“I’m afraid you must think our goings on rather eccentric,” Rorie began shyly; “but perhaps Vix —— Miss Tempest has told you what old friends we are; that, in fact, I am quite the oldest friend she has. I came to Jersey on purpose to ask her to marry me, and she has been good enough” — smiling blissfully at Vixen, who tried to look daggers at him—”to say Yes.”
“Dear me!” exclaimed Miss Skipwith, looking much alarmed; “this is very embarrassing. I am so unversed in such matters. My life has been given up to study, far from the haunts of man. My nephew informed me that there was a kind of — in point of fact — a flirtation between Miss Tempest and a gentleman in Hampshire, of which he highly disapproved, the gentleman being engaged to marry his cousin.”
“It was I,” cried Rorie, “but there was no flirtation between Miss Tempest and me. Whoever asserted such a thing was a slanderer and —— I won’t offend you by saying what he was, Miss Skipwith. There was no flirtation. I was Miss Tempest’s oldest friend — her old playfellow, and we liked to see each other, and were always friendly together. But it was an understood thing that I was to marry my cousin. It was Miss Tempest’s particular desire that I should keep an engagement made beside my mother’s death-bed. If Miss Tempest had thought otherwise, I should have been at her feet. I would have flung that engagement to the winds; for Violet Tempest is the only woman I ever loved. And now all the world may know it, for my cousin has jilted me, and I am a free man.”
“Good gracious! Can I really believe this?” asked Miss Skipwith, appealing to Violet.
“Rorie never told a falsehood in his life,” Vixen answered proudly.
“I feel myself in a most critical position, my dear child,” said Miss Skipwith, looking from Roderick’s frank eager face to Vixen’s downcast eyelids and mantling blushes. “I had hoped such a different fate for you. I thought the thirst for knowledge had arisen within you, that the aspiration to distinguish yourself from the ruck of ignorant women would follow the arising of that thirst, in natural sequence. And here I find you willing to marry a gentleman who happens to have been the companion of your childhood, and to resign — for his sake — all hopes of distinction.”
“My chances of distinction were so small, dear Miss Skipwith,” faltered Vixen. “If I had possessed your talents!”
“True,” sighed the reformer of all the theologies. “We have not all the same gifts. There was a day when I thought it would be my lot to marry and subside into the dead level of domesticity; but I am thankful to think I escaped the snare.”
“And the gentleman who wanted to marry you, how thankful must he be!” thought Rorie dumbly.
“Yet there have been moments of depression when I have been weak enough to regret those early days,” sighed Miss Skipwith. “At best our strength is tempered with weakness. It is the fate of genius to be lonely. And now I suppose I am to lose you, Violet?”
“I am summoned home to poor mamma,” said Vixen.
“And after poor mamma has recovered, as I hope she speedily may, Violet will be wanted by her poor husband,” said Rorie. “You must come across the sea and dance at our wedding, Miss Skipwith.”
“Ah,” sighed Miss Skipwith, “if you could but have waited for the establishment of my universal church, what a grand ceremonial your marriage might have been!”
Miss Skipwith, though regretful, and inclined to take a dismal view of the marriage state and its responsibilities under the existing dispensation, was altogether friendly. She had a frugal supper of cold meat and salad, bread and cheese and cider, served in honour of Mr. Vawdrey, and they three sat till midnight talking happily — Miss Skipwith of theology, the other two of themselves and the smiling future, and such an innocent forest life as Rosalind and Orlando may have promised themselves, when they were deep in love, and the banished duke’s daughter sighed for no wider kingdom than a shepherd’s hut in the woodland, with the lover of her choice.
There were plenty of spare bedrooms at the manor house, but so bare and empty, so long abandoned of human occupants, as to be fit only for the habitation of mice and spiders, stray bat or wandering owl. So Roderick had to walk down the hill again to St. Helier’s, where he found hospitality at an hotel. He was up betimes, too happy to need much sleep, and at seven o’clock he and Vixen were walking in the dewy garden, planning the wonderful life they were to lead at Briarwood, and all the good they were to do. Happiness was to radiate from their home, as heat from the sun. The sick, and the halt, and the lame were to come to Briarwood; as they had come to the Abbey House before Captain Winstanley’s barren rule of economy.
“God has been so good to us, Rorie,” said Vixen, nestling at her lover’s side. “Can we ever be good enough to others?”
“We’ll do our best, anyhow, little one,” he answered gently. “I am not like Mallow, I’ve no great ideas about setting my native country in order and doing away with the poor laws; but I’ve always tried to make the people round me happy, and to keep them out of the workhouse and the county jail.”
They went to the court-yard where poor Argus lived his life of isolation, and they told him they were going to be married, and that his pathway henceforward would be strewn with roses, or at all events Spratt’s biscuits. He was particularly noisy and demonstrative, and appeared to receive this news with a wild rapture that was eminently encouraging, doing his best to knock Roderick down, in the tumult of his delight. The lovers and the dog were alike childish in their infinite happiness, unthinking beings of the present hour, too happy to look backward or forward, this little space of time called “now” holding all things needful for delight.
These are the rare moments of life, to which the heart of man cries, “Oh stay, thou art so beautiful!” and could the death-bell toll then, and doom come then, life would end in a glorious euthanasia.
Violet’s portmanteaux were packed. All was ready. There would be just time for a hurried breakfast with Miss Skipwith, and then the fly from St. Helier’s would be at the gate to carry the exile on the first stage of the journey home.
“Poor mamma!” sighed Vixen. “How wicked of me to feel go happy, when she is ill.”
And then Rorie comforted her with kindly-meant sophistries. Mrs. Winstanley’s indisposition was doubtless more an affair of the nerves than a real illness. She would be cheered and revived immediately by her daughter’s return.
“How could she suppose she would be able to live without you!” cried Rorie. “I know I found life hard to bear.”
“Yet you bore it for more than a year with admirable patience,” retorted Vixen, laughing at him; “and I do not find you particularly altered or emaciated.”
“Oh, I used to eat and drink,” said Rorie, with a look of self-contempt. “I’m afraid I’m a horribly low-minded brute. I used even to enjoy my dinner, sometimes, after a long country ride; but I could never make you understand what a bore life was to me all last year, how the glory and enjoyment seemed to have gone out of existence. The dismal monotony of my days weighed upon me like a nightmare. Life had become a formula. I felt like a sick man who has to take so many doses of medicine, so many pills, so many basins of broth, in the twenty-four hours. There was no possible resistance. The sick-nurse was there, in the shape of Fate, ready to use brute force if I rebelled. I never did rebel. I assure you, Vixen, I was a model lover. Mabel and I had not a single quarrel. I think that is a proof that we did not care a straw for each other.”
“You and I will have plenty of quarrels,” said Vixen. “It will be so nice to make friends again.”
Now came the hurried breakfast — a cup of tea drunk, standing, not a crumb eaten; agitated adieux to Miss Skipwith, who wept very womanly tears over her departing charge, and uttered good wishes in a choking voice. Even the Dodderys seemed to Vixen more human than usual, now that she was going to leave them, in all likelihood for ever. Miss Skipwith came to the gate to see the travellers off, and ascended the pilgrim’s bench in order to have the latest view of the fly. From th
is eminence she waved her handkerchief as a farewell salutation.
“Poor soul!” sighed Vixen; “she has never been unkind to me; but oh! what a dreary life I have led in that dismal old house!”
They had Argus in the fly with them, sitting up, with his mouth open, and his tail flapping against the bottom of the vehicle in perpetual motion. He kept giving his paw first to Vixen and then to Rorie, and exacted a great deal of attention, insomuch that Mr. Vawdrey exclaimed:
“Vixen, if you don’t keep that dog within bounds, I shall think him as great a nuisance as a stepson. I offered to marry you, you know, not you and your dog.”
“You are very rude!” cried Vixen.
“You don’t expect me to be polite, I hope. What is the use of marrying one’s old playfellow if one cannot be uncivil to her now and then? To me you will always be the tawny-haired little girl I used to tease.”
“Who used to tease you, you mean. You were very meek in those days.”
Oh, what a happy voyage that was, over the summer sea! They sat side by side upon the bridge, sheltered from wind and sun, and talked the happy nonsense lovers talk: but which can hardly be so sweet between lovers whose youth and childhood have been spent far apart, as between these two who had been reared amidst the same sylvan world, and had every desire and every thought in unison. How brief the voyage seemed. It was but an hour or so since Roderick had been buying peaches and grapes, as they lay at the end of the pier at Guernsey, and here were the Needles and the chalky cliffs and undulating downs of the Wight. The Wight! That meant Hampshire and home!
“How often those downs have been our weather-glass, Rorie, when we have been riding across the hills between Lyndhurst and Beaulieu,” said Vixen.
She had a world of questions to ask him about all that had happened during her exile. She almost expected to hear that Lyndhurst steeple had fallen; that the hounds had died of old age; that the Knightwood Oak had been struck by lightning; or that some among those calamities which time naturally brings had befallen the surroundings of her home. It was the strangest thing in the world to hear that nothing had happened, that everything was exactly the same as it had been when she went away. That dreary year of exile had seemed long enough for earthquakes and destructions, or even for slow decay.
“Do you know what became of Arion?” asked Vixen, almost afraid to shape the question.
“Oh, I believe he was sold, soon after you left home,” Rorie answered carelessly.
“Sold!” echoed Vixen drearily. “Poor dear thing! Yes, I felt sure Captain Winstanley would sell him. But I hoped — —”
“What?”
“That some one I knew might buy him. Lord Mallow perhaps.”
“Lord Mallow! Ah, you thought he would buy your horse, for love of the rider. But you see constancy isn’t one of that noble Irishman’s virtues. He loves and he rides away — when the lady won’t have him, bien entendu. No, Arion was sent up to Tattersall’s, and disposed of in the usual way. Some fellow bought him for a covert hack.”
“I hope the man wasn’t a heavy weight,” exclaimed Vixen, almost in tears.
She thought Rorie was horribly unfeeling.
“What does it matter? A horse must earn his salt.”
“I had rather my poor pet had been shot, and buried in one of the meadows at home,” said Vixen plaintively.
“Captain Winstanley was too wise to allow that. Your poor pet fetched a hundred and forty-five guineas under the hammer.”
“I don’t think it is very kind of you to talk of him so lightly,” said Vixen.
This was the only little cloud that came between them in all the voyage. Long before sunset they were steaming into Southampton Water, and the yellow light was still shining on the furzy levels, when the brougham that contained Vixen and her fortunes drove along the road to Lyndhurst.
She had asked the coachman for news of his mistress, and had been told that Mrs. Winstanley was pretty much the same. The answer was in some measure reassuring: yet Violet’s spirits began to sink as she drew nearer home, and must so soon find herself face to face with the truth. There was a sadness too in that quiet evening hour; and the shadowy distances seemed full of gloom, after the dancing waves, and the gay morning light.
The dusk was creeping slowly on as the carriage passed the lodge, and drove between green walls of rhododendron to the house. Captain Winstanley was smoking his cigar in the porch, leaning against the Gothic masonry, in the attitude Vixen knew so well of old.
“If my mother were lying in her coffin I daresay he would be just the same,” she thought bitterly.
The Captain came down to open the carriage-door. Vixen’s first glance at his face showed her that he looked worn and anxious.
“Is mamma very ill?” she asked tremulously.
“Very ill,” he answered, in a low voice. “Mind, you are to do or say nothing that can agitate her. You must be quiet and cheerful. If you see a change you must take care to say nothing about it.”
“Why did you leave me so long in ignorance of her illness? Why did you not send for me sooner?”
“Your mother has only been seriously ill within the past few days. I sent for you directly I saw any occasion for your presence,” the Captain answered coldly.
He now for the first time became aware of Mr. Vawdrey, who had got out of the brougham on the other side and came round to assist in the unshipment of Violet’s belongings.
“Good evening, Mr. Vawdrey. Where in Heaven’s name did you spring from?” he inquired, with a vexed air.
“I have had the honour of escorting Miss Tempest from Jersey, where I happened to be when she received your telegram.”
“Wasn’t that rather an odd proceeding, and likely to cause scandal?”
“I think not; for before people can hear that Miss Tempest and I crossed in the same boat I hope they will have heard that Miss Tempest and I are going to be married.”
“I see,” cried the Captain, with a short laugh of exceeding bitterness; “being off with the old love you have made haste to be on with the new.”
“I beg your pardon. It is no new love, but a love as old as my boyhood,” answered Rorie. “In one weak moment of my life I was foolish enough to let my mother choose a wife for me, though I had made my own choice, unconsciously, years before.”
“May I go to mamma at once?” asked Vixen.
The Captain said Yes, and she went up the staircase and along the corridor to Mrs. Winstanley’s room. Oh, how dear and familiar the old house looked, how full of richness and colour after the bareness and decay of Les Tourelles; brocaded curtains hanging in heavy folds against the carved oaken framework of a deep-set window; gleams of evening light stealing through old stained glass; everywhere a rich variety of form and hue that filled and satisfied the eye; a house worth living in assuredly, with but a little love to sanctify and hallow all these things. But how worthless these things if discord and hatred found a habitation among them.
The door of Mrs. Winstanley’s room stood half open, and the lamplight shone faintly from within. Violet went softly in. Her mother was lying on a sofa by the hearth, where a wood-fire had been newly lighted. Pauline was sitting opposite her, reading aloud in a very sleepy voice out of the Court Journal: “The bride was exquisitely attired in ivory satin, with flounces of old Duchesse lace, the skirt covered with tulle, bouilloné, and looped with garlands of orange-blossom — —”
“Pauline,” murmured the invalid feebly, “will you never learn to read with expression? You are giving me the vaguest idea of Lady Evelyn Fitzdamer’s appearance.”
Violet went over to the sofa and knelt by her mother’s side and embraced her tenderly, looking at her earnestly all the while, in the clear soft lamp-light. Yes, there was indeed a change. The always delicate face was pinched and shrunken. The ivory of the complexion had altered to a dull gray. Premature age had hollowed the cheeks, and lined the forehead. It was a change that meant decline and death. Violet’s heart sank as she beheld
it: but she remembered the Captain’s warning, and bravely strove to put on an appearance of cheerfulness.
“Dear mother, I am so happy to come home to you,” she said gaily; “and I am going to nurse and pet you, for the next week or so; till you get tremendously well and strong, and are able to take me to innumerable parties.”
“My dear Violet, I have quite given up parties; and I shall never be strong again.”
“Dearest, it has always been your habit to fancy yourself an invalid.”
“Yes, Violet, once I may have been full of fancies: but now I know that I am ill. You will not be unkind or unjust to Conrad, will you, dear? He sent for you directly I asked him. He has been all goodness to me. Try and get on with him nicely, dear, for my sake.”
This was urged with such piteous supplication, that it would have needed a harder heart than Violet’s to deny the prayer.
“Dear mother, forget that the Captain and I ever quarrelled,” said Vixen. “I mean to be excellent friends with him henceforward. And, darling, I have a secret to tell you if you would like to hear it.”
“What secret, dear?”
“Lady Mabel Ashbourne has jilted Roderick!”
“My love, that is no secret. I heard all about it day before yesterday. People have talked of nothing else since it happened. Lady Mabel has behaved shamefully.”
“Lady Mabel has behaved admirably. If other women were wise enough to draw back at the last moment there would be fewer unhappy marriages. But Lady Mabel’s elopement is only the prologue to my story.”
“What can you mean, child?”
“Roderick came to Jersey to make me an offer.”
“So soon! Oh, Violet, what bad taste!”
“Ought he to have gone into mourning? He did not even sing willow, but came straight off to me, and told me he had loved me all his life; so now you will have my trousseau to think about, dearest, and I shall want all your good taste. You know how little I have of my own.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 681