Rupert Godwin

CHAPTER I.

A SAD FAREWELL.

In a charming residence, half cottage, half manor-house, embosomed in the woodland scenery of Hampshire, lived a family who might have formed the model for a poet’s ideal of domestic happiness. The home-circle was not a large one. It consisted of only four persons—Captain Harley Westford, of the merchant service, his wife, son, and daughter. The Captain and his wife were both in the fairest prime of middle age. Life for them seemed at its brightest and best. Clara Westford’s girlish beauty might, indeed, have vanished with the snows of departed winters, the blossoms of bygone spring-times; but another kind of beauty had succeeded—the calm loveliness of the matron whose life has been cloudless as one long summer’s day, pure as the untrodden snows of some far Alpine region.

Yes; she was very lovely still. Beauty has its Indian summer, and the glory of that later splendour is scarcely less than the early freshness of spring-time. Mrs. Westford possessed even a rarer charm than mere perfection of face or figure. Every look, every movement, was instinct with that indefinable grace for which we can find no better name than good breeding. She had that winning manner the French call graciousness. Those who were intimate with the Captain and his wife whispered that Clara Westford came of a nobler race than that of her husband. It was said that she had left the house of a wealthy father, to begin the battle of life with the frank, genial, handsome merchant sailor, and that she had thus made herself for ever an outcast from the family to which she belonged.

No one knew the real story of that runaway marriage. The Captain and his wife kept the secrets of the past locked in their own breasts. Mrs. Westford could very seldom be induced to speak of her marriage; but when she did speak, it was always in words that expressed the pride she felt in her husband.

“I know that his family has no place amongst Burke’s landed gentry, and that his grandfather was a trader on the high seas, like himself,” she would say; “but I also know that his name is honoured by the few to whom it is familiar, and that in his native town, Westford and honesty are synonymous terms.”

Only one shadow ever darkened that rustic dwelling among the verdant woods and fair spreading pastures of Hampshire; and that shadow was a very terrible one.

It came when the husband and father was obliged to leave the dear ones who made his home a kind of paradise for him. Partings were very frequent in that simple household. The Captain’s professional duties called him often away to scenes of peril and tempest, far from that happy nook in peaceful England.

To-day the June sunshine is bright on the lawn and flower-beds in the Captain’s garden; but the shadow comes with the sunshine, and the bright midsummer noontide is an hour of sadness for the seaman’s household.

The Captain and his wife are walking slowly, arm in arm, under the shelter of a long alley of hazel and filbert trees. It is a lovely day at the close of June; the roses are in their fullest splendour; the deep blue sky is unshadowed by a cloud; the hum of bees and carolling music of birds make all the air melodious with nature’s simple harmonies; a thousand butterflies are fluttering above the flower-beds on the smooth lawn before the windows of the old Grange. Every quaint diamond-paned casement and broad mullioned window winks and blinks in the warm sunlight, till the old house seems full of eyes. The yellow stone-crop on the gabled roof, the deep crimson of the brickwork, are sharply defined against an ultramarine sky, and make a picture that would gladden the eyes of a pre-Raphaelite. The sunshine steeps every leaf and every flower in its warm radiance—it floods the trees with silvery light, it transforms and glorifies the commonest objects, until the earth seems unfamiliar and beautiful as fairyland.

On such a day as this, it seems almost impossible to believe that sorrow or heartache can have any existence upon this glorified earth; we almost forgot that hearts can break amid beauty and sunshine.

Clara Westford’s noble face is pale and wan this sunny morning. Dark circles surround her eyes—earnest eyes, from whose clear depths the very soul of truth looks out. All through the past night this true-hearted wife has watched and wept on her knees before Him who can alone protect the wanderer.

“Oh, Harley,” she exclaimed, in a low, tremulous voice, while her slender fingers tightened their grasp upon the Captain’s arm, “it is so bitter—so bitter; almost too bitter to bear. We have parted often before to-day; and yet to-day, for the first time, the anguish of parting seems more than I can endure.”

There was a look of agony in the wife’s pale face, as she turned it towards her husband, that expressed even more than her passionate words. There were no tears in the large violet-hued eyes; but there was a quivering motion about the compressed lips that betrayed a world of suffering.

At sea, or in any hour of peril and contest, Harley Westford possessed the courage of a lion; but the aspect of his wife’s grief transformed him into the veriest coward. He strove manfully, however, to conceal his emotion, and it was in a tone of affected gaiety that he replied to Mrs. Westford.

“My darling,” he exclaimed, “this is really foolish, and quite unworthy of a seaman’s wife, who should have a soul above fear. This parting ought not to be a hard one; for is not this to be my last voyage? After this one trip to China, by which I hope to make a sackful of golden guineas for you and the dear ones, I mean to settle down for the rest of my life in this dear old Grange, a regular landsman, a gentleman farmer, if you like; going in for pigs, and prize cattle, and monster turnips, and all that kind of thing, like a country squire to the manner born. Why, Clara, you ought not to shed a tear, this time!”

“There are no tears in my eyes, Harley,” his wife answered, in the same low, faltering voice, so terribly expressive of mental anguish; “there is something in my sorrow too deep for tears. I have shed tears always on the day of our parting, and I know that my cowardly weakness has often unmanned you, Harley; but I can shed no tears to-day. There is an awful terror in my heart. My dreams for the last week have been full of trouble and foreboding. My prayers last night brought no consolation. It seemed to me as if Heaven was deaf to my cries. I feel like some unhappy wretch who wanders blindfold upon the brink of a precipice—every step may plunge me into an abyss of darkness and horror. O, Harley, Harley, have pity upon me! I know there is danger in this voyage—deadly, unseen peril. Do not go! Have mercy upon my anguish, Harley, and do not go!”

Again the slender hands tightened convulsively upon the sailor’s arm. It seemed as if the agonized wife would have held her husband despite himself in that passionate grasp.

Captain Westford smiled sadly.

“My darling,” he said, “foolish as I know your fears to be, I might perhaps indulge them if my word were not pledged to this voyage; but my word is pledged. And when did Harley Westford ever break his promise? There is not a sailor amongst my crew who does not look forward to this trip as a means of taking home comfort to his wife and little ones. They all confide in me as if I were their brother as well as their captain; and I know their plans, poor fellows, and the disappointment they would feel if anything prevented the voyage. No, darling, you must be bold and brave, like a true-hearted sailor’s wife as you are. The Lily Queen—your ship, Clara; christened after you, the queen of all earthly lilies—the Lily Queen sails from London Docks at daybreak to-morrow, and, if he lives, Harley Westford sails with her!”

The wife knew that all further remonstrance was useless. She knew that her husband valued his word and honour more than his life—more even than her happiness. She only breathed one long sigh, which sounded like the last murmur of a despairing heart.

“And now listen to me, my dearest one,” said Harley Westford, in tones which he strove to render cheerful. “Listen to me, my own brave, true-hearted wife; for I must talk to you of serious business before the Winchester coach turns the sharp corner yonder by the village pond.”

He looked at his watch as he spoke.

“Only one more half-hour, Clara, and then good-bye!” he exclaimed. “Now, darling, listen. You know that, thanks to Providence, I have been enabled to save a very decent little fortune for you and yours. Close against my breast I carry a pocket-book containing bank-notes to the amount of twenty thousand pounds, the entire bulk of my fortune, withdrawn from different foreign investments, by the advice of friends, who have given me warning of an approaching crisis in the money-market. There seems to be always something or other wrong in the money-market, by the way. Directly I return from China I shall invest this money, with the earnings of my present enterprise, in the best and safest manner I can. In the mean time, I shall place the money in the hands of the present head of the banking firm in which my father had the highest confidence and in whose house he kept an account for thirty years of his life. In such hands the money will be safe until my return And, to guard against any chance of accident, I shall send you the banker’s receipt for the twenty thousand pounds, and for the title-deeds of this house and land, which I shall also lodge in his hands. You will receive these from me before I set sail; and then, as my will is in the hands of my lawyer, you and the children will be safe, come what may.”

“O, Harley,” murmured Clara Westford, “every word you say makes me more and more wretched. You talk as if you were going to certain death.”

“No, darling, I only talk like a prudent man, who knows the uncertainty of life. But I will say no more, Clara. With twenty thousand pounds, and the freehold of this old Grange, with fifty acres of the best land in Hampshire spreading round it, you and the dear ones cannot be ill provided for. And now, dearest, nearly half my time has gone, and I must go and say good-bye to my children.”

The Captain stepped from the shady alley to the broad sunshine of the lawn. Opposite him were the windows of a pretty morning-room, sheltered by a long verandah, half hidden under honeysuckle and roses. The cages of the pet birds hung under this verandah, and a Skye terrier was lying on the silky white mat stretched before one of the long French windows, blinking his lazy eyelids in the meridian sun.

A girl of about seventeen appeared in this window. As the Captain stepped out upon the lawn she came running towards him.

Never, perhaps, had the June sunlight shone upon a lovelier creature than this white-robed girl who came to meet the Captain. Her beauty had a sunny freshness which seemed in harmony with the summer morning. Her features were small and delicately-formed; the nose, forehead, and chin of the purest Grecian type. Her eyes, like her mother’s, were of the deepest violet hue, large, lustrous, and earnest, fringed by long auburn lashes. Her hair was of that golden tint, so rare in nature, and which art has been wont to simulate, from the age of Roman Lydias and Julius down to our own enlightened era.

This was Violet Westford. They had called her Violet because of those deep-blue eyes, which were only to be matched by the hue of the modest hedgerow flower that hides its beauty under sheltering leaves. They had called her Violet; and well did the sweet romantic name harmonize with the nature of Clara Westford’s daughter, for the girl was almost as unconscious of her exquisite loveliness as the timid blossom after which she had been christened.

“Dearest father,” she exclaimed, passing her little hand through the Captain’s arm, while Mrs. Westford sank faint and exhausted upon a garden-seat on the lawn, “mamma has been very cruel to detain you so long, while your poor Violet has been longing for a chance of saying good-bye. I have been counting the minutes, papa, and the coach will be at the gate almost immediately. O, papa, papa, it seems so hard to lose you!”

The beautiful blue eyes filled with tears as the girl clung to her father; but in Violet Westford’s face there was no trace of that awful shadow which blanched the cheeks and lips of her mother to a death-like whiteness. Violet only felt a natural grief at this parting with a father whom she idolized. There was no presentiment of impending peril weighing down her heart.

“Lionel has gone to get Warrior saddled,” she said; “he is going to ride by the cross-road to Winchester. He will be there to meet you when the coach arrives, and will only part from you when the train leaves the station. How I envy him that half-hour at the station! Men are always better off than women,” murmured the petted beauty of seventeen, with the most bewitching moue.

“My darling, hark! There is the coach.”

The guard’s horn playing a joyous polka made itself heard among the trees as the Captain spoke. At the same moment Lionel Westford rode out of an old-fashioned ivy-covered archway, which formed the entrance to the stables. The coach stopped at the low wide gate opening into the Grange gardens, and the guard’s horn had an impatient sound in the ears of Violet Westford.

Mrs. Westford rose from the rustic bench, calm and tearless, but deadly pale. She advanced to her husband, and put her icy hands in his.

“My beloved,” she murmured, “my all in all, I can only pray for you. I must ask you one question, Harley. You spoke just now of a banker; tell me his name, dearest. I have a particular reason for making this inquiry.”

“My father’s bankers were Godwin and Selby,” answered the Captain; “the present head of the firm is Rupert Godwin. My own darling, good-bye.”

The horn playing that cheerful dance-music sounded louder and more clamorous than ever, as Harley Westford pressed one kiss upon his wife’s white lips and tore himself away. So hurried, so agitated, had the Captain been in that sad parting, that he had been utterly unconscious of the one low agonized cry which broke from his wife’s lips at the sound of Rupert Godwin’s name.

But as the coach drove away, bearing with it the husband and father, Clara Westford tottered forward a few paces, and then fell back swooning on the grass.

Violet returned from the garden-gate to see her mother lying upon the ground, white and motionless as a corpse. The girl’s terror-stricken shriek brought a couple of women servants running from the house. Mrs. Westford was no puling sentimentalist; and deeply as she had always felt the pain of parting from the husband she so fondly loved, she had never before been known to lose consciousness. She had, indeed, been distinguished for the heroic calmness with which she had always endured her sorrow setting a noble example to her son and daughter.

The servants, assisted by Violet, carried the unconscious wife into the house, and laid her on a sofa in the cool drawing-room, carefully darkened by the Venetian shutters.

One of the women then ran to fetch the village doctor, while Violet knelt by her mother’s side, bathing the pale forehead with toilet vinegar.

Presently the dark-blue eyes were slowly opened and turned towards Violet with a fixed and almost awful stare.

“Rupert Godwin! Rupert Godwin!” cried Clara Westford in tones of anguish. “O, not to him, Harley! O, no, no, no! Not to him! Rupert Godwin! I knew that there was peril, deadly peril, in store for you; but I never dreamt of that danger.”

Again the eyes closed; the head fell back upon the sofa-pillows.

The doctor came; but neither he nor any other doctor upon this earth could have ministered to her, whose disease was of the mind rather than of the body.

Mrs. Westford fell from one fainting-fit into another. She was conveyed to her own room, where she was tenderly watched by her daughter, and by her son Lionel, who returned from Winchester after having seen his father start by the London train.

The young man adored his mother, and was both grieved and alarmed by her sudden illness. He insisted upon taking up his post in a pretty little boudoir adjoining Mrs. Westford’s bedroom, and he sat there hour after hour, listening to every sound in the sick chamber.

The old Grange, so gay with happy voices only a few days before, was now silent as the house of death. The doctor ordered his patient to be kept in unbroken quiet, and his orders were implicitly obeyed.

But though Mr. Sanderson, the village surgeon, was a man of considerable experience, he found his patient’s illness of a nature to baffle his best care, his highest skill.

“The mind is ailing, Miss Westford,” he said, in answer to Violet’s anxious questions; “the parting of to-day has affected your mother very keenly, and hers is an illness that time alone can heal. In the meanwhile I can only recommend perfect repose. The mind has been over-excited by painful emotions, and we must allow time for recovery. A night’s rest may restore the brain to its normal state. To-morrow all may be well.”