Sylvia's Choice

Chapter I

" "VTOW, Sylvia," said Sir William Falk- -^ " land, deliberately, ' ' as for your father coining here, and as for our meeting him again on terms of equality, the thing is out of the question." They were all talking in the drawing room at Chester Square. Sylvia had told the story of her afternoon visit to Sir Wil liam and Lady Falkland and her mother, and an angry discussion was following her narration. " I could just as easily ask the footman to VOL. II. B come in to dinner," said Sir William. " He has chosen his position — or he has got pushed into his position, if you like ; but there, at any rate, he is ; and it is a position that is not ours." " I have nothing to do with that," Sylvia answered in a low voice. "You have just this much to do with it — that you must recognize it, and be satisfied to take the same view of the restrictions that it will lay upon your intercourse with him that those do who are older and wiser than yourself."

" If you mean that because Papa is poor," Sylvia said, still in the same low voice, "because he is no longer what — what you call a gentleman — I am to forget that he is my father — then, grandpapa, I cannot do what you expect." She was sitting with her hands locked nervously together, with the colour bright in her cheeks, and a little tremor in her voice; but it was a tremor from excitement, not from hesitation, and Sir William as he looked in her face felt that he should have to do battle with her. " What is it that you suppose I expect ?" " You expect that I am only to see Papa now and then. You expect that, except for an occasional call upon him, I am to go on living exactly as I am living now." " Yes — that is precisely what I expect." And then there was a moment or two's dead silence.

"That is what I expect; and moreover, Sylvia, that is what I shall insist on." " Then, grandpapa," — she spoke hardly above her breath, but she spoke quickly and without hesitation — "then, grandpapa, I cannot obey you." " Sylvia, how can you speak in that way to your grandfather ? — to your good, kind b grandfather?" Mrs. Duncombe broke in indignantly; but Sir William waved his hand. "Never mind her, Agnes; leave her alone," he said. " She shall have time to consider the matter quietly. You are excited just now, Sylvia, and have lost command over yourself." " Grandpapa, I am not excited," the girl said sadly — "or at least I am not excited as you seem to suppose I am. I cannot feel about Papa as you do, that is all. How could I ? How could I feel about him as you do, or talk of him as you do, when the mere thought that he is alive has seemed to change all the world for me ?

You all stand joined together against him ; do you think I don't know that ? And I can un derstand it, too, you know ; I can under stand how much you have had to bear be cause of him — in the old days, when he was unfortunate, and draped Mamma down / Do with him. Oh ! I don't forget all that ; but yet how can you think — how can you dream that / could turn against him ? I am the only creature belonging to him in the world who loves him, or longs for him ; and I do long for him — I feel as if I couldn't bear it if I did not go back to him again. When he told me to-day that he has come and stood here at our doorstep just to wait and see some of us pass by, I felt as if my heart would break — -as if all I could do for him, all my hfe long, would never be enough to make up to him for that one thing."

She broke into a sudden passionate sob, and hid her face upon her hands ; and then after that there was a long silence. Mrs. Duncombe presently put her handkerchief to her eyes, and Sir William took up a newspaper, and began to read or seem to read it. He had not conquered Sylvia, but he did not know what more to say to her. He loved the girl, in his way, and he was not angry with her ; he even had a sort of sympathy with' her love and pity for her luck less father ; but yet he saw further than she could do. He took a view of the case that she could not take, and he knew that Ralph Ferrar's wife could never be on terms of daughterly intimacy with a man who lived the life of a workman, and gained his bread by mending watches. The thing was not possible. If she stuck by her father she must give up Mr. Ferrar ; and it would be madness to give up Mr. Ferrar.

So Sir William argued with him self, as he sat with the newspaper before his face, seeming to read the lines that he was only looking at with blank eyes. What a weight upon their shoulders the man had been to them all his life ! What a different lot Agnes might have had but for him ! How differeut it might have been for them all ! For sixteen years his misfortunes had been a thorn in their side, and now at last here was the living man himself come back to trouble them — living still, when they had all thought him dead ! "I think no woman was ever so pursued by trouble as I have been," Mrs. Dun combe had begun to say plaintively. " I have never had an hour's peace — literally, I have never had an hour's peace — since I married that man. I can't think what I have ever done to deserve to suffer so — year after year — year after year."

"And do you think he has not suffered too, Mamma ? " Sylvia asked in a low tone, turning her sad face round. " How can I tell whether or not he has suffered ? If he has suffered he has de served to suffer — I know that. But men like him don't suffer, Sylvia ; they leave all that to others. Your father always had a selfish way of shaking misfortunes off his own back to the backs of other people. Oh, I know him well ! He will never bear any thing while there is anybody else left to bear it for him." " Then he must have come to the end of finding other people to bear things for him, I should say, a good while ago," Sylvia answered, still in the same low tone, but with something in her voice that made it tremble. ' If he has I am glad of it. It is only what he richly deserves." "Oh, Mother!" " Sylvia, be silent.

Agnes, my dear, try to compose yourself. What is the good of talking of it ? Of course it is hard for you — it is terribly hard for you " Lady Falkland began to say soothingly, trying to spread oil upon the waters : but her daughter broke excitedly across her sen tence before she could bring it to an end. " Hard for me ! What can you know about how hard it is? You have never felt what it is, Mamma, to have your own child turn against you, — yes, your own child, — your own flesh and blood, that you have cherished and lived for." "Mamma, I haven't turned against you," poor Sylvia said. "You have turned against me. You have turned against me and been ungrateful and disobedient to me a hundred and a hundred times. You would not care this moment, so that you got your own way, though you broke my heart.

And you will break it soon. Yes — I tell you that : you will end by breaking it, — and then perhaps some day, when you come to stand by my grave "Agnes, you are not fair to the child," Sir William interposed gravely. He rose up, and went to Sylvia's side, and laid his hand kindly on her shoulder. " My dear, you are placed in a difficult position : we all ought to recognize that," he said. " Of course you naturally have your heart drawn to your father. It is quite right that it should be so : it could not be other wise : but yet this is a matter in which you must try to let yourself be guided by people who are older and who have had more experience than yourself. You owe something to your father ; I won't dispute that : but unquestionably, whatever you may owe to him, you owe more to us, and to Ralph Ferrar.

Think over it calmly, and you will come to feel more with us than you do now. And for the present let us drop the subject. We are only wasting words by talking more about it to-night." Sylvia had laid her own hand over Sir William's as he was speaking: when he finished speaking she drew it to her lips and kissed it. A moment or two after wards she went to her mother's seat, and put her cheek on hers. " Don't be angry with me, Mamma : don't let us quarrel," she said sadly. But Mrs. Duncombe moved her face pettishly away, and then Sylvia did not speak again. " What am I to do ?" she went away thinking sorrowfully to herself. Her mother's anger had made her unhappy, but it had only made her unhappy in the way it had done a thousand times before, without convincing her, or shaking her resolution : her resolution, in as far as it had been shaken at all, had been shaken, not by that, but by Sir William's kindness.

For Sylvia could resist anger, and hold her own iu spite of it, but kindness conquered her and broke her down. She had come back from Brompton resolved to hold fast by her father, — to take her stand by his side and look upon all those who made them selves his enemies as her enemies too : but now she began to ask herself hesitating ly what right she had to look as if they were her enemies on those who would not hold out a friendly hand to him ? Had not her grandfather only said the truth when he had told her that, whatever she might owe to her father, she owed more to them? That sentence that he had spoken had struck home to her : it had checked her in her defiance ; it had silenced her with a sudden sense of shame. Was not her mother right after all when she called her ungrateful? Was she not ungrateful when, for some one whom she had never seen for sixteen years, she had been ready in a moment to defy and forsake the friends who had been kind to her all her life ?

And yet ! " Oh, he wants me more than they do !" the girl all at once cried again passionately to herself . " He has been alone all these years — he has had nobody to comfort him — nobody to care for him ; they never loved me as he has done, — not one of them ; not Mamma, — not Ralph. They none of them love me now, or want me as he does." Not Ralph, she said. She grew very quiet after she had spoken her lover's name. With whom would Mr. Ferrar side ? Would he take Sylvia's part and her father's, or would he take part against Sylvia with all the rest ? She sat thinking of him, but as she sat thinking she did not ask herself this question. She knew the answer to it too well to ask it ; she knew already, as plainly as if she had spoken to him face to face, that in this trouble of hers she should meet with no help and sympathy from Mr. Ferrar.

She said to Sir William early in the morning, " I promised to go and see Papa again to-day. Please let me go. Don't think me obstinate, grandpapa. I don't know how it is all to end yet, — but let me go to-day, because I promised." " If you promised you must go, but you had better not have promised, my dear," Sir William said. But after that nobody opposed her, and in the afternoon she went. She thought to herself as she drove to Brompton, " Shall I tell him what they have said, and ask him what I ought to do ?" But she felt as if she could not have the heart to tell him what they had said. She could not ask for help in her decision from him ; she could not ask him to tell her whether she should stand by him or give him up. She had been impatient to see him again, but yet when they met once more she felt strange and shy with him.

While she had been away from him he had seemed to cease to be a stranger to her, but now that she was with him again the unfamiliar face still made a barrier between them. " I hardly thought that you would come again. Have you come back really of your own will _ he said pathetically to her a minute or two after they had met. Perhaps he was justified in asking her that question because she was so quiet and shy, but it hurt her when he asked it. " Come of my own will? Do you think they would be likely to send me ?" she asked him quickly. " Well, no, they wouldn't be likely to send you ; I don't suppose that, " he answered with a half laugh; "but you might only have come because you said you would, — because you thought I should expect you. Do you know I lay awake last night and said to myself that you would not come back any more.

I thought they would not let you, my dear. I don't understand how they have let you even yet." " I told them that I had promised to come," she said. " Ah, then, they would have kept you away if you had not promised ; that is it? I thought I was not so far wrong. You see we got happy yesterday, like fool ish people, and forgot the hard world out there. We must be wiser to-day, Sylvia. Shall we?" (he asked this suddenly and wistfully) — " or shall I have my little girl for my own this other day too ?" He held out his hand to her as he spoke, and she looked in his face a moment, and then went to him. Poor thing, she went to him, and put her arms about his neck, and began to cry. After a minute she said a few words to him, and then by degrees she told him all her trouble. She had no one else to speak to ; how could she help telling it to him ?

" They want to keep me from coming to you, and I feel as if it would break my heart not to come. Oh, I don't know what to do ! Tell me what to do," she said. " How can I obey them without do ing wrong to you ? How can I help wrong ing somebody, whatever I do ?" " My dear," said poor Richard Duncombe slowly, " I wish, for your sake, you had not found me." He could unselfishly wish that ; but help in her difficulty, or light to solve her provol. n. c blem — that he could not give her. His own life had been too full of unsolved problems, of needs which he had never met to reconcile the irreconcilable, for aid of that sort to be forthcoming from him. The world and its difficulties had been too much for him long ago. He had never been able to see his own way through this earthly wilderness, far less to guide others to find theirs.

"You had better give me up, my dar ling — I don't see anything else for it," was all he could presently say. " If you can't come without offending them — well, you mustn't offend them, I suppose. It's three to one, you see, and that's too great an odds. But as for what is right — ah ! I can't help you there. What is right seems often to be such a strange, doubtful thing. Sometimes there seems no right at all, and sometimes there seem two, or more than two, rights. It's often a curious kind of confusion, like a tangled skein." He went on talking in this way to her ; he could not help her ; he could only comfort her with his sympathy. But yet sympathy alone does give com fort sometimes, and Sylvia grew happier gradually as they sat talking to each other. They fell to talking presently about her old childish days, and she nestled to him, and laid her head upon his shoulder.

He took one of her fair curls in his hand once and kissed it. She said to him, " You used to do that long ago — do you remember? You used to gather all my curls together and kiss them — so. Nobody ever did that but you." " Look here," he. said, and out of a drawer he took a little feebly-drawn pic ture of a room that she did not recognise — " look, we did this together one niornc2 ing, just before I went away. You don't remember it, but you sat on my knee, and we made it together. There is the cat before the fire, and there is your Noah's Ark, and that is you, and this is me. I am afraid the portraits are not very life life, but we used to play that way, you know, upon the floor. This bit of paper has been all round the world with me. See, you made those pencil-marks in the corner there. I have kissed that corner many a day."

Was it Sylvia's fault if, as she sat listen ing to these stories of her childish years, as she sat clasping the thin hand, and looking into the face that had grown old before its time, but which, as she gazed at it, seemed slowly to be growing familiar to her once more — was it her fault if she felt her heart warming to him — this father whom she had never seen for sixteen years — as it had never warmed in all those sixteen years to the mother by whose side she had grown up ? She had an affinity with him that she had not with her mother ; that kindly, tender, loveable nature of his drew hers to it ; he had gone through so much, and in a worldly way had sunk so low, but yet he had still the charm that in old days had made people like him — the charm that made even most people whom his misfor tunes had injured (except his wife) speak gently of his failings, and forgive him.

"Papa, I am so happy here," she said softly to him once. She was stroking his hand as she said this ; he had just put his arm about her. They were sitting in a small, dingy parlour, on an old horsehair sofa, with a shabby drugget on the floor, with a shabby table and three cane-bottom chairs for all the other furniture of the room. It was a strange place for her to find herself in — the place, the com panionship, the surroundings, all utterly unlike the places and the people and the things that she had hitherto been familiar with ; all was so shabby and poor ; the arm she leaned on had a threadbare sleeve ; the wristband at the edge was frayed ; and yet, strange as it all was, in spite of its poverty, in spite of its unfamiliarity, a feeling was slowly stealing over the girl's heart that this place was "home," — that this worn face she looked into was the face that loved her best in all the world, — that this hand she clung to was the hand that she had longed to hold through all her life.

He had begun to tell her about his wan derings, about his failures in this place and that, about his coming home again nine years ago. "You see, another kind of man might have succeeded out there," he said, " but I never had the elements of success in me. It was a hopeless business from the first. I don't blame them for wanting to get rid of me. God knows what they could have done with me if I had remained to be a weight upon them here ! I can imagine what a comfort it must have been to ship me off to the other side of the world. No, your grandfather didn't treat me badly, Sylvia ; he was kinder to me than many a man in his place would have been. He lent me some money that I don't seem ever likely to be able to pay him back, and he never spoke a really hard word to me. I have always had a grateful feeling to him. — It was in New York that I took to the watch-mending business first.

I didn't go there with any thought of watch-mending. I went to be clerk in a goods store, but after I had been there for a while some body one day showed an old watch to me, and asked me if I thought anything could be done with it ; and I took it to pieces for amusement (I had always, when I was a boy, had a great liking for that sort of thing), and that was the beginning of it. Yes, I stayed a good while in New York. I had a shop there for three years, and I saved enough money in that time to bring me home. Of course I should have been wiser not to have come home. I should have done better out there than I have ever done here, but" — he stopped for a moment, and patted her hand with his — " I got sick with longing to know some thing about this little girl. That was what brought me back. I didn't know whether you were living or dead, my darling, but I thought that, if you were alive, I would rather starve near you on a dry crust than live at ease anywhere else in the world.

" Why did I never write home, you say ? Well, they had shaken me off, and I thought what they would all like best would be to be well quit of me. I should have written if I had had any good report to give of myself, but I don't think your mother would have cared much — would she ? — to hear that I had set up a watch mending shop in New York. It was just a poky little place in a back-street, not much better than this. It was not exactly a home that I should have asked your mother to come out and share." He said this with a laugh. " I daresay I was wrong — I have been wrong about most things all my hfe — but I thought she would like best never to hear more about me — just to be left to make up her mind that I was dead. " It was summer time when I came home." He said this* after a little silence.

"It was a June day — the 16th of June — when I first saw you, my dear. I got to London early that morning, and I left my traps at a public-house (I hadn't many of them to leave), and went straight to Ches ter Square. I had found out that your grandfather was still living there, but I did not know if you were living with him, or where you were. I got to the house about ten o'clock, and I waited about the street all that day till half-past two. I should have waited till it was dark if I had not seen you. But at half-past two the door opened, and you came out, — you and your grandmother." " And did you know me ?" she said. "Well, when I saw you there I knew you. I fancied I should have known you anywhere, but I was wrong in that, I daresay. Yet you had still the same little dainty ways that you had when I went away from you.

You came skipping down the steps with your tiny feet ; you had your pretty hair in curls all round your neck in the old way. I could not stand still and look at you, you know, for fear your grandmamma should recognize me, but I saw your face well for a moment. Can you imagine what a moment it was ? Ah, my darling, if I could have dared to speak to you then, and tell you who I was !" "You ought to have done it. You ought to have done it," she said. " Ought I ? Well, — I don't know. The things we long to do are generally the things that we should leave undone, I think. That is what I have found through hfe, for the most part. If I had done what I had longed to do sixteen years ago I should have taken my little maid out to Queens land with me, and have let us sink or swim there together; but you see it wouldn't have been right to do that — nobody would have let me do it."

"Would it not have been right?" she said. " Ah ! I wish you had taken me with you. If I had lived with you always I think I should be better than I am now. I should have been of some use to some body, — and I am of no use to anybody now." " I don't think that can be true, my dear." " Oh, yes, it is true. Everybody here has been very kind to me, but nobody has ever really wanted me, as you would have wanted me. And now " said the girl suddenly, and then all at once stopped, with her lips quivering. " Oh, it is so dreadful to regret things, and to wish when it is too late that we had done differently. — Papa," she said, nervously, " I haven't told you yet — I ought to tell you — Do you — do you know that I am going to be married ?" " Ah ! dear me, has it come to be time for that ?" he said. He began to stroke her hair softly.

" I shall be glad, I daresay, presently. I ought to be glad, I am sure. Come, tell me all about it. Tell me who the lover is?" "You remember Ralph Ferrar?" " What ! little Ralph ? Is it he ? He was a good lad, — a very good lad. But is it really he ?" " He asked me to marry him early in the summer. I didn't want to do it then, and I said no; but he asked me again, and they all wanted it so much, and Mam ma, particularly, had set her heart upon it, — and so, at last " The sentence died away without an ending. There was a little silence before her father spoke. " And so now the marriage is to be ? And are you quite happy, my dear?" he said. He asked the question tenderly, but his very tenderness broke her down. She tried to answer him, and, instead of answering him, she burst into tears. She had had nobody as yet to pity her, or to speak a consoling word to her — no one ever to understand what she felt when the prospect of her future life appalled her.

" They all think I am so fortunate, be cause Ralph is rich — and he is a good man too," she began to say presently, in a sad, deprecating way. " They think I ought to be contented — and so I ought, perhaps. I try to be — indeed I do ; only sometimes, when I think of living with him all my life She broke off with a sudden shudder. " Oh, I know I ought not to speak like this, for he is so good ; you can't think how good he is, and so patient too — but sometimes — sometimes, Papa, I feel as if I would rather break stones upon the street than be his wife !" " My dear, why on earth, then, should you think of being his wife, if you feel like this about him ?" Mr. Duncombe quietly asked. Mr. Duncombe, I suppose, when he put this question, had begun to forget the ways of the world out of which he had slipped so many years ago ; he had begun to forget some of the things that he used to know, and had fallen into the habit of viewing some matters not through the artificial hght of the society in which he had lived once, but in the light of common sense.