by Ellen Wood
“Of all brazen-faced knaves, that Stockhausen must be the worst! — an adept in cunning, a lying hypocrite!” exploded the Squire.
“I suspected him at the time,” said Duffham.
“You did! What were your grounds for it?”
“I had no particular grounds. His manner did not appear to me to be satisfactory; that was all. Of course I was not sure.”
“He is a base man,” concluded the Squire. And from that time he turned the cold shoulder on Hyde.
But time is a sure healer of wounds; a softener of resentment. As it passed on, we began to forget Hyde’s dark points, and to remember his good qualities. Any way, Ketira the gipsy and Ketira’s daughter passed out of memory, just as they had passed out of sight.
Suddenly we heard that Abel Carew was preparing to go on a journey. I went off to ask him where he was bound for.
“I am going to see them, Master Johnny,” he replied. “I don’t know how they are off, sir, and it is my duty to see. The child is ill: and I fear they may be wanting assistance, which Ketira is too proud to write and ask for.”
“Kettie ill! What is the matter with her?”
Abel shook his head. “I shall know more when I get there, sir.”
Abel Carew locked up his cottage and began his pilgrimage into Hertfordshire with a staff and a wallet, intending to walk all the way. In a fortnight he was back again, bringing with him a long face.
“It is sad to see the child,” he said to me, as I sat in his room listening to the news. “She is no more like the bonnie Kettie that we knew here, than a dead girl’s like a living one. Worn out, bent and silent, she sits, day after day and week after week, and her mother cannot rouse her. She has sat so all along.”
“But what is the matter with her?”
“She is slowly dying, sir.”
“What of?”
“A broken heart.”
“Oh dear!” said I; believing I knew who had broken it.
“Yes,” said Abel, “he. He won her heart’s best love, Master Johnny, and she pines for him yet. Ketira says it was his marriage that struck her the death-blow. A few weeks she may still linger, but they won’t be many.”
Very sorry did I feel to hear it: for Ketira’s sake as well as Kettie’s. The remembrance of the day I had gilded the oak-ball, and her wonderful gratitude for it, came flashing back to me.
And there’s nothing more to add to this digression. Except that Kettie died.
The tidings did not appear to affect Hyde Stockhausen. All his thoughts were given to his wife and child. Old Abel had never reproached him by as much as a word: if by chance they met, Abel avoided looking at him, or turned off another way.
When the baby was six months old and began to cut his teeth, he did not appear inclined to do it kindly. He grew thin and cross; and the parents, who seemed to think no baby ever born could come up to this one, began to be anxious. Hyde worshipped the child ridiculously.
“The boy will do well enough if he does not get convulsions,” Duffham said in semi-confidence to some people over his surgery counter. “If they come on — why, I can’t answer for what the result might be. Fat? Yes, he is a great deal too fat: they feed him up so.”
The surgeon was sitting by his parlour-fire one snowy evening shortly after this, when Stockhausen burst upon him in a fine state of agitation; arms working, breath gone. The baby was in a fit.
“Come, come; don’t you give way,” cried the doctor, believing Hyde was going into a fit on his own account. “We’ll see.”
Out of one convulsion into another went the child that night: but in a few days it was better; thought to be getting well. Mr. and Mrs. Stockhausen in consequence felt themselves in the seventh heaven.
“The danger is quite past,” observed Hyde, walking down the snowy path with Duffham, one morning when the doctor had been paying a visit; and Hyde rubbed his hands in gleeful relief, for he had been like a crazed lunatic while the child lay ill. “Duffham, if that child had died, I think I should have died.”
“Not a bit of it,” said Duffham. “You are made of tougher stuff.”
He was about to open the garden-gate as he spoke. But, suddenly appearing there to confront them stood Ketira the gipsy. A moment’s startled pause ensued. Duffham spoke kindly to her. Hyde recoiled a step or two; as if the sight had frightened him.
“You may well start back,” she said to the latter, taking no notice of Duffham’s civility. “I told you, you should not see me many times in life, Hyde Stockhausen, but that when you did, I should be the harbinger of evil. Go home, and meet it.”
Turning off under the garden-hedge, without another word, she disappeared from their view as suddenly as she had come into it. Hyde Stockhausen made a feint of laughing.
“The woman is more mad than ever,” he said. “Decidedly, Duffham, she ought to be in confinement.”
Never an assenting syllable gave Duffham. He was looking as stern as a judge. “What’s that?” he suddenly exclaimed, turning sharply to the house.
A maid-servant was flying down the path. Deborah Preen stood at the door, crying and calling as if in some dire calamity. Hyde rushed towards her, asking what was amiss. Duffham followed more slowly. The baby had got another attack of convulsions.
And this time it was for death.
When these events were happening, Great Malvern was not the overgrown, fashionable place it is now; but a quiet little spot with only a few houses in it, chiefly clustering under the highest of the hills. Amid these houses, one bright May day, Hyde Stockhausen went, seeking lodgings.
Hyde had not died of the loss of the baby. For here he was, alive and well, nearly eighteen months afterwards. That it had been a sharp trial for him nobody doubted; and for his wife also. And when a second baby came to replace the first, it brought them no good, for it did not live a week.
That was in March: two months ago: and ever since Mrs. Stockhausen had been hovering between this world and the next. A fever and other ailments had taken what little strength she had out of her. This, to Hyde Stockhausen, was a worse affliction than even the loss of the children, for she was to him as the very apple of his eye. When somewhat improving, the doctors recommended Malvern. So Hyde had brought her to it with a nurse and old Deborah; and had left them at the Crown Hotel while he looked for lodgings.
He found them in one of the houses down by the abbey. Some nice rooms, quite suitable. And to them his wife was taken. For a very few days afterwards she seemed to be getting better: and then all the bad symptoms returned. A doctor was called in. He feared she might not rally again; that the extreme debility might prevent it: and he said as much to Hyde in private.
Anything more unreasonable than the spirit in which Hyde met this, the Malvern doctor had never seen.
“You are a fool,” said Hyde. “Begging your pardon, sir, I should think you don’t know your profession. My wife is fifty pounds better than she was at Church Dykely. How can you take upon yourself to say she will not rally?”
“I said she might not,” replied the surgeon, who happened to possess a temper mild as milk. “I hope she will with all my heart. I shall do my best to bring it about.”
It was an anxious time. Mrs. Stockhausen fluctuated greatly: to-day able to sit up in an easy-chair; to-morrow too exhausted to be lifted out of bed. But, one morning she did seem to be ever so much better. Her cheeks were pink, her lips had a smile.
“Ah,” said the doctor cheerfully when he went in, “we shall do now, I hope. You are up early to-day.”
“I felt so much better that I wanted to get up and surprise you,” she answered in quite a strong voice — for her. “And it was so warm, and the world looked so beautiful. I should like to be able to mount one of those donkeys and go up the hill. Hyde says that the view, even from St. Ann’s well, is charming.”
“So it is,” assented the surgeon. “Have you never seen it?”
“No, I have not been to Malvern before.”
This was
the first day of June. Hyde would not forget the date to the last hour of his life. It was hot summer weather: the sun came in at the open window, touching her hair and her pale forehead as she lay back in the easy-chair after the doctor left; a canary at a neighbouring house was singing sweetly; the majestic hills, with their light and shade, looked closer even than they were in reality. Hyde began to lower the blind.
“Don’t, please, Hyde.”
“But, my darling, the sun will soon be in your eyes.”
“I shall like it. Is it not a lovely day! I think it is that which has put new life into me.”
“And we shall soon have you up the hill, where we can sit and look all over everywhere. On one or two occasions, when the atmosphere was rarefied to an unusual degree, I have caught the silver line of the Bristol Channel.”
“How pleasant it will be, Hyde! To sit there with you, and to know that I am getting well!”
Early in the afternoon, when Mabel lay down to rest, Hyde went strolling up the hill, for the first time since his present stay at Malvern. He got as far as St. Ann’s; drank a tumbler of the water, and then paced about, hither and thither, to the right and left, not intending to ascend higher that day. If he went to the summit, Mabel might be awake before he got home again; and he would not have lost five minutes of her waking moments for a mine of gold. Looking at his watch, he sat down on a bench that was backed by some dark trees.
“Yes,” he mused, “it will be delightful to sit about here with Mabel, and show her the different points of interest in the landscape. Worcester Cathedral, and St. Andrew’s Spire; and the Bristol — —”
Some stir behind caused him to turn his head. The words froze on his tongue. There stood Ketira the gipsy. She had been sitting or lying amidst the trees, wrapped in her red cloak. Hyde’s look of startled dread was manifest. She saw it; and accosted him.
“We meet again, Hyde Stockhausen. Ah, you have cause to fear! — your face may well whiten to the shivering hue of snow at sight of me! You are alone in the world now — as you left my daughter to be. Once more we shall see one another. Till then farewell.”
Recovering his equanimity when left alone, Hyde betook himself down the zig-zag path towards the village, calling the gipsy all the wicked names in the dictionary, and feeling tempted to give her into custody.
At his home, he was met by a commotion. The nurse wore a scared face; Deborah Preen, wringing her hands, burst out sobbing.
Mabel was dead. Had died in a fainting-fit.
Leaving his wife in her grave at Malvern, Hyde Stockhausen returned to Church Dykely. We hardly knew him.
A more changed man than Hyde was from that time the world has never seen. He walked about like a melancholy maniac, hands in his coat-pockets, eyes on the ground, steps dragging; looking just like one who has some great remorse lying upon his conscience and is being consumed by the past. The most wonderful thing in the eyes of Church Dykely was, that he grew religious: came to church twice on Sunday, stayed for the Sacrament, was good to the poor, gentle and kindly to all. Mr. Holland observed to the Squire that Stockhausen had become a true Christian. He made his will, and altogether seemed to be tired of life.
“Go you, Johnny, and ask him to come over to us sometimes in an evening; tell him it will be a break to his loneliness,” said the Squire to me one day. “Now that the poor fellow is ill and repentant, we must let bygones be bygones. I hear that Abel Carew spent half-an-hour sociably with him yesterday.”
I went off as directed. Summer had come round again, for more than a year had now passed since Mabel’s death, and the Virginia creeper on the cottage walls was all alight with red flowers. Hyde was pacing his garden in front of it, his head bent.
“Is it you, Johnny?” he said, in the patient, gentle tone he now always used, as he held his hand out. He was more like a shadow than a man; his face drawn and long, his blue eyes large and dark and sad.
“We should be so glad if you would come,” I added, after giving the message. “Mrs. Todhetley says you make yourself too much of a stranger. Will you come this evening?”
He shook his head slightly, clasping my hand the while, his own feeling like a burning coal, and smiling the sweetest and saddest smile.
“You are all too good for me; too considerate; better far than I deserve. No, I cannot come to you this evening, Johnny: I have not the spirits for it; hardly the strength. But I will come one evening if I can. Thank them all, Johnny, for me.”
And he did come. But he could not speak much above a whisper, so weak and hollow had his voice grown. And of all the humble-minded, kindly-spirited individuals that ever sat at our tea-table, the chiefest was Hyde Stockhausen.
“I fear he is going the way of all the Stockhausens,” said Mrs. Todhetley afterwards. “But what a beautiful frame of mind he is in!”
“Beautiful, you call it!” cried the pater. “The man seems to me to be eating his heart out in some impossible atonement. Had I set fire to the church and burnt up all the congregation, I don’t think it could have subdued me to that extent.”
Of all places, where should I next meet Hyde but at Worcester races! We knew that he had been worse lately, that his mother had come to Virginia Cottage to be with him at the last, and that there was no further hope. Therefore, to see Hyde this afternoon, perched on a tall horse on Pitchcroft, looked more like magic than reality.
“You at the races, Hyde!”
“Yes; but not for pleasure,” he answered, smiling faintly; and looking so shadowy and weak that it was a marvel how he could stick on the horse. “I am in search of one who is growing too fond of these scenes. I want to find him — and to say a few last words to him.”
“If you mean Jim Massock” — for I thought it could be nobody but young Jim— “I saw him yonder, down by the shows. He was drinking porter outside a booth. How are you, Hyde?”
“Oh, getting on slowly,” he said, with a peculiar smile.
“Getting on! It looks to me to be the other way.”
Turning his horse quickly round, after nodding to me, in the direction of the shows and drinking booths, he nearly turned it upon a tall, gaunt skeleton in a red cloak — Ketira the gipsy. She must have sprung out of the crowd.
But oh, how ill she looked! Hyde was strangely altered; but not as she was. The yellow face was shrivelled and shrunken, the fire had left her eyes. Hyde checked his horse; but the animal turned restive. He controlled it with his hand, and sat still before Ketira.
“Yes, look at me,” she burst forth. “For the last time. The end is close at hand both for you and for me. We shall meet Kettie where we are going.”
He leaned from his horse to speak to her: his voice a low sad wail, his words apparently those of deprecating prayer. Ketira heard him quietly to the end, gazing into his face, and then slowly turned away.
“Fare you well, Hyde Stockhausen. Farewell for ever.”
Before leaving the course Hyde had an accident. While talking to Jim Massock, some drums and trumpets struck up their noise at a neighbouring show; the horse started violently, and Hyde was thrown. He thought he was not much hurt and mounted again.
“What else could you expect?” demanded Duffham, when Hyde got back to Virginia Cottage. “You have not strength to sit a donkey, and you must go careering off to Worcester races on a fiery horse!”
But the fall had done Hyde some inward damage, and it hastened the end. He died that day week.
“Some men’s sins go before them to Judgment, and some follow after,” solemnly said Mr. Holland the next Sunday from the pulpit. “He who is gone from among us had taken his to his Saviour — and he is now at rest.”
“All chance and coincidence,” pronounced Duffham, talking over the strange threat of Ketira the gipsy and its stranger working out. “Yes; chance, I say, each of the three times. The woman, happening to be at hand, must have known by common report that the child was in peril; she may have learnt at Malvern that the wife was dying; and any goose with eyes in its h
ead might have read coming death on his face that afternoon on Pitchcroft. That’s all about it, Johnny.”
Very probably. The reader can exercise his own judgment. I only know it all happened.
THE CURATE OF ST. MATTHEW’S.
I.
“No, Johnny Ludlow, I shall not stay at home, and have the deeds sent up and down by post. I know what lawyers are; so will you, some time: this letter to be read and answered to-day; that paper to be digested and despatched back to-morrow — anything to enchance their bill of costs. I intend to be in London, on the spot; and so will you be, Mr. Johnny.”
So said Mr. Brandon to me, as we sat in the bay-window at Crabb Cot, at which place we were staying. I was willing enough to go to London; liked the prospect beyond everything; but he was not well, and I thought of the trouble to him.
“Of course, sir, if you consider it necessary we should be there. But — —”
“Now, Johnny Ludlow, I have told you my decision,” he interrupted, cutting me short in all the determination of his squeaky little voice. “You go with me to London, sir, and we start on Monday morning next; and I dare say we shall be kept there a week. I know what lawyers are.”
This happened when I came of age, twenty-one; but I should not be of age as to my property for four more years: until then, Mr. Brandon remained my arbitrary guardian and trustee, just as strictly as he had been. Arbitrary so far as doing the right thing as trustee went, not suffering me, or any one else, to squander a shilling. One small bit of property fell to me now; a farm; and old Brandon was making as much legal commotion over the transfer of it from his custody to mine, as though it had been veined with gold. For this purpose, to execute the deeds of transfer, he meant to take up his quarters in London, to be on the spot with the lawyers who had it in hand, and to carry me up with him.