Sheppard--oh, yes, at once! I did not know--I never thought that she was really in any danger."
Poor Minola! With all her wild-bird freedom and her pride in her lonely independence and her love of London, there yet remained in her that instinct of home, that devotion to the principle of family and authority, that she would have done homage at such a moment, and with something like enthusiasm, to even such a simulacrum of the genius of home as she had lately known. Something had pa.s.sed through her mind that very day as she talked with Heron, and feared she had talked too freely: something that had made her think with vague pain of yearning on the sweetness of a sheltered home. Her heart beat as she thought, "I will go to her--I will go home; I will try to love her."
Mr. Sheppard dispelled her enthusiasm. "Mrs. Saulsbury did not exactly express a wish to see you."
"Oh!"
"In fact, when that was suggested to her--I am sure I need hardly say that I at once suggested it--she thought, and perhaps wisely, that it would be better you should not meet."
Minola drew back, and stood as Mr. Heron had been standing near the chimney-piece. She did not speak.
"But Mrs. Saulsbury begged me to convey to you the a.s.surance of her entire and cordial forgiveness."
Minola bowed gravely.
"And her hope that you will be happy in life and be guided toward true ends, and find that peace which it has been her privilege to find."
Minola bore all this without a word.
"What shall I say to her from you?" he asked. "Miss Grey, remember that she is dying."
The caution was not needed.
"Say that I thank her," said Minola in a low, subdued tone. "Say that, after what flourish your nature will, Mr. Sheppard. I suppose I was wrong as much as she. I suppose it was often my fault that we did not get on better. Say that I am deeply grieved to hear that she is so dangerously ill, but that I hope--oh, so sincerely!--that she may yet recover."
Mr. Sheppard looked into her eyes with puzzled wonder. Was she speaking in affected meekness, or in irony, as was her wont? Was the proud, rebellious girl really so gentle and subdued? Could it be that she took thus humbly Mrs. Saulsbury"s pardon? Yes, it seemed all genuine. There was no constraint on the lines of her lips; no scorn in her eyes. In truth, the sympathetic and generous heart of the girl was touched to the quick. The prospect of death sanctified the woman who had been so hard to her, and turned her cold, self-complacent pardon into a blessing. If the dying are often the most egotistic and self-complacent of all human creatures, and are apt to make of their very condition a fresh t.i.tle to lord it for the moment over the living--as if none had ever died before, and none would die after them, and therefore the world must pay special attention and homage to them--if this is so, Minola did not then know it or think about it.
The one thing on earth which Mr. Sheppard most loved to see was woman amenable to authority. He longed more pa.s.sionately than ever to make Minola his wife.
"There is something else on which I should like to have your permission to speak," he said; and his thin lips grew a little tremulous. "But I could come another time, if you preferred."
"I would rather you said now, Mr. Sheppard, whatever you wish to say to me."
"It is only the old story. Have you reconsidered your determination--you remember that last day--in Keeton? I am still the same."
"So am I, Mr. Sheppard."
"But things have changed--many things; and you may want a home; and you may grow tired of this kind of life--and I shan"t be a person to be ashamed of, Minola! I am going to be in Parliament, and you shall hear me speak--and I know I shall get on. I have great patience. I succeed in everything--I really do."
She smiled sadly and shook her head.
"In everything else I do a.s.sure you, so far--and I may even in that; I must, for I have set my heart upon it."
She turned to him with a glance of scorn and anger. But his face was so full of genuine emotion, of anxiety and pa.s.sion and pain, that its handsome commonplace character became almost poetic. His lips were quivering; and she could see drops of moisture on his shining forehead, and his eyes were positively glittering as if in tears.
"Don"t speak harshly to me," he pleaded; "for I don"t deserve it. I love you with all my heart, and today more than ever--a thousand times more--for you have shown yourself so generous and forgiving--and--and like a Christian."
Then for the first time the thought came, a conviction, into her mind--"He really is sincere!" A great wave of new compa.s.sion swept away all other emotions.
"Mr. Sheppard," she said in softened tones, "I do ask of you not to say any more of this. I couldn"t love you even if I tried, and why should you wish me to try? I am not worth all this--I tell you with all my heart that I am not worth it, and that you would think so one day if I were foolish enough to--to listen to you. Oh! indeed you are better without me! I wish you every success and happiness. I don"t want to marry."
"Once," he said, "you told me there was no one you cared for but a man in a book. I wonder is that so now?"
In spite of herself the color rushed into Minola"s face. It was a lucky question for her, however unlucky for him, because it recalled her from her softer mood to natural anger.
"You can believe me in love with any one you please to select in or out of a book, Mr. Sheppard, so long as it gives you a reason for not persecuting me with your own attentions. I like a man in a book better than one out of it; it is so easy to close the book and be free of his company when he grows disagreeable."
She did not look particularly like a Christian then, probably, in his eyes. He left her, his heart bursting with love and anger. When Mary Blanchet returned she found Minola pale and haggard, her eyes wasted with tears.
CHAPTER XIII.
A MAN OF THE TIME.
Several days pa.s.sed away, and Minola heard no more from Mr. Sheppard.
She continued in a state of much agitation; her nerves, highly strung, were sharply jarred by the news of the approaching death of Mrs.
Saulsbury. It was almost like watching outside a door, and counting the slow, painful hours of some lingering life within, while yet one may not enter and look upon the pale face, and mingle with the friends or the mourners, but is shut out and left to ask and wait; it was like this, the time of suspense which Minola pa.s.sed, not knowing whether the wife of her father was alive or dead. As is the way of all generous natures, it was now Minola"s impulse to accuse and blame herself because there had been so little of mutual forbearance in her old home at Keeton. She kept wondering whether things might not have gone better, if she had said and done this or that; or, if she had not said and done something else. Full of this feeling, she wrote a long emotional letter to Mr.
Saulsbury, which, she begged of him to read to his wife, if she were in a condition to hear it. The letter was suffused with generous penitence and self-humiliation. It was a letter which perhaps no impartial person could have read without becoming convinced that its writer must have been in the right in most of the controversies of the past.
The letter did not reach the eyes or ears for which it was particularly intended. Minola received a coldly forgiving answer from Mr.
Saulsbury--forgiving her upon his own account, which was more than Minola had sought--but adding, that he had not thought it desirable to withdraw, for a moment, by the memory of earthly controversies, the mind of his wife from the contemplation of that well-merited heaven which was opening upon her. Great goodness has one other advantage in addition to all the rest over unconverted error; it can, out of its own beatification, find a means of rebuking those with whom it is not on terms of friendship. The expected ascent of Mrs. Saulsbury into heaven became another means of showing poor Minola her own unworthiness. Mr.
Saulsbury closed by saying that Mrs. Saulsbury might linger yet a little, but that her apotheosis (this, however, was not his word) was only a question of days.
There was nothing left for Minola but to wait, and now accuse and now try to justify herself. Many a time there came back to her mind the three faces on the mausoleum in Keeton, the symbols of life, death, and eternity; and she could not help wondering whether the mere pa.s.sing through the portal of death could all at once transfigure a cold, narrow-minded, peevish, egotistical human creature into the soul of lofty calmness and ineffable sweetness, all peace and love, which the sculptor had set out in his ill.u.s.tration of humanity"s closing state.
Meantime, she kept generally at home, except for her familiar walks in the park and her now less frequent visits to the British Museum and to South Kensington. Lucy Money, surprised at her absence, hunted her up, to use Lucy"s own expression, and declared that she was looking pale and wretched, and that she must come over to Victoria street, and pa.s.s a day or two there, for companionship and change. Mary Blanchet, too, pressed Minola to go; and at last she consented, not unwilling to be taken forcibly out of her self-inquisition and her anxieties for the moment. She had made no other acquaintances, and seemed resolute not to make any, but there was always something peculiarly friendly and genial to her in the atmosphere of the Moneys" home. The whole family had been singularly kind to her, and their kindness was absolutely disinterested. Minola could not but love Mrs. Money, and could not but be a little amused by her; and there was something very pleasing to her in Mr. Money"s strong common sense and blunt originality. Minola liked, too, the curious little peeps at odd groupings of human life which she could obtain by sitting for a few hours in Mrs. Money"s drawing-room.
All the _schwarmerei_ of letters, politics, art, and social life seemed to ill.u.s.trate itself "in little" there.
Minola, when she accompanied Lucy to her home, was taken by the girl up and down to this room and that to see various new things that had been bought, and the two young women entered Mrs. Money"s drawing-room a little after the hour when she usually began to receive visitors. A large lady, who spoke with a very deep voice, was seated in earnest conversation with Mrs. Money.
"This is my darling, sweet Lucy, I perceive," the lady said in tones of soft rolling thunder as the young women came in.
"Oh--Lady Limpenny!"
"Come here, child, and embrace me! But this is not your sister? My sight begins to fail me so terribly; we must expect it, Mrs. Money, at our time of life."
Lucy tossed her head at this, and could hardly be civil. She was always putting in little protests, more or less distinctly expressed, against Lady Limpenny"s cla.s.sification of Mrs. Money and herself as on the same platform in the matter of age, and talking so openly of "their time of life." In truth, Mrs. Money was still quite a young-looking woman, while Lady Limpenny herself was a remarkably well-preserved and even handsome matron; a little perhaps too full-blown, and who might at the worst have sat fairly enough for a portrait of Hamlet"s mother, according to the popular dramatic rendering of Queen Gertrude.
"No; this young lady is taller than Theresa. I can see that, although I have forgotten my gla.s.s. I always forget or mislay my gla.s.s."
"This is Miss Grey--Miss Minola Grey," said Mrs. Money. "Lady Limpenny, allow me to introduce my dear young friend, Miss Minola Grey."
"Dear child, what a sweet, pretty name! Now tell me, dearest, where did your people find out that name? I should so like to know."
"I think it was found in Shakespeare," Minola answered. "It was my mother"s choice, I believe."