Falsely True ... Revised edition

Front matter

FALSELY TRUE. Jl "glotiel. BY MRS. CASHEL HOEY, c AUTHOR of riON OF CAIN," "A HOUSE OF "NO SIGN," Etc, Etc. "THE QUESTION OF CAIN," "A HOUSE OF CARDS." " His honour, rooted in dishonour, stood ; And faith, unfaithful, kept him falsely true." NEW AND REVISED EDITION. WARD AND DOWNEY, ,2, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON 1890. PRINTED BY KELLY & CO., MIDDLE MILL, KINGSTON-ON-THAMES ; AND GATE STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, W.C. CONTENTS. CHAP, page I. GERALDINE'S BROTHER . . . I II. — Geraldine's Friend . . .8 III. — Geraldine's Husband . . . .14 IV. — The Red House . . . . 21 V. — Culvers Manor . . . . .2(1 VI. — The old Story .... 33 VII. — The old Truth . . . . .41 VIII. — "Visited urON the Children" . . 48 IX. — Parting .... .60 X. — Sir Frederick "pronounces" . . 68 XI. — Two Embassies . . . . -79 XII. — Receiving his Passports . . .

S8 XIII. —Discomfiture . . . . 9S XIV. — At the Parsonage .. . . . 107 XV. —Harold's Trouble . . . . .116 XVI.— "Vi" . . . . . .125 XVII. — While Geraldine waits . . . 135 XVIII. — "My Lady" ..... 145 XIX. — In the Land or the Southern Cross . ■ '54 XX. — Don Dieco's Daughter . . . 162 XXI. — News at last . . . . .172 XXII. — By the merest chance . . . 185 XXIII. — A Suggestion . . . . • '93 XXIV. — A Temptation .... C02 XXV.— Long Odds . . . . - .210 XXVI.— "Vi" victrix ..... 219 XXVII.— Geraldine's Letter . . . .226 XXVIII.— Dolores . . ... -239 XXIX. — Checkmate foe Vi . . . . - 250 XXX. — "Cursed with a granted Prayer" . . 261 XXXI.— "The Wat of Transgressors is hard" . . 272 XXXII.— At Gatcombe ..... 286 XXXIII.— "Thursday, the Sixteenth of June" . . 298 XXXIV. — " One Sinner that RErENTETii " . . 311 XXXV. — "If only that the King had done no Wrong" 327 XXXVI. — "In the Evening there shall be Light" . THIS STORY (FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1870) IS DEDICATED TO JAMES PAYN.

Chapter I. Geraldine's Brother

There are places, not generally considered picturesque, and whose local history is not to be utilised in the interests of book-making or hotel-keeping, which possess a great deal of beauty, and have the power of attaching dwellers in them strongly. The people who find out this beauty are, naturally, very fond of it, very proud of it, and inclined to regard it as more distinguished, more to be desired, than the better - known, vulgarised advantages of places which every one talks about, and restless people, of the vagabond travelling tribe, visit. The prosperous, proper little village of Culvers was one of those secluded, self-centred, self-satisfied places. It was situated on the southern border of an eastern county, and it was unknown to fame. If wild flowers, by their beauty and profusion, could have made a reputation for Culvers, it assuredly would have had one ; for the lanes, the fields, and the hedges were studded with them ; and if rosy-cheeked, fearless-eyed children could have given the place a character, it would not have been wanting.

The wild flowers and the children alike bloomed unseen, however, so far as the great world was concerned, and only the people of Culvers knew how beautiful, peaceful, healthful a spot it was. On the gravestones in the tranquil, secluded place of burial, clustering round the gray, lichen-grown church, the same names were repeated over and over again. Some of the slabs had no surface to spare for new inscriptions, to tel of the Grenfells, the Wendells, the Jennifers, and the i Dukes still to be gathered to those predecessors whose names might be traced with difficulty in the dim shapeless ness of words of remembrance at the top of the slabs, or read in the clear-cut accuracy of the record of only a few years or months, at the bottom. Inside the old church — a venerable building, retaining traces of solemn beauty even in the interior, wherever it had escaped "restoration " — many of the same names were inscribed in ostentatious lists of benefactors, calculated at once to glorify actual, and stimulate potential, generosity ; and on the fly-leaves of the fat elderly bibles and prayer-books, which rested six days in each week on the faded ample cu.hions of the apparently impregnable pews, and did duty on the seventh.

A staid and solemn air of conservative respectability pervaded the village, between whose main — indeed only — street, properly so called, and the church, a neat, well-kept " green " inter vened, bounded on one side by the faultless palings and the shining laurel-hedges of the parsonage. The parsonage, although modern in comparison with the church, was old enough to be respectable, even according to the standard of Culvers. The pervading primness of its arrangements harmonised well with its formal outline and small, heavily-set windows, whose ugliness Mrs. Stepney had disguised to the utmost of her skill by creeping plants and climbing-plants — in short, by every kind of vegetation which could be induced to accommodate itself to gray stones and rusty iron bars and clamps. A narrow path, unacquainted with weeds, and edged by box borders in which intrusive snails were never known to lurk, led, on the inner side of the shining laurels, to a small iron gate, which gave admittance to the churchyard, and formed the private entre'e of the family from the parsonage.

From the path upon which the private gate opened, was to be seen the Red House, the most picturesque object in or near Culvers. Superficial observers might have pro nounced it the only one ; but they could not have loitered on the brink of the tranquil river which wound its way among the willows, and swept with so soft a curve by the mossy lawn of the Wyverns ; they could not have trodden the solemn aisles of the elm-walk in Culvers Park ; or sat by any of the dells in the common of Woodlee, when the GERALDINE'S BROTHER. 3 wild flowers cluster there, and the bees pry into their fragrant hearts. The path lay straight through the churchyard, and terminated in a second gate, which opened on the "green," within a few yards of the Red House, whose gable was presented to the side of the parsonage, and whose garden was divided from the churchyard by a hazel fence : over this, on the right, the flatly-extending branches of a splendid cedar spread their sombre shade.

Midway between the two gates a lady and a gentleman stood, one summer afternoon several years ago, contem plating the Red House. The sun was shining, over the garden a haze of golden summer heat had settled. The lady was Mrs. Stepney, and her companion was her half brother, Harold D'Arcy. These two had seldom met since Geraldine Quinn left her stepfather's house, twelve years before, as the bride of the Reverend Philip Stepney. The restricted intercourse between Geraldine Stepney and her half-brother had not been altogether the result of the disfavour with which her stepfather regarded her marriage. Mr. D'Arcy, — a rich and placable Yorkshire squire, who left it to his relatives to be inordinately proud of his Norman extraction, and was in his own person merely scrupulously careful of his property — had contented himself with representing the disadvantages of the marriage ; he had not gone the lengths of resenting it.

" I consider Geraldine a great fool," Mr. D'Arcy had re marked to Geraldine's mother, from whom her daughter had certainly not inherited her folly. The former Mrs. Quinn had been a Dublin girl of remarkable beauty, possessed of the average education, but of no fortune. Her father was an attorney, and Lieutenant Quinn, of the 200th Foot, with "something" in addition to his pay, was an undeniably good match for Miss Macnamara. Geraldine was the only child of this marriage ; and the girl was almost as much to be congratulated as her mother, when, after five years of widowhood, passed in shabby gentility and very sensible poverty, the still beautiful Mrs. Quinn had the good fortune to captivate Mr. D'Arcy. The long-descended and very wealthy Yorkshire squire married the Irish widow ; and the majority of his friends probably thought him as great a fool as he subsequently 1 — thought his stepdaughter, of whom he was very fond, al though not to the extent of giving her, when she married a poor man, so liberal a dowry as she might have had if she had "married into the county."

No consciousness of the questionable prudence of his own marriage affected his judgment of Geraldine's. One's own love is an irresistible, reasonable, indeed praiseworthy passion; but how childish and absurd an argument is love, when pleaded by other people. The Reverend Philip Stepney was as poor as any typical curate of romance when he married Geraldine Quinn ; travelling at that time was neither so cheap nor so expedi tious as it is now ; so that the young pair did not revisit the grand Yorkshire mansion Geraldine had exchanged for a home so much humbler — an exchange which she con tinued to regard as the very best bargain she ever made in her life, although she afterwards became an adept in bar gains, and was undeniably fond of them. Just as fortune, personated by a friendly patron, who presented Philip Stepney to the living of Culvers, began to shine upon them, Geraldine's mother died.

The softening influence of a common sorrow drew Mr. D'Arcy and his stepdaughter together after this event. The Yorkshire squire was not in danger of being made uncomfortable by the indications of small means — by any of those makeshifts which are natur ally unpleasant to witness in the case of near relations, especially when, with suggestive impertinence, they contrast with the luxury and completeness of our own surroundings and the dignified ease of our own life. Mr. D'Arcy held that parsons had no business to be actually rich — except in the case of eccentric persons, who, being born rich, made the clerical profession their choice. Stepney was not actually rich, but he was very well off, and the parsonage was a place of which no one need be ashamed, not even a Yorkshire squire, with a purse and a pedigree in admirable accord.

Culvers was a small place, to be sure, and insig nificant in every sense ; but the " neighbourhood " was very " good," and Geraldine was both important and popular. Mrs. D'Arcy had added but one scion to the ancient Norman house, which had seldom been better graced than by her lovely and clever self; — a son, who was remarkably GERALDINE'S BROTHER. 5 unlike his important ancestors, but who strongly resembled his Irish progenitors. The latter had possessed beauty and brains, although fortune had been niggardly to them in the way of pedigree and pelf. Harold D'Arcy had been brought up, to the present period of his life, in accordance with the traditions of the family ; these held that a public school was "levelling," and prescribed instruction at a private tutor's, on the most ex pensive scale, until the proper time should arrive for a university career, to be marked by the hereditary respectability of the D'Arcys, but kept clear of desire for distinction ; in short, of anything with a tendency to make the heir of the D'Arcys think there could be a better kind of life than that of his predecessors.

There was apparently no danger of such a perverse notion taking possession of Harold D'Arcy. He went through the private-tutor stage, in com pany with two other young gentlemen of fortune, who were as commonplace as the best-regulated minds could desire; and, on the rare occasions when he met his sister, he pro duced a rather puzzling effect upon her. He was a " nice " boy, and she liked him very much. He was handsome, like her mother's brother — Geraldine remembered — who used to visit them, at their lodgings at Malahide, when she was a child, and give her cakes and toys, but who did away with the value and appropriateness of the gifts by borrowing a good deal more than the price of them from his sister. Harold was high-spirited and bright ; but was there much " in " him ? She had no opportunity to make up her mind on this point, and circumstances had not hitherto called for any special interest in her half-brother — who certainly might be reckoned among the favourites of fortune, as to the present and future of his position.

But things had changed a short time before that summer afternoon when Mrs. Stepney and her brother stood on the path in the churchyard, and contemplated the Red House. Harold D'Arcy had amazed his father, and scandalised the family in general, by avowing a vehement antipathy to the prescribed university career, and by insensibility to the argument, naturally supposed by his relations to be invin cible and unanswerable— that every D'Arcy of Gatcombe had gone to Oxford as a matter of course. Harold's aunts were especially dismayed. Nothing so painful had occurred in the family since their brother had made that extraordinary marriage with the " Irish person." Perhaps this departure on the part of Harold from the traditions of his house was a consequence of his terrible Irish blood. What did the misguided boy want ?

Harold told his father what he wanted, but declined to be brought to book by any other person. The fact was that the course and method of instruction to which Harold had been subjected at the private tutor's, and which had resulted in the case of his two associates in turning them out gentlemanly and vicious members of society — had produced an unforeseen effect on Mr. D'Arcy's son. It had led him to find something in himself which could not be satisfied with education on the recognised scale, or life on the approved system, and to resolve on breaking new ground, on educating himself after a fashion of his own, and profiting by the wealth and position he was to inherit, according to his own ideas, rather than on the ancestral pattern. If his father insisted on his going to Oxford, he was sure he should only lose his time there ; for he should have no other feeling than impatience to get away, no other desire than to carry out the scheme of wide, wild, and adventurous travel which he had been long maturing.

The nursing-mother of the immortal " Ugly Duck " was not more perplexed by the conduct of that ultimately vindi cated bird, than was the Yorkshire squire, when he fully comprehended the novel notion of a grand tour as pro pounded by his son. He had travelled himself, of course, as persons of condition did travel in his time ; and he distinctly remembered to have been very glad when his journeys were over, when for him henceforth " men" might mean only Englishmen, and "cities" only London and York ; when he could settle down out of hearing of foreign tongues, and reserve foreign cookery exclusively for his guests. But this scheme of Harold's was quite another thing; it included dreadful outlandish places, where the men were wild, and the cities were buried — where roads were unheard of, and a courier would be useless.

Mr. D'Arcy did not give in easily, but ultimately he yielded, and GERALDINE'S BROTHER. 7 Harold, who was not particularly selfish or callous consider ing that he was a rich man's only son— appreciated his father's kindness, although he could not estimate his self sacrifice. It is so easy to our children to leave us ; it is so hard for us to let them go. One portion of Harold D'Arcy's plan was pleasing to his father, because it implied delay ; and Mr. D'Arcy, in this instance also oblivious of his own youth, hoped that the lapse of a little time might change Harold's mind — forgetting that what was a freak to him was to his son a purpose full of delightful anticipation. Harold was aware that his half sister's husband was learned in oriental languages, and he proposed to the Reverend Philip Stepney that he should receive him as an inmate for six months, and instruct him in those difficult branches of learning.

"Think, my dear Geraldine," wrote Mr. D'Arcy to his stepdaughter, when Mr. and Mrs. Stepney had acceded to Harold's request, " what a trial, what a disappointment this is to me. It is such an unaccountable thing that Harold should be so unlike the family. I have no wish to make little of the Eas'.ern languages, I am sure, especially as Mr. Stepney understands them, and of course Eastern people must have some way of expressing themselves ; but it is an extraordinary fancy, is it not ? \\ hat a state your poor dear mother would have been in, if she had lived to see Harold set off on such a madcap expedition ! " " I am not so sure of that," remarked Mrs. Stepney on reading Mr. D'Arcy's letter to her husband. " Mamma had a great love of novelty, and a strong dash of adventure in her. I well remember the pleasure with which she used to tell of her 'foreign-service' days; and I doubt whether she really enjoyed the ease and luxury of Gatcombe so much as roughing it in the Canadas and Corfu."

" However " (returning to the letter), " there is some time before us yet ; and I have much hope that, with judicious management, you may succeed in putting this most objec tionable scheme out of Harold's head." " I don't think you'll do that," said Philip Stepney. " I shall not try," said Geraldine.

Chapter II. Geraldine's Friend

" You really think Culvers a pretty place ? " Mrs. Stepney asked Harold D'Arcy, as they strolled along the churchyard path towards the gate which opened on the village green. " It must seem very small and tame to you." " It may, perhaps, when I come home from everywhere, and compare it with everything," said Harold with a smile; " but Yorkshire isn't so very grand, and I'm tired of the Lake country. What a fine copper beech that is ! " He pointed to a superb tree, whose far-reaching branches almost touched the wall of the Red House. " Yes, a beauty ; it glows like burnished metal when the sun shines upon it, and helps to make the name of Mr. Har greaves' house appropriate. Culvers is proud of the anti quity of the Red House ; it has been in the family time out of mind. It looks venerable, does it not ?

" " It does indeed. I like the mellow red brick, and the low casements, and the overhanging roof, with those queer creatures, which have no business in brick architecture, presiding over the waterspouts. And what a profusion of trees and plants. I suppose there's a fine garden beyond that ancient wall ? " " There is ; a dear old garden, a regular old-fashioned place, with lavender hedges and cabbage roses. Like Mary Howitt's garden, it has ' Guelder-roses, gillyflowers, And pinks all kinds exceeding, With many a root of love-in-a-mist. And plenty of love-lies-ableeding.! " And who inhabits this old-world Eden ? A widow, a spinster ? or an old bachelor and his maiden sister — a softened Jonathan Oldbuck, and a Miss Grizel, without the mob and the mittens ? " " Smart, Harold," said Geraldine, laughing, " but inac curate.

The dwellers in the Red House are Mr. Hargreaves GERALDINE'S FRIEND. 9 — a widower — and his daughter ; she is, I suppose, techni cally a spinster, but not at all like one." " A young lady, then," said Harold ; " devoted daughter, and that kind of thing? " " Not at all ' that kind of thing,' if you mean a sneer," said Mrs. Stepney ; " Emily Hargreaves is a devoted daughter, and also — " At this moment a straw hat appeared above the boundary wall, which the brother and sister had now approached, and in another the wearer was at the gate, and had laid her hand upon the latch before she saw them. On perceiving them, the young lady drew back and looked slightly disconcerted. Harold D'Arcy had time to perceive that she was very pretty, and that she had recently been crying, before she and his sister, addressing each other respectively as " Emily " and " Geraldine," had exchanged greetings.

" Were you coming to see me ? " Miss Hargreaves enquired. " No," replied Mrs. Stepney. " I was just taking my brother, who arrived this morning — Mr. D'Arcy, Miss Har greaves — over the premises, and showing him the pussy-cat lions of Culvers. Were you coming to see me?" " I was. I did not know you expected Mr. D'Arcy to day." " I didn't expect him until Thursday," said Geraldine ; " and it is fortunate I was at home. But you must come back with us, Emily ; I assure you our family talk, which was not very interesting or important, is all done." " But your walk is not," said Miss Hargreaves. " Let me persuade you to visit me instead. Mr. D'Arcy is looking at the Red House as though he admired it." Harold was not Miss Hargreaves' equal in ease of manner. No very young man ever is the equal in that respect of a well-bred girl, who is not thinking of the impression she is making upon a new acquaintance.

He expressed his admiration of the Red House rather awkwardly, and trod on his sister's dress as he followed her through the gate. " Papa is in the drawing-room, and will be glad to see you, Geraldine, and Mr. D'Arcy also. Will you come in at once, or shall we lake your brother to the wilderness and through the garden ? — We are quite proud of our old trees and old-fashioned flowers," she continued, turning to Harold with a smile ; the sweetest and brightest, he thought, he had ever seen. Emily Hargreaves' face had instantly conveyed to Mrs. Stepney that something of a painful nature had occurred, and that her intended visit to the parsonage was to have been devoted to a confidence on the subject. She pressed Emily's arm, and walked briskly on, talking about the trees, and the grass, and the house, and old Billy King's admirable gardening — in short everything except the matter in her thoughts — an art which the best of women find them selvcs obliged to practise.

An observant person, seeing the two women together, would have known that they were friends, and would soon have perceived the kind and degree of likeness and of difference between them that makes the friendship of women true and lasting — the sort of tie which is not exposed to the strain of rivalry or jealousy, but is strengthened by the needs of both natures. Geraldine Stepney was thirty five years old ; Emily Hargreaves was nineteen. They were both handsome ; but the elder lady, like her half-brother, had inherited the Irish type of beauly, and, with her steady dark-blue eyes, deep-cut lids, and thick black lashes, her clear blue-veined skin, wide lofty brow, and rather large expressive mouth, had been in her youth more strikingly handsome than the English girl with her softness and her bloom.

Beside the tall upright figure of Mrs. Stepney, Emily's slight form might have been insignificant, only for its grace ; but her face was full of character. Before he had made the tour of the wilderness and the garden, Harold D'Arcy's first impression regarding the sweetness of Emily's smile had extended to her countenance generally, and he was convinced that not one of the York shire young ladies of his acquaintance had eyes so brown, so soft, so gentle, or features so refined, overspread with so fine a bloom of youth and health and purity. She had taken off her straw hat, and pushed her nut-brown curls behind her ears. Every moment her manner gained in animation without losing in modest gentleness. As he bent his head, so as to clear the Venetian blind over the large window opening to the ground through which Miss GERALDINE'S FRIEND. 11 Hargreaves led her visitors from the garden into the house, Harold D'Arcy admitted to himself that, if he had ever realised that such a girl existed, he had certainly not ex pected to meet her as Culvers.

The drawing-room at the Red House was large, long, and low. Three windows, with narrow spaces between them filled from ceiling to floor with books, admitted the summer air and a rich scent of flowers. The room, plentifully furnished in an old-fashioned comfortable style, and taste fully arranged, had but one occupant when Miss Hargreaves led her guests into it. This was an old man, who, when he saw Mrs. Stepney, put out a thin white hand and caught hold of a stick which stood beside his arm-chair, and made an attempt at rising, frustrated by Geraldine's hastening towards him. That Mr. Hargreaves was an invalid there was abundant evidence in the arrangements for his comfort ; but his appearance — although his figure was feeble and fragile, and his face too thin and transparent for health — did not indicate suffering.

He had a fine head, and a face in which superior intelligence and the habit of thought were easily discerned. It was a patient face too, but not serene ; patience had come into it gradually, not without striving and revolt, and there might sometimes be seen a yearning look in the clear gray eyes, which had doubtless once flashed and sparkled in dispute and doing, and had interpreted the activities of in tellectual and actual life. His whole appearance indicated a highly-strung nervous organisation, to which inaction of either mind or body must be unnatural and irksome. He could stand, supporting himself on a staff; but he could not walk, had not walked since his daughter was twelve years old. In those days beards were not worn, and Mr. Hargreaves' face was cleanly shaven, so that the finely shaped jaw and imperious mouth were clearly defined.

The latter feature showed many lines set there by pain, and many more by sorrow. " No harm can come to him any more in this world except through me," his good daughter had said to herself, when first she saw him have patience in lieu of pain of mind, and tranquillity for pain of body; "and through me it never shall come, except I die. Living, God will help me to keep my resolution ; and that it may be kept, God will let me live." She knew the meaning and the weight of the compact she thus made with herself ; she knew that the path of her duty would not always be smooth or pleasant, but she also knew she should have strength given her to walk therein, and undismayed she entered upon it, from the hour in which she learned the whole of her father's history. The knowledge had come to her while she was yet very young for the comprehension of wrong and sorrow ; but a part of the penalty of wrong is that it saddens the minds of the young whom we love, and for whom we would buy that unattain able thing — happiness — at the price of our own marred lives.

" I saw Stepney this morning," said Mr. Hargreaves, after he had acknowledged Harold D'Arcy's presence with much kindness and courtesy ; " he did not say your brother had arrived." " He did not know it ; he does not know it yet," said Geraldine ; " and at all events he would not have remembered to tell you. The whirl of parish business oc cupies him fully until late in the day. He begins to subside about dinner-time." " I don't think anything short of Bessie setting herself on fire, or Tom falling out of window, would take Mr. Stepney's mind off the parish during his workingtime, and he works long hours too," said Emily. " If there is anything I admire more in your husband than his active conscientiousness," said Mr. Hargreaves, "it is his indomitable cheerfulness, his exuberant good humour.

His laugh is a fortune in itself to his parishioners." "Papa says," said Emily archly, ''that Sir Frederick Grim shaw ought to pay him five hundred pounds a year to let that laugh be heard once a week in the marble halls of Culvers." ''Harold will think we have a concerted scheme to im press him favourably with his brother-in-law and tutor, if you toss about the ball of my husband's praises after this fashion," said Geraldine, " and he may be disappointed in Philip." (There was a stronger testimony to the husband's worth in the wife's proud and loving smile, than in the spoken words of all the party.) " But I see you don't know what I mean by talking of Philip as my brother's tutor." GERALDINE'S PRIEND. 13 This remark led to an inquiry on the part of Mr. Har greaves, and set Harold at ease, by introducing the topic of his projects.