The widower : a novel

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — A FRESH DEPARTURE 1

II. — Homeward bound 16

Chapter I. A Fresh Departure

It was in the month of March that Mrs. Pennant’s long illness and comparatively short life ended, with some effect of suddenness, at Girgenti, in Sicily, whither she and her husband had betaken themselves to evade the rigours of winter. Her health, to be sure, had for more than a year been in such a condition that the doctors had ceased to speak of her ultimate recovery; but neither the doctors nor Mr. Pennant, nor the invalid herself, had supposed that she was in any immediate danger. However, a chill, the result of her own imprudence in insisting upon sitting out of doors after sunset one fine evening, brought about her death almost before those around her had time to realize that she was dying.

“ And a very good thing, too,” was Lady Wardlaw’s remark when the news reached London.

“ My dear Jane! ” remonstrated Sir William from the other side of the breakfast table.

“I waited until the servants were out of the room,” said Lady Wardlaw.

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“ Yes; but really, you know — poor woman! ”

“ Oh, poor woman, as much as you like! But it has been poor James for a good deal longer than I have liked, and I am not going to pretend that I am sorry to hear of his being set free at last. Now perhaps his life may begin. When all is said, he has hardly yet reached the prime of it, notwithstanding these unfortunate, wasted years.”

Sir William lighted a cigarette and gazed out at the bare trees of Berkeley Square, in which desirable quarter his town residence was situated. “ I suppose,” he remarked meditatively, “ J ames will marry again.”

Sir William was a small man, with thin, dustcoloured hair, short-sighted gray eyes, and a waxed mustache. In obedience to a fashion which was at that time just beginning to be adopted, he wore a crimson plush smoking suit, and most people would have pronounced him at first sight to be a somewhat effeminate person. In reality, he was stronger and more wiry than he looked, as friends who had been in his company on Scottish moors and deer forests could have testified. His age was a complete puzzle to all who were introduced to him until they reached home and looked him up in the red book, wherein he appeared as: “ Sir William, 7th bart., eld. s. of 6th bart., b. 1848, m. 1874 Jane Constantia, only dau. of late Adml. Sir George Pennant, G. C. B.” Jane Constantia, who had the appearance of being considerably his junior, was betrayed by no red books, since she was not of noble birth; but she would willingly have told anybody who cared to know that she had

A FRESH DEPARTURE.

celebrated her thirtieth birthday. She was a lady of frank, open countenance and free speech, already inclining toward embonpoint , but holding herself erect and pleasant to look upon, with her fresh complexion, her white teeth, and her bright brown eyes, though she had never been accounted handsome.

“He must — naturally/' she remarked, in reply to her husband.

Sir William, after taking time for reflection, didn't quite see why he should, unless he chose.

“ Well, situated as he is, it is scarcely a question of choice. Only the one child — and she a girl. The property is entailed, you know."

“ So you think it's his duty to have a lot of children? Well may you call him poor James! If there is a luckless being whom I pity from the bottom of my heart, it's a man whose house is infested with squalling brats. Personally, I would rather let my property go to the Crown than spend my earthly existence in such a premature purgatory."

Childless Lady Wardlaw laughed. In days gone by she had sometimes winced a little under her husband's rather clumsy efforts to console her for what they both in their hearts felt to be a trial; but now she did not dislike to hear him say that sort of thing. It was a reminder, if a needless one, of the solid mutual affection and friendship which subsisted between him and her.

“ But, setting aside all considerations of worldly expediency," she resumed, “ one does wish James to have a suitable wife and a comfortable home of his own. How many years is it — it can't be much

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less than ten — that he has been houseless and homeless, trapesing all over Europe at the bidding of a wife who was unsuited to him in every possible way? ”

“ I only saw her once,” observed Sir William musingly. “ I thought her awfully good-looking.”

“ She was a perfectly detestable woman,” said Lady Wardlaw, with decision.

“ Perhaps he didn’t think so.”

“ Ah, that is what nobody will ever know.”

“Nobody ever will if you don’t, that’s certain. I take it that James Pennant has just one intimate friend in the world, and far be it from me to deny that he made a wise selection when he appointed his cousin Jane to the post.”

“ He might have made a worse one,” Lady Wardlaw agreed. “ But although James writes to me on an average once a fortnight, he doesn’t tell me things. I know no more than you do what he really thought of his Ada; I only suspect.”

“ Well, whatever she may have been, she is dead now,” observed Sir William, who was one of the most kind-hearted of mortals. He added, after a pause, “ One must admit that there is a certain aptness about her demise at this particular moment. So long as that irreconcilable old man lived, her gadding about the Continent didn’t matter; James was as well abroad as at home. But Abbotswell couldn’t have been left standing empty forever, and this change seems to solve the difficulty. Pity the girl isn’t a boy.”

Lady Wardlaw was not so sure that it was a pity. “James is queer and reticent, and extraordinarily

A FRESH DEPARTURE.

sensitive under his impassive exterior. And his experiences of matrimony must have left him raw and bleeding. If he had a son and heir, he might be capable of shutting himself up drearily in a corner of that big house till the end of his days, rather than risk a second plunge. Whereas, now that the duty of begetting a son and heir is so obvious, his life, as I say, must be only on the verge of starting.”

“ Quite so,” assented Sir William. “ And who is she, if it isn’t indiscreet to inquire?”

Lady Wardlaw laughed. “ Oh, there are dozens of her — half dozens, anyhow; I haven’t had time to fix upon any special one yet. Besides, it isn’t only domestic joys that are his due; with abilities like his he will have to become a public man and make himself heard of in the world. I don’t suppose you realize a bit what a bright light has been quenched by that fatal extinguisher of an Ada ever since James Pennant threw himself away upon her.”

“ H’m! He has no ear for music,” remarked Sir William.

“ Great men scarcely ever have, unless they happen to be Jews. A few pretend to be musical, and I have watched some of them at Eichter concerts, following the score in the wrong place. Ho; it’s unfortunate, but it’s a fact, that statesmanship and artistic sensibility don’t go together.”

“ So James is to be a statesman, is he? I wish him joy of the job. Likewise, I wish him joy of the plain-headed woman who is destined to sit at the head of his table. You mean her to be a plain-headed one, Jane; you know you do.”

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“ I mean her,” Lady Wardlaw declared emphatically, “ to be a decent woman and a good wife. It is a great deal more important for her to be that than to be a beauty.”

“ Perhaps it is. I wonder whether he will kick. Meanwhile, it might be as well to avoid allusions to her in your letter of condolence.”

“ Good gracious! What do you take me for?”

Sir William opened his lips, but closed them again without audible response. If he doubted his wife’s discretion — and in truth he did — why should he hurt her feelings by telling her so? For the rest, she was likely enough, he thought, to bring her amiable intentions to a successful issue. She had great influence with James, and her influence would be exerted in what, after all, must be pronounced the right direction. Then he remembered Mrs. Arthur Pennant, with her boy, who was at present heir presumptive to the Abbotswell estate, and he said to himself, “ I shouldn’t wonder if we were to witness some ructions over this business.” Aloud, he contented himself with remarking that, in any case, James Pennant would have to make up his mind to fresh departures.

At that selfsame moment James Pennant, standing beside the open window of the hotel at Girgenti, and staring out at the blue sea with eyes which transmitted no impression of the prospect before them to a preoccupied brain, was in the act of contemplating fresh departures. These evidently had to be contemplated; nor was there very much doubt as to the shape which they must assume. Abbotswell, any-

A FRESH DEPARTURE.

how — the home of his boyhood, unvisited by him (owing to adverse circumstances) for a matter of ten years past and, since his father’s death a twelvemonth back, his own property — must of course be henceforth his abode. Ada would never have consented to live at Abbotswell — had, indeed, declared unequivocally that, rather tjian do that, she would set up a separate establishment abroad. But Ada, poor soul, lay silent in a corner of the sunny cemetery, where the English chaplain had read the burial service over her coffin some days ago; so that there was no longer a question of her living anywhere, nor anything to prevent an expatriated country gentleman from responding to the call of duty as soon as he liked.

Only a month, or even a fortnight, earlier James would have said without hesitation that he asked nothing better than to obey that call, desired nothing more ardently than to turn his back forever upon the wandering life of which he had been made so heartily sick; but now that he was at liberty to give effect to his wishes, he felt a little less sure of them. English country life, under gray skies, with its accompaniment of hunting, shooting, rent audits, quarter sessions, dinners with dull neighbours, and so forth — all this did not seem to smile upon him, somehow. Perhaps his long exile had unfitted him for such pursuits; perhaps he had certain rather absurd compunctions, as though, by yielding to the inevitable, he would be guilty of a species of treachery to his dead wife. His dead wife had been more than once guilty of treachery — or something closely resembling it — to him; but that was a reflection upon which he

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did not care to dwell. He had buried with her the memory of her ceaseless flirtations, of the incipient scandals which he had been forced to check by flitting from one European capital or watering place to another, of her caprices and extravagances, of the miserable, ignoble bickerings which even his imperturbable self-control had not wholly availed to obviate; he preferred to remember the early days of their married life, when they had been perfectly happy together (knowing so little of one another!), and he said to himself remorsefully that if he had not been what he was, Ada would doubtless have been very different from what she had become.

But neither philosophy, nor religion, nor sage resolutions, nor any other agency known to man can prevent a single one of us from being what he is, and if Mrs. Pennant could have returned from the dead, the old estrangement, the old subdued antagonism, all the old troubles would speedily have returned also. James knew it, and that knowledge added something to the poignancy of a regret wdiich was not the less genuine because it had already entered upon a conflict with relief in which it was sure to be worsted.

“ I am a brute! ” he exclaimed. “ I was hard to her while she lived, and I don’t know that I am not going to be even harder to her now that she is gone. I suppose the truth is that I dislike women too much to judge them fairly. I wonder whether that is because I understand them or because I don’t.”

If he did not understand them particularly well,

A FRESH DEPARTURE.

the fault was scarcely his. With certain failings appertaining to their sex he had been rendered painfully familiar, while the countervailing merits which every impartial observer must acknowledge had not chanced to be conspicuously brought under his notice. A man is, and must be, the creature of his experience, and James Pennant’s unfortunate experience pointed to the conclusion that women have little sense of honour or justice, little or no regard for truth. There was Jane Wardlaw, to be sure — but no rule is without exceptions.

Well, be the other sex what it might, his own, at all events, could not pretend to ignore certain elementary obligations, and it is the first duty of every gentleman to keep his word. Ada, just before her death, had stretched out her wasted arms and drawn his head down to her. “ James,” she had gasped, “the child!” And, understanding very well the scared, imploring look in her eyes, and all that her labouring breath could not utter, he had answered, “Yes; I promise. Cuckoo shall not suffer in any way that I have it in my power to prevent.”

He disliked that nickname of Cuckoo, which Ada had bestowed upon the little girl — there had been so many things which he had disliked and his wife had liked! But he was loyally determined to maintain it; determined also to replace to the best of his ability that irreplaceable endowment — a mother’s love and care. He rang the bell and told the waiter who answered it to send the young lady to him. He had scarcely seen her since the funeral.

At the expiration of five minutes or so the door

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opened and in trotted a small person, smothered in black crape, with closely cropped brown hair, a turned-up nose, and eyes of remarkable size and brilliancy. She had the air of being tempted to break into smiles, but conscious that decency forbade her to yield to the temptation. Advancing quickly toward the spare, clean-shaven man who had now seated himself beside a writing table, she took possession of his hand and began:

“ Father, you must not grieve any more for mother, because she has gone to heaven, which is much better for her than being alive and ill; and — and you have me.”

J ames lifted the child up and placed her upon his knee. “ Who told you to say that, Cuckoo?” he asked.

She replied unhesitatingly, “ Budgie. Didn’t I say it right? ”

“ Quite right; only in future I should like you to say just what is in your own mind, not what Budgett or anybody else may consider appropriate.”

Cuckoo probably did not know the meaning of the word appropriate, but she was glad of the permission to state what was in her own mind, and she lost no time in profiting by it.

“ Mayn’t Budgie and me go down to the beach again now?” she asked, “and mayn’t I have the dolls out? Wre’ve put them all in mourning.”

“Of course,” answered James, “why should you stay indoors? ”

The child had cried bitterly, and had been very sorry, and was now consoled; it did not follow that

A FRESH DEPARTURE.

she was heartless. Assuming a child’s day to be equivalent to one of our weeks — which is really a moderate enough computation — the time had doubtless come for Cuckoo to do as we must all needs do when the first sharpness of a bereavement has worn off, and pick up the dropped thread of actual existence once more. But he had one or two things to say to her before he let her go, and he tried to say them, though speech of that kind never came very easily to him. He wanted Cuckoo to understand that since he and she had now only one another in the world, they must be closer and more confidential friends than they had hitherto been; he wanted to make it clear that, so far as in him lay, he would henceforth be a mother as well as a father to her; above all, he wanted to impress upon the child that she must never be afraid of him. That she had been afraid of him he was well aware; many people were so, and he was accustomed to being considered formidable, though he scarcely knew what he had done to earn the reputation.

Cuckoo could have told him. While she sat on his knee, playing with his watch chain and studying, at unwontedly close quarters, his clear, refined features (James Pennant had been, and still was, a handsome man — black haired, gray eyed, with firm lips, which had never been concealed by a mustache, and a slightly prominent chin), she may have been thinking to herself that her father’s loquacity was something quite new. It was his habitual silence that rendered him terrible — that and the impossibility of

ever making him lose either his patience or his tem- 2

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per. Whether she appreciated much of the intention of his discourse may be doubted; but she put her arms round his neck presently and kissed him, taking advantage of that tender attitude to whisper in his ear, “ Father, isn’t it wrong for people whose wives die to marry somebody else?”

James smiled. “ Budgett again? ” said he. “ No , my dear, it isn’t wrong; but it is often rather foolish. As for me, I gave up being foolish a great many years ago, you will be glad to hear. Now run away, with your dolls, but don’t stay out after the sun has gone down.” He added, as an afterthought, “ By the way, when you come in you might tell Budgett that I should like to speak to her for a few minutes.”

Budgett lifted up her voice and wept aloud on receiving the above message. She had been the late Mrs. Pennant’s confidential maid; her ostensible occupation was gone; she suspected that her master had no great liking for her, and nothing seemed to her more probable than that she was about to be given a formal intimation of his ability to dispense with her future services. Cuckoo, moved by the woman’s distress, roared in sympathy, declaring that if her dear Budgie were to be sent away she would go too; but Mr. Pennant, it subsequently appeared, had no such fell intentions as were imputed to him. When Budgett, red in the face and swollen as to the eyelids, presented herself, he made haste to allay the fears which he divined.

“ I have decided,” said he, “ that it will not be necessary for you to leave us, Budgett, unless you wish to do so. Miss Cuckoo hardly requires a nurse

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now and will, I suppose, require a maid before very long. Meanwhile, as a sort of personal attendant ”

“ I could not think of leaving the dear child, sir,” interrupted Budgett, who was less afraid of James than she was of losing her situation, and who judged it best to lead at once from her strong suit. “ I look upon her as what I may term a sacred charge, bequeathed to my care almost at the last moment, and ”

Mr. Pennant checked her by raising his hand. “ I am sure you will do your best, Budgett,” he said, rather coldly. “ Hitherto you have proved yourself a devoted servant, and your mistress, I know, had complete confidence in you.”

“ She had indeed, sir! She told me everything, and, as she often used to say, we was almost like sisters.”

James did not believe that his wife had ever said anything of the kind. She had had frequent squabbles with her maid, for whom he personally entertained a rather strong feeling of antipathy. But he had a rather strong feeling of antipathy for most women, and this one, to do her justice, had not spared herself in nursing a somewhat querulous invalid.

“ So that I shall be glad to keep you,” he continued, “and to add ten pounds to your wages for the future, in acknowledgment of the help that you have recently given us. It will devolve upon you to take care of Miss Cuckoo, at all events until we reach England, for I do not propose to take the Italian nurse away from her own country.”

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Budgett thanked him, and added, “ We are going to England, then, sir? Fm very glad of that.”

James made a sign of assent. He was willing to believe that the woman’s familiarity was not intentionally offensive. She was not a well-trained servant, this rather impudent-looking little person, with the sallow complexion and the exaggerated coiffure ; hut his wife had, for some reason or other, been fond of her, and she appeared also to have won the child’s affections. He was about to terminate the audience by saying “ That is all,” when Budgett resumed:

“ And I was to tell you, sir, that there is no more bills to come in — not as she could call to mind. But she never had any head for figures, poor dear!”

James made no reply; but he raised his eyes and gazed steadily at the speaker, who found herself outside the door before she knew where she was. Then he reverted to the occupation from which he had been turned aside by her entrance, and which chanced to be precisely that of examining Ada’s unpaid bills. In spite of the assurance just conveyed to him, he knew that there would be more of them. It did not matter, now that he was well off, although it had mattered once, and trouble had been the result of bygone extravagances and concealments.

Did the mass of letters, addressed to the late Mrs. Pennant, which it was likewise his unpleasant duty to examine before destroying, matter? Apparently he did not think so, for he tore them to pieces after a mere glance at their opening and concluding words. How, since those words unmistakably proved a large portion of them to be love letters, it will be perceived

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that James must either have been an unusually complaisant husband or a man whose rigid sense of honour would not permit him to read what had not been meant for his eyes. The late Mrs. Pennant had had numerous charges to bring against him; but never in her life had it occurred to her to accuse him of being complaisant.

CHAPTEE II.

J

HOMEWARD BOUND.

After all, James Pennant did not at once make for England. It was kind of Jane Wardlaw to be so eager for his return and to write him such sympathizing letters upon the subject; but he felt hardly ready yet even for Jane, and certainly not ready for Abbotswell, which, having stood empty for upward of a twelvemonth, might surely be left empty a little longer without detriment to anybody’s interests. He wanted time to accustom and adjust himself to the completely altered conditions of life which he must soon face, and he did not want — well, in plain words, he did not want to be bothered.

He had been terribly bothered during the years that were now over and done with; so much so that he almost doubted whether he would be able to care for anything in the future, except peace and quietness. He was in his thirty-fourth year, and as likely as not to live for another thirty-four years, so that misgivings of that kind were palpably opposed to nature and common sense. Yet nothing could be more certain than that he would never be young again. If he had not wasted his whole life, he had at least thrown away that portion of it in which 16

HOMEWARD BOUND.

alone a career can be initiated — a process which had, moreover, deprived him of all wish for a prominent career. Over and done with, like the years which had made an old man of him, were ambition, curiosity, the healthy, legitimate desire to win in the race of earthly existence, without which it is hardly worth anybody’s while to have been born. It w^as a pity, of course, but there was no help for it. The marriage which his strait-laced old father could never be induced to condone (for in truth poor Mrs. James Pennant had not been quite a lady in birth, nor at all a good imitation of a lady in appearance and conduct) would doubtless have proved fatal to him even if it had turned out happily; and it had not turned out happily. In his silent, uncomplaining way, J ames had borne with Ada, remonstrating only when it became absolutely necessary to do so, complying as far as possible with her whims and caprices, converting himself into a useless, ignoble loafer because she averred that neither her health nor her spirits could hold out against residence in England; but the whole thing had broken his heart, and it is not at the age of four and thirty that a broken-hearted man can begin all over again.

However, the melancholy wisdom and experience which he had acquired might yet be of service to somebody else. In fact, the one important thing seemed to him to be that his wisdom and experience should be thus utilized, and that Cuckoo should be trained to become — he did not say to himself — as unlike her mother as possible; but he did say that he wanted her to grow up unlike the generality of

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women. Hitherto he had seen and known surprisingly little of the child, for Ada’s queer, jealous temperament had always taken umbrage at any attempt on his part to share in what she regarded as exclusively her own; but now he resolved that there should be a total change in that respect. Circumstances were propitious, and he could easily devote a few weeks, or even months, to making friends with one who must henceforth be his dearest friend and his sole absorbing interest.

So, instead of going straight home, he dawdled slowly through Italy, halting at Naples, Rome, and Florence, and settling down at length, on the advent of warm weather, at an hotel on the Lago Maggiore, where, at that early season of the year, he was in little danger of being annoyed by encounters with acquaintances. There was, happily, no difficulty about making friends with Cuckoo, who was then — and indeed she has never, up to this present moment, been anything else — the easiest little person in the world to get on with. James Pennant, who was by no means easy to get on with, soon found himself adoring her, such capital company was she, so winning were her ways, and so readily did she seem to fall in with the ideas which he strove to inculcate. Of these the chief and all-important one was, that it is a most disgraceful thing — an offence of which no gentleman can possibly be guilty — to tell a lie, and that what is usually qualified by the mild term of “ exaggeration ” is in reality neither more nor less than falsehood. Certain symptoms of a somewhat exuberant imagination on the child’s part caused J ames to insist very strong-

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ly upon that point, and she appeared to be duly impressed by what he said.

“ I suppose grown-up people never tell lies, do they, father?” she asked one day.

James was sorry to be obliged to reply that many of them did.

“But not gentlemen?” said Cuckoo, interrogatively.

“ No, not gentlemen. If I were to tell a lie I could not expect to be considered a gentleman any longer.”

“ Well,” observed Cuckoo, with a meditative sigh, “ Budgie isn’t a gentleman. She says she is a lady; but ”

“ Then she says what is not the case, and it is very silly of her to do so.”

Budgett, it presently transpired, had been making numerous statements which were not only silly, but palpably apocryphal. It did not, for instance, seem altogether probable, even to the unsuspecting faith of childhood, that she was the scion of an ancient family, reduced, through pecuniary misfortunes for which that family were in no way to blame, to her present position of domestic servitude; nor was it quite easy to believe that in her last place she had always been treated as a friend, not as a lady’s maid, accompanying her mistress on daily drives in a “beautiful open carriage and pair” and sitting down to dinner with her every evening; nor, again, was that story of her having refused repeated offers of marriage from “ some of the highest in the land ” of a nature to command ready and implicit credence.