Into the Turkey carpet his chilled feet sank gratefully. He was so wet he did not like to sit down and tarnish with his dripping garments the morocco leather of the easy chair. A sense of peace, and leisure, and quietness, and trust fell upon him.
The rush of the river grew less audible.
"I will do it. I will tell him all, by——."
And never in his later years had Mr. Asherill uttered the sacred name with such agonized earnestness as then.
A man entered, old, white-haired, affluent; a man who did not merely look like a gentleman, but who was one; a man who talked little about religion, but whose life had been a long worship, a perpetual thanksgiving, a continual striving to do good.
He looked at the saturated clothes, at the white anxious face, at the mute glance towards the still open door; then he walked to the door, and having closed and bolted it, came close up to his visitor and asked,
"What is it? what is the matter?"....
It was a common enough story, and it did not take long to tell. When it was ended, Mr. Mortomley went to his safe, unlocked it, took out his cheque-book, filled in a cheque, signed and blotted off the writing.
"You cannot get this cashed to-day," he said; "it is too late, but first thing on Monday will be time enough for what you want. There, there; don't thank me. Thank the Almighty for sending you here and saving you from a worse crime still. Now go. Yet stay a moment. You look as if you wanted food and drink and firing. Here are a couple of sovereigns; and now do, do pray let this be a warning to you for the remainder of your life."
That was the phantom memory conjured up. Instead of the river or a prison, relief and a fresh chance given him.
It all happened just as the waves of time brought it back to his recollection.
A similar Saturday—the rain pouring down—only now it was to the old man's son, ruin had come, and there was no one to hold out a helping hand to him.
Never had Mrs. Asherill beheld her husband in a more gracious or softer mood than when, after dinner, he sat before a blazing fire and helped her to grapes and filled a wine glass with some choice port, and insisted on her drinking it.
"I have some sad news for you," she said. "I have kept it till now lest it should spoil your appetite for dinner. My poor friend Rosa Gilbert is dead, and she has left me five hundred pounds."
"Dear, dear, dear; dead is she, poor thing!" remarked Mr. Asherill. "What frail creatures we are! Grass before the mower. Here to-day; to-morrow, where?" And he folded his hands and stretched out his feet towards the fire, whilst Mrs. Asherill considered the question of mourning, and thought it seemed but a few days since Rosa and she were girls together.
"My dear," said Mr. Asherill, "if you have no objection I should like to devote fifty pounds of this legacy in charity. I have heard to-day of a sad case, a most sad case; a family opulent, highly esteemed, of considerable social standing, reduced to beggary. With your permission I should wish to send fifty pounds to the family as a thanks offering for great mercies vouchsafed to ourselves."
Mrs. Asherill instantly agreed to this. Though a woman, she was not mean; though a Christian, she had not her husband's faculty for looking after loaves and fishes.
She only bargained she should see the kind letter which accompanied the gift, and then and there, accordingly, Mr. Asherill wrote a draft of it.
With morning, however, came reflection. Fifty pounds was a large sum Mr. Asherill considered, and the Mortomleys might stand in no need of it.
He decided not to send so much, but to say nothing of the reduced gift to his wife.
She had seen the letter. That letter could go all the same with a smaller enclosure. The acknowledgment of a friendly gift from J. J. could be inserted in the 'Daily News' as he had requested. There was no necessity to change the form of that.
Monday came, and with it more prudent reflections.
Tuesday, even the later impulses of his generosity had been absurd.
Wednesday, and with it questions from Mrs. Asherill.
Thursday, and a greater access of prudence. Nevertheless, something must be done, he felt, and so he did something. He wrote out the letter in a fair hand, signed it,—"Your well wisher, John Jones," and enclosed a post-office order for £2. 10s.
Saturday came, no advertisement in the 'Daily News,' and more questions from Mrs. Asherill.
Monday, and this paragraph met Mr. Asherill's eyes,—
"Mrs. M. begs to acknowledge the receipt of two pounds ten shillings from J. J., which she has forwarded to the Secretary of the London Hospital."
Mr. Asherill shook all over with indignation. He had seen Mrs. Mortomley on the previous Saturday and was not surprised when he read the foregoing paragraph. He had fervently prayed privately that she might never associate him and the so-signed John Jones together, but he felt indignant nevertheless.
Particularly as it compelled him to practise a deception on the wife of his bosom.
He had to draw out an advertisement himself and take the Thursday's paper containing it home to Kew for Mrs. Asherill's delectation.
"Mrs. M. acknowledges the receipt of £50 from J. J. to whom she begs to tender her most grateful thanks."
On the whole, occupied though Mrs. M.'s mind chanced at the time to be with other matters, it was quite as well for J. J. that the 'Daily News' was not a paper which the local vendor generally left at Homewood.
Pedigree is one of those intangible and incontrovertible commodities which never commands a premium in the busy, bustling, practical city of London.
A long course of successful trade, big warehouses, troops of clerks, fleets of vessels,—by these things and such as these shall a man work out his temporal salvation; and, therefore, to those persons who, in the ordinary course of business, had come in contact with Mortomley, it did not signify in the slightest degree whether he had raised himself from the gutter, or was the last male of a family which had been of some reputation in days when England and Englishmen cared for something beyond sale and barter; when they laid down their lives for the sake of King, Country, Religion; and entertained grand ideas on the subject of Loyalty, Patriotism, and Courage, which pounds shillings and pence, the yard measure, and the modern god Commerce have long since elbowed out of court.
And yet the fact remained that the Mortomleys had once been country squires of some reputation, and that, notwithstanding their long connection with trade, and their inter-marriages with the daughters of a lower social scale, some gentle blood flowed in the veins of Archibald Mortomley, who was about to be delivered bound hand and foot to the tormentors.
There is an inevitable decay in some great business houses as there is in some great families.
Properties change hands, titles become extinct; the trade made so hardly, the money garnered so carefully, pass into other hands. It has always been thus; it will be thus till the end, and the reasons are not perhaps far to seek.
If time brings with it ripeness, it brings with it rottenness also; it brings the mature fruit, but it brings likewise the dead leaf and the bare brown branches. If it brings the strength of manhood, it brings sooner or later the weakness of age.
That weakness had fallen on Archibald Mortomley, not because he was old or because he was by constitution delicate, but merely because he had carried the traditions of a bygone and romantic age down into one eminently utilitarian,—because with every condition of existence changed, he had tried to do as his fathers had done before him,—because with rogues multiplying on every side as, like caterpillars, they are certain to do where the land is well planted and fertile, he refused to believe in the possibility of being brought personally into contact with them.
Like his progenitors, without a doubt of failure, he, full of generous impulses and philanthropic feeling, started on his business journey, and behold, he fell among thieves.
The stage at which he had therefore arrived when we make his acquaintance was something a hundred times worse than bankruptcy—a thousand times worse than friendly liquidation by arrangement. Coolly those about him, with his most innocent concurrence, handed the cards which dropped from his feeble fingers to his worst enemies, who, under the guise of friendship, undertook to play out the game for him, and played it as we shall see.
About a century ago there came up to London the younger son of a Leicestershire squire, who, having quarrelled with his father, thought he would see whether the great metropolis might not prove a more genial parent.
He came up with some money, good looks, the manners of a gentleman, and that certain quantity of brains which Heaven, since the time of Jacob, usually inclines, no doubt for good and equitable reasons, to bestow on the junior members of a family.
In London he was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a certain Philip Gyson, whose ancestors had long and honourably been connected with the city, and who was about to start a colour works in the then rural village of Hackney.
Into this works Hildebrand Mortomley—his family had not then lost either the names or the traditions of those who, having fought on the losing side for King and Crown, were loyal spite of royal ingratitude, when the King came to his own again—threw himself, his money, his energy, and his genius.
For he had genius. First of all he set himself to master his trade. When he had mastered it, he at once began to reject its crude old-fashioned formulæ, and invent, and simplify, and improve for himself.
A story of a successful man's life might have been written about this first Mortomley, who, forsaking the paths hitherto trodden by his progenitors, struck out one for himself which led to fortune and domestic happiness.
He married a daughter of Philip Gyson, a maiden fair, discreet, young and well-dowered. When evil days came to the old man, his father, he succoured him as Joseph succoured Jacob. When famine, sore and sudden, fell upon the Mortomleys, in Leicestershire, he bade his brothers and his sisters welcome to sit at his board, and share of the plenty which had fallen to his lot in the strange land of Cockaigne. He helped the males of his family to wend their way to foreign lands as the humour seized them; the females married or died. He buried his father in a vault he built for the purpose in Hackney old church-yard,—and when his own time came, he was laid beside him, and his son succeeded him.
This son was not the Archibald mentioned in the preceding chapter as connected with an unpleasant occurrence in Mr. Asherill's experience, but a Mortomley christened Hill—the name to which his father's somewhat lengthy cognomen had been judiciously abbreviated—who worked even harder at the colour trade than his father had done, and who, when he died, left behind him not merely the original little factory enlarged, but a new and extensive works, situate on the north bank of the Thames, between what is now called the Regent's Canal and the then unbuilt West India Docks. Further, during his reign the old city warehouse in Thames Street,—where Philip Gyson carried on his business and lived when in town, and not at his country seat in the delightful village of Hackney, famous in his day for the salubrity of its air, and a favourite resort of city merchants and their families,—was enlarged and altered so as to suit the requirements of his extending business. Much more he might have done, but that in his prime he caught a cold which turned to a fever that ended in his being carried likewise to the family vault at Hackney.
Out of many children only one son remained, Archibald, and with him began, not the downfall of the business edifice, but the commencement of that dead level of successful trading which indicates surely that the table land is reached, and the next incline will have to be trodden down, not up.
A man who found and maintained a most lucrative business, who was content to leave things as he found them, to do all the good he could in life, whose delight it was to make other people happy, who, excepting theoretically, had no faith whatever in original sin, and who, thanks to those who had gone before, never found himself in a serious embarrassment or difficulty from the time he entered man's estate till his turn came to take possession of that other property which Adam with strict impartiality left a share of to all his descendants for ever.
Before Archibald Mortomley's death he had, however, lived a sufficient number of years to leave some difficult problems for the solution of his next heir, if that next heir had, in addition to being a clever, chanced likewise to be a wise man. The two phrases are not inter-changeable. Archibald the second was not a wise man, and therefore he did not try to solve the problems; he accepted them.
What his father had done seemed right in his eyes; and as his father had permitted himself to be governed by his wife, so he allowed himself to be ruled by his mother.
Early in life the first Archibald Mortomley had a disappointment in love sufficient to wean his thoughts from matrimony till he was surely old enough never to have thought of it at all.
Perhaps he did not think of it till the idea was suggested by a widow lady already the happy mother of one son.
For this son and herself she was anxious to find a suitable home, and as no more eligible victim offered, she secured that home by marrying Mortomley.
From the hour she did so she devoted herself to sounding his praises; and poor Mr. Mortomley, who in his modesty really believed she had thrown herself away upon him, would cheerfully have laid down his life to please her.
Unhappily for him and those who were to come after she did not want him to do anything of the kind. She wanted him to live, she wanted him to push on her first-born; she wished him to see Archibald their son grow to manhood; she nursed, coddled, petted, flattered him to such good purpose that, although his will did not prove to have been made exactly in accordance with her secret desires, still he had lived long enough to indoctrinate his son with his own opinions, so that in effect the document which left the business and properties to Archibald junior and to herself only a life annuity proved a mere form.
To all intents and purposes she and Richard, her eldest son, long married to a most disagreeable woman, had the ball at their feet.
Archibald worshipped his mother with a worship worthy of a better object, and in his eldest brother he believed with that touching faith which would be pathetic were it not irritating, which single-minded, honest men will persist occasionally on lavishing on rogues and vagabonds.
Not that Richard Halling came precisely under either category. He was a man who, while he wilfully deceived himself, was too selfish to understand his deceit might chance to prove the ruin of other people.
He ran into debt meaning to repay; he borrowed money intending to return; he took the roads which pleased him best, and let others settle for the cost of conveyance and maintenance, with the full determination of making all their fortunes when he reached his goal. But, like other men of his temperament, he never reached that goal; he lay down by the way weary, and died, confessing himself a "gigantic failure," which, indeed, he was not, since he had never even striven to rise to any height; blessing his brother for his generous kindness; and lest that kindness should be in danger of rusting for want of exercise, leaving him in trust a son and daughter,—that son and daughter, in fact, of which Mr. Kleinwort had spoken in anything rather than flattering terms to Mr. Asherill.
Some time, however, before Mr. Halling—long a widower—went to rejoin his wife, Mortomley, motherless too late, had met the one woman of his life.
She would not have been every one's fancy, but she was his, and the way in which he chanced to meet with her was in this wise.
He had been working hard and fretting, in his own silent fashion, concerning the death of his mother, and these two causes combined found him, towards the beginning of a summer which was ever after stamped on his memory,—ill, languid, in poor health, and worse spirits.
Hitherto he had been wont to take his holidays at the sea-side, in Scotland, Ireland, or on the Continent; but on this occasion, when the doctors told him he required change and must have it, he elected to seek that change in Leicestershire, and look at the old acres and trees and houses which had formerly made the name of Mortomley a household one in the county.
The Mortomleys who had preceded this man, being nearer to the root of the family tree, felt only a vague gratification in being the son, grandson, and great-grandson of the last squire, but to the Archibald Mortomley of whom I am writing, the glories of his race, fast merging in the mists of distance, had been his thought and pride since earliest boyhood. If they were vanishing it was the more reason he should try to grasp them; if they were in danger of becoming mere memories of the past, there was all the more reason why he should strive to make them once again realities of the present.
From his mother he had inherited a pride of family which would have been at once ludicrous and intolerable, but that such pride, unlike that of wealth, rarely finds voice sufficient to proclaim itself. Herself, the daughter of one parvenu, and the widow of another, it was perhaps natural that after Mrs. Halling married Mortomley the elder, she should, when reckoning up his claims to social and personal consideration, have placed rather an undue value on the monuments, tablets, brasses, lists of doles, and other such like matters, which were still to be seen in Great Dassell Church, where the Mortomleys had once their great family pew, that now, with the lands and woods and manors, was merged in larger properties owned by mightier men than they had ever been.
And the reader may be quite sure that she instructed her son in all these matters. Not merely had he grown up to think his father the cleverest man in the world, his mother the wisest woman, his step-brother a model of what a brother and a son should be, but the Mortomley family as one of the first consideration; and, therefore, it is not, perhaps, a matter for astonishment, that when ill and out of spirits, he should try to recruit his health and improve his mental tone by visiting a place where those of his ancestors, who would have turned up their patrician noses at colour works and colour-makers, had, from cradle to grave, travelled that pleasant road which leads to ruin.
To Great Dassell he accordingly made his way, companionless; for one of the many evils of a youth having been brought up under the eye of a woman is, that when manhood surprises him with its presence, he finds the capacity for making male friends has somehow been lost in the process of his one-sided education.
He rented farmhouse apartments, from the windows of which he could see the turrets and chimneys of the old mansion, now owned by Lord Darsham, and called Dassell Court, that had been formerly known as Mortomley Place, or most commonly, "The Place;" and before a week was over, it was rumoured through all the country round and about Great Dassell, that a great-great-grandson of the last Mortomley, of The Place, was lodging at Braffin's Farm, and hand-and-glove with the vicar, a nephew of the late Lord Darsham.
More than that, Sir Thomas Laman left his card at Braffin's, and supplemented that delicate attention by asking Mr. Mortomley to dinner; and it was well known Sir Thomas was twice as rich as Lord Darsham, for he could afford to reside on his property, whilst his lordship was obliged to shut up the Court and live upon as little as might be in "foreign parts."
In one wing of Dassell Court Miss Trebasson resided with her mother, the Honourable Mrs. Trebasson, sister-in-law to his lordship; and in that part of the shire mother and daughter made genteel poverty not merely respectable, but almost fashionable. They dressed like nuns and lived like anchorites; but being ladies born, of a stately carriage and wont to dispense alms out of a most insufficient income, people of all classes bowed down before and did them homage.
Even Sir Thomas and his wife and daughters they received with a distant courtesy, which taught the worthy baronet and his family they were too rich and too new to be received quite on an exact equality by their poorer neighbours.
To Miss Trebasson, whom he chanced to meet at the Vicarage, Mr. Mortomley was indebted for that private view of Dassell Court, which showed him at once how little and how much the Mortomleys had formerly been; how little, that is, without the glamour and how much with it. Mrs. Trebasson, who was slightly paralysed, received him with great kindness, and, so far as her infirmity would permit, waxed eloquent on the subject of family histories in general, and the history of the Mortomley family in particular.
Drinking tea out of very fine china in company with these ladies, listening to Mrs. Trebasson's slow talk and old-world ideas, his eyes wandering over woods and park, and the great silence which necessarily surrounds a secluded country mansion, causing a tension on his nerves of hearing which the rattle of East-cheap had never done,—Mortomley felt for the time a convert to the doctrine that, as compared with birth, riches were but dross; that the lives of these two must be happy and peaceful beyond that of dwellers in towns; that it would be delightful to dream existence away in just such an old mansion as this, which had once belonged to his ancestors, reading, thinking, experimenting, without a thought of profit or dread of failure to break in even for a moment upon the illusions of his life.
Mortomley was an experimenter. When ruin has marked a family for her own, she usually endows the last of the race with some such form of genius, which clings about and lends a certain picturesque grace to his decay, as ivy climbing around an almost lifeless tree clothes it with a freshness and a beauty it lacked in the days of its strength.
And the form of genius of the first Mortomley who engaged in trade had, with every condition of existence altered, reappeared in this later, weaker, and more sensitive descendant.
Even in his father's time he had introduced processes and combinations into their laboratory hitherto unthought of; and since he had been sole master of the business, strange and unwonted colours had appeared in the market which caused astonishment, not unmixed with dread, to fill the hearts of those who had hitherto been content to travel in the footsteps of their predecessors, but who now confessed they must move quicker or they would be left far in the rear.
Of all these things Mrs. Trebasson encouraged Mr. Mortomley to speak as she would have encouraged any former Mortomley to talk of his hunters, his hounds, his library, or anything else in which he took delight; and Mortomley, flattered and pleased, talked of his plans and hopes with the simplicity of a boy, and further, as the intimacy grew closer, told the old lady about his lonely home, his lack of all near relatives, the love he had borne for his mother, and the tender respect, the unquestioning admiration, the devoted affection he had felt for his father—a Mortomley every inch—though a Mortomley of The Place no more.
And Miss Trebasson, in her plain nun-like dress, her beauty unheightened by decking or jewel, sat by and listened; and Mortomley never knew he had spoken to such purpose of himself and his surroundings, that the daughter had given him her heart and the mother was willing to give him her daughter before his holiday came to an end. But it was not to be. Had that ever been, this story must have remained unwritten. With Leonora Trebasson for his wife, it is quite certain Mortomley never would, whether ill or well, successful or defeated, have been permitted to make the awful fiasco of delivering himself, hair-shorn, strength gone, into the hands of the Philistines. There are wives and wives; and Mortomley, people said, was not fortunate in the choice of his. Spite of her almost judicial wisdom, other people thought Miss Trebasson had not been fortunate in the choice of her dearest friend. Perhaps for a time she thought so herself, when she found that friend had bound Mortomley to her chariot wheels. Perhaps for one night her heart did feel very bitter towards her inseparable companion; but if this were so, she was too essentially just to allow her disappointment to overpower her reason. If her eyes had been unclouded by prejudice, she would have understood long before, that although Dolly Gerace was not apparently possessed of a single quality likely to win a man like Mortomley, yet in reality she was precisely the sort of girl a keen observer would have prophesied certain to attract him.
And yet so little observant had she been that the truth came upon her like the stab of a sharp knife, and so little observant had Mrs. Trebasson been that she actually encouraged Dolly to visit the Court more frequently than ever during Mr. Mortomley's stay in the neighbourhood to act as a foil—so the would-be worldly old lady thought—to her own stately and beautiful daughter.
From which remarks it will readily be concluded that Dolly Gerace was no beauty; further, that she was not merely destitute of good looks, but that she had several undesirable points about her.
These things were the case. Dolly had not a good feature in her face. In person she was small, slight, insignificant; mentally, she was an utter anomaly to those who came in contact with her; while in more serious matters, though born in a Christian land of Christian parents—having been duly baptized and confirmed—being the daughter of a clergyman, and the only living child of a most truly good woman, Dolly was as thorough a little heathen as if she had called a squaw mother—and a brave father.
More so indeed, for then she would have had some settled idea of a certain code of morals and religion.
As matters stood, Dolly, for all she seemed to reverence or respect anything, might have been her own Creator—her own all in all.
Not that any one could accuse her of flippancy, irreverence, undue selfishness, or habitual ill-humour.
She had a want of something, rather than an excess of any evil quality; indeed she had no evil quality, unless an occasional tendency to flame up could be so considered. But then she never flamed up except when her equanimity had been long and sorely tried, and the usual happy brightness of her temper was pleasant as sunshine—as music—as the songs of birds—as the perfume of flowers.
Long before Mortomley came upon the scene, Miss Trebasson had exercised her mind upon the subject of Dolly Gerace.
After much consideration, which ended in leaving her as wise as she was before, it suddenly dawned upon Miss Trebasson that her friend either had been born without a soul or that it had never developed.
From that hour Miss Trebasson treated Dolly with the same sort of tenderness as she might an eminently interesting and attractive infant; and when it was proved to demonstration that Mortomley had fallen in love with the girl, Miss Trebasson, after the first bitterness was over, felt no surprise at his choice.
Beside Dolly, spite of her beauty, her intellect, her ancestors, her titled relations, Leonora Trebasson knew she must look but as a bird of very dull plumage.
Weather, means, the state of the domestic atmosphere, the depression of the home funds, never made any difference to Dolly. Given that you expected her, and she was quite certain to appear crisp, smiling, happy, bright, with nothing to say perhaps particularly worth recording, and yet able to say that nothing in a way which made the time speed by quickly and pleasantly.
Miss Trebasson had no more thought of Dolly as a rival than she might have taken of a kitten or a puppy; and yet when Mortomley lost his heart, being a woman rarely wise and with somewhat of a man's instincts, she understood he had done so for the same reason in great measure as she loved Dolly herself, because the creature was gay, sun-shiny, brimful of life and spirits,—because, in a word, she was Dolly Gerace.
Miss Trebasson had seen Dolly in the dumps,—she had seen Dolly rueful—Dolly in sorrow—Dolly crying fit to break her heart—Dolly living with a father who, though loving, never interfered with her—Dolly living with an aunt who never ceased to interfere; and yet, through all these changes, Dolly left the impression that in the country where she lived a fine climate was the rule, not the exception.
When Mortomley fell in love with Dolly, Miss Trebasson waited curiously, and—she was only human and a woman—anxiously, to see if her friend would at length develope any of those qualities which are supposed, more or less erroneously, to attach to a person destined to exist throughout eternity as well as time, but she watched in vain.
Dolly went through her engagement and her marriage with her customary sun-shiny cheerfulness.
"She has no soul," decided Miss Trebasson, "she does not care for him one bit;" and the tears Miss Trebasson shed that night were very bitter, for she herself had cared for Archibald Mortomley very much, and she doubted greatly whether Dolly Gerace was the wife he ought to have chosen. However, he had chosen her, and there was an end of the matter.
Mr. Trebasson gave her away; Miss Trebasson, Miss Halling, and a couple more young ladies were bridesmaids. Mortomley had been sorely exercised to find a best man, but at length he hit on Henry Werner.
The wedding breakfast was by desire of Lord Darsham held at the Court.
Thus Mortomley came by his wife. A few sentences will explain how she came by her being:—
A certain Mr. Gerace having been presented by his pupil, Lord Darsham, with the family living of Great Dassell, which was not a very great thing after all, being only about three hundred and fifty pounds a year, beside the Vicarage-house and glebe lands, the Reverend Mr. Gerace immediately married an eminently discreet, Christian-minded, and unendowed young governess, for which act he had no excuse to offer except that he loved her.
This justification might have been all very well if, in addition to a tender heart, the clergyman had not possessed a weary list of college debts.
He had been foolish once,—he had to pay for that folly to the last day of his life.
He thought he could do much with his income as vicar of Great Dassell, and yet he was only able to live and go on paying those weary, weary bills till it was impossible for him to do anything more on earth.
Before hope had died out in him a female child was born, and after a serious consultation he and his wife decided to name her Dollabella after a distant relative who had no sons or daughters, but, better than either, a considerable amount of money.
She stood for one of the godmothers, together with Miss Celia Gerace, an aunt of the vicar's, Lord Darsham volunteering the part of godfather. Dolly had not so much as a spoon from the whole of the trio,—she was wont to state this fact with a certain malicious point in her sentence; but they had all, with the exception of Miss Dollabella, been kind to her,—so kind—better than any number of services of plate, Dolly added with her wonderful rippling laugh.
And she meant it. They had been kind,—every one was kind sooner or later to Dolly.
This was another peculiarity about her friend which puzzled Miss Trebasson; other people professed much gratitude for favours received, even though they spoke with occasional bitterness of those who conferred them; but that was not Dolly's way, she accepted kindness as she accepted unkindness, with an equanimity of feeling which seemed simply incomprehensible.
As she grew older this equanimity increased. She laughed and jested with those about her when they were in pleasant moods; when the reverse was the case, when her aunt Celia took her grand-niece to task for the general sins of the human race, Dolly either left the house as soon as she decently could, or if that were impossible, busied herself about domestic matters or worked with rare industry at whatever article of apparel she was making, till the storm blew over, and the domestic atmosphere was clear once more.
There were those who, knowing Miss Celia's temper, wondered Dolly could live with it and its owner; but if people do not object to rain, bad weather cannot seriously affect their spirits, and accordingly, in spite of the usual inclemency of the climate at Eglantine Cottage, Dolly spent some not unhappy years under its roof.
All the great, passionate, unruly love her untrained nature had yet given to any one, she had laid, the first year she was in her teens, in her father's grave.
The world,—her poor little narrow world, did what it could for the orphan, but, as was natural, failed to sympathize fully in her grief.
That was enough for Dolly. She did not trouble the world with much outward evidence of sorrow after that. The wound closed externally, bled internally. Her bed-room in the roof of Eglantine Cottage, selected by herself because there she was out of the way, the lonely woods around Dassell Court, the alder-trees growing by the trout streams, quiet lanes bordered by wild roses, holly and blackberries, and even quieter fields where the half-horned cattle browsed peacefully,—could have told tales of long weary fits of crying, of broken-hearted inquiries as to why such things should be, of an insensate struggle against the inevitable,—of very, very bad half-hours indeed when Dolly wished she was lying beside her father in Dassell's quiet church-yard.
Time went by; and if the wound was not healed it ceased to bleed at any rate. Life had to be gone through, and Dolly was not one to lengthen the distance between the miles with useless repinings. Though she probably had never read "A Winter's Tale" with sufficient attention to know that
"A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a!"
she seemed to have adopted that couplet for her ensampler.
She might, as Miss Trebasson suspected, have no soul, but she was possessed of a wonderful temper—of a marvellous elasticity.
She took life after the fashion of an amiable cat or dog. If people stroked and patted her, she purred and gambolled for joy; if they were out of sorts she crept away from sight till that mood was past.
She was a lazy little sinner—lazy, that is, in points where other young ladies of her acquaintance were most industrious. She would not practice, she would not sketch, she resolutely refused to read German with any one, and she openly scoffed at two London misses who visiting at the Rectory talked French to each other on the strength of having spent a winter at Paris, imagining the Dassell natives could not understand their satirical sentences.
She commented on their remarks in English, and so put them to the rout.
"I thought you told me you could not speak French?" said the youngest to her.
"Neither I can any better than you," retorted Dolly; "and I do not call that speaking French."
Altogether an unpleasant young person, and yet Miss Trebasson loved her tenderly, and Mortomley as well as he knew how.
"What is the matter with you to-night, Dolly?" asked Miss Celia one evening when her niece had sat longer than usual looking out into the twilight while the spinster indulged in that nap which "saved candles." "Are not you well? I told you how it would be going out for that long walk in the heat of the day."
"We walked through the woods, aunt, and it was not too hot,—and I am quite well," answered Dolly in her concise manner, still looking out into the gathering night. If she could have seen painted upon that blank background all that was to come, would she have gone forward?
Yes, I think so; I am sure she would. For although Dolly had not been born in the purple, there was not a drop of cowardly blood in her veins.
"Then what is the matter with you?" persisted Miss Celia, who always resented having been permitted to finish her nap in peace.
"I was only thinking, aunt."
"That is a very bad habit, particularly for a young girl like you."
"I do not quite see how young girls can help thinking sometimes any more than old ones," answered Dolly, but there was no flippancy in her tone, if there were in her words. "Aunty, Mr. Mortomley—that gentleman I have told you of, who is so much at the Vicarage and Dassell Court—has asked me to marry him."
"Asked you to marry him, child?"
"Yes."
"And what did you say?"
"What could I say, aunt? He is coming to see you about it to-morrow."
Miss Celia arose from her easy-chair. Perhaps out of the midst of the cloud of years that had gathered behind her there arose the ghost of an old love-dream, never laid—never likely to be laid. At all events her usually shrill voice was modulated to an almost tender key, as, drawing Dolly towards her, she asked,
"Do you love him, Dolly?"
"What should I know about love, aunty?" inquired Dolly; and at that answer the elder woman's embrace relaxed. Here was no sentimental Miss such as she herself had been in her teens, but a girl lacking something as every one felt—who in some way or other was not as other human beings—who even in those remote wilds was able to behold a personable man and not go crazy about him on the instant.
Clearly there was a want in Dolly. Miss Gerace could not imagine what that want might be, but that it existed she entertained not the smallest manner of doubt.
After that answer about love, Dolly slipped out of her aunt's arms, out of the room, out of the house. It was a quiet country place, and so she merely wrapped a shawl about her head and shoulders, and walked a few paces up the road to a field path across which she struck—a field path leading to the church-yard.
There were no gates and bolts and locks there—cutting off the dead from the living. Dolly swung back the turnstile gate—it had often yielded to her touch before—and entered the enclosure.
Leaning over the spot where her father lay, she—this girl who had never known a mother—whispered her story.
Dolly's best friend was right, I fear, and the girl was a heathen; but this visit to the dead had been a fancy of hers for years. Whenever she was troubled, whenever she was glad, whenever she was in perplexity, whenever a difficult problem had been solved—she carried the trouble, the gladness, the perplexity, the solution to a mound where the grass grew, which the daisies covered, and went away relieved.
A strange creature—destitute of beauty, not in the least like other young ladies, with occasionally a biting tongue—for Mortomley to choose.
Yet he chose her; that was the last act wanting to complete his ruin.
Had he married Leonora Trebasson, she would have made him successful. Her grand nature, her imperial beauty, her strength of character, would have impelled him to deeds of daring; she would have armed him for the battle and insisted on his coming back victorious.
As matters stood, he wooed and won Dolly; he married her in the spring succeeding his first visit to Dassell. When the woods were putting on their earliest robings of delicate green he made her his wife, and Miss Trebasson was principal bridesmaid, and Mr. Henry Werner best man.
So the play I have to recount commenced; how it ended, if you have patience, you shall know.
As has been already stated, Mr. Henry Werner assisted at the wedding in the character of best man, and it was to this circumstance that he owed the good fortune of subsequently marrying Miss Trebasson himself.
Had he met that young lady—as he did afterwards meet her, as a mere guest at Homewood—in the unexalted position of Mrs. Mortomley's friend, he would never have thought of asking her to be his wife; but seeing her for the first time with the glamour of Dassell Court upon her, and the glory of her relatives surrounding her, he thought it would be a fine thing for him to win and wed such a woman even if she had not, as he soon found out was the case, a penny of fortune.
More of these matches are made than people generally imagine. It is astonishing to look around and behold the number of well-born women who have married men, that at first sight one might imagine to have been as far distant from the upper ten thousand as earth is from heaven; and it is more astonishing still to find that these women have, one and all—despite their prejudices, their pedigree, their pride, and their delicate sensitiveness—married for money.
It would be useless to deny that Leonora Trebasson did this. She was not a girl of whom such a step could have been predicated, and yet, looking at the affair from a common-sense point of view, it was quite certain—after the event—that if no one for whom she could feel affection possessed of money came to woo, she would marry some person for whom she did not care in the least.
It was necessary for her to marry; she knew it, she had always known it. Her mother's small jointure died with her. Whenever her cousin, the heir of Dassell Court, took a wife—and there was just as great a necessity for him to find an heiress as for her to meet a man possessed of a competence, at all events—she understood she and her mother would have to leave the Court, and settle down in perhaps such another cottage as that tenanted by Miss Gerace.
There had been a tenderness once between herself and Charley—the Honourable Charles Trebasson—but the elders on both sides comprehending how disastrous such a pauper union must prove, speedily nipped that attachment in the bud, and the future Lord went out into the world to look for his heiress, whilst Miss Trebasson stayed at Dassell to await the husband fate might send her.
Of these and such like matters the mother and daughter never spoke openly; but it was clearly understood between them, that curates without private fortune, officers with no income beyond their pay, the younger sons of neighbouring squires, were to be considered as utterly ineligible for husbands.
Mrs. Trebasson herself having made a love-match and suffered for the imprudence every day of her married life, she had educated Leonora to keep her feelings well in hand and on no account to let affection run away with her judgment.
When Archibald Mortomley went down that summer to fish, and recruit his health, Mrs. Trebasson's hopes grew high that love and prudence might, for once, be able to walk hand in hand together.
She liked Mortomley—he was the kind of man to whom women, especially elderly women, take naturally with as true and keen an instinct as children—and the thought passed through her mind that here, at last, was a possible son-in-law, who would not merely make a good husband to her daughter, but prove a friend to herself.
She pictured Homewood, and fancied she could end her days there happily. In those days of uncertainty the future wore a fairer face for mother and child than had ever been the case previously.
And then the vision departed—Dolly, whom Mrs. Trebasson had always regarded as less than nobody, was preferred to Leonora. Without lifting a finger to secure the prize—without the slightest effort or trouble on her part—the stranger yielded himself captive. It was not Dolly's fault, nevertheless Mrs. Trebasson regarded her with unchristian feelings for the remainder of her life.
When, after a time, Henry Werner preferred his suit and was accepted, Mrs. Trebasson never spoke of ending her days in his house; rather she trusted she "should not have to leave Dassell Court until she was laid in the family vault."
She had no fault to find with Mr. Werner. He was a much richer man than Mortomley; he was possessed of more worldly sense than any Mortomley ever boasted; he was ambitious and might rise to be a man of mark as well as one of wealth; he spent money lavishly; he evidently intended to maintain a handsome establishment; he was proud of the beauty and stately grace of his fiancée; he bowed down before the Darshams and worshipped them; he was of a suitable age and sufficiently presentable—and yet—and yet—Mrs. Trebasson felt her daughter ought to have married Archibald Mortomley, and then Dolly Gerace might have been chosen by Henry Werner or some one like him.
Dolly had no love, however, for Henry Werner. So far as she was in the habit of developing antipathies she felt one for him, and when she learned he had proposed for Leonora and been accepted, she expressed her opinions on the subject with a freedom which Mrs. Trebasson, at all events, keenly resented.
"You must not be angry with poor Dolly, mamma," said her friend, tearing Mrs. Mortomley's letter into very small fragments and then strewing them on the fire. Mrs. Trebasson had desired the letter should be preserved and deposited with other family treasures, to the end that Dolly might, at some future day, be confronted with it and covered with confusion; but her daughter would permit nothing of the kind.
"I do not know why you call her 'poor' Dolly," retorted Mrs. Trebasson, "she has an excellent husband who gives her everything she wants and never crosses her whims. She has plenty of money and a pretty house—she who never had a sovereign in her pocket she could call her own; and now, forsooth, she must give herself airs and presume to dictate to you."
"She does not dictate, mamma, she only expresses her opinions—she means no harm."
"It would be harm in any one else. Why should you defend her when she is so grossly impertinent?"
"I love Dolly," was the quiet answer. "She is often very foolish, sometimes very trying, always disappointing and unsatisfying; but I shall love her to the end."
When Miss Trebasson set her foot down upon such a sentence as the foregoing, Mrs. Trebasson understood further expostulation was useless, and so the offensive letter smouldered into ashes, and the bride elect tried to forget its contents as she had too readily, perhaps, forgiven them.
Fortunately for all concerned Dolly was unable to be present at her friend's wedding, and Mortomley gladly enough made the state of his wife's health a plea for excusing his own attendance.
Owing either to her own folly, or to some remoter cause with which this story has no concern, Mrs. Mortomley was, at that period, having an extremely hard fight for life. She had been happy with her child—that Lenore of whom Mr. Kleinwort made mention—for a couple of days. Every one was satisfied, husband, doctor, nurse; and then suddenly there came a reaction, and Dolly hung between life and death, insensible to the reality of either.
When Mrs. Werner, after her wedding tour, drove over and visited her friend, she found outwardly a very different Dolly to that photographed in her memory.
A pale weak woman, with hair cut short and softly curling round her temples; a creature with transparent hands; dark eyes looking eagerly and anxiously out of a white sunken face; the Dolly of old; but Dolly as she might have looked had she gone to heaven and come back again to earth; Dolly etherealised, and with a beauty of delicacy strange as it was new—but Dolly unchanged mentally.
With a feeling of surprise and regret Mrs. Werner confessed to herself that not even the fact of having set her feet in the valley of the shadow, and being brought back into the sunshine, almost by a miracle, had altered her friend.
The want there had been in Dolly before her marriage still remained unsupplied.
"I wonder what would really change her," thought Mrs. Werner looking at the poor wan cheeks, at the wasted figure, at the feeble woman too weak to hold her child in her arms and coo soft tender nothings in its ear.
One day Mrs. Werner was to understand; but before that day arrived she was destined to see many changes in Dolly.
When Mrs. Mortomley was sufficiently recovered to endure the fatigue of travelling, the doctors recommended her to leave London and remain for some time at a quiet watering-place on the East coast. Near that particular town resided some relatives of the Trebassons, and to them Mrs. Werner wrote, asking them to call on her friend.
That proved the turning point in Dolly's life, and she took, as generally proves the case, the wrong road. With what anguish of spirit, over what weary and stony paths, through what hedges set thick with thorns, she retraced her steps, it is part of the purpose of this story to show. As matters then stood, she simply went along winding lanes bordered with flowers, festooned by roses, the sun shining over-head, the birds singing all around; went on, unthinking of evil, happier than she had ever been before; satisfied, because at last she had found her vocation.
To enjoy herself—that was the object for which she was created. If she did not say this in so many words, she felt it, felt it like a blessing each night as she laid her head on her pillow—her poor foolish little head which was not strong enough to bear the excitement of the new and strange life suddenly opened before her.
She was young—she was recovering from dangerous illness; she was, notwithstanding her feeble health, bright and gay and sun-shiny. She had plenty of money, for her husband grudged her nothing his love could supply; she was interesting and fresh, and new, and naïve, and she was the dearest friend Leonora Trebasson ever had; what wonder therefore that the people amongst whom she was thrown fussed over, and petted and flattered, and humoured her, till they taught Dolly wherein her power and her genius lay; so that when Mrs. Mortomley returned home she took with her graces previously undeveloped, and left behind the virtue of unconsciousness and the mantle of personal humility which had hitherto clothed her.
Up to that time Dolly had not thought much of herself. Now she was as one possessed of a beautiful face, who having seen her own reflection for the first time can never forget the impression it produced upon her.
In her own country and amongst her own people, Dolly had been no prophet. Rather she had been regarded as a nonentity, and the little world of Dassell wondered at Mr. Mortomley's choice. Amongst strangers Dolly had spread her wings and tried her strength. She felt in the position of a usually silent man, considered by his friends rather stupid than otherwise, who in a fresh place and under unwonted circumstances opens his mouth and gives utterance to words he knew not previously were his to command.
Yes, Dolly would never be humble again. She had lost that attraction, and through all the years to follow, the years filled with happiness and sorrow, exaltation and abasement, she never recovered it.
There are plants of a rare sweetness which die more surely from excess of sunshine than from the severity of frost; common plants, yet that we miss from the borders set round and about our homes with a heart-ache we never feel when a more flaunting flower fails to make its appearance; and just such a tender blossom, just such a healing herb, died that summer in the garden of Dolly's nature.
And she only nineteen! Well-a-day, the plant had not perhaps had time to strike its roots very deep, and the soil was certainly uncongenial. At all events its place knew it no more, and something of sweetness and softness departed with it.
But it was only a very keen and close observer who could have detected all this; for other flowers sprang up and made a great show where that had been—graces of manner, inflections of voice, thoughtfulness for others, which if acquired seemed none the less charming on that account, a desire to please and be pleased, which exercised itself on rich and poor alike—these things and the sunshine of old which she still carried with her, made Dolly seem a very exceptional woman in the bright years which were still to come.
They made her so exceptional in fact, that her god-mother left her eight thousand pounds. She would not have left her eight pence in the Dassell days, but after spending a fortnight at Homewood she returned home, altered her will which had provided for the establishment and preservation of certain useless charities, and bequeathed eight thousand pounds, her plate, and her jewellery, and her lace, to her beloved god-daughter Dollabella, wife of Archibald Mortomley, Esquire, of Homewood.
If people be travelling downhill the devil is always conveniently at hand to give the vehicle they occupy a shove. That eight thousand pounds proved a nice impetus to the Mortomleys, and a further legacy from a distant relative which dropped in shortly after the previous bequest, accelerated the descent.
When Dolly was married, no girl could have come to a husband with more economical ideas than she possessed. Poverty and she had been friends all her life; she had been accustomed to shortness of money, to frugal fare, to the closest and strictest expenditure from her childhood upwards, and had Mortomley been wise as he was amiable, she might have regarded changing a five-pound note with a certain awe and hesitation to the end of her days.
In money as in other matters, however, she speedily, in that different atmosphere, lost her head. There can be no greater mistake than to suppose, because a person has made both ends meet on, say a hundred and fifty pounds a year, he will be able to manage comfortably on fifteen hundred; on the contrary, he is nearly certain either to turn miser or spendthrift. Dolly had not the faintest idea how to deal with a comfortable income, and as her husband was as incompetent as herself, he let her have pretty well her own way, which was a very bad way indeed. Like his wife, perhaps, he thought those legacies represented a great deal more money than was the case, since money only represents money according to the way in which it chances to be expended.
It is not in the unclouded noontide, however, when fortune wears its brightest smiles, that any one dreams of the wild night—the darkness of despair to follow. It seems to me that the stories we hear of second sight, of presentiments, of warnings, had a deeper origin than the usual superstitious fantasies we associate with them. I think they were originally intended as parables—as prophecies.
I believe the words of dark import were designed to convey to the man—prosperous, victorious—safe in the security of his undiscovered sins, the same lesson that Nathan's final sentence, "Thou art the Man," conveyed in his hour of fancied safety to the heart of David. I believe under the disguise of a thrice-told tale, those inscrutable warnings of which we hear, arresting a man in the middle of a questionable story or a peal of drunken laughter, were meant to be as truly writings on the wall as ever silenced the merriment in Belshazzar's halls—as certainly prophecies as that dream which prefigured Nebuchadnezzar's madness.
And there was a time when portents, prophecies, and parables did influence men for good, did turn them from the evil, did turn their thoughts from earth to heaven, but that was in the days when people having time to think—thought; when sometimes alone, separate from their fellow-creatures, able to forget for a period the world and its requirements, they were free to think of that which, spite of a learned divine's dictum, is more wonderful and more bewildering than eternity—the soul of man—the object of his creation, the use and reason and purpose of his ever having been made in God's image to walk erect upon the earth.
There were not wanting, in the very middle of their abundant prosperity, signs and tokens sufficient to have assured the Mortomleys that to the life, one at least of them was leading, there must come an end; but neither husband nor wife had eyes to see presages which were patent to the very ordinary minds of some of the business men with whom the owner of Homewood had dealings. Notwithstanding his large connexion, his monopoly of several lucrative branches of his trade, his own patrimony, his wife's thousands, Mortomley was always short of money.
When once shortness of money becomes chronic, it is quite certain the patient is suffering under a mortal disease. People who are clever in commercial matters understand this fact thoroughly. Chronic shortness of money has no more to do with unexpected reverses, with solvent poverty, with any ailment curable by any means short of sharp and agonizing treatment, than the heart throbs of a man destined some day to fall down stone dead in the middle of a sentence, has a likeness to the pulsations of fever, or the languid flow of life which betokens that the body is temporarily exhausted.
Like all persons, however, who are sickening unto death, Mortomley was the last to realize the fact.
He knew he was embarrassed, he knew why he was embarrassed, and he thought he should have no difficulty in clearing himself of those embarrassments.
And, in truth, had he been a wise man he might have done so. If, after the death of his brother, which occurred about seven years subsequent to his own marriage with Dolly, he had faced his position, there would have been no story to tell about him or his estate either; but instead of doing that, he drifted—there are hundreds and thousands in business, in love, on sea or land, who when an emergency comes, always drift—and always make ship-wreck of their fortunes and their lives in consequence.
For years he had helped his step-brother by going security for him, by lending his name, by giving him money, by paying his debts. Somehow the security had never involved pecuniary outlay. The loan of the name had been renewed, passed into different channels, held over, manipulated in fact by Mr. Richard Halling, until, in very truth, Mortomley, at best as wretched a financier as he was an admirable inventor, knew no more than his own daughter how accounts stood between him and the man who had been his mother's favourite son.
One day, however, Mr. Richard Halling caught cold—a fortnight after, he was dead. The debts he left behind him were considerable; his effects small. To Mortomley he bequeathed the former, together with his son and daughter. Of his effects the creditors took possession.
The event cut up Mr. Mortomley considerably. He was a man who, making no fresh friends, felt the loss of relatives morbidly.
He returned from the funeral looking like one broken-hearted, and brought back with him to Homewood his nephew and niece, who were to remain there "until something definite could be settled about their future."
To this arrangement Dolly made no objection. Dolly would not have objected had her husband suggested inviting the noblemen composing the House of Lords, or a regiment of soldiers, or a squad of workhouse boys. People came and people went. It was all the same to Dolly.