Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  “He does not like it and would not countenance it: washed his hands of it (as he told us) altogether.”

  “Any good reason for that?”

  “Not particularly good, that I see. Somehow he disliked Hamlyn; and Tom Rivers wanted Eliza, which would have pleased him greatly. But Eliza was not without blame. My father gave way so far as to ask her to delay things for a few months, not to marry in haste, and she would not. She might have conceded as much as that.”

  “Did you ever know Eliza concede anything, Bertie?”

  “Well, not often.”

  “Who gave her away?”

  “I did: look at my gala toggery” — opening his overcoat. “He wanted to forbid it. ‘Don’t hinder me, father,’ I pleaded; ‘it is the last brotherly service I can ever render her.’ And so,” his tone changing to lightness, “I have been and gone and done it.”

  Harry Carradyne understood. “Not the last, Hubert; don’t say that. I hope you will live to render her many another yet.”

  Hubert smiled faintly. “Look at me,” he said in answer.

  “Yes, I know; I see how you look. But you may take a turn yet.”

  “Ah, miracles are no longer wrought for us. Shall I surprise you very much, cousin mine, if I say that were the offer made me of prolonged life, I am not sure that I should accept it?”

  “Not unless health were renewed with it; I can understand that. You have had to endure suffering, Bertie.”

  “Ay. Pain, discomfort, fears, weariness. After working out their torment upon me, they — why then they took a turn and opened out the vista of a refuge.”

  “A refuge?”

  “The one sure Refuge offered by God to the sick and sorrowful, the weary and heavy-laden — Himself. I found it. I found Him and all His wonderful mercy. It will not be long now, Harry, before I see Him face to face. And here comes His true minister, but for whom I might have missed the way.”

  Harry turned his head, and saw, advancing up the drive, a good-looking young clergyman. “Who is it?” he involuntarily cried.

  “Your brother-in-law, Robert Grame. Lucy’s husband.”

  It was not the fashion in those days for a bride’s mother (or one acting as her mother) to attend the bride to church; therefore Mrs. Carradyne, following it, was spared risk of conflict with Captain Monk on that score. She was in Eliza’s room, assisting at the putting on of the bridal robes (for we have to go back an hour or so) when a servant came up to say that Mr. Hamlyn waited below. Rather wondering — for he was to have driven straight to the church — Mrs. Carradyne went downstairs.

  “Pardon me, dear Mrs. Carradyne,” he said, as he shook hands, and she had never seen him look so handsome, “I could not pass the house without making one more effort to disarm Captain Monk’s prejudices, and asking for his blessing on us. Do you think he will consent to see me?”

  Mrs. Carradyne felt sure he would not, and said so. But she sent Rimmer to the library to ask the question. Mr. Hamlyn pencilled down a few anxious words on paper, folded it, and put it into the man’s hand.

  No; it proved useless. Captain Monk was harder than adamant; he sent Rimmer back with a flea in his ear, and the petition torn in two.

  “I feared so,” sighed Mrs. Carradyne. “He will not this morning see even Eliza.”

  Mr. Hamlyn did not sigh in return; he spoke a cross, impatient word: he had never been able to see reason in the Captain’s dislike to him, and, with a brief good-morning, went out to his carriage. But, remembering something when crossing the hall, he came back.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Carradyne; I quite forgot that I have a note for you. It is from Mrs. Peveril, I believe; it came to me this morning, enclosed in a letter of her husband’s.”

  “You have heard at last, then!”

  “At last — as you observe. Though Peveril had nothing particular to write about; I daresay he does not care for letter writing.”

  Slipping the note into her pocket, to be opened at leisure, Mrs. Carradyne returned to the adorning of Eliza. Somehow, it was rather a prolonged business — which made it late when the bride with her bridesmaid and Hubert drove from the door.

  Mrs. Carradyne remained in the room — to which Eliza was not to return — putting up this, and that. The time slipped on, and it was close upon twelve o’clock when she got back to the drawing-room. Captain Monk was in it then, standing at the window, which he had thrown wide open. To see more clearly the bridal party come out of church, was the thought that crossed Mrs. Carradyne’s mind in her simplicity.

  “I very much feared they would be late,” she observed, sitting down near her brother: and at that moment the church clock began to strike twelve.

  “A good thing if they were too late!” he answered. “Listen.”

  She supposed he wanted to count the strokes — what else could he be listening to? And now, by the stir at the distant gates, she saw that the bridal party had come out.

  “Good heavens, what’s that?” shrieked Mrs. Carradyne, starting from her chair.

  “The chimes,” stoically replied the Captain. And he proceeded to hum through the tune of “The Bay of Biscay,” and beat a noiseless accompaniment with his foot.

  “The Chimes, Emma,” he repeated, when the melody had finished itself out. “I ordered them to be played. It’s the last day of the old year, you know.”

  Laughing slightly at her consternation, Captain Monk closed the window and quitted the room. As Mrs. Carradyne took her handkerchief from her pocket to pass it over her face, grown white with startled terror, the note she had put there came out also, and fell on the carpet.

  Picking it up, she stood at the window, gazing forth. Her sight was not what it used to be; but she discerned the bride and bridegroom enter their carriage and drive away; next she saw the bridesmaid get into the carriage from the Hall, assisted by Hubert, and that drive off in its turn. She saw the crowd disperse, this way and that; she even saw the gig there, its occupant talking with John Cale. But she did not look at him particularly; and she had not the slightest idea but that Harry was in India.

  And all that time an undercurrent of depression was running riot in her heart. None knew with what a strange terror she had grown to dread the chimes.

  She sat down now and opened Mrs. Peveril’s note. It treated chiefly of the utterly astounding ways that untravelled old lady was meeting with in foreign parts. “If you will believe me,” wrote she, “the girl that waits on us wears carpet slippers down at heel, and a short cotton jacket for best, and she puts the tea-tray before me with the handle of the tea-pot turned to me and the spout standing outwards, and she comes right into the bed-room of a morning with Charles’s shaving-water without knocking.” But the one sentence that arrested Mrs. Carradyne’s attention above any other was the following: “I reckon that by this time you have grown well acquainted with our esteemed young friend. He is a good, kindly gentleman, and I’m sure never could have done anything to deserve his wife’s treatment of him.”

  “Can she mean Mr. Hamlyn?” debated Mrs. Carradyne, all sorts of ideas leaping into her mind with a rush. “If not — what other ‘esteemed friend’ can she allude to? — she, old herself, would call him young. But Mr. Hamlyn has not any wife. At least, had not until to-day.”

  She read the note over again. She sat with it open, buried in a reverie, thinking no end of things, good and bad: and the conclusion she at last came to was, that, with the unwonted exercise of letter-writing, poor old Mrs. Peveril’s head had grown confused.

  “Well, Hubert, did it all go off well?” she questioned, as her nephew entered the room, some sort of excitement on his wasted face. “I saw them drive away.”

  “Yes, it went off well; there was no hitch anywhere,” replied Hubert. “But, Aunt Emma, I have brought a friend home with me. Guess who it is.”

  “Some lady or other who came to see the wedding,” she returned. “I can’t guess.”

  “You never would, though I were to give you ten guesses; no, though
je vous donne en mille, as the French have it. What should you say to a young man come all the way over seas from India? There, that’s as good as telling you, Aunt Emma. Guess now.”

  “Oh, Hubert!” clasping her trembling hands. “It cannot be Harry! What is wrong?”

  Harry brought his bright face into the room and was clasped in his mother’s arms. She could not understand it one bit, and fears assailed her. Come home in this unexpected manner! Had he left the army? What had he done? What had he done? Hubert laughed and told her then.

  “He has done nothing wrong; everything that’s good. He has sold out at my father’s request and left with honours — and is come home the heir of Leet Hall. I said all along it was a shame to keep you out of the plot, Aunt Emma.”

  Well, it was glorious news for her. But, as if to tarnish its delight, like an envious sprite of evil, deep down in her mind lay that other news, just read — the ambiguous remark of old Mrs. Peveril’s.

  IV

  The walk on the old pier was pleasant enough in the morning sun. Though yet but the first month in the year, the days were bright, the blue skies without a cloud. Mr. and Mrs. Hamlyn had enjoyed the fine weather at Cheltenham for a week or two; from that pretty place they had now come to Brighton, reaching it the previous night.

  “Oh, it is delightful!” exclaimed Eliza, gazing at the waves. She had not seen the sea since she crossed it, a little girl, from the West Indies. Those were not yet the days when all people, gentle and simple, told one another that an autumn tour was essential to existence. “Look at the sunbeams sparkling on the ripples and on the white sails of the little boats! Philip, I should like to spend a month here.”

  “All right,” replied Mr. Hamlyn.

  They were staying at the Old Ship, a fashionable hotel then for ladies as well as gentlemen, and had come out after breakfast; and they had the pier nearly to themselves at that early hour. A yellow, gouty gentleman, who looked as if he had quarrelled with his liver in some clime all fire and cayenne, stood at the end leaning on his stick, alternately looking at the sea and listlessly watching any advancing stragglers.

  There came a sailor, swaying along, a rope in his hand; following him, walked demurely three little girls in frocks and trousers, with their French governess; then came two eye-glassed young men, dandified and supercilious, who appeared to have more money than brains — and the jaundiced man went into a gaping fit of lassitude.

  Anyone else coming? Yes; a lady and gentleman arm-in-arm: quiet, well-dressed, good-looking. As the invalid watched their approach, a puzzled look of doubt and surprise rose to his countenance. Moving forward a step or two on his gouty legs, he spoke.

  “Can it be possible, Hamlyn, that we meet here?”

  Even through his dark skin a red flush coursed into Mr. Hamlyn’s face. He was evidently very much surprised in his turn, if not startled.

  “Captain Pratt!” he exclaimed.

  “Major Pratt now,” was the answer, as they shook hands. “That wretched climate played the deuce with me, and they graciously gave me a step and allowed me to retire upon it. The very deuce, I assure you, Philip. Beg pardon, ma’am,” he added, seeing the lady look at him.

  “My wife, Mrs. Hamlyn,” spoke her husband.

  Major Pratt contrived to lift his hat, and bow: which feat, what with his gouty hands and his helpless legs and his great invalid stick, was a work of time. “I saw your marriage in the Times, Hamlyn, and wondered whether it could be you, or not: I didn’t know, you see, that you were over here. Wish you luck; and you also, ma’am. Hope it will turn out more fortunate for you, Philip, than — —”

  “Where are you staying?” broke in Mr. Hamlyn, as if something were frightening him.

  “At some lodgings over yonder, where they fleece me,” replied the Major. “You should see the bill they’ve brought me in for last week. They’ve made me eat four pounds of butter and five joints of meat, besides poultry and pickles and a fruit pie! Why, I live mostly upon dry toast; hardly dare touch an ounce of meat in a day. When I had ’em up before me, the harpies, they laid it upon my servant’s appetite — old Saul, you know. He answered them.”

  Mrs. Hamlyn laughed. “There are two articles that are very convenient, as I have heard, to some of the lodging-house keepers: their lodgers’ servant, and their own cat.”

  “By Jove, ma’am, yes!” said the Major. “But I’ve given warning to this lot where I am.”

  Saying au revoir to Major Pratt, Mr. Hamlyn walked down the pier again with his wife. “Who is he, Philip?” she asked. “You seem to know him well.”

  “Very well. He is a sort of connection of mine, I believe,” laughed Mr. Hamlyn, “and I saw a good deal of him in India a few years back. He is greatly changed. I hardly think I should have known him had he not spoken. It’s his liver, I suppose.”

  Leaving his wife at the hotel, Mr. Hamlyn went back again to Major Pratt, much to the lonely Major’s satisfaction, who was still leaning on his substantial stick as he gazed at the water.

  “The sight of you has brought back to my mind all that unhappy business, Hamlyn,” was his salutation. “I shall have a fit of the jaundice now, I suppose! Here — let’s sit down a bit.”

  “And the sight of you has brought it to mine,” said Mr. Hamlyn, as he complied. “I have been striving to drive it out of my remembrance.”

  “I know little about it,” observed the Major. “She never wrote to me at all afterwards, and you wrote me but two letters: the one announcing the fact of her disgrace; the other, the calamity and the deaths.”

  “That is quite enough to know; don’t ask me to go over the details to you personally,” said Mr. Hamlyn in a tone of passionate discomfort. “So utterly repugnant to me is the remembrance altogether, that I have never spoken of it — even to my present wife.”

  “Do you mean you’ve not told her you were once a married man?” cried Major Pratt.

  “No, I have not.”

  “Then you’ve shown a lack of judgment which I wouldn’t have given you credit for, my friend,” declared the Major. “A man may whisper to his girl any untoward news he pleases of his past life, and she’ll forgive and forget; aye, and worship him all the more for it, though it were the having set fire to a church: but if he keeps it as a bonne bouchée to drop out after marriage, when she has him fast and tight, she’ll curry-comb his hair for him in style. Believe that.”

  Mr. Hamlyn laughed.

  “There never was a hidden skeleton between man and wife yet but it came to light sooner or later,” went on the Major. “If you are wise, you will tell her at once, before somebody else does.”

  “What ‘somebody?’ Who is there here that knows it?”

  “Why, as to ‘here,’ I know it, and nearly spoke of it before her, as you must have heard; and my servant knows it. That’s nothing, you’ll say; we can be quiet, now I have the cue: but you are always liable to meet with people who knew you in those days, and who knew her. Take my advice, Philip Hamlyn, and tell your wife. Go and do it now.”

  “I daresay you are right,” said the younger man, awaking out of a reverie. “Of the two evils it may be the lesser.” And with lagging steps, and eyes that seemed to have weights to them, he set out to walk back to the Old Ship Hotel.

  IV. — NOT HEARD

  I

  That oft-quoted French saying, a mauvais-quart-d’heure, is a pregnant one, and may apply to small as well as to great worries of life: most of us know it to our cost. But, rely upon it, one of the very worst is that when a bride or bridegroom has to make a disagreeable confession to the other, which ought to have been made before going to church.

  Philip Hamlyn was finding it so. Standing over the fire, in their sitting-room at the Old Ship Hotel at Brighton, his elbow on the mantelpiece, his hand shading his eyes, he looked down at his wife sitting opposite him, and disclosed his tale: that when he married her fifteen days ago he had not been a bachelor, but a widower. There was no especial reason for his not having told h
er, save that he hated and abhorred that earlier period of his life and instinctively shunned its remembrance.

  Sent to India by his friends in the West Indies to make his way in the world, he entered one of the most important mercantile houses in Calcutta, purchasing a lucrative post in it. Mixing in the best society, for his introductions were undeniable, he in course of time met with a young lady named Pratt, who had come out from England to stay with her elderly cousins, Captain Pratt and his sister. Philip Hamlyn was caught by her pretty doll’s face, and married her. They called her Dolly: and a doll she was, by nature as well as by name.

  “Marry in haste and repent at leisure,” is as true a saying as the French one. Philip Hamlyn found it so. Of all vain, frivolous, heartless women, Mrs. Dolly Hamlyn turned out to be about the worst. Just a year or two of uncomfortable bickering, of vain endeavours on his part, now coaxing, now reproaching, to make her what she was not and never would be — a reasonable woman, a sensible wife — and Dolly Hamlyn fled. She decamped with a hair-brained lieutenant, the two taking sailing-ship for England, and she carrying with her her little one-year-old boy.

  I’ll leave you to guess what Philip Hamlyn’s sensations were. A calamity such as that does not often fall upon man. While he was taking steps to put his wife legally away for ever and to get back his child, and Captain Pratt was aiding and abetting (and swearing frightfully at the delinquent over the process), news reached them that Heaven’s vengeance had been more speedy than theirs. The ship, driven out of her way by contrary winds and other disasters, went down off the coast of Spain, and all the passengers on board perished. This was what Philip Hamlyn had to confess now: and it was more than silly of him not to have done it before.

  He touched but lightly upon it now. His tones were low, his words when he began somewhat confused: nevertheless his wife, gazing up at him with her large dark eyes, gathered an inkling of his meaning.