"By appointment, I suppose."
"No, not by appointment. Have you done your catechism?"
"Yes--and now I am going to preach a homily on it. I see through you perfectly, Edward. You are getting tired of me, and you want to be rid of me. I tell you plainly that you are not going the right way to work about it. No woman, especially if she be in my--unfortunate position, can tamely bear to see herself discarded for another. Certainly I cannot--and I caution you--I caution you to be careful, because when I think of such a thing I am not quite myself," and suddenly, without the slightest warning (for her face had been hard and cold as stone), she burst into a flood of tears.
Now Edward Cossey was naturally somewhat moved at this sight. Of course he did his best to console her, though with no great results, for she was still sobbing bitterly when suddenly there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Quest turned her face towards the wall and pretended to be reading a letter, and he tried to look as unconcerned as possible.
"A telegram for you, sir," said the girl with a sharp glance at her mistress. "The telegraph boy brought it on here, when he heard that you were not at home, because he said he would be sure to find you here--and please, sir, he hopes that you will give him sixpence for bringing it round, as he thought it might be important."
Edward felt in his pocket and gave the girl a shilling, telling her to say that there was no answer. As soon as she had gone, he opened the telegram. It was from his sister in London, and ran as follows:
"Come up to town at once. Father has had a stroke of paralysis.
Shall expect you by the seven o"clock train."
"What is it?" said Mrs. Quest, noting the alarm on his face.
"Why, my father is very ill. He has had a stroke of paralysis, and I must go to town by the next train."
"Shall you be long away?"
"I do not know. How can I tell? Good-bye, Belle. I am sorry that we should have had this scene just as I am going, but I can"t help it."
"Oh, Edward," she said, catching him by the arm and turning her tear- stained face up towards his own, "you are not angry with me, are you?
Do not let us part in anger. How can I help being jealous when I love you so? Tell me that you do not hate me--or I shall be wretched all the time that you are away."
"No, no, of course not--but I must say, I wish that you would not make such shocking scenes--good-bye."
"Good-bye," she answered as she gave him her shaking hand. "Good-bye, my dear. If only you knew what I feel here," she pointed to her breast, "you would make excuses for me." Almost before she had finished her sentence he was gone. She stood near the door, listening to his retreating footsteps till they had quite died away, and then flung herself in the chair and rested her head upon her hands. "I shall lose him," she said to herself in the bitterness of her heart.
"I know I shall. What chance have I against her? He already cares for Ida a great deal more than he does for me, in the end he will break from me and marry her. Oh, I had rather see him dead--and myself too."
Half-an-hour later, Mr. Quest came in.
"Where is Cossey?" he asked.
"Mr. Cossey"s father has had a stroke of paralysis and he has gone up to London to look after him."
"Oh," said Mr. Quest. "Well, if the old gentleman dies, your friend will be one of the wealthiest men in England."
"Well, so much the better for him. I am sure money is a great blessing. It protects one from so much."
"Yes," said Mr. Quest with emphasis, "so much the better for him, and all connected with him. Why have you been crying? Because Cossey has gone away--or have you quarrelled with him?"
"How do you know that I have been crying? If I have, it"s my affair.
At any rate my tears are my own."
"Certainly, they are--I do not wish to interfere with your crying--cry when you like. It will be lucky for Cossey if that old father of his dies just now, because he wants money."
"What does he want money for?"
"Because he has undertaken to pay off the mortgages on the Castle estates."
"Why has he done that, as an investment?"
"No, it is a rotten investment. I believe that he has done it because he is in love with Miss de la Molle, and is naturally anxious to ingratiate himself with her. Don"t you know that? I thought perhaps that was what you had been crying about?"
"It is not true," she answered, her lips quivering with pain.
Mr. Quest laughed gently. "I think you must have lost your power of observation, which used to be sufficiently keen. However, of course it does not matter to you. It will in many ways be a most suitable marriage, and I am sure they will make a very handsome couple."
She made no answer, and turned her back to hide the workings of her face. For a few moments her husband stood looking at her, a gentle smile playing on his refined features. Then remarking that he must go round to the office, but would be back in time for tea, he went, reflecting with satisfaction that he had given his wife something to think about which would scarcely be to her taste.
As for Belle Quest, she waited till the door had closed, and then turned round towards it and spoke aloud, as though she were addressing her vanished husband.
"I hate you," she said, with bitter emphasis. "I hate you. You have ruined my life, and now you torment me as though I were a lost soul.
Oh, I wish I were dead! I wish I were dead!"
On reaching his office, Mr. Quest found two letters for him, one of which had just arrived by the afternoon post. The first was addressed in the Squire"s handwriting and signed with his big seal, and the other bore a superscription, the sight of which made him turn momentarily faint. Taking up this last with a visible effort, he opened it.
It was from the "Tiger," alias Edith, and its coa.r.s.e contents need not be written here. Put shortly they came to this. She was being summoned for debt. She wanted more money and would have it. If five hundred pounds were not forthcoming and that shortly--within a week, indeed-- she threatened with no uncertain voice to journey down to Boisingham and put him to an open shame.
"Great heavens!" he said, "this woman will destroy me. What a devil!
And she"d be as good as her word unless I found her the money. I must go up to town at once. I wonder how she got that idea into her head.
It makes me shudder to think of her in Boisingham," and he dropped his face upon his hands and groaned in the bitterness of his heart.
"It is hard," he thought to himself; "here have I for years and years been striving and toiling, labouring to become a respectable and respected member of society, but always this old folly haunts my steps and drags me down, and by heaven I believe that it will destroy me after all." With a sigh he lifted his head, and taking a sheet of paper wrote on it, "I have received your letter, and will come and see you to-morrow or the next day." This note he placed in an envelope, which he directed to the high-sounding name of Mrs. d"Aubigne, Rupert St., Pimlico--and put it in his pocket.
Then with another sigh he took up the Squire"s letter, and glanced through it. Its length was considerable, but in substance it announced his acceptance of the arrangement proposed by Mr. Edward Cossey, and requested that he would prepare the necessary deeds to be submitted to his lawyers. Mr. Quest read the letter absently enough, and threw it down with a little laugh.
"What a queer world it is," he said to himself, "and what a ludicrous side there is to it all. Here is Cossey advancing money to get a hold over Ida de la Molle, whom he means to marry if he can, and who is probably playing her own hand. Here is Belle madly in love with Cossey, who will break her heart. Here am I loving Belle, who hates me, and playing everybody"s game in order to advance my own, and become a respected member of a society I am superior to. Here is the Squire blundering about like a walrus in a horse-pond, and fancying everything is being conducted for his sole advantage, and that all the world revolves round Honham Castle. And there at the end of the chain is this female harpy, Edith Jones, otherwise d"Aubigne, alias the Tiger, gnawing at my vitals and holding my fortunes in her hand.
"Bah! it"s a queer world and full of combinations, but the worst of it is that plot as we will the solution of them does not rest with us, no --not with us."
CHAPTER XV
THE HAPPY DAYS
This is a troublesome world enough, but thanks to that mitigating fate which now and again interferes to our advantage, there do come to most of us times and periods of existence which, if they do not quite fulfil all the conditions of ideal happiness, yet go near enough to that end to permit in after days of our imagining that they did so. I say to most of us, but in doing so I allude chiefly to those cla.s.ses commonly known as the "upper," by which is understood those who have enough bread to put into their mouths and clothes to warm them; those, too, who are not the present subjects of remorseless and hideous ailments, who are not daily agonised by the sight of their famished offspring; who are not doomed to beat out their lives against the madhouse bars, or to see their hearts" beloved and their most cherished hope wither towards that cold s.p.a.ce from whence no message comes. For such unfortunates, and for their million-numbered kin upon the globe--the victims of war, famine, slave trade, oppression, usury, over-population, and the curse of compet.i.tion, the rays of light must be few indeed; few and far between, only just enough to save them from utter hopelessness. And even to the favoured ones, the well warmed and well fed, who are to a great extent lifted by fortune or by their native strength and wit above the degradations of the world, this light of happiness is but as the gleam of stars, uncertain, fitful, and continually lost in clouds. Only the utterly selfish or the utterly ignorant can be happy with the happiness of savages or children, however prosperous their own affairs, for to the rest, to those who think and have hearts to feel, and imagination to realise, and a redeeming human sympathy to be touched, the mere weight of the world"s misery pressing round them like an atmosphere, the mere echoes of the groans of the dying and the cries of the children are sufficient, and more than sufficient, to dull, aye, to destroy the promise of their joys. But, even to this finer sort there do come rare periods of almost complete happiness--little summers in the tempestuous climate of our years, green-fringed wells of water in our desert, pure northern lights breaking in upon our gloom. And strange as it may seem, these breadths of happy days, when the old questions cease to torment, and a man can trust in Providence and without one qualifying thought bless the day that he was born, are very frequently connected with the pa.s.sion which is known as love; that mysterious symbol of our double nature, that strange tree of life which, with its roots sucking their strength from the dust-heap of humanity, yet springs aloft above our level and bears its blooms in the face of heaven.
Why it is and what it means we shall perhaps never know for certain.
But it does suggest itself, that as the greatest terror of our being lies in the utter loneliness, the unspeakable ident.i.ty, and unchanging self-completeness of every living creature, so the greatest hope and the intensest natural yearning of our hearts go out towards that pa.s.sion which in its fire heats has the strength, if only for a little while, to melt down the barriers of our individuality and give to the soul something of the power for which it yearns of losing its sense of solitude in converse with its kind. For alone we are from infancy to death!--we, for the most part, grow not more near together but rather wider apart with the widening years. Where go the sympathies between the parent and the child, and where is the close old love of brother for his brother?
The invisible fates are continually wrapping us round and round with the winding sheets of our solitude, and none may know all our heart save He who made it. We are set upon the world as the stars are set upon the sky, and though in following our fated orbits we pa.s.s and repa.s.s, and each shine out on each, yet are we the same lonely lights, rolling obedient to laws we cannot understand, through s.p.a.ces of which none may mark the measure.
Only, as says the poet in words of truth and beauty: