EPILOGUE.
It is the April of the following year. Mr. Sivewright’s collection has been sold in February, and the sale, happening in a halcyon period for the disposal of bric-à-brac, has justified the collector’s proudest hopes. He has divided the proceeds into two equal portions, one of which he has bestowed upon Lucius as Lucille’s dower; and with a part of this money Lucius has bought a modest practice, with the potentiality of unlimited improvement, in a narrow street, situated in that remote, but not unaristocratic region, beyond Manchester-square.
It is late in April, Lent is just over; there are wallflowers for sale on the greengrocers’ stalls, a perfume of spring in the atmosphere, even at the eastern end of London. The spar-forests yonder in the docks rise gaily against a warm blue sky, whence the smoke clouds have been swept by the brisk westerly breeze.
Bells are ringing gaily from the crocketed finial of the little Gothic church whose services Lucius Davoren has been wont faithfully to attend on his lonely bachelor Sundays; and Lucius, nevermore a bachelor, leads forth his fair young bride from the same Gothic temple. Not alone doth he issue forth as bridegroom, for behind him follow Geoffrey and Janet, who have also made glad surrender of their individual liberty before the altar in the rose-coloured light of yonder Munich window, a rose glow which these happy people accept as typical of the atmosphere of all their lives to come. Trouble can scarcely approach those whose love and faith are founded on so firm a rock.
Lucius has kept his promise, and waited for the same April sunlight to shine upon Geoffrey’s nuptials and his own. Miss Glenlyne has been one of the foremost figures in the little wedding group, and Mr. Sivewright has stood up before the altar, strong and solid of aspect as one of the various pillars of the church, to bestow his adopted granddaughter upon the man of her choice. Lucille has but one bridesmaid, in the person of Flossie, who looks like a small Titania, in her airy dress and wreath of spring blossoms. Never was there a smaller wedding party at a double marriage, never a simpler wedding.
They go straight from the church to the old house in the Shadrack-road, which no persuasion can induce Mr. Sivewright to abandon. Here, in the old panelled parlour, endeared to Lucius by the memory of many a happy hour with his betrothed, they find a modest banquet awaiting them, and a serious individual of the waiter-tribe, in respectable black, who has been sent from Birch’s with the banquet. Moselle corks fly merrily. Mr. Sivewright does the honours of the feast as gracefully as if he had been entertaining his friends habitually for the last twenty years. Lucille and Lucius go round the old house for a kind of farewell, but carefully avoid that one locked chamber which was the scene of Ferdinand Sivewright’s dreadful fate, and which has never been occupied since that night.
It is quite late in the afternoon when two carriages bear the two couples off to different railway stations: Lucius and Lucille on their way to Stillmington, where they are to spend their brief honeymoon of a week or ten days before beginning real and earnest life in the neatly-furnished, newly papered and painted house near Manchester-square, where Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and the inevitable Mercury are to compose their modest establishment; Geoffrey and Janet to Dover, whence they are to travel southwards, to climb Swiss mountains and do Rhine and Danube ere they return to take possession of a small but perfect abode in Mayfair, where Mrs. Hossack is to give musical evenings to her heart’s content, and where Flossie’s nursery is to be a very bower of bliss, full to overflowing of Siraudin’s bonbon boxes and illuminated fairy-tale books.
When Lucius and his bride take leave of Miss Glenlyne, the old lady, who has ‘borne up,’ as she calls it, wonderfully hitherto, melts into tears, and tells them that she means in future to spend the summer months in London, whether Spilling likes it or not, that she will take lodgings near Lucille’s new house, so that her darling may come and make tea for her every day. And then she adds in a whisper, that she has made a new will, and made Lucille her residuary legatee. ‘And except forty pounds a year to Spilling, and a legacy of fifty to each of the other servants, every sixpence I have is left to you, dear,’ she adds confidentially. She squeezes a fifty-pound note into Lucille’s hand just at the last, wrapped in a scrap of paper, on which is written in the old lady’s tremulous hand, ‘For hotel expenses at Stillmington.’
So they depart, happy, to begin that new life whose untrodden path to most of this world’s wayfarers seems somewhat rose-bestrewn. These begin their journey with a fair promise of finding more roses than thorns.
Thus it happens that Mr. Glenlyne Spalding Glenlyne remains in undisputed possession of his lands, tenements, and hereditaments, to grow big turnips, and employ labour, and do good in his generation; while Lucius, unburdened by superfluous wealth, yet amply provided against the hazards of professional income, is left free to pursue that calling which to him is at once exalted and congenial; and every one is content.
THE END.
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N. W.