"Humph! no. I can"t say that you do. But that"s n.o.body"s business if the lady"s pleased. Now, having given your memory a jog about the flight of time, I"ll send her up to you."
"Let me go to her."
"Stay where you are, sir; don"t stir, I beg. I don"t profess to know much about woman"s curious little idiosyncrasies, but I"ll bet a dozen of claret, that this humdrum chamber of yours where she nursed you day after day for four weeks, is the dearest place to her of all the world, and I"ll go farther and say that so long as she lives the memory of this same room, sir, will have power to send the rush of fond tears up to her eyes, be she happy or miserable. You see she found you here, and got your life from Heaven, as it were, by dint of unwearied prayer, and its hallowed to her like a little sanctuary. Women are strange creatures, sir and I advise you, if you want to sway her heart to your wishes, to see her here."
Lying face downward and alone, with his hands clasped in grateful thanksgiving, all the wicked recklessness and the unbelief and the cynical fatalism slipped forever from St. Udo"s soul, and he turned after long years to the idol of his youth--hope crowned with Heavenly faith; and in that sweet hour of supreme humility the sheath dropped from the fruit, and the n.o.ble works of Heaven"s hand turned to adore its Creator.
So it came to pa.s.s that when Margaret Walsingham, standing at the doorway, too timid to approach--too womanly soft to go away, now that the man was dying for her--heard the low entreaty,
"Bless me with her love--enn.o.ble me with her love, O Heaven!"
Her whole face became transfigured with joy, and she stood there a breathless and a lovely vision, listening to what she dared not believe before.
"Is that my darling, standing on the threshold? Come."
Folded heart to heart, her head upon its place for the first time, his arms about her in a band of love--her hour of sweet recompense has come at last, and with unutterable thrills shooting through her tremulous frame, she whispers, smiling:
"I have won my own dear lord of Castle Brand."
CHAPTER x.x.xIII.
MARGARET"S HAPPY DESTINY.
"By gar! _mon camarade_, and do you call yourself a man, prying into Madam Fortune"s good graces? Why, she has starved you, the jade, she has given you the prison fare, she has been a vampire to you, _mon_ colonel.
What for you wear that face of parchment when I come to preside over the hand-grip, and to bless, and to be the good fairy? Ah, bah! Your future may be very good, but your past has been execrably bad. I drop the tear of friendship to your _mal-de-grain_."
Monsieur, the chevalier, had just arrived from New York per steamer, breezy, brisk, jocund as a stage harlequin, and rushed in upon our colonel to congratulate him after having hunted up all particulars connected with him in the little town, and had the gratification of finding affairs so much better than he feared.
"Ah, Calembours, it"s some time since we met. You look so flourishing that I need scarcely express a hope that you are well. Thanks for your sympathy. Don"t waste it, though. I"ll soon be all right, if I"m not done brown in Fortune"s frying-pan. But what brings you to Key West? A consignment of tough beef?"
"_Ma foi!_ you take a man up sharp, _mon ami_. I have not the affliction to see the last of the Brand spirit, gone out of you, for all the sugars and panadas of this illness. Do you suppose a consignment of anything could bring me to this _inferno_ of yellow fever and negroes? Why not sooner suggest pleasure, duty, or what say you to friendship for you, _mon camarade_?"
"Pshaw! Calembours, you and I know that your capabilities of friendship could be bought at a ransom of five shillings."
"_Mon Dieu!_ but you are hard on your Ludovic. Did I not squander all my little gains for to get your rights in England? Did I not give up the grand demoiselle. Marguerite, to you, when she might have been the countess, when she might have loved me? Ah, _mon_ colonel, you have me to thank for all your good fortune, and yet you will not lift the eyes to thank me."
"Brag was an impudent dog; still, there"s my hand, comrade, and in virtue of my present happiness, which you helped to bring about, take a hearty squeeze."
The chevalier squeezed it, and declared, with tears in his eyes, that he was the luckiest dog out of Paris in possessing such a fine _camarade_.
"You shall now hear my little plan in having ventured to this infectious place," he cried. "Your glorious mademoiselle had struck such frenzy of admiration into my soul that the instant Madame Hesslein released me from attending upon her--curse Madame Hesslein"--his visage grew pale with uncontrollable rage--"I determined to follow Mademoiselle Walsingham here, and to find if the plague had spared her, and if she was left without protection, (for I must tell you, _mon ami_, that I had no hope of seeing you alive again), to offer her my poor help and escort back to her home and friends in Surrey, and to be the friend in need to her until she turned me away.
"I come full of these glorious plans of benevolence which might well enn.o.ble any man, and find--hey, presto! the romance has turned the other way! My colonel still lives, being conjured back to life by undiluted fidelity; the lawyer with the knotty head has argued the plague out of conceit of him, and the glorious mademoiselle is a _fiancee_; so I bury my too fond plans for mademoiselle"s welfare, and I crucify the flesh, and say to myself:
""I will be the good fairy for these two people; will be the mason to build the steps to their summit of bliss; I will be the porter to carry them thence."
"So I fly to you--behold me--I am here to act as manager--I glow with the eagerness of friendship."
"And in return, what do you expect?"
Calembours shrugged his shoulders and grinned.
"_Vive l"Anglais!_" he cried, "they can make a good bull"s-eye can the John Bulls. You see this _bourse_? Bah! how wrinkled are its sides, how flattened under hard pressure of poverty! _Mon Dieu!_ did not the jade, Madame Hesslein, take the bread out of my mouth in the amplitude of her revenge? Very well. You who offer me the hand of friendship in return for that leetle favor, and also for the other not leetle favor of sending your Marguerite to save your life, shall take her fingers in yours, kiss them, and say: "Have you forgotten the small souvenir which you promised to my friend, the chevalier?" _Ma Mignonette_, now is the time to remember it. And she will remember it--my word upon it, she will, and will also urge upon you to let her souvenir me with a leetle more of her pin-money. And with the proceeds of your joint munificence I shall float again on the ascending tide of fortune, in my tight little bark, in spite of the _grande_ she devil who has ruined me."
"Ah, your funds have run low, and you are here to replenish them?"
"By gar! that is so, _mon ami_."
The two men eyed each other; St Udo with raised eyebrows and slightly scornful amus.e.m.e.nt; the ex-tailor of Szegedin with an ingratiating impudence which showed that monsieur knew his man very well.
"I have told you often that you are a greedy dog," said the colonel; "but I have no wish to see you under the feet of your favourite G.o.ddess, though I had much rather you had left your services to speak for themselves to our pockets. How much did Miss Walsingham agree to give you? Davenport, it seems to me, mentioned something of this to me."
"Only one thousand of your pounds, _cher ami_, only one thousand; she was going to insist upon doubling it, but I implored her: "Admirable lady, press no more upon me. At that time I little dreamed the days were coming when necessity should compel me to accept."
"You shall have fifteen hundred to give you a start. I think you will manage upon that, you are such a man of resource." Said the colonel, admiringly, who had heard Davenport"s grumbling account of the money arrangement with the chevalier, and remembered it very well.
Whereupon monsieur got up, flung his arms around St. Udo, gave him a French embrace, vowed he was a lord, and then coolly announced himself the _attache_ of the little party, he rushed off to hunt up his quondam antagonist, Davenport, and discuss the management of affairs, with much impudent triumph, over that worthy gentleman for his former suspicions of the honor of a French chevalier.
The white moonbeams poured brilliant as diamond lights into the porch of the old church of Key West.
The spicy odor of the citron trees and of the orange groves filled each pa.s.sing breath; the boom of the far-off surf against the reefs made endless sounding, like the dull roar of a conch-sh.e.l.l at the ear.
The robed figure of a clergyman stood in the low-browed church doorway, and his hands gently chafed each other as he gazed down the white road after a quiet cortege, which was gliding slowly toward the town.
Into the flickering shades of a branching palm-tree out to the vivid moonbeams, bright as day, quietly moving farther and farther from the man who had bound them together, for a peaceful or a turbulent life.
And the good pastor, softly chafing his hands, and thinking of the bride"s soft, holy face, and of the bridegroom"s beauty, which had reminded him of Antinous, grave, yet not severe, breathes a blessing upon these strangers, who this night will leave forever behind them his fairy isle.
"May their wedded life be as serene and smooth as these shades are light, and these bursts of moonlight translucent. May the sky ever be clear for them--the sea of life ever be unruffled, as yonder crystal channel, to which they are hastening."
Then he, also, leaves the glistening temple behind him, and goes his way among the down-dropping shrubs and spicy blossoms to his home among the bananas.
Standing on the deck of the steamer, which was to convey him to his long-forsaken home, with his arm around the Venus-like figure of his wife, and his eyes upon the swiftly vanishing roof of the isle, St. Udo Brand, who had spoken but little since repeating the vows which had made his darling by his side his own, now found speech, and half playfully apostrophized the dreamlike scene before him thus:
"Farewell ye coral isles, wherein I found my Pearl and happiness.
Blessed be your coraline foundations, your lazy inhabitants, and your fever-breeding climate. You have been to me a world of pa.s.sion, of hope, of purity. Oh, my Lost Good, who has been sent to me in mercy"--his playful accents changed to the gravity of deep emotion, as he drew yet closer to him his "Perdita"--"I turn to you henceforth to be what you would wish me, and to study your secret of how to live. I have been wandering on the burning sands, and pressing forever onward to reach a glittering lake of the desert, which, ever rippling and vanishing, beckoned me farther from the cool, calm shades of rest. Now I come, a wearied pilgrim to your pure heart, my wife, for you have opened it to let a weary, dusty wanderer in. Your purity, my simple Margaret, reminds me of the immaculate heights of snow-capped Gaurisankar--serene, majestic, while I, a lava-crusted, thunderous, calcined volcano, lashed by the fires of many pa.s.sions, come to cool my fevered blood by your chill radiance."
"Hush, St. Udo! If you knew how intensely happy I am with my destiny----"
She paused, for her glad eyes were filling fast, her fond tones faltering.
"Oh, my soft-souled Perdita! my simple darling!"