"You remember--how I refused--when you asked me--to take any steps toward voiding it?"
Her lips made a dumb movement of a.s.sent.
"But--at last--I took them. In the final interview I had with Melrose, he threatened me with the cancelling of his will, unless I consented--Tatham has told you--to sell him my uncle"s gems. I refused. And so far as words could, he there and then stripped me of his property. It is by the mere accident of his murder at that precise moment that it has come to me. Now then--what is to be done?"
Her hand slipped further into his. For a few minutes he seemed to be absorbed in the silent reconstruction of past trains of thought, emerging with a cry--though it was under his breath:
"If I took his money now--against his will--I should feel his yoke--his hateful yoke--again, on my neck! I should be his slave still."
"You shall not take it!" she said with pa.s.sion.
He smiled at her suddenly.
"It is nothing to Lydia, to be poor?"
"And free--and happy--and alive!--no, nothing!"
At that he could only draw her to him again. She herself must needs bring him back to the point.
"You have decided?"
"I could of course refuse the succession. That would throw the whole property into Chancery; the personalty would go to the mother and daughter, the real estate to whatever legal heirs could be discovered.
There are same distant cousins of Lady Tatham, I believe. However--that did not attract me at all."
He rose from his seat beside her, and stood looking down upon her.
"You"ll realize?--you"ll understand?--that it seems to me just--and desirable--that I should have some voice in the distribution of this money, this and land, rather than leave it all to the action of a court.
Everything--as things are--is legally mine. The personalty is immense; there are about thirty thousand acres of land, here and elsewhere; and the collections can"t be worth much less than half a million. I decline to own them; but I intend to settle what becomes of them! Nash and others say they will dispute the will. They won"t. There is no case. As to the personalty and the land--well, well, you"ll see! As to the collections--I mean to make them, if I can, of some use to the community. And in that effort"--he spoke slowly--"I want you to help me!"
Their eyes met; hers full of tears. She tried to speak, and could not. He came to kneel down by her and took her in his arms.
"Did you think I had sold myself to the devil last time I was here?"
"I was so harsh!--forgive ..." she said brokenly.
"No. You called things by their right names."
There was silence till he murmured:
"Isn"t it strange? I had quite given up prayer--till these last weeks. To pray for any definite physical or material thing would seem to me now--as it always has done--absurd. But to reach out--to the Power beyond our weakness!"
He paused a moment and resumed:
"Boden did that for me. He came to me--at the worst. He never preached to me. He has his black times--like the rest of us. But something upholds him--and--oh! so strangely--I don"t think he knew--through him--I too laid hold. But for that--I might have put an end to myself--more than once--these last weeks."
She clung to him--whispering:
"Neither of us--can ever suffer--again--without the other--to help."
They kissed once more, love and youth welling up in them, and drowning out of sight, for the moment at least, the shapes and images of pain.
Then recovering his composure, hand fast in hand, Faversham began to talk more calmly, drawing out for her as best he could, so that it need not be done again--and up to the very evening of the murder--the history of the nine months which had, so to speak, thrown his whole being into the melting-pot, and through the fusing and bruising of an extraordinary experience, had remade a man. She listened in a happy bewilderment. It struck her newly--astonishingly. Her love for him had always included a tenderly maternal, pitying element. She had felt herself the maturer character. Sympathy for his task, flattered pleasure in her Egeria role, deepening into something warmer and intenser with every letter from him and every meeting, even when she disputed with and condemned him; love in spite of herself; love with which conscience, taste, aspiration, all quarrelled; but love nevertheless, the love which good women feel for the man that is both weaker and stronger than themselves--it was so she might have read her own past, if the high pa.s.sion of this ultimate moment had not blurred it.
But "Life at her grindstone" had been busy with Faversham, and in the sifted and sharpened soul laid bare to her, the woman recognized her mate indeed. Face to face with cruelty and falsehood, in others, and with the potentialities of them in his own nature; dazzled by money and power; and at last, delivered from the tyranny of the as though by some fierce gaol-delivering angel, Faversham had found himself; and such a self as could never have been reasonably prophesied for the discontented idler who in the May meadows had first set eyes on Lydia Penfold.
He sketched for her his dream of what might be done with the treasures of the Tower.
Through all his ugly wrestle with Melrose, with its disappointments and humiliations, his excavator"s joy in the rescue and the setting in order of Melrose"s amazing possessions had steadily grown of late, the only pleasure of his day had come from handling, cleaning and cataloguing the lovely forgotten things of which the house was full. These surfaces of ivory and silver, of stucco or marble, of wood or canvas, pottery or porcelain, on which the human mind, in love with some fraction of the beauty interwoven with the world, had stamped an impress of itself, sometimes exquisite, sometimes whimsical, sometimes riotous--above all, _living_, life reaching to life, through the centuries: these, from a refuge or an amus.e.m.e.nt, had become an abiding delight, something, moreover, that seemed to point to a definite lifework--paid honourably by cash as well as pleasure.
What would she think, he asked her, of a great Museum for the north--a centre for students--none of your brick and iron monstrosities, rising amid slums, but a beautiful house showing its beautiful possessions to all who came; and set amid the streams and hills? And in one wing of it, perhaps, curator"s rooms--where Lydia, the dear lover of nature and art, might reign and work--fitly housed?...
But his brow contracted before she could smile.
"Some time perhaps--some time--not now! Let"s forget--for a little.
Lydia--come away with me--let"s be alone. Oh, my dear!--let"s be alone!"
She was in his arms again, calming the anguish that would recur--of those nights in the Tower after the murder, when it had seemed to him that not Brand, but himself, was the prey that a whole world was hunting, with Hate for the huntsman.
But presently, as they clung to each other in the firelight, he roused himself to say:
"Now, let me see your mother; and then I must go. There is much to do.
You will get a note from Lady Tatham to-night."
She looked up startled. And then it came over her, that he had never really told her what he meant to do with Melrose"s money. She had no precise idea. Their minds jumped together, and she saw the first laugh in his dark eyes.
"I shan"t tell you! Beloved--be good and wait! But you guess already. We meet to-morrow--at Duddon."
She asked no question. The thin mystery--for her thoughts did indeed drive through it--pleased her; especially because it seemed to please him.
Then Mrs. Penfold and Susy were brought down, and Mrs. Penfold sat amid explanations and embraces, more feather-headed and inconsequent even than usual, but happy, because Lydia caressed her, and this handsome though pale young man on the hearthrug kissed her hand and even, at command, her still pink cheek; and it seemed there was to be a marriage--only not the marriage there should have been--a subst.i.tution, clearly, of Threlfall for Duddon? Lydia would live at Threlfall; would be immensely rich; and there would be no more bloodhounds in the park.
But when Faversham was gone, and realities began to sink into the little lady"s mind, as Lydia sitting at her feet, and holding her hand, tried to infuse them, dejection followed. No coronet!--and now, no fortune! She did not understand these high-stepping morals, and she went sadly to bed; though never had Lydia been so sweet to her, so ready to brush her hair by the fire as long as ever she chose, so full of daughterly promises.
Susy kissed her sister when they were alone, tenderly but absently.
"You"re a rare case, Lydia--unique, I think. The Greeks would call you something--I forget! I should really like to understand the psychology of it. It might be useful."
Lydia bantered her a little--rather sorely. But the emotions of her family would always be so much "copy" to Susy; and the fact did not in the least prevent her being a warm-hearted, and, in her own way, admirable little person.
Finally, Lydia turned the tables on her, by throwing an arm round her neck, and inquiring whether Mr. Weston had not paid her a very long call the day before. Susy quietly admitted it, and added: "But I told him not to call again. I"m afraid--I"m bored with him. There are no mysteries in his character--no lights and shades at all. He is too virtuous--monotonously so. It would be of no technical advantage to me whatever, to fall in love with him."
That evening came a note from Lady Tatham:
"MY DEAR LYDIA:
"We expect you to-morrow at 11:30. Mr. Faversham has asked that we--and you--Cyril Boden, Doctor Undershaw, old Dixon, and Felicia (her poor mother is _very_ ill, and we hear news to-day of the sudden death of the old grandfather)--should meet him at that hour in Harry"s library. And afterward, you will stay to lunch? My dear, you have in this house two warm friends who love you and long to see you. Each hour that pa.s.ses grows more thrilling than the last....
"I have been spending some time with old Mrs. Brand--and I told her I knew you would go to her to-morrow. They have given her her dead son--and she sits with his feet against her breast. She loved him best of all. One thinks of Rizpah gathering the bones."