Phemie Keller

Time went by, and still Phemie remained unmarried.

Suitors had come, and suitors had gone; but to each and all the widow’s answer was the same. She would never take a second husband. And so time went on, and she was still, as I have said, unmarried.

But the years had in other respects worked great changes in her. She was not the Phemie we have seen in the pages that have been written. She was outwardly a changed Phemie; a woman who, finding that neither work nor solitude availed to bring her peace, went in for distraction, and was to be met with at every concert, flower-show, pic-nic, what you will.

It was Duncan Aggland who had greatly contributed to bring about this alteration; Duncan, who, seeming to imagine he owned a kind of reversionary interest in his cousin, had wanted her to cast her fortunes with his, and when she declined to do so, remarked that she was staying single for the sake of Basil Stondon—that he knew she was, and that everybody said (oh! the horror of that everybody) no young woman would mew herself up at Roundwood as she did if she had not been disappointed by some one; and that further, he (the speaker) had not been so blind as perhaps she imagined to the state of affairs at Marshlands.

Mr. Duncan Aggland was very angry, or perhaps he would never have uttered such very disagreeable truths; and, like all people who are angry, he got the worst of the encounter, for Phemie thanked him for his engaging frankness, and begged that for the future he would not consider Roundwood so much his home as formerly.

“Because,” she finished, “I purpose taking a house in town, and I might see more of you then than would be at all agreeable if you continued to visit me as often as you have done.”

“But I am doing so well, Phemie,” he pleaded, becoming submissive in a moment. “I am to be taken into partnership next year, and——”

“No one can be more delighted to hear of your worldly advancement than I,” broke in Phemie. “I am charmed to know you are doing so well, and I have not the least doubt of your ability to maintain a wife; but on principle I object to the marriage of cousins, and whomsoever I may choose hereafter to marry, be quite sure it will not be you.”

“That is plain at any rate,” said the young man.

“I meant it to be so,” she answered; “obscurity can serve no good purpose on either side; you have made a mistake, that is all, and it would be unkind in me not to undeceive you. Now, good-bye, and when you meet with any one you consider worthy to become Mrs. Duncan Aggland, I, as the female head of your family, shall be most happy to call upon her.” With which speech, Mrs. Stondon dismissed her admirer, and from that day forth devoted herself, so far as any mere observer could discover, heart and soul to amusement and frivolity.

People who had seen the widow during her time of mourning marvelled to behold her, when that time was over, emerging from her seclusion, accepting all invitations, appearing here and there and everywhere, seeming to care very little what was thought about her, providing only she could pass the time and make the hours fly quicker.

“What a flirt that woman is,” some one said, casually, to Basil Stondon, when speaking of his relative.

“Yes,” thought Basil, as he walked home, “what a flirt! Hang her, she never was anything but a flirt. If she had, my life might have been a different one.”

So, when men stumble over a pebble they are apt to blame the pebble instead of their own stupidity; so, when they fall into a hole they are in the habit of anathematising the hole for being there instead of their own blindness which was unable to see it; and so on precisely the same principle Basil accused Phemie of causing misfortunes which had been brought about entirely by himself.

As for the life she led—the heartless, purposeless, unsatisfying life—what can we say but this, that there are some people who when they are in trouble take to dram-drinking, while others prefer opium; and in like manner there are men and women who mentally seek the oblivion of excitement, while others court the deadening monotony of seclusion. Which is worst—providing the patient must run to either extreme—to one the wine cup, or to another the opium? They are both so injurious, you answer, that it would be impossible to make a choice, and yet for Phemie I think the intoxication of society was the least hurtful of the twain. To a temperament like hers—secure against disappointment, against love, against expectations that could never be realised—excitement was surely less fatal than inaction, the round of gaiety than the round of endurance.

The world was, as usual, critical and not over kind in its remarks upon her: some people saying she was seeking for a coronet, others that a title would content her, even if the title were no higher than that of baronet.

As to her views and wishes, if she had any, all her own relatives were at fault, even Mr. Aggland, who only once ventured to say—

To which Phemie answered by putting her hand over his mouth, and saying—

“Ah, uncle, it went long ago; no need to remind me of how fast youth and beauty pass away.”

They were rather unique, this uncle and niece, and much sought after in London society accordingly. Every grace of manner, every art and conventionality Mrs. Stondon had acquired so dearly, she put forth now to win her popularity and regard.

Her little affectations were brought out once again—brought out and aired after years. She fenced, she rallied, she retorted, she laughed, she looked grave, according to the rules she had taken so much trouble to learn.

Well, well, life is strange, and women are the strangest part of life, and Phemie could not have given a reason for what she did save this, that she hoped some day to meet Basil Stondon and his wife in society, and astonish them with her cold bright wit, her unimpassioned manner, her worldly ideas, and her unromantic views of life.

And so the years went on, as I have said, and still there was only one suitor who hung back, one man who felt that a woman like this was not calculated to make his life happy, his home a peaceful one.

Obedient to the last request her lips had framed, Major Morrice never through the years lost sight of his dead love’s friend, but visited her, talked with her, walked with her, and had been so near proposing many times that the world had almost ground for its gossip when it said at last they were engaged.

Never, however, even within sight of that shore came they: the woman was serious—she really did not intend to marry again. When her friends fancied she was in jest, she spoke in sober earnest.

Had she been as one of those with whom she was associating, she might have buried not one but twenty husbands, and assisted at the obsequies of the last with cheerful resignation. But life with its sorrows, was an earnest affair to Phemie, and its troubles were matters of serious import to her.

“I suppose you think I like this whirl,” she said, one day, to Major Morrice; and he answered,

“It is impossible for me to think otherwise, seeing how thoroughly you seem to enjoy it.”

“One must live,” Mrs. Stondon asserted, a little defiantly.

“True; but is it necessary always to live in public?” he replied.

“It is to me,” she said; “it is to me.”

“Would it be impertinent if I asked why?” and he spoke with a tone of pity in his voice such as Phemie had not heard previously in the voice of any one unconnected with her by blood or kinship.

“Because I have no home ties,” she returned; “because I have neither father nor mother, brother nor sister, husband nor children; because I am lonely—lonely beyond all power of description. There, you have made me talk about myself; now forget me. Let us talk about something else.”

“May I talk about myself?” he asked, drawing a little nearer to her.

“Yes; that is always a welcome topic,” she answered. And he went on—

“I, too, am lonely in the world. Why should we not cast our loneliness together. Will you take me—knowing all the past—for your husband? I will strive to prove myself worthy of the trust——”

She was astonished—too much astonished perhaps at first to answer; but at last she slowly said—

“Major Morrice, you do not know what you are saying; you do not know what you are asking——”

“I am praying you to be my wife,” he replied. “Having loved your friend as far as man can love, I am beseeching her friend to make me happy.”

She laid her hand on his shoulder, and looked steadily in his face while she answered—

“Major Morrice, you may know how much the past has taken from me when I say I cannot accept a husband even like you. I think I may truly affirm that I love and honour you more than any man on earth; but I cannot marry you. I would not give one like you the mere husk of a love out of which the heart was eaten long and long ago.”

Very tenderly he talked to her, but it was of no use. Very earnestly he pleaded that he had affection enough and to spare for both. Phemie was resolute.

“You are worthy a better fate,” she said. “I have done harm enough in my life, let me be fair and true and honest now.”

And she was all these, though it may have been that for the moment she felt tempted to flee from the awful loneliness of her purposeless existence—from the cold selfishness of the world to the warmth and the welcome of his love.

But it was not to be—it was never to be. She had toiled for her wages in the years which were gone, and her wages were now being paid to her by no niggardly hand.

That which we contract for we must fulfil—that which we agree blindly, or with our eyes open, to receive, we must content ourselves withal.

“The wages of sin is death.” She had sinned, and death fell on every blade of grass near her—on every shrub—on every flower.

It was the summer time, and a great longing came over her to see the hills and the mountains and the valleys and the wild dale country once more.

“I should like to go to Cumberland for a month,” she said, one day; and accordingly she and her uncle and Helen set forth together on that long northern journey which wearied Phemie even before she reached the old “Salutation” Inn, which has greeted so many a tourist entering the Lake District.

But, spite of her weariness, she could not rest in the hotel. Tired and exhausted, Helen went off to bed, while Mr. Aggland and his niece walked along the road which leads from Ambleside to Rydal.

They walked in silence; he was busy with his thoughts, she with hers. They had come back to the old country again, though not to the old place. They had crossed the frontier and passed out of the flat, rich southern lands into the lake district, where mountains rose to the sky and streams came down the hill sides; and the traveller, wandering solitary over the fells, heard the plash of distant waterfalls alone breaking the desolate silence.

They had come back from the bustle of great towns, from intercourse with many men, from the life which always grows more rapid and more exciting the nearer people draw towards London—to the old quiet home, to the tarns, to the heather, to the mountains, to the valleys, which were all the same as when Phemie had dwelt among them, the adopted daughter of the owner of the Hill Farm.

She had left the wild mountain country when the sun was shining brightly; in the noontide, in the light; she returned to walk through it once more, but the grey evening shadows were settling down over the landscape, as the shadows had settled upon her life. She left it to become a great lady, and she had achieved that object. She had gained wealth and position, and she was now wondering, as she looked to right and left, what wealth and position availed.

They walked on, and the pure sweet air coming down from among the hills seemed to put fresh life into her, to restore something of the elasticity of her youth. Side by side, still in silence, they passed by Rydal Hill, through Rydal village, and so on till they came within sight of a house which most tourists in that part of England must have paused to admire. It is a cottage set back a little from the road, looking over Rydal Lake, with Nab Scar and Helm Crag overshadowing it, with the sweet greenery of that lovely country swelling away from it on all sides, with the summer flowers giving forth their sweetest perfume around it, with climbers and creepers trailing over it—a delightful spot in which to live, a sad place in which to die.

There are nooks on the earth that seem too beautiful to leave; there are seasons when everything in nature is so perfect, when her skies are so soft, her woods so leafy, her sunsets so gorgeous, her mornings so bright and gladsome, her streams so clear, her lakes so calm, her flowers and shrubs so fragrant, that it seems impossible for man to go away from all this beauty and brightness, to close his eyes on the face of this lovely world, and never to open them in time again.

Some thought of this kind came across Phemie’s mind as she stood looking at the lake and the landscape, which now lay bathed and steeped in moonlight. For the first time for years she felt that there was a happiness in the mere fact of existence; that no human being can have quite done with life so long as he remains in the flesh. It came upon her suddenly that she had been wrong, that she had done wrong, in suffering herself to grow so weary of so beautiful a world; and as out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh, so out of her heart dropped the sentence,

“I think one might grow almost happy again, uncle, living in a place like this.”

Then they turned and retraced their steps, talking as they went, talking under the moonlight of many things about which they had held their peace for years; and it was getting late when they found themselves in Ambleside once more, and entering the Salutation, at the door of which hotel some excursionists were just alighting.

“Mother, and father, and children,” decided Phemie, as she passed them by; and she would have gone upstairs and thought no more of them but for a voice which she fancied she knew, exclaiming,

“Don’t run in so rudely, Harry; keep back, sir.” Whereupon at once the lady said, “You are always snubbing that boy, Basil.”

The person so addressed never turned to answer; he caught the child, who was rushing past Phemie, with one hand, while with the other he raised his hat and apologised for his son’s forwardness.

“You need not apologise to me,” answered Phemie; “we are too old friends to stand on ceremony.” And she put out her hand and clasped his again after years—after years.

“Well, I declare,” cried Mrs. Basil Stondon, while they all stood grouped together in the hall; “if this is not a pleasant surprise. Who would have thought of meeting you here?”

“There is nothing extraordinary in meeting me,” Phemie answered; “the wonder is meeting you.”

“It was a fancy of Basil’s,” that gentleman’s wife replied. “He wanted to come north—and so we came north; we have been here, in Westmoreland I mean, ten days, and I for one was getting terribly sick of it; but now you are in the same place it will make a difference. It is so horrid being among strangers, not having a soul one knows to speak to.”

Phemie agreed that to be so placed must indeed be distressing; and they all adjourned upstairs, and having arranged to spend the evening together, the ladies took off their bonnets while the gentlemen ordered tea.

“And you positively look younger than when I saw you last,” remarked Mrs. Basil Stondon, querulously; “but it is easy for you to look young: free from care and without children, and surrounded by every blessing and comfort, why should you not keep your beauty?”

“I have not kept it,” answered Phemie, and she sighed as she spoke; though the past with its vanities, and its temptations, and its sorrows and its repentance seemed like a dream to her at the moment. “I have not kept it, and there is no reason why I should have kept it. Youth cannot stay with us for ever, Georgina; if it did, girls would have small chance of ever being either wooed or wed.”

There was a little side blow in this sentence, and Georgina felt it. Her youth had helped her to secure Basil, a prize she often told him was scarcely worth the trouble, to which remark he had a habit of retorting—

“You did not think so at one time, at least, judging by the trouble you took,” for Basil never hesitated to remind his wife of the efforts she had made to win him, and was not over delicate about recapitulating to her all the advantages she had gained for herself by the match.

They lived such a life that the presence of any stranger seemed a relief; and accordingly both husband and wife eagerly pressed Mr. Aggland, and Phemie, and Helen to join them in their various excursions, and to make up parties for visiting Keswick, and Coniston, and Ullswater, and many a lovely spot much more accessible from Ambleside than those just enumerated.

Day after day they passed together, evening after evening they spent, talking in the moonlight or across the tea-table; but the more Phemie saw of Basil and his wife, the more wretched she felt satisfied they were.

Georgina had not found the game all profit, and was disappointed in some way. Basil did not care for the woman he had married, and took no pains to conceal that the only creature for whom he now lived, and moved, and had his being, was Harry, his son and heir, whom his mother spoiled past redemption, and encouraged in all acts of disobedience and rebellion, possibly to annoy his father.

As for the little girl, she went to the wall entirely; neither father nor mother seemed to recognise her as belonging to the same species as Master Harry, who was for ever up to some mischief, and being perpetually called to account for his misdeeds by Basil, who “snubbed the child,” so said his wife.

“And I do hope,” exclaimed Georgina, when the day of separation came at last, “that you will come and spend a long time with me in Norfolk. It would be a real charity, for Basil is scarcely ever in the house. He leaves me alone from morning till night. Now do come, will you?”

“Do you really wish me to come, Georgina?” asked Mrs. Stondon, who had latterly begun to doubt whether she heard and saw correctly. “Are you speaking honestly and truly, when you say you wish I would do so?”

“Honestly and truly, and there is my hand on it,” laughed Georgina.

“And your husband?”

“Oh! my husband must answer for himself. I never presume to understand what may be the state of Basil’s mind on any subject. If you wish him to invite you also, I will ask him to write you a letter requesting the honour, et cetera; but I should have thought my invitation sufficient. You are such a great lady now, though, there is no knowing how to deal with you.”

“I will come,” answered Phemie, suddenly, “sometime in the autumn, when the trees are looking their best.”

“That is a dear good creature,” remarked Mrs. Basil Stondon, mentally adding, “now that will drive Mrs. Montague away; and if I once get her out of the house, I will take precious good care she never enters it again.”

From which speech it will be perceived that Georgina Stondon was not a particularly different individual from Georgina Hurlford, but rather that she was capable of planning and scheming a little still.

Late in the season Phemie returned to Roundwood; but she had not been long settled there before a letter arrived from Marshlands entreating her not to forget her promise, but to come as soon as ever she could, and bring her uncle with her.

His part of the performance Mr. Aggland emphatically declined, and he could not quite resist saying to his niece—

“Phemie, do you think it is right for you to go? Are you safe—are you strong—are you not mad, think you, to fling yourself into such peril again?”

They were standing in the drawing-room at Roundwood as he spoke thus, he on one side of the centre table, she on the other; and the light of the wax candles fell full on her face as she remained for a moment silent ere she answered—

“I am safe—I am strong—and I am not mad—and I place myself in no peril. I am speaking the truth,” she added, with a smile. “I have no feeling now for Basil Stondon except that of friendship and pity. Seeing him as he is—not as I fancied him, but as he actually is—has done more towards curing me than all my punishment—than all my resolution.”

And she put her hand in his, and he felt that it did not tremble—that every finger lay passive—that every nerve seemed still.

“A woman’s mind is one of the inscrutable mysteries of this earth to me,” decided Mr. Aggland, as he thought over the puzzle of Phemie’s conduct in his own apartment. “I reared that woman—I watched her in childhood, girlhood—and best part of her womanhood I have spent by her side—and yet I know no more about her than if she were the greatest stranger upon earth. Well, she seems resolved to put herself in danger, but it is not my fault. Now, heaven and earth,” finished the perplexed philosopher, “is it?”

Down to Disley, Phemie travelled—over the old familiar ground the train swept on; and she took off her bonnet, and, drawing the blue curtain so as to shade her eyes from the glare of the light, looked out across the country just as she had done that day when she returned to Norfolk after her long sojourn abroad.

The fields were the same—the stations—the towns—the hedgerows—the poplars. Everything seemed unchanged excepting herself.

There was a great hush in the still autumn afternoon—a strange quietness in the air. Phemie thought of that journey afterwards, and remembered how often a calm precedes a storm. She was travelling down into Norfolk, all unconsciously, to fulfil a mission; and as the train sped on she tried to account to herself for the desire she felt to revisit Marshlands and to spend a few weeks with Basil and his wife.

It was no love for Basil. She knew that. She had examined her heart, and found the idol in possession no longer. Her youth had gone, and the passionate attachment of her youth with it. And yet something remained—some tie of memory, or association, or affection, or pity, which was strong enough to bring the woman back to Marshlands—to the dear home where she had been so happy and so wretched.

There came a point in that journey, however—at Cambridge, I think—when Phemie, unable fully to analyse her own sensations, turned coward, and would fain have gone back again.

She dreaded the sight of the old place, of the familiar rooms, the resurrection of the thousand-and-one recollections. She did not know whether, after all, she could be quite brave when the pines and the elms appeared standing clear against the sky as of yore. One by one the details of the picture which had been blurred and destroyed a little by the lapse of years came out clearly and distinctly before her view.

Only one thing she could not realise fully. Basil master of Marshlands, Georgina mistress, she herself their guest; children’s voices echoing about the place, and those very children leaving their games and their amusements, their father and their mother, to come to her.

Was that the bait which lured the lonely woman back to her old home? I do not know how she could have blinded and deluded herself into ignorance on this point when she knew that the only gentle, womanly tears she had shed for years fell over the face of Basil’s little girl.

She had never desired children—she had always held them away from her at arm’s length, and yet now she would have liked to carry “Fairy,” as she called her, back to Roundwood, whether for love of the little creature, or for love of its father, or simply because she wanted to have something all to herself, who can say? Only one fact is certain—the only pleasant hours she passed in Marshlands were those when she and Fairy wandered about the grounds hand-in-hand—when the child came to her room and listened to story and legend and song—when the little feet came running to meet her, making sweet pattering music by the way—when the soft arms were stretched out to “Mamma Phemie,” to “dear, dear Mamma Phemie,” who came at last to the conclusion it was best for her to leave Marshlands before Basil saw what an idiot she had grown.

But Basil saw it all—saw how his children turned from his wife to the woman he still loved better than his wife, and he grew angry at Georgina for having asked Phemie to the house, and words at last waxed hot between them on the subject.

For ever and for ever they were quarrelling, so far as difference of opinion was concerned, and wrangling over their differences. Phemie’s presence or Phemie’s absence signified little, only the quarrels became more vehement. Basil accused Georgina of striving to hurt and annoy him, Georgina declared that he had by his temper driven away every old acquaintance they possessed, and that she was determined to have somebody to speak to.

“If Mrs. Stondon were the devil,” she remarked, with somewhat unladylike vehemence, “I would cultivate her. I mean to go and stay with her. I intend to be asked to her house in town, and I do not intend to live any longer with your mother.”

“If you mean to have your own way in everything, then,” retorted Basil, “you had better put in your list that you will have to live without me.”

“That would be no loss—a decided gain,” replied Georgina. And thus the battle terminated for the time, only to be resumed the next day about Harry, who, young though he was, should, his father declared, be sent to school forthwith, unless his mother would have him kept out of the stable-yard, and away from the horse’s heels.

“I tell you now what it is,” said Basil, collecting all the men and women servants together, and addressing them en masse, “the first time I find Master Harry in the stables, or out about the grounds anywhere by himself, I will discharge you every one. Take this for notice, for by —— I will keep my word.”

“What a milksop you would make of the boy,” sneered Mrs. Basil Stondon. “What must the servants think of you?”

“They cannot think less of me than I do of myself for ever having been such a cursed fool as to marry you,” retorted Basil. Whereupon one word led, as usual, to more, and the quarrel terminated in Basil flinging a few things into a portmanteau and starting for a friend’s house, as was his wont whenever matrimony and the cares thereof grew too much for him.

Fain would Phemie have followed his example and taken flight also, but Georgina entreated her so earnestly to remain, that Mrs. Stondon yielded, and wrote to her uncle not to expect her at Roundwood for a week or ten days.

“Now I hope to heaven,” was Mr. Aggland’s secret thought, “she is not getting too fond of that place again, nor of its owner.” And his hope was fulfilled.

Phemie had grown perfectly sick of the place, but she stayed on as a matter of kindness to Georgina, and perhaps, also, with some faint hope of opening the misguided woman’s eyes, and making his home more comfortable for Basil.

“It is of no use talking,” remarked Georgina, one morning; “he ought to have married you, that is the whole secret of the affair, and—and——” She turned her head sharply away, and Phemie heard her sob. She had packed the cards, she had won all she asked for, and this was the result—a wretched home, a neglectful husband, a cat and dog existence. How could Phemie help—spite of all the misery Georgina had wrought her—feeling sorry for the unhappy wife?

“You might surely make a better thing of your life still,” she said, gently, “if you would only agree to bear and forbear; if you would only bring up Harry as his father wishes; if you would only just try for a little time, the effect of meeting his views instead of thwarting them, I am certain you might be a great deal more comfortable. I am confident Basil would pay back every concession with interest.”

“He would not,” she answered, slowly. “You may think you know Basil, but you do not. He has never forgiven me, and he never will. He might not have cared much for you had you been married to him, but as you were not, he thinks he only required you to make him the happiest man on earth. I thought I could have made him love me once,” she went on, speaking more rapidly; “but I was mistaken. The way to make a man like my husband hate you, is to belong to him. I ought not to show you what an escape you had,” she added; “but I owe you a good turn for the bad one I did you when I was a girl; and for all the rest, I have forgiven you long ago, I have indeed.”

“You are very kind,” answered Phemie; “but I have not the slightest idea what you had to forgive.”

“Have you not? I may tell you some day, but not at present.” And Georgina walked, as she spoke, to the window, opened it, and stepped out on the balcony mentioned in the earlier portion of this story.

She remained leaning over it for a few minutes, turning every now and then to address some sentence to Phemie, who stood behind her in the drawing-room. She talked much about Miss Derno, and how greatly she had disliked her, how firmly she had believed in her designs on Basil.

“I really thought at the time,” she was proceeding, when she suddenly stopped.

“What—what is it?” she broke out. “What are they bringing? Mrs. Stondon—quick—look, do you see that?”

Phemie ran, at the words, into the balcony, and then as instantly left it, and rushed from the drawing-room, and out at the front door, and round the house, and through the shrubberies, to a point where she met the men who had attracted Georgina’s attention.

“What is the matter?” she asked, with a quick look behind to see if Georgina were following. “What is it?” And the group parted in silence and let her look for herself.

Involuntarily she cried out, and the cry was repeated at her elbow by the wretched mother, who shrieked—

“I knew it was Harry. Bring him in and send for the doctor. Ride for your lives. Why do you all stand there doing nothing?” she went on fiercely, for the men never moved, but looked either down to the ground, or else each in his fellow’s face. “Do you hear me? Go for the doctor. Give me my son.”

“Give him to me,” Phemie said, and they put the child into her arms. His little hand dropped limp as they did so, and his head fell back.

“Ride for the doctor,” Phemie ordered, “for your mistress.” And she led the way into the house, carrying the dead heir of all those broad lands, of all that fine property, while the men lifted Georgina from the ground, where she had dropped, not absolutely fainting, but down in an incapable heap, and bore her in after the boy, for whose sake she had once forgotten her pain and her travail, and rejoiced that there was a man-child born into the world!