Clara Harrington; a domestic tale

Chapter I

" Then, said she, I am very dreary. He will not come ; she said. She wept. I am aweary, aweary, Oh ! God, that I were dead !" Tennyson. In the immediate neighbourhood of London there are numerous dwellings, which, though without splendour, or any pretension to fashion, yet abound with accommodation, are Capable of much elegance and beauty, and are full of those VOL. I. B peculiar English comforts that so much help to create the charm of Home. In spring, before smoke and dust have spoiled the freshness of their trees and shrubs, whde the tender green leaves and fragrant flowers are stiU young, the Uttle gardens attached to these suburban abodes are almost as beautiful as those of the real country. Their growth may be less vigorous and their odour less sweet, but these disadvantages are to a large extent com pensated by the contrast derived from the close proximity of the vast city, in the dust and stifling atmosphere of which few plants will live, and hardly any flowers grow.

Here, whde walking up and down one of these narrow gardens, the true lover of nature sometimes speculates on the question whether, though the colour of his flowers is no doubt tarnished, and the vigour of their growth checked by the smoke, so that some of the leaves of his roses and geraniums are yellow, and others so scanty that he can count every one, he still does not derive as much enjoyment from his little garden as many landed proprietors from their large parks. At aU events, the lover of flowers will admit that the difference is greater between having such a garden and no garden at all — perhaps nothing but a flagged court or the back of an adjoining house — than between having such a garden and being the possessor of a park. Situated among many rows, terraces, crescents, and so-called viUas of a similar description, there was, a few miles out of London, a small house with one of these Uttle gardens before it.

The treUised bal cony was filled with boxes of mignionette, B pots of hyacinths, violets, dwarf acacias, and some even of the more rare and costy plants, arranged so as to form a flowery srrove round the window. The little garden was brilUant with lilacs and laburnums, and gave evidence of the presiding hand of some person of unusual taste and elegance; and within the house this graceful presence was even more conspicuous. The drawing room, small in dimensions, was refined and elegant in aU its appointments; simple, yet far more beautiful than many magnificent rooms filled with costly silks and gilding. Some people possess a genius for the kind of arrangement which gives this impression of beauty. With no materials beyond ordinary furniture, they have the power, by good combinations and a magic touch here and there, to make all that was ungraceful, or merely common-place, truly elegant; and such was the talent with which the mistress C-a this house was endowed.

The least ob servant person felt the influence stealing over him, like an enchantment, when he entered that room. There was nothing remarkable about it, nothing that any one could remember and hope to succeed in imitating; it was the arrangement of the whole that made it charming. Glasses of flowers, looking as if placed and arranged by a fairy's hand, casts from small pieces of statuary, books, musical instruments, en gravings — aU these were seen through the softening half light of Venetian blinds and muslin curtains, while the air was perfumed in passing through the plants on the bal cony. Without changing any one of these articles, the whole might have been so disposed as merely to convey the impression, that there were collected in that particular room so many pieces of furniture for use or ornament; as actually arranged ]:y the hand that gave them grace and beauty, they recalled to mind the old man's study of Hoffman, over the common green paper of which the power of poetry cast such a glow, that it was transformed in the eyes of the student Anselmus into a real grove, with fairy flowers and trees that waved in the wind.

It was in this pleasant home, that, to wards six o'clock on a spring afternoon, she who had created its charm, stood in a little back room at the top of the house, with her head leaning against the opened window frame, gazing intently along the dusty Lon don road, as motionless as the cast of Sappho in her own drawing-room. In her arms was a young chdd, two years old, with its waxen hands clasped round the young mother's neck, and its velvet cheek resting against hers. Now and then the little pink fingers softly patted the mother's face, and then the mother would for a moment withdraw her eyes from the road to look tenderly at her child, but quickly, as if afraid of having lost a moment of her watching, she turned to look eagerly again. Thus they stood then, and usually stood every day about this time, to watch along that dusty road, sometimes for two or three hours together, often to be disappointed at last and to give up hope, the mother to sit down in her solitude with her sad thoughts, the unconscious infant to suffer from the reflexion of that anxiety and sorrow.

Six o'clock was approaching; the hour was even beginning to strike, when Mrs. Merton, standing at that lonely window, saw with delight the longed-for carriage driving quickly up the road. It was her constant, though somewhat childish, practice — and Clara was scarcely more than a chdd — to remain in the same posture at the window, watching till the carriage reached one particular tree, then to walk slowly down-stairs, and begin some occupation which would take her double the time to finish that could elapse before her husband's cabriolet drove to the gate ; for there was something exquisite in contriving to be surprised at last by the ring at the bell, and then to start up, throw away the work, and rush, with her beating heart, to open the door herself, forgetting aU the long hours of watching and waiting in the joy of that actual presence.

On this particular day, Mrs. Merton watched the cabriolet pass the tree, and then, haA'ing gone down slowly as usual, she took up a book from the drawing-room table, and resolved to read one whole page. She read the words very quickly that she might be ready. The page was finished, yet no ring was heard. She tried to read it again, but was obliged to lay it down. She walked very slowly up and down the lobby, — stiU no ring. Then she went back to the drawing-room, from the window of which she could only see a few yards, for there was a turn in the road ; she would not even look that short distance, because it would spoil the surprise of the ring. She sat resolutely down, and took up the book to read again. She once more finished the page, and then hurried up-stairs again to the higher window.

Nothing unusual was to be seen, no crowd of people, no one running hurriedly along the road, as if an accident had happened, — carriages, horsemen, carts, foot passengers, went up and down, but there was no appearance of the person for whom alone she had eyes or thoughts. She was quite sure it was he whom she had seen ; she knew the carriage, the horse, the groom, too well to be mistaken, and, far better, the master. Five minutes of wretched anxiety, such as watchers alone know, had passed — minutes that seemed like hours. And how many long, profitless hours are endured by women who love — hours that engender fret ful, suspicious thoughts — those thoughts which are the bane of a happy home ! Mrs. Merton sat down before a clock, and resolved that as soon as the hand had passed the quarter, she would go out and ask the people in shops, as she went along, whether any accident had happened, but just at the instant, when this resolution was formed, a loud ring sounded, like heavenly music in her ears, and she ran down with her little Bertha, whose eyes had caught the joy shining in her mother's, and with trembUng, eager hands, opened the door, but — instead of him she looked for, there stood a strange servant, and in place of the expected cabriolet, a hired carriage.

Without waiting to answer the question whether " Mrs. Merton was at home ?" with an aching heart Clara rushed back into the house ; but scarcely had she time to bury her weeping face in the sofa pillows, before kind, friendly arms, were thrown around her, and a soft voice tried to soothe her, asking earnestly the cause of the tears which little Bertha was trying to wipe from her mother's eyes. Half ashamed of her violent emotion, the poor, disappointed Avatcher looked round, and then exclaimed, with amazement, "Oh, Leonora, can this be you ? You have come at last !" " Yes, my Clara, never, I trust, to leave you again. " Do I, indeed, see you once more ?" resumed Clara ; " though I can hardly bear to look at you, for I see in your face the traces of what you have suffered. Yes, I know how much, how deeply.

But yet what a blessing it is to see you again." Even while she said these words, and kissed her friend again and again, who continued to fold her to her heart with maternal fondness, that anxious friend ob served that her thoughts were absent, that her face was constantly turned back to the window, and that she was wholly absorbed in listening. Scarcely, indeed, had a few minutes passed in this manner, when, at the sound of another ring, she started, and, without a word of explanation, snatched up Bertha, and again ran to the gate, again to be disappointed. This time, however, there was some aUe viation of her suffering, for a boy had brought a note from her husband in his own handwriting. It contained only a few hurried lines, written in pencd, to say that he had been unexpectedly prevented, by affairs of consequence, from coming to her.

He did not give a very clear explanation of these affairs, but intimated that they were of consequence to her as well as to other members of his family. Then followed a few words of tenderness, and the note concluded by saying, that the day after to-morrow he hoped to have the great pleasure of riding with her, if she would be ready at two o'clock, when he would send the horses for her, and would meet her at a certain spot, which he named. She stood in the passage reading and re-reading the unsatisfactory note ; then questioned the boy who brought it, and whom she recognized as one who swept the crossing close by. He could only teU her that a groom gave it to him, — that the groom was dressed in dark grey, — that this was about five minutes ago ; that after giving it to him the groom ran "quickly along the opposite road, and that, just as he, the boy, had got to Mrs. Merton's gate with the note, he observed a cabriolet drive past the turning with this groom behind it.

Instantly the impatient questioner ran back into the house and up-stairs to the little back window which gave a view of the London Road. But she was too late ; she had not even the comfort of seeing her husband driving away from her. She stood there a few minutes, too much bewildered to shed tears. There was a shade of anger mixed with her sorrow ; anger at the mystery in this proceeding, — 'the intention to conceal his having been so near her. It was this anger which gave her strength to chase away, for the moment, her sorrow at the disappointment, and to make her say to herself, " I wiU be happy, and enjoy my dear Leonora's presence, even though Gerard is not with me." But when she went once more into the drawing-room, and looked in her friend's kind face, and heard herself addressed in tender soothing accents, as "my own dear Clara!" then this poor Clara's heart lost aU its hardness, and as she put her arms round that friend's neck tears came to her relief, and she said again and again, "Now that you are come to help me, I shall soon be happier."

In a few minutes the visitor had dis missed her carriage, the two friends having resolved not to separate again till the following morning. Dinner was soon over, and Clara, with her own hands, laid her child to rest, pillowed on the sofa near them, for Leonora begged that the child might not be taken out of the room. " It seemed," she said, " as if she could never tire of looking into its deep, earnest eyes." It was remarkable, that from the first moment of her arrival, Bertha, who was an unusually shy or rather fanciful child, seemed to lay her head with as much confidence on the stranger's bosom as on her mother's, and it was not till those large blue eyes had slowly closed, that Leonora seemed inclined for conversation, and then she still sat on a low stool by the sleeping child, holding one of the little soft hands in hers.

Chapter II

" She wept — because she had no more to say, Of that perpetual weight, which on her spirit lay." Words wor. th. "It is strange, Clara," she then said, with a grave and even melancholy expression, " that you should never have written to me since our accidental meeting the autumn before last." " It must, indeed, seem strange to you." " You cannot wonder that it appeared to VOL. i. c me incomprehensible, and that it was very painful. We had arranged, you remember, that I should spend some days with you." " It would have been a sweet happiness to me." "Do you remember our last meeting? Oh ! what a joy it was to me to see you again. " And to me, so unexpectedly to meet you, dearest Leonora." " Bertha could then have been only about six weeks old," continued Leonora. "I had been anticipating with the greatest delight my promised visit.

Conceive, then, my disappointment, my grief, when I went to your house on the day you had ap pointed, and found that you were gone, that you had left no message for me, and that I could discover no trace of you." "My disappointment and grief were greater than your own," answered Clara ; "for, besides my sorrow that I could not see you, I had to endure the apprehension that you would think me both unaffectionate and ungrateful." " Oh ! no ; sisters in affection cannot so think of each other. Mistrust cannot mix in a love so proved as ours. I never for a moment felt anything but anxiety and sorrow; but anxious I was, more than I can describe, for I knew how much you would suffer from our mutual disappoint ment, and I dreaded what you might be suffering from your domestic position." Clara was silent.

" Of course I attributed your disappear ance and the strangeness of the circum stances under which it happened to your husband. You know how uneasy I felt from the first at your acquaintance with c him ; and I have since heard nothing to relieve my apprehension." An involuntary sigh was the only answer returned by Clara. " I came to you now, in the hope that you would be able to lessen this apprehen sion. But I own I am disappointed. What I have seen to-day increases my fear. His strange appearance and disappearance, his incomprehensible note, — these are circumstances but little calculated to diminish my uneasiness." Clara tried to speak, but after uttering a few broken and confused sentences, she leant her head on her hand, endeavouring to conceal her emotion. "You must make me acquainted with your real position," resumed Leonora, " simply and truly, as far as you yourself un derstand it.

I have said that our affection is sisterly ; but it is more than that, for I am so much older than you, and have had so much more experience, that I regard myself in some degree as your mother, as well as your friend." " In your own loving heart," said Clara, earnestly, " you are at once sister, mother, friend." " Something wrong there must be," resumed Leonora ; " there is no confidence between you and your husband. Either you are wanting in your duty, or he fails in his. If there is fault on your side, dearest Clara, let me help you, as I have done before." " Oh ! if you had been with me, I should not have suffered so much, so very much." " Well, even if it is he who is wrong, still I may help you, help you to bear with fortitude what cannot be remedied, or to make the requisite effort to rescue yourself from the worst evUs of a position in which you have been unworthfly placed — if, indeed, it be so."

Whde thus speaking, Leonora laid the child's hand softly down, as if afraid to disturb its tranquil sleep, now that she had entered on so agitating a topic. She then rose from her low seat, and placed herself at some distance. Clara gazed at her earnestly, with some thing of bewilderment in her look, and after a silence of a few moments, she threw her self kneeling before her friend, and cried in a tone of anguish as she clasped her hand: " Leonora, do not talk so of him. You give me pain greater than I can bear. I look to you for help. You must not encourage me to feel unjustly, bitterly against him. You must promise to strengthen me, and to give me heart and hope when I fail." Leonora pressed the trembling hands that were now laid within hers, and said " I am here to give you comfort and aid ; and you feel that I shall do so, do you not, in your inmost heart ?"

Clara went on. " I wiU tell you everything, and when you know all, you will see how much I need your help. You will feel that he is not wrong. You must make me think so ; must make me feel so, when dis appointment and anguish disturb the clear ness of my own judgment. Oh, my Leo nora," she continued, " I owe everything I am to you. Without you I should have been lost, numbered with that vast mul titude that are destroyed and forgotten in this dreary London. I know you will never forsake me." "Never until I am myself bereft of reason and of feeling," cried Leonora fervently. " Then," replied Clara, " you must teac me to love and esteem my husband. With out that, I can accept of no happiness; there are difficulties in my way ; and it is for this reason that I want your sympathy and help." '• My sympathy you are sure of, and also of what help I can give, but I fear my task will be a difficult one."

" You think it wdl be difficult," said Clara ; " aud that you wiU have a bad pupil; but you came to me to-day, just as I had been severely tried and had nearly failed." " How ?" asked Leonora. " It is because you saw my grief and wit nessed my anger against him, that you imagine I am unhappy, and that he makes me so. You are wrong, very wrong, and to encourage in me this state of feeling is to weaken, not to strengthen me, and to make me wicked as well as weak. Of what value is that love which cannot forgive !" She had risen from Leonora's feet and now stood proudly up. Perhaps if that true friend had said one single word in opposition to her feeling, at that moment, all the power of affection to comfort and to guide would have been lost to her ; but Leonora sat silent till this sudden burst of emotion had passed away.

" Ah ! you think me weak, absurd," she resumed ; " but you do not know how difficult it is for one living so much alone to prevent suspicious and unworthy thoughts from taking possession, — sometimes, yes, entire possession of me." And she sobbed bitterly, covering her face with her hands. Leonora pressed her to her bosom, stiU without speaking. " But now that you are come to help me, dearest Leonora, you wdl be my good angel; you wiU drive these demons from my heart; you wiU allow them no longer to find a resting-place there." " I trust I shall be a comfort and help to you. " You have been so from the first moment that you ever spoke to me," resumed Clara ; " when we first met, when you found me a poor girl utterly destitute, from that moment — no, do not stop me, it does me good to think and speak of this — from that moment I felt 'you to be my guardian spirit.

Then you did not rest satisfied with wishing me weU when we parted in London, but you sought me out and gave me your counsel and assistance. Never yet have I been able to make any return, excepting my gratitude and my devoted love ; but it was a blessed state to feel such admiration and love as I felt for you ! Then came sorrow — sorrow, where there ought to have been nothing but additional joy. Then I first knew Mr. Merton. You had left London, you had returned to Italy; there your own trials and duties were sufficient to absorb you, yet you never ceased to love me and to care for me, and I wrote constantly to you. I told you at the time everything that passed between us ; everything that occurred ; my engagement at the Haymarket, where he came every night; everything until that wretched time when " Clara ceased speaking, her face flushed with crimson. * " What would I not give," she resumed, '• to be able to forget that one wrong thing he did ?

But, my Leonora, he himself re pented of it; repented having offered me the indignity of such proposals, and at once urged me to become his wife." " But how could you consent, after he had offered you such an outrage ?" '•' It was indeed contrary to your earnest counsel." " It was my opinion, my deep conviction, that you ought at once to have separated yourself from him, and that you could place no trust in a man who had so deservedly forfeited your respect and confidence," " But I loved him so much that I was able to forgive him." " You should have respected duty more than love. It was wrong to place your happiness in the keeping of a man, who had shown himself capable of acting with such utter disregard to principle." "But his repentance was so deep, his desire to make me reparation so earnest, his misery so intense, aud my own wretched ness so overwhelming, that I seemed to myself to see, in the threatened, the certain destruction of the happiness of both of us, the condemnation of that unchristian spirit which cannot forgive."

" To forgive is one thing : to repose im plicit, blind confidence — confidence involv ing the whole happiness of life — is quite another." " Do not say blind confidence. All the reparation which it was in human power to make was offered me. Ought not that instant reparation to have satisfied me? How could I ever offer up prayers for for giveness for myself, while conscious that I cherished in my heart a feeling of implaca bdity, and that against one who loved me with his whole soul, whose happiness was in my hands, whom indeed it was in my power to make happy by pronouncing a single word? No, Leonora! there may be some who think that they may be so sinned against that they cannot forgive, on whom repentauce and reparation make no impres sion. But I do not think and feel in that manner. I could not doubt the sincerity or strength of his love.

I know my own, and in consenting to become his wife, I trusted through that very love, to save and bless my husband." "God grant," cried Leonora fervently, "that your expectation may be realized!" " We were married — We were happy. Many months passed on swiftly like a dream, and yet the memory of that time fiUs so large a space in my mind, that it seems to equal all the other parts of my Use. Gradually, however, I fancied, and by degrees I was obliged to acknowledge to myself, that there was some alloy mixed with this happiness. The first thing that materially interrupted my peace had relation to yourself. He insisted that you should be kept in entire ignorance of our marriage. Why he made so decided a point of this I never could conjecture. He said many things to me in explanation of his motives ; but I never could see any sufficient reason for giving me so great a grief.

I was so absorbed in my own happiness, that all the rest of the world beside you appeared nothing to me; but you were stiU the same to me; and, independently of my regret that you were not with me to share my happiness, and that I could not even have the comfort of your sympathy, the thought that I must appear to you ungrateful, was a source of bitterness in the midst of my delirium of joy. The only reason I could understand for his feeling towards you, was the manner in which you expressed yourself with regard to his former conduct. I made no secret of your opinion, nor did I conceal from him that you thought he had justly forfeited all claim to my respect and confidence, nor that you had used your utmost efforts to separate us altogether. This, he said, he never could or would forgive." "And was this the only alloy which mingled with your happiness at that time V " There was another thing which troubled me a little, but I never attached much im portance to it.

I mean his continued con cealment of our marriage from his family. N I was annoyed at this, because I dislike concealment; but he assured me that the necessity for it in the present instance would cease after a short time; and I really cared very little about it." " Has the necessity for this concealment ceased yet ?" " Not that I am aware of. It is certain that he has not made our marriage public or introduced me to any of his family." " Had you any other ground of unhap piness ?" " Yes, there was another, — the greatest of all, — without which I sliould have disregarded all the others. I mean his frequent absence. At first he was almost always with me, but of course he could not be entirely so, because he had not left his own home, and his friends were ignorant of everything about me. When he was VOL. I. d absent I had no friend in the world but you, and to you he would not let me write."

" Oh, yes, he aUowed you to write one letter," said Leonora, in a tone of bitterness. " Yes, — that letter, that dreadful letter. You well know what it cost me to write it ; but I hoped that my assurance that I was happy, and that I had done nothing wrong woidd have consoled you for my absence and silence for a time, for I hoped and believed that neither would be very long. They have, indeed, been long, but he would not let me write again, and, on my part, I loved him so much that I could not persist in wishing to do anything of which he disapproved. He said that if I loved him truly and entirely I shoidd wish for no other companion, and least of aU for one with whom he felt, as he said, so justly irritated, and so I at length taught myself to think that to wish for you was to be untrue to him ; but you must not imagine that for one moment my love and gratitude to you were shaken.

I knew you were right to have felt and acted about him as you did, and I was obliged to acknowledge to my own mind, even from the very first, when I wished to be blind to aU his faults, that it was neither good nor worthy in him to harbour this revengeful feeling. Some times I could not help fancying that there must be some other cause at the foundation of his strange aversion, but whenever I mentioned this suspicion it roused up so much bitterness and anger in his ex pressions about you that I was very soon silenced. But do you really think there can have been any other cause?" and she d looked searchingly in her friend's face, as if longing to find there some help in unravel ling the tangled skein of her life. " It is impossible to divine the real cause of this particular feeling," answered Leo nora, " unless we could discover the motives which have induced him to involve the whole affair in mystery.