THE EPILOGUE.
After the terrible crash which ended her brief married life, Florence Lobyer took shelter with her Aunt Bushby until such time as her father should return to England and be able to receive her at the Fountains. Tender letters, dictated by that generous father, and written in Georgina's elegant Italian hand, came to comfort the poor terror-stricken young widow.
No Aladdin palace floating skyward through the thin air ever vanished more completely from its sometime possessor than the splendours of Pevenshall vanished from her who had once been the queen of that gorgeous mansion. Of all the grandeurs of her married life Mrs. Lobyer did not carry away with her so much as a trinket. Iron-hearted functionaries swooped down upon the noble dwelling which honest, hard-working Thomas Lobyer the elder had created to be an abiding monument of an industrious and honourable career, and the widow was given to understand that the gown upon her back and the wedding-ring on her finger were about the only possessions she had any right to carry away with her.
Poor Florence was glad to part with the costly frivolities for which she had sold herself; she was glad to separate herself from every evidence of that ill-omened bargain. She looked back upon her past life with unspeakable horror. The letters found in her husband's desk had confirmed Sir Nugent Evershed's suspicions of that husband's baseness. They contained ample proof that Thomas Lobyer had been engaged in the attempt to get up evidence against his wife's honour at the moment when commercial ruin overtook him, and that he had plotted a vengeance that should involve the enemy of his boyhood and the wife of whom he had grown weary in the same destruction.
It was scarcely strange, therefore, if Florence was glad to escape from Pevenshall, and from every thing associated with her married life. She secluded herself in one of the remoter chambers of her aunt's house, and would see no one except Lady Cecil, who had early tidings of her friend's affliction, and who came to see her, looking very pale and weak after that tedious illness through which Mr. O'Boyneville had nursed her so patiently.
The two women embraced each other tenderly. For some minutes Cecil sat in silence with Flo's slender black-robed figure folded in her arms. Then they talked a little in low suppressed voices of the dreadful event which had occasioned the wearing of that dismal black raiment.
"You must come to Chudleigh Combe with Laurence and me," Cecil said by-and-by. "Mr. O'Boyneville has bought the dear old place where I spent my childhood, Flo. It was the negotiation about the purchase which took him away from Pevenshall that time. Oh Florence, I can never tell you how good he has been to me. I shall never dare to tell you how unworthy I have been of his goodness. But we are very happy now—thank God, we are completely happy now. He nursed me all through my long illness; and I used to wake and see him watching me in the dead of the night, when I was too languid to speak, and powerless to tell him that I was conscious of his goodness. It was in those long night-watches that I learnt to understand him; and now I think there is nothing in the world that could come between us."
This was all that Cecil said about herself. She stopped with her old friend for some hours; and in the course of their conversation it transpired that Major Gordon had gone to Spanish America with a party of savans and explorers, on a mission which involved as much peril as could be found on any battle-field.
Flo accepted her friend's invitation, and spent some weeks in the old-fashioned house surrounded by Devonian woodland, and within sound of the low murmur of the sea. She stayed with Cecil till she was summoned to the Fountains, where her stepmother received her with quiet tenderness that was infinitely soothing, and where she found her father just beginning to hope that he might live to paint his Andromeda.
"I am equal to either fortune," he said, turning his face towards his wife, illumined by a more beautiful smile than even his pencil had ever transferred to canvas; "for in Georgey I have something better than mortal eyesight. I have been so happy as the poor blind slave of my Delilah, that I am almost afraid I may lose something by regaining my sight."
In that bright peaceful home, with all fair and pleasant images around her, Florence found it easy to forget the past. Sometimes when she lingered before the glass, arranging the bright rippling tresses under her widow's-cap, the image of Sir Nugent Evershed flitted through her brain.
"I was weak enough to think that he really loved me, and that if I had been free, he would have been at my feet," she thought with a blush; "and though I have been a widow nearly a twelvemonth he has never come near me, or made the faintest sign of any interest in my fate. It was very pleasant to flirt with the foolish mistress of Pevenshall Place, but Sir Nugent is too wise to marry a bankrupt cotton-spinner's widow. I begin to think there is only one person in the world who ever truly loved me."
That one person is an individual who is rising gradually in the estimation of his fellow-men as a landscape-painter, and who comes to the Fountains now and then on a Sunday evening, and seems always glad to find his way to the quiet corner where Florence sits in her widow's-weeds. If the sombre dress—invested with a grace by the artistic hands of Mrs. Crawford's milliner—happens to be very becoming, it is no fault of the young widow, who owes her present charm to no coquetry of manner, but rather to a pensive gravity, which the dismal close of her married life has left upon her. She is so young and so pretty that no one looking at her can doubt for a moment that the hour must come sooner or later when a new life will begin for her, and a bright future open itself before her thoughtful eyes like a sunshiny vista in one of Philip Foley's landscapes. There are people who venture to prophesy that the landscape-painter will be the happy individual for whose enchantment those dismal draperies of black will be transformed into the white robes of a bride.
Meanwhile life glides smoothly by at the Fountains. Never was ministering slave more devoted to an idolised master than the elegant Georgina to her husband. The bronzes, and cabinet-pictures, and Persian carpets, and Angora cats have been removed from the Hermitage to Mr. Crawford's dwelling; and the little retreat in the lane near Hyde Park is again in the market, at the moderate rent of 700l. per annum. It is scarcely necessary to say that Mrs. Champernowne's admirers were surprised and indignant when the tidings of her marriage fell like a thunderbolt amongst the ranks of her victims: but Time, which brings resignation to all earthly mourners, has consoled the idolaters of the widow, and they flock to the Fountains, as they flocked to the Hermitage, to burn incense at the shrine of the most charming woman in London.
The one trouble of Mr. Crawford's married life has been but of brief duration, for the painter has regained the use of his eyes in time to see his daughter in her widow's-cap, and in time to begin his Andromeda before the success of his Dido has been forgotten by the most fickle of his admirers.
Amongst the Sunday-evening visitors at the Fountains appear very often Mr. and Lady Cecil O'Boyneville. The barrister has fought his way into the House of Commons; and there is some talk of his speedy elevation to the bench. He has removed his household goods from Bloomsbury to sunnier regions within sight of the verdant vistas of Kensington Gardens; and Mrs. MacClaverhouse tells her niece that she has reason to be thankful to the Providence that has given her so good a husband and so handsome an income.
Cecil lives to look once more upon Hector Gordon's wedding-cards; but this time the sight brings her no pang of regret. She hands the little packet to her husband with a smile and says:
"I am so glad he has married again; and I hope he will be as happy—as we are."
The barrister looks up from his Times to reply with a vague murmur; and then resumes his reading. But presently he looks up again with his face radiant.
"I knew Valentine would make a mess of his defence in Peter versus Piper!" he exclaims; "that's a case I should like to have had the handling of myself!"
THE END.
[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation left as printed.]