CHAPTER VIII.
THE INDISSOLUBLE LINK.
How will it be possible to adequately describe Fenella’s feelings at this juncture, so as to make those who read of them judge her leniently? No man could do it; no man could even understand the emotions that passed through her mind, or enter into the passion that actuated her conduct. A man must stand on one side and be dumb. And neither could a woman, unless she had been a mother, and received back her child, as it were, from the dead; even a woman must have passed through similar circumstances before she could comprehend the difficult position in which Fenella was placed. Picture her wild surprise on hearing that the child of her love—the child of the man whom she could not forget—still lived, and was dependent on her; that somewhere in this wide world it stretched tiny arms to the empty air, yearning for a mother’s tenderness; and then think of the impossibility of her telling the secret to any one—of the impossibility of her having the infant with her at all unless she stooped to a deception which seemed innocent beside the crime of disowning it. Once made aware of its existence, Fenella could not close her eyes to her responsibility. She could not have done it under any circumstances, for her heart was that of a true mother, and she would have gone forth into the world, if needful, with her baby in her arms, and supported it by the most menial of labour, sooner than have confided it any longer to the care of strangers.
But there was another motive working in her breast, a motive for which the world (who embraces coroneted courtesans) will be the most ready to condemn her,—she loved the father of her child with every fibre of her heart. It was her greatest sin, this impossibility to be faithless and forget. Let it be written down against her. This is not the history of a saint. It only professes to be the record of an erring woman’s life.
But Fenella did not intend at first to follow Bennett’s suggestion in all its details. It is questionable, indeed, if she ever intended to do so, for she was true by nature (as has already been pointed out), and it was only the greater passion fighting against the lesser that made her untrue to her nature now. It is the same with all of us when brought face to face with the greatest difficulties of our lives—the master-passion (whichever it may be) prevails. And Fenella’s master-passion—whether it demonstrated itself in one phase or another—was love.
When the wonder and the surprise of the revelation had somewhat subsided—when she had heard every detail that the nurse could give her of the circumstances under which her infant had been placed in the charge of Martha Bennett, and was thoroughly convinced that there was a living being dependent upon her alone for care and support and affection in the future, then all the mother’s love came welling forth, and Fenella felt as if she could not rest until she held her child in her arms.
Bennett did not fail to improve the occasion. Her conscience had sorely upbraided her for taking part in the deception even from the beginning, but she had been a tool in the hands of Mrs Barrington, and had simply done as her mistress commanded her. But the spell was broken now; the magnetic chain which the frivolous woman of fashion seemed to have woven about the will of her dependant was snapt in two, and Eliza Bennett could once more think and speak for herself. She impressed the truth on Lady Conroy that, if she was ever to act in the matter, it must be then; that next year, even next month, might be too late; and that it would give her incalculable trouble, and the child incalculable disadvantages (not only now, but in the future), if she were not brought up by her side.
‘Just think what she may be, fifteen or twenty years hence, my lady. Why, the very thought makes me shudder! Even if you was to give her the best of homes and education, where is she to go when she’s a grown lady?—for a lady she is, my dear, and nothing can’t unmake her that. And for my part, it seems a moral duty to me that you should have her home; and, if I may make so bold as to say it, God Almighty seems to have paved the way for you Himself.’
‘I intend to reclaim her, Bennett; don’t have any fear of that. Do you think I could be so cruel and cowardly as to leave my own little child, that I brought into the world, to grow up without knowing that I am her mother?’ exclaimed Fenella. ‘Oh no! It is only the means of doing it that perplexes me. It can never be justifiable to deceive, you know. And if they should ever find it out—’
‘Well, my dear, I shouldn’t worry myself about that matter now; and you can do as you think best with respect to Sir Gilbert afterwards. There can never be no call for you to tell Lady Marjoram, surely.’
‘Oh no, no!’
‘Take a week or two to think over it,’ suggested the servant; ‘second thoughts is always best. And meanwhile I can fetch the little one, that you may have a look at her.’
Fenella’s eyes sparkled with a sudden joy.
‘But when, Bennett—when? How soon can you go?’
‘You won’t have her here, Miss Fenella,’ said the woman dubiously.
‘I’ll do just what you think best.’
‘I’d like you to move farther on, my dear—to some place where you are not likely to meet any of your fine friends; and then when you’re settled, I’ll go over quietly and bring the child back with me.’
‘We will go to St Pré,’ said Lady Conroy; ‘there is no one there at this time of the year.’
She was burning with anxiety to clasp her baby in her arms. She would have stripped herself of every earthly possession to attain her object. She could think of nothing else until it was accomplished.
Yet the time which Fenella passed alone in the little auberge of St Pré, during the two or three days that her servant was necessarily absent in England, was one of great perplexity to her. A dozen plans for telling the truth, and yet keeping her first-born by her side, darted into her mind, and had to be as summarily rejected. Her husband knew every particular of her former history—of that she felt certain—it had never entered her head for a moment that it could be otherwise; but, of course, Mrs Barrington had told him the same falsehood she did to herself, and he believed the baby to be dead. What would he say if he were told it lived? Would he not order her never to see it again, never to speak of it—to bury the fact of its existence in oblivion, as he had desired her to bury the remembrance of its birth? And Fenella felt this was what she could not do. A chord had been struck in her breast which vibrated through her whole body. Her child lived! The life that was one with hers had not been quenched, and whilst it existed they must exist together. Yet she could not make up her mind what to do, and she put the question from her as something to be settled in the future. But she did not write to announce the death of little Valeria to Lady Marjoram, and so the first thread was woven of the net in which her life was to become entangled.
On the evening on which she had been led to expect Bennett back again from Ines-cedwyn, Lady Conroy behaved like a wild creature. Her suspense, her agitation, her anxiety were so extreme, that she was compelled to go and lock herself into her own room, that she might be able to pace the floor, and laugh, and cry, and talk to herself, as she felt inclined, without the fear of making the inmates of the auberge say she had gone mad. At last, after hours of restless expectation, Fenella heard a bustle on the stairs, accompanied by a fretful cry. She threw open her bedroom door, and stood panting on the threshold.
‘Give her to me!’ she cried impetuously, as Bennett approached with a bundle in her arms.
‘Oh, my lady, be careful! You’ll frighten the child to death.’
But Fenella was not in a condition to listen to any advice. She hastily tore open the shawl that enveloped the infant, and met the gaze of two startled blue eyes, shaded by dark lashes; a little white face, hardly bigger than that of the child she had just lost, surrounded by rings of silky brown hair; and a sad drooping mouth that had just puckered itself up for another cry. She pounced upon the baby like a tigress on its prey, and clasped her vehemently to her bosom.
‘Take care, my dear; pray take care,’ repeated the servant fearfully. ‘Don’t forget she’s just come off a long journey, and everything is strange to her.’
But the mother had got the child’s face close to her own; she saw nothing but the child—she heard nothing but the throbbing of her own heart beneath which God had called it into being.
‘Baby,’ she murmured, in a soft, tremulous voice; ‘baby, do you know I am your mother?’
The sweet pathos in her tones attracted the little one’s attention. She had just been going to cry, but she thought better of it, and smiled instead.
‘She knows me!’ Fenella cried triumphantly. ‘She recognises me, nurse. She sees something in my face she has been waiting for.’
‘Bless her heart!’ said Eliza Bennett, with the stereotyped nursery benediction, ‘she’s been good as gold all the way coming over, and Martha was finely put out parting with her, I can tell you; but I said as her mamma had come back from the Injies, and wanted to look after her herself. And I give her the money you sent, my dear, and she considered it most handsome, and she hopes that the child’s things (such as they are) will be found in decent order; but, of course, it’s little she’s been able to do for her that way, for what your dear mamma paid her, though ample, didn’t leave much and above over for clothes. But we’ll soon put that to rights, won’t we, my lady? It’ll be quite a pleasure to me to dress the little dear in decent things. But she is a rare little one—ain’t she now?’
Bennett might have gone on talking till doomsday, for Fenella was not listening to a word she said. Her eyes, dim with unshed tears, were riveted upon the child, who lay in her arms, passive and contented, as if she knew where she had got to. Suddenly the blue eyes glistened, the tiny fingers were stretched upward, and in another moment had firmly grasped a gold locket which had escaped from the bosom of Fenella’s dress. The last pledge that Geoffrey Doyne had given her, in token of his unalterable fidelity, lay in the hands of his child. At that sight Lady Conroy’s tears fell like rain. She turned her face aside, and hid it in the cushion of the sofa upon which she was seated.
‘You have been unfaithful to me,’ she murmured inwardly; ‘you left me without a thought whether I might not be destroyed, body and soul, by your desertion; but I will not desert your child. Whatever may happen to me in consequence—whatever I may lose, or give up, or have to resign, I pledge myself here to redeem as much of my past as is possible to me, by devoting the rest of my life to the life you created. O Geoffrey! Geoffrey! Why did you not take mine before you laid this burden on my soul?’
Bennett perceived that Fenella was weeping, and came at once to the rescue.
‘Now, my lady, please, we mustn’t have anything of this sort. I shall be sorry I’ve brought the baby over here, if she’s to be a misery to you instead of a comfort. Lor’! What has she got now? That there nasty locket! I thought there was something of that kind in the wind. Now, my little dear, you please to give that up, and come to Bennett. ’Twould have been a deal better for your poor mamma if she’d never seen the trumpery thing, nor the one as give it to her neither. Come, my lady, let me take her, and you rest yourself on the sofa, whilst I feed her and put her to bed. She’ll sleep without rocking to-night, I warrant.’
But Fenella would not be parted from her new-found treasure. Together the women undressed and washed the infant, and put it to sleep in the nurse’s bed. And late that night, when the inmates of the little hotel had long retired, and Eliza Bennett thought that her mistress too was wrapt in slumber, a white-robed figure stole softly to her side, and a low voice whispered,—
‘Is she sleeping, nurse? Has she taken her food? Are you sure she is quite comfortable and well?’
‘Bless you, yes! My lady. The dear child’s sleeping like an angel! Just look at her little face upon the piller. Ain’t she like a little wax doll—the pretty dear! But do go back to your bed, Miss Fenella, for you’ll get your death of cold standing about these nasty painted boards.’
‘I’ll go back directly, nurse; but couldn’t you bring her and lay her by my side? I think I could go to sleep if I knew that she was there.’
‘Lor’! My dear, you’d never rest with a baby in your bed. It’s terrible, till you’re used to them.’
‘I think I could—and I would like to try; do wrap a shawl round her and bring her to me. You don’t know how my heart does ache! I think if I had my baby next it, it would be a little comfort to me.’
Bennett did not attempt any further remonstrance, but lifting up the sleeping child, carried it into the next room and laid it by its mother’s side. And when she crept in again towards the early morning, to see how they both fared, she found them in the same position and fast asleep, the infant’s tiny face nestled in Fenella’s bosom. The servant stood and gazed at them until her eyes filled with tears.
‘Well,’ she thought to herself, ‘if to bring them two together is a sin, may God forgive me! But I can’t see it. Poor little mite! Don’t she look as if she’d got home at last? And my sweet young lady, too, is dreaming a happy dream with that smile upon her lips. May God bless ’em both! And if any harm comes of it, I’ll work to keep ’em to my life’s end.’
And Fenella too, with this new legitimate love awakened in her bosom at the very moment when it felt so empty and so cold, was ready to resign the world itself, if necessary, sooner than give up her child again. It seemed to her as if she had never really known what it was to be a mother until she clasped her in her arms, and before she had regained possession of her for a week her infant had become her idol. She could not bear her to go out of her sight; she was always in terror lest some ill should happen to her; and she spent her days in studying the tiny features, and watching the development of the tardily awakening intellect. She was scarcely ever out of her mother’s arms; day after day Fenella’s tall, lithe figure might be seen traversing the byroads and field paths around St Pré, with the fragile baby clasped to her breast; and the affection of the English lady for her little child was the observation of every one. And yet Fenella was not happy. In her case the saying, ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coute,’ was eminently true. In delaying to write and announce the death of Sir Gilbert’s child to Lady Marjoram, she had taken that first step which she would never be able to retrace; and as day succeeded day, and the time drew near for her return to London, she felt that she must adopt Bennett’s suggestion and keep her own counsel, whether she wished it or not, for there was no possibility of disclosing the truth at that date.
When May arrived she parted from her child with many tears, and leaving it at St Pré under the charge of her nurse and a French bonne, travelled to England with her lady’s-maid (a new acquisition imported from Paris) to spend the London season under the wing of her sister-in-law.
Lady Marjoram was delighted to receive Lady Conroy, and equally delighted to hear that she had left the baby behind her.
‘My dear, how sensible and nice you are! One would believe you were eight-and-twenty instead of eighteen. I can’t tell you how I have been dreading the advent of your nursery brigade—not, of course, that they could make any difference to me with my terrible tribe, only I was afraid you’d be running upstairs to see if the little animal was dead or alive twenty times a-day, and wanting to stuff it, with its nurse, on the back seat of the carriage whenever we drove in the park, and all that sort of thing. So interesting you know, my dear, and so abominably disagreeable!’
‘I am afraid you must have a very small idea of my common sense, Janie,’ replied Fenella, colouring. ‘I confess I was very sorry to leave my little girl behind me, but I thought it best for her—particularly as we shall be out, I suppose, day and night.’
‘Indeed, we shall, Fenella. This promises to be the gayest season we have had for years. My engagement list is something terrible to look at already. By the way, the Culletons are going to have a series of tableaux vivants and private theatricals at Fotheringay House in June and July, and I have promised faithfully that you will assist them. They want the loan of your voice, too, for some amateur concerts. I hope you have not neglected your singing lately?’
‘No; I have had a piano wherever I went, and practised assiduously, and I intend to take another course of lessons from Signor Possetrina. By the way, Janie, I have not yet shown you Gilbert’s last letter. He seems quite delighted with Sovooranooko, and talks of having me out there next year to judge of it for myself.’
‘Don’t you believe a word of that, my dear; it’s only a sop for Cerberus. Bertie has no more idea of having you out to Sovooranooko than of coming home himself. We had a letter from Lord Laurence by last mail, and he says Bertie is mad to get into the interior, and already organising a shooting party to start as soon as the cool weather commences. He has got the Englishman’s mania on him to “kill something,” Fenella, and the best thing you can do is to let him tire himself out. He’ll get a grab from a lion or a squeeze from a bear some day, and come crying home to you to kiss the place and make it well; but he won’t come before. And what should you want to go out to that horrid place for—to lose your complexion and your hair, and perhaps get the yellow fever, or some pleasantry of that sort? Don’t you be so silly. You had better stay at home with the baby than do that.’
‘Oh yes! I don’t want to leave my baby,’ cried the mother, with a sudden thrill.
‘Well, you couldn’t take her with you, so let’s talk no more about it. Besides, it is time we went to dress. We have a concert at the Duke of Doldrum’s at two.’
The next three months were spent by Fenella in a round of dissipation, during which she distinguished herself in theatricals and at concerts, and heard her talents talked of as much as her beauty had been the year before.
But her heart and all her thoughts were at St Pré. She required bulletins to be sent her daily of the health and well-doing of her child, and she bought every dainty little garment or expensive toy she could light upon, to decorate the body, or amuse the mind, of her absent baby.
Lady Marjoram noticed this almost feverish anxiety and restlessness on the part of her sister-in-law concerning her child, and laughed at it. ‘It was very becoming,’ she said patronisingly, and just as it ought to be, she wished she could get up the same sort of excitement about her own brats. It gave one such a pretty flush to be anxious, and one’s eyes looked so quick and bright about the time that the post was expected.
But for all that, Lady Marjoram did not quite believe in the genuineness of Fenella’s concern, and she could no more have entered into her real feelings respecting her child than she could sympathise with Sir Gilbert’s exultation at bringing down an elephant. The one sensation was as much a sealed book to her as the other. However, as soon as the season was over, Lady Conroy flew to the side of her child again, and shed tears of real joy, because it held out arms of welcome as soon as it recognised her.
The Earl and Countess of Marjoram were bound for Norway that year, and as soon as they had left England, Fenella brought her little party over, and established them in a lovely Devonshire village by the sea, where she spent all her days upon the beach with the little Valeria in her arms. For the infant who had been unbaptized when restored to its mother, had of course to be called by the name of the one whose place she assumed.
And here it was, whilst yielding herself up to the softening influence which nature generally exerts on a mind fitted to perceive and appreciate her beauties, and whilst watching the daily growing resemblance to her father in the face of her little child, that Fenella began to have gentler and more generous thoughts of Geoffrey Doyne. For since the day on which she received the shock of hearing of his marriage, the remembrance of him had been fraught with torture to her. He had never come into her mind but to suggest something that was most cruel and heartless and untrue. She had tried to shut out the memory even of the time she knew him, as of some horrible dream that to dwell upon would madden her. But now, as little Valeria’s baby lips met hers, as she watched her toddle feebly from one spot to another, as she heard her faltering tongue trying to frame the syllables of ‘mother,’ the child’s angel whispered to her thoughts of forgiveness and of mercy, and from the child’s eyes there beamed a look that softened her recollection of the past.
In fancy, Fenella saw again the flowery landslip, strewn with fallen petals—fallen like her hopes! She saw the golden sands, the ruined bungalow, the stretch of placid sea, and blue unclouded sky; and then above, beyond them all, in beauty and in pleasantness, the smile, the look, the tones of Geoffrey Doyne. And she began to make excuses for him—she, who had called him (and justly) by all sorts of hard and ugly names, whose life had been ruined by his desertion—she began to wonder if some dark mystery might not lie at the bottom of his apparent cruelty; whether he could have been told falsehoods of her, or been forced into that marriage that broke her heart; whether he might not believe that she was dead, or had refused ever to see or speak to him again. A hundred reasons, all equally vague and improbable, floated through Fenella’s mind as she attempted, in her loving generosity, to account for as dastardly a piece of cruelty as ever a man employed to wreck a woman’s life.
She could not satisfy herself. Her own nature was too true to accept any excuse for his conduct, still less for the silence which preceded and followed it; yet she tried so hard, ‘for baby’s sake,’ she would say to herself with quivering lips, to make out the father of her child less undeserving than he was.
But often (after Fenella had been thinking thus for hours) she would catch her infant in her arms and sob over it in so piteous a manner, that the little creature would weep with terror. And then Fenella would soothe it, and kiss it, and sing to it, until it smiled again, and whisper in its ear that its mother would always love it for its father’s sake, although he had trampled on her heart as if it had been the ground beneath his feet.
Meanwhile, the little Valeria grew strong and fat, but still remained so tiny that Bennett’s prophecies concerning her apparent age seemed likely to be verified, and when the second London season dawned upon the world, Fenella ventured to send her with her nurses up to Conroy Castle, where she remained until her mother could rejoin her.
‘Really, Fenella,’ exclaimed Lady Marjoram, ‘you are getting too absurdly domestic! Why should you go and bury yourself all alone in Scotland with that child? Why cannot you spend the autumn at Southfield with us? I shall be horribly dull without you.’
‘I thought, Janie, that as I had not been at the castle all last year, and Gilbert talks of returning in the spring, he might consider it my duty to go and look after the place a little.’
‘My dear girl, what rubbish! Who do you suppose looked after it all the years before he met you? Bertie was never there, except for the shooting. He was better employed elsewhere, I can tell you. Now, do come down to Southfield with me! It will be a perfect charity. And send for the child and nurses to join you there, as I know you will not come without her.’
‘No, I will not come without her,’ replied Fenella, smiling; and so Bennett was written to, and in due course appeared with her baby and her aide-de-camp at Southfield.
‘And now, pray let us see this wonderful baby,’ exclaimed the Countess, on the first day as they sat together after dinner. ‘Your devotion to her is so extraordinary that it has excited my curiosity. I expect a rara avis. Give your orders, Fenella, for Bennett to bring the young lady down to dessert.’
Lady Conroy looked uneasy.
‘I think you had better not see her now,’ she said; ‘you don’t like children, and she is very shy with strangers, and will most likely cry.’
‘Never mind! If she cries, we’ll send her back again,’ replied Lady Marjoram, who always liked to have her own way. ‘I think it is quite time I made the acquaintance of my niece. Let me see! How old is she?’
‘Eighteen months,’ said Fenella, in a low voice.
‘Quite grown up, I declare,’ laughed her sister-in-law. ‘Send for her at once. The girls are so precocious now-a-days, that at this rate she will be married before I see her.’
The order was given, and in a few minutes a tap was heard upon the dining-room door, and Bennett entering, set down with much pride upon the carpet a tiny creature, dressed in lace and ribbons, of about two feet high, who stood the centre of attraction, looking with scared and wistful eyes upon the strangers.
‘Baby!’ said Fenella, in her sweet, low voice.
The little figure fluttered like a blue-and-white butterfly, and then with a cry of pleasure tottered to her mother’s side, and laid her curly head against her knee. Fenella lifted her in her arms, and pressed her glowing face in the folds of the infant’s frock.
‘What a little fairy,’ cried the Countess. ‘She looks as if she had just stepped, ready dressed, out of the Soho Bazaar! Marjoram! Why don’t my children make a rush at me like that? Why do they always hang back and stick their fingers in their mouths, and their heads in the nurse’s apron? Look at that child! Stroking Fenella’s face like a grown being! I should get quite fond of a baby if it showed as much sense as that.’
‘She has always been with me,’ said Fenella ingenuously.
‘That’s it,’ acquiesced the Earl. ‘Lady Conroy has nursed her child, and you leave yours to a set of hirelings.’
‘Hold your tongue, Marjoram! You don’t know anything about it. How old did you say she was, Fenella? Can she talk?’
‘Very little, Janie. She can only say “mother,” and “father,” and “Bennie.”’
‘And whom does she resemble? Turn her face round, my dear, that I may see it,’ continued Lady Marjoram.
Fenella grew crimson.
‘They say she is very like me,’ she answered, with a rapidly beating heart.
‘Not a bit of it,’ cried the Countess. ‘She’s the very image of Bertie! The hair’s a trifle darker, perhaps, but that is the only difference I can see. I shall tell him so in my next letter. Well, Bennett, you can take Miss Conroy away now if you like, and I think she is a very fine little girl for her age, and does you a great deal of credit.’
‘Thank you, my lady,’ replied the servant, as she disengaged the clinging arms from about her mistress’s neck, and conveyed little Valeria out of sight again.
After that interview Fenella’s heart grew secure, and she took her child about with her wherever she went.
Since she had passed the crucible of Lady Marjoram’s scrutiny, she considered that all risk of discovery was over; and so much does custom become our second nature, that at times Fenella almost forgot what she had done, and detected herself waking with a start, to remember that Valeria was not Sir Gilbert Conroy’s child. That is, she contrived to lull her uneasy conscience to sleep respecting the deception she had practised, so long as it seemed to concern no one but herself. But the day arrived when the person who had been most injured by the transaction reappeared upon the scene, and from that moment the heart of Fenella reasserted itself, and refused to be quieted by any specious arguments that tried to make a wrong thing look as if it were right.
With the return of spring came Sir Gilbert Conroy from Sovooranooko. He had not resigned his appointment, but he required change of air and relaxation, and had procured so many months’ leave to England in consequence. He came back accompanied by his private secretary, and laden with the spoils of the chase, in excellent humour with the world, his wife, himself, and everybody belonging to him. But with the first kiss of welcome he bestowed upon her, all Fenella’s fancied serenity fled like a dream, and for the first time she saw what she had done in its true light.
END OF VOL. II.
COLSTON AND SON, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.