At first she was haunted by memories of how good he had been to her when her cousin Maria died, and many a time before; and she used to dream about him at night with so much of the old trust and affection that it took all the day to stamp out the fragrance of tenderness which her dreams had left behind. But after a time these dreams and memories grew fewer and less distinct, and she persuaded herself that Christopher had never been the true and devoted friend she had once imagined him to be, but that the kind and affectionate Chris of olden days had been merely a creature of her own invention. There was no one to plead his cause for him, as he was far away, and appearances were on the side of his accuser; so he was tried in the court of Elisabeth"s merciless young judgment, and sentenced to life-long banishment from the circle of her interests and affections. She forgot how he had comforted her in the day of her adversity. If he had allowed her to comfort him, she would have remembered it forever; but he had not; and in this world men must be prepared to take the consequences of their own mistakes, even though those mistakes be made through excess of devotion to another person.
In certain cases it may be necessary to pluck out the right eye and cut off the right hand; but there is no foundation for supposing that the operation will be any the less painful because of the righteous motive inducing it. And so Christopher Thornley learned by bitter experience, when, after many days, he returned from a fruitless search for the missing heir, to find the countenance of Elisabeth utterly changed toward him. She was quite civil to him--quite polite; she never attempted to argue or quarrel with him as she had done in the old days, and she listened patiently to all the details of his doings in Australia; but with gracious coldness she quietly put him outside the orbit of her life, and showed him plainly that he was now nothing more to her than her trustee and the general manager of her works.
It was hard on Christopher--cruelly hard; yet he had no alternative but to accept the position which Elisabeth, in the blindness of her heart, a.s.signed to him. Sometimes he felt the burden of his lot was almost more than he could bear; not because of its heaviness, as he was a brave man and a patient one, but because of the utter absence of any joy in his life. Men and women can endure much sorrow if they have much joy as well; it is when sorrow comes and there is no love to lighten it, that the Hand of G.o.d lies heavy upon them; and It lay heavy upon Christopher"s soul just then. Sometimes, when he felt weary unto death of the dreary routine of work and the still drearier routine of his uncle"s sick-room, he recalled with a bitter smile how Elisabeth used to say that the gloom and smoke of the furnaces was really a pillar of cloud to show how G.o.d was watching over the people at the Osierfield as He watched over them in the wilderness. Because she had forgotten to be gracious to him, he concluded that G.o.d had forgotten to be gracious to him also--a not uncommon error of human wisdom; but though his heart was wounded and his days darkened by her injustice toward him, he never blamed her, even in his inmost thoughts. He was absolutely loyal to Elisabeth.
One grim consolation he had--and that was the conviction that he had not won, and never could have won, Elisabeth"s love; and that, therefore, poverty or riches were matters of no moment to him. Had he felt that temporal circ.u.mstances were the only bar between him and happiness, his position as her paid manager would have been unendurable; but now she had taught him that it was he himself, and not any difference in their respective social positions, which really stood between herself and him; and, that being so, nothing else had any power to hurt him. Wealth, unshared by Elisabeth, would have been no better than want, he said to himself; success, uncrowned by her, would have been equivalent to failure. When Christopher was in Australia he succeeded in tracing George Farringdon as far as Broken Hill, and there he found poor George"s grave. He learned that George had left a widow and one son, who had left the place immediately after George"s death; but no one could give him any further information as to what had subsequently become of these two. And he was obliged at last to abandon the search and return to England, without discovering what had happened to the widow and child.
Some years after his nephew"s fruitless journey to Australia Richard Smallwood died; and though the old man had been nothing but a burden during the last few years of his life, Christopher missed him sorely when he was gone. It was something even to have a childish old man to love him, and smile at his coming; now there was n.o.body belonging to him, and he was utterly alone.
But the years which had proved so dark to Christopher had been full of brightness and interest to Elisabeth. She had fulfilled her intention of studying at the Slade School, and she had succeeded in her work beyond her wildest expectations. She was already recognised as an artist of no mean order. Now and then she came down to the Willows, bringing Grace Cobham with her; and the young women filled the house with company. Now and then they two went abroad together, and satisfied their souls with the beauty of the art of other lands. But princ.i.p.ally they lived in London, for the pa.s.sion to be near the centre of things had come upon Elisabeth; and when once that comes upon any one, London is the place in which to live. People wondered that Elisabeth did not marry, and blamed her behind her back for not making suitable hay while it was as yet summer with her. But the artist-woman never marries for the sake of being married--or rather for the sake of not being unmarried--as so many of her more ordinary sisters do; her art supplies her with that necessary interest in life, without which most women become either invalids or shrews, and--unless she happens to meet the right man--she can manage very well without him.
George Farringdon"s son had never turned up, in spite of all the efforts to discover him; and by this time Elisabeth had settled down into the belief that the Willows and the Osierfield were permanently hers. She had long ago forgiven Christopher for setting her and her interests aside, and going off in search of the lost heir--at least she believed that she had; but there was always an undercurrent of bitterness in her thoughts of him, which proved that the wound he had then dealt her had left a scar.
Several men had wanted to marry Elisabeth, but they had not succeeded in winning her. She enjoyed flirting with them, and she rejoiced in their admiration, but when they offered her their love she was frightened and ran away. Consequently the world called her cold; and as the years rolled on and no one touched her heart, she began to believe that the world was right.
"There are three great things in life," Grace Cobham said to her one day, "art and love and religion. They really are all part of the same thing, and none of them is perfected without the others. You have got two, Elisabeth; but you have somehow missed the third, and without it you will never attain to your highest possibilities. You are a good woman, and you are a true artist; but, until you fall in love, your religion and your art will both lack something, and will fall short of perfection."
"I"m afraid I"m not a falling-in-love sort of person," replied Elisabeth meekly; "I"m extremely sorry, but such is the case."
"It is a pity! But you may fall in love yet."
"It"s too late, I fear. You see I am over thirty; and if I haven"t done it by now, I expect I never shall do it. It is tiresome to have missed it, I admit; and especially as you think it would make me paint better pictures."
"Well, I do. You paint so well now that it is a pity you don"t paint still better. I do not believe that any artist does his or her best work until his or her nature is fully developed; and no woman"s nature is fully developed until she has been in love."
"I have never been in love; I don"t even know what it is like inside,"
said Elisabeth sadly; "and I dreadfully want to know, because--looked at from the outside--it seems interesting."
Grace gazed at her thoughtfully. "I wonder if it is that you are too cold to fall in love, or whether it only is that the right person hasn"t appeared."
"I don"t know. I wish I did. What do you think it feels like?"
"I know what it feels like--and that is like nothing else this side heaven."
"It seems funny to get worked up in that sort of way over an ordinary man--turning him into a revival-service or a national anthem, or something equally thrilling and inspiring! Still, I"d do it if I could, just from pure curiosity. I should really enjoy it. I"ve seen stupid girls light up like a turnip with a candle inside, simply because some plain young man did the inevitable, and came up into the drawing-room after dinner; and I"ve seen clever women go to pieces like a linen b.u.t.ton at the wash, simply because some ignorant man did the inevitable, and preferred a more foolish and better-looking woman to themselves."
"Have you really never been in love, Elisabeth?"
Elisabeth pondered for a moment. "No; I"ve sometimes thought I was, but I"ve always known I wasn"t."
"I wonder at that; because you really are affectionate."
"That is quite true; but no one has ever seemed to want as much as I had to give," said Elisabeth, the smile dying out of her eyes; "I do so long to be necessary to somebody--to feel that it is in my power to make somebody perfectly happy; but n.o.body has ever asked enough of me."
"You could have made the men happy who wanted to marry you," suggested Grace.
"No; I could have made them comfortable, and that"s not the same thing."
As Elisabeth sat alone in her own room that night, she thought about what Grace had said, and wondered if she were really too cold ever to experience that common yet wonderful miracle which turns earth into heaven for most people once in their lives. She had received much love and still more admiration in her time; but she had never been allowed to give what she had to give, and she was essentially of the type of woman to whom it is more blessed to give than to receive. She had never craved to be loved, as some women crave; she had only asked to be allowed to love as much as she was capable of loving, and the permission had been denied her. As she looked back over her past life, she saw that it had always been the same. She had given the adoration of her childhood to Anne Farringdon, and Anne had not wanted it; she had given the devotion of her girlhood to Felicia, and Felicia had not wanted it; she had given the truest friendship of her womanhood to Christopher, and Christopher had not wanted it. As for the men who had loved her, she had known perfectly well that she was not essential to them; had she been, she would have married them; but they could be happy without her--and they were. For Grace she had the warmest sense of comradeship; but Grace"s life was so full on its own account, that Elisabeth could only be one of many interests to her. Elisabeth was so strong and so tender, that she could have given much to any one to whom she was absolutely necessary; but she felt she could give of her best to no man who desired it only as a luxury--it was too good for that.
"It seems rather a waste of force," she said to herself, with a whimsical smile. "I feel like Niagara, spending its strength on empty splashings, when it might be turning thousands of electric engines and lighting millions of electric lights, if only its power were turned in the right direction and properly stored. I could be so much to anybody who really needed me--I feel I could; but n.o.body seems to need me, so it"s no use bothering. Anyway, I have my art, and that more than satisfies me; and I will spend my life in giving forth my strength to the world at large, in the shape of pictures which shall help the world to be better and happier. At least I hope so."
And with this reflection Elisabeth endeavoured to console herself for the non-appearance of that fairy prince, who, in her childish dreams, had always been wounded in the tournament of life, and had turned to her for comfort.
The years which had pa.s.sed so drearily for Christopher, had cast their shadows also over the lives of Alan and Felicia Tremaine. When Willie was a baby, his nurse accidentally let him fall; and the injury he then received was so great that, as he grew older, he was never able to walk properly, but had to punt himself about with a little crutch. This was a terrible blow to Alan; and became all the greater as time went on, and Felicia had no other children to share his devotion. Felicia, too, felt it sorely; but she fretted more over the sorrow it was to her husband than on her own account.
There was a great friendship between Willie and Elisabeth. Weakness of any kind always appealed to her, and he, poor child! was weak indeed. So when Elisabeth was at the Willows and Willie at the Moat House, the two spent much time together. He never wearied of hearing about the things that she had pretended when she was a little girl; and she never wearied of telling him about them.
"And so the people, who lived among the smoke and the furnaces, followed the pillar of cloud till it led them to the country on the other side of the hills," said Willie one day, as he and Elisabeth were sitting on the old rustic seat in the Willows" garden. "I remember; but tell me, what did they find in the country over there?" And he pointed with his thin little finger to the blue hills beyond the green valley.
"They found everything that they wanted," replied Elisabeth. "Not the things that other people thought would be good for them, you know; but just the dear, foolish, impossible things that they had wanted for themselves."
"And did the things make them happy?"
"Perfectly happy--much happier than the wise, desirable, sensible things could have made them."
"I suppose they could all walk without crutches," suggested Willie.
"Of course they could; and they could understand everything without being told."
"And the other people loved them very much, and were very kind to them, weren"t they?"
"Perhaps; but what made them so happy was that they loved the other people and were kind to them. As long as they lived here in the smoke and din and bustle, everybody was so busy looking after his own concerns that n.o.body could be bothered with their love. There wasn"t room for it, or time for it. But in the country over the hills there was plenty of room and plenty of time; in fact, there wasn"t any room or any time for anything else."
"What did they have to eat?" Willie asked.
"Everything that had been too rich for them when they were here."
Willie sighed. "It must have been a nice country," he said.
"It was, dear; the nicest country in the world. It was always summer there, too, and holiday time."
"Didn"t they have any lessons to learn?"
"No; because they"d learned them all."
"Did they have roads and railways?" Willie made further inquiry.
"No; only narrow green lanes, which led straight into fairyland. And the longer you walked in them the less tired you were."
"Tell me a story about the country over there," said Willie, nestling up to Elisabeth; "and let there be a princess in it."
She put her strong arm round him and held him close. "Once upon a time,"
she began, "there was a princess, who lived among the smoke and the furnaces."
"Was she very beautiful?"
"No; but she happened to have a heart made of real gold. That was the only rare thing about her; otherwise she was quite a common princess."