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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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"Johnny Ludlow" was the name used by Ellen Wood as the by-line for a series of 90 popular stories and serial novels published in the British monthly Argosy, which she bought in 1867 and edited under her married name, Mrs. Henry Wood. The first story signed by and featuring "Johnny Ludlow" appeared in January 1868, the last in January-June 1891.
Six collections of stories in the series were published in book form. The first story, "Shaving the Ponies' Tails," was not included in any of these collections, presumably because some elements of the narrative and characterization are atypical in comparison with the rest of the series. The 48th story, "Fred Temple's Warning," was also omitted.
—Roy Glashan
I HARDLY know whether to write this history; for its events did not occur within my own recollection, and I can only relate them at second- hand—from the Squire and others. They are curious enough; especially as regard the three parsons—one following upon another—in their connection with the Monk family, causing no end of talk in Church Leet parish, as well as in other parishes within earshot.
About three miles' distance from Church Dykely, going northwards across country, was the rural parish of Church Leet. It contained a few farmhouses and some labourers' cottages. The church, built of grey stone, stood in its large graveyard; the parsonage, a commodious house, was close by; both of them were covered with time-worn ivy. Nearly half a mile off, on a gentle eminence, rose the handsome mansion called Leet Hall, the abode of the Monk family. Nearly the whole of the parish—land, houses, church and all—belonged to them. At the time I am about to tell of they were the property of one man—Godfrey Monk.
The late owner of the place (except for one short twelvemonth) was old James Monk, Godfrey's father. Old James had three sons and one daughter—Emma—his wife dying early. The eldest son (mostly styled "young James") was about as wild a blade as ever figured in story; the second son, Raymond, was an invalid; the third, Godfrey, a reckless lad, ran away to sea when he was fourteen.
If the Monks were celebrated for one estimable quality more than another, it was temper: a cross-grained, imperious, obstinate temper. "Run away to sea, has he?" cried old James when he heard the news; "very well, at sea he shall stop." And at sea Godfrey did stop, not disliking the life, and perhaps not finding any other open to him. He worked his way up in the merchant service by degrees, until he became commander and was called Captain Monk.
The years went on. Young James died, and the other two sons grew to be middle-aged men. Old James, the father, found by signs and tokens that his own time was approaching; and he was the next to go. Save for a slender income bequeathed to Godfrey and to his daughter, the whole of the property was left to Raymond, and to Godfrey after him if Raymond had no son. The entail had been cut off in the past generation; for which act the reasons do not concern us.
So Raymond, ailing greatly always, entered into possession of his inheritance. He lived about a twelvemonth afterwards, and then died: died unmarried. Therefore Godfrey came into all.
People were curious, the Squire says, as to what sort of man Godfrey would turn out to be; for he had not troubled home much since he ran away. He was a widower; that much was known; his wife having been a native of Trinidad, in the West Indies.
A handsome man, with fair, curling hair (what was left of it); proud blue eyes; well-formed features with a chronic flush upon them, for he liked his glass, and took it; a commanding, imperious manner, and a temper uncompromising as the grave. Such was Captain Godfrey Monk; now in his forty- fifth year. Upon his arrival at Leet Hall after landing, with his children and one or two dusky attendants in their train, he was received by his sister Emma, Mrs. Carradyne. Major Carradyne had died fighting in India, and his wife, at the request of her brother Raymond, came then to live at Leet Hall. Not of necessity, for Mrs. Carradyne was well off and could have made her home where she pleased, but Raymond had liked to have her. Godfrey also expressed his pleasure that she should remain; she could act as mother to his children.
Godfrey's children were three: Katherine, aged seventeen; Hubert, aged ten; and Eliza, aged eight. The girls had their father's handsome features, but in their skin there ran a dusky tinge, hinting of other than pure Saxon blood; and they were every whit as haughtily self-willed as he was. The boy, Hubert, was extremely pretty, his face fair, his complexion delicately beautiful, his auburn hair bright, his manner winning; but he liked to exercise his own will, and appeared to have generally done it.
A day or two, and Mrs. Carradyne sat down aghast. "I never saw children so troublesome and self-willed in all my life, Godfrey," she said to her brother. "Have they ever been controlled at all?"
"Had their own way pretty much, I expect," answered the Captain. "I was not often at home, you know, and there's nobody else they'd obey."
"Well, Godfrey, if I am to remain here, you will have to help me manage them."
"That's as may be, Emma. When I deem it necessary to speak, I speak; otherwise I don't interfere. And you must not get into the habit of appealing to me, recollect."
Captain Monk's conversation was sometimes interspersed with sundry light words, not at all orthodox, and not necessarily delivered in anger. In those past days swearing was regarded as a gentleman's accomplishment; a sailor, it was believed, could not at all get along without it. Manners change. The present age prides itself upon its politeness: but what of its sincerity?
Mrs. Carradyne, mild and gentle, commenced her task of striving to tame her brother's rebellious children. She might as well have let it alone. The girls laughed at her one minute and set her at defiance the next. Hubert, who had good feeling, was more obedient; he did not openly defy her. At times, when her task pressed heavily upon her spirits, Mrs. Carradyne felt tempted to run away from Leet Hall, as Godfrey had run from it in the days gone by. Her own two children were frightened at their cousins, and she speedily sent both to school, lest they should catch their bad manners. Henry was ten, the age of Hubert; Lucy was between five and six.
Just before the death of Raymond Monk, the living of Church Leet became vacant, and the last act of his life was to present it to a worthy young clergyman named George West. This caused intense dissatisfaction to Godfrey. He had heard of the late incumbent's death, and when he arrived home and found the living filled up he proclaimed his anger loudly, lavishing abuse upon poor dead Raymond for his precipitancy. He had wanted to bestow it upon a friend of his, a Colonial chaplain, and had promised it to him. It was a checkmate there was no help for now, for Mr. West could not be turned out again; but Captain Monk was not accustomed to be checkmated, and resented it accordingly. He took up, for no other reason, a most inveterate dislike to George West, and showed it practically.
In every step the Vicar took, at every turn and thought, he found himself opposed by Captain Monk. Had he a suggestion to make for the welfare of the parish, his patron ridiculed it; did he venture to propose some wise measure at a vestry meeting, the Captain put him and his measure down. Not civilly either, but with a stinging contempt, semi- covert though it was, that made its impression on the farmers around. The Reverend George West was a man of humility, given to much self-disparagement, so he bore all in silence and hoped for better times.
The time went on; three years of it; Captain Monk had
fully settled down in his ancestral home, and the neighbours
had learnt what a domineering, self-willed man he was. But
he had his virtues. He was kind in a general way, generous
where it pleased him to be, inordinately attached to his
children, and hospitable to a fault.
On the last day of every year, as the years came round, Captain Monk, following his late father's custom, gave a grand dinner to his tenants; and a very good custom it would have been, but that he and they got rather too jolly. The parson was always invited—and went; and sometimes a few of Captain Monk's personal friends were added.
Christmas came round this year as usual, and the invitations to the dinner went out. One came to Squire Todhetley, a youngish man then, and one to my father, William Ludlow, who was younger than the Squire. It was a green Christmas; the weather so warm and genial that the hearty farmers, flocking to Leet Hall, declared they saw signs of buds sprouting in the hedges, whilst the large fire in the Captain's dining-room was quite oppressive.
Looking from the window of the parsonage sitting-room in the twilight, while drawing on his gloves, preparatory to setting forth, stood Mr. West. His wife was bending over an easy-chair, in which their only child, little Alice, lay back, covered up. Her breathing was quick, her skin parched with fever. The wife looked sickly herself.
"Well, I suppose it is time to go," observed Mr. West, slowly. "I shall be late if I don't."
"I rather wonder you go at all, George," returned his wife. "Year after year, when you come back from this dinner, you invariably say you will not go to another."
"I know it, Mary. I dislike the drinking that goes on—and the free conversation—and the objectionable songs; I feel out of place in it all."
"And the Captain's contemptuous treatment of yourself, you might add."
"Yes, that is another unwelcome item in the evening's programme."
"Then, George, why do you go?"
"Well, I think you know why. I do not like to refuse the invitation; it would only increase Captain Monk's animosity and widen still further the breach between us. As patron he holds so much in his power. Besides that, my presence at the table does act, I believe, as a mild restraint on some of them, keeping the drinking and the language somewhat within bounds. Yes, I suppose my duty lies in going. But I shall not stay late, Mary," added the parson, bending to look at the suffering child; "and if you see any real necessity for the doctor to be called in to-night, I will go for him."
"Dood-bye, pa-pa," lisped the little four-year-old maiden.
He kissed the little hot face, said adieu to his wife and went out, hoping that the child would recover without the doctor; for the living of Church Leet was but a poor one, though the parsonage house was so handsome. It was a hundred-and-sixty pounds a year, for which sum the tithes had been compounded, and Mr. West had not much money to spare for superfluities—especially as he had to substantially help his mother.
The twilight had deepened almost to night, and the lights in the mansion seemed to smile a cheerful welcome as he approached it. The pillared entrance, ascended to by broad steps, stood in the middle, and a raised terrace of stone ran along before the windows on either side. It was quite true that every year, at the conclusion of these feasts, the Vicar resolved never to attend another; but he was essentially a man of peace, striving ever to lay oil upon troubled waters, after the example left by his Master.
Dinner. The board was full. Captain Monk presided, genial to-day; genial even to the parson. Squire Todhetley faced the Captain at the foot; Mr. West sat at the Squire's right hand, between him and Farmer Threpp, a quiet man and supposed to be a very substantial one. All went on pleasantly; but when the elaborate dinner gave place to dessert and wine-drinking, the company became rather noisy.
"I think it's about time you left us," cried the Squire by-and-by to young Hubert, who sat next him on the other side: and over and over again Mr. Todhetley has repeated to us in later years the very words that passed.
"By George, yes!" put in a bluff and hearty fox-hunter, the master of the hounds, bending forward to look at the lad, for he was in a line with him, and breaking short off an anecdote he was regaling the company with. "I forgot you were there, Master Hubert. Quite time you went to bed."
"I daresay!" laughed the boy. "Please let me alone, all of you. I don't want attention drawn to me."
But the slight commotion had attracted Captain Monk's notice. He saw his son.
"What's that?—Hubert! What brings you there now, you young pirate? I ordered you to go out with the cloth."
"I am not doing any harm, papa," said the boy, turning his fair and beautiful face towards his father.
Captain Monk pointed his stern finger at the door; a mandate which Hubert dared not disobey, and he went out.
The company sat on, an interminable period of time it seemed to the Vicar. He glanced stealthily at his watch. Eleven o'clock.
"Thinking of going, Parson?" said Mr. Threpp. "I'll go with you. My head's not one of the strongest, and I've had about as much as I ought to carry."
They rose quietly, not to disturb the table; intending to steal away, if possible, without being observed. Unluckily, Captain Monk chanced to be looking that way.
"Halloa! who's turning sneak?—Not you, surely, Parson!—" in a meaningly contemptuous tone. "And you, Threpp, of all men! Sit down again, both of you, if you don't want to quarrel with me. Odds fish! has my dining-room got sharks in it, that you'd run away? Winter, just lock the door, will you; you are close to it, and pass up the key to me."
Mr. Winter, a jovial old man and the largest tenant on the estate, rose to do the Captain's behest, and sent up the key.
"Nobody quits my room," said the host, as he took it, "until we have seen the old year out and the new one in. What else do you come for—eh, gentlemen?"
The revelry went on. The decanters circulated more quickly, the glasses clinked, the songs became louder, the Captain's sea stories broader. Mr. West perforce made the best of the situation, certain words of Holy Writ running through his memory:
" Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright!"
Well, more than well, for Captain Monk, that he had not looked upon the red wine that night!
In the midst of all this, the hall clock began to strike twelve. The Captain rose, after filling his glass to the brim.
"Bumpers round, gentlemen. On your legs. Ready? Hooray! Here's to the shade of the year that's gone, and may it have buried all our cares with it! And here's good luck to the one setting in. A happy New Year to you all; and may we never know a moment in it worse than the present? Three- times-three—and drain your glasses."
"But we have had the toast too soon!" called out one of the farmers, making the discovery close after the cheers had subsided. "It wants some minutes yet to midnight, Captain."
Captain Monk snatched out his watch—worn in those days in what was called the fob-pocket—its chain and bunch of seals at the end hanging down.
"By Jupiter!" he exclaimed. "Hang that butler of mine! He knew the hall clock was too fast, and I told him to put it back. If his memory serves him no better than this, he may ship himself off to a fresh berth.—Hark! Listen!"
It was the church clock striking twelve. The sound reached the dining-room room very clearly, the wind setting that way. "Another bumper," cried the Captain, and his guests drank it.
"This day twelvemonth I was at a feast in Derbyshire; the bells of a neighbouring church rang in the year with pleasant melody; chimes they were," remarked a guest, who was a partial stranger. "Your church has no bells, I suppose?"
"It has one; an old ting-tang that calls us to service on a Sunday," said Mr. Winter.
"I like to hear those midnight chimes, for my part. I like to hear them chime in the new year," went on the stranger.
"Chimes!" cried out Captain Monk, who was getting very considerably elated, "why should we not have chimes? Mr. West, why don't we have chimes?"
"Our church does not possess any, sir—as this gentleman has just remarked," was Mr. West's answer.
"Egad, but that parson of ours is going to set us all ablaze with his wit!" jerked out the Captain ironically. "I asked, sir, why we should not get a set of chimes; I did not say we had got them. Is there any just cause or impediment why we should not, Mr. Vicar?"
"Only the expense," replied the Vicar, in a conciliatory tone.
"Oh, bother expense! That's what you are always wanting to groan over. Mr. Churchwarden Threpp, we will call a vestry meeting and make a rate."
"The parish could not bear it, Captain Monk," remonstrated the clergyman. "You know what dissatisfaction was caused by the last extra rate put on, and how low an ebb things are at just now."
"When I will a thing, I do it," retorted the Captain, with a meaning word or two. "We'll send out the rate and we'll get the chimes."
"It will, I fear, lie in my duty to protest against it," spoke the uneasy parson.
"It may lie in your duty to be a wet blanket, but you won't protest me out of my will. Gentlemen, we will all meet here again this time twelvemonth, when the chimes shall ring-in the new year for you.—— Here, Dutton, you can unlock the door now," concluded the Captain, handing the key to the other churchwarden. "Our parson is upon thorns to be away from us."
Not the parson only, but several others availed themselves of the opportunity to escape.
IT perhaps did not surprise the parish to find that its owner and master, Captain Monk, intended to persist in his resolution of embellishing the church-tower with a set of chiming-bells. They knew him too well to hope anything less. Why! two years ago, at the same annual feast, some remarks or other at table put it into his head to declare he would stop up the public path by the Rill; and his obstinate will carried it out, regardless of the inconvenience it caused.
A vestry meeting was called, and the rate (to obtain funds for the bells) was at length passed. Two or three voices were feebly lifted in opposition; Mr. West alone had courage to speak out; but the Captain put him down with his strong hand. It may be asked why Captain Monk did not provide the funds himself for this whim. But he would never touch his own pocket for the benefit of the parish if he could help it: and it was thought that his antagonism to the parson was the deterring motive.
To impose the rate was one thing, to collect it quite another. Some of the poorer ratepayers protested with tears in their eyes that they could not pay. Superfluous rates (really not necessary ones) were perpetually being inflicted upon them, they urged, and were bringing them, together with a succession of recent bad seasons, to the verge of ruin. They carried their remonstrances to their Vicar, and he in turn carried them to Captain Monk.
It only widened the breach. The more persistently, though gently, Mr. West pleaded the cause of his parishioners, asking the Captain to be considerate to them for humanity's sake, the greater grew the other's obstinacy in holding to his own will. To be thus opposed roused all the devil within him—it was his own expression; and he grew to hate Mr. West with an exceeding bitter hatred.
The chimes were ordered—to play one tune only. Mr. West asked, when the thing was absolutely inevitable, that at least some sweet and sacred melody, acceptable to church- going ears, might be chosen; but Captain Monk fixed on a sea-song that was a favourite of his own—"The Bay of Biscay." At the end of every hour, when the clock had struck, the Bay of Biscay was to burst forth to charm the parish.
The work was put in hand at once, Captain Monk finding the necessary funds, to be repaid by the proceeds of the rate. Other expenses were involved, such as the strengthening of the belfry. The rate was not collected quickly. It was, I say, one of those times of scarcity that people used to talk so much of years ago; and when the parish beadle, who was the parish collector, went round with the tax-paper in his hand, the poorer of the cottagers could not respond to it. Some of them had not paid the last levy, and Captain Monk threatened harsh measures. Altogether, what with one thing or another, Church Leet that year was kept in a state of ferment. But the work went on.
One windy day in September, Mr. West sat in his study
writing a sermon, when a jarring crash rang out from the
church close by. He leaped from his chair. The unusual noise
had startled him; and it struck on every chord of vexation
he possessed. He knew that workmen were busy in the tower,
but this was the first essay of the chimes. The bells had
clashed in some way one upon the other; not giving out The
Bay of Biscay or any other melody, but a very discordant
jangle indeed. It was the first and the last time that poor
George West heard their sound.
He put the blotting-paper upon his sermon; he was in no mind to continue it then; took up his hat and went out. His wife spoke to him from the open window.
"Are you going out now, George? Tea is all but ready."
Turning back on the path, he passed into the sitting- room. A cup of tea might soothe his nerves. The tea-tray stood on the table, and Mrs. West, caddy in hand, was putting the tea into the tea-pot. Little Alice sat gravely by.
"Did you hear dat noise up in the church, papa?" she asked.
"Yes, I heard it, dear," sighed the Vicar.
"A fine clashing!" cried Mrs. West. "I have heard something else this afternoon, George, worse than that: Bean's furniture is being taken away."
"What?" cried the Vicar.
"It's true. Sarah went out on an errand and passed the cottage. The chairs and tables were being put outside the door by two men, she says: brokers, I conclude."
Mr. West made short work of his tea and started for the scene. Thomas Bean was a very small farmer indeed, renting about thirty acres. What with the heavy rates, as he said, and other outgoings and bad seasons, and ill-luck altogether, he had been behind in his payments this long while; and now the ill-luck seemed to have come to a climax. Bean and his wife were old; their children were scattered abroad.
"Oh, sir," cried the old lady when she saw the Vicar, the tears raining from her eyes, "it cannot be right that this oppression should fall upon us! We had just managed—Heaven knows how, for I'm sure I don't—to pay the Midsummer rent; and now they've come upon us for the rates, and have took away things worth ten times the sum."
"For the rates!" mechanically spoke the Vicar.
She supposed it was a question. "Yes, sir; two of 'em we had in the house. One was for putting up the chimes; and the other—well, I can't just remember what the other was. The beadle, old Crow, comes in, sir, this afternoon. 'Where be the master?' says he. 'Gone over to t'other side of Church Dykely,' says I. 'Well,' says he, upon that, 'you be going to have some visitors presently, and it's a pity he's out.' 'Visitors, for what, Crow?' says I. 'Oh, you'll see,' says he; 'and then perhaps you'll wish you'd bestirred yourselves to pay your just dues. Captain Monk's patience have been running on for a goodish while, and at last it have run clean out.' Well, sir——"
She had to make a pause; unable to control her grief.
"Well, sir," she went on presently, "Crow's back was hardly turned, when up came two men, wheeling a truck. I saw 'em afar off, by the ricks yonder. One came in; t'other stayed outside with the truck. He asked me whether I was ready with the money for the taxes; and I told him I was not ready, and had but a couple of shillings in the house. 'Then I must take the value of it in kind,' says he. And without another word, he beckons in the outside man to help him. Our middle table, a mahogany, they seized; and the handsome oak chest, which had been our pride; and the master's arm- chair—— But, there! I can't go on."
Mr. West felt nearly as sorrowful as she, and far more angry. In his heart he believed that Captain Monk had done this oppressive thing in revenge. A great deal of ill- feeling had existed in the parish touching the rate made for the chimes; and the Captain assumed that the few who had not yet paid it would not pay—not that they could not.
Quitting the cottage in an impulse of anger, he walked swiftly to Leet Hall. It lay in his duty, as he fully deemed, to avow fearlessly to Captain Monk what he thought of this act of oppression, and to protest against it. The beams of the setting sun, sinking below the horizon in the still autumn evening, fell across the stubbled fields from which the corn had not long been reaped; all around seemed to speak of peace.
To accommodate two gentlemen who had come from Worcester that day to Leet Hall on business, and wished to quit it again before dark, the dinner had been served earlier than usual. The guests had left, but Captain Monk was seated still over his wine in the dining-room when Mr. West was shown in. In crossing the hall to it, he met Mrs. Carradyne, who shook hands with him cordially.
Captain Monk looked surprised. "Why, this is an unexpected pleasure—a visit from you, Mr. Vicar," he cried, in mocking jest. "Hope you have come to your senses! Sit down. Will you take port or sherry?"
"Captain Monk," returned the Vicar, gravely, as he took the chair the servant had placed, "I am obliged for your courtesy, but I did not intrude upon you this evening to drink wine. I have seen a very sad sight, and I am come hoping to induce you to repair it."
"Seen what?" cried the Captain, who, it is well to mention, had been taking his wine very freely, even for him. "A flaming sword in the sky?"
"Your tenants, poor Thomas Bean and his wife, are being turned out of house and home, or almost equivalent to it. Some of their furniture has been seized this afternoon to satisfy the demand for these disputed taxes."
"Who disputes the taxes?"
"The tax imposed for the chimes was always a disputed tax; and——"
"Tush!" interrupted the Captain; "Bean owes other things as well as taxes."
"It was the last feather, sir, which broke the camel's back."
"The last feather will not be taken off, whether it breaks backs or leaves them whole," retorted the Captain, draining his glass of port and filling it again. "Take you note of that, Mr. Parson."
"Others are in the same condition as the Beans—quite unable to pay these rates. I pray you, Captain Monk—I am here to pray you—not to proceed in the same manner against them. I would also pray you, sir, to redeem this act of oppression by causing their goods to be returned to these two poor, honest, hard-working people."
"Hold your tongue!" retorted the Captain, aroused to anger. "A pretty example you'd set, let you have your way. Every one of the lot shall be made to pay to the last farthing. Who the devil is to pay, do you suppose, if they don't?"
"Rates are imposed upon the parish needlessly, Captain Monk; it has been so ever since my time here. Pardon me for saying that if you put up chimes to gratify yourself, you should bear the expense, and not throw it upon those who have a struggle to get bread to eat."
Captain Monk drank off another glass. "Any more treason, Parson?"
"Yes," said Mr. West, "if you like to call it so. My conscience tells me that the whole procedure in regard to setting up these chimes is so wrong, so manifestly unjust, that I have determined not to allow them to be heard until the rates levied for them are refunded to the poor and oppressed. I believe I have the power to close the belfry- tower, and I shall act upon it."
"By Jove! do you think you are going to stand between me and my will?" cried the Captain passionately. "Every individual who has not yet paid the rate shall be made to pay it to-morrow."
"There is another world, Captain Monk," interposed the mild voice of the minister, "to which, I hope, we are all——"
"If you attempt to preach to me——"
At this moment a spoon fell to the ground by the sideboard. The Vicar turned to look; his back was towards it; the Captain peered also at the end of the rapidly- darkening room: when both became aware that one of the servants—Michael, who had shown in Mr. West—stood there; had stood there all the time.
"What are you waiting for, sirrah?" roared his master. "We don't want you. Here! put this window open an inch or two before you go; the room's close."
"Shall I bring lights, sir?" asked Michael, after doing as he was directed.
"No: who wants lights? Stir the fire into a blaze."
Michael left them. It was from him that thus much of the conversation was subsequently known.
Not five minutes had elapsed when a commotion was heard in the dining-room. Then the bell rang violently, and the Captain opened the door—overturning a chair in his passage to it—and shouted out for a light. More than one servant flew to obey the order: in his hasty moods their master brooked not delay: and three separate candles were carried in.
"Good lack, master!" exclaimed the butler, John Rimmer, who was a native of Church Dykely, "what's amiss with the Parson?"
"Lift him up, and loosen his neck-cloth," said Captain Monk, his tone less imperious than usual.
Mr. West lay on the hearthrug near his chair, his head resting close to the fender. Rimmer raised his head, another servant took off his black neck-tie; for it was only on high days that the poor Vicar indulged in a white one. He gasped twice, struggled slightly, and then lay quietly in the butler's arms.
"Oh, sir!" burst forth the man in a horror-stricken voice to his master, "this is surely death!"
It surely was. George West, who had gone there but just before in the height of health and strength, had breathed his last.
How did it happen? How could it have happened? Ay, how indeed? It was a question which has never been entirely solved in Church Leet to this day.
Captain Monk's account, both privately and at the inquest, was this: As they talked further together, after Michael left the room, the Vicar went on to browbeat him shamefully about the new chimes, vowing they should never play, never be heard; at last, rising in an access of passion, the Parson struck him (the Captain) in the face. He returned the blow—who wouldn't return it?—and the Vicar fell. He believed his head must have struck against the iron fender in falling: if not, if the blow had been an unlucky one (it took effect just behind the left ear), it was only given in self-defence. The jury, composed of Captain Monk's tenants, expressed themselves satisfied, and returned a verdict of Accidental Death.
"A false account," pronounced poor Mrs. West, in her dire tribulation. "My husband never struck him—never; he was not one to be goaded into unbecoming anger, even by Captain Monk. George struck no blow whatever; I can answer for it. If ever a man was murdered, he has been."
Curious rumours arose. It was said that Mrs. Carradyne, taking the air on the terrace outside in the calmness of the autumn evening, heard the fatal quarrel through the open window; that she heard Mr. West, after he had received the death blow, wail forth a prophecy (or whatever it might be called) that those chimes would surely be accursed; that whenever their sound should be heard, so long as they were suffered to remain in the tower, it should be the signal of woe to the Monk family.
Mrs. Carradyne utterly denied this; she had not been on the terrace at all, she said. Upon which the onus was shifted to Michael: who, it was suspected, had stolen out to listen to the end of the quarrel, and had heard the ominous words. Michael, in his turn, also denied it; but he was not believed. Anyway, the covert whisper had gone abroad and would not be laid.
CAPTAIN MONK speedily filled up the vacant living, appointing to it the Reverend Thomas Dancox, an occasional visitor at Leet Hall, who was looking out for one.
The new Vicar turned out to be a man after the Captain's heart, a rollicking, jovial, fox-hunting young parson, as many a parson was in those days—and took small blame to himself for it. He was only a year or two past thirty, good-looking, of taking manners and hail-fellow-well-met with the parish in general, who liked him and called him to his face Tom Dancox.
All this pleased Captain Monk. But very soon something was to arrive that did not please him—a suspicion that the young parson and his daughter Katherine were on rather too good terms with one another.
One day in November he stalked into the drawing-room, where Katherine was sitting with her aunt. Hubert and Eliza were away at school, also Mrs. Carradyne's two children.
"Was Dancox here last night?" began Captain Monk.
"Yes," replied Mrs. Carradyne.
"And the evening before—Monday?"
Mrs. Carradyne felt half afraid to answer, the Captain's tone was becoming so threatening. "I—I think so," she rather hesitatingly said. "Was he not, Katherine?"
Katherine Monk, a dark, haughty young woman, twenty-one now, turned round with a flush on her handsome face. "Why do you ask, papa?"
"I ask to be answered," replied he, standing with his hands in the pockets of his velveteen shooting-coat, a purple tinge of incipient anger rising in his cheeks.
"Then Mr. Dancox did spend Monday evening here."
"And I saw him walking with you in the meadow by the rill this morning," continued the Captain. "Look here, Katherine, no sweethearting with Tom Dancox. He may do very well for a parson; I like him as such, as such only, you understand; but he can be no match for you."
"You are disturbing yourself unnecessarily, sir," said Katherine, her own tone an angry one.
"Well, I hope that is so; I should not like to think otherwise. Anyway, a word in season does no harm; and, take you notice that I have spoken it. You also, Emma."
As he left the room, Mrs. Carradyne spoke, dropping her voice: "Katherine, you know that I had already warned you. I told you it would not do to fall into any particular friendship with Mr. Dancox; that your father would never countenance it."
"And if I were to?—and if he did not?" scornfully returned Katherine. "What then, Aunt Emma?"
"Be silent, child; you must not talk in that strain. Your papa is perfectly right in this matter. Tom Dancox is not suitable in any way—for you."
This took place in November. Katherine paid little heed to the advice; she was not one to put up with advice of any sort, and she and Mr. Dancox met occasionally under the rose. Early in December she went with Mr. Dancox into the Parsonage, while he searched for a book he was about to lend her. That was the plea; the truth, no doubt, being that the two wanted a bit of a chat in quiet. As ill-luck had it, when she was coming out again, the Parson in attendance on her as far as the gate, Captain Monk came by.
A scene ensued. Captain Monk, in a terrible access of passion, vowed by all the laws of the Medes and Persians, which alter not, that never, in life or after death, should those two rebellious ones be man and wife, and he invoked unheard-of penalties on their heads should they dare to contemplate disobedience to his decree.
Thenceforth there was no more open rebellion; upon the surface all looked smooth. Captain Monk understood the folly to be at an end: that the two had come to their senses; and he took Tom Dancox back into favour. Mrs. Carradyne assumed the same. But Katherine had her father's unyielding will, and the Parson was bold and careless, and in love.
The last day of the year came round, and the usual
banquet would come with it. The weather this Christmas was
not like that of last; the white snow lay on the ground, the
cold biting frost hardened the glistening icicles on the
trees.
And the chimes? Ready these three months past, they had not yet been heard. They would be to-night. Whether Captain Monk wished the remembrance of Mr. West's death to die away a bit first, or that he preferred to open the treat on the banqueting night, certain it was that he had kept them silent. When the church clock should toll the midnight knell of the old year, the chimes would ring out to welcome the new one, and gladden the ears of Church Leet.
But not without a remonstrance. That morning, as the Captain sat in his study writing a letter, Mrs. Carradyne came to him.
"Godfrey," she said in a low and pleading tone, "you will not suffer the chimes to play to-night, will you? Pray do not."
"Not suffer the chimes to play?" cried the Captain. "But indeed I shall. Why, this is the special night they were put up for."
"I know it, Godfrey. But—you cannot think what a strangely strong feeling I have against it: an instinct, it seems to me. The chimes have brought nothing but discomfort and disaster yet; they may bring more in the future."
Captain Monk stared at her. "What d'ye mean, Emma?"
" I would never let them be heard," she said impressively. "I would have them taken down again. The story went about, you know, that poor George West in dying prophesied that whenever they should be heard woe would fall upon this house. I am not superstitious, Godfrey, but——"
Sheer passion had tied, so far, Godfrey Monk's lips. "Not superstitious!" he raved out. "You are worse than that, Emma—a fool. How dare you bring your nonsense here? There's the door."
The banquet hour approached. Nearly all the guests of last year were again present in the warm and holly-decorated dining-room, the one notable exception being the ill-fated Parson West. Parson Dancox came in his stead, and said grace from the post of honour at the Captain's right hand. Captain Monk did not appear to feel any remorse or regret: he was jovial, free, and grandly hospitable; one might suppose he had promoted the dead clergyman to a canonry instead of to a place in the churchyard.
"What became of the poor man's widow, Squire?" whispered a gentleman from the neighbourhood of Evesham to Mr. Todhetley, who sat on the left hand of his host; Sir Thomas Rivers taking the foot of the table this year.
"Mrs. West? Well, we heard she opened a girls' school up in London," breathed the Squire.
"And what tale was that about his leaving a curse on the chimes?—I never heard the rights of it."
"Hush!" said the Squire cautiously. "Nobody talks of that here. Or believes it, either. Poor West was a man to leave a blessing behind him; never a curse."
Hubert, at home for the holidays, was again at table. He was fourteen now, tall of his age and slender, his blue eyes bright, his complexion delicately beautiful. The pleated cambric frill of his shirt, which hung over the collar of his Eton jacket after the fashion of the day, was carried low in front, displaying the small white throat; his golden hair curled naturally. A boy to admire and be proud of. The manners were more decorous this year than they ever had been, and Hubert was allowed to sit on. Possibly the shadow of George West's unhappy death lay insensibly upon the party.
It was about half-past nine o'clock when the butler came into the room, bringing a small note, twisted up, to his master from Mrs. Carradyne. Captain Monk opened it and held it towards one of the lighted branches to read the few words it contained.
"A gentleman is asking to speak a word to Mr. Dancox. He says it is important."
Captain Monk tore the paper to bits. "Not to- night, tell your mistress, is my answer," said he to Rimmer. "Hubert, you can go to your aunt now; it's past your bed-time."
There could be no appeal, as the boy knew; but he went off unwillingly and in bitter resentment against Mrs. Carradyne. He supposed she had sent for him.
"What a cross old thing you are, Aunt Emma!" he exclaimed as he entered the drawing-room on the other side the hall. "You won't let Harry go in at all to the banquets, and you won't let me stay at them! Papa meant—I think he meant—to let me remain there to hear the chimes. Why need you have interfered to send for me?"
"I neither interfered with you, Hubert, nor sent for you. A gentleman, who did not give his name and preferred to wait outside, wants to see Mr. Dancox; that's all," said Mrs. Carradyne. "You gave my note to your master, Rimmer?"
"Yes, ma'am," replied the butler. "My master bade me say to you that his answer was not to-night."
Katherine Monk, her face betraying some agitation, rose from the piano. "Was the message not given to Mr. Dancox?" she asked of Rimmer.
"Not while I was there, Miss Katherine. The master tore the note into bits, after reading it; and dropped them under the table."
Now it chanced that Mr. Dancox, glancing covertly at the note while the Captain held it to the light, had read what was written there. For a few minutes he said nothing. The Captain was busy sending round the wine.
"Captain Monk—pardon me—I saw my name on that bit of paper; it caught my eye as you held it out," he said in a low tone. "Am I called out? Is anyone in the parish dying?"
Thus questioned, Captain Monk told the truth. No one was dying, and he was not called out to the parish. Some gentleman was asking to speak to him; only that.
"Well, I'll just see who it is, and what he wants," said Mr. Dancox, rising. "Won't be away two minutes, sir."
"Bring him back with you; tell him he'll find good wine here and jolly cheer," said the Captain. And Mr. Dancox went out, swinging his napkin in his hand.
In crossing the hall he met Katherine, exchanged a hasty word with her, let fall the serviette on a chair as he caught up his hat and overcoat, and went out. Katherine ran upstairs.
Hubert lay down on one of the drawing-room sofas. In point of fact, that young gentleman could not walk straight. A little wine takes effect on youngsters, especially when they are not accustomed to it. Mrs. Carradyne told Hubert the best place for him was bed. Not a bit of it, the boy answered: he should go out on the terrace at twelve o'clock; the chimes would be fine, heard out there. He fell asleep almost as he spoke; presently he woke up, feeling headachy, cross and stupid, and of his own accord went up to bed.
Meanwhile, the dining-room was getting jollier and louder as the time passed on towards midnight. Great wonder was expressed at the non-return of the parson; somebody must be undoubtedly grievously sick or dying. Mr. Speck, the quiet little Hurst Leet doctor, dissented from this. Nobody was dying in the parish, he affirmed, or sick enough to need a priest; as a proof of it, he had not been sent for.
Ring, ring, ring! broke forth the chimes on the quiet midnight air, as the church clock finished striking twelve. It was a sweet sound; even those prejudiced against the chimes could hear that: the windows had been opened in readiness.
The glasses were charged; the company stood on their legs, some of them not at all steady legs just then, bending their ears to listen. Captain Monk stood in his place, majestically waving his head and his left hand to keep time in harmony with The Bay of Biscay. His right hand held his goblet in readiness for the toast when the sounds should cease.
Ring, ring, ring! chimed the last strokes of the bells, dying away to faintness on the still evening air. Suddenly, amidst the hushed silence, and whilst the sweet melody fell yet unbroken on the room, there arose a noise as of something falling outside on the terrace, mingled with a wild scream and the crash of breaking glass.
One of the guests rushed to the window, and put his head out of it. So far as he could see, he said (perhaps his sight was somewhat obscured), it was a looking-glass lying further up on the terrace.
Thrown out from one of the upper windows! scornfully pronounced the Captain, full of wrath that it should have happened at that critical moment to mar the dignity of his coming toast. And he gave the toast heartily; and the new year came in for them all with good wishes and good wine.
Some little time yet ere the company finally rose. The mahogany frame of the broken looking-glass, standing on end, was conspicuous on the white ground in the clear frosty night, as they streamed out from the house. Mr. Speck, whose sight was rather remarkably good, peered at it curiously from the hall steps, and then walked quickly along the snowy terrace towards it.
Sure enough, it was a looking-glass, broken in its fall from an open window above. But, lying by it in the deep snow, in his white night-shirt, was Hubert Monk.
When the chimes began to play, Hubert was not asleep. Sitting up in bed, he disposed himself to listen. After a bit they began to grow fainter; Hubert impatiently dashed to the window and threw it up to its full height as he jumped on the dressing-table, when in some unfortunate way he overbalanced himself, and pitched out on the terrace beneath, carrying the looking-glass with him. The fall was not much, for his room was in one of the wings, the windows of which were low; but the boy had struck his head in falling, and there he had lain, insensible, on the terrace, one hand still clasping the looking-glass.
All the rosy wine-tint fading away to a sickly paleness on the Captain's face, he looked down on his well-beloved son. The boy was carried indoors to his room, reviving with the movement.
"Young bones are elastic," pronounced Mr. Speck, when he had examined him; "and none of these are broken. He will probably have a cold from the exposure; that's about the worst."
He seemed to have it already: he was shivering from head to foot now, as he related the above particulars. All the family had assembled round him, except Katherine.
"Where is Katherine?" suddenly inquired her father, noticing her absence.
"I cannot think where she is," said Mrs. Carradyne. "I have not seen her for an hour or two. Eliza says she is not in her room; I sent her to see. She is somewhere about, of course."
"Go and look for your sister, Eliza. Tell her to come here," said Captain Monk. But though Eliza went at once, her quest was useless.
Miss Katherine was not in the house: Miss Katherine had made a moonlight flitting from it that evening with the Reverend Thomas Dancox.
IT could not be said the Church Leet chimes brought good when they rang out that night at midnight, as the old year was giving place to the new. Mrs. Carradyne, in her superstition, thought they brought evil. Certainly evil set in at the same time, and Captain Monk, with all his scoffing obstinacy, could not fail to see it. That fine young lad, his son, fell through the window listening to them; and in the self-same hour the knowledge reached him that Katherine, his eldest and dearest child, had flown from his roof in defiant disobedience, to set up a home of her own.
Hubert was soon well of his bruises; but not of the cold induced by lying in the snow, clad only in his white night- shirt. In spite of all Mr. Speck's efforts, rheumatic fever set in, and for some time Hubert hovered between life and death. He recovered; but would never again be the strong, hearty lad he had been—though indeed he had never been very physically strong. The doctor privately hoped that the heart would be found all right in future, but he would not have answered for it.
The blow that told most on Captain Monk was that inflicted by Katherine. And surely never was disobedient marriage carried out with the impudent boldness of hers. Church Leet called it "cheek." Church Leet (disbelieving the facts when they first oozed out) could talk of nothing else for weeks. For Katherine had been married in the church hard by, that same night.
Special licenses were very uncommon things in those days; they cost too much; but the Reverend Thomas Dancox had procured one. With Katherine's money: everybody guessed that. She had four hundred a-year of her own, inherited from her dead mother, and full control over it. So the special license was secured, and their crafty plans were laid. The stranger who had presented himself at the Hall that night (by arrangement), asking for Mr. Dancox, thus affording an excuse for his quitting the banquet-room, was a young clergyman of Worcester, come over especially to marry them. When tackled with his deed afterwards, he protested that he had not been told the marriage was to be clandestine. Tom Dancox went out to him from the banquet; Katherine, slipping on a bonnet and shawl, joined them outside; they hastened to the rectory and thence into the church. And while the unconscious master of Leet Hall was entertaining his guests with his good cheer and his stories and his hip, hip, hurrah, his Vicar and Katherine Monk were made one until death should them part. And death, as it proved, intended to do that speedily.
At first Captain Monk, in his unbounded rage, was for saying that a marriage celebrated at ten o'clock at night by the light of a solitary tallow candle, borrowed from the vestry, could not hold good. Reassured upon this point, he strove to devise other means to part them. Foiled again, he laid the case before the Bishop of Worcester, and begged his lordship to unfrock Thomas Dancox. The Bishop did not do as much as that; though he sent for Tom Dancox and severely reprimanded him. But that, as Church Leet remarked, did not break bones. Tom had striven to make the best of his own cause to the Bishop, and the worst of Captain Monk's obdurate will; moreover, stolen marriages were not thought much of in those days.
An uncomfortable state of things was maintained all the year, Hall Leet and the Parsonage standing at daggers drawn. Never once did Captain Monk appear at church. If he by cross-luck met his daughter or her husband abroad, he struck into a good fit of swearing aloud; which perhaps relieved his mind. The chimes had never played again; they pertained to the church, and the church was in ill-favour with the Captain. As the end of the year approached, Church Leet wondered whether he would hold the annual banquet; but Captain Monk was not likely to forego that. Why should he? The invitations went out for it; and they contained an intimation that the chimes would again play.
The banquet took place, a neighbouring parson saying grace at it in the place of Tom Dancox. While the enjoyment was progressing and Captain Monk was expressing his marvel for the tenth time as to what could have become of Speck, who had not made his appearance, a note was brought in by Rimmer—just as he had brought in one last year. This also was from Mrs. Carradyne.
" Please come out to me for one moment, dear Godfrey. I must say a word to you."
Captain Monk's first impulse on reading this was to send Rimmer back to say she might go and be hanged. But to call him from the table was so very extreme a measure, that on second thoughts he decided to go to her. Mrs. Carradyne was standing just outside the door, looking as white as a sheet.
"Well, this is pretty bold of you, Madam Emma," he began angrily. "Are you out of your senses?"
"Hush, Godfrey! Katherine is dying."
"What?" cried the Captain, the words confusing him.
"Katherine is dying," repeated his sister, her teeth chattering with emotion.
In spite of Katherine's rebellion, Godfrey Monk loved her still as the apple of his eye; and it was only his obstinate temper which had kept him from reconciliation. His face took a hue of terror, and his voice a softer tone.
"What have you heard?"
"Her baby's born; something has gone wrong, I suppose, and she is dying. Sally ran up with the news, sent by Mr. Speck. Katherine is crying aloud for you, saying she cannot die without your forgiveness. Oh, Godfrey, you will go, you will surely go!" pleaded Mrs. Carradyne, breaking down with a burst of tears. "Poor Katherine!"
Never another word spoke he. He went out at the hall-door there and then, putting on his hat as he leaped down the steps. It was a wretched night; not white, clear, and cold as the last New Year's Eve had been, or mild and genial as the one before it; but damp, raw, misty.
"You think I have remained hard and defiant, father," Katherine whispered to him, "but I have many a time asked God's forgiveness on my bended knees; and I longed—oh, how I longed!—to ask yours. What should we all do with the weight of sin that lies on us when it comes to such an hour as this, but for Jesus Christ—for God's wonderful mercy!"
And, with one hand in her father's and the other in her husband's, both their hearts aching to pain, and their eyes wet with bitter tears, poor Katherine's soul passed away.
After quitting the parsonage, Captain Monk was softly closing the garden gate behind him—for when in sorrow we don't do things with a rush and a bang—when a whirring sound overhead caused him to start. Strong, hardened man though he was, his nerves were unstrung to- night in company with his heartstrings. It was the church clock preparing to strike twelve. The little doctor, Speck, who had left the house but a minute before, was standing at the churchyard fence close by, his arms leaning on the rails, probably ruminating sadly on what had just occurred. Captain Monk halted beside him in silence, while the clock struck.
As the last stroke vibrated on the air, telling the knell of the old year, the dawn of the new, another sound began.
Ring, ring, ring! Ring, ring, ring!
The chimes! The sweet, soothing, melodious chimes, carolling forth The Bay of Biscay. Very pleasant were they in themselves to the ear. But—did they fall pleasantly on Captain Monk's? It may be, not. It may be, a wish came over him that he had never thought of instituting them. But for doing that, the ills of his recent life had never had place. George West's death would not have lain at his door, or room been made by it for Tom Dancox, and Katherine would not be lying as he had now left her—cold and lifeless.
"Could nothing have been done to save her, Speck?" he whispered to the doctor, whose arms were still on the churchyard railings, listening to the chimes in silence—though indeed he had asked the same question indoors before.
"Nothing; or you may be sure, sir, it would have been," answered Mr. Speck. "Had all the medical men in Worcestershire been about her, they could not have saved her any more than I could. These unfortunate cases happen now and then," sighed he, "showing us how powerless we really are."
Well, it was grievous news wherewith to startle the parish. And Mrs. Carradyne, a martyr to belief in ghosts and omens, grew to dread the chimes with a nervous and nameless dread.
IT was but the first of February, yet the weather might have served for May-day: one of those superb days that come once in a while out of their season, serving to remind the world that the dark, depressing, dreary winter will not last for ever; though we may have half feared it means to, forgetting the reassuring promise of the Divine Ruler of all things, given after the Flood:
" While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease."
The warm and glorious sunbeams lay on Church Leet, as if to woo the bare hedges into verdant life, the cold fields to smiling plains. Even the mounds of the graveyard, interspersed amidst the old tombstones, looked green and cheerful to-day in the golden light.
Turning slowly out of the Vicarage gate came a good- looking clergyman of seven-or-eight-and-twenty. A slender man of middle height, with a sweet expression on his pale, thoughtful face, and dark earnest eyes. It was the new Vicar of Church Leet, the Reverend Robert Grame.
For a goodish many years have gone on since that tragedy of poor Katherine's death, and this is the second appointed Vicar since that inauspicious time.
Mr. Grame walked across the churchyard, glancing at the inscriptions on the tombs. Inside the church porch stood the clerk, old John Cale, keys in hand. Mr. Grame saw him and quickened his pace.
"Have I kept you waiting, Cale?" he cried in his pleasant, considerate tones. "I am sorry for that."
"Not at all, your reverence; I came afore the time. This here church is but a step or two off my home, yonder, and I'm as often out here as I be indoors," continued John Cale, a fresh-coloured little man with pale grey eyes and white hair. "I've been clerk here, sir, for seven-and-thirty years."
"You've seen more than one parson out then, I reckon."
"More than one! Ay, sir, more than—more than six times one, I was going to say; but that's too much, maybe. Let's see: there was Mr. Cartright, he had held the living I hardly know how many years when I came, and he held it for many after that. Mr. West succeeded him—the Reverend George West; then came Thomas Dancox; then Mr. Atterley: four in all. And now you've come, sir, to make the fifth."
"Did they all die? or take other livings?"
"Some the one thing, sir, and some the other. Mr. Cartright died, he was old; and Mr. West, he—he——" John Cale hesitated before he went on—"he died; Mr. Dancox got appointed to a chaplaincy somewhere over the seas; he was here but about eighteen months, hardly that; and Mr. Atterley, who has just left, has had a big church with a big income, they say, given to him over in Oxfordshire."
"Which makes room for me," smiled Robert Grame.
They were inside the church now; a small and very old- fashioned church, with high pews, dark and sombre. Over the large pew of the Monks, standing sideways to the pulpit, sundry slabs were on the wall, their inscriptions testifying to the virtues and ages of the Monk family dead and gone. Mr. Grame stood to read them. One slab of white marble, its black letters fresh and clear, caught especially his eye.
"Katherine, eldest child of Godfrey Monk, gentleman, and wife of the Reverend Thomas Dancox," he read out aloud. "Was that he who was Vicar here?"
"Ay, 'twas. She married him again her father's wish, and died, poor thing, just a year after it," replied the clerk. "And only twenty-three, as you see, sir! The Captain came down and forgave her on her dying bed, and 'twas he that had the stone put up there. Her baby-girl was taken to the Hall, and is there still: ten years old she must be now; 'twas but an hour or two old when the mother died."
"It seems a sad history," observed Mr. Grame as he turned away to enter the vestry.
John Cale did the honours of its mysteries: showing him the chest for the surplices; the cupboard let into the wall for the register; the place where candles and such-like stores were kept. Mr. Grame opened a door at one end of the room and saw a square flagged place, containing grave- digging tools and the hanging ropes of the bell which called people to church. Shutting the door again, he crossed to a door on the opposite side. But that he could not open.
"What does this lead to?" he asked. "It is locked."
"It's always kept locked, that door is, sir; and it's a'most as much as my post is worth to open it," said the clerk, his voice sinking to a mysterious whisper. "It leads up to the chimes."
"The chimes!" echoed the new parson in surprise. "Do you mean to say this little country church can boast of chimes?"
John Cale nodded. "Lovely, pleasant things they be to listen to, sir, but we've not heard 'em since the midnight when Miss Katherine died. They play a tune called 'The Bay o' Biscay.'"
Selecting a key from the bunch that he carried in his hand, he opened the door, displaying a narrow staircase, unprotected as a ladder and nearly perpendicular. At the top was another small door, evidently locked.
"Captain Monk had all this done when he put the chimes up," remarked he. "I sweep the dust off these stairs once in three months or so, but otherwise the door's not opened. And that one," nodding to the door above, "never."
"But why?" asked the clergyman. "If the chimes are there, and are, as you say, melodious, why do they not play?"
"Well, sir, I b'lieve there's a bit of superstition at the bottom of it," returned the clerk, not caring to explain too fully lest he should have to tell about Mr. West's death, which might not be the thing to frighten a new Vicar with. "A feeling has somehow got abroad in the parish (leastways with a many of its folk) that the putting-up of its bells brought ill-luck, and that whenever the chimes ring out some dreadful evil falls on the Monk family."
"I never heard of such a thing," exclaimed the Vicar, hardly knowing whether to laugh or lecture. "The parish cannot be so ignorant as that! How can the putting-up of chimes bring ill-luck?"
"Well, your reverence, I don't know; the thing's beyond me. They were heard but three times, ringing in the new year at midnight, three years, one on top of t'other—and each time some ill fell."
"My good man—and I am sure you are good—you should know better," remonstrated Mr. Grame. "Captain Monk cannot surely give credence to this?"
"No, sir; but his sister up at the Hall does—Mrs. Carradyne. It's said the Captain used to ridicule her finely for it; he'd fly into a passion whenever 'twas alluded to. Captain Monk, as a brave seaman, is too bold to tolerate anything of the sort. But he has never let the chimes play since his daughter died. He was coming out from the death- scene at midnight, when the chimes broke forth the third year, and it's said he can't abear the sound of 'em since."
"That may well be," assented Mr. Grame.
"And finding, sir, year after year, year after year, as one year gives place to another, that they are never heard, we have got to call 'em amid ourselves, the Silent Chimes," spoke the clerk, as they turned to leave the church. "The Silent Chimes, sir."
Clinking his keys, the clerk walked away to his home, an ivy-covered cottage not a stone's-throw off; the clergyman lingered in the churchyard, reading the memorials on the tombstones. He was smiling at the quaintness of some of them, when the sound of hasty footsteps caused him to turn. A little girl was climbing over the churchyard-railings (as being nearer to her than the entrance-gate), and came dashing towards him across the gravestones.
"Are you grandpapa's new parson?" asked the young lady; a pretty child of ten, with a dark skin, and dusky-violet eyes staring at him freely out of a saucy face.
"Yes, I am," said he. "What is your name?"
"What is yours?" boldly questioned she. "They've talked about you at home, but I forgot it."
"Mine is Robert Grame. Won't you tell me yours?"
"Oh, it's Kate.—Here's that wicked Lucy coming! She's going to groan at me for jumping here. She says it's not reverent."
A charming young lady of some twenty years was coming up the path, wearing a scarlet cloak, its hood lined with white silk; a straw hat shaded her fair face, blushing very much just now; in her dark-grey eyes might be read vexation, as she addressed Mr. Grame.
"I hope Kate has not been rude? I hope you will excuse her heedlessness in this place. She is only a little girl."
"It's only the new parson, Lucy," broke in Kate without ceremony. "He says his name's Robert Grame."
"Oh, Kate, don't! How shall we ever teach you manners?" reprimanded the young lady, in distress. "She has been very much indulged, sir," turning to the clergyman.
"I can well understand that," he said, with a bright smile. "I presume that I have the honour of speaking to the daughter of my patron—Captain Monk?"
"No; Captain Monk is my uncle: I am Lucy Carradyne."
As the young clergyman stood, hat in hand, a feeling came over him that he had never seen so sweet a face as the one he was looking at. Miss Lucy Carradyne was saying to herself, "What a nice countenance he has! What kindly, earnest eyes!"
"This little lady tells me her name is Kate."
"Kate Dancox," said Lucy, as the child danced away. "Her mother was Captain Monk's eldest daughter; she died when Kate was born. My uncle is very fond of Kate; he will hardly have her controlled at all."
"I have been in to see my church! John Cale has been doing its honours for me," smiled Mr. Grame. "It is a pretty little edifice."
"Yes, and I hope you will like it; I hope you will like the parish," frankly returned Lucy.
"I shall be sure to do that, I think. As soon, at least, as I can feel convinced that it is to be really mine," he added, with a quaint expression. "When I heard, a week ago, that Captain Monk had presented me—an entire stranger to him—with the living of Church Leet, I could not believe it. It is not often that a nameless curate, without influence, is spontaneously remembered."
"It is not much of a living," said Lucy, meeting the words half jestingly. "Worth, I believe, about a hundred and sixty pounds a-year."
"But that is a great rise for me—and I have a house to myself large and beautiful—and am a Vicar and no longer a curate," he returned, laughingly. "I cannot imagine, though, how Captain Monk came to give it me. Have you any idea how it was, Miss Carradyne?"
Lucy's face flushed. She could not tell this gentleman the truth: that another clergyman had been fixed upon, one who would have been especially welcome to the parishioners; that Captain Monk had all but nominated him to the living. But it chanced to reach the Captain's ears that this clergyman had expressed his intention of holding the Communion service monthly, instead of quarterly as heretofore, so he put the question to him. Finding it to be true, he withdrew his promise; he would not have old customs broken in upon by modern innovation, he said; and forthwith he appointed the Reverend Robert Grame.
"I do not even know how Captain Monk heard of me," continued Mr. Grame, marking Lucy's hesitation.
"I believe you were recommended to him by one of the clergy attached to Worcester Cathedral," said Lucy.—"And I think I must wish you good-morning now."
But there came an interruption. A tall, stately, haughty young woman, with an angry look upon her dark and handsome face, had entered the churchyard, and was calling out as she advanced:
"That monkey broken loose again, I suppose, and at her pranks here! What are you good for, Lucy, if you cannot keep her in better order? You know I told you to go straight on to Mrs. Speck, and——"
The words died away. Mr. Grame, who had been hidden by a large upright tombstone, emerged into view. Lucy, with another blush, spoke to cover the awkwardness.
"This is Miss Monk," she said to him. "Eliza, it is the new clergyman, Mr. Grame."
Miss Monk recovered her equanimity. A winning smile supplanted the anger on her face; she held out her hand, grandly gracious. For she liked the stranger's look: he was beyond doubt a gentleman—and an attractive man.
"Allow me to welcome you to Church Leet, Mr. Grame. My father chances to be absent to-day; he is gone to Evesham."
"So the clerk told me, or I should have called this morning to pay my respects to him, and to thank him for his generous and most unexpected patronage of me. I got here last night," concluded Mr. Grame, standing uncovered as when he had saluted Lucy. Eliza Monk liked his pleasant voice and taking manners: her fancy went out to him there and then.
"But though papa is absent, you will walk up with me now to the Hall to make acquaintance with my aunt, Mrs. Carradyne," said Eliza, in tones that, gracious though they were, sounded in the light of a command—just as poor Katherine's had always sounded. And Mr. Grame went with her.
But now—handsome though she was, gracious though she meant to be—there was something about Eliza Monk that seemed to repulse Robert Grame, rather than attract him. Lucy had fascinated him; she repelled. Other people had experienced the same kind of repulsion, but knew not where it lay.
Hubert, the heir, about twenty-five now, came forward to greet the stranger as they entered the Hall. No repulsion about him. Robert Grame's hand met his with a warm clasp. A young man of gentle manners and a face of rare beauty—but oh, so suspiciously delicate! Perhaps it was the extreme slenderness of the frame, the wan look in the refined features and their bright hectic that drew forth the clergyman's sympathy. An impression came over him that this young man was not long for earth.
"Is Mr. Monk strong?" he presently asked of Mrs. Carradyne, when Hubert had temporarily quitted the room.
"Indeed, no. He had rheumatic fever some years ago," she added, "and has never been strong since."
"Has he heart disease?" questioned the clergyman. He thought the young man had just that look.
"We fear his heart is weak," replied Mrs. Carradyne.
"But that may be only your fancy, you know, Aunt Emma," spoke Miss Monk reproachfully. She and her father were both passionately attached to Hubert; they resented any doubt cast upon his health.
"Oh, of course," assented Mrs. Carradyne, who never resented anything.
"We shall be good friends, I trust," said Eliza, with a beaming smile, as her hand lay in Mr. Grame's when he was leaving.
"Indeed I hope so," he answered. "Why not?"
SUMMER lay upon the land. The landscape stretched out before Leet Hall was fair to look upon. A fine expanse of wood and dale, of trees in their luxuriant beauty; of emerald-green plains, of meandering streams, of patches of growing corn already putting on its golden hue, and of the golden sunlight, soon to set and gladden other worlds, that shone from the deep-blue sky. Birds sang in their leafy shelters, bees were drowsily humming as they gathered the last of the day's honey, and butterflies flitted from flower to flower with a good-night kiss.
At one of the windows stood, in her haughty beauty, Eliza Monk. Not, surely, of the lovely scene before her was she thinking, or her face might have worn a more pleasing expression. Rather did she seem to gaze, and with displeasure, at two or three people who were walking in the distance: Lucy Carradyne side by side with the clergyman, and Miss Kate Dancox pulling at his coat-tails.
"Shameful flirt!"
The acidity of the tone was so pronounced that Mrs. Carradyne, seated near and busy at her netting, lifted her head in surprise. "Why, Eliza, what's the matter? Who is a flirt?"
"Lucy," curtly replied Eliza, pointing with her finger.
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Carradyne, after glancing outwards.
"Why does she persistently lay herself out to attract that man?" was the passionate rejoinder.
"Be silent, Eliza. How can you conjure up so unjust a charge? Lucy is not capable of laying herself out to attract anyone. It lies but in your imagination."
"Day after day, when she is out with Kate, you may see him join her—allured to her side."
"The 'allurer' is Kate, then. I am surprised at you, Eliza: you might be talking of a servant-maid. Kate has taken a liking for Mr. Grame, and she runs after him at all times and seasons."
"She ought to be stopped, then."
"Stopped! Will you undertake to do it? Could her mother be stopped in anything she pleased to do? And the child has the same rebellious will."
"I say that Robert Grame's attraction is Lucy."
"It may be so," acknowledged Mrs. Carradyne. "But the attraction must lie in Lucy herself; not in anything she does. Some suspicion of the sort has, at times, crossed me."
She looked at them again as she spoke. They were sauntering onwards slowly; Mr. Grame bending towards Lucy, and talking earnestly. Kate, dancing about, pulling at his arm or his coat, appeared to get but little attention. Mrs. Carradyne quietly went on with her work.
And that composed manner, combined with her last sentence, brought gall and wormwood to Eliza Monk.
Throwing a summer scarf upon her shoulders, Eliza passed out at the French window, crossed the terrace, and set out to confront the conspirators. But she was not in time. Seeing her coming, or not seeing her—who knew?—Mr. Grame turned off with a fleet foot towards his home. So nobody remained for Miss Monk to waste her angry breath upon but Lucy. The breath was keenly sharp, and Lucy fell to weeping.
"I am here, Grame. Don't go in."
The words fell on the clergyman's ears as he closed the Vicarage gate behind him, and was passing up the path to his door. Turning his head, he saw Hubert Monk seated on the bench under the may tree, pink and lovely yet. "How long have you been here?" he asked, sitting down beside him.
"Ever so long; waiting for you," replied Hubert.
"I was only strolling about."
"I saw you: with Lucy and the child."
They had become fast and firm friends, these two young men; and the minister was insensibly exercising a wonderful influence over Hubert for good. Believing—as he did believe—that Hubert's days were numbered, that any sharp extra exertion might entail fatal consequences, he gently strove, as opportunity offered, to lead his thoughts to the Better Land.
"What an evening it is!" rapturously exclaimed Hubert.
"Ay: so calm and peaceful."
The rays of the setting sun touched Hubert's face, lighting up its extreme delicacy; the scent of the closing flowers filled the still air with sweetness; the birds were chanting their evening song of praise. Hubert, his elbow on the arm of the bench, his hand supporting his chin, looked out with dreamy eyes.
"What book have you there?" asked Mr. Grame, noticing one in his other hand.
"Herbert," answered the young man, showing it. "I filched it from your table through the open window, Grame."
The clergyman took it. It chanced to open at a passage he was very fond of. Or perhaps he knew the place, and opened it purposely.
"Do you know these verses, Hubert? They are appropriate enough just now, while those birds are carolling."
"I can't tell. What verses? Read them."
"Hark, how the birds do sing,
And woods do ring!
All creatures have their joy, and man hath his,
Yet, if we rightly measure,
Man's joy and pleasure
Rather hereafter than in present is.
Not that we may not here Taste of the cheer;
But as birds drink and straight lift up the head,
So must he sip and think
Of better drink
He may attain to after he is dead."
"Ay," said Hubert, breaking the silence after a time, "it's very true, I suppose. But this world—oh, it's worth living for. Will anything in the next, Grame, be more beautiful than that?"
He was pointing to the sunset, marvellously and unusually beautiful. Lovely pink and crimson clouds flecked the west; in their midst shone a dazzling golden light too glorious to look upon.
"One might fancy it the portals of heaven," said the clergyman; "the golden gate of entrance, leading to the pearly gates within, and to the glittering walls of precious stones."
"Ay! And it seems to take the form of an entrance-gate!" exclaimed Hubert; for it really did so. "Look at it! Oh, Grame, surely the very gate of Heaven cannot be more wonderful than that!"
"And if the gate of entrance is so unspeakably beautiful, what will the City itself be?" murmured Mr. Grame. "The Heavenly City! the New Jerusalem!"
"It is beginning to fade," said Hubert presently, as they sat watching; "the brightness is going. What a pity!"
"All that's bright must fade in this world, you know; and fade very quickly. Hubert! it will not in the next."
Church Leet, watching its neighbours' doings sharply,
began to whisper that the new clergyman, Mr. Grame, was
likely to cause unpleasantness to the Monk family, just as
some of his predecessors had caused it. For no man having
eyes in his head (still less any woman) could fail to see
that the Captain's imperious daughter had fallen desperately
in love with him. Would there be a second elopement, as in
the days of Tom Dancox? Would Eliza Monk set her father at
defiance as Katherine did?
One of the last to see signs and tokens, though they took place under her open eyes, was Mrs. Carradyne. But she saw at last. The clergyman could not walk across a new-mown field, or down a shady lane, or be hastening along the dusty turnpike road, but by some inexplicable coincidence he would be met by Miss Monk; and when he came to the Hall to pass an hour with Hubert, she generally made a third at the interview. It had pleased her latterly to take to practising on the old church organ; and if Mr. Grame was not wiled into the church with her and her attendant, the ancient clerk, who blew the bellows, she was sure to alight upon him in going or returning.
One fine evening, dinner over, when the last beams of the sun were slanting into the drawing-room, Eliza Monk was sitting back on a sofa, reading; Kate romped about the room, and Mrs. Carradyne had just rung the bell for tea. Lucy had been spending the afternoon with Mrs. Speck, and Hubert had now gone to fetch her home.
"Good gracious, Kate, can't you be quiet!" exclaimed Miss Monk, as the child in her gambols sprang upon the sofa, upsetting the book and its reader's temper. "Go away: you are treading on my flounces. Aunt Emma, why do you persist in having this tiresome little reptile with us after dinner?"
"Because your father will not let her be sent to the nursery," said Mrs. Carradyne.
"Did you ever know a child like her?"
"She is only as her mother was; as you were, Eliza—always rebellious. Kate, sit down to the piano and play one of your pretty tunes."
"I won't," responded Kate. "Play yourself, Aunt Emma."
Dashing through the open glass doors, Kate began tossing a ball on the broad gravel walk below the terrace. Mrs. Carradyne cautioned her not to break the windows, and turned to the tea-table.
"Don't make the tea yet, Aunt Emma," interrupted Miss Monk, in tones that were quite like a command. "Mr. Grame is coming, and he won't care for cold tea."
Mrs. Carradyne returned to her seat. She thought the opportunity had come to say something to her niece which she had been wanting to say.
"You invited Mr. Grame, Eliza?"
"I did," said Eliza, looking defiance.
"My dear," resumed Mrs. Carradyne with some hesitation, "forgive me if I offer you a word of advice. You have no mother; I pray you to listen to me in her stead. You must change your line of behaviour to Mr. Grame."
Eliza's dark face turned red and haughty. "I do not understand you, Aunt Emma."
"Nay, I think you do understand me, my dear. You have incautiously allowed yourself to fall into—into an undesirable liking for Mr. Grame. An unseemly liking, Eliza."
"Unseemly!"
"Yes; because it has not been sought. Cannot you see, Eliza, how he instinctively recedes from it? how he would repel it were he less the gentleman than he is? Child, I shrink from saying these things to you, but it is needful. You have good sense, Eliza, keen discernment, and you might see for yourself that it is not to you Mr. Grame's love is given—or ever will be."
For once in her life Eliza Monk allowed herself to betray agitation. She opened her trembling lips to speak, but closed them again.
"A moment yet, Eliza. Let us suppose, for argument's sake, that Mr. Grame loved you; that he wished to marry you; you know, my dear, how utterly useless it would be. Your father would not suffer it."
"Mr. Grame is of gentle descent; my father is attached to him," disputed Eliza.
"But Mr. Grame has nothing but his living—a hundred and sixty pounds a year; you must make a match in accordance with your own position. It would be Katherine's trouble, Katherine's rebellion over again. But this was mentioned for argument's sake only; Mr. Grame will never sue for anything of the kind; and I must beg of you, my dear, to put all idea of it away, and to change your manner towards him."
"Perhaps you fancy he may wish to sue for Lucy!" cried Eliza, in fierce resentment.
"That is a great deal more likely than the other. And the difficulties in her case would not be so great."
"And pray why, Aunt Emma?"
"Because, my dear, I should not resent it as your father would. I am not so ambitious for her as he is for you."
"A fine settlement for her—Robert Grame and his hundred——"
"Who is taking my name in vain?" cried a pleasant voice from the open window; and Robert Grame entered.
"I was," said Eliza readily; her tone changing like magic to sweet suavity, her face putting on its best charm. "About to remark that the Reverend Robert Grame has a hundred faults. Aunt Emma agrees with me."
He laughed lightly, regarding it as pleasantry, and inquired for Hubert.
Eliza stepped out on the terrace when tea was over, talking to Mr. Grame; they began to pace it slowly together. Kate and her ball sported on the gravel walk beneath. It was a warm, serene evening, the silver moon shining, the evening star just appearing in the clear blue sky.
"Lucy being away, you cannot enjoy your usual flirtation with her," remarked Miss Monk, in a light tone.
But he did not take it lightly. Rarely had his voice been more serious than when he answered: "I beg your pardon. I do not flirt—I have never flirted with Miss Carradyne."
"No! It has looked like it."
Mr. Grame remained silent. "I hope not," he said at last. "I did not intend—I did not think. However, I must mend my manners," he added more gaily. "To flirt at all would ill become my sacred calling. And Lucy Carradyne is superior to any such trifling."
Her pulses were coursing on to fever heat. With her whole heart she loved Robert Grame: and the secret preference he had unconsciously betrayed for Lucy had served to turn her later days to bitterness.
"Possibly you mean something more serious," said Eliza, compressing her lips.
"If I mean anything, I should certainly mean it seriously," replied the young clergyman, his face blushing as he made the avowal. "But I may not. I have been reflecting much latterly, and I see I may not. If my income were good it might be a different matter. But it is not; and marriage for me must be out of the question."
"With a portionless girl, yes. Robert Grame," she went on rapidly with impassioned earnestness, "when you marry, it must be with someone who can help you; whose income will compensate for the deficiency of yours. Look around you well: there may be some young ladies rich in the world's wealth, even in Church Leet, who will forget your want of fortune for your own sake."
Did he misunderstand her? It was hardly possible. She had a large fortune; Lucy none. But he answered as though he comprehended not. It may be that he deemed it best to set her ill-regulated hopes at rest for ever.
"One can hardly suppose a temptation of that kind would fall in the way of an obscure individual like myself. If it did, I could only reject it. I should not marry for money. I shall never marry where I do not love."
They had halted near one of the terrace seats. On it lay a toy of Kate's, a little wooden "box of bells." Mechanically, her mind far away, Eliza took it up and began, still mechanically, turning the wire which set the bells playing with a soft but not unpleasant jingle.
"You love Lucy Carradyne!" she whispered.
"I fear I do," he answered. "Though I have struggled against the conviction."
A sudden crash startled them; shivers of glass fell before their feet; fit accompaniment to the shattered hopes of one who stood there. Kate Dancox, aiming at Mr. Grame's hat, had sent her ball through the window. He leaped away to catch the culprit, and Eliza Monk sat down on the bench, all gladness gone out of her. Her love-dream had turned out to be a snare and a delusion.
"Who did that?"
Captain Monk, frightened from his after-dinner nap by the crash, came forth in anger. Kate got a box on the ear, and was sent to bed howling.
"You should send her to school, papa."
"And I will," declared the Captain. "She startled me out of a sleep. Out of a dream, too. And it is not often I dream. I thought I was hearing the chimes again."
"Chimes which I have not yet been fortunate enough to hear at all," said Mr. Grame with a smile. Eliza recalled the sound of the bells she had set in motion, and thought it must have reached her father in his sleep.
"By George, no! You shall, though, Grame. They shall ring the new year in when it comes."
"Aunt Emma won't like that," laughingly commented Eliza. She was trying to be gay and careless before Robert Grame.
"Aunt Emma may dislike it!" retorted the Captain. "She has picked up some ridiculously absurd notion, Grame, that the bells bring ill-luck when they are heard. Women are so foolishly superstitious."
"That must be a very far-fetched superstition," said the parson.
"One might as well believe in witches," mocked the Captain. "I have given in to her fancies for some years, not to cross her, and allowed the bells to be silent: she's a good woman on the whole; but be hanged if I will any longer. On the last day of this year, Grame, you shall hear the chimes."
How it came about nobody exactly knew, unless it was
through Hubert, but matters were smoothed for the parson and
Lucy.
Mrs. Carradyne knew his worth, and she saw that they were as much in love with one another as ever could be Hodge and Joan. She liked the idea of Lucy being settled near her—and the vicarage, large and handsome, could have its unused rooms opened and furnished. Mr. Grame honestly avowed that he should have asked for Lucy before, but for his poverty; he supposed that Lucy was poor also.
"That is so; Lucy has nothing of her own," said Mrs. Carradyne to this. "But I am not in that condition."
"Of course not. But—pardon me—I thought your property went to your son."
Mrs. Carradyne laughed. "A small estate of his father's, close by here, became my son's at his father's death," she said. "My own money is at my disposal; the half of it will eventually be Lucy's. When she marries, I shall allow her two hundred a year: and upon that, and your stipend, you will have to get along together."
"It will be like riches to me," said the young parson all in a glow.
"Ah! Wait until you realise the outlets for money that a wife entails," nodded Mrs. Carradyne in her superior wisdom. "Not but that I'm sure it's good for young people, setting up together, to be straitened at the beginning. It teaches them economy and the value of money."
Altogether it seemed a wonderful prospect to Robert Grame. Miss Lucy thought it would be Paradise. But a stern wave of opposition set in from Captain Monk.
Hubert broke the news to him as they were sitting together after dinner. To begin with, the Captain, as a matter of course, flew into a passion.
"Another of those beggarly parsons! What possessed them, that they should fix upon his family to play off their machinations upon! Lucy Carradyne was his niece: she should never be grabbed up by one of them while he was alive to stop it."
"Wait a minute, father," whispered Hubert. "You like Robert Grame; I know that: you would rather see him carry off Lucy than Eliza."
"What the dickens do you mean by that?"
Hubert said a few cautious words—hinting that, but for Lucy's being in the way, poor Katherine's escapade might have been enacted over again. Captain Monk relieved his mind by some strong language, sailor fashion; and for once in his life saw he must give in to necessity.
So the wedding was fixed for the month of February, just one year after they had met: that sweet time of early spring, when spring comes in genially, when the birds would be singing, and the green buds peeping and the sunlight dancing.
But the present year was not over yet. Lucy was sewing at her wedding things. Eliza Monk, smarting as from an adder's sting, ran away to visit a family who lived near Oddingly, an insignificant little place, lying, as everybody knows, on the other side of Worcester, famous only for its dullness and for the strange murders committed there in 1806—which have since passed into history. But she returned home for Christmas.
Once more it was old-fashioned Christmas weather; Jack Frost freezing the snow and sporting his icicles. The hearty tenants, wending their way to the annual feast in the winter twilight, said how unusually sharp the air was, enough to bite off their ears and noses.
The Reverend Robert Grame made one at the table for the first time, and said grace at the Captain's elbow. He had heard about the freedom obtaining at these dinners; but he knew he was utterly powerless to suppress it, and he hoped his presence might prove some little restraint, just as poor George West had hoped in the days gone by: not that it was as bad now as it used to be. A rumour had gone abroad that the chimes were to play again, but it died away unconfirmed, for Captain Monk kept his own counsel.
The first to quit the table was Hubert. Captain Monk looked up angrily. He was proud of his son, of his tall and graceful form, of his handsome features, proud even of his bright complexion; ay, and of his estimable qualities. While inwardly fearing Hubert's signs of fading strength, he defiantly refused to recognise it or to admit it openly.
"What now?" he said in a loud whisper. "Are you turning renegade?"
The young man bent over his father's shoulder. "I don't feel well; better let me go quietly, father; I have felt pain here all day"—touching his left side. And he escaped.
There was present at table an elderly gentleman named Peveril. He had recently come with his wife into the neighbourhood and taken on lease a small estate, called by the odd name of Peacock's Range, which belonged to Hubert and lay between Church Dykely and Church Leet. Mr. Peveril put an inopportune question.
"What is the story, Captain, about some chimes which were put up in the church here and are never allowed to ring because they caused the death of the Vicar? I was told of it to-day."
Captain Monk looked at Mr. Peveril, but did not speak.
"One George West, I think. Was he parson here?"
"Yes, he was parson here," said Farmer Winter, finding nobody else answered Mr. Peveril, next to whom he sat. He was a very old man now, but hale and hearty still, and a steadfast ally of his landlord. "Given that parson his way and we should never have had the chimes put up at all. Sweet sounding bells they are, too."
"But how could the chimes kill him?" went on Mr. Peveril. "Did they kill him?"
"George West was a quarrelsome, mischief-making meddler, good for nothing but to set the parish together by the ears; and I must beg of you to drop his name when at my table, Peveril. As to the chimes, you will hear them to-night."
Captain Monk spoke in his sternest tones, and Mr. Peveril bowed. Robert Grame had listened in surprise. He wondered what it all meant—for nobody had ever told him of this phase of the past. The table clapped its unsteady hands and gave a cheer for the chimes, now to be heard again.
"Yes, gentlemen," said the Captain, not a whit more steady than his guests. "They shall ring for us to-night, though it brought the parson out of his grave."
A few minutes before twelve the butler, who had his orders, came into the dining-room and set the windows open. His master gave him another order and the man withdrew. Entering the drawing-room, he proceeded to open those windows also. Mr. Peveril, and one or two more guests, sat with the family; Hubert lay back in an easy-chair.
"What are you about, Rimmer?" hastily cried out Mrs. Carradyne in surprise. "Opening the windows!"
"It is by the master's orders, ma'am," replied the butler; "he bade me open them, that you and the ladies might get a better hearing of the chimes."
Mrs. Carradyne, superstitious ever, grew white as death. " The chimes!" she breathed in a dread whisper. "Surely, surely, Rimmer, you must be mistaken. The chimes cannot be going to ring again!"
"They are to ring the New Year in," said the man. "I have known it this day or two, but was not allowed to tell, as Madam may guess"—glancing at his mistress. "John Cale has got his orders, and he'll set 'em going when the clock has struck twelve."
"Oh, is there no one who will run to stop it?" bewailed Mrs. Carradyne, wringing her hands in all the terror of a nameless fear. "There may yet be time. Rimmer! can you go?"
Hubert came out of his chair laughing. Rimmer was round and fat now, and could not run if he tried. "I'll go, aunt," he said. "Why, walking slowly, I should get there before Rimmer."
The words, "walking slowly," may have misled Mrs. Carradyne; or, in the moment's tribulation, perhaps she forgot that Hubert ought not to be the one to use much exertion; but she made no objection. No one else made way, and Hubert hastened out, putting on his overcoat as he went towards the church.
It was the loveliest night; the air was still and clear, the landscape white and glistening, the moon bright as gold. Hubert, striding along at a quick walk, had traversed half the short distance, when the church clock struck out the first note of midnight. And he knew he should not be in time—unless——
He set off to run: it was such a very little way! Flying along without heed to self, he reached the churchyard gate. And there he was forced—forced—to stop to gather up his laboured breath.
Ring, ring, ring! broke forth the chimes melodiously upon Hubert's ear. "Stop!" he shouted, panting; "stop! stop!"—just as if John Cale could hear the warning: and he began leaping over the gravestones in his path, after the irreverent fashion of Miss Kate Dancox.
"Stop!" he faintly cried in his exhaustion, dashing through the vestry, as the strains of "The Bay of Biscay" pursued their harmonious course overhead, sounding louder here than in the open air. "Sto——"
He could not end the word. Pulling the little door open, he put his foot on the first step of the narrow ladder of a staircase: and then fell prone upon it. John Cale and young Mr. Threpp, the churchwarden's son, who had been the clerk's companion, were descending the stairs, after the chimes had chimed themselves out, and they had locked them up again to (perhaps) another year, when they found some impediment below.
"What is it?" exclaimed young Mr. Threpp. The clerk turned on his lantern.
It was Hubert, Captain Monk's son and heir. He lay there with a face of deadly whiteness, a blue shade encircling his lips.
IT was an animated scene; and one you only find in England. The stubble of the cornfields looked pale and bleak in the departing autumn, the wind was shaking down the withered leaves from the trees, whose thinning branches told unmistakably of the rapidly-advancing winter. But the day was bright after the night's frost, and the sun shone on the glowing scarlet coats of the hunting-men, and the hounds barked in every variety of note and leaped with delight in the morning air. It was the first run of the season, and the sportsmen were fast gathering at the appointed spot—a field flanked by a grove of trees called Poachers' Copse.
Ten o'clock, the hour fixed for the throw-off, came and went, and still Poachers' Copse was not relieved of its busy intruders. Many a gentleman fox-hunter glanced at his hunting-watch as the minutes passed, many a burly farmer jerked his horse impatiently; while the grey-headed huntsman cracked his long whip amongst his canine favourites and promised them they should soon be on the scent. The delay was caused by the non-arrival of the Master of the Hounds.
But now all eyes were directed to a certain quarter, and by the brightened looks and renewed stir, it might be thought that he was appearing. A stranger, sitting his horse well and quietly at the edge of Poachers' Copse, watched the newcomers as they came into view. Foremost of them rode an elderly gentleman in scarlet, and by his side a young lady who might be a few years past twenty.
"Father and daughter, I'll vow," commented the stranger, noting that both had the same well-carved features, the same defiant, haughty expression, the same proud bearing. "What a grandly-handsome girl! And he, I suppose, is the man we are waiting for. Is that the Master of the Hounds?" he asked aloud of the horseman next him, who chanced to be young Mr. Threpp.
"No, sir, that is Captain Monk," was the answer. "They are saying yonder that he has brought word the Master is taken ill and cannot hunt to-day"—which proved to be correct. The Master had been taken with giddiness when about to mount his horse.
The stranger rode up to Captain Monk; judging him to be regarded—by the way he was welcomed and the respect paid him—as the chief personage at the meet, representing in a manner the Master. Lifting his hat, he begged grace for having, being a stranger, come out, uninvited, to join the field; adding that his name was Hamlyn and he was staying with Mr. Peveril at Peacock's Range.
Captain Monk wheeled round at the address; his head had been turned away. He saw a tall, dark man of about five-and- thirty years, so dark and sunburnt as to suggest ideas of his having recently come from a warmer climate. His hair was black, his eyes were dark brown, his features and manner prepossessing, and he spoke as a man accustomed to good society.
Captain Monk, lifting his hat in return, met him with cordiality. The field was open to all, he said, but any friend of Peveril's would be doubly welcome. Peveril himself was a muff, in so far as that he never hunted.
"Hearing there was to be a meet to-day, I could not resist the temptation of joining it; it is many years since I had the opportunity of doing so," remarked the stranger.
There was not time for more, the hounds were throwing off. Away dashed the Captain's steed, away dashed the stranger's, away dashed Miss Monk's, the three keeping side by side.
Presently came a fence. Captain Monk leaped it and galloped onwards after the other red-coats. Miss Eliza Monk would have leaped it next, but her horse refused it; yet he was an old hunter and she a fearless rider. The stranger was waiting to follow her. A touch of the angry Monk temper assailed her and she forced her horse to the leap. He had a temper also; he did not clear it, and horse and rider came down together.
In a trice Mr. Hamlyn was off his own steed and raising her. She was not hurt, she said, when she could speak; a little shaken, a little giddy—and she leaned against the fence. The refractory horse, unnoticed for the moment, got upon his legs, took the fence of his own accord and tore away after the field. Young Mr. Threpp, who had been in some difficulty with his own steed, rode up now.
"Shall I ride back to the Hall and get the pony-carriage for you, Miss Eliza?" asked the young man.
"Oh, dear, no," she replied, "thank you all the same. I should prefer to walk home."
"Are you equal to walking?" interposed the stranger.
"Quite. The walk will do away with this faintness. It is not the first fall I have had."
The stranger whispered to young Mr. Threpp—who was as good-natured a young fellow as ever lived. Would he consent to forego the sport that day and lead his horse to Mr. Peveril's? If so, he would accompany the young lady and give her the support of his arm.
So William Threpp rode off, leading Mr. Hamlyn's horse, and Miss Monk accepted the stranger's arm. He told her a little about himself as they walked along. It might not have been an ominous commencement, but intimacies have grown sometimes out of a slighter introduction. Their nearest way led past the Vicarage. Mr. Grame saw them from its windows and came running out.
"Has any accident taken place?" he asked hurriedly. "I hope not."
Eliza Monk's face flushed. He had been Lucy's husband several months now, but she could not yet suddenly meet him without a thrill of emotion. Lucy ran out next; the pretty young wife for whom she had been despised. Eliza answered Mr. Grame curtly, nodded to Lucy, and passed on.
"And, as I was telling you," continued Mr. Hamlyn, "when this property was left to me in England, I made it a plea for throwing up my post in India, and came home. I landed about six weeks ago, and have been since busy in London with lawyers. Peveril, whom I knew in the days gone by, wrote to invite me to come to him here on a week's visit, before he and his wife leave for the South of France."
"They are going to winter there for Mrs. Peveril's health," observed Eliza. "Peacock's Range, the place they live at, belongs to my cousin, Harry Carradyne. Did I understand you to say that you were not an Englishman?"
"I was born in the West Indies. My family were English and had settled there."
"What a coincidence!" exclaimed Eliza Monk with a smile. "My mother was a West Indian, and I was born there.—There's my home, Leet Hall!"
"A fine old place," cried Mr. Hamlyn, regarding the mansion before him.
"You may well say 'old,'" remarked the young lady. "It has been the abode of the Monk family from generation to generation. For my part, I sometimes half wish it would tumble down that we might move to a more lively locality. Church Leet is a dead-alive place at best."
"We always want what we have not," laughed Mr. Hamlyn. "I would give all I am worth to possess an ancestral home, no matter if it were grim and gloomy. We who can boast of only modern wealth look upon these family castles with an envy you have little idea of."
"If you possess modern wealth, you possess a very good and substantial thing," she answered, echoing his laugh.—"Here comes my aunt, full of wonder."
Full of alarm also. Mrs. Carradyne stood on the terrace steps, asking if there had been an accident.
"Nothing serious, Aunt Emma. Saladin refused the fence at Ring Gap, and we both came down together. This gentleman was so obliging as to forego his day's sport and escort me home. Mr.—Mr. Hamlyn, I believe?" she added. "My aunt, Mrs. Carradyne."
The stranger confirmed it. "Philip Hamlyn," he said to Mrs. Carradyne, lifting his hat.
Gaining the hall-door with slow and gentle steps came a young man, whose beautiful features were wasting more perceptibly day by day, and their hectic growing of a deeper crimson. "What is wrong, Eliza?" he cried. "Have you come to grief? Where's Saladin?"
"My brother," she said to Mr. Hamlyn.
Yes, it was indeed Hubert Monk. For he did not die of that run to the church the past New Year's Eve. The death- like faint proved to be a faint, nothing more. Nothing more then. But something else was advancing with gradual steps: steps that seemed to be growing almost perceptible now.
Now and again Hubert fainted in the same manner; his face taking a death-like hue, the blue tinge surrounding his mouth. Captain Monk, unable longer to shut his eyes to what might be impending, called in the best medical advice that Worcestershire could afford; and the doctors told him the truth—that Hubert's days were numbered.
To say that Captain Monk began at once to "set his house in order" would not be quite the right expression, since it was not he himself who was going to die. But he set his affairs straight as to the future, and appointed another heir in his son's place—his nephew, Harry Carradyne.
Harry Carradyne, a brave young lieutenant, was then with his regiment in some almost inaccessible fastness of the Indian Empire. Captain Monk (not concealing his lamentation and the cruel grief it was to himself personally) wrote word to him of the fiat concerning poor Hubert, together with a peremptory order to sell out and return home as the future heir. This was being accomplished, and Harry might now be expected almost any day.
But it may as well be mentioned that Captain Monk, never given to be confidential about himself or his affairs, told no one what he had done, with one exception. Even Mrs. Carradyne was ignorant of the change in her son's prospects and of his expected return. The one exception was Hubert. Soon to lose him, Captain Monk made more of his son than he had ever done, and seemed to like to talk with him.
"Harry will make a better master to succeed you than I should have made, father," said Hubert, as they were slowly pacing home from the parsonage, arm-in-arm, one dull November day, some little time after the meet of the hounds, as recorded. It was surprising how often Captain Monk would now encounter his son abroad, as if by accident, and give him his arm home.
"What d'ye mean?" wrathfully responded the Captain, who never liked to hear his own children disparaged, by themselves or by anyone else.
Hubert laughed a little. "Harry will look after things better than I ever should. I was always given to laziness. Don't you remember, father, when a little boy in the West Indies, you used to tell me I was good for nothing but to bask in the heat?"
"I remember one thing, Hubert; and, strange to say, have remembered it only lately. Things lie dormant in the memory for years, and then crop up again. Upon getting home from one of my long voyages, your mother greeted me with the news that your heart was weak; the doctor had told her so. I gave the fellow a trimming for putting so ridiculous a notion into her head—and it passed clean out of mine. I suppose he was right, though."
"Little doubt of that, father. I wonder I have lived so long."
"Nonsense!" exploded the Captain; "you may live on yet for years. I don't know that I did not act foolishly in sending post-haste for Harry Carradyne."
Hubert smiled a sad smile. "You have done quite right, father; right in all ways; be sure of that. Harry is one of the truest and best fellows that ever lived: he will be a comfort to you when I am gone, and the best of all successors later. Just—a—moment—father!"
"Why, what's the matter?" cried Captain Monk—for his son had suddenly halted and stood with a rapidly-paling face and shortened breath, pressing his hands to his side. "Here, lean on me, lad; lean on me."
It was a sudden faintness. Nothing very much, and it passed off in a minute or two. Hubert made a brave attempt at smiling, and resumed his way. But Captain Monk did not like it at all; he knew all these things were but the beginning of the end. And that end, though not with actual irreverence, he was resenting bitterly in his heart.
"Who's that coming out?" he asked, crossly, alluding to some figure descending the steps of his house—for his sight was not what it used to be.
"It is Mr. Hamlyn," said Hubert.
"Oh—Hamlyn! He seems to be always coming in. I don't like that man somehow, Hubert. Wonder what he's lagging in the neighbourhood for?"
Hubert Monk had an idea that he could have told. But he did not want to draw down an explosion on his own head. Mr. Hamlyn came to meet them with friendly smiles and hand- shakes. Hubert liked him; liked him very much.
Not only had Mr. Hamlyn prolonged his stay beyond the "day or two" he had originally come for, but he evinced no intention of leaving. When Mr. Peveril and his wife departed for the south, he made a proposal to remain at Peacock's Range for a time as their tenant. And when the astonished couple asked his reasons, he answered that he should like to get a few runs with the hounds.
THE November days glided by. The end of the month was approaching, and still Philip Hamlyn stayed on, and was a very frequent visitor at Leet Hall. Little doubt that Miss Monk was his attraction, and the parish began to say so without reticence.
The parish was right. One fine, frosty morning Mr. Hamlyn sought an interview with Captain Monk and laid before him his proposals for Eliza.
One might have thought by the tempestuous words showered down upon him in answer that he had proposed to smother her. Reproaches, hot and fast, were poured forth upon the suitor's unlucky head.
"Why, you are a stranger!" stormed the Captain; "you have not known her a month! How dare you? It's not commonly decent."
Mr. Hamlyn quietly answered that he had known her long enough to love her, and went on to say that he came of a good family, had plenty of money, and could make a liberal settlement upon her.
"That you never will," said Captain Monk. "I should not like you for my son-in-law," he continued candidly, calming down from his burst of passion to the bounds of reason. "But there can be no question of it in any way. Eliza is to become Lady Rivers."
Mr. Hamlyn opened his eyes in astonishment. "Lady Rivers!" he echoed. "Do you speak of Sir Thomas Rivers?—that old man!"
"No, I do not, sir. Sir Thomas Rivers has one foot in the grave. I speak of his eldest son. He wants her, and he shall have her."
"Pardon me, Captain, I—I do not think Miss Monk can know anything of this. I am sure she did not last night. I come to you with her full consent and approbation."
"I care nothing about that. My daughter is aware that any attempt to oppose her will to mine would be utterly futile. Young Tom Rivers has written to me to ask for her; I have accepted him, and I choose that she shall accept him. She'll like it herself, too; it will be a good match."
"Young Tom Rivers is next door to a simpleton: he is not half-baked," retorted Mr. Hamlyn, his own temper getting up: "if I may judge by what I've seen of him in the field."
"Tom Rivers is a favourite everywhere, let me tell you, sir. Eliza would not refuse him for you."
"Perhaps, Captain Monk, you will converse with her upon this point?"
"I intend to give her my orders—if that's what you mean," returned the Captain. "And now, sir, I think our discussion may terminate."
Mr. Hamlyn saw no use in prolonging it for the present. Captain Monk bowed him out of the house and called his daughter into the room.
"Eliza," he began, scorning to beat about the bush, "I have received an offer of marriage for you."
Miss Eliza blushed a little, not much: few things could make her do that now. Once our blushes have been wasted, as hers were on Robert Grame, their vivid freshness has faded for ever and aye. "The song has left the bird."
"And I have accepted it," continued Captain Monk. "He would like the wedding to be early in the year, so you may get your rattle-traps in order for it. Tell your aunt I will give her a blank cheque for the cost, and she may fill it in."
"Thank you, papa."
"There's the letter; you can read it"—pushing one across the table to her. "It came by special messenger last night, and I have sent my answer this morning."
Eliza Monk glanced at the contents, which were written on rose-coloured paper. For a moment she looked puzzled.
"Why, papa, this is from Tom Rivers! You cannot suppose I would marry him! A silly boy, younger than I am! Tom Rivers is the greatest goose I know."
"How dare you say so, Eliza?"
"Well, he is. Look at his note! Pink paper and a fancy edge!"
"Stuff! Rivers is young and inexperienced, but he'll grow older—he is a very nice young fellow, and a capital fox-hunter. You'd be master and mistress too—and that would suit your book, I take it. I want to have you settled near me, Eliza—you are all I have left, or soon will be."
"But, papa——"
Captain Monk raised his hand for silence.
"You sent that man Hamlyn to me with a proposal for you. Eliza; you know that would not do. Hamlyn's property lies in the West Indies, his home too, for all I know. He attempted to tell me that he would not take you out there against my consent; but I know better, and what such ante- nuptial promises are worth. It might end in your living there."
"No, no."
"What do you say 'no, no' for, like a parrot? Circumstances might compel you. I do not like the man, besides."
"But why, papa?"
"I don't know; I have never liked him from the first. There! that's enough. You must be my Lady Rivers. Poor old Tom is on his last legs."
"Papa, I never will be."
"Listen, Eliza. I had one trouble with Katherine; I will not have another with you. She defied me; she left my home rebelliously to enter upon one of her own setting-up: what came of it? Did luck attend her? Do you be more wise."
"Father," she said, moving a step forward with head uplifted; and the resolute, haughty look which rendered their faces so much alike was very conspicuous on hers, "do not let us oppose each other. Perhaps we can each give way a little? I have promised to be the wife of Philip Hamlyn, and that promise I will fulfil. You wish me to live near you: well, he can take a place in this neighbourhood and settle down in it; and on my part, I will promise you not to leave this country. He may have to go from time to time to the West Indies; I will remain at home."
Captain Monk looked steadily at her before he answered. He marked the stern, uncompromising expression, the strong will in the dark eyes and in every feature, which no power, not even his, might unbend. He thought of his elder daughter, now lying in her grave; he thought of his son, so soon to be lying beside her; he did not care to be bereft of all his children, and for once in his hard life he attempted to conciliate.
"Hark to me, Eliza. Give up Hamlyn—I have said I don't like the man; give up Tom Rivers also, as you will. Remain at home with me until a better suitor shall present himself, and Leet Hall and its broad lands shall be yours."
She looked up in surprise. Leet Hall had always hitherto gone in the male line; and, failing Hubert, it would be, or ought to be, Harry Carradyne's. Though she knew not that any steps had already been taken in that direction.
"Leet Hall?" she exclaimed.
"Leet Hall and its broad lands," repeated the Captain impatiently. "Give up Mr. Hamlyn and it shall all be yours."
She remained for some moments in deep thought, her head bent, revolving the offer. She was fond of pomp and power, as her father had ever been, and the temptation to rule as sole domineering mistress in her girlhood's home was great. But at that very instant the tall fine form of Philip Hamlyn passed across a pathway in the distance, and she turned from the temptation for ever. What little capability of loving had been left to her after the advent of Robert Grame was given to Mr. Hamlyn.
"I cannot give him up," she said in low tones.
"What moonshine, Eliza! You are not a love-sick girl now."
The colour dyed her face painfully. Did her father suspect aught of the past; of where her love had been given—and rejected? The suspicion only added fuel to the fire.
"I cannot give up Mr. Hamlyn," she reiterated.
"Then you will never inherit Leet Hall. No, nor aught else of mine."
"As you please, sir, about that."
"You set me at defiance, then!"
"I don't wish to do so, father; but I shall marry Mr. Hamlyn."
"At defiance," repeated the Captain, as she moved to escape from his presence; "Katherine secretly, you openly. Better that I had never had children. Look here, Eliza: let this matter remain in abeyance for six or twelve months, things resting as they are. By that time you may have come to your senses; or I (yes, I see you are ready to retort it) to mine. If not—well, we shall only then be where we are."
"And that we should be," returned Eliza, doggedly. "Time will never change either of us."
"But events may. Let it be so, child. Stay where you are for the present, in your maiden home."
She shook her head in denial; not a line of her proud face giving way, nor a curve of her decisive lips: and Captain Monk knew that he had pleaded in vain. She would neither give up her marriage nor prolong the period for its celebration.
What could be the secret of her obstinacy? Chiefly the impossibility of tolerating opposition to her own indomitable will. It was her father's will over again; his might be a very little softening with years and trouble; not much. Had she been in desperate love with Hamlyn one could have understood it, but she was not; at most it was but a passing fancy. What says the poet? I daresay you all know the lines, and I know I have quoted them times and again, they are so true:
"Few hearts have never loved, but fewer still
Have felt a second passion. None a third.
The first was living fire; the next a thrill;
The weary heart can never more be stirred:
Rely on it the song has left the bird."
Very, very true. Her passion for Robert Grame had been as living fire in its wild intensity; it was but the shadow of a thrill that warmed her heart for Philip Hamlyn. Possibly she mistook it in a degree; thought more of it than it was. The feeling of gratification which arises from flattered vanity deceives a woman's heart sometimes: and Mr. Hamlyn did not conceal his rapturous admiration of her.
She held to her defiant course, and her father held to his. He did not continue to say she should not marry; he had no power for that—and perhaps he did not want her to make a moonlight escapade of it, as Katherine had made. So the preparation for the wedding went on, Eliza herself paying for the rattletraps, as they had been called; Captain Monk avowed that he "washed his hands of it," and then held his peace.
Whether Mr. Hamlyn and his intended bride considered it best to get the wedding over and done with, lest adverse fate, set afoot by the Captain, should after all circumvent them, it is impossible to say, but the day fixed was a speedy one. And if Captain Monk had deemed it "not decent" in Mr. Hamlyn to propose for a young lady after only a month's knowledge, what did he think of this? They were to be married on the last day of the year.
Was it fixed upon in defiant mockery?—for, as the reader knows, it had proved an ominous day more than once in the Monk family. But no, defiance had no hand in that, simply adverse fate. The day originally fixed by the happy couple was Christmas Eve: but Mr. Hamlyn, who had to go to London about that time on business connected with his property, found it impossible to get back for the day, or for some days after it. He wrote to Eliza, asking that the day should be put off for a week, if it made no essential difference, and fixed the last day in the year. Eliza wrote word back that she would prefer that day; it gave more time for preparation.
They were to be married in her own church, and by its Vicar. Great marvel existed at the Captain's permitting this, but he said nothing. Having washed his hands of the affair, he washed them for good: had the bride been one of the laundry-maids in his household he could not have taken less notice. A Miss Wilson was coming from a little distance to be bridesmaid; and the bride and bridegroom would go off from the church door. The question of a breakfast was never mooted: Captain Monk's equable indifference might not have stood that.
"I shall wish them good luck with all my heart—but I don't feel altogether sure they'll have it!" bewailed poor Mrs. Carradyne in private. "Eliza should have agreed to the delay proposed by her father."
RING, ring, ring, broke forth the chimes on the frosty midday air. Not midnight, you perceive, but midday, for the church clock had just given forth its twelve strokes. Another round of the dial, and the old year would have departed into the womb of the past.
Bowling along the smooth turnpike road which skirted the churchyard on one side came a gig containing a gentleman, a tall, slender, frank-looking young man, with a fair face and the pleasantest blue eyes ever seen. He wore a white top- coat, the fashion then, and was driving rapidly in the direction of Leet Hall; but when the chimes burst forth he pulled up abruptly.
"Why, what in the world——" he began—and then sat still listening to the sweet strains of "The Bay of Biscay." The day, though in mid-winter, was bright and beautiful, and the golden sunlight, shining from the dark- blue sky, played on the young man's golden hair.
"Have they mistaken midday for midnight?" he continued, as the chimes played out their tune and died away on the air. "What's the meaning of it?"
He, Harry Carradyne, was not the only one to ask this. No human being in and about Church Leet, save Captain Monk and they who executed his orders, knew that he had decreed that the chimes should play that day at midday. Why did he do it? What could his motive be? Surely not that they should, by playing (according to Mrs. Carradyne's theory), inaugurate ill-luck for Eliza! At the moment they began to play she was coming out of church on Mr. Hamlyn's arm, having left her maiden name behind her.
A few paces more, for he was driving gently on now, and Harry pulled up again, in surprise, as before, for the front of the church was now in view. Lots of spectators, gentle and simple, stood about, and a handsome chariot, with four post-horses and a great coat-of-arms emblazoned on its panels, waited at the church gate.
"It must be a wedding!" decided Harry.
The next moment the chariot was in motion; was soon about to pass him, the bride and bridegroom within it. A very dark but good-looking man, with an air of command in his face, he, but a stranger to Harry; she, Eliza. She wore a grey silk dress, a white bonnet, with orange blossoms and a veil, which was quite the fashionable wedding attire of the day. Her head was turned, nodding its farewells yet to the crowd, and she did not see her cousin as the chariot swept by.
"Dear me!" he exclaimed, mentally. "I wonder who she has married?"
Staying quietly where he was until the spectators should have dispersed, whose way led them mostly in opposite directions, Harry next saw the clerk come out of the church by the small vestry door, lock it and cross over to the stile: which brought him out close to the gig.
"Why, my heart alive!" he exclaimed. "Is it Captain Carradyne?"
"That's near enough," said Harry, who knew the title was accorded him by the rustic natives of Church Leet, as he bent down with his sunny smile to shake the old clerk's hand. "You are hearty as ever, I see, John. And so you have had a wedding here?"
"Ay, sir, there have been one in the church. I was not in my place, though. The Captain, he ordered me to let the church go for once, and to be ready up aloft in the belfry to set the chimes going at midday. As chance had it, the party came out just at the same time; Miss Eliza was a bit late in coming, ye see; so it may be said the chimes rang 'em out. I guess the sound astonished the people above a bit, for nobody knew they were going to play."
"But how was it all, Cale? Why should the Captain order them to chime at midday?"
John Cale shook his head. "I can't tell ye that rightly, Mr. Harry; the Captain, as ye know, sir, never says why he does this or why he does t'other. Young William Threpp, who had to be up there with me, thought he must have ordered 'em to play in mockery—for he hates the marriage like poison."
"Who is the bridegroom?"
"It's a Mr. Hamlyn, sir. A gentleman who is pretty nigh as haughty as the Captain himself; but a pleasant-spoken, kindly man, as far as I've seen: and a rich one, too."
"Why did Captain Monk object to him?"
"It's thought 'twas because he was a stranger to the place and has lived over in the Indies; and he wanted Miss Eliza, so it's said, to have young Tom Rivers. That's about it, I b'lieve, Mr. Harry."
Harry Carradyne drove away thoughtfully. At the foot of the slight ascent leading to Leet Hall, one of the grooms happened to be standing. Harry handed over to him the horse and gig, and went forward on foot.
"Bertie!" he called out. For he had seen Hubert before him, walking at a snail's pace: the very slightest hill tried him now. The only one left of the wedding-party, for the bridesmaid drove off from the church door. Hubert turned at the call.
"Harry! Why, Harry!"
Hand locked in hand, they sat down on a bench beside the path; face gazing into face. There had always been a likeness between them: in the bright-coloured, waving hair, the blue eyes and the well-favoured features. But Harry's face was redolent of youth and health; in the other's might be read approaching death.
"You are very thin, Bertie; thinner even than I expected to see you," broke from the traveller involuntarily.
" You are looking well, at any rate," was Hubert's answer. "And I am so glad you are come: I thought you might have been here a month ago."
"The voyage was unreasonably long; we had contrary winds almost from port to port. I got on to Worcester yesterday, slept there, and hired a horse and gig to bring me over this morning. What about Eliza's wedding, Hubert? I was just in time to see her drive away. Cale, with whom I had a word down yonder, says the master does not like it."
"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.
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.
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 her, 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.
"Don't tell it me!" she passionately interrupted. "Do not tell me that I am only your second wife."
He went over to her, praying her to be calm, speaking of the bitter feeling of shame which had ever since clung to him.
"Did you divorce her?"
"No, no; you do not understand me, Eliza. She died before anything could be done; the ship was wrecked."
"Were there any children?" she asked in a hard whisper.
"One; a baby of a year old. He was drowned with his mother."
Mrs. Hamlyn folded her hands one over the other, and leaned back in her chair. "Why did you deceive me?"
"My will was good to deceive you for ever," he confessed with emotion. "I hate that past episode in my life; hate to think of it: I wish I could blot it out of remembrance. But for Pratt I should not have told you now."
"Oh, he said you ought to tell me?"
"He did: and blamed me for not having told you already."
"Have you any more secrets of the past that you are keeping from me?"
"None. Not one. You may take my honour upon it, Eliza. And now let us——"
She had started forward in her chair; a red flush darkening her pale cheeks. "Philip! Philip! am I legally married? Did you describe yourself as a bachelor in the license?"
"No, as a widower. I got the license in London, you know."
"And no one read it?"
"No one save he who married us: Robert Grame, and I don't suppose he noticed it."
Robert Grame! The flush on Eliza's cheeks grew deeper.
"Did you love her?"
"I suppose I thought so when I married her. It did not take long to disenchant me," he added with a harsh laugh.
"What was her Christian name?"
"Dolly. Dora, I believe, by register. My dear wife, I have told you all. In compassion to me let us drop the subject, now and for ever."
Was Eliza Hamlyn—sitting there with pale, compressed lips, sullen eyes, and hands interlocked in pain—already beginning to reap the fruit she had sown as Eliza Monk by her rebellious marriage? Perhaps so. But not as she would have to reap it later on.
Mr. and Mrs. Hamlyn spent nearly all that year in travelling. In September they came to Peacock's Range, taking it furnished for a term of old Mr. and Mrs. Peveril, who had not yet come back to it. It stood midway, as may be remembered, between Church Leet and Church Dykely, so that Eliza was close to her old home. Late in October a little boy was born: it would be hard to say which was the prouder of him, Philip Hamlyn or his wife.
"What would you like his name to be?" Philip asked her one day.
"I should like it to be Walter," said Mrs. Hamlyn.
" Walter!"
"Yes. I like the name to begin with, but I once had a dear little brother named Walter, just a year younger than I. He died before we came home to England. Have you any objection to the name?"
"Oh, no, no objection," he slowly said. "I was only thinking whether you would have any. It was the name given to my first child."
"That can make no possible difference—it was not my child," was her haughty answer. So the baby was named Walter James; the latter name also chosen by Eliza, because it had been old Mr. Monk's.
In the following spring Mr. Hamlyn had to go to the West Indies. Eliza remained at home; and during this time she became reconciled to her father.
Hubert brought it about. For Hubert lived yet. But he was a mere shadow and had to take entirely to the house, and soon to his room. Eliza came to see him, again and again; and finally over Hubert's sofa peace was made—for Captain Monk loved her still, just as he had loved Katherine, for all her rebellion.
Hubert lingered on to the summer. And then, on a calm evening, when one of the glorious sunsets that he had so loved to look upon was illumining the western sky, opening up to his dying view, as he had once said, the very portals of Heaven, he passed peacefully away to his rest.
THE next change that set in at Leet Hall concerned Miss Kate Dancox. That wilful young pickle, somewhat sobered by the death of Hubert in the summer, soon grew unbearable again. She had completely got the upper hand of her morning governess, Miss Hume—who walked all the way from Church Dykely and back again—and of nearly everyone else; and Captain Monk gave forth his decision one day when all was turbulence—a resident governess. Mrs. Carradyne could have danced a reel for joy, and wrote to a governess agency in London.
One morning about this time (which was already glowing with the tints of autumn) a young lady got out of an omnibus in Oxford Street, which had brought her from a western suburb of London, paid the conductor, and then looked about her.
"There!" she exclaimed in a quaint tone of vexation, "I have to cross the street! and how am I to do it?"
Evidently she was not used to the bustle of London streets or to crossing them alone. She did it, however, after a few false starts, and so turned down a quiet side street and rang the bell of a house in it. A slatternly girl answered the ring.
"Governess-agent—Mrs. Moffit? Oh, yes; first-floor front," said she crustily, and disappeared.
The young lady found her way upstairs alone. Mrs. Moffit sat in state in a big arm-chair, before a large table and desk, whence she daily dispensed joy or despair to her applicants. Several opened letters and copies of the daily journals lay on the table.
"Well?" cried she, laying down her pen, "what for you?"
"I am here by your appointment, made with me a week ago," said the young lady. "This is Thursday."
"What name?" cried Mrs. Moffit sharply, turning over rapidly the leaves of a ledger.
"Miss West. If you remember, I——"
"Oh, yes, child, my memory's good enough," was the tart interruption. "But with so many applicants it's impossible to be certain as to faces. Registered names we can't mistake."
Mrs. Moffit read her notes—taken down a week ago. "Miss West. Educated in first-class school at Richmond; remained in it as teacher. Very good references from the ladies keeping it. Father, Colonel in India."
"But——"
"You do not wish to go into a school again?" spoke Mrs. Moffit, closing the ledger with a snap, and peremptorily drowning what the applicant was about to say.
"Oh, dear, no, I am only leaving to better myself, as the maids say," replied the young lady, smiling.
"And you wish for a good salary?"
"If I can get it. One does not care to work hard for next to nothing."
"Or else I have—let me see—two—three situations on my books. Very comfortable, I am instructed, but two of them offer ten pounds a-year, the other twelve."
The young lady drew herself slightly up with an involuntary movement. "Quite impossible, madam, that I could take any one of them."
Mrs. Moffit picked up a letter and consulted it, looking at the young lady from time to time, as if taking stock of her appearance. "I received a letter this morning from the country—a family require a well-qualified governess for their one little girl. Your testimonials as to qualifications might suit—and you are, I believe, a gentlewoman——"
"Oh, yes; my father was——"
"Yes, yes, I remember—I've got it down; don't worry me," impatiently spoke the oracle, cutting short the interruption. "So far you might suit: but in other respects—I hardly know what to think."
"But why?" asked the other timidly, blushing a little under the intent gaze.
"Well, you are very young, for one thing; and they might think you too good-looking."
The girl's blush grew red as a rose; she had delicate features and it made her look uncommonly pretty. A half- smile sat in her soft, dark hazel eyes.
"Surely that could not be an impediment. I am not so good-looking as all that!"
"That's as people may think," was the significant answer. "Some families will not take a pretty governess—afraid of their sons, you see. This family says nothing about looks; for aught I know there may be no sons in it. 'Thoroughly competent'—reading from the letter—'a gentlewoman by birth, of agreeable manners and lady-like. Salary, first year, to be forty pounds.'"
"And will you not recommend me?" pleaded the young governess, her voice full of entreaty. "Oh, please do! I know I should be found fully competent, and promise you that I would do my best."
"Well, there may be no harm in my writing to the lady about you," decided Mrs. Moffit, won over by the girl's gentle respect—with which she did not get treated by all her clients. "Suppose you come here again on Monday next?"
The end of the matter was that Miss West was engaged by the lady mentioned—no other than Mrs. Carradyne. And she journeyed down into Worcestershire to enter upon the situation.
But clever (and generally correct) Mrs. Moffit made one mistake, arising, no doubt, from the chronic state of hurry she was always in. "Miss West is the daughter of the late Colonel William West," she wrote, "who went to India with his regiment a few years ago, and died there." What Miss West had said to her was this: "My father, a clergyman, died when I was a little child, and my uncle William, Colonel West, the only relation I had left, died three years ago in India." Mrs. Moffit somehow confounded the two.
This might not have mattered on the whole. But, as you perceive, it conveyed a wrong impression at Leet Hall.
"The governess I have engaged is a Miss West; her father was a military man and a gentleman," spake Mrs. Carradyne one morning at breakfast to Captain Monk. "She is rather young—about twenty, I fancy; but an older person might never get on at all with Kate."
"Had good references with her, I suppose?" said the Captain.
"Oh, yes. From the agent, and especially from the ladies who have brought her up."
"Who was her father, do you say?—a military man?"
"Colonel William West," assented Mrs. Carradyne, referring to the letter she held. "He went to India with his regiment and died there."
"I'll refer to the army-list," said the Captain; "daresay it's all right. And she shall keep Kate in order, or I'll know the reason why."
The evening sunlight lay on the green plain, on the white
fields from which the grain had been reaped, and on the
beautiful woods glowing with the varied tints of autumn. A
fly was making its way to Leet Hall, and its occupant,
looking out of it on this side and that, in a fever of
ecstasy, for the country scene charmed her, thought how
favoured was the lot of those who could live out their lives
amidst its surroundings.
In the drawing-room at the Hall, watching the approach of this same fly, stood Mrs. Hamlyn, a frown upon her haughty face. Philip Hamlyn was still detained in the West Indies, and since her reconciliation to her father, she would go over with her baby-boy to the Hall and remain there for days together. Captain Monk liked to have her, and he took more notice of the baby than he had ever taken of a baby yet. For when Kate was an infant he had at first shunned her, because she had cost Katherine her life. This baby, little Walter, was a particularly forward child, strong and upright, walked at ten months old, and much resembled his mother in feature. In temper also. The young one would stand sturdily in his little blue shoes and defy his grandpapa already, and assert his own will, to the amused admiration of Captain Monk.
Eliza, utterly wrapt up in her child, saw her father's growing love for him with secret delight; and one day when he had the boy on his knee, she ventured to speak out a thought that was often in her heart.
"Papa," she said, with impassioned fervour, "he ought to be the heir, your own grandson; not Harry Carradyne."
Captain Monk simply stared in answer.
"He lies in the direct succession; he has your own blood in his veins. Papa, you ought to see it."
Certainly the gallant sailor's manners were improving. For perhaps the first time in his life he suppressed the hot and abusive words rising to his tongue—that no son of that man, Hamlyn, should come into Leet Hall—and stood in silence.
" Don't you see it, papa?"
"Look here, Eliza: we'll drop the subject. When my brother, your uncle, was dying, he wrote me a letter, enjoining me to make Emma's son the heir, failing a son of my own. It was right it should be so, he said. Right it is; and Harry Carradyne will succeed me. Say no more."
Thus forbidden to say more, Eliza Hamlyn thought the more, and her thoughts were not pleasant. At one time she had feared her father might promote Kate Dancox to the heirship, and grew to dislike the child accordingly. Latterly, for the same reason, she had disliked Harry Carradyne; hated him, in fact. She herself was the only remaining child of the house, and her son ought to inherit.
She stood this evening at the drawing-room window, this and other matters running in her mind. Miss Kate, at the other end of the room, had prevailed on Uncle Harry (as she called him) to play a game at toy ninepins. Or perhaps he had prevailed on her: anything to keep her tolerably quiet. She was in her teens now, but the older she grew the more troublesome she became; and she was remarkably small and childish-looking, so that strangers took her to be several years younger than she really was.
"This must be your model governess arriving, Aunt Emma," exclaimed Mrs. Hamlyn, as the fly came up the drive.
"I hope it is," said Mrs. Carradyne; and they all looked out. "Oh, yes, that's an Evesham fly—and a ramshackle thing it appears."
"I wonder you did not send the carriage to Evesham for her, mother," remarked Harry, picking up some of the nine- pins which Miss Kate had swept off the table with her hand.
Mrs. Hamlyn turned round in a blaze of anger. "Send the carriage to Evesham for the governess. What absurd thing will you say next, Harry?"
The young man laughed in good humour. "Does it offend one of your prejudices, Eliza?—a thousand pardons, then. But really, nonsense apart, I can't see why the carriage should not have gone for her. We are told she is a gentlewoman. Indeed, I suppose anyone else would not be eligible, as she is to be made one of ourselves."
"And think of the nuisance it will be! Do be quiet, Harry! Kate ought to have been sent to school."
"But your father would not have her sent, you know, Eliza," spoke Mrs. Carradyne.
"Then——"
"Miss West, ma'am," interrupted Rimmer, the butler, showing in the traveller.
"Dear me, how very young!" was Mrs. Carradyne's first thought. "And what a lovely face!"
She came in shyly. In her whole appearance there was a shrinking, timid gentleness, betokening refinement of feeling. A slender, lady-like girl, in a plain, dark travelling-suit and a black bonnet lined and tied with pink, a little lace border shading her nut-brown hair. The bonnets in those days set off a pretty face better than do these modern ones. That's what the Squire tells us.
Mrs. Carradyne advanced and shook hands cordially; Eliza bent her head slightly from where she stood; Harry Carradyne stood up, a pleasant welcome in his blue eyes and in his voice, as he laughingly congratulated her upon the ancient Evesham fly not having come to grief en route. Kate Dancox pressed forward.
"Are you my new governess?"
The young lady smiled and said she believed so.
"Aunt Eliza hates governesses; so do I. Do you expect to make me obey you?"
The governess blushed painfully; but took courage to say she hoped she should. Harry Carradyne thought it the very loveliest blush he had ever seen in all his travels, and she the sweetest-looking girl.
And when Captain Monk came in he quite took to her appearance, for he hated to have ugly people about him. But every now and then there was a look in her face, or in her eyes, that struck him as being familiar—as if he had once known someone who resembled her. Pleasing, soft, dark hazel eyes they were as one could wish to see, with goodness in their depths.
MONTHS passed away, and Miss West was domesticated in her new home. It was not all sunshine. Mrs. Carradyne, ever considerate, strove to render things agreeable; but there were sources of annoyance over which she had no control. Kate, when she chose, could be verily a little elf, a demon; as Mrs. Hamlyn often put it, "a diablesse." And she, that lady herself, invariably treated the governess with a sort of cool, indifferent contempt; and she was more often at Leet Hall than away from it. The Captain, too, gave way to fits of temper that simply terrified Miss West. Reared in the quiet atmosphere of a well-trained school, she had never met with temper such as this.
On the other hand—yes, on the other hand, she had an easy place of it, generous living, was regarded as a lady, and—she had learnt to love Harry Carradyne for weal or for woe.
But not—please take notice—not unsolicited. Tacitly, at any rate. If Mr. Harry's speaking blue eyes were to be trusted and Mr. Harry's tell-tale tones when with her, his love, at the very least, equalled hers. Eliza Hamlyn, despite the penetration that ill-nature generally can exercise, had not yet scented any such treason in the wind: or there would have blown up a storm.
Spring was to bring its events; but first of all it must be said that during the winter little Walter Hamlyn was taken ill at Leet Hall when staying there with his mother. The malady turned out to be gastric fever, and Mr. Speck was in constant attendance. For the few days that the child lay in danger, Eliza was almost wild. The progress to convalescence was very slow, lasting many weeks; and during that time Captain Monk, being much with the little fellow, grew to be fond of him with an unreasonable affection.
"I'm not sure but I shall leave Leet Hall to him after all," he suddenly observed to Eliza one day, not noticing that Harry Carradyne was standing in the recess of the window. "Halloa! are you there, Harry? Well, it can't be helped. You heard what I said?"
"I heard, Uncle Godfrey: but I did not understand."
"Eliza thinks Leet Hall ought to go in the direct line—through her—to this child. What should you say to that?"
"What could he say to it?" imperiously demanded Eliza. "He is only your nephew."
Harry looked from one to the other in a sort of bewildered surprise: and there came a silence.
"Uncle Godfrey," he said at last, starting out of a reverie, "you have been good enough to make me your heir. It was unexpected on my part, unsolicited; but you did do it, and you caused me to leave the army in consequence, to give up my fair prospects in life. I am aware that this deed is not irrevocable, and certainly you have the right to do what you will with your own property. But you must forgive me for saying that you should have made quite sure of your intentions beforehand: before taking me up, if it be only to throw me aside again."
"There, there, we'll leave it," retorted Captain Monk testily. "No harm's done to you yet, Mr. Harry; I don't know that it will be."
But Harry Carradyne felt sure that it would be; that he should be despoiled of the inheritance. The resolute look of power on Eliza's face, bent on him as he quitted the chamber, was an earnest of that. Captain Monk was not the determined man he had once been; that was over.
"A pretty kettle of fish, this is," ruefully soliloquised Harry, as he marched along the corridor. "Eliza's safe to get her will; no doubt of that. And I? what am I to do? I can't repurchase and go back amongst them again like a returned shilling; at least, I won't; and I can't turn Parson, or Queen's Counsel, or Cabinet Minister. I'm fitted for nothing now, that I see, but to be a gentleman-at-large; and what would the gentleman's income be?"
Standing at the corridor window, softly whistling, he ran over ways and means in his mind. He had a pretty house of his own, Peacock's Range, formerly his father's, and about four hundred a-year. After his mother's death it would not be less than a thousand a-year.
"That means bread and cheese at present. Later—— Heyday, young lady, what's the matter?"
The school room door, close by, had opened with a burst, and Miss Kate Dancox was flying down the stairs—her usual progress the minute lessons were over. Harry strolled into the room. The governess was putting the littered table straight.
"Any admission, ma'am?" cried he quaintly, making for a chair. "I should like to ask leave to sit down for a bit."
Alice West laughed, and stirred the fire by way of welcome; he was a very rare visitor to the school-room. The blaze, mingling with the rays of the setting sun that streamed in at the window, played upon her sweet face and silky brown hair, lighted up the bright winter dress she wore, and the bow of pink ribbon that fastened the white lace round her slender, pretty throat.
"Are you so much in need of a seat?" she laughingly asked.
"Indeed I am," was the semi-grave response. "I have had a shock."
"A very sharp one, sir?"
"Sharp as steel. Really and truly," he went on in a different tone, as he left the chair and stood up by the table, facing her; "I have just heard news that may affect my whole future life; may change me from a rich man to a poor one."
"Oh, Mr. Carradyne!" Her manner had changed now.
"I was the destined inheritor, as you know—for I'm sure nobody has been reticent upon the subject—of these broad lands," with a sweep of the hand towards the plains outside. "Captain Monk is now pleased to inform me that he thinks of substituting for me Mrs. Hamlyn's child."
"But would not that be very unjust?"
"Hardly fair—as it seems to me. Considering that my good uncle obliged me to give up my own prospects for it."
She stood, her hands clasped in sympathy, her face full of earnest sadness. "How unkind! Why, it would be cruel!"
"Well, I confess I felt it to be so at the first blow. But, standing at the outside window yonder, pulling myself together, a ray or two of light crept in, showing me that it may be for the best after all. 'Whatever is, is right,' you know."
"Yes," she slowly said—"if you can think so. But, Mr. Carradyne, should you not have anything at all?—anything to live upon after Captain Monk's death?"
"Just a trifle, I calculate, as the Americans say—and it is calculating I have been—so that I need not altogether starve. Would you like to know how much it will be?"
"Oh, please don't laugh at me!"—for it suddenly struck the girl that he was laughing, perhaps in reproof, and that she had spoken too freely. "I ought not to have asked that; I was not thinking—I was too sorry to think."
"But I may as well tell you, if you don't mind. I have a very pretty little place, which you have seen and heard of, called by that delectable title Peacock's Range——"
"Is Peacock's Range yours?" she interrupted, in surprise. "I thought it belonged to Mr. Peveril."
"Peacock's Range is mine and was my father's before me, Miss Alice. It was leased to Peveril for a term of years, but I fancy he would be glad to give it up to-morrow. Well, I have Peacock's Range and about four hundred pounds a- year."
Her face brightened. "Then you need not talk about starving," she said, gaily.
"And, later, I shall have altogether about a thousand a- year. Though I hope it will be very long before it falls to me. Do you think two people might venture to set up at Peacock's Range, and keep, say, a couple of servants upon four hundred a-year? Could they exist upon it?"
"Oh, dear, yes," she answered eagerly, quite unconscious of his drift. "Did you mean yourself and some friend?"
He nodded.
"Why, I don't see how they could spend it all. There'd be no rent to pay. And just think of all the fruit and vegetables in the garden there!"
"Then I take you at your word, Alice," he cried, impulsively, passing his arm round her waist. "You are the 'friend.' My dear, I have long wanted to ask you to be my wife, and I did not dare. This place, Leet Hall, encumbered me: for I feared the opposition that I, as its heir, should inevitably meet."
She drew away from him, with doubting, frightened eyes. Mr. Harry Carradyne brought all the persuasion of his own dancing blue ones to bear upon her. "Surely, Alice, you will not say me nay!"
"I dare not say yes," she whispered.
"What are you afraid of?"
"Of it altogether; of your friends. Captain Monk would—would—perhaps—turn me out. And there's Mrs. Carradyne!"
Harry laughed. "Captain Monk can have no right to any voice in my affairs, once he throws me off; he cannot expect to have a finger in everyone's pie. As to my mother—ah, Alice, unless I am much mistaken, she will welcome you with love."
Alice burst into tears: emotion was stirring her to its depths. " Please to let it all be for a time," she pleaded.
"If you speak it would be sure to lead to my being turned away."
"I will let it be for a time, my darling, so far as speaking about it goes: for more reasons than one it may be better. But you are my promised wife, Alice; always recollect that."
And Mr. Harry Carradyne, bold as a soldier should be, took a few kisses from her unresisting lips to enforce his mandate.
SOME time rolled on, calling for no particular record. Mr. Hamlyn's West Indian property, which was large and lucrative, had been giving him trouble of late; at least, those who had the care of it gave it, and he was obliged to go over occasionally to see after it in person. Between times he stayed with his wife at Peacock's Range; or else she joined him in London. Their town residence was in Bryanston Square; a pretty house, but not large.
It had been an unfavourable autumn; cold and wet. Snow had fallen in November, and the weather continued persistently dull and dreary. One gloomy afternoon towards the close of the year, Mrs. Hamlyn, shivering over her drawing-room fire, rang impatiently for more coal to be piled upon it.
"Has Master Walter come in yet?" she asked of the footman.
"No, ma'am. I saw him just now playing in front there."
She went to the window. Yes, running about the paths of the Square garden was the child, attended by his nurse. He was a sturdy little fellow. His mother, wishing to make him hardy, sent him out in all weathers, and the boy throve upon it. He was three years old now, but looked older; and he was as clever and precocious as some children are at five or six. Her heart thrilled with a strange joy only at the sight of him: he was her chief happiness in life, her idol. Whether he would succeed to Leet Hall she knew not; since that one occasion, Captain Monk had said no more upon the subject, for or against it.
Why need she have longed for it so fervently? to the setting at naught the express wishes of her deceased uncle and to the detriment of Harry Carradyne? It was simply covetousness. As his father's eldest son (there were no younger ones yet) the boy would inherit a fine property, a large income; but his doting mother must give him Leet Hall as well.
Her whole heart went out to the child as she watched him playing there. A few snowflakes were beginning to fall, and twilight would soon be drawing on, but she would not call him in. Standing thus at the window, it gradually grew upon her to notice that something was standing back against the opposite rails, looking fixedly at the houses. A young, fair woman apparently, with a profusion of light hair; she was draped in a close dark cloak which served to conceal her figure, just as the thick veil she wore concealed her face.
"I believe it is this house she is gazing at so attentively—and at me," thought Mrs. Hamlyn. "What can she possibly want?"
The woman did not move away and Mrs. Hamlyn did not move; they remained staring at one another. Presently Walter burst into the room, laughing in glee at having distanced his nurse. His mother turned, caught him in her arms and kissed him passionately. Wilful though he was by disposition, and showing it at times, he was a lovable, generous child, and very pretty: great brown eyes and auburn curls. His life was all sunshine, like a butterfly's on a summer's day; his path as yet one of roses without their thorns.
"Mamma, I've got a picture-book; come and look at it," cried the eager little voice, as he dragged his mother to the hearthrug and opened the picture-book in the light of the blaze. "Penelope bought it for me."
She sat down on a footstool, the book on her lap and one arm round him, her treasure. Penelope waited to take off his hat and pelisse, and was told to come for him in five minutes.
"It's not my tea-time yet," cried he defiantly.
"Indeed, then, Master Walter, it is long past it," said the nurse. "I couldn't get him in before, ma'am," she added to her mistress. "Every minute I kept expecting you'd be sending one of the servants after us."
"In five minutes," repeated Mrs. Hamlyn. "And what's this picture about, Walter? Is it a little girl with a doll?"
"Oh, dat bootiful," said the eager little lad, who was not yet as advanced in speech as he was in ideas. "It says she——dere's papa!"
In came Philip Hamlyn, tall, handsome, genial. Walter ran to him and was caught in his arms. He and his wife were just a pair for adoring the child.
But nurse, inexorable, appeared again at the five minutes' end, and Master Walter was carried off.
"You came home in a cab, Philip, did you not? I thought I heard one stop."
"Yes; it is a miserable evening. Raining fast now."
"Raining!" she repeated, rather wondering to hear it was not snowing. She went to the window to look out, and the first object her eyes caught sight of was the woman; leaning in the old place against the railings, in the growing twilight.
"I'm not sorry to see the rain; we shall have it warmer now," remarked Mr. Hamlyn, who had drawn a chair to the fire. "In fact, it's much warmer already than it was this morning."
"Philip, step here a minute."
His wife's tone had dropped to a half-whisper, sounding rather mysterious, and he went at once.
"Just look, Philip—opposite. Do you see a woman standing there?"
"A woman—where?" cried he, looking of course in every direction but the right one.
"Just facing us. She has her back against the railings."
"Oh, ay, I see now; a lady in a cloak. She must be waiting for some one."
"Why do you call her a lady?"
"She looks like one—as far as I can see in the gloom. Does she not? Her hair does, any way."
"She has been there I cannot tell you how long, Philip; half-an-hour, I'm sure; and it seems to me that she is watching this house. A lady would hardly do that."
"This house? Oh, then, Eliza, perhaps she's watching for one of the servants. She might come in, poor thing, instead of standing there in the rain."
"Poor thing, indeed!—what business has any woman to watch a house in this marked manner?" retorted Eliza. "The neighbourhood will be taking her for a female detective."
"Nonsense!"
"She has given me a creepy feeling; I can tell you that, Philip."
"But why?" he exclaimed.
"I can't tell you why; I don't know why; it is so. Do not laugh at me for confessing it."
Philip Hamlyn did laugh; heartily. "Creepy feelings" and his imperiously strong-minded wife could have but little affinity with one another.
"We'll have the curtains drawn, and the lights, and shut her out," said he cheerily. "Come and sit down, Eliza; I want to show you a letter I've had to-day."
But the woman waiting outside there seemed to possess for Eliza Hamlyn somewhat of the fascination of the basilisk; for she never stirred from the window until the curtains were drawn.
"It is from Peveril," said Mr. Hamlyn, producing the letter he had spoken of from his pocket. "The lease he took of Peacock's Range is not yet out, but he can resign it now if he pleases, and he would be glad to do so. He and his wife would rather remain abroad, it seems, than return home."
"Yes. Well?"
"Well, he writes to me to ask whether he can resign it; or whether I must hold him to the promise he made me—that I should rent the house to the end of the term. I mean the end of the lease; the term he holds it for."
"Why does he want to resign it? Why can't things go on as at present?"
"I gather from an allusion he makes, though he does not explicitly state it, that Mr. Carradyne wishes to have the place in his own hands. What am I to say to Peveril, Eliza?"
"Say! Why, that you must hold him to his promise; that we cannot give up the house yet. A pretty thing if I had no place to go down to at will in my own county!"
"So far as I am concerned, Eliza, I would prefer to stay away from the county—if your father is to continue to treat me in the way he does. Remember what it was in the summer. I think we are very well here."
"Now, Philip, I have said. I do not intend to release our hold on Peacock's Range. My father will be reconciled to you in time as he is to me."
"I wonder what Harry Carradyne can want it for?" mused Philip Hamlyn, bowing to the imperative decision of his better half.
"To live in it, I should say. He would like to show his resentment to papa by turning his back on Leet Hall. It can't be for anything else."
"What cause for resentment has he? He sent for him home and made him his heir."
" That is the cause. Papa has come to his senses and changed his mind. It is our darling little Walter who is to be the heir of Leet Hall, Philip—and papa has so informed Harry Carradyne."
Philip Hamlyn gazed at his wife in doubt. He had never heard a word of this; instinct had kept her silent.
"I hope not," he emphatically said, breaking the silence.
"You hope not?"
"Walter shall never inherit Leet Hall with my consent, Eliza. Harry Carradyne is the right and proper heir, and no child of mine, as I hope, must or shall displace him."
Mrs. Hamlyn treated her husband to one of her worst looks, telling of contempt as well as of power; but she did not speak.
"Listen, Eliza. I cannot bear injustice, and I do not believe it ever prospers in the long run. Were your father to bequeath—my dear, I beg of you to listen to me!—to bequeath his estates to little Walter, to the exclusion of the true heir, rely upon it the bequest would never bring him good. In some way or other it would not serve him. Money diverted by injustice from its natural and just channel does not carry a blessing with it. I have noted this over and over again in going through life."
"Anything more?" she contemptuously asked.
"And Walter will not need it," he continued persuasively, passing her question as unheard. "As my son, he will be amply provided for."
A very commonplace interruption occurred, and the subject was dropped. Nothing more than a servant bringing in a letter for his master, just come by hand.
"Why, it is from old Richard Pratt!" exclaimed Mr. Hamlyn, as he turned to the light.
"I thought Major Pratt never wrote letters," she remarked. "I once heard you say he must have forgotten how to write."
He did not answer. He was reading the note, which appeared to be a short one. She watched him. After reading it through he began it again, a puzzled look upon his face. Then she saw it flush all over, and he crushed the note into his pocket.
"What is it about, Philip?"
"Pratt wants a prescription for gout that I told him of. I'm sure I don't know whether I can find it."
He had answered in a dreamy tone with thoughts preoccupied, and quitted the room hastily, as if in search of it.
Eliza wondered why he should flush up at being asked for a prescription, and why he should have suddenly lost himself in a reverie. But she had not much curiosity as to anything that concerned old Major Pratt—who was at present staying in lodgings in London.
Downstairs went Mr. Hamlyn to the little room he called his library, seated himself at the table under the lamp, and opened the note again. It ran as follows:—
"Dear Philip Hamlyn,—
The other day, when calling here, you spoke of some infallible prescription to cure gout that had been given you. I've symptoms of it flying about me—and be hanged to it! Bring it to me yourself to- morrow; I want to see you. I suppose there was no mistake in the report that that ship did go down?—and that none of the passengers were saved from it?
"Truly yours,
"Richard Pratt."
"What can he possibly mean?" muttered Philip Hamlyn.
But there was no one to answer the question, and he sat buried in thought, trying to answer it himself. Starting up from the useless task, he looked in his desk, found the infallible prescription, and then snatched his watch from his pocket.
"Too late," he decided impatiently; "Pratt would be gone to bed. He goes at all kinds of unearthly hours when out of sorts." So he went upstairs to his wife again, the prescription displayed in his hand.
Morning came, bringing the daily routine of duties in its train. Mrs. Hamlyn had made an engagement to go with some friends to Blackheath, to take luncheon with a lady living there. It was damp and raw in the early portion of the day, but promised to be clear later on.
"And then my little darling can go out to play again," she said, hugging the child to her. "In the afternoon, nurse; it will be drier then; it is really too damp this morning."
Parting from him with fifty kisses, she went down to her comfortable and handsome carriage, her husband placing her in.
"I wish you were coming with me, Philip! But, you see, it is only ladies to-day. Six of us."
Philip Hamlyn laughed. "I don't wish it at all," he answered; "they would be fighting for me. Besides, I must take old Pratt his prescription. Only picture his storm of anger if I did not."
Mrs. Hamlyn was not back until just before dinner: her husband, she heard, had been out all day, and was not yet in. Waiting for him in the drawing-room listlessly enough, she walked to the window to look out. And there she saw with a sort of shock the same woman standing in the same place as the previous evening. Not once all day long had she thought of her.
"This is a strange thing!" she exclaimed. "I am sure it is this house that she is watching."
On the impulse of the moment she rang the bell and called the man who answered it to the window. He was a faithful, attached servant, had lived with them ever since they were married, and previously to that in Mr. Hamlyn's family in the West Indies.
"Japhet," said his mistress, "do you see that woman opposite? Do you know why she stands there?"
Japhet's answer told nothing. They had all seen her downstairs, yesterday evening as well as this, and wondered what she could be watching the house for.
"She is not waiting for any of the servants, then; not an acquaintance of theirs?"
"No, ma'am, that I'm sure she's not. She is a stranger to us all."
"Then, Japhet, I think you shall go over and question her," spoke his mistress impulsively. "Ask her who she is and what she wants. And tell her that a gentleman's house cannot be watched with impunity in this country—and she will do well to move away before the police are called to her."
Japhet looked at his mistress and hesitated; he was an elderly man and cautious. "I beg your pardon, madam," he began, "for venturing to say as much, but I think it might be best to let her alone. She'll grow tired of stopping there. And if her motive is to attract pity, and get alms sent out, why the fact of speaking to her might make her bold enough to ask for them. If she comes there to-morrow again, it might be best for the master to take it up himself."
For once in her life Mrs. Hamlyn condescended to listen to the opinion of an inferior, and Japhet was dismissed without orders. Close upon that, a cab came rattling down the square, and stopped at the door. Her husband leaped out of it, tossed the driver his fare—he always paid liberally—and let himself in with his latch-key. To Mrs. Hamlyn's astonishment she had seen the woman dart from her standing-place to the middle of the road, evidently to look at or to accost Mr. Hamlyn. But his movements were too quick: he was within in a moment and had closed the outer door. She then walked rapidly away, and disappeared.
Eliza Hamlyn stood there lost in thought. The nurse came in to take the child; Mr. Hamlyn had gone to his room to dress for dinner.
"Have you seen the woman who has been standing out there yesterday evening and this, Penelope?" she asked of the nurse, speaking upon impulse.
"Oh, yes, ma'am. She has been there all the blessed afternoon. She came into the garden to talk to us."
"Came into the garden to talk to you?" repeated Mrs. Hamlyn. "What did she talk about?"
"Chiefly about Master Walter, ma'am. She seemed to be much taken with him; clasped him in her arms and kissed him, and said how old was he, and was he difficult to manage, and that he had his father's beautiful brown eyes——"
Penelope stopped abruptly. Mistaking the hard stare her mistress was unconsciously giving her for one of displeasure, she hastened to excuse herself. The fact was, Mrs. Hamlyn's imagination was beginning to run riot.
"I couldn't help her speaking to me, ma'am, or her kissing the child; she took me by surprise. That was all she said—except that she asked whether you were likely to be going into the country soon, away from the house here. She didn't stay five minutes with us, but went back to stand by the railings again."
"Did she speak as a lady or as a common person?" quite fiercely demanded Mrs. Hamlyn. "Is she young?—good- looking?"
"Oh, I think she is a lady," replied the girl, her accent decisive. "And she's young, as far as I could see, but she had a thick veil over her face. Her hair is lovely, just like threads of pale gold," concluded Penelope, as Mr. Hamlyn's step was heard.
He took his wife into the dining-room, apologising for being late. She, giving full range to the fancies she had called up, heard him in silence with a hardening haughty face.
"Philip, you know who that woman is," she suddenly exclaimed during a temporary absence of Japhet from the dining-room. "What is it that she wants with you?"
"I!" he returned, in a surprise very well feigned if not real. "What woman? Do you mean the one who was standing out there yesterday?"
"You know I do. She has been there again—all the blessed afternoon, as Penelope expresses it. Asking questions of the girl about you—and me—and Walter; and saying the child has your beautiful brown eyes. I ask you who is she?"
Mr. Hamlyn laid down his knife and fork to gaze at his wife. He looked quite at sea.
"Eliza, I assure you I know nothing about it. Or about her."
"Indeed! Don't you think it may be some acquaintance, old or new? Possibly someone you knew in the days gone by—come over seas to see whether you are yet in the land of the living? She has wonderful hair, which looks like spun gold."
All in a moment, as the half-mocking words left her lips, some idea seemed to flash across Philip Hamlyn, bringing with it distress and fear. His face turned to a burning red and then grew white as the hue of the grave.
BREAKFAST was on the table in Mr. Hamlyn's house in Bryanston Square, and Mrs. Hamlyn waited, all impatience, for her lord and master. Not in any particular impatience for the meal itself, but that she might "have it out with him"—the phrase was hers, not mine, as you will see presently—in regard to the perplexity existing in her mind connected with the strange appearance of the damsel watching the house, in her beauty and her pale golden hair.
Why had Philip Hamlyn turned sick and faint—to judge by his changing countenance—when she had charged him at dinner, the previous evening, with knowing something of this mysterious woman? Mysterious in her actions, at all events; probably in herself. Mrs. Hamlyn wanted to know that. No further opportunity had then been given for pursuing the subject. Japhet had returned to the room, and before the dinner was at an end, some acquaintance of Mr. Hamlyn had fetched him out for the evening. And he came home with so fearful a headache that he had lain groaning and turning all through the night. Mrs. Hamlyn was not a model of patience, but in all her life she had never felt so impatient as now.
He came into the room looking pale and shivery; a sure sign that he was suffering; that it was not an invented excuse. Yes, the pain was better, he said, in answer to his wife's question; and might be much better after a strong cup of tea; he could not imagine what had brought it on. She could have told him, though, had she been gifted with the magical power of reading minds, and have seen the nervous apprehension that was making havoc with his.
Mrs. Hamlyn gave him his tea in silence, and buttered a dainty bit of toast to tempt him to eat. But he shook his head.
"I cannot, Eliza. Nothing but tea this morning."
"I am sorry you are ill," she said, by-and-by. "I fear it hurts you to talk; but I want to have it out with you."
"Have it out with me!" cried he, in real or feigned surprise. "Have what out with me?"
"Oh, you know, Philip. About that woman who has been watching the house these two days; evidently watching for you."
"But I told you I knew nothing about her: who she is, or what she is, or what she wants. I really do not know."
Well, so far that was true. But all the while a sick fear lay on his heart that he did know; or, rather, that he was destined to know very shortly.
"When I told you her hair was like threads of fine, pale gold, you seemed to start, Philip, as if you knew some girl or woman with such hair, or had known her."
"I daresay I have known a score of women with such hair. My dear little sister who died, for instance."
"Do not attempt to evade the subject," was the haughty reprimand. "If——"
Mrs. Hamlyn's sharp speech was interrupted by the entrance of Japhet, bringing in the morning letters. Only one letter, however, for they were not as numerous in those days as they are in these.
"It seems to be important, ma'am," Japhet remarked, with the privilege of an old servant, as he handed it to his mistress. She saw it was from Leet Hall, in Mrs. Carradyne's handwriting, and bore the words: "In haste," above the address.
Tearing it open Eliza Hamlyn read the short, sad news it contained. Captain Monk had been taken suddenly ill with inward inflammation. Mr. Speck feared the worst, and the Captain had asked for Eliza. Would she come down at once?
"Oh, Philip, I must not lose a minute," she exclaimed, passing the letter to him, and forgetting the pale gold hair and its owner. "Do you know anything about the Worcestershire trains?"
"No," he answered. "The better plan will be to get to the station as soon as possible, and then you will be ready for the first train that starts."
"Will you go down with me, Philip?"
"I cannot. I will take you to the station."
"Why can't you?"
"Because I cannot just now leave London. My dear, you may believe me, for it is the truth. I cannot do so. I wish I could."
And she saw it was true: for his tone was so earnest as to tell of pain.
Making what haste she could, kissing her boy a hundred times, and recommending him to the special care of his nurse and of his father during her absence, she drove with her husband to the station, and was just in time for a train. Mr. Hamlyn watched it steam out of the station, and then looked up at the clock.
"I suppose it's not too early to see him," he muttered. "I'll chance it, at any rate. Hope he will be less suffering than he was yesterday, and less crusty, too."
Dismissing his carriage, for he felt more inclined to walk than to drive, he went through the park to Pimlico, and gained the house of Major Pratt.
This was Friday. On the previous Wednesday evening a note had been brought to Mr. Hamlyn by Major Pratt's servant, a sentence in which, as the reader may remember, ran as follows:—
"I suppose there was no mistake in the report that that ship did go down?—and that none of the passengers were saved from it?"
This puzzled Philip Hamlyn: perhaps somewhat troubled him in a hazy kind of way. For he could only suppose that the ship alluded to must be the sailing-vessel in which his first wife, false and faithless, and his little son of a twelvemonth old had been lost some five or six years ago—the Clipper of the Seas. And the next day (Thursday) he had gone to Major Pratt's, as requested, to carry the prescription for gout he had asked for, and also to inquire of the Major what he meant.
But the visit was a fruitless one. Major Pratt was in bed with an attack of gout, so ill and so "crusty" that nothing could be got out of him excepting a few bad words and as many groans. Mr. Hamlyn then questioned Saul—of whom he used to see a good deal in India, for he had been the Major's servant for years and years.
"Do you happen to know, Saul, whether the Major wanted me for anything in particular? He asked me to call here this morning."
Saul began to consider. He was a tall, thin, cautious, slow-speaking man, honest as the day, and very much attached to his master.
"Well, sir, he got a letter yesterday morning that seemed to put him out, for I found him swearing over it. And he said he'd like you to see it."
"Who was the letter from? What was it about?"
"It looked like Miss Caroline's writing, sir, and the postmark was Essex. As to what it was about—well, the Major didn't directly tell me, but I gathered that it might be about——"
"About what?" questioned Mr. Hamlyn, for the man had come to a dead standstill. "Speak out, Saul."
"Then, sir," said Saul, slowly rubbing the top of his head, and the few grey hairs left on it, "I thought—as you tell me to speak—it must be something concerning that ship you know of; she that went down on her voyage home, Mr. Philip."
"The Clipper of the Seas?"
"Just so, sir; the Clipper of the Seas. I thought it by this," added Saul: "that pretty nigh all day afterwards he talked of nothing but that ship, asking me if I should suppose it possible that the ship had not gone down and every soul on board, leastways of her passengers, with her. 'Master,' said I, in answer, 'had that ship not gone down and all her passengers with her, rely upon it, they'd have turned up long before this.' 'Ay, ay,' stormed he, 'and Caroline's a fool.'—Which of course meant his sister, you know, sir."
Philip Hamlyn could not make much of this. So many years had elapsed now since news came out to the world that the unfortunate ship, Clipper of the Seas, went down off the coast of Spain on her homeward voyage, and all her passengers with her, as to be a fact of the past. Never a doubt had been cast upon any part of the tidings, so far as he knew.
With an uneasy feeling at his heart, he went off to the city, to call upon the brokers, or agents, of the ship: remembering quite well who they were, and that they lived in Fenchurch Street. An elderly man, clerk in the house for many years, and now a partner, received him.
"The Clipper of the Seas?" repeated the old gentleman, after listening to what Mr. Hamlyn had to say. "No, sir, we don't know that any of her passengers were saved; always supposed they were not. But lately we have had some little cause to doubt whether one or two might not have been."
Philip Hamlyn's heart beat faster.
"Will you tell me why you think this?"
"It isn't that we think it; at best 'tis but a doubt," was the reply. "One of our own ships, getting in last month from Madras, had a sailor on board who chanced to remark to me, when he was up here getting his pay, that it was not the first time he had served in our employ: he had been in that ship that was lost, the Clipper of the Seas. And he went on to say, in answer to a remark of mine about all the passengers having been lost, that that was not quite correct, for that one of them had certainly been saved—a lady or a nurse, he didn't know which, and also a little child that she was in charge of. He was positive about it, he added, upon my expressing my doubts, for they got to shore in the same small boat that he did."
"Is it true, think you?" gasped Mr. Hamlyn.
"Sir, we are inclined to think it is not true," emphatically spoke the old gentleman. "Upon inquiring about this man's character, we found that he is given to drinking, so that what he says cannot always be relied upon. Again, it seems next to an impossibility that if any passenger were saved we should not have heard of it. Altogether we feel inclined to judge that the man, though evidently believing he spoke truth, was but labouring under an hallucination."
"Can you tell me where I can find the man?" asked Mr. Hamlyn, after a pause.
"Not anywhere at present, sir. He has sailed again."
So that ended it for the day. Philip Hamlyn went home and sat down to dinner with his wife, as already spoken of. And when she told him that the mysterious lady waiting outside must be waiting for him—probably some acquaintance of his of the years gone by—it set his brain working and his pulses throbbing, for he suddenly connected her with what he had that day heard. No wonder his head ached!
To-day, after seeing his wife off by train, he went to find Major Pratt. The Major was better, and could talk, swearing a great deal over the gout, and the letter.
"It was from Caroline," he said, alluding to his sister, Miss Pratt, who had been with him in India. "She lives in Essex, you know, Philip."
"Oh, yes, I know," answered Philip Hamlyn. "But what is it that Caroline says in her letter?"
"You shall hear," said the Major, producing his sister's letter and opening it. "Listen. Here it is. 'The strangest thing has happened, brother! Susan went to London yesterday to get my fronts recurled at the hairdresser's, and she was waiting in the shop, when a lady came out of the back room, having been in there to get a little boy's hair cut. Susan was quite struck dumb when she saw her: she thinks it was poor erring Dolly; never saw such a likeness before, she says; could almost swear to her by the lovely pale gold hair. The lady pulled her veil over her face when she saw Susan staring at her, and went away with great speed. Susan asked the hairdresser's people if they knew the lady's name, or who she was, but they told her she was a stranger to them; had never been in the shop before. Dear Richard, this is troubling me; I could not sleep all last night for thinking of it. Do you suppose it is possible that Dolly and the boy were not drowned? Your affectionate sister, Caroline.' Now, did you ever read such a letter?" stormed the Major. "If that Susan went home and said she'd seen St. Paul's blown up, Caroline would believe it. Who's Susan, d'ye say? Why, you've lost your memory, Philip. Susan was the English maid we had with us in Calcutta."
"It cannot possibly be true," cried Mr. Hamlyn with quivering lips.
"True, no! of course it can't be, hang it! Or else what would you do?"
That might be logical though not satisfactory reasoning. And Mr. Hamlyn thought of the woman said to be watching for him, and her pale gold hair.
"She was a cunning jade, if ever there was one, mark you, Philip Hamlyn; that false wife of yours and kin of mine; came of a cunning family on the mother's side. Put it that she was saved: if it suited her to let us suppose she was drowned, why, she'd do it. I know Dolly."
And poor Philip Hamlyn, assenting to the truth of this with all his heart, went out to face the battle that might be coming upon him, lacking the courage for it.
THE cold, clear afternoon air touching their healthy faces, and Jack Frost nipping their noses, raced Miss West and Kate Dancox up and down the hawthorn walk. It had pleased that arbitrary young damsel, who was still very childish, to enter a protest against going beyond the grounds that fine winter's day; she would be in the hawthorn walk, or nowhere; and she would run races there. As Miss West gave in to her whims for peace' sake in things not important, and as she was young enough herself not to dislike running, to the hawthorn walk they went.
Captain Monk was recovering rapidly. His sudden illness had been caused by drinking some cold cider when some out- door exercise had made him dangerously hot. The alarm and apprehension had now subsided; and Mrs. Hamlyn, arriving three days ago in answer to the hasty summons, was thinking of returning to London.
"You are cheating!" called out Kate, flying off at a tangent to cross her governess's path. "You've no right to get before me!"
"Gently," corrected Miss West. "My dear, we have run enough for to-day."
"We haven't, you ugly, cross old thing! Aunt Eliza says you are ugly. And—"
The young lady's amenities were cut short by finding herself suddenly lifted off her feet by Mr. Harry Carradyne, who had come behind them.
"Let me alone, Harry! You are always coming where you are not wanted. Aunt Eliza says so."
A sudden light, as of mirth, illumined Harry Carradyne's fresh, frank countenance. "Aunt Eliza says all those things, does she? Well, Miss Kate, she also says something else—that you are now to go indoors."
"What for? I shan't go in."
"Oh, very well. Then that dandified silk frock for the new year that the dressmaker is waiting to try on can be put aside until midsummer."
Kate dearly loved new silk frocks, and she raced away. The governess followed more slowly, Mr. Carradyne talking by her side.
For some months now their love-dream had been going on; aye, and the love-making too. Not altogether surreptitiously; neither of them would have liked that. Though not expedient to proclaim it yet to Captain Monk and the world, Mrs. Carradyne knew of it and tacitly sanctioned it.
Alice West turned her face, blushing uncomfortably, to him as they walked. "I am glad to have this opportunity of saying something to you," she spoke with hesitation. "Are you not upon rather bad terms with Mrs. Hamlyn?"
"She is with me," replied Harry.
"And—am I the cause?" continued Alice, feeling as if her fears were confirmed.
"Not at all. She has not fathomed the truth yet, with all her penetration, though she may have some suspicion of it. Eliza wants to bend me to her will in the matter of the house, and I won't be bent. Old Peveril wishes to resign the lease of Peacock Range to me; I wish to take it from him, and Eliza objects. She says Peveril promised her the house until the seven years' lease was out, and that she means to keep him to his bargain."
"Do you quarrel?"
"Quarrel! no," laughed Harry Carradyne. "I joke with her, rather than quarrel. But I don't give in. She pays me some left-handed compliments, telling me that I am no gentleman, that I'm a bear, and so on; to which I make my bow."
Alice West was gazing straight before her, a troubled look in her eyes. "Then you see that I am the remote cause of the quarrel, Harry. But for thinking of me, you would not care to take the house on your own hands."
"I don't know that. Be very sure of one thing, Alice: that I shall not stay an hour longer under the roof here if my uncle disinherits me. That he, a man of indomitable will, should be so long making up his mind is a proof that he shrinks from committing the injustice. The suspense it keeps me in is the worst of all. I told him so the other evening when we were sitting together and he was in an amiable mood. I said that any decision he might come to would be more tolerable than this prolonged suspense."
Alice drew a long breath at his temerity.
Harry laughed. "Indeed, I quite expected to be ordered out of the room in a storm. Instead of that, he took it quietly, civilly telling me to have a little more patience; and then began to speak of the annual new year's dinner, which is not far off now."
"Mrs. Carradyne is thinking that he may not hold the dinner this year, as he has been so ill," remarked the young lady.
"He will never give that up, Alice, as long as he can hold anything; and he is almost well again, you know. Oh, yes; we shall have the dinner and the chimes also."
"I have never heard the chimes," she said. "They have not played since I came to Church Leet."
"They are to play this year," said Harry Carradyne. "But I don't think my mother knows it."
"Is it true that Mrs. Carradyne does not like to hear the chimes? I seem to have gathered the idea, somehow," added Alice. But she received no answer.
Kate Dancox was changeable as the ever-shifting sea. Delighted with the frock that was in process, she extended her approbation to its maker; and when Mrs. Ram, a homely workwoman, departed with her small bundle in her arms, it pleased the young lady to say she would attend her to her home. This involved the attendance of Miss West, who now found herself summoned to the charge.
Having escorted Mrs. Ram to her lowly door, and had innumerable intricate questions answered touching trimmings and fringes, Miss Kate Dancox, disregarding her governess altogether, flew back along the road with all the speed of her active limbs, and disappeared within the churchyard. At first Alice, who was growing tired and followed slowly, could not see her; presently, a desperate shriek guided her to an unfrequented corner where the graves were crowded. Miss Kate had come to grief in jumping over a tombstone, and bruised both her knees.
"There!" exclaimed Alice, sitting down on the stump of an old tree, close to the low wall. "You've hurt yourself now."
"Oh, it's nothing," returned Kate, who did not make much of smarts. And she went limping away to Mr. Grame, then doing some light work in his garden.
Alice sat on where she was, reading the inscriptions on the tombstones; some of them so faint with time as to be hardly discernible. While standing up to make out one that seemed of a rather better class than the rest, she observed Nancy Cale, the clerk's wife, sitting in the church-porch and watching her attentively. The poor old woman had been ill for a long time, and Alice was surprised to see her out. Leaving the inscriptions, she went across the churchyard.
"Ay, my dear young lady, I be up again, and thankful enough to say it; and I thought as the day's so fine, I'd step out a bit," she said, in answer to the salutation. An intelligent woman, and quite sufficiently cultivated for her work—cleaning the church and washing the parson's surplices. "I thought John was in the church here, and came to speak to him; but he's not, I find; the door's locked."
"I saw John down by Mrs. Ram's just now; he was talking to Nott, the carpenter," observed Alice. "Nancy, I was trying to make out some of those old names; but it is difficult to do so," she added, pointing to the crowded corner.
"Ay, I see, my dear," nodded Nancy. " His be worn a'most right off. I think I'd have it done again, an I was you."
"Have what done again?"
"The name upon your poor papa's gravestone."
"The what?" exclaimed Alice. And Nancy repeated her words.
Alice stared at her. Had Mrs. Cale's wits vanished in her illness? "Do you know what you are saying, Nancy?" she cried; "I don't. What had papa to do with this place? I think you must be wandering."
Nancy stared in her turn. "Sure, it's not possible," she said slowly, beginning to put two and two together, "that you don't know who you are, Miss West? That your papa died here? and lies buried here?"
Alice West turned white, and sat down on the opposite bench to Nancy. She did know that her father had died at some small country living he held; but she never suspected that it was at Church Leet. Her mother had gone to London after his death, and set up a school—which succeeded well. But soon she died, and the ladies who took to the school before her death took to Alice with it. The child was still too young to be told by her mother of the serious past—or Mrs. West deemed her to be so. And she had grown up in ignorance of her father's fate and of where he died.
"When we heard, me and John, that it was a Miss West who had come to the Hall to be governess to Parson Dancox's child, the name struck us both," went on Nancy. "Next we looked at your face, my dear, to trace any likeness there might be, and we thought we saw it—for you've got your papa's eyes for certain. Then, one day when I was dusting in here, I let fall a hymn-book from the Hall pew; in picking it up it came open, and the name writ in it stared me in the face, 'Alice West.' After that, we had no manner of doubt, him and me, and I've often wished to talk with you and tell you so. My dear, I've had you on my knee many a time when you were a little one."
Alice burst into tears of agitation. "I never knew it! I never knew it. Dear Nancy, what did papa die of?"
"Ah, that was a sad piece of business—he was killed," said Nancy. And forthwith, rightly or wrongly, she, garrulous with old age, told all the history.
It was an exciting interview, lasting until the shades of evening surprised them. Miss Kate Dancox might have gone roving to the other end of the globe, for all the attention given her just then. Poor Alice cried and sighed, and trembled inwardly and outwardly. "To think that it should just be to this place that I should come as governess, and to the house of Captain Monk!" she wailed. "Surely he did not kill papa!—intentionally!"
"No, no; nobody has ever thought that," disclaimed Nancy. "The Captain is a passionate man, as is well-known, and they quarrelled, and a hot blow, not intentional, must have been struck between 'em. And all through them blessed chimes, Miss Alice! Not but that they be sweet to listen to—and they be going to ring again this New Year's Eve."
Drawing her warm cloak about her, Nancy Cale set off towards her cottage. Alice West sat on in the sheltered porch, utterly bewildered. Never in her life had she felt so agitated, so incapable of sound and sober thought. Now it was explained why the bow-windowed sitting- room at the Vicarage would always strike her as being familiar to her memory; as though she had at some time known one that resembled it, or perhaps seen one like it in a dream.
"Well, I'm sure!"
The jesting salutation came from Harry Carradyne. Despatched in search of the truants, he had found Kate at the Vicarage, making much of the last new baby there, and devouring a sumptuous tea of cakes and jam. Miss West? Oh, Miss West was sitting in the church porch, talking to old Nancy Cale, she said to Harry.
"Why! What is it?" he exclaimed in dismay, finding that the burst of emotion which he had taken to be laughter, meant tears. "What has happened, Alice?"
She could no more have kept the tears in than she could help—presently—telling him the news. He sat down by her and held her close to him, and pressed for it. She was the daughter of George West, who had died in the dispute with Captain Monk in the dining-room at the hall so many years before, and who was lying here in the corner of the churchyard; and she had never, never known it!
Mr. Carradyne was somewhat taken to; there was no denying it; chiefly by surprise.
"I thought your father was a soldier, Alice—Colonel West; and died when serving in India. I'm sure it was said so when you came."
"Oh, no, that could not have been said," she cried; "unless Mrs. Moffit, the agent, made a mistake. It was my uncle who died in India. No one here ever questioned me about my parents, knowing they were dead. Oh, dear," she went on in agitation, after a silent pause, "what am I to do now? I cannot stay at the Hall. Captain Monk would not allow it either."
"No need to tell him," quoth Mr. Harry.
"And—of course—we must part. You and I."
"Indeed! Who says so?"
"I am not sure that it would be right to—to—you know."
"To what? Go on, my dear."
Alice sighed; her eyes were fixed thoughtfully on the fast-falling twilight. "Mrs. Carradyne will not care for me when she knows who I am," she said in low tones.
"My dear, shall I tell you how it strikes me?" returned Harry: "that my mother will be only the more anxious to have you connected with us by closer and dearer ties, so as to atone to you, in even a small degree, for the cruel wrong which fell upon your father. As to me—it shall be made my life's best and dearest privilege."
But when a climax such as this takes place, the right or the wrong thing to be done cannot be settled in a moment. Alice West did not see her way quite clearly, and for the present she neither said nor did anything.
This little matter occurred on the Friday in Christmas week; on the following day, Saturday, Mrs. Hamlyn was returning to London. Christmas Day this year had fallen on a Monday. Some old wives hold a superstition that when that happens, it inaugurates but small luck for the following year, either for communities or for individuals. Not that that fancy has anything to do with the present history. Captain Monk's banquet would not be held until the Monday night: as was customary when New Year's Eve fell on a Sunday. He had urged his daughter to remain over New Year's Day; but she declined, on the plea that as she had been away from her husband on Christmas Day, she would like to pass New Year's Day with him. The truth being that she wanted to get to London to see after that yellow-haired lady who was supposed to be peeping after Philip Hamlyn.
On the Saturday morning Mrs. Hamlyn was driven to Evesham in the close carriage, and took the train to London. Her husband, ever kind and attentive, met her at the Paddington terminus. He was looking haggard, and seemed to be thinner than when she left him nine days ago.
"Are you well, Philip?" she asked anxiously.
"Oh, quite well," quickly answered poor Philip Hamlyn, smiling a warm smile, that he meant to look like a gay one. "Nothing ever ails me."
No, nothing might ail him bodily; but mentally—ah, how much! That awful terror lay upon him thick and threefold; it had not yet come to any solution, one way or the other. Major Pratt had taken up the very worst view of it; and spent his days pitching hard names at misbehaving syrens, gifted with "the deuce's own cunning" and with mermaids' shining hair.
"And how have things been going, Penelope?" asked Mrs. Hamlyn of the nurse, as she sat in the nursery with her boy upon her knee. "All right?"
"Quite so, ma'am. Master Walter has been just as good as gold."
"Mamma's darling!" murmured the doting mother, burying her face in his. "I have been thinking, Penelope, that your master does not look well," she added after a minute.
"No, ma'am? I've not noticed it. We have not seen much of him up here; he has been at his club a good deal—and dined three or four times with old Major Pratt."
"As if she would notice it!—servants never notice anything!" thought Eliza Hamlyn in her imperious way of judging the world. "By the way, Penelope," she said aloud in light and careless tones, "has that woman with the yellow hair been seen about much?—has she presumed again to accost my little son?"
"The woman with the yellow hair?" repeated Penelope, looking at her mistress, for the girl had quite forgotten the episode. "Oh, I remember—she that stood outside there and came to us in the square-garden. No, ma'am, I've seen nothing at all of her since that day."
"For there are wicked people who prowl about to kidnap children," continued Mrs. Hamlyn, as if she would condescend to explain her inquiry, "and that woman looked like one. Never suffer her to approach my darling again. Mind that, Penelope."
The jealous heart is not easily reassured. And Mrs. Hamlyn, restless and suspicious, put the same question to her husband. It was whilst they were waiting in the drawing- room for dinner to be announced, and she had come down from changing her apparel after her journey. How handsome she looked! a right regal woman! as she stood there arrayed in dark blue velvet, the firelight playing upon her proud face, and upon the diamond earrings and brooch she wore.
"Philip, has that woman been prowling about here again?"
Just for an imperceptible second, for thought is quick, it occurred to Philip Hamlyn to temporize, to affect ignorance, and say, What woman? just as if his mind was not full of the woman, and of nothing else. But he abandoned it as useless.
"I have not seen her since; not at all," he answered: and though his words were purposely indifferent, his wife, knowing all his tones and ways by heart, was not deceived. "He is afraid of that woman," she whispered to herself; "or else afraid of me." But she said no more.
"Have you come to any definite understanding with Mr. Carradyne in regard to Peacock's Range, Eliza?"
"He will not come to any; he is civilly obstinate over it. Laughs in my face with the most perfect impudence, and tells me: 'A man must be allowed to put in his own claim to his own house, when he wants to do so.'"
"Well, Eliza, that seems to be only right and fair. Peveril made no positive agreement with us, remember."
"Is it right and fair? That may be your opinion, Philip, but it is not mine. We shall see, Mr. Harry Carradyne!"
"Dinner is served, ma'am," announced the old butler.
That evening passed. Sunday passed, the last day of the dying year; and Monday morning, New Year's Day, dawned.
New Year's Day. Mr. and Mrs. Hamlyn were seated at the
breakfast-table. It was a bright, cold, sunny morning,
showing plenty of blue sky. Young Master Walter, in
consideration of the day, was breakfasting at their table,
seated in his high chair.
"Me to have dinner wid mamma to-day! Me have pudding!"
"That you shall, my sweetest; and everything that's good," assented his mother.
In came Japhet at this juncture. "There's a little boy in the hall, sir, asking to see you," said he to his master. "He——"
"Oh, we shall have plenty of boys here to-day, asking for a new year's gift," interposed Mrs. Hamlyn, rather impatiently. "Send him a shilling, Philip."
"It's not a poor boy, ma'am," answered Japhet, "but a little gentleman: six or seven years old, he looks. He says he particularly wants to see master."
Philip Hamlyn smiled. "Particularly wants a shilling, I expect. Send him in, Japhet."
The lad came in. A well-dressed beautiful boy, refined in looks and demeanour, bearing in his face a strange likeness to Mr. Hamlyn. He looked about timidly.
Eliza, struck with the resemblance, gazed at him. Her husband spoke. "What do you want with me, my lad?"
"If you please, sir, are you Mr. Hamlyn?" asked the child, going forward with hesitating steps. "Are you my papa?"
Every drop of blood seemed to leave Philip Hamlyn's face and fly to his heart. He could not speak, and looked white as a ghost.
"Who are you? What is your name?" imperiously demanded Philip's wife.
"It is Walter Hamlyn," replied the lad, in clear, pretty tones.
And now it was Mrs. Hamlyn's turn to look white. Walter Hamlyn?—the name of her own dear son! when she had expected him to say Sam Smith, or John Jones! What insolence some people had!
"Where do you come from, boy? Who sent you here?" she reiterated.
"I come from mamma. She would have sent me before, but I caught cold, and was in bed all last week."
Mr. Hamlyn rose. It was a momentous predicament, but he must do the best he could in it. He was a man of nice honour, and he wished with all his heart that the earth would open and engulf him. "Eliza, my love, allow me to deal with this matter," he said, his voice taking a low, tender, considerate tone. "I will question the boy in another room. Some mistake, I reckon."
"No, Philip, you must put your questions before me," she said, resolute in her anger. "What is it you are fearing? Better tell me all, however disreputable it may be."
"I dare not tell you," he gasped; "it is not—I fear—the disreputable thing you may be fancying."
"Not dare! By what right do you call this gentleman 'papa'?" she passionately demanded of the child.
"Mamma told me to. She would never let me come home to him before because of not wishing to part from me."
Mrs. Hamlyn gazed at him. "Where were you born?"
"At Calcutta; that's in India. Mamma brought me home in the Clipper of the Seas, and the ship went down, but quite everybody was not lost in it, though papa thought so."
The boy had evidently been well instructed. Eliza Hamlyn, grasping the whole truth now, staggered in terror.
"Philip! Philip! is it true? Was it this you feared?"
He made a motion of assent and covered his face. "Heaven knows I would rather have died."
He stood back against the window-curtains, that they might shade his pain. She fell into a chair and wished he had died, years before.
But what was to be the end of it all? Though Eliza Hamlyn went straight out and despatched that syren of the golden hair with a poison-tipped bodkin (and possibly her will might be good to do it), it could not make things any the better for herself.
NEW YEAR'S NIGHT at Leet Hall, and the banquet in full swing—but not, as usual, New Year's Eve.
Captain Monk headed his table, the parson, Robert Grame, at his right hand, Harry Carradyne on his left. Whether it might be that the world, even that out-of-the-way part of it, Church Leet, was improving in manners and morals; or whether the Captain himself was changing: certain it was that the board was not the free board it used to be. Mrs. Carradyne herself might have sat at it now, and never once blushed by as much as the pink of a seashell.
It was known that the chimes were to play this year; and, when midnight was close at hand, Captain Monk volunteered a statement which astonished his hearers. Rimmer, the butler, had come into the room to open the windows.
"I am getting tired of the chimes, and all people have not liked them," spoke the Captain in slow, distinct tones. "I have made up my mind to do away with them, and you will hear them to-night, gentlemen, for the last time."
"Really, Uncle Godfrey!" cried Harry Carradyne, in most intense surprise.
"I hope they'll bring us no ill-luck to-night!" continued Captain Monk as a grim joke, disregarding Harry's remark. "Perhaps they will, though, out of sheer spite, knowing they'll never have another chance of it. Well, well, they're welcome. Fill your glasses, gentlemen."
Rimmer was throwing up the windows. In another minute the church clock boomed out the first stroke of twelve, and the room fell into a dead silence. With the last stroke the Captain rose, glass in hand.
"A happy New Year to you, gentlemen! A happy New Year to us all. May it bring to us health and prosperity!"
"And God's blessing," reverently added Robert Grame aloud, as if to remedy an omission.
Ring, ring, ring! Ah, there it came, the soft harmony of the chimes, stealing up through the midnight air. Not quite as loudly heard perhaps, as usual, for there was no wind to waft it, but in tones wondrously clear and sweet. Never had the strains of "The Bay of Biscay" brought to the ear more charming melody. How soothing it was to those enrapt listeners; seeming to tell of peace.
But soon another sound arose to mingle with it. A harsh, grating sound, like the noise of wheels passing over gravel. Heads were lifted; glances expressed surprise. With the last strains of the chimes dying away in the distance, a carriage of some kind galloped up to the hall door.
Eliza Hamlyn alighted from it—with her child and its nurse. As quickly as she could make opportunity after that scene enacted in her breakfast-room in London in the morning, that is, as soon as her husband's back was turned, she had quitted the house with the maid and child, to take the train for home, bringing with her—it was what she phrased it—her shameful tale.
A tale that distressed Mrs. Carradyne to sickness. A tale that so abjectly terrified Captain Monk, when it was imparted to him on Tuesday morning, as to take every atom of fierceness out of his composition.
"Not Hamlyn's wife!" he gasped. "Eliza!"
"No, not his wife," she retorted, a great deal too angry herself to be anything but fierce and fiery. "That other woman, that false first wife of his, was not drowned, as was set forth, and she has come to claim him with their son."
"His wife; their son," muttered the Captain as if he were bewildered. "Then what are you?—what is your son? Oh, my poor Eliza."
"Yes, what are we? Papa, I will bring him to answer for it before his country's tribunal—if there be law in the land."
No one spoke to this. It may have occurred to them to remember that Mr. Hamlyn could not legally be punished for what he did in innocence. Captain Monk opened the glass doors and walked on to the terrace, as if the air of the room were oppressive. Eliza went out after him.
"Papa," she said, "there now exists all the more reason for your making my darling your heir. Let it be settled without delay. He must succeed to Leet Hall."
Captain Monk looked at his daughter as if not understanding her. "No, no, no," he said. "My child, you forget; trouble must be obscuring your faculties. None but a legal descendant of the Monks could be allowed to have Leet Hall. Besides, apart from this, it is already settled. I have seen for some little time now how unjust it would be to supplant Harry Carradyne."
"Is he to be your heir? Is it so ordered?"
"Irrevocably. I have told him so this morning."
"What am I to do?" she wailed in bitter despair. "Papa, what is to become of me—and of my unoffending child?"
"I don't know: I wish I did know. It will be a cruel blight upon us all. You will have to live it down, Eliza. Ah, child, if you and Katherine had only listened to me, and not made those rebellious marriages!"
He turned away as he spoke in the direction of the church, to see that his orders were being executed there. Harry Carradyne ran after him. The clock was striking midday as they entered the churchyard.
Yes, the workmen were at their work—taking down the bells.
"If the time were to come over again, Harry," began Captain Monk as they were walking homeward, he leaning upon his nephew's arm, "I wouldn't have them put up. They don't seem to have brought luck somehow, as the parish has been free to say. Not but that it must be utter nonsense."
"Well, no, they don't, uncle," assented Harry.
"As one grows in years, one gets to look at things differently, lad. Actions that seemed laudable enough when one's blood was young and hot, crop up again then, wearing another aspect. But for those chimes, poor West would not have died as he did. I have had him upon my mind a good bit lately."
Surely Captain Monk was wonderfully changing! And he was leaning heavily upon Harry's arm.
"Are you tired, uncle? Would you like to sit down on this bench and rest?"
"No, I'm not tired. It's West I'm thinking about. He lies on my mind sadly. And I never did anything for the wife or child to atone to them! It's too late now—and has been this many a year."
Harry Carradyne's heart began to beat a little. Should he say what he had been hoping to say sometime? He might never have a better opportunity than this.
"Uncle Godfrey," he spoke in low tones, "would you—would you like to see Mr. West's daughter? His wife has been dead a long while; but—would you like to see her—Alice?"
"Ay," fervently spoke the old man. "If she be in the land of the living, bring her to me. I'll tell her how sorry I am, and how I would undo the past if I could. And I'll ask her if she'll be to me as a daughter."
So then Harry Carradyne told him all. It was Alice West who was already under his roof, and who, fate and fortune permitting, Heaven permitting, would sometime be Alice Carradyne.
Down sat Captain Monk on a bench of his own accord. Tears rose to his eyes. The sudden revulsion of feeling was great: and truly he was a changed man.
"You spoke of Heaven, Harry. I shall begin to think it has forgiven me. Let us be thankful."
But Captain Monk found he had more to thank Heaven for ere many minutes had elapsed. As Harry Carradyne sat by him in silence, marvelling at the change, yet knowing that the grievous blow which was making havoc of Eliza had effected the completeness of the subduing, he caught sight of an approaching fly. Another fly from the railway station at Evesham.
"How dare you come here, you villain!" shouted Captain Monk, rising in threatening anger, as the fly's inmate called to the driver to stop and began to get out of it. "Are you not ashamed to show your face to me, after the evil you have inflicted upon my daughter?"
Philip Hamlyn, smiling kindly and calmly, caught Captain Monk's lifted hands. "No evil, sir," he said, soothingly. "It was all a mistake. Eliza is my true and lawful wife."
"Eh? What's that?" said the Captain quite in a whisper, his lips trembling.
Quietly Philip Hamlyn explained. He had taken the previous day to investigate the matter, and had followed his wife down by a night train. His first wife was dead. She had been drowned in the Clipper of the Seas, as was supposed. The child was saved, with his nurse: the only two passengers who were saved. The nurse made her way to a place in the south of France, where, as she knew, her late mistress's sister lived, Mrs. O'Connett, formerly Miss Sophia Pratt. Mrs. O'Connett, a young widow, had just lost her only child, a boy about the age of the little one rescued from the cruel seas. She seized on him with feverish avidity, adopted him as her own, quitted the place for another Anglo-French town where she was not previously known, taught the child to call her "Mamma," and had never let it transpire that the boy was not hers. But now, after the lapse of a few years, Mrs. O'Connett was on the eve of marriage with an Irish Major. To him she told the truth; and, as he did not want to marry the child as well as herself, he persuaded her to return him to his father. Mrs. O'Connett brought the child to London, ascertained Mr. Hamlyn's address, and all about him, and watched about to speak to him, alone if possible, unknown to his wife. Remembering what had been the behaviour of the child's mother, she was by no means sure of a good reception from Philip himself, or what adverse influence might be brought to bear by the new ties he had formed. Mrs. O'Connett had the same remarkable and lovely hair that her sister had had, whom she very much resembled; she had also a talent for underhand ways.
That was the truth—and I have had to tell it in a nutshell, space growing limited. Philip Hamlyn had ascertained it all beyond possibility of dispute, had seen Mrs. O'Connett, and had brought down the good tidings.
Of all the curious sights this record has afforded, perhaps the most surprising was to see Captain Monk pass his arm lovingly within that of Philip Hamlyn and march off with him to Leet Hall as if he were a prize to be coveted. "Here he is, Eliza," said he; "he has come to cheer both you and me."
For once in her life Eliza Hamlyn was subdued to meekness. She kissed her husband and shed happy tears. She was his lawful wife, and the little one was his lawful child. True, there was an elder son; but, compared with what had been feared, that was a slight evil.
"We must make them true brothers, Eliza," whispered Philip Hamlyn. "They shall share alike all I have and all I leave behind me. And our own little one must be called James in future."
"And you and I will be good friends from henceforth," cried Captain Monk warmly, clasping Philip Hamlyn's ready hand. "I have been to blame in more ways than one, giving the reins unduly to my arbitrary temper. It seems to me, however, that life holds enough of real angles for us without creating any for ourselves."
And surely it did seem, as Mrs. Carradyne would have liked to point out aloud, that those chimes had been fraught with messages of evil. For had not all these blessings set in with their removal?—even in the very hour that their fate was sealed!
Harry Carradyne had drawn his uncle from the room; he now came in again, bringing Alice West. Her face was a picture of agitation, for she had been made known to Captain Monk. Harry led her up to Mrs. Hamlyn, with a beaming smile and a whisper.
"Eliza, as we seem to be going in generally for amenities, won't you give just a little corner of your heart to her? We owe her some reparation for the past. It is her father who lies in that grave at the north end of the churchyard."
Eliza started. "Her father! Poor George West her father?"
"Even so."
Just a moment's struggle with her rebellious spirit and Mrs. Hamlyn stooped to kiss the trembling girl. "Yes, Alice, we do owe you reparation amongst us, and we must try to make it," she said heartily. "I see how it is: you will reign here with Harry; and I think he will be able, after all, to let us keep Peacock's Range."
There came a grand wedding, Captain Monk himself giving Alice away. But Mr. and Mrs. Hamlyn did not retain Peacock's Range; they and their boys, the two Walters, had to look out for another local residence; for Mrs. Carradyne retired to Peacock's Range herself. Now that Leet Hall had a young mistress, she deemed it policy to quit it; though it should have as much of her as it pleased as a visitor. And Captain Godfrey Monk made himself happier in these peaceful days than he had ever been in his stormy ones.
And that's the history. If I had to begin it again, I don't think I should write it; for I have had to take its details from other people—chiefly from the Squire and old Mr. Sterling, of the Court. There's nothing of mine in it, so to say, and it has been only a bother.
And those unfortunate chimes have nearly passed out of memory with the lapse of years. The "Silent Chimes" they are always called when, by chance, allusion is made to them, and will be so called for ever.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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