"I do not consider my sister a piece of merchandise to be sold to the highest bidder. Granted that Hammond is poor and a n.o.body. He is an honourable man, highly gifted, brave as a lion, and he is my dearest friend. Can you wonder that I rejoice at my sister"s having won him for her adoring lover?"
"Can he really care for her, after having loved Lesbia?"
"That was the desire of the eye, this is the love of the heart. I know that he loves Mary ever so much better than he loved Lesbia. I can a.s.sure your ladyship that I am not such a fool as I look. I am very fond of my sister Mary, and I have not been blind to her interests. I tell you on my honour that she ought to be very happy as John Hammond"s wife."
"I am obliged to believe what you say about his character," said Lady Maulevrier. "And I am willing to admit that the husband"s character has a great deal to do with the wife"s happiness, from a moral point of view; but still there are material questions to be considered. Has your friend any means of supporting a wife?"
"Yes, he has means; quite sufficient means for Mary"s views, which are very simple."
"You mean to say he would keep her in decent poverty? Cannot you be explicit, Maulevrier, and say what means the man has, whether an income or none? If you cannot tell me I must question Mr. Hammond himself."
"Pray do not do that," exclaimed her grandson urgently. "Do not take all the flavour of romance out of Molly"s love story, by going into pounds, shillings, and pence. She is very young. You would hardly wish her to marry immediately?"
"Not for the next year, at the very least."
"Then why enter upon this sordid question of ways and means. Make Hammond and Mary happy by consenting to their engagement, and trust the rest to Providence, and to me. Take my word for it, Hammond is not a beggar, and he is a man likely to make his mark in the world. If a year hence his income is not enough to allow of his marrying, I will double Mary"s allowance out of my own purse. Hammond"s friendship has steadied me, and saved me a good deal more than five hundred a year."
"I can quite believe that. I believe Mr. Hammond is a worthy man, and that his influence has been very good for you; but that does not make him a good match for Mary. However, you seem to have settled the business among you, and I suppose I must submit. You had better all drink tea with me to morrow afternoon; and I will receive your friend as Mary"s future husband."
"That is the best and kindest of grandmothers."
"But I should like to know more of his antecedents and his relations."
"His antecedents are altogether creditable. He took honours at the University; he has been liked and respected everywhere. He is an orphan, and it is better not to talk to him of his family. He is sensitive on that point, like most men who stand alone in the world."
"Well, I will hold my peace. You have taken this business into your hands, Maulevrier; and you must be responsible for the result."
Maulevrier left his grandmother soon after this, and went downstairs, whistling for very joyousness. Finding the billiard-room deserted he repaired to the drawing-room, where he found Mary playing sc.r.a.ps of melody to her lover at the shadowy end of the room, while Fraulein sat by the fire weaving her web as steadily as one of the Fatal Sisters, and with a brow prophetic of evil.
Maulevrier crept up to the piano, and came stealthily behind the lovers.
"Bless you, my children," he said, hovering over them with outspread hands. "I am the dove coming back to the ark. I am the bearer of happy tidings. Lady Maulevrier consents to your acquiring the legal right to make each other miserable for the rest of your lives."
"G.o.d bless you, Maulevrier," said Hammond, clasping him by the hand.
"Only as this sister of mine is hardly out of the nursery you will have to wait for her at least a year. So says the dowager, whose word is like the law of the Modes and Persians, and altereth not."
"I would wait for her twice seven years, as Jacob waited, and toil for her, as Jacob toiled," answered Hammond, "but I should like to call her my own to-morrow, if it were possible."
Nothing could be happier or gayer than the tea-drinking in Lady Maulevrier"s room on the following afternoon. Her ladyship having once given way upon a point knew how to make her concession gracefully. She extended her hand to Mr. Hammond as frankly as if he had been her own particular choice.
"I cannot refuse my granddaughter to her brother"s dearest friend," she said, "but I think you are two most imprudent young people."
"Providence takes care of imprudent lovers, just as it does of the birds in their nests," answered Hammond, smiling.
"Just as much and no more, I fear. Providence does not keep off the cat or the tax-gatherer."
"Birds must take care of their nests, and husbands must work for their homes," argued Hammond. "Heaven gives sweet air and sunlight, and a beautiful world to live in."
"I think," said Lady Maulevrier, looking at him critically, "you are just the kind of person who ought to emigrate. You have ideas that would do for the Bush or the Yosemite Valley, but which are too primitive for an over-crowded country."
"No, Lady Maulevrier, I am not going to steal your granddaughter. When she is my wife she shall live within call. I know she loves her native land, and I don"t think either of us would care to put an ocean between us and rugged old Helvellyn."
"Of course having made idiots of yourselves up there in the fog and the storm you are going to worship the mountain for ever afterwards," said her ladyship laughing.
Never had she seemed gayer or brighter. Perhaps in her heart of hearts she rejoiced at getting Mary engaged, even to so humble a suitor as fortuneless John Hammond. Ever since the visit of the so-called Rajah she had lived as Damocles lived, with the sword of destiny--the avenging sword--hanging over her by the finest hair. Every time she heard carriage wheels in the drive--every time the hall-door bell rang a little louder than usual, her heart seemed to stop beating and her whole being to hang suspended on a thread. If the thread were to snap, there would come darkness and death. The blow that had paralysed one side of her body must needs, if repeated, bring total extinction. She who believed in no after life saw in her maimed and wasting arm the beginning of death. She who recognised only the life of the body felt that one half of her was already dead. But months had gone by, and Louis Asoph had made no sign. She began to hope that his boasted doc.u.ments and witnesses were altogether mythical. And yet the engines of the law are slow to put in motion. He might be working up his case, line upon line, with some hard-headed London lawyer; arranging and marshalling his facts; preparing his witnesses; waiting for affidavits from India; working slowly but surely, underground like the mole; and all at once, in an hour, his case might be before the law courts. His story and the story of Lord Maulevrier"s infamy might be town talk again; as it had been forty years ago, when the true story of that crime had been happily unknown.
Yes, with the present fear of this Louis Asoph"s revelations, of a new scandal, if not a calamity, Lady Maulevrier felt that it was a good thing to have her younger granddaughter"s future in some measure secured. John Hammond had said of himself to Lesbia that he was not the kind of man to fail, and looking at him critically to-day Lady Maulevrier saw the stamp of power and dauntless courage in his countenance and bearing. It is the inner mind of a man which moulds the lines of his face and figure; and a man"s character may be read in the way he walks and holds himself, the action of his hand, his smile, his frown, his general outlook, as clearly as in any phrenological development. John Hammond had a n.o.ble outlook: bold, without impudence or self-a.s.sertion; self-possessed, without vanity. Yes, a.s.suredly a man to wrestle with difficulty, and to conquer fate.
When that little tea-drinking was over and Maulevrier and his friend were going away to dress for dinner, Lady Maulevrier detained Mary for a minute or two by her couch. She took her by the hand with unaccustomed tenderness.
"My child, I congratulate you," she said. "Last night I thought you a fool, but I begin to think that you are wiser than Lesbia. You have won the heart of a n.o.ble young man."
CHAPTER XXIII.
"A YOUNG LAMB"S HEART AMONG THE FULL-GROWN FLOCKS."
For three most happy days Mary rejoiced in her lover"s society, Maulevrier was with them everywhere, by brookside and fell, on the lake, in the gardens, in the billiard-room, playing propriety with admirable patience. But this could not last for ever. A man who has to win name and fortune and a home for his young wife cannot spend all his days in the primrose path. Fortunes and reputations are not made in dawdling beside a mountain stream, or watching the play of sunlight and shadow on a green hill-side; unless, indeed, one were a new Wordsworth, and even then fortune and renown are not quickly made.
And again, Maulevrier, who had been a marvel of good-nature and contentment for the last eight weeks, was beginning to be tired of this lovely Lakeland. Just when Lakeland was daily developing into new beauty, Maulevrier began to feel an itching for London, where he had a comfortable nest in the Albany, and which was to his mind a metropolis expressly created as a centre or starting point for Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot and Goodwood.
So there came a morning upon which Mary had to say good-bye to those two companions who had so blest and gladdened her life. It was a bright sunshiny morning, and all the world looked gay; which seemed very unkind of Nature, Mary thought. And yet, even in the sadness of this parting, she had much reason to be glad. As she stood with her lover in the library, in the three minutes of _tete-a-tete_ She stolen from the argus-eyed Fraulein, folded in his arms, looking up at his manly face, it seemed to her that the mere knowledge that she belonged to him and was beloved by him ought to sustain and console her even in long years of severance. Yes, even if he were one of the knights of old, going to the Holy Land on a crusade full of peril and uncertainty. Even then a woman ought to be brave, having such a lover.
But her parting was to be only for a few months. Maulevrier promised to come back to Fellside for the August sports, and Hammond was to come with him. Three months--or a little more--and they were to meet again.
Yet in spite of these arguments for courage, Mary"s face blanched and her eyes grew unutterably sad as she looked up at her lover.
"You will take care of yourself, Jack, for my sake, won"t you, dear?"
she murmured. "If you should be ill while you are in London! If you should die--"
"Life is very uncertain, love, but I don"t feel like sickness or death just at present," answered Hammond cheerily. "Indeed, I feel that the present is full of sweetness, and the future full of hope. Don"t suppose, dear, that I am not grieved at this good-bye; but before we are a year older I hope the time will have come when there will be no more farewells for you and me. I shall be a very exacting husband, Molly. I shall want to spend all the days and hours of my life with you; to have not a fancy or a pursuit in which you cannot share, or with which you cannot sympathise. I hope you will not grow tired of me!"
"Tired!"
Then came silence, and a long farewell kiss, and then the voice of Maulevrier shouting in the hall, just in time to warn the lovers, before Miss Muller opened the door and exclaimed,
"Oh, Mr. Hammond, we have been looking for you _everywhere_. The luggage is all in the carriage, and Maulevrier says there is only just time to get to Windermere!"
In another minute or so the carriage was driving down the hill; and Mary stood in the porch looking after the travellers.
"It seems as if it is my fate to stand here and see everybody drive away," she said to herself.
And then she looked round at the lovely gardens, bright with spring flowers, the trees glorious with their young, fresh foliage, and the vast panorama of hill and dale, and felt that it was a wicked thing to murmur in the midst of such a world. And she remembered the great unhoped-for bliss that had come to her within the last four days, and the cloud upon her brow vanished, as she clasped her hands in child-like joyousness.