
ridiculous to him at the time, but, notwithstanding, she had yielded to
his better judgment and had followed the directions he had given her.
And there did not seem any reason to believe that she would not do the
same again. She was of a very tender nature, poor Winnie! She could not
bear to hurt any one. It was not to be expected, probably it was not
even to be desired, that the real advantages of this arrangement should
strike her as they did himself. She had a natural clinging to her
brothers. She declined to see them in their true light. It was terrible
to her to profit by their ruin. But Langton, though acknowledging all
this, could not conceive the possibility that Winnie would actually
resist his guidance, and follow her own conclusions. She could not do
it. She would do as he indicated, though it might cost her some tears,
and perhaps a struggle with herself, tears which Langton was fully in
the mind to repay by such love and care when she was his wife as would
banish henceforward all other tears from her eyes. Like so many other
clever persons, he shut his own in the meantime. He was aware that the
position in which she was placed, the thought of the future, lay at the
bottom of her illness, and even that until the constant irritation thus
caused was withdrawn or neutralised, her mind would not recover its
tone. At least he would have been fully aware of this had his patient
been any other than Winifred. She was suffering, no doubt, he allowed,
but by and by she would get over it, the disturbing influence would work
itself out, and all would be well.
And in the meantime there were moments of sweetness for both in the
interval that followed. As Winifred recovered slowly, the subduing
influence of bodily weakness hushed her cares. For the moment she could
do nothing, and, anxious as she was, it was so soothing to have the
company, and sympathy, and care of her lover, that she too pushed aside
all disturbing influences, and almost succeeded while he was with her in
forgetting. Instinctively she was aware that on this point his mind and
hers would not be in accord--on every other point they were one, and she
listened to the suggestions he made as to improvements and alterations
with that sensation of pleasure ineffable which arises in a woman's mind
when the man whom she loves shows himself at his best. He had too much
discretion and good feeling to do more than suggest these beneficial
changes, and above all he never betrayed the elation in his own views
and intention in his own mind to carry them out himself. But from her
sofa, or from the terrace, where presently she was able to walk with the
support of his arm, Winifred listened to his description of all that
could be done, and looked at the little sketches he would make of
improved houses, and new ways of effectual succour to the poor, with a
pleasure which was more near what we may suppose to be angelic
satisfaction than any other on earth. When he went away, a cloud would
come over the landscape. She would say to herself that George would be
little likely to carry out these plans, and again with a keener pang
would be conscious that Edward was as yet unconvinced of her
determination on the subject. But when he came back to her, all that
could possibly come between them was by common instinctive accord put
away, and there was a happiness in those days of waiting almost like the
pathetic happiness which softens the ebbing out of life. Miss Farrell,
who was more than ever like a mother to the poor girl who had so much
need of her, looked forward, as a mother so often does, with almost as
much happiness as the chief actors in that lovers' meeting to Edward's
coming. Every evening, when his work was over, the two ladies would
listen for his quick step, or the sound of his horse's hoofs over the
fallen leaves in the avenue. He came in, bringing the fresh air with
him, and the movement and stir of life, with such news as was to be had
in that rural quiet, with stories of his humble patients, and all the
humours of the countryside. It was something to expect all day long and
make the slow hours go by as on noiseless wings. There is perhaps
nothing which makes life so sweet. This is half the charm of marriage to
women; and before marriage there is a delicacy, a possibility of
interruption, a voluntary and spontaneous character in the intercourse
which makes it even more delightful. In the moonlight evenings, when the
yellow harvest moon was resplendent over all the country, and Winifred
was well enough for the exertion, the two would stray out together,
leaving the gentle old spectator of their happiness almost more happy
than they, in the tranquillity of her age, to prepare the tea for them,
or with Hopkins's assistance (given with a little contemptuous
toleration of her interference) the "cup" which Langton had the bad
taste to prefer to tea.
This lasted for several weeks, even months, and it was not till October,
when the woods were all russet and yellow, and a little chill had come
into the air, that the tranquillity was disturbed by a telegram which
announced the arrival of Tom. It was dated from Plymouth, and even in
the concise style demanded by the telegraph there was a ring of
satisfaction and triumph to Winifred's sensitive ear. She trembled as
she read--"Shall lose no time expect me by earliest train to-morrow."
This intimation came tingling like a shot into the calm atmosphere,
sending vibrations everywhere. In the first moment it fell like a
death-blow on Winifred, severing her life in two, cutting her off from
all the past, even, it was possible, from Edward and his love. When he
came in the evening she said nothing until they were alone upon the
terrace in the moonlight, taking the little stroll which had become so
delightful to her. It was the last time, perhaps, that, free from all
interruption, they would spend the tranquil evening so. She walked about
for some time leaning upon him, letting him talk to her, answering
little or nothing. Then suddenly, in the midst of something he was
saying, without sequence or reason, she said suddenly, "Edward, I have
had a telegram from Tom."
He started and stopped short with a quick exclamation--"From Tom!"
"He is coming to-morrow," Winifred said; and then there fell a silence
over them, over the air, in which the very light seemed to be affected
by the shock. She felt it in the arm which supported her, in the voice
which responded with a sudden emotion in it, and in the silence which
ensued, which neither of them seemed able to break.
"I fear," said Edward at last, "that it will be very agitating and
distressing for you, my darling. I wish I could do it for you. I wish I
could put it off till you were stronger."
She shook her head. "I must do it myself," she said, "not even you. We
have been very quiet for a long time--and happy."
"We shall be happy still, I hope," he said,--"happier, since the time
is coming when we are always to be together, Winnie."
She did not make any reply at first, but then said drearily, "I don't
feel as if I could see anything beyond to-night. Life will go on again,
I suppose, but between this and that there seems to me, as in the
parable, a gulf fixed."
"Not one that cannot be passed over," he said.
But he did not ask her what she meant to say to her brother, nor had she
ever told him. Perhaps he took it for granted that only one thing could
be said, and that to be told what their father's will was, would be
enough for the young men; or perhaps, for that was scarcely credible, he
supposed that Mr. Babington would be called upon to explain everything,
and the burden thus taken off her shoulders. Only when she was bidding
him good-night he ventured upon a word.
"You must husband your strength," he said, "and not wear yourself out
more than you can help. Remember there is George to come."
"I will have to say what there is to say at once, Edward. Oh, how could
I keep them in suspense?"
"But you must think a little, for my sake, of yourself, dear."
She shook her head, and looked at him wistfully. "It is not I that have
to be thought of, it is the boys that I have to think of. Oh, poor boys!
how am I to tell them?" she cried.
And he went away with no further explanation. He could not ask in so
many words, What do you intend to say to them? And yet he had made up
his mind so completely what ought to be said. He said to himself as he
went down the avenue that he had been a fool, that it was false delicacy
on his part not to have had a full explanation of her intentions. But,
on the other hand, how could he suggest a mode of action to her? There
was but one way--they must understand that she could not sacrifice
herself for their sakes.
CHAPTER XIII
Winifred scarcely slept all that night. She had enough to think of. Her
entire life hung in the balance. And, indeed, that was not all, for
there remained the doubtful possibility that she might deprive herself
of everything without doing any good by her sacrifice. The necessity to
be falsely true seemed, once having been taken up, to pursue her
everywhere. Unless she could find some way of accomplishing it
deceitfully, and frustrating her father's will, while she seemed to be
executing it, she would be incapable of doing anything for her brothers,
and would either be compelled to accept an unjust advantage over them,
or give up everything that was in her own favour without advantaging
them. She lay still in the darkness and thought and thought over this
great problem, but came no nearer to any solution. And she was separated
even from her usual counsellors in this great emergency. In respect to
Edward, she divined his wishes with a pang unspeakable, yet excused him
to herself with a hundred tender apologies. It was not that he was
capable of wronging any one, but he felt--who could help feeling
it?--that all would go better in his hands. She, too, felt it. She said
to herself, it would be better for Bedloe, better for the people, that
he, through her, should reign, instead of George or Tom, who, if they
did well at all, would do well for themselves only, and who, up to this
time, even in that had failed. To give it over to two bad or indifferent
masters, careless of everything, save what it produced; or to place it
under the care of a wise and thoughtful master, who would consider the
true advantage of all concerned: who, she asked herself, could hesitate
as to which was best? But though it would be best, it would be founded
on wrong, and would be impossible. Impossible! that was the only word.
She was in no position to abolish the ordinary laws of nature, and act
upon her own judgment of what was best. It was impossible, whatever good
might result from it, that she should build her own happiness upon the
ruin of her brothers. Even Miss Farrell did not take the same view of
the subject. She had wept over the dethronement of the brothers, but she
could not consent to Winifred's renunciation of all things for their
sake. "You can always make it up to them," she had said, reiterating the
words, without explaining how this was to be done. How was it to be
done? Winifred tried very hard through all to respect her father. She
tried to think that he had only exposed her to a severe trial to prove
her strength. She thought that now at least, even if never before, he
must be enlightened, he must watch her with those "larger, other eyes
than ours," with which natural piety endows all who have passed away,
whether bad or good. Even if he had not intended well at the time, he
must know better now. But how was she to do it? How succeed in thwarting
yet obeying him? The problem was beyond her powers, and the hours would
not stop to give her time to consider it. They flowed on, slow, yet
following each other in a ceaseless current; and the morning broke which
was to bring her perplexities to some sort of issue, though what she did
not know.
Tom arrived by the early morning train. He also had not slept much in
the night, and his eyes were red, and his face pale. He was tremulous
with excitement, not unmingled with anxiety; but an air of triumph over
all, and elation scarcely controlled, gave a certain wildness to his
aspect, almost like intoxication. It was an intoxication of the spirit,
however, and not anything else, though, as he leapt out of the dog-cart
and made a rush up the steps, Winifred, standing there to meet him,
almost shrank from the careless embrace he gave her. "Well, Win, and so
here we are back again," he said. He had no great reason, perhaps, to be
touched by his father's death. It brought him back from unwilling work,
it gave him back (he thought) the wealth and luxury which he loved, it
restored him to all that had been taken from him. Why should he be
sorry? And yet, at the moment of returning to his father's house, it
seemed to his sister that some natural thought of the father, who had
not always been harsh, should have touched his heart. But Tom did not
show any consciousness of what nature and good feeling required, which
was, after all, as Winifred reflected next moment, better, perhaps, as
being more true than any pretence at fictitious feeling. He gave nods of
acknowledgment, half boisterous, half condescending, to the servants as
he passed through the hall to the dining-room, which stood open, with
the table prepared for breakfast. He laughed at the sight, and pointed
to his sister. "It was supper you had waiting for me the last time I was
here," he said, with a laugh, and went in before her, and threw himself
down in the large easy chair, which was the seat Mr. Chester had always
occupied. Probably Tom forgot, and meant nothing; but old Hopkins
hastened to thrust another close to the table, indicating it with a wave
of his hand.
"Here, sir, this is your place, sir," the old butler said.
"I am very comfortable where I am," cried Tom. "That's enough, Hopkins;
bring the breakfast." Hopkins explained to the other servants when he
left the room that Mr. Tom was excited. "And no wonder, considering all
that's happened," he said.
"Well," repeated Tom, when he and his sister were left alone, "so here
we are again. You thought it was for good when I went away, Winnie."
"I thought it would be--for a longer time, Tom."
"You thought it was for good; but you might have known better. The poor
old governor thought better of it at the last?"
"I don't think that he changed--his opinion," Winifred said, hesitating,
afraid to carry on the deception, afraid to undeceive him, tired and
excited as he was.
"Well," said Tom, addressing himself to the good things on the breakfast
table, "whatever his opinion was, it don't matter much now, for here I
am, at all events, and that horrible episode of New Zealand over. It
didn't last very long, thank Heaven!"
It was, perhaps, only because the conversation was so difficult that she
asked him then suddenly whether, perhaps, on the way he had seen
anything of George.
"Of George?" Tom put down his knife and fork and stared at her. "How, in
the name of Heaven, could I see anything of George--on my way home?"
"I--don't know, Tom. I am not clear about the geography. I thought
perhaps you might have come by the same ship."
"By the same ship?" It was only by degrees that he took in what she
meant. Then he thrust back his chair from the table and exclaimed,
"What! is George coming too?" in a tone full of disgust and dismay.
"I sent for him at the same time," she replied, in spite of herself, in
a tone of apology. "How could I leave him out?"
"You sent for him?" said Tom, with evident relief. "Then I think you
did a very silly thing, Winnie. Why should he come here, such an
expensive journey, stopping his work and everything? Some one told me he
was getting on very well out there."
"I thought it indispensable that he should come back, that we should all
meet to arrange everything."
"To arrange everything?" There was a sort of compassionate impatience in
Tom's tone. "I suppose that is how women judge," he said. "What can
there be to arrange? You may be sure the governor had it all set down
clear enough in black and white. And now you will have disturbed the
poor beggar's mind all for nothing; for he is sure to build upon it,
and think there's something for him. I hope, at least, you made that
point clear."
"Tom, if you would but listen to me! There is no point clear. I felt
that I must see you both, and talk it all over, and that we must decide
among us"--
"You take a great deal upon you, Winnie," said Tom. "You have got
spoilt, I think. What is there to decide about? The thing that vexes me
is for George's own sake. That you might like to see him, and give him a
little holiday, that's no harm; and I suppose you mean to make it up to
him out of your own little money, though I should think Langton would
have a word to say on that subject. But how do you know what ridiculous
ideas you may put into the poor beggar's head? He may think that the
governor has altered his will again. He is sure to think something
that's absurd. If it's not too late, it would be charity to telegraph
again and tell him it was not worth his while."
"Tom," said Winifred, faltering, "he is our brother, and he is the
eldest. Whatever my father's will was, do you think it would be right to
leave him out?"
"Oh, that is what you are after!" said Tom. "To work upon me, and get me
to do something for him! You may as well understand once for all that
I'll be no party to changing the governor's will--I'll not have him
cheated, poor old gentleman! in his grave."
He had risen up from the table full of angry decision, pushing his chair
away, while Winifred sat weak and helpless, more bewildered at every
word, gazing at him, not knowing how to reply.
"He was a man of great sense, was the governor," said Tom. "He was a
better judge of character than either you or I. To be sure, he made a
little mistake that time about me; but it hasn't done me any harm, and
I wouldn't be the one to bring it up against him. And I'll be no party
to changing his will. If you bring George here, it is upon your own
responsibility. He need not look for anything from me."
"Tom, I don't ask anything from you; but don't you think--oh, is not
your heart softer now that you know what it is to suffer hardship
yourself?"
"That's all sentimental nonsense," said Tom hastily. He went to the
fireplace and warmed himself, for there is always a certain chill in
excitement. Then he returned to the table to finish his breakfast. He
had a feverish appetite, and the meal served to keep in check the fire
of expectation and restlessness in his veins. After a few minutes'
silence he looked up with a hurried question. "Babington has been sent
for to meet me, I suppose?"
"He is coming on Monday. We did not think you could arrive before
Monday, and George perhaps by that time"--
"Always George!" he said, with an angry laugh.
"Always both of you, Tom. We are only three in the world, and to whom
can I turn but to my brothers to advise me? Oh, listen a little! I want
you to know everything, to judge everything, and then to tell me"--
It was natural enough, perhaps, that Tom should think of her personal
concerns. "Oh, I see," he said; "you and Langton don't hit it off,
Winnie? That's a different question. Well, he is not much of a match for
you. No doubt you could do much better for yourself; but that's not
enough to call George for, from the Antipodes. I'll advise you to the
best of my ability. If you mean to trust for advice to George"--
"It is not about myself," said Winifred. "Oh, Tom, how am I to tell you?
I cannot find the words--my father--oh, listen to me for a
little--don't go away!"
"If you say anything--to make me think badly of the governor, I will
never forgive you, Winnie!" he said. His face grew pale and then almost
black with gloom and excitement. "I've been travelling all night," he
added. "I want a bath, and to make myself comfortable. It's too soon to
begin about your business. Where have you put me? In the old room, I
suppose?"
"All your things have been put there," replied Winifred. It was a relief
to escape from the explanation, and yet a disappointment. He turned away
without looking at her.
"Oh, all right! there is plenty of time to change when I have made up my
mind which I like best," he said.
CHAPTER XIV
George arrived by the next mail. He did not travel all night, but came
in the evening, driving up the avenue with a good deal of noise and
commotion, with two flys from the station carrying him and the two
children and the luggage they brought, in addition to the brougham which
had been sent out of respect to the lady. She occupied it by herself,
for it was a small carriage, and she was a large woman, and thus was the
first to arrive, stumbling out with a large cage in her hand containing
a pair of unhappy birds with drooping feathers and melancholy heads. She
would not allow any one to take them from her hand, but stumbled up the
steps with them and thrust them upon Winnie, who had come out to the
door to receive her brother, but who did not at first realise who this
was.
"Here, take 'em," said Mrs. George; "they're for you, and they've been
that troublesome! I've done nothing but look after them all the voyage.
I suppose you're Winnie," she added, pausing with a momentary doubt.
"I hope you are not very tired," Winifred said, with that imbecility
which extreme surprise and confusion gives. She took the cage, which was
heavy, and set it on a table. "And George--where is George?" she said.
"Oh, George is coming fast enough; he's in the first fly with the
children. But you don't look at what I've brought you. They're the true
love-birds, the prettiest things in the world. I brought them all the
way myself. I trusted them to nobody. George said you would think a
deal of them."
"So I shall--when I have time to think. It was very kind," said Winnie.
"Oh, George!" She ran down to meet him as he stepped out with a child on
his arm.
George was not fat, like his wife, but careworn and spare.
"How do you do, Winnie?" he said, taking her outstretched hand. "Would
you mind taking the baby till I get Georgie and the things out of the
fly?"
The baby was a fat baby, and like his mother. He gazed at her with a
placid aspect, and did not cry. There was something ludicrous in the
situation, which Winifred faintly perceived, though everything was so
serious. George was not like the long-lost brother of romance. He had
shaken hands with her as if he had parted from her yesterday. He
scarcely cast a glance at the house to which he was coming back, but
turned quickly to the fly, and lifted out first a little fat boy of
three, then parcel after parcel, with a slightly anxious but quite
business-like demeanour.
"The maid and the boxes can go round to the other door," he said, paying
serious attention to every detail. "I suppose I can leave these things
to be brought upstairs, Winnie? Now, Georgie, come along. There's mamma
waiting." He did not offer to take the baby, which was a serious weight
upon Winifred's slight shoulder, but looked with a certain grave
gratification at his progeny. "He is quite good with you," he said, with
pleased surprise. There was nothing in the fact of his return home that
affected George so much. "Look at baby, how good he is with Winnie! I
told you the children would take to her directly."
"Well, I suppose it's natural your sister should look to you first,"
said the wife; "but I've taken a great deal of trouble bringing the
birds to her, and she hasn't given them hardly a glance."
"It was very kind," said Winnie; "but the children must come first. This
is the way; don't you remember, George? Bring your wife here."
"I don't believe she knows my name, or perhaps she's proud, and won't
call me by it, George?"
"Winnie proud? Look how good baby is with her!" said George.
They discussed Winifred thus, walking on either side of her, while she
tottered under the weight of the big baby, from which neither dreamt of
relieving her. Winifred began to feel a nervous necessity to laugh,
which she could not control. She drew a chair near the fire for her
sister-in-law, and put down the good-humoured baby, in whose contact
there seemed something consolatory, though he was very heavy, on the
rug. "I should like to give the other one a kiss," she said--"is he
George too?--before I give you some tea."
"Yes, I should like my tea," said Mrs. George; "I'm ready for it after
that long journey. Have you seen after Eliza and the boxes, George?
We've had a good passage upon the whole; but I should never make a good
sailor if I were to make the voyage every year. Some people can never
get over it. Don't you think, Miss Winnie, that you could tell that old
gentleman to bring the birds in here?"
"Is it old Hopkins?" said George. "How do you do, Hopkins? There is a
cage with some birds"--
"I hope I see you well, sir?" said the old butler. "I'm glad as I've
lived to see you come home. And them two little gentlemen, sir, they're
the first little grandsons? and wouldn't master have been pleased to see
them!" Hopkins had been growing feeble ever since his master's death,
and showed a proclivity to tears, which he had never dared to indulge
before.
"Well, I think he might have been," said George, with a dubious tone.
But his mind was not open to sentiment. "They might have a little bread
and butter, don't you think?--it wouldn't hurt them,--and a cup of
milk."
"No, George," said his wife; "it would spoil their tea."
"Do you think it would spoil their tea? I am sure Winnie would not mind
them having their tea here with us, the first evening, and then Eliza
might put them to bed."
"Eliza has got my things to look to," said Mrs. George; "besides being
put out a little with a new place, and all that houseful of servants. I
shouldn't keep up half of them, when once we have settled down and see
how we are going to fit in."
"Some one must put the children to bed," said George, with an anxious
countenance. This conversation was carried on without any apparent
consciousness of Winnie's presence, who, what with pouring out tea and
making friends with the children, did her best to occupy the place of
spectator with becoming unconsciousness. Here, however, she was suddenly
called into the discussion. "Oh, Winnie," said her brother, "no doubt
you've got a maid, or some one who knows a little about children, who
could put them to bed?"
"He is an old coddle about the children," said his wife; "the children
will take no harm. Eliza must see to me first, if I'm to come down to
dinner as you'd wish me to. But George is the greatest old coddle."
She ran into a little ripple of laughter as she spoke, which was fat and
pleasant. Her form was soft and round, and prettily coloured, though her
features, if she had ever possessed any, were much blunted and rounded
into indistinctness. A sister is, perhaps, a severe judge under such
circumstances; yet Winifred was relieved and softened by the new
arrival. She made haste to offer the services of her maid, or even her
own, if need were. The house was turned entirely upside down by this
arrival. The two babies sent a thrill of excitement through all the
female part of the household, from Miss Farrell downwards, and old
Hopkins was known to have wept in the pantry over the two little
grandsons, whom master would have been so proud to see. Winifred alone
felt her task grow heavier and heavier. The very innocence and
helplessness of the party whom she had thus taken in hand, and whom,
after all, she was likely to have so little power to help, went to her
heart. She was not fitted to play the part of Providence. And certain
looks exchanged between George and his wife, and a few chance words, had
made her heart sick. They had pointed out to each other how this and
that could be changed. "The rooms in the wing would be best for the
nurseries," George had said and "There's just the place for you to
practise your violin," his wife had added. They looked about them with a
serene and satisfied consciousness (though George was always anxious)
that they were taking possession of their own house. Winifred felt as
she came back into the hall, where Mrs. George's present was still
standing, the cage with the two miserable birds, laying their drooping
heads together, that this simplicity was more hard to deal with than
even Tom's discontent and sullen anger. She felt that she had collected
elements of mischief together with which she was quite unable to deal,
and stood in the midst of them discouraged, miserable, feeling herself
disapproved and unsupported. Not even Edward stood by her. Edward, least
of all, whose want of sympathy she felt to her soul, though it had never
been put into words. And Miss Farrell's attempts to make the best were
almost worse than disapproval. She was entirely alone with those
contending elements, and what was she to do?
Tom had chosen to be absent when his brother arrived; he did not appear
even at dinner, to which Mrs. George descended, to the surprise of the
ladies, decked in smiles and in an elaborate evening dress, which (had
they but known) she had spent all the spare time on the voyage in
preparing out of the one black silk which had been the pride of her
heart. She had shoulders and arms which were worth showing had they not
been a trifle too fat, so white and rosy, so round and dimpled. She made
a little apology to Winifred for the absence of crape. "It was such a
hurry," she said, "to get away at once. George would not lose a day, and
I wouldn't let him go without me, and such things as that are not to be
got on a ship," she added, with a laugh. Mrs. George's aspect, indeed,
did not suggest crape or gloom in any way.
"No, I wouldn't let him come without me," she continued, while they sat
at dinner. "I couldn't take the charge of the children without him to
help me, and then I thought he might be put upon if he came to take
possession all alone. I didn't know that Miss Winnie was as nice as she
is, and would stand his friend."
"She is very nice," said Miss Farrell, to whom this remark was
addressed, looking across the table at her pupil with eyes that
glistened, though there was laughter in them. The sight of this pair,
and especially of the wife with her innocence and good-humour, had been
very consoling to the old lady. And she was anxious to awaken in
Winifred a sense of the humour of the situation to relieve her more
serious thoughts.
"But then I had never seen her," said Mrs. George; "and it's so natural
to think your husband's sister will be nasty when she thinks herself a
cut above the like of you. I thought she might brew up a peck of
troubles for George, and make things twice as hard."
"I wish you wouldn't talk so much," her husband said under his breath.
"Why shouldn't I talk? I'm only saying what's agreeable. I am saying I
never thought she would be so nice. I thought she might stand in
George's way. I am sure it might make any one nasty that was likely to
marry and have children of her own, to see everything going past her to
a brother that had behaved like George has done and taken his own way."
This innocent conversation went on till Winifred felt her part become
more and more intolerable. Her paleness, her hesitating replies, and
anxious air at last caught George's attention, though he had little to
spare for his sister. "Have you been ill, Winnie?" he said abruptly, as
he followed them into the drawing-room when dinner was over.
"Yes, George," she put her hand on his arm timidly; "and I am ill now
with anxiety and trouble. I have something to say to you."
George was always ready to take alarm. He grew a little more depressed
as he looked at her. "Is it anything about the property?" he said.
"I never thought to deceive you," she cried, losing command of herself.
"I did not know. I thought it would be all simple, George--oh, if you
will hear me to the end! and let us all consult together and see what
will be best."
George did not make her any reply. He looked across at his wife, and
said, "I told you there would be something," with lips that quivered a
little. Mrs. George got up instantly and came and stood beside him, all
her full-blown softness reddening over with quick passion. "What is it?
Have I spoke too fast? Is there some scheme against us after all?" she
cried.
"George," said Winifred, "you know I am in no scheme against you. I want
to give you your rights--but it seems I cannot. I want you to know
everything, to help me to think. Tom will not hear me, he will not
believe me; but you, George!"
"Tom?" George cried. The news seemed so unexpected that his astonishment
and dismay were undisguised. "Is Tom here?"
"I sent for you both on the same day," said Winifred, bowing her head as
if it were a confession of guilt.
"Oh," he said; he did not show excitement in its usual form, he grew
quieter and more subdued, standing in a sort of grey insignificance
against the flushed fulness of his astonished wife. "If it is Tom," he
said, "you might as well have let us stay where we were. He never held
up a finger for me when my father sent me away. You did your best,
Winnie; oh, I am not unjust to you. Whatever it is, it's not your fault.
But Tom--if Tom has got it! though I thought he had been sent about his
business too."
"But, George, George!" cried his wife, almost inarticulate with
eagerness to speak. "George, you're the eldest son. I want to know if
you're the eldest son, yes or no? And after that, who--who has any
right? I'm in my own house and I'll stay. It's my own house, and nobody
shall put me out," she cried, with a hysterical laugh, followed by a
burst of tears.
"Stop that," said George, with dull quiet, but authoritatively. "I don't
mean to say it isn't an awful disappointment, Winnie; but if it's Tom,
why did you go and send for me?"
Winifred stood between the two, the wife sobbing wildly behind her, her
brother looking at her in a sort of dull despair, and stretched out her
hands to them with an appeal for which she could find no words. But at
that moment the door opened harshly and Tom came in, appearing at the
end of the room, with a pale and gloomy countenance, made only more
gloomy by wine and fatigue, for he had ridden far and wildly, dashing
about the country to exhaust his rage and disappointment. All that he
had done had been to increase both. "Oh, you have got here," he said,
with an angry nod to his brother. "It is a nice home-coming ain't it,
for you and me? Shake hands; we're in the same boat now, whatever we
once were. And there stands the supplanter, the hypocrite that has got
everything!" cried the excited young man, the foam flying from his
mouth. And thereupon came a shriek from Mrs. George, which went through
poor Winifred like a knife. For some minutes she heard no more.
CHAPTER XV
Winifred had never fainted before in her life, and it made a great
commotion in the house. Hopkins, without a word to any one, sent off for
Dr. Langton, and half the maids in the house poured into the room
eagerly to help, bringing water, eau de Cologne, everything they could
think of. Mrs. George's hysterics fled before the alarming sight, the
insensibility, and pallor, which for a moment she took for death, and
with a cry of horror and pity, and the tears still standing upon her
flushed cheeks, she flung herself on her knees on the floor by
Winifred's side. The two brothers stood and looked on, feeling very
uncomfortable, gazing with a half-guilty aspect upon the fallen figure.
Would any one perhaps say that it was their fault? They stood near each
other, though without exchanging a word, while the sudden irruption of
women poured in. Winifred, however, was not long of coming to her
senses. She woke to find herself lying on the floor, to her great
astonishment, in the midst of a little crowd, and then struggled back
into full consciousness again with a head that ached and throbbed, and
something singing in her ears. She got to her feet with an effort and
begged their pardon faintly. "What has happened?" she said; "have I done
any thing strange? what have I done?"
"You have only fainted," said Miss Farrell, "that is all. Miss Chester
is better now. She has no more need of you, you may all go. Yes, my
dear, you have fainted, that is all. Some girls are always doing it; but
it never happened to you before, and it ought to be a proof to you,
Winnie, that you are only mortal after all, and can't do more than you
can."
Winifred smiled as best she could in the face of her old friend. "I did
not know I could be so foolish," she said; "but it is all over now. Dear
Miss Farrell, leave me with them. There is something I must say."
"Oh, put it off till to-morrow," said Mrs. George; "whether you've been
our enemy or not, you are only a bit of a girl; and it can't hurt to
wait till to-morrow. I know what nerves are myself, I've always been a
dreadful sufferer. A dead faint like that, it is very frightening to
other people. Don't send the old lady away."
"I am going to stay with you, Winnie--unless you will be advised by me,
and by Mrs. George, who has a kind heart, I am sure she has--and go to
bed."
Winifred placed herself in a deep easy-chair which gave her at least a
physical support. She gave her hand to Miss Farrell, who stood by her,
and turned to the brothers, who were still looking on uneasily,
half-conscious that it was their fault, half-defiant of her and all that
she could say. She lifted her eyes to them, in that moment of weakness
and uncertainty before the world settled back into its place. Even their
faces for a little while were but part of a phantasmagoria that moved
and trembled in the air around her. She felt herself as in a dream,
seeing not only what was before her, but many a visionary scene behind.
She had been the youngest, she had always yielded to the boys; and as
they stood before her thus, though with so few features of the young
playfellows and tyrants to whom all her life she had been more or less
subject, it became more and more impossible to her to assume the
different part which an ill fate had laid upon her. As she looked at
them, so many scenes came back. They had been fond of her and good to
her in their way, when she was a child. She suddenly remembered how
George used to carry her up and down-stairs when she was recovering from
the fever which was the great event in her childish life, and in how
many rides and rows she had been Tom's companion, grateful above measure
for his notice. These facts, with a hundred trivial incidents which she
had forgotten, rushed back upon her mind. "Boys," she said, and then
paused, her eyes growing clearer and clearer, but tears getting into her
voice.
"Come, Winnie," said George, "Tom and I are a little too old for that."
"You will never be too old for that to me," she said. "Oh, if you would
but look a little kind, as you used to do! It was against my will and
my prayers that it was left to me. I said that I would not accept it,
that I would never, never, take what was yours. I never deceived him in
that. Oh, boys! do you think it is not terrible for me to be put into
your place, even for a moment? And that is not the worst. I thought when
I sent for you that I could give it you back, that it would all be easy;
but there is more to tell you."
They looked at her, each in his different way. Tom sullenly from under
his eyebrows, George with his careworn look, anxious to get to an end of
it, to consult with his wife what they were to do; but neither said a
word.
"After," she said with difficulty, struggling against the rising in her
throat, "after--it was found that I could not give it you back. If I did
so, I too was to lose everything. Oh, wait, wait, till I have done! What
am I to do? I put it in your hands. If I try to give you any part, it
is lost to us all three. What am I to do? I can take no advice from any
but you. What I wish is to restore everything to you; but if I attempt
to do so, all is lost. What am I to do? What am I to do?"
"Winnie, what you will do is to make yourself ill in the meantime."
"What does it matter?" she cried wildly; "if I were to die, I suppose it
would go to them as my heirs."
The blank faces round her had no pity in them for Winnie. They were for
the moment too deeply engrossed with the news which they had just heard.
Miss Farrell alone stooped over her, and stood by her, holding her hand.
Mrs. George, who had been listening, bewildered, unable to divine what
all this could mean, broke the silence with a cry.
"She don't say a word of Georgie. Is there nothing for Georgie? I don't
know what you mean, all about giving and not giving--it's our right.
George, ain't it our right?"
"There are no rights in our family," said George; "but I don't know what
it means any more than you."
Here Tom stepped forward into the midst of the group, lifting his sullen
eyebrows. "I know what it means," he said. "It is easy enough to tell
what it means. If she takes you in, she can't take me in. I saw how
things were going long ago. First one was got out of the house and then
another, but she was always there, saying what she pleased, getting over
the old man. Do you think if he had been in his right senses, he would
have driven away his sons, and put a girl over our heads? I'll tell you
what," he cried with passion, "I am not going to stand it if you are.
She was there always at one side of him, and the doctor at the other.
The daughter and the doctor and nobody else. Every one knows how a
doctor can work upon your nerves; and a woman that is always nursing
you, making herself sweet. If there ever was undue influence, there it
is. And I don't mean to stand it for one."
George was not enraged like his brother: he looked from one to another
with his anxious eyes. "If you don't stand it, what can you do?" he
said.
"I mean to bring it to a trial. I mean to take it into court. There
isn't a jury in England but would give it in our favour," said Tom. "I
know a little about the law. It is the blackest case I ever knew. The
doctor, Langton, he is engaged to Winnie. He has put her up to it; I
don't blame her so much. He has stood behind her making a cat's-paw of
her. Oh, I've found out all about it. He belongs to the old family that
used to own Bedloe, and he has had his eye on this ever since we came
here. The governor was very sharp," said Tom, "he was not one to be
beaten in the common way. But the doctor, that was always handy, that
came night and day, that cured him--the first time," he added
significantly.
Tom, in his fury, had not observed, nor had any of his agitated hearers,
the opening of the door behind, the quiet entry into the room of a
new-comer, who, arrested by the words he heard, had stood there
listening to what Tom said. At this moment he advanced quickly up the
long room. "You think perhaps that I killed him--the second time?" he
said, confronting the previous speaker.
Winifred rose from her chair with a low cry, and came to his side,
putting her arm through his.
"Edward! Edward! he does not know what he is saying," she cried.
The other pair had stood bewildered during all this, Mrs. George gasping
with her pretty red lips apart, her husband, always careworn, looking
anxiously from one face to another. When she saw Winnie's sudden
movement, Mrs. George copied it in her way. She was cowed by the
appearance of the doctor, who was so evidently a gentleman, one of those
superior beings for whom she retained the awe and admiration of her
youth.
"Oh, George, come to bed! don't mix yourself up with none of them--don't
get yourself into trouble!" she cried, doing what she could to drag him
away.
"Let alone, Alice," he said, disengaging himself. "I suppose you are Dr.
Langton. My brother couldn't mean that; but if things are as he says,
it's rather a bad case."
A fever of excitement, restrained by the habit of self-command, and
making little appearance, had risen in Langton's veins. "Winifred," he
cried, with the calm of passion, "you have been breaking your heart to
find out a way of serving your brothers. You see how they receive it.
Retire now, you are not able to deal with them, and leave it to me."
She was clinging to him with both hands, clasping his arm, very weak,
shaken both in body and mind, longing for quietness and rest; but she
shook her head, looking up with a pathetic smile in his face.
"No, Edward," she said.
"No?" he looked at her, not believing his ears. She had never resisted
him before, even when his counsels were most repugnant to her. A sudden
passionate offence took possession of him. "In that case," he said,
"perhaps it is I that ought to withdraw, and allow your brother to
accuse me of every crime at his ease."
"Oh, Edward, don't make it harder! It is hard upon us all, both them and
me. It is desperate, the position we are in. I cannot endure it, and
they cannot endure it. What are we to do?"
"Nor can I endure it," he said. "Let them contest the will. It is the
best way; but in that case they cannot remain under your roof."
"Who gave you the right to dictate what we are to do?" cried Tom, who
was beside himself with passion. "This is my father's house, not yours.
It is my sister's, if you like, but not yours. Winnie, let that fellow
go; what has he got to do between us? Let him go away; he has got
nothing to do here."
"You are of that opinion too?" Langton said, turning to her with a pale
smile. "Be it so. I came to look after Miss Chester's health, not to
disturb a family party."
"Edward!" Winifred cried. The name he gave her went to her heart. He had
detached himself from her hold; he would not see the hand which she held
out to him. His ear was deaf to her voice. She had deserted him, he said
to himself. She had brought insult upon him, and an atrocious
accusation, and she had not resented it, showed no indignation, rejected
his help, prepared to smooth over and conciliate the miserable cad who
had permitted himself to do this thing. Beneath all this blaze of
passion, there was no doubt also the bitterness of disappointment with
which he saw the destruction of those hopes which he had been foolishly
entertaining, allowing himself to cherish, although he knew all the
difficulties in the way. He saw and felt that, right or wrong, she would
give all away, that Bedloe was farther from him than ever it had been.
He loved Winifred, it was not for Bedloe he had sought her; but
everything surged up together at this moment in a passion of
mortification, resentment, and shame. She had not maintained his cause,
she had refused his intervention, she had allowed these intruders to
regard him as taking more upon him than she would permit, claiming an
authority she would not grant. He neither looked at her, nor listened to
the call which she repeated with a cry that might have moved a savage. A
man humiliated, hurt in his pride, is worse than a savage.
"Take care of her," he said, wringing Miss Farrell's hand as he passed
her, and without another look or word went away.
Winifred, standing, following with her eyes, with consternation
unspeakable, his departing figure, felt the strength ebb out of her as
he disappeared. But yet there was relief in his departure, too. A woman
has often many pangs to bear between her husband and her family. She has
to endure and maintain often the authority which she does not
acknowledge, which in her right he assumes over them, which is a still
greater offence to her than to them; and an instinctive sense that her
lover should not have any power over her brothers was strong in her
notwithstanding her love. Her agitated heart returned after a moment's
pause to the problem which was no nearer solution than before. She said
softly--
"All that I can do for your sake I will do, whatever I may suffer. There
is one thing I will not do, and that is, defend myself or him. If you do
not know that neither I nor he have done anything against you, it is not
for me to say it. It is hard, very hard for us all. If you will advise
with me like friends what to do, I shall be very, very thankful; but if
not, you must do what you will, and I will do what I can, and there is
no more to say."
The interruption, though it had been hard to bear, had done her good.
She went back to her chair, and leant back, letting her head rest on
good Miss Farrell's faithful shoulder. A kind of desperation had come to
her. She had sent her lover away, and nothing remained for her, but only
this forlorn duty.
"Edward will not come back," she said in Miss Farrell's ear.
"To-morrow, my darling, to-morrow," the old lady said, with tears in her
eyes.
Winifred shook her head. No one could deceive her any more. She seemed
to have come to that farthest edge of life on which everything becomes
plain. After a while she withdrew, leaving the others to their
consultation; they had been excited by Edward's coming, but they were
cowed by his going away. It seemed to bring to all a strange
realisation, such as people so often reach through the eyes of others,
of the real state of their affairs.
CHAPTER XVI
Enough had been done and said that night. They remained together for
some time in the drawing-room, having the outside aspect of a family
party, but separated, as indeed family parties often are. Winifred, very
pale, with the feeling of exhaustion both bodily and mental, sat for a
time in her chair, Miss Farrell close to her, holding her hand. They
said nothing to each other, but from time to time the old lady would
bend over her pupil with a kiss of consolation, or press between her own
the thin hand she held. She said nothing, and Winifred, indeed, was
incapable of intercourse more articulate. On the other side of the
fireplace George and his wife sat together, whispering and consulting.
She was very eager, he careworn and doubtful, as was his nature.
Sometimes he would shake his head, saying, "No, Alice," or "It is not
possible." Sometimes her eager whispering came to an articulate word.
Their anxious discussion, the close union of two beings whose interests
were one, the life and expectation and anxiety in their looks, made a
curious contrast to the exhaustion of Winnie lying back in her chair,
and the sullen loneliness of Tom, who sat in the centre in front of the
fire, receiving its full blaze upon him in a sort of ostentatious
resentment and sullenness, though his hand over his eyes concealed the
thought in his face. The only sound was the whispering of Mrs. George,
and the occasional low word with which her husband replied. Further, no
communication passed between the different members of this strange
party. They separated after a time with faint good-nights, Mrs. George
eager, indeed, to maintain the forms of civility, but the brothers each
in his way withdrawing with little show of friendship. After this,
Winifred too went upstairs. Her heart was very full.
"Did you ever," she said to her companion "feel a temptation to run
away, to bear no more?"
"Yes, I have felt it; but no one can run away. Where could we go that
our duty would not follow us? It is shorter to do it anyhow at first
hand."
"Is it so?" said Winifred, with a forlorn look from the window into the
night where the stars were shining, and the late moon rising. "'Oh that
I had the wings of a dove!'--I don't think I ever understood before what
that meant."
"And what does it mean, Winnie? The dove flies home, not into the
wilds, which is what you are thinking of."
"That is true," said the girl, "and I have no home, except with you. I
have still you"--
"He will come back to-morrow," Miss Farrell said.
"No, he will not come back. They insulted him, and I--did not want him.
That is true. I did not want him. I wanted none of his advice. I
preferred to be left to do what I had to do myself. It is true, Miss
Farrell. Can a man ever forgive that? It would have been natural that he
should have done everything for me, and instead of that-- Are not these
all great mysteries?" said Winifred after a pause. "A woman should not
be able to do so. She should put herself into the hands of her husband.
Am I unwomanly?--you used to frighten me with the word; but I could not
do it. I did not want him. My heart rose against his interference. If I
knew that he felt so to me, I--I should be wounded to death. And yet--it
was so--it is quite true. I think he will never forgive me."
"It is a mystery, Winnie. I don't know how it is. When you are married
everything changes, or so people say. But love forgives everything,
dear."
"Not that," Winifred said.
She sat by her fire, when her friend left her, in a state of mind which
it is impossible to describe in words. It was despair. Despair is
generally tragical and exalted; and perhaps that passion is more easy to
bear with the excitement that belongs to it than the quiet consciousness
that one has come to a dead pause in one's life, and that neither on one
side or the other is there any outlet. Winifred was perfectly calm and
still. She sat amid all the comfort of her chamber, gazing dimly into
the cheerful fire. She was rich. She was highly esteemed. She had many
friends. And yet she had come to a pass when everything failed her. Her
brothers stood hostile about her, feeling her with justice to be their
supplanter, to stand in their way. Her lover had left her, feeling with
justice that she wronged his love and rejected his aid. With
justice--that was the sting. To be misunderstood is terrible, yet it is
a thing that can be surmounted; but to be guilty, whether by any fault
of yours, whether by terrible complication of events, whether by the
constitution of your mind, which is the worst of all, this is despair.
And there was no way of deliverance. She could not make over her
undesired wealth to her brothers, which had at first seemed to be so
easy a way; and also, far worse, far deeper, far more terrible, she
could not make Edward see how she could put him away from her, yet love
him. She felt herself to sit alone, as if upon a pinnacle of solitude,
regarding all around and seeing no point from which there could come any
help. It is seldom that the soul is thus overwhelmed on all sides. When
one hope fails, another dawns upon the horizon; rarely, rarely is there
no aid near. But to Winifred it seemed that everything was gone from
her. Her lover and friends stood aloof. Her life was cut off. To
liberate every one and turn evil into good, the thing best to be done
seemed that she should die. But she knew that of all aspirations in the
world that is the most futile. Death does not come to the call of
misery. Those who would die, live on: those who would live are stricken
in the midst of their happiness. Perhaps to a more cheerful and buoyant
nature the crisis would have been less terrible; but to her it seemed
that everything was over, and life come to a standstill. She was
baffled and foiled in all that she wished, and that which she did not
desire was forced upon her. There seemed no strength left in her to
fight against all the adverse forces around. Her heart failed
altogether, and she felt in herself no power even to meet them, to begin
again the discussion, to hear again, perhaps, the baseless threat which
had driven Edward away. Ah, it was not that which had driven him away.
It was she herself who had been the cause; she who had not wanted him,
who even now, in the bitterness of the loss, which seemed to her as if
it must be for ever, still felt a faint relief in the thought that at
least no conflict between his will and hers would embitter the crisis,
and that she should be left undisturbed to do for her brothers all that
could be done, alone.
Next day she was so shaken and worn out with the experiences of that
terrible evening, that she kept her room and saw no one, save Miss
Farrell. Edward made no appearance; he did not even inquire for her, and
till the evening, when Mr. Babington arrived, Winifred saw no one. The
state of the house, in which George and his family held a sort of
encampment on one side, and Tom a hostile position on the other, was a
very strange one. There was a certain forlorn yet tragi-comic separation
between them. Even in the dining-room, where they sat at table together,
Mrs. George kept nervously at one end, as far apart as she could place
herself from her brother-in-law. The few words that were interchanged
between the brothers she did everything in her power to interrupt or
stop. She kept George by her side, occupied him with the children,
watched over him with a sort of unquiet care. Tom had assumed his
father's place at the foot of the table before the others perceived
what that meant. They established themselves at the head, George and
his wife together, talking to each other in low voices, while there was
no one with whom Tom could make up a faction. The servants walked with
strange looks from the one end to the other, serving the two groups who
were separated by the white stretch of flower-decorated table. Old
Hopkins groaned, yet so reported the matter that the company in the
housekeeper's room shook their sides with mirth. "It was for all the
world like one of them big hotels as I've been to many a time with
master. Two lots, with a scoff and a scowl for everything that each
other did." Notwithstanding this disunion, however, the two brothers had
several conferences in the course of the day. They had a common
interest, though they thus pitted themselves against each other. It was
Tom who was the chief spokesman in these almost stealthy interviews.
Tom was so sore and resentful against his sister, that he was willing to
make common cause with George against her.
"If it is as she says," he said, "there's no jury in England but would
find undue influence, and perhaps incapacity for managing his own
affairs. We have the strongest case I ever heard of."
"I don't believe you'll get a jury against Winnie," said George, shaking
his head.
"Why shouldn't we get a jury against Winnie? She has stolen into my
place and your place, and set the governor against us."
"Perhaps she has," said George; "but you won't get a jury against her."
"Why not? There is no man in the world that would say otherwise than
that ours was a hard case."
"Oh yes, it is a very hard case; but you would not get a jury against
Winnie," George repeated, with that admirable force of passive
resistance and blunted understanding which is beyond all argument.
This was what they talked of when they walked up and down the
conservatory together in the afternoon. Tom was eager, George doubtful;
but yet they were more or less of accord on this subject. It was a hard
case--no one would say otherwise; and though George could not in his
heart get himself to believe that any argument would secure a verdict
against Winnie, yet it was a case, it was evident, in which something
ought to be done, and he began to yield to Tom's certainty. When Mr.
Babington arrived, they both met him with a certain expectation.
"We can't stand this, you know," said Tom. "It is not in nature to
suppose that we could stand it."
"Oh, can't you?" Mr. Babington said.
"Tom thinks," his brother explained in his slow way, "that there has
been undue influence."
"The poor old governor must have been going off his head. It is as clear
as daylight: he never could have made such a will if he hadn't been off
his head; and Winnie and this doctor one on each side of him. Such a
will can never stand," said Tom.
"But I say he'll never get a jury against Winnie," said George, with his
anxious eyes fixed on Mr. Babington's face.
The lawyer listened to this till they had done, and then he said, "Oh,
that is what you think!" and burst into a peal of laughter. "Your father
was the sort of person, don't you think, to be made to do what he didn't
want to do? I don't think I should give much for your chance if that is
what you build upon."
This laugh, more than all the reasoning in the world, took the courage
out of Tom, and George had never had any courage. They listened with
countenances much cast down to Mr. Babington's narrative of their
father's proceedings, and of how Winnie was bound, and how Mr. Chester
had intended to bind her. They neither of them were clever enough to
remark that there were some points upon which he gave them no
information, though he seemed so certain and explicit. But they were
both completely lowered and subdued after an hour of his society,
recognising for the first time the desperate condition of affairs.
That evening, when Winnie, weary of her day's seclusion, sick at heart
to feel her own predictions coming true, and to realise that Edward had
let the day pass without a word, was sitting sadly in her dressing-gown
before her fire, there came a knock softly at her door, late in the
evening, when the household in general had gone to bed. She turned
round with a little start and exclamation, and her surprise was not
lessened when she perceived that her visitor was Tom. He came in with
scarcely a word, and drew a chair near her, and sat down in front of the
fire.
CHAPTER XVII
There is, among the members of many families, a frank familiarity which
dispenses with all those forms which keep life on a level of courtesy
with persons not related to each other. Tom did not think it necessary
to ask his sister how she was, or to show any anxiety about her health.
He drew his chair forward and seated himself near her, without any
formulas.
"You know how to make yourself comfortable," he said, with a glance
round the room, which indeed was very luxuriously furnished, like the
rest of the house, and with some taste, which was Winifred's own. The
tone in which he spoke conveyed a subtle intimation that Winifred made
herself comfortable at his expense, but he did not say so in words. He
stretched out his feet towards the fire. Perhaps he found it a little
difficult to come to the point.
"I am sorry," said Winifred, "to have been shut up here. If I had been
stronger--but you must remember I have had an illness, Tom; and to feel
that you were both against me"--
"Oh, it doesn't matter about that," said Tom, with a wave of his hand.
Then, after a pause, "In that you're mistaken, Winnie. I'm not against
you. A fellow could not but be disappointed to find what a different
position he was in, after the telegram and all. But when one comes to
hear all about it, I'm not against you: I'm rather--though perhaps you
won't believe me--on your side."
"Oh, Tom!" cried Winifred, laying her hand upon his arm; "I am too glad
to believe you. If you will only stand by me, Tom"--
"Oh yes," he said, "I'll stand by you. I've been thinking it over since
last night. You want some one to be on your side, Winnie. When I saw the
airs of--But never mind, I have been thinking it all over, and I am on
your side."
"If that is so, I shall be able to bear almost anything," said Winifred
faintly.
"You will have George to bear and his wife. They say women never can put
up with other women. And, good heavens, to think that for a creature
like that he should have stood out and lost his chances with the
governor! I never was a fool in that way, Winnie. If I went wrong, it
was for nobody else's sake, but to please myself. I should never have
let a girl stand in my way--not even pretty, except in a poor sort of
style, and fat at that age." Here Tom made a brief pause. "But of
course you know I shall want something to live on," he said.
"I know that you shall have everything that I can give you," Winifred
cried.
"Ah! but that's easier said than done. We must not run against the will,
that is clear. I've been thinking it over, as I tell you, and my idea
is, that after a little time, when you have taken possession and got out
of Mr. Babington's hands and all that, you might make me a present, as
it were. Of course your sense of justice will make it a handsome
present, Winnie."
"You shall have half, Tom. I have always meant you should have half."
"Half?" he said. "It's rather poor, you'll allow, to have to come down
to that after fully making up one's mind that one was to have
everything!"
"But, Tom, you would not have left George out--you would not have had
the heart!"
"Oh, the heart!" said Tom. "I shouldn't have stood upon ceremony,
Winnie; and besides, I always had more respect for the poor old governor
than any of you. It suits my book that you should go against him, but I
shouldn't have done it, had it been me. Well, half! I suppose that's
fair enough. You couldn't be expected to do more. But you must be very
cautious how you do it, you know. It's awfully unbusiness-like, and
would have made the governor mad to think of. You must just get the
actual money, sell out, or realise, or whatever they call it, and give
it to me. Nothing that requires any papers or settlements or anything.
You will have to get the actual money and give it me. You had better do
it at different times, so many thousand now, and so many thousand then.
It will feel awfully queer getting so much money actually in one's
hand--but nice," Tom added, with a little laugh. He got up and stood
with his back to the fire, looking down upon her. "Nice in its way, if
one could forget that it ought to have been so much more."
"Tom, you will be careful and not spend too much--you will not throw it
all away?"
"Catch me!" he said. "I'll tell you what I mean to do, Winnie. I'll go
on the Stock Exchange. The governor's old friends will lend me a hand,
thinking mine a hard case, as it is. And then it's easy to make them
believe I've been lucky, or inherit (as I believe I do) the governor's
head for business. It would be droll if some of us hadn't got that, and
I am sure it's neither George nor you. Well, then, that's settled,
Winnie. It will be easy to find out from Babington what the half is: a
precious big figure, I don't doubt," he added, with a triumph which for
the moment he forgot to disguise. Then he added after a moment, in a
more indifferent tone, "There is no telling what may happen when a man
is once launched. If you give me your share to work the markets with,
you can do anything on the Stock Exchange with a lot of money. I'll
double your money for you in a year or two, which will be as good as
giving it all back."
"I don't know anything about the Stock Exchange, Tom; only don't lose
your money speculating."
"Oh, trust me for that!" he said. "I tell you I am the one that has got
the governor's head." Then it seemed to strike him for the first time
that it would not be amiss to show some regard for his sister. He
brought his hand down somewhat heavily on her shoulder, which made her
start violently.
"Come," he said, "you must not be down-hearted, Win. If I was a little
nasty at first, can't you understand that? And now I've made up my mind
to it, there's nothing to look so grave about. I'll stand by you
whatever happens."
"Thank you, Tom," she said faintly.
"You needn't thank me; it's I that ought to thank you, I suppose. I
might have known you would behave well, for you always did behave well,
Winnie. And look here, you must not make yourself unhappy about
everybody as you do. George, for instance: I would be very careful of
what I gave him, if I were you. Let them go out to their own place
again, they will be far better there than here. And don't give them too
much money: enough to buy a bit of land is quite enough for them; and
when the boys are big enough to help him to work it, he'll do very
well." This prudent advice Tom delivered as he strolled, pausing now and
then at the end of a sentence, towards the door. He was, perhaps, not
very sure that it was advice that would commend itself to Winnie, or
that it came with any force from his mouth; nevertheless he had a sort
of conviction, which was not without reason, that it was sensible
advice. "By the bye," he added, turning short round and standing in the
half dark in the part of the room which was not illuminated by the
lamp--"by the bye, I suppose you will have to sell Bedloe, before you
can settle with me?"
"Sell Bedloe!" Winifred was startled out of the quiescence with which
she had received Tom's other proposals. "Why should there be any
occasion to do that, Tom?"
"My dear," he said, with a sort of amiable impatience, "how ignorant you
are of business! Don't you see that before you halve everything with me
as you promise, all the property must be realised? I mean to say, if you
don't understand the word, sold. That is the very first step."
"Sell Bedloe?" she repeated. "Dear Tom, that is the very last thing my
father would have consented to do. Oh no, I cannot sell Bedloe. He hoped
it was to descend to his children, and his name remain in the county; he
intended"--
"Do you think he intended to preserve the name of the Langtons in the
county, Winnie? You can't be such a fool as that. And, as I suppose your
children, when you have them, will be Langtons, not Chesters"--
She interrupted him eagerly, her face covered with a painful flush. "I
am going to carry out my father's will against his will, Tom; and, oh, I
feel sure where he is now he will forgive me. He has heirs of his own
name-- I mean them to have Bedloe. Where he is he knows better," she
said, with emotion; "he will understand, he will not be angry. Bedloe
must be for George."
Tom came forward close to her, within the light of the lamp, with his
lowering face. "I always knew you were a fool, but not such a fool as
that, Winnie. Bedloe for George! a fellow that has disgraced his family,
marrying a woman that--why, even Hopkins is better than she is; they
wouldn't have her at table in the housekeeper's room. I thought you were
a lady yourself, I thought you knew--why, Bedloe, Winnie!" he seized her
by the arm; "if you do this you will show yourself an utter idiot,
without any common sense, not to be trusted. If you don't sell Bedloe,
how are you to pay me?" he cried, with an honest conviction that in
saying this righteous indignation had reached its climax, and there was
nothing more to add.
"Tom," said Winifred, "leave me for to-night. I am not capable of
anything more to-night. Don't you feel some pity for me," she cried,
"left alone with no one to help me?"
But how was he to understand this cry which escaped from her without any
will of hers?
"To help you? whom do you want to help you? I should have helped you if
you had shown any sense. Bedloe to George! Then it is the half of the
money only that is to be for me? Oh, thank you for nothing, Miss
Winnie, if you think I am to be put off with that. Look here! I came to
you thinking you meant well, to show you a way out of it. But I've got a
true respect for the governor's will, if no one else has. Don't you know
that for years and years he had cut George out of it altogether, and
that it was just Bedloe--Bedloe above everything--that he was not to
have?"
Winifred shrank and trembled as if it were she who was the criminal.
"Yes," she said almost under her breath, "I know; but, Tom, think. He
is the eldest, he has children who have done no wrong."
"I don't think anything about it," said Tom. "The governor cut him out;
and what reason have you got for giving him what was taken from him?
What can you say for yourself? that's what I want to know."
"Tom," said Winifred, trembling, with tears in her eyes, "there are the
children: little George, who is called after my father, who is the real
heir. His heart would have melted, I am sure it would, if he had seen
the children."
"Oh, the children! that woman's children, and the image of her! Can't
you find a better reason than that?"
"Tom," said Winifred again, "my father is dead, he can see things now in
a different light. Oh, what is everything on the earth, poor bits of
property and pride, in comparison with right and justice? Do you think
they don't know better and wish if they could to remedy what has been
wrong here?"
"I don't know what you mean by they," said Tom sullenly. "If you mean
the governor, we don't know anything about him; whether--whether it's
all right, you know, or if"--Here he paused for an appropriate word,
but, not finding one, cried out, as with an intention of cutting short
the subject, "That's all rubbish! I'll tell you what I'll do. If you go
on with this folly, to drag the governor's name through the mud, by
Jove! I'll tell Babington. I'll put him up to what you're after. Against
my own interest? What do I care? I'll tell Babington, by Jove! to spite
you if nothing more!"
"I think you will kill me!" cried Winifred, at the end of her patience;
"and that would be the easiest of all, for you would be my heirs, George
and you."
He stared at her for a moment as if weighing the suggestion, then,
saying resentfully, "Always George," turned and left her, shutting the
door violently behind him. The noise echoed through the house, which was
all silent and asleep, and Winifred, very lonely, deserted on all sides,
leaned back in her chair and cried to herself silently, in prostration
of misery and weakness. What was she to do? to whom was she to turn? She
had nobody to stand by her. There was nothing but a blank and silence on
every side wherever she could turn.
CHAPTER XVIII
This interview did not calm the nerves of the agitated girl or bring her
soothing or sleep. It was almost morning before the calm of exhaustion
came, hushing the thoughts in her troubled brain and the pulses in her
tired body. She slept without comfort, almost without unconsciousness,
carrying her cares along with her, and when she awoke suddenly to an
unusual sound by her bedside, could scarcely make up her mind that she
had been asleep at all, and believed at first that the little babbling
voice close to her ear was part of a feverish dream. She started up in
her bed, and saw on the carpet close to her the little three-year-old
boy, a small, square figure with very large wide-open blue eyes, who was
altogether new to her experiences, and whom she only identified after a
moment's astonished consideration as little George, her brother's child.
The first clear idea that flashed across her mind was that, as Tom said,
he was "the image of his mother," not a Chester at all, or like any of
her family, but the picture, in little, of the very overblown beauty of
George's wife. This sensation checked in Winifred's mind, mechanically,
without any will of hers, the natural impulse of tenderness towards the
child, who, staring at her with his round eyes, had been making
ineffectual pulls at the counterpane, and calling at intervals, "Auntie
Winnie!" in a frightened and reluctant tone. Little George had "got on"
very well with his newly-found relative on the night of his arrival, but
to see an unknown lady in bed, with long hair framing her pale face,
and that look of sleep which simulates death, had much disturbed the
little boy. He fulfilled his consigne with much faltering bravery, but
he did not like it; and when the white lady with the brown hair started
up suddenly, he recoiled with a cry which was very nearly a wail. She
recovered and came to herself sooner than he did, and, smiling, held out
a hand to him.
"Little George, is it you? Come, then, and tell me what it is," she
said.
Here the baby recoiled a step farther, and stared with still larger
eyes, his mouth open ready to cry again, the tears rising, his little
person drawn together with that instinctive dread of some attack which
seems natural to the helpless. Winnie stretched out her arm to him with
a smile of invitation.
"Come to me, little man, come to me," she cried. Tears came to her eyes
too, and a softening to her heart. The little creature belonged to her
after a fashion; he was her own flesh and blood; he was innocent, not
struggling for gain. She did not ask how he came there, nor notice the
straying of his eyes to something behind, which inspired yet terrified
him. She was too glad to feel the unaccustomed sensation of pleasure
loosen her bonds. "It is true I am your Aunt Winnie. Come, Georgie,
don't be afraid of me. Come, for I love you," she said.
Half attracted, half forced by the influence behind, which was to Winnie
invisible, the child made a shy step towards the bed. "Oo send Georgie
away," he stammered. "Oo send Georgie back to big ship. Mamma ky.
Georgie no like big ship."
"Come and tell me, Georgie." She leant towards him, holding out arms in
which the child saw a refuge from the imperative signs which were being
addressed to him from behind the bed. He came forward slowly with his
little tottering steps, his big eyes full of inquiry, wonder, and
suspicion.
"Oo take care of Georgie?" he said, with a little whimper that went to
Winifred's heart; then suffered himself to be drawn into her arms. The
touch of the infant was like balm to her.
"Yes, dear," she cried, with tears in her eyes; "as far as I can, and
with all my heart I will take care of Georgie." It was a vow made, not
to the infant, who had no comprehension, but to Heaven and her own
heart.
But there was some one else who heard and understood after her fashion.
As Winifred said these words with a fervour beyond description, a sudden
running fire of sobs broke forth behind the head of her bed. Then with a
rush and sweep something heavy and soft fell down by her side, almost
crushing Georgie, who began to cry with fright and wonder.
"Oh, Miss Winnie! God bless you! I knew that was what you would say,"
cried Mrs. George, clasping Winifred's arm with both her hands, and
laying down her wet, soft cheek upon it. "He thought not; he said we
should have to go back again in that dreadful ship; but oh, bless you! I
knew you weren't one of that kind!"
"Is it you, Mrs. George?" said Winifred faintly. The sudden apparition
of the mother gave her a shock; and she began to perceive that the
little scene was melodramatic, got up to excite her feelings. She drew
back a little coldly; but the baby gazing at her between his bursts of
crying, and pressing closer and closer to her shoulder, frightened by
his mother's onslaught, was no actor. She began to feel after a moment
that the mother herself, crying volubly like a schoolgirl, and
clutching her arm as if it were that of a giant, was, if an actor so
very simple an actor, with devices so transparent and an object so
little concealed, that moral indignation was completely misplaced
against her artless wiles, and that nature was far stronger in her than
guile. In the first revulsion she spoke coldly; but after a moment, with
a truer insight, "Stand up," she said. "Don't cry so. Get a chair and
come and sit by me. You must not go on your knees to me."
"Oh, but that I will," cried Mrs. George, "as if you were the Queen,
Miss Winnie; for you have got our lives in your hands. Look at that poor
little fellow, who is your own flesh and blood. Oh, will you listen to
what worldly folks say, and send him away to be brought up as if he was
nobody, and him your own nephew and just heir?--oh, I don't mean that!
It appears he's got no rights, though I always thought--the eldest son's
eldest son! But no; I don't say that. George pleased himself marrying
me, and if he lost his place for that, ain't it more than ever my duty
to do what I can for him? And I don't make no claim. I don't talk about
rights. You've got the right, Miss Winnie, and there's an end of it.
Whoever opposes, it will never be George and me. But oh," cried the
young woman, rising from her knees, and addressing to Winifred all the
simple eloquence of her soft face, her blue eyes blurred with tears,
which flowed in half a dozen channels over the rosy undefined outline of
her cheeks,--"oh, if you only knew what life was in foreign parts! It
don't suit George. He was brought up a gentleman, and he can't abear
common ways. And the children!--oh, Miss Winnie, the little boys! Would
you stand by and see them brought up to hold horses and to run
errands--them that are your own flesh and blood?"
Little Georgie had ceased to whimper. The sight of his mother's crying
overawed the baby. He was too safe and secure in Winifred's arms to move
at once--but, reflecting in his infant soul, with his big eyes turned to
his mother all the while she spoke, was at last touched beyond his
childish capacity of endurance, forsook the haven in which he had found
shelter, and, flinging his arms about her knees, cried out, "Mamma,
don't ky, mamma, me love you!" burying his face in the folds of her
dress. Mrs. George stooped down and gathered him up in her arms with a
sleight of hand natural to mothers, and then, child and all,
precipitated herself once more on the carpet at the bedside.
Winifred, too, was carried out of herself by this little scene. She
dried the fast-flowing tears from the soft face so near to her as if
the young mother had been no more serious an agent than Georgie. "You
shall not go back. You shall want nothing that I can do for you," she
cried, soothing them. It was some time before the tumult calmed; but
when at last the fit of crying was over, Mrs. George began at once to
smile again, with an easy turn from despair to satisfaction. She held
her child for Winifred to kiss, her own lips trembling between joy and
trouble.
"I don't ask you to kiss me, for I'm not good enough for you to kiss;
but Georgie--he is your own flesh and blood."
"Do not say so," said Winifred, kissing mother and child. "And now sit
beside me and talk to me, and do not call me miss, for I am your sister.
I am sure you have been a good wife to George."
"I should be that and more: since he lost his fortune, and his 'ome, and
all, for me," she cried.
The scene which ensued was the most unexpected of all. Mrs. George
placed the child upon Winifred's bed and began, without further ado, a
baby game of peeps and transparent hidings, her excitement turning to
laughter, as it had turned to tears. Winifred, too, though her heart was
heavy enough, found herself drawn into that sudden revulsion. They
played with little Georgie for half an hour in the middle of all the
care and pain that surrounded them, the one woman with her heart
breaking, the other feeling, as far as she could feel anything, that the
very life of her family hung in the balance--moving the child to peals
of laughter, in which they shared after their fashion, as women only
can, interposing this episode of play into the gravest crisis. It was
only when Georgie's laughter began to show signs of that over-excitement
that leads to tears, that Winifred suddenly said, almost to herself,
"But how am I to do it? how am I to do it?" with an accent of weary
effort which almost reached the length of despair.
"Oh dear! you that are so good and kind," cried Mrs. George, changing
also in a moment, "just let us stay with you, dear Winnie--it's a
liberty to call you Winnie; but oh dear, dear! why can't we just live
all together? That would do nobody any harm. That would go against no
one's will. It wasn't said you were not to give me and George and the
children an 'ome. Oh, only think! it's such a big, big house! If you
didn't like the noise of the children,--but you aren't one of that sort,
not to like the noise of the children, and so I told George,--they could
have their nursery where you would never hear a sound. And George would
be a deal of use to you in managing the estate, and I would do the
housekeeping, and welcome, and save you any trouble. And why, why--oh,
why shouldn't we just settle down all together, and be, oh, so
comfortable, Miss Winnie, dear?"
This suggestion, it need scarcely be said, struck Winifred with dismay.
The face, no longer weeping, no longer elevated by the passionate
earnestness of the first appeal, dropping to calculations which,
perhaps, were more congenial to its nature, gave her a chill of
repulsion while still her heart was soft. She seemed to see, with a
curious second sight, the scene of family life, of family tragedy, which
might ensue were this impossible plan attempted. It was with difficulty
that she stopped Mrs. George, who, in the heat of success, would have
settled all the details at once, and it was only the entrance of Miss
Farrell, tenderly anxious about her pupil's health, and astounded to
find Mrs. George and her child established in her room, that finally
delivered poor Winnie.
"You would have no need of strangers eating you up if you had us," her
sister-in-law said, as she stooped to kiss her ostentatiously, and held
the child up to repeat the salute ere she went away.
Winifred had kissed the young mother almost with emotion in the midst of
her pleading; but somehow this return of the embrace gave a slight shock
both to her delicacy and pride. She laughed a little and coloured when
Miss Farrell, after the door closed, looked at her astonished. "You
think I have grown into wonderful intimacy with Mrs. George?" she said.
"I do indeed, Winnie. My dear, I would not interfere, but you must not
let your kind heart carry you too far."
"Oh, my kind heart!" cried the girl, feeling a desperate irony in the
words. "She suggests that they should live with me," she added, turning
her head away.
"Live with you? Winnie! my dear!" Miss Farrell gasped, with a sharp
break between each word.
"She thinks it will arrange itself so, quite simply--oh, it is quite
simple! Dear Miss Farrell, don't say anything. I have been pushing it
off. I have been pretending to be ill because I was miserable. Let me
get up now--and don't say anything," she added after a moment, with lips
that trembled in spite of herself. "There are no--letters; no one--has
been here?"
"Nothing, Winnie." Her friend did not look at her; she dared not betray
her too profound sympathy, her personal anguish, even by a kiss.
When Winifred came downstairs she found Mr. Babington waiting for her.
He was a very old acquaintance, whom she had not been used to think of
as a friend; but trouble makes strange changes in the aspect of things
around us, turning sometimes those whom we have loved most into
strangers, and lighting up faces that have been indifferent to us with
new lights of compassion and sympathy. Mr. Babington's formal manner,
his well-known features, so composed and commonplace, his grey, keen
eyes under their bushy eyebrows, suddenly took a new appearance to
Winifred. They seemed to shine upon her with the warmth of ancient
friendship. She had known him all her life, yet, it seemed, had never
known him till to-day. He came to meet her, holding out his hand, with
some kind, ordinary questions about her health, but all the while a
light put out, as it were, at the windows of his soul, to help her,
another poor soul stumbling along in the darkness. It was not anything
that he said, nor that she said. She did not ask for any help, nor he
offer it; and yet in a moment Winifred felt herself, in her mind,
clinging to him with the sense that here was an old, old friend,
somebody, above all doubt and uncertainty, in whom she could trust.
"Miss Winifred," he said, "I am afraid, though you don't seem much like
it, that we must talk of business."
"Yes; I wish it, Mr. Babington. I am only foolish and troubled--not ill
at all."
"I am not so sure about that; but still-- Your brother Tom has been
warning me, Miss Winifred-- I hope to save you from a false step; that
you are thinking of--going against your father's will"--
"Did Tom tell you so, Mr. Babington?"
"He did. I confess that I was not surprised. I have expected you to do
so all along; but so fine a fortune as you have got is not to be lightly
parted with, my dear young lady. Think of all the power it gives you,
power to do good, to increase the happiness, or at least the comfort,
perhaps of hundreds of people. If it was in your brothers' hands, do you
think it would be used as well? We must think of that, Miss Winifred, we
must think of that."
"If it was in my power," she said, looking at him wistfully, "I should
think rather of what is just. Can anything be good that is founded upon
injustice? Oh, Mr. Babington, put yourself in my place! Could you bear
to take away from your brother, from any one, what was his by nature--to
put yourself in his seat, to take it from him, to rob him?"
"Hush, hush, my dear girl! I am afraid I have not a conscience so
delicate as yours. I could bear a great deal which does not seem
bearable to you. And you must remember it is no doing of yours. Your
father thought, and I agree with him, that you would make a better use
of his money, and do more credit to his name, than either of your
brothers. It throws a fearful responsibility upon you, we may allow;
but still, my dear Miss Winifred"--
"Mr. Babington," she cried, interrupting him, "you are my oldest
friend--oh yes, my oldest friend! You know, if I am forced to do this,
it will only be deceiving from beginning to end. I will only pretend to
obey. I will be trying all the time, as I am now, to find out ways of
defeating all his purposes, and doing--what he said I was not to do!"
Her eyes shone almost wildly through the tears that stood in them. She
changed colour from pale to red, from red to pale; her weakness gave her
the guise of impassioned strength.
"Miss Winifred," said the lawyer very gravely, "do you know that you are
guilty of the last imprudence in saying this, of all people in the
world, to me?"
"Oh," she cried, "you are my friend, my old friend! I never remember the
time when I did not know you. It is not imprudent, it is my only hope.
Think a little of me first, whom you knew long before this will was
made. Tell me how I can get out of the bondage of it. Teach me, teach me
how to cheat everybody, for that is all that is left to me! how to keep
it from them so as best to give it to them. Teach me! for there is no
one I can ask but you."
The lawyer looked at her with a very serious face. Her great emotion,
her trembling earnestness, the very force of her appeal, as of one
consulting her only oracle, hurt the good man with a sympathetic pain.
"My dear," he said, "God forbid I should refuse you my advice, or
misunderstand you, you who are far too good for any of them. But, Miss
Winifred, think again, my dear. Are you altogether a free agent? Is
there not some one else who has a right to be consulted before you take
a step--which may change the whole course of your life?"
Winifred grew so pale that he thought she was going to faint, and got up
hurriedly to ring the bell. She stopped him with a movement of her hand.
Then she said firmly, "There is no one; no one can come between me and
my duty. I will consult nobody--but you."
"My dear young lady, excuse me if I speak too plainly; but want of
confidence between two people that are in the position of"--
"You mean," she said faintly yet steadily, "Dr. Langton? Mr. Babington,
he has no duty towards George and Tom. I love them--how can I help it?
they are my brothers; but he--why should he love them? I don't expect
it--I can't expect it. I must settle this by myself."
"And yet he will be the one to suffer," said the lawyer reflectively in
a parenthesis. "My dear Miss Winifred, take a little time to think it
over, there is no cause for hurry; take a week, take another day. Think
a little"--
"I have done nothing but think," she said, "since you told me first.
Thinking kills me, I cannot go on with it; and you can't tell--oh, you
can't tell how it harms them, what it makes them do and say!
Tom"--(here her voice was stifled by the rising sob in her throat) "and
all of them," she cried hastily. "Oh, tell me how to be done with it, to
settle it so that there shall be no more thinking, no more struggling!"
She clasped her hands with a pathetic entreaty, and looked imploringly
at him. And she bore in her face the signs of the struggle which she
pleaded to be freed from. Her face had the parched and feverish look of
anxiety, its young, soft outline had grown pinched and hollow, and all
the cheerful glow of health had faded. The lawyer looked at her with
genuine tenderness and pity.
"My poor child," he said, "one can very well see that this great
fortune, which your poor father believed was to make you happy, has
brought anything but happiness to you."
She gave him a little pathetic smile, and shook her head; but she was
not able to speak.
"Then, Miss Winifred," he said cheerfully, "since you are certain that
you don't want it, and won't have it, and have made up your mind to do
nothing but scheme and plot to frustrate the will, even when you are
seeming to obey it,--I think I know a better way. Write down what you
mean to do with the property, and leave the rest to me."
She looked at him, roused by his words, with an awakening thrill of
wonder. "Write down--what I mean to do? But that will make me helpless
to do it; that will risk everything; or so you said."
"I said true. Nevertheless, if you are sure you wish, at the bottom of
your heart, to sacrifice yourself to your brothers"--
She shook her head half angrily, with a gesture of impatience. "To give
them back their rights."
"That means the same thing in your phraseology. If that is what you
really wish, do what I say, and leave the rest to me."
She looked at him for a moment, bewildered, then rose up hastily and
flew to the writing-table. How easy it was to do it! how blessed if only
it were possible to throw this weight once for all off her shoulders,
and be free!
CHAPTER XIX
This was in the morning, and nothing further happened until the
afternoon. Winifred, though she was tremulous with weakness, had her
pony carriage brought round, and went out, taking Miss Farrell with her.
They went sometimes slowly, sometimes like the wind, as their
conversation flagged or came to a point of interest. They had much to
say to each other, and argued over and over again the same question.
They went round and round the park, and along a bit of road between the
Brentwood gate and the one that was called the Hollyport. Winifred's
ponies seemed to take that way without any will of hers. Was it without
her will? But, if not, it was quite ineffectual. The long road stretched
white on either side, disappearing here and there round the corner of
the woods; but there was no one visible, one way or the other--no one
whom the ladies wished to see. Once, indeed, as they approached the
farthest gate on their return, some one riding quickly, at a pace only
habitual to one person they knew, appeared on the brow of the Brentwood
hill coming towards them. The reins shook in Winifred's hands. She let
her ponies fall into a walk, not so much of set purpose as because her
wrists had lost all power; and the reins lay on the necks of the little
pair, who, like other pampered servants, did no more work than they were
obliged to do. The horseman came steadily down the hill, and disappeared
in the hollow, from which he would naturally reappear again and meet
them before many minutes. But he did not reappear. The ladies lingered,
the ponies took advantage of the moment of weakness to draw aside to the
edge of the road and munch grass, as if they were uncertain of their
daily corn. But no one came by that way. They had not said anything to
each other, nor had either said a word to show that she was aware of any
meaning in this pause. When, however, there was no disguising that it
was futile, Winifred said, almost under her breath, "He must have gone
round by the other way."
"I heard there was some one ill at the Manor Farm," said Miss Farrell,
with a quick catching of her breath.
"That will be the reason," Winifred said, with a dreary calm, and she
said no more, nor was any name mentioned between them as they drove
quietly home. Old Hopkins came out to the steps as she gave the groom
the reins.
"If you please, Miss Winifred, Mr. Babington has been asking for you.
He said, would you please step into the library as soon as you came
back. The gentlemen," Hopkins added after a pause, with much gravity,
"is both there."
"Will you come, Miss Farrell?" Winifred said.
"If I could be of any use to you, my darling; but I could not, and you
would rather that no one was there."
"Perhaps," said Winifred, with a sigh. Yet it was forlorn to see her in
her deep mourning, walking slowly in her weakness, alone and deserted,
though with so much depending on her. She went into the library without
even taking off her hat. Mr. Babington was seated there at what had been
her father's writing-table, and Tom and George were both with him. Tom
stood before the fire, with that air of assumption which he had never
put off--the rightful-heir aspect, determined to stand upon his rights.
George had his wife with him as usual, and sat with her whispering and
consulting at the other end of the room. Mr. Babington had been writing;
he had a number of papers before him, but evidently, from the silence,
only broken by the undertones of George and his wife, which prevailed,
had put off all explanations until Winifred was present. Neither of the
brothers stirred when she entered. George had forgotten, in the
composure of a husband whose wife requires none of the delicacies of
politeness from him, those civilities which men in other circumstances
instinctively pay to women, and Tom was too much out of temper and too
deeply opposed to his sister to show her any attention. Mr. Babington
rose and gave her a chair.
"Sit here, Miss Winifred. I shall want to place various things very
clearly before you," he said. "Now, will you all give me your
attention?" His voice subdued Mrs. George, who had sprung up to go to
her sister-in-law with a beaming smile of familiarity. She fell back
with a little alarm into her chair at her husband's side.
"You are all aware of the state of affairs up to this point," Mr.
Babington said. "Your father's large fortune, left in succession, first
to one and then to the other of his sons, to be withdrawn from both as
they in turn displeased him, has been finally left to Miss Winifred,
whom he thought the most likely of his three children to do him credit
and spend his money fitly. Exception may be taken to what he did, but
none, in my opinion, to the reason. He thought of that more than
anything else, and he chose what seemed to him the best means to have
what he wanted."
"He must have been off his head; I shall never believe anything else,
though there may not be enough evidence," Tom said.
"I daresay my father was right," said George in his despondent voice.
"I think, from his point of view, your father was quite right; but there
are many things that men, when they make their wills, don't take into
consideration. They think, for one thing, that their heirs will feel as
they do, and that they have an absolute power to make themselves obeyed.
This, unfortunately, they very often fail to do. Miss Winifred becomes
heir under a condition with which she refuses to comply."
"Mr. Babington!" Winifred said, putting her hand on his arm.
"You may trust to me, my dear. The condition is, that she is not, under
any circumstances, to share the property with her brothers, or to
interfere in any way with the testator's arrangements for them. This she
refuses to do."
"Don't be a fool, Winnie!" cried Tom. "Pass over that, please. We all
know what you mean, and that she's to pose as our benefactor, and to
receive our eternal gratitude, and so forth."
"I think it would be a great pity if Winnie took any rash step," George
said.
Mr. Babington looked round upon them with a smile. "She wishes," he
said, "to give the landed property, Bedloe, to her brother George, and
to make up an equivalent to it in money for Mr. Tom there. These are the
arrangements she proposes to me--the sole executor, you will observe,
charged to carry your father's will into effect." He took up one of the
papers as he spoke, and with a smile, caught in his own the hand which
she once more tremulously put forth to interrupt him. "Here is the
proposal written in her own hand," he said. "Miss Winifred, you must
trust to me; I am acting for the best. Naturally this puts an end to
her, as her father's heir."
Here there arose a confused tumult round the little group in the middle
of the room. Mrs. George was the first to make herself heard. She burst
forth into sobs and tears.
"Oh! after all she's promised to do for us! after all she's said for the
children! Oh, George! go and do something, stand up for your sister.
Don't let it be robbed away from her, after all she's promised. Oh,
George! Oh, Miss Winnie! remember what you've promised!--and what is to
become of Georgie?" the young mother cried.
"Mr. Babington," said George, "I don't think it's right to take
advantage of my sister because she's foolish and generous. Who is it to
go to if you take it from her? Let one of us at least have the good of
it. I don't want her to give me Bedloe. She could be of use to us
without that."
Tom had burst into a violent laugh of despite and despair. "If that's
what it's to come to," he said, "we'll go to law all of us. Winnie too,
by Jove! No one can say we're not a united family now."
Winifred sat with her eyes fixed on the old lawyer's face. She said
nothing, and if there was a tremor in her heart too, did not express it,
though already there began to arise dull whispers--Ought she to have
done it? Was it her duty? Was this in reality the way to serve them
best?
"The law is open to whoever seeks its aid--when they have plenty of
money," said Mr. Babington quickly. "You ask a very pertinent question,
Mr. George. It is one which never has been put to me before by any of
the persons most concerned."
This statement fell among them with a thrill like an electric shock. It
silenced Tom's nervous laughter and Mrs. George's sobs. They
instinctively drew near with a bewildering expectation, although they
knew not what their expectation was.
"Mr. Chester," said the lawyer, "like most men, thought he had plenty of
time before him, and he did not understand much about the law. I am
bound to add that in this particular he got little information from me;
and the consequence was that he forgot, in God's providence, to assign
any heirs, failing Miss Winifred. It was a disgrace to my office to let
such a document go out of it," he added, with a twinkle in his eyes,
"but so it was. He thought perhaps that he would live for ever, or that
at least he'd see his daughter's children, or that she would do
implicitly what he told her, or something else as silly--begging your
pardon; all men are foolish where wills are concerned."
There was another pause. Mr. Babington leant back in his chair, so much
at his ease and leisure, that he looked like a benevolent grandfather
discoursing to his children round him. They surrounded him, a group of
silent and anxious faces. Tom was the one who thought he knew the most.
He asked, with a voice which sounded parched in his throat, moistening
his lips to get the words out, "Who gets the property, then?" bringing
out the question with a rush.
Mr. Babington turned his back upon Tom. He addressed himself to George,
whose face had no prevision in it, but was only dully, quietly anxious,
as was habitual to him. George knew little about the law. He was not in
the way of expecting much. Whatever new thing might come, it was in all
likelihood a little worse than the old. He was vexed and grieved that
Winnie, who certainly would have been kind to him and his children, was
not to have the money; but he had not an idea in his mind as to what,
failing her, its destination would be.
"Mr. George Chester," he said, "you are the eldest son; your father, I
suppose, had his reasons for cutting you out, but those reasons I hope
don't exist now. As your sister refuses to accept the condition under
which the property comes to her, and as your father made no provision
for such a contingency, it follows that the will is not worth the paper
it is written on, and that Mr. Chester as good as died intestate, if you
know what that means."
Tom, who had been listening intently over Mr. Babington's shoulder,
threw up his clenched hands with a loud exclamation. Into George's blank
face there crept a tremor as of light coming. Winifred and Mrs. George
sat unmoved except by curiosity and wonder, unenlightened, trying to
read, as women do, the meaning in the face of the speaker, but
uninformed by the words.
"If I know what that means? Intestate? I don't think I do know what it
means."
"You fool!" his brother cried.
"It means," said Mr. Babington, "a kind of natural justice more or less,
at least in the present circumstances. When a man dies intestate, his
landed property (I'll spare you law terms) goes without question to his
eldest son--which you are--and natural representative. The personalty,
that is the money, you know, is divided. Do you understand now what I
mean? The personal property is far more than the real in this case, so
it will make a very just and equal division. And now, Miss Winnie, tell
me if I have not managed well for you? Are you satisfied now to have
trusted yourself to your old friend?"
"George, George! I don't understand. What's to be divided? What do we
get?" cried Mrs. George, standing up, the tears only half dried in her
eyes, her rose tints coming back to her face.
George was so startled and overwhelmed by information which entered but
slowly into an intelligence confused by ill-fortune, that for the moment
he made his wife no reply; but Tom did, who had already fully savoured
all the sweets and bitters of this astounding change of affairs.
"Mrs. Chester," he said, with an ironical bow, "you get Bedloe, my
father's place, that he never would have let you set foot in, if he
could have helped it, poor old governor. And the rest of us get--our
due; oh yes, we get our due. I know I was a fool and didn't keep his
favour when I had got it; and you, Winnie, you traitor, oh, you traitor!
There isn't a female for the word, is there? it should be female
altogether. You that he put his last trust in, poor old governor! you've
served him out the best of any of us," said Tom, with a burst of violent
laughter, "and there's an end of him and all his schemes!" he cried.
Winifred rose up tremulous. There was perhaps in her heart too an echo
of Tom's rage and sense of wrong. This woman, the reverse of all that
her father's ambition (vulgar ambition, yet so strong) had hoped for, to
be the mistress of the house! And Bedloe, which Winnie loved, to pass
away to a family which had rubbed off and forgotten even the little
gloss of artificial polish which Mr. Chester had procured for his sons.
She would have given it to them had the power been in her hands, she had
always intended it, never from the first moment meant anything else. And
yet when all was thus arranged according to her wish, above her hopes,
Winifred felt, to the bottom of her heart, that to give up her home to
Mrs. George was a thing not to be accomplished without a thrill of
indignation, a sense of wrong. And the very relief which filled her soul
brought back to her those individual miseries which this blessed
decision (for it was a blessed decision though cruel) could not take
away. She made Tom no reply. She scarcely returned the pressure of Mr.
Babington's kind hand. She said not a word to the agitated, triumphant,
yet astonished pair, who could not yet understand what good fortune had
happened to them. She went straight out of the library to Miss Farrell's
room. She still wore her hat and outdoor dress. She took her old
friend's hand, and drew her out of the chair in which she had been
seated, watching for every opening of the door. "Come," she said, "come
away."
"What has happened, Winnie? What has happened?"
"Everything that is best. George has got Bedloe. It is all right, all
right, better than any one could have hoped. And I shall not sleep
another night under this roof. Dear Miss Farrell, if you love me, come
away, come away!"
CHAPTER XX
Edward Langton had never meant to forsake his love. He intended no more
to give her up because she did not agree with him, because he thought
her mistaken, or even because she had rejected his guidance and wounded
his pride, than he meant to give up his life. But he had been very
deeply wounded by her acceptance of his withdrawal at that critical
moment. She had not chosen to put him, her natural defender, between her
brothers and herself. She had refused, so his thoughts went on to say,
his intervention. She had preferred to keep her interests separate from
his, to give him no share in what might be the most important act of
her life. He would not believe it possible when he left her. As he
crossed the hall and hurried down the avenue, he thought every moment
that he heard some one, a messenger hastening after him to bring him
back. But there was no such messenger. He expected next morning a letter
of explanation, of apology, at least of invitation imploring him not to
forsake her--but there was none. While Winifred's heart sank lower and
lower at the absence of any communication from him, he was waiting with
a mingled sense of dismay, astonishment, and indignation for something
from her. It seemed incredible to him that she should not write to
soothe away his offence, to explain herself. His first sensation indeed
had been that the offence given to him was deadly and not to be
explained, and that she who would not have him to help her in her
trouble, could not want him in her life; but before the next morning
came he had reasoned himself into a certainty that he should have as
full an explanation as it was possible to make, that she would excuse
herself by means of a hundred arguments which his own reason suggested
to him, and call him to her with every persuasion of love. But nothing
of the kind took place-- Winifred, sick and miserable, awaited on her
side the letter, the inquiry which never came, and felt herself forsaken
at the moment when every generous heart, she thought, must have felt how
much she needed support and sympathy. She did not want his interference;
she had been able to manage her family business--to do without him; he
had been de trop between her brothers and herself. Then let it be so!
he said at last to himself, and plunged into his work, riding hither and
thither, visiting even patients who needed him no longer, to prove to
himself that he was too much and too seriously offended to care. To be
sure, he was not the man to stand cap in hand and plead for her favour.
He went over all the district in those three days, dashing along the
roads, hurrying from one hamlet to another. It was not the life he had
been so foolish as to imagine to himself, the life--he felt himself
blush hotly at the recollection--of the master of Bedloe, restoring the
prestige of the old name, changing the aspect of the district,
ameliorating everything as only (he thought) a man who was born the
friend and master of the place could do. It had been an ideal life which
he had imagined for himself, not one of selfishness. He had meant to
brighten the very face of the country, to mend everything that needed
mending, to do good to the poor people, who were his own people. He
remembered now that there were those who thought it humiliating and base
for a man to be enriched by his wife, and the subtle contempt of women
embodied in that popular prejudice rose up in hot and painful shame to
his heart and his face. A man is never so sure that women are inferior,
as when a woman has neglected or played him false. Edward Langton's
heart was very sore, but he began to say to himself that it served him
right for his meanness in depending on a woman, and that a man ought to
be indebted to his own exertions and not look for advancement in so
humiliating a way. These thoughts grew more and more bitter as the days
went on. He flung himself into his work: an epidemic would have pleased
him better than the mild little ailments or lingering chronic diseases
which were the only visitations known among those healthy country folk;
but such as they were he made the most of them, frightening the sick
people by the unnecessary energy of his attendance, and saying to
himself that this, and not a fiction of the imagination or anything so
degrading as a wife's fortune, was his true life. That he flew about the
country without many a lingering unwilling look towards Bedloe, it would
be false to say. His way wherever he went led him past the park gates,
which he found always closed, silent, giving no sign. On the one
occasion when Winifred perceived him descending the hill, by one of
those hazards which continually arise to confuse human affairs, he, for
the moment half-happy in the entrancement of a case which presented
dangerous complications, did not see or recognise the little pony
carriage lingering under the russet trees, and thus missed the only
chance of a meeting and explanation; but he did meet, when that chance
was over, next day, in the afternoon, Mr. Babington driving his heavy
old phaeton from the gates of Bedloe. Langton's heart gave a leap even
at this means of hearing something of Winnie; but perhaps his pride
would still have prevented any clearing up, had not the old lawyer taken
it into his own hands. He stopped his horse and waited till Edward, who
was walking home from the house of a patient in the village, came up.
"I want to speak to you," Mr. Babington said. "Will you jump up and come
with me along the road, or will you offer me your hospitality and a bit
of dinner? There is full moon to-night and I don't mind being late. Oh,
if it's not convenient, never mind."
Edward's pride had made him hesitate--his good breeding came to his aid,
showing it to be inevitable that he should obey the hungry longing of
his heart.
"Certainly it is convenient, and I am too glad--drive on to my house,
and I shall be with you in a moment."
Though he had felt it to be his only salvation to hold fast by his
profession and present tenor of existence, Langton's heart beat loud as
he hurried on. Now, he said to himself, he should know what it meant,
now he should have some light thrown upon the position at least which
Winifred had assumed.
Mr. Babington, however, ate his dinner, which was simple and not
over-abundant, having been prepared for the doctor alone, with steady
composure, and it was only when the meal was over that he opened out.
Langton had apologised, as was inevitable, for the simple fare.
"Don't say a word," said the lawyer, with a wave of his hand. "It was
all excellent, and I'm glad to see you've such a good cook. You don't
know what a comfort it is to come out of a confused house like that,
with lengthy fine dinners that nobody understands, to a comfortable chop
which a man can enjoy and which it is a pleasure to see."
"Bedloe was not a confused house in former days," said Langton, with a
feeling that Winifred's credit was somehow assailed.
"Ah, nothing is as it was in former days," said Mr. Babington, shaking
his head; "everything is topsy-turvy now. I suppose you know all about
the last turn the affair has taken. I wonder you were not there, though,
to support poor Miss Winifred, poor thing, who has had a great deal to
go through."
"You will be surprised," said Langton, forcing a somewhat pale smile,
"if I tell you that I don't know anything about it. Miss Chester
preferred that the question between her brothers and herself should be
settled among themselves. And perhaps she was right."
"My dear Langton," said Mr. Babington, laying his hand on the young
man's arm, "I hope there's no coolness on this account between that poor
girl and you?"
"I see no reason why she should be called a poor girl," Langton said
quickly.
"Ah, well, you have not seen her then during the last two or three days.
Poor thing! between making the best of these fellows, and struggling to
keep up a show of following her father's directions--between acting
false and meaning true"--
"Mr. Babington," said Langton, with a dryness in his throat, "unhappily,
as you say, there has been--no coolness, thank Heaven--but a little--a
momentary silence between Miss Chester and me. Perhaps I have been to
blame. I thought she-- Tell me what has happened, and how everything is
settled, for pity's sake!"
"Yes," said the old lawyer, "I haven't the slightest doubt, my young
friend, that you have been to blame. That is why the poor child looked
so white and pathetic when she said to me that she had no one to
consult. When you come to have girls of your own," Mr. Babington said
somewhat severely, "you'll know how it feels to see a little young
creature you are fond of look like that."
Heaven and earth! as if all the old fogeys in the world, if they had a
thousand daughters, could feel half what a young lover feels! The blood
rose to young Langton's temples, but he did not trust himself to reply.
"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
medival, 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.
"I was coming to ask you," George said. "My sister went off in such a
hurry she left no address. She left her maid to pack up her things. I
did not even know she was going. It was a great disappointment to my
wife and me. We should have been very glad to have had her to stay with
us until--well, until her own affairs were settled. She would have been
of great use to Alice," George continued, with an unconscious gravity of
egotism which was almost too simple to be called by that harsh name.
"She could have put my wife up to a great many things: for we haven't
just been used, you know, to this sort of life, and it is very difficult
to get into all the ways. And then the children were so good with
Winnie, they took to her in a moment. Speaking of that, I wish you would
just come up and look at Georgie. My wife thinks he is quite well, but I
don't quite like the little fellow's look," the anxious father said.
Langton was not mollified by this unexpected invitation. The idea of
becoming medical attendant to George Chester's children and at the beck
and call of the new household at Bedloe filled him indeed with an
unreasonable exasperation. He explained as coldly as he could that he
did not "go in for" children's ailments, and recommended Mr. Marlitt, of
Brentwood, who was specially qualified to advise anxious parents. He was
indeed so moved by the sight of the new master of Bedloe, that the
purpose for which George had come was momentarily driven out of his
head. Why it should be a grievance to him that George Chester was master
of Bedloe he could not of course have explained to any one. He had not
been exasperated by George's father. Disappointment, and the sharper
self-shame with which he could not help remembering his own imaginations
on the matter, joined with the sense of angry scorn with which he beheld
the place which he had meant to fill so well, filled so badly by
another. George thanked him warmly for recommending Dr. Marlitt, "though
I am very sorry, and so will my wife be, that you don't pay attention to
that branch. Isn't it a pity? for surely if anything is important, it's
the children," he said in all good faith.
It was only after he was gone that Edward reflected that he had obtained
no information. It soothed him a little to think that she had not let
her brother know where she was going. It had been, then, a sudden
impulse of disgust, a hasty step taken in a moment when she felt herself
abandoned. Edward did not forgive her, but yet he was soothed a little,
even though excited and distressed beyond measure by his failure to know
where she was. A day or two passed in the lethargy of this
disappointment and perplexity as to what to do next. Then he thought of
Mr. Babington. He wrote immediately to the old lawyer, begging him to
find out at once where Winifred was. "I don't ask if you can, for I know
you must be able to do it. People don't disappear in these days."
But Mr. Babington, with a somewhat peevish question whether he knew how
many people did disappear, in the Thames or otherwise, and were never
heard of, in these famous days of ours, informed him that he knew
nothing about Winifred's whereabouts. She had gone abroad, and with Miss
Farrell, that was all he knew. By this time Edward Langton had become
very anxious and unhappy, ready almost to advertise in the Times or
take any other wild step. He resolved to lose no further time, not to
delay by writing, but to go off at once and find her as soon as he had
the smallest clue. This clue was found at last through the bankers (for
Langton was quite right in his certainty that people with a banking
account who draw money never do really disappear in these days), who did
not refuse to tell where the last remittances had been sent. He was so
anxious by this time that he went up to London himself to make these
inquiries, and came back again with the fullest determination to start
at once in search of Winifred. He sent to Mr. Marlitt, of Brentwood, who
was a young doctor, but recently established and much in want of
patients, to ask whether he could take charge of the few sick folk at
Bedloe, and made all his preparations to go. It was November by this
time, and all the fields were heaped with fallen leaves. He had settled
everything easily on the Saturday, and on Sunday night was going up to
town in time to catch the Continental mail next day.
Then--according to the usual perversity of human affairs--the epidemic
came all at once, which he had invoked some time before. It broke out on
the very Saturday when all his arrangements were made--two cases in one
house, one in the house next door. He perceived in a moment that this
was no time to leave his duty. Next day there were three more cases in
the village, and in the evening, just at the moment when he should have
been starting, the brougham from Bedloe drew up at his door, with an air
of agitation about the very horses, which had flecks of foam on their
shoulders, and every indication of having been hard driven. George
Chester entered precipitately, as pale as death.
"Oh, Langton," he cried, "look here! don't stand on ceremony. I never
did anything against you. You attend the children in the village; why
don't you attend mine? Little Georgie's got it!" the poor man cried out,
with quivering lips.
It is not for a moment to be supposed that Edward could resist such an
appeal. He went with the distracted father, and fought night and day for
two or three weeks for little Georgie's life, as well as for the lives
of several other little Georgies as dear in their way. Here he had what
he wanted, but not when he wanted it. When he woke up in the morning
from the interrupted sleep, which was all his anxieties allowed him, he
would remember in anguish that even the clue given by the bankers would
serve no longer. But during the day, as he went from one bedside to
another, he had too much to remember, and so the dark winter days wore
away.
Winifred had taken refuge in the universal expedient of going "abroad."
It is difficult to tell all that this means to simple minds. It means a
sort of cancelling of time and space, a flying on the wings of a dove,
an abstraction of one's self and one's affairs from the burden of
circumstances, from the questions of the importunate, from all that
holds us to a local habitation. Winifred was sick at heart of her
habitual place, and all the surroundings to which she had been
accustomed. It was not possible for her, she thought, to explain the
position, to answer all the demands, to make it apparent to the meanest
capacity how and why it was that her own heirship was at an end. She
fled from this, and from the unnatural (she said) prejudice against her
brother and his wife which seized her as soon as it became apparent that
Bedloe was in their hands--and she fled, but not so much from Edward, as
from what she thought his desertion of her. What she thought--for after
a while she too, like Edward himself, began to feel uncertain as to
whether he had deserted her--to ask herself whether she had been
blameless, to say to herself that it could not be, that it was
impossible they could part like this. What was it that had parted them?
It had been done in a moment, it had been her brother's foolish
accusation--ah, no, not that, but her own tacit refusal of his counsel
and aid. When Winifred began to come to herself, to disentangle her
thoughts, to see everything in perspective, it became gradually and by
slow degrees apparent to her that if Edward was in the wrong, he was yet
not altogether or alone in the wrong. Her mind worked more slowly than
did Langton's, partly because it had been far more strained and worn,
and because the complications were all on her side. She had to disengage
her mind from all that had troubled and disturbed her life for weeks
and months before, and to recover from the agitation of so many shocks
and changes before she could think calmly, or at least without the
burning at her heart of wounded feeling, hurt pride, and neglected love,
of all that concerned her lover. It was some time even before she spoke
to Miss Farrell of the subject that soon occupied all her thoughts. Miss
Farrell had felt Edward's silence on her pupil's account with almost
more bitterness than Winifred herself had felt it. She had put away his
name from her lips, and had concluded him unworthy. She avoided talking
of him even when Winifred began tentatively to approach the subject. "My
darling, don't let us speak of him," she had said. "I have not command
of myself: I might say things which I should be sorry for afterwards."
"But why should he have changed so?" Winifred said; "what reason was
there? He was always kind and true."
"I don't know about true, Winnie."
Then Winifred faltered a little, remembering how he had advised her to
humour her father. She made a little pause of reflection, and then
abandoned the subject for the moment; but only to return to it a hundred
and a hundred times. She was not one of those that prolong a
misunderstanding through a lifetime. She pondered and pondered, and it
was her instinct to think herself in the wrong. She had been hasty, she
had been self-absorbed. And had he not a right to be offended when she
so distinctly, of her own will, by no one's suggestion, put him aside
from her counsels, and let him know that she must deal with her brothers
alone? It made her shiver to think what a thing it was she had thus
done. She would have done it again, it was a necessity of the position
in which she found herself. But yet when you reflect, to put your
betrothed husband away from you in a great crisis of fate, to reject his
aid, to bid him--for it was as good as bidding him--leave her to arrange
matters in her own way, what an outrage was that! She could not think
how she could have done it, and yet she would have done it over again.
To get Miss Farrell to see this was difficult, but she succeeded at
last; and then they both trembled and grew pale together to think of
what had been done. Poor Edward! and all those days when Winifred had
sat miserable in her room, feeling that her last hope and prop had
failed her, and that she was left alone in the world, what had he been
thinking on his side? That she had thrown him off, that she would have
none of him? In their consultations these ladies made great use of the
man's wounded pride. They allowed to each other that it was the wrong
of all others which he would be least likely to bear. It was not only a
wrong, it was an insult. How could they ever have thought otherwise? It
was he who was forsaken, and that without a word, without a reason
given.
They had settled themselves, after some wanderings, in one of those
villages of the Riviera, which fashion and the pursuit of health have
taken out of the hands of their peasant inhabitants. It was not a great
place, full of life and commotion; but a little picturesque cluster of
houses, small and great, with an old campanile rising out of the midst
of them, and a soft background of mild olive-trees behind. They had
thought they would stay there till the winter was over, till England had
begun to grow green again, and the east winds were gone; but already,
though it was not yet Christmas, they were beginning to reconsider the
matter, to feel home calling them over the misty seas. Christmas! but
what a Christmas! with roses blooming, and all the landscape green and
soft, the sea warm enough to bathe in, the sunshine too hot at noon.
Winifred had begun to weary of the eternal greenness, of the skies which
were always clear, of the air which caressed and never smote her cheek,
before they had long been established in the little paradise which Miss
Farrell, even with all her desire to see her child happy, could not
pretend not to be pleased with.
"I cannot believe it is Christmas," Winifred said discontentedly. "No
frost, no cold, even flowers!" as if this were a kind of insult.
"Everything," she cried, "is out of season. I don't see how we can spend
Christmas here."
"It is not like Christmas weather," said Miss Farrell; "but still, my
dear, neither was it in the Holy Land, I should suppose, not like what
we call Christmas," she added, faltering a little; "but it is very nice,
Winnie, don't you think, dear?"
"No, I don't think it is nice: it is enervating, it is unmeaning, it has
no character in it. It might be May," cried Winnie; and then she added
with a sudden outburst of passion, "I don't think I can bear it any
longer. I cannot bear it any longer. Oh, Miss Farrell, Edward! what can
he be thinking of me, if he has not given up thinking of me altogether?"
"No, dear, not that," Miss Farrell said, soothing her.
"What, then? he must be beginning to hate me. I cannot let Christmas
pass and this go on. Think of him alone amongst the frost and the snow,
nothing but his sick people, no one to cheer him, called out perhaps in
the middle of the night, riding miles and miles to comfort some poor
creature, and no one, no one to comfort him!"
"My dear child!" Miss Farrell cried, taking Winifred into her kind arms.
At this moment there was a tinkle at the queer little bell outside--or
rather it had tinkled at the moment when Winifred spoke of the frost and
snow. When Miss Farrell rose and hastened to her, to raise her downcast
head and dry her tears, the old lady gave a start and cry, displacing
suddenly that head which she had drawn to her own breast. Winifred, too,
looked up in the sudden shock; and there, opposite to her in the
doorway, a cold freshness as of the larger atmosphere outside coming in
with him, stood Edward Langton, pale and eager, asking, "May I come in?"
with a voice that was unsteady, between deadly anxiety and certain
happiness.
They said a great deal to each other, enough to fill volumes; but so far
as the present history is concerned, there need be no more to say.