The singer wrote to apprise Mrs. Vance of the death of her daughter and son-in-law, and the birth of the infant whom she undertook shortly to send to England. But the babe, whom meanwhile she took to herself, got hold of her affections; with that yearning for children which makes so remarkable and almost uniform a characteristic of French women (if themselves childless) in the wandering Bohemian cla.s.s that separates them from the ordinary household affections, never dead in the heart of woman till womanhood itself be dead, the singer clung to the orphan little one to whom she was for the moment rendering the cares of a mother. She could not bear to part with it; she resolved to adopt it as her own. The knowledge of Mrs. Vance"s circ.u.mstances--the idea that the orphan, to herself a blessing, would be an unwelcome enc.u.mbrance to its own relations--removed every scruple from a mind unaccustomed to suffer reflection to stand in the way of an impulse. She wrote word to Mrs.
Vance that the child was dead. She trusted that her letter would suffice, without other evidence, to relations so poor, and who could have no suspicion of any interest to deceive them. Her trust was well founded. Mrs. Vance and the boy Frank, whose full confidence and grat.i.tude had been already secured to their correspondent for her kind offices to the young parents, accepted, without a demur or a question, the news that the infant was no more. The singer moved on to the next town at which she was professionally engaged. The infant, hitherto brought up by hand, became ailing. The medical adviser called in recommended the natural food, and found, in a village close by, the nurse to whom a little time before Jasper Losely had consigned his own daughter. The latter died; the nurse then removed to Paris to reside with the singer, who had obtained a lucrative appointment at one of the metropolitan theatres. In less than two years the singer herself fell a victim to a prevailing epidemic. She had lived without thought of the morrow; her debts exceeded her means; her effects were sold. The nurse, who had meanwhile become a widow, came for advice and refuge to her sister, who was in the service of Gabrielle Desmarets. Gabrielle, being naturally appealed to, saw the infant, heard the story, looked into the statement which, by way of confession, the singer had drawn up, and signed, in a notary"s presence, before she died; looked into the letters from Mrs. Vance, and the schoolboy scrawls from Frank, both to the singer and to the child"s parents, which the actress had carefully preserved; convinced herself of the poverty and obscurity of the infant"s natural guardians and next of kin; and said to Jasper, who was just dissipating the fortune handed over to him as survivor of his wife and child: "There is what, if well-managed, may retain your hold on a rich father-in-law when all else has failed. You have but to say that this infant is his grandchild; the nurse we can easily bribe, or persuade to confirm the tale. I, whom he already knows as that respectable baroness, your Matilda"s friend, can give to the story some probable touches. The lone childless man must rejoice to think that a tie is left to him. The infant is exquisitely pretty; her face will plead for her. His heart will favour the idea too much to make him very rigorous in his investigations. Take the infant. Doubtless in your own country you can find some one to rear it at little or no expense, until the time come for appeal to your father-in-law when no other claim on his purse remains."
Jasper a.s.sented with the insouciant docility by which he always acknowledged Gabrielle"s astuter intellect. He saw the nurse; it was clear that she had nothing to gain by taking the child to English relations so poor. They might refuse to believe her, and certainly--could not reward. To rid herself of the infant, and obtain the means to return to her native village with a few hundred francs in her purse, there was no promise she was not willing to make, no story she was too honest to tell, no paper she was too timid to sign.
Jasper was going to London on some adventure of his own. He took the infant--chanced on Arabella--the reader knows the rest. The indifference ever manifested by Jasper to a child not his own--the hardness with which he had contemplated and planned his father"s separation from one whom he had imposed by false pretexts on the old man"s love, and whom he only regarded as an alien enc.u.mbrance upon the scanty means of her deluded protector--the fitful and desultory mode in which, when (contrary to the reasonings which Gabrielle had based upon a very large experience of the credulities of human nature in general, but in utter ignorance of the nature peculiar to Darrell) his first attempt at imposition had been so scornfully resisted by his indignant father-in-law, he had played fast and loose with a means of extortion which, though loth to abandon, he knew would not bear any strict investigation;--all this is now clear to the reader. And the reader will also comprehend why, partly from fear that his father might betray him, partly from a compa.s.sionate unwillingness to deprive the old man of a belief in which William Losely said he had found such solace, Jasper, in his last interview with his father, shrank from saying, "but she is not your grandchild!" The idea of recurring to the true relations of the child naturally never entered into Jasper"s brain. He considered them to be as poor as himself. They buy from him the child of parents wh.o.r.e they had evidently, by their letters, taxed themselves to the utmost, and in vain, to save from absolute want! So wild seemed the notion, that he had long since forgotten that relations so useless existed. Fortunately the nurse had preserved the written statement of the singer--the letters by Mrs. Vance and Frank--the certificate of the infant"s birth and baptism--some poor relics of Sophy"s ill-fated parents-ma.n.u.scripts of Arthur"s poems--baby-caps with initials and armorial crests, wrought, before her confinement, by the young wife--all of which had been consigned by the singer to the nurse, and which the nurse willingly disposed of to Mrs. Crane, with her own formal deposition of the facts, confirmed by her sister, Gabrielle"s old confidential-attendant, and who, more favoured than her mistress, was living peaceably in the rural scenes of her earlier innocence, upon the interest of the gains she had saved in no innocent service--confirmed yet more by references to many whose testimonials could trace, step by step, the child"s record from its birth to its transfer to Jasper, and by the brief but distinct avowal, in tremulous lines, writ by Jasper himself. As a skein crossed and tangled, when the last knot is loosened, slips suddenly free, so this long bewildering mystery now became clear as a commonplace! What years of suffering Darrell might have been saved had he himself seen and examined the nurse--had his inquiry been less bounded by the fears of his pride--had the great lawyer not had himself for a client!
Darrell silently returned to Alban Morley the papers over which he had cast his eye as they walked slowly to and fro the sloping banks of the lake.
"It is well," said he, glancing fondly, as Fairthorn had glanced before him, towards the old House, now freed from doom, and permitted to last its time. "It is well," he repeated, looking away towards that part of the landscape where he could just catch a glimpse of Sophy"s light form beyond the barbed thorn-tree; "it is well," he repeated thrice with a sigh. "Poor human nature! Alban, can you conceive it? I, who once so dreaded that that poor child should prove to be of my blood, now, in knowing that she is not, feel a void, a loss! To Lionel I am so distant a kinsman!--to his wife, to his children, what can I be? A rich old man; the sooner he is in his grave the better. A few tears, and then the will! But, as your nephew says, "This life is but a school;" the new-comer in the last form thinks the head-boy just leaving so old! And to us, looking back, it seems but the same yesterday whether we were the last comer or the head-boy."
"I thought," said Alban, plaintively, "that, for a short time at least, I had done with "painful subjects." You revel in them! County Guy, you have not left school yet; leave it with credit; win the best prize." And Alban plunged at once into THE CRISIS. He grew eloquent; the Party, the Country, the Great Measure to be intrusted to Darrell, if he would but undertake it as a member of the Cabinet; the Peerage, the House of Vipont, and immortal glory!--eloquent as Ulysses haranguing the son of Peleus in Troilus and Cressida.
Darrell listened coldly; only while Alban dwelt on "the Measure,"
in which, when it was yet too unripe for practical statesmen, he had attached his faith as a thinker, the orator"s eye flashed with young fire. A great truth is eternally clear to a great heart that has once nourished its germ and foreseen its fruits. But when Alban quitted that part of his theme, all the rest seemed wearisome to his listener. They had now wound their walk to the opposite side of the lake, and paused near the thick beech-trees, hallowed and saddened by such secret a.s.sociations to the mournful owner.
"No, my dear Alban," said Darrell, "I cannot summon up sufficient youth and freshness of spirit to re-enter the turbulent arena I have left. Ah!
look yonder where Lionel and Sophy move! Give me, I do not say Lionel"s years, but Lionel"s wealth of hope, and I might still have a wish for fame and a voice for England; but it is a subtle truth, that when a man misses a home, a link between his country and himself is gone. Vulgar ambition may exist--the selfish desire of power; they were never very strong in me, and now less strong than the desire of rest; but that beautiful, genial, glorious union of all the affections of social citizen, which begins at the hearth and widens round the land, is not for the hermit"s cell."
Alban was about to give up the argument in irritable despair, when happening to turn his eye towards the farther depth of the beech-grove, he caught a glimpse--no matter what of; but quickening his step in the direction to which his glance had wandered, he seated himself on the gnarled roots of a tree that seemed the monarch of the wood, widespreading as that under which t.i.tyrus reclined of old; and there, out of sight of the groups on the opposite banks of the lake--there, as if he had sought the gloomiest and most secret spot for what he had yet to say, he let fall, in the most distinct yet languid tones of his thoroughbred, cultured enunciation: "I have a message to you from Lady Montfort. Restless man, do come nearer, and stand still. I am tired to death." Darrell approached, and, leaning against the trunk of the giant tree, said, with folded arms and compressed lips:
"A message from Lady Montfort!"
"Yes. I should have told you, by-the-by, that it was she who, being a woman, of course succeeded where I, being a man, despite incredible pains and trouble, signally failed, discovered Arabella Fossett, alias Crane, and obtained from her the doc.u.ments which free your life forever from a haunting and torturing fear. I urged her to accompany me hither, and place the doc.u.ments herself in your hand. She refused; you were not worth so much trouble, my dear Guy. I requested her at least to suffer me to show to you a paper containing Jasper Losely"s confession of a conspiracy to poison her mind against you some years ago--a conspiracy so villianously ingenious that it would have completely exonerated any delicate and proud young girl from the charge of fickleness in yielding to an impulse of pique and despair. But Lady Montfort did not wish to be exonerated; your good opinion has ceased to be of the slightest value to her. But to come to the point. She bade me tell you that, if you persist in sheltering yourself in a hermit"s cell from the fear of meeting her--if she be so dangerous to your peace--you may dismiss such absurd apprehension. She is going abroad, and between you and me, my dear fellow, I have not a doubt that she will marry again before six months are out. I spoke of your sufferings; she told me she had not the smallest compa.s.sion for them."
"Alban Morley, you presumed to talk thus of me?" cried Darrell, livid with rage.
"Strike, but hear me. It is true you would not own, when I was last at Fawley, that she was the cause of your secluded life, of your blighted career; but I knew better. However, let me go on before you strangle me. Lady Montfort"s former feelings of friendship for you are evidently quite changed; and she charged me to add, that she really hoped that you would exert your good sense and pride (of which Heaven knows you have plenty) to eradicate an absurd and romantic sentiment, so displeasing to her, and so--"
"It is false! it is false! What have I done to you, Colonel Morley, that you should slander me thus? I send you messages of taunt and insult, Mr.
Darrell! You cannot believe it--you cannot!"
Caroline Montfort stood between the two, as if she had dropped from heaven.
A smile, half in triumph, half in irony, curved the lip of the fine gentleman. It faded instantly as his eye turned from the face of the earnest woman to that of the earnest man. Alban Morley involuntarily bowed his head, murmured some words unheard, and pa.s.sed from the place unheeded.
Not by concert nor premeditation was Caroline Montfort on that spot; she had consented to accompany her cousin to Fawley, but before reaching the park gates her courage failed her; she would remain within the carriage; the Colonel, wanted in London as soon as possible, whatever the result of his political mission to Darrell, could not stay long at Fawley; she would return with him. Vance"s presence and impatient desire to embrace his niece did not allow the Colonel an occasion for argument and parley.
Chafed at this fresh experience of the capricious uncertainty of woman, he had walked on with Vance to the Manor-house. Left alone, Caroline could not endure the stillness and inaction which increased the tumult of her thoughts; she would at least have one more look--it might be the last--at the scenes in which her childhood had sported--her youth known its first happy dreams. But a few yards across those circ.u.mscribed demesnes, on through those shadowy serried groves, and she should steal unperceived in view of the house, the beloved lake, perhaps even once more catch a pa.s.sing glimpse of the owner. She resolved, she glided on; she gained the beech-grove, when, by the abrupt wind of the banks, Darrell and Alban came suddenly on the very spot. The flutter of her robe, as she turned to retreat, caught Alban"s eye; the reader comprehends with what wily intent, conceived on the moment, that unscrupulous schemer shaped the words which chained her footstep, and then stung her on to self-disclosure. Trembling and blushing, she now stood before the startled man--He startled out of every other sentiment and feeling than that of ineffable, exquisite delight to be once more in her presence; she, after her first pa.s.sionate outburst, hastening on, in confused broken words, to explain that she was there but by accident--by chance; confusion growing deeper and deeper--how explain the motive that had charmed her steps to the spot?
Suddenly from the opposite bank came the music of the magic flute, and her voice as suddenly stopped and failed her.
"Again--again," said Darrell, dreamily. "The same music! the same air!
and this the same place on which we two stood together when I first dared to say, "I love!" Look! we are under the very tree! Look! there is the date I carved on the bark when you were gone, but had left Hope behind. Ah, Caroline, why can I not now resign myself to age? Why is youth, while I speak, rushing back into my heart, into my soul? Why cannot I say, "Gratefully I accept your tender friendship; let the past be forgotten; through what rests to me of the future while on earth, be to me as a child. I cannot--I cannot! Go!"
She drew nearer to him, gently, timidly. "Even that, Darrell,--even that; something in your life--let me be something still!"
"Ah," he said with melancholy bitterness, "you deceive me no longer now!
You own that, when here we stood last and exchanged our troth, you in the blossom, and I in the prime, of life--you own that it was no woman"s love, deaf to all calumny, proof to all craft that could wrong the absent; no woman"s love, warm as the heart, undying as the soul, that you pledged me then?"
"Darrell, it was not--though then I thought it was."
"Ay, ay," he continued with a smile, as if of triumph in his own pangs, "so that truth is confessed at last! And when, once more free, you wrote to me the letter I returned, rent in fragments, to your hand--or when, forgiving my rude outrage and fierce reproach, you spoke to me so gently yonder, a few weeks since, in these lonely shades, then what were your sentiments, your motives? Were they not those of a long-suppressed and kind remorse? of a charity akin to that which binds rich to poor, bows happiness to suffering?--some memories of grat.i.tude--nay, perhaps of childlike affection?--all amiable, all generous, all steeped in that sweetness of nature to which I unconsciously rendered justice in the anguish I endured in losing you; but do not tell me that even then you were under the influence of woman"s love."
"Darrell, I was not."
"You own it, and you suffer me to see you again! Trifler and cruel one, is it but to enjoy the sense of your undiminished, unalterable power?"
"Alas, Darrell! alas! why am I here?--why so yearning, yet so afraid to come? Why did my heart fail when these trees rose in sight against the sky?--why, why--why was it drawn hither by the spell I could not resist?
Alas, Darrell, alas! I am a woman now--and--and this--"
She lowered her veil, and turned away; her lips could not utter the word, because the word was not pity, not remorse, not remembrance, not even affection; and the woman loved now too well to subject to the hazard of rejection--LOVE!
"Stay, oh stay!" cried Darrell. "Oh that I could dare to ask you to complete the sentence! I know--I know by the mysterious sympathy of my own soul, that you could never deceive me more! Is it--is it--"
His lips falter too; but her hand is clasped in his; her head is reclining upon his breast; the veil is withdrawn from the sweet downcast face; and softly on her ear steal the murmured words, "Again and now, till the grave--Oh, by this hallowing kiss, again--the Caroline of old!"
Fuller and fuller, spreading, wave after wave, throughout the air, till it seemed interfused and commingled with the breath which the listeners breathe, the flute"s mellow gush streams along. The sun slopes in peace towards the west; not a cloud in those skies, clearer seen through yon boughs stripped of leaves, and rendering more vivid the evergreen of the arbute and laurel.
Lionel and Sophy are now seated on yon moss-grown trunk, on either side the old grey-haired man, as if agreeing for a while even to forget each.
other, that they may make him feel how fondly he is remembered. Sophy is resting both her hands on the old man"s shoulder, looking into his face, and murmuring in his ear with voice like the coo of a happy dove.
Ah, fear not, Sophy; he is happy too--he who never thinks of himself.
Look--the playful smile round his arch lips; look--now he is showing off Sir Isaac to Vance; with austere solemnity the dog goes through his tricks; and Vance, with hand stroking his chin, is moralising on all that might have befallen had he grudged his three pounds to that famous INVESTMENT.
Behind that group, shadowed by the Thorn-tree, stands the PREACHER, thoughtful and grave, foreseeing the grief that must come to the old man with the morrow, when he will learn that a guilty son nears his end, and will hasten to comfort Jasper"s last days with pardon. But the Preacher looks not down to the death-couch alone; on and high over death looks the Preacher! By what words Heavenly Mercy may lend to his lips shall he steal away, yet in time, to the soul of the dying, and justify murmurs of hope to the elm of a life so dark with the shades of its past? And to him, to the Preacher, they who survive--the two mourners will come in their freshness of sorrow! He, the old man? Nay, to him there will be comfort. His spirit Heaven"s kindness had tempered to trials; and, alas for that son, what could father hope more than a death free from shame, and a chance yet vouchsafed for repentance? But she, the grim, iron-grey woman? The Preacher"s interest, I know, will soon centre on her:--And balm may yet drop on thy wounds, thou poor, grim, iron-grey, loving woman.
Lo! that traitor, the Flute-player, over whom falls the deep grateful shade from the eaves of the roof-tree reprieved; though unconscious as yet of that happy change in the lot of the master which, ere long, may complete (and haply for sons sprung in truth from the blood of the Darrell) yon skeleton pile, and consummate, for ends n.o.bler far, the plan of a grand life imperfect;--though as yet the musician nor knows nor conjectures the joy that his infamous treason to Sophy so little deserves; yet, as if by those finer perceptions of sense impressed ere they happen, by changes of pleasure and of pain, which Art so mysteriously gives to the minds from which music is born, his airs, of themselves, float in joy: Like a bird at the coming of spring, it is gladness that makes him melodious.
And Alban Morley, seemingly intent upon the sketch which his amiable niece-in-law submits to his critical taste ere she ventures to show it to Vance, is looking from under his brows towards the grove, out from which, towering over all its dark brethren, soars the old trysting beech-tree, and to himself he is saying: "Ten to one that the old House of Vipont now weather the CRISIS; and a thousand to one that I find at last my armchair at the hearth of my schoolfriend, Guy Darrell!"
And the lake is as smooth as gla.s.s; and the swans, hearkening the music, rest still, with white b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the gra.s.s of the margin; and the doe, where she stands, her fore-feet in the water, lifts her head wistfully, with nostrils distended, and wondering soft eyes that are missing the master. Now full on the beech-grove shines the westering sun; out from the gloomy beech-grove into the golden sunlight--they come, they come--Man and the Helpmate, two lives re-betrothed--two souls re-united. Be it evermore! Amen.