XLI. CHESTS AND HEARTS…

XLI. CHESTS AND HEARTS

'Waketh a vision, and a voice within her Sweeter than dreams and dearer than complaint-- Is it a man thou lovest, and a sinner? No; but a soul, O woman! and a saint.' Frederick W.H. Myers.

One snowy November night Lancelot caught cold, and aggravated the ailment during his organist's duties on Sunday so much, that though he resigned himself to Mrs. Froggatt's attentions on Monday, she soon found herself obliged to supplement them by Mr. Rugg's; and her letter on the Wednesday caused Felix to bring Angela to nurse him through a sharp attack of pleurisy, complicated with bronchitis.

All went well, and by the week before Christmas he was fit to be taken home, uniting in persuading Mrs. Froggatt that her care was necessary to him en route, chiefly because he and his brother could not bear to leave her to her widowed Christmas. She came, but nothing would induce her to stay beyond Christmas Day; nor would she even wait till Felix returned with the New Year to Bexley, to busy himself with the accounts, about which Lance was concerning himself too much for his good, writing such characteristic notes that when, half way through January, Felix came home, he was disappointed to find so little progress made towards recovery. The great musical brow, big blue eyes, straight nose, and brown hairiness, seemed to have lost the cheeks from among them: there was a weary yearning look in the eyes, and the whole demeanour was languid and dejected. Lance just crept into the painting-room at noon, and spent the afternoon by the drawing-room fire, talking a little at times, or amused by Wilmet's baby; but her boys were too much for him; and though he liked Stella's music, he was fretted by Angela's careless notes, and had not energy to play for himself. His voice indeed was scarcely serviceable even for speaking, and its absence always made him unhappy. A reader only in the way of business, books and newspapers were distasteful; and though he could not be ill-humoured, he was evidently a heavy burden to himself; sad and listless; he neither ate nor slept, and yet the actual symptoms were not unfavourable.

'He does not get on,' said Felix, as he and Clement stood consulting in the library.

'He sleeps so badly, and has two hours or so of bad cough in the early morning, and that seems to exhaust him for the day.'

'So you wrote, and I told Rugg, who said that would wear off gradually; but I cannot see that he is mending.'

'Nor does he think so,' said Clement.

'Rugg declares that there is no reason he should not entirely get over this, and he never gives any encouragement he can help. I shall not rest till May has seen him.'

'I should have sent if you had not been coming.'

'So he is low about himself, dear fellow! Have you had it out with him?'

'Nay, he seemed to me quite willing it should be so. If he is not, I don't know who should be! He never seems to have been from under the shadow of his cathedral. I believe he rather puzzled Miss Isabella the other day!'

'You don't mean that she has been at him?

'Yes, she affected an entrance when no one was on guard but poor little Stella, who was dreadfully upset, and told Cherry all about it. It seems the good lady is shocked at our all deceiving him.'

'And took it on herself to warn him?'

'And to inquire if he were a Christian, and into the foundation of his hope--all which he seems to have received as a kindness. Stella says he answered that he was quite aware of his condition, but he did not think there was much need to grieve himself or others over it. Indeed, she--Miss Isabella--told me herself that he is a heavenly-minded young man.'

'Yes, they met in the inmost heart of things, without battling on the outworks. When I look back at that boy's life, I do not feel as if I deserved him; I ought not to have let him sacrifice himself to that life at Bexley.'

'It was his own doing, poor fellow! and he sees his mistake.'

'None of us could realize at the time the force of contrast,' said Felix; 'indeed, I should have thought him the last person to have been affected by it.'

'I did not mean that only. I meant the higher service,' said Clement, making Felix suspect that his consolations had been so applied as to deepen the depression, and resolve the more to write to Dr. May.

So two days later, with a certain passiveness, as though the physician's visits were a matter of course, Lance, who had just finished his tardy toilette, obeyed the summons into the library, and submitted to the examination, which ended in an assurance that there was no tendency to pulmonary disease, and that care and patience would soon subdue the remains of his illness.

'Thank you, Sir,' in a perplexed half-incredulous tone, as he leant back, not troubling himself to ask a question as to the treatment.

Dr. May waited a little, then looked steadily into his face. 'Now, Lance, we doctors ask startling questions. You've not fallen in love?'

'Not particularly,' said Lance, without a particle of blush, even if he had had cheeks to blush with.

'What does that mean? Generally?'

'I never let myself go in for it. It was of no use.'

'Without letting yourself, then?'

'No, indeed!' returned Lance, almost petulantly; 'I never had the chance. How should I? It would have been something to care about.'

'This fellow does not half believe in me,' muttered the Doctor.

'Lance, do you remember consulting me before, when you thought your brains were addled by the sun-stroke?'

'They might as well have been, for any good I have done with them.'

'I thought you were one of the lights of Bexley.'

'A nice sort of light, and place too,' muttered he, with scant courtesy; but the Doctor caught an idea from the dull weary tone.

'It must be a dullish sort of life,' he threw out.

'Can't be helped,' in the same tone, almost conveying that it was merely his own affair. 'It was my own doing; and I've been like this before, and come round.'

'Your chest has been as sound as a bell before!' said the Doctor, with a little wilful misunderstanding.

'My chest,' with a sound of contempt.

'If not your chest, what?'

'My--myself. The Everlasting Everything,' said Lance, with a sort of impatience, covering his face with his hands, as though--had twenty years been subtracted from his age--he would have begun to cry.

'My dear boy,' said the Doctor, 'never mind me. Have it out. You don't like to complain to your brother, and you can't stand the life you are leading?'

'No use to say can't,' said Lance, looking up, with his brow contracted; 'I must and I will, if I am to get well. I got over it before, and I shall again, I suppose, when my strength comes back. I made my bed, and must lie on it.'

'You mean that you chose your present business?' said the Doctor, trying another leading question.

'Ay. My brothers, as soon as they could, both offered me to go to the University and take Holy Orders! but, as Clem said, my hurdy-gurdy was a new toy, and I was as proud as Punch of it, and thought life offered nothing better; besides, I was always a dolt at classics, and thought they would split my head.'

'Are you ever reminded of that sun-stroke?'

'Less every year; but summer sunshine still makes me sick and giddy, and now and then extra work brings on a racking headache.'

'Take my word, your instinct was right. You could not have stood college work.'

'So I thought; but if I had scraped through, it would all have been over now.'

'Very likely,' was the dry answer.

'Well, it would have been worth dying for. I did not know what I was giving up.'

'In position?'

'Partly. I was a mere boy, and did not see the difference as I do now I have been with Will Harewood at Oxford, or when I come here. I keep out of it as much as I can, for it's just a mockery to go and mix with their friends here, and talk to a pretty girl, when I know she would not touch me with a pair of tongs at home.'

'More shame for her, then. Have you no society at home?

'Oh yes, plenty of nice fellows--professionals, I mean, and a dinner with the upper-crust now and then,' said Lance, laughing; 'not much in itself, but making me cock of the walk in our own line--trade, I mean. Nice girls there are, too--if one had seen nothing else--but then, they keep out of the way, and the others make themselves such fools. It was good fun once; but one gets sick of it, as one does of everything else.'

The vein of confidence had been found at last, and a mere demonstration of sympathy was enough to draw him on. 'I seem to have got to the end of my tether with everything--Pursuivant and all. Even the organ, I can do no more with it as it is; and it is no good crying out for more stops, for nobody cares. I have worked at the science as far as Miles or my own study can take me with my present means; and as it is, I know more than there is any power to use in my squirrel's cage, yet I can't go on into what there is beyond without giving my whole self to that and nothing else.'

'Is that out of the question?'

'It would bring in no return; and I am not a gentleman at large, nor am I sure of the right and expedience of it after all, nor whether the craving is to praise God or please myself. What I have seen behind the scenes at musical festivals--ay, and before them too--has made me doubt whether the most perfect music gets put to its full use.'

'Or ever can be here.'

'Ay. Practically, the anthem, chant, and hymn, have the direct devotional use; and that they may serve it, they must not too much go beyond the average musical capacity of your congregation.'

'Quite true. You have thought it all out,' said Dr. May. 'I wish more organists saw it so.'

'That's just what the St. Oswald's people say I don't! Well, you see what it is. My poor brother Edgar told me how it would be when I would not be a regular professional.'

'How what would be?'

'Why, that it would all get intolerably slow and flat, and that I should not be able to bear it. It is true enough, but I got over it once.'

'And as you say, you will do so again. The life you embraced upon principle may for a time be distasteful, but the restlessness under it can only be a trail. If I understand you right, Lance, your motto has been

"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget her cunning."'

'Stay, stay, Dr. May. I don't regret that first decision--not at all--but the other--when they offered me to study for Holy Orders. I find I was like a soldier, who thought playing in the band was fighting in the ranks!' And Lance lay back in his chair, and shaded his face with his thin hand.

'And that has been preying on you all this time?'

'Perhaps. I am for ever coming on facts about crime, misery, ignorance--here, there, everywhere; and I know that with a little perseverance and resolution I might have been a priest, doing the only work worth doing--and behold, all I have done--has been--to gratify my passion--for music--and call it--dedicating--' He had begun to cough distressingly, and could not go on.

'If I had not known it was more spirits than lungs, I would not have let you go on,' said Dr. May, when Lance could hear again. 'Your present life is irksome, and you think you may have done wrong in not making an effort for the higher service?' Lance nodded assent. 'But remember, non-commissioned officers are as much needed as commissioned ones, and your Pursuivant is no mean weapon. It is really easier to find clergy than thorough-going lay-men in a position like yours; and from all I can gather, if you had tried to fight your way to Ordination, you would only have broken down, and done nothing. So be content, my boy. You have honestly put the higher duty foremost, and it will come right somehow.'

'Only--'

'Hush! If the thermometer gets above 50 degrees, take a turn in the cloister. Fresh air will do sleep and spirits the most good; only lay up entirely, and blister on any symptom of return of pain. But go about the house, and get back to family habits as you feel up to them, not troubling yourself as to what is to come after. I'm wrong! You are never to ride outside a velocipede in the rain again. That pleasure is for ever forbidden! Somewhere about the end of the east winds you may go into questions of the future, though to me it seems that your post is one of rare value and influence. While--as for the "not impossible she," for whom it is worth while to go in in particular--depend upon it, she is waiting for you, and will fall in your way yet, even if, as Captain M'Intyre felicitously expresses it, your veins were filled with printers' ink! I should be ashamed to think it could be otherwise. Now rest. Don't speak.'

'Only one thing. My voice--will it come again?'

'Your voice? Of course. You spoke very well before I let you wear it out.'

'For speaking--oh yes--but singing?'

'Singing? Your throat was a good deal affected. Your voice--what kind? High tenor, did you say? Ah! those are very soon damaged; but one can't tell; don't go trying experiments on it too soon. Happily, it is not a vital question with you.' And as he saw the lip tremble, and a tear in the eye, 'Don't fancy I meant to prepare you for its loss; I dare say you would rather lose a good deal besides.'

'I believe I had.'

'Let it alone then, and guard your throat.' And with a few more counsels as to the treatment, Dr. May left him, and much consoled Felix and Cherry by assurances that the lungs were fast recovering, and that the spirits would probably follow them. And he then proceeded to give a message that he was to deliver contingently upon his patient's state--namely, the offer of a visit from Gertrude. His little granddaughter, Margaret Rivers, was at Dawlish, in so sad a state of suffering, that he and Ethel were to go and be with the parents; but Gertrude was not wanted, and would gladly bestow herself upon Geraldine.

'You'll take care of her,' he said, with the solicitude that fathers never lose for their youngest daughter. 'You have no young lords nor precipices to put in her way, I trust.'

'Lords, precipices, and thunder-storms, are equally improbable just now,' said Cherry; 'the tithe-dinner and school-treat are the most brilliant entertainments in prospect.'

'I shall tell her to mind you like an Ethel the second. By-the-by, Ethel says she never saw any one so good for the child. She was our spoilt one--at least, so Ethel says; though I'm an old fool of a father, and never saw it, and you are said to have put the womanliness into her.'

'I'm afraid I don't deserve the compliment. "I speks it growed."'

'To tell the truth, so do I,' laughed the Doctor.

Geraldine in her secret soul thought the development in maidenliness due to something besides age, for she knew what was the great bond between herself and Gertrude May; and bethinking herself of the entire extinction of all remaining sentiment for Alice Knevett, she could not but speculate on the possible results of the coming visit, and recollect that to shrink from them would have no such excuse as in the former case.

The announcement was not received with acclamation. Angela did not like Gertrude May. Both were high-spirited free-spoken unconventional girls, in whom something of womanly grace was as yet slow in coming; but Gertrude was more essentially a lady, though louder voiced and less naturally graceful; nor had she a particle of flirtation, but disliked young men, and was unpopular from irony and exclusiveness; whereas Angela was thoroughly the girl of the period in a highly stimulated state.

'Bother!' she exclaimed. 'She is nearly as bad as Miss May herself.'

'Indeed!' said Felix, in a much offended voice.

'As good then, and that's as bad!'

'Stuck-up, like all the Mays,' put in Bernard.

'They have been very good-natured to you,' said Felix again, in a tone of reproof.

'Soup tickets,' muttered Bernard.

'Take care, Bear,' said Cherry. 'Small minds repudiate gratitude.'

'Then Bernard's bound to entertain her,' said Lance.

'Catch me,' quoth Bernard.

'Perhaps she may alleviate his pangs for the faithless Countess,' suggested Angela.

'She!' The unutterable contempt of that monosyllable set all laughing, and he indignantly reiterated, 'She is stuck-up enough for ten countesses and duchesses to boot.'

'The monotony of Bear's ideas was always striking,' said Felix.

'He's got but one pole to run up, poor Bruin!' said Angela. 'Now, I could have found ever so many objections.'

'Only that it would be a queer way to welcome Cherry's guest,' said Clement, in reprobation.

'As if you liked her yourself, Clem!' exclaimed Angela, 'when Stoneborough is altogether in the rear, and not one of the whole crew belongs to the E.C.U.'

'Is it impossible to be courteous to any one out of the E.C.U.?' said Clement so gravely, that the laughter was renewed; but Cherry had the uncomfortable certainty that if there had been a show of hands it would have been on Bernard's side. Clement and the Mays had never harmonized; and Lance, who was always reluctant to face his sister's young-lady associates, now had no escape, and was ready to feel everything an oppression, so that his silence was an act of forbearance.

It was a good sign, that when Clement came in unobserved from Evensong, he found Lance at the piano, making twilight beautiful with something wonderfully yearning and mournful, but with a deep underkey of resolution ever waxing stronger and stronger. Clement leant on the settee, listening till his eyes grew moist; and when the cough forced the musician to desist, and come back exhausted to the sofa, he asked, 'Where did that come from?'

'It is a Largo of Beethoven's in C Major. I fell in love with it when we had C---- at Minsterham.'

'Dr. May has done you good.'

'I don't know. I see he thinks my voice done for.'

'I would sooner have your fingers than your voice, Lance,' said Clement, appreciating the grief as Dr. May could not, never having heard those notes.

Lance shook his head. The trouble was too deep and real for speech.

'Sooner or later we shall have our voices in perfection,' said Clement. 'Meantime, who knows how good it may be for you to be parted from that beautiful thing!'

'My golden idol!' Lance broke out in a sort of laughing coughing sob.

'At least, you have the comfort of knowing you never prostituted it to any ungodly purpose,' said Clement. 'You always treated it as His goodly gift.'

Lance made no answer. Perhaps he felt at that moment that his voice had been the chief thing that made his dull life pleasant to him, and that to be either dumb or an offence to his own delicate ear was a lot to which he could hardly resign himself. Clement went to the piano, and softly sung 'Angels brightly shine forth.'

Angela came into the room with a light as he ended; Lance started up, and hastened out of the room.

He was rather worse than better for the next day or two, and shuddered with annoyance when Gertrude May's wheels approached. He would not, however, vex Cherry by shirking the early dinner, where Gertrude, a bright mixture of blue merino and swans' down, was making fun of her precise brother Tom's inclination to escort her on this her first solitary journey, when she knew it was only 'because of his friend at Ewmouth, who is equally crazy about microscopes and such unpleasant things.'

'As microscopes?' said Felix.

'That depends on what you look at. Now Tom is making perquisitions into the germs of all kinds of diseases and infections, and is never so happy as when he gets an excuse for driving over to Ewmouth.'

'Is there anything so scientific there?'

'Mr. Elsted, the chemist. He was a fellow-student of Tom's, but he hasn't nerve enough to practise; so he is a kind of stickit doctor, though he has science at his fingers' ends--the right place for a chemist, you'll say--so very sensibly he took to that line.'

'We must make friends with him,' said Felix.

'Do! It would be a great kindness. He is really very much of a gentle--' where she awkwardly stopped, and caught herself up, colouring to the ears.

'Which cannot be said of all medical students,' said Felix, greatly helping her out.

'No! And as Tom could not come himself, he has given me a precious little box to carry, which the post would squash. Don't be afraid; it isn't the plague, or the small-pox, or anything--'

'I thought of going to Ewmouth this afternoon if you like the drive,' said Cherry.

'You don't trust me! You want to be rid of Pandora's box.'

Of course there was more fun about it, resulting in the timid being only half certified that it contained only some slides of glass; but Lance took his part in the teasing, nor did he forget--what Cherry took care to tell him on her return--that Gertrude had shaken hands cordially with the chemist under the very shadow of his purple jars.

Gertrude's spirits were not much affected by her niece's illness; and she had been so seldom from home, that this was a new experience, from which she derived as much freshness as she brought. The Squire was always her hero, and with him she was always on her best behaviour, as if trying to redeem her performance on the Kitten's Tail; while he treated her--like all his sisters' friends--with the gentle playful courtesy that had first begun with Alice Knevett. A musical evening seemed to have thoroughly fitted her in among the inhabitants, and in the forenoon she repaired quite naturally to Cherry's painting-room.

'That's right, I have designs on you.'

'Me, myself me, or in character?'

'In character. I catch every one. One gets so tame and unreal without fact.'

'But you'll let me write to Ethel. It feels so queer without the old thing. I'm not sure that my head is on the right way.'

'Pray write. You ought to be doing something.'

Just then a pair of slippered feet came noiselessly to the door, and with 'Good morning, Miss May,' Lance came in, his sister exclaiming, 'How early! You have not had your sleep after breakfast.'

'No, but I slept a good deal later this morning, which is a better thing,' he said, advancing to a big arm-chair. Gertrude had hoped for a snug morning with Cherry; but he looked so wan, pinched, and shadowy in the morning light, that there was no grudging him the content with which he sank into his place, nor the anxiety with which Stella was sent down to hasten his beef-tea.

'Have you made your capture, Cherry?' he asked.

'I was beginning when you came.'

'Then Miss May has not seen your contribution to the "Rights of Woman."'

'I have only escaped from the subject at home. Mrs. Harvey Anderson has been getting up a meeting for the Ladies' Suffrage, and wanted Ethel to come to it.'

'O for her likeness!'

'What can you want of it?'

In answer, Cherry produced two cartoons. One was a kind of parody of Raphael's School of Athens, all the figures female, not caricatures, but with a vein of satire throughout. The demonstration on the floor was an endeavour to square the circle; some of the elder ladies were squabbling, some of the younger furtively peeping at themselves in pocket-mirrors, or comparing ornaments; some in postures of weariness, one gazing eagerly as if responding to some signal, another mimicking her teacher, a third frowning at her rival's success. There was no air of union or harmony, but something of vanity and vexation of spirit pervaded all.

The companion was arranged on the same lines, but the portico was a cloister, and the aisle of a church was dimly indicated through a door-way. The figures and occupations were the same, but all was in harmony. The maidens, though mostly in secular garb, wore the cross; the central figure, in matronly beauty, was portioning out the household tasks, while in the place of the harsh or sour or tyrannizing disputatious ladies were women, some in hood and veil, but others in ordinary dress, all dignified and sweet, while the damsels were smiling happily over their employments, for the most part the same as before, but in a different spirit. The demonstration on the floor was no longer impossible. It was the circle of eternity spanned by the Cross; the quizzing and teasing had ceased, the loiterers were at their needlework; the rivals were united; the girl, whose glance down the grove had been furtive, was now standing in the door-way, openly watching for the little male figure in the distance. Both were in rough bold outline, almost scrawled, and here and there dashed with pen or Indian ink; but Geraldine's masterly hand showed wonderfully in the grace and expression.

'I don't know whether I shall make anything of it,' she said. 'I sketched it in a kind of frenzy; and Felix is bent on my going on with it.'

'It would do for Punch, if for nothing else,' said Lance.

'For shame!' exclaimed Gertrude.

'No, it is a great compliment,' said Cherry; 'but what the Squire wants is to have them in the Exhibition. Now I mean No. 1 to bring out--'

'The lesson of Tennyson's Princess,' interrupted Gertrude.

'In part, but going further into life. I mean that while woman works merely for the sake of self-cultivation, the clever grow conceited and emulous, the practical harsh and rigid, the light or dull, vain, frivolous, deceitful, by way of escape, and it all gets absurd. But the being handmaids of the Church brings all right; and the School of St. Sophia develops even the intellect.'

'You'll have to write a key,' said Lance.

'I leave that to you gentlemen of the press. I don't expect that many will enter into it, but if only a few do it will answer its purpose, and be worth doing. I want to know whether it conveys its meaning to a fresh eye.'

'Let me see,' said Gertrude. 'Woman working every one for her own hand, is all nohow, either grim or silly, the laughing-stock of gods and men; while working for the Church makes all harmonious, and sets each in her place.'

'It might as well be man as woman,' said Lance.

'More so, I believe,' said Cherry; 'because marriage gives woman a head; so I think the married ones at least do not suffer so much in character from misbelief. Family life affords a sort of religion to those who do not know the truth; and so while man kept them in subjection, they did not need to think it out, as the single ones must do now.'

'The Church provides ties and object for them,' said Gertrude. 'Ethel would like that.'

'Clan Hepburn would more than ever warn one against making an idol of an abstraction,' said Lance. 'I couldn't help asking them what they thought of the Bride in the Revelation, and they warned me against taking the figurative literally; but they are deeply good old girls, though your St. Sophia has not had the training of them.'

'Not consciously,' said Cherry. 'They did her work, though, in the dark times; and if she had thorough hold of them, they would not be meddling with the clergyman's province.'

So saying, she produced two more finished copies, the building elaborately put in, and some of the faces and figures worked up evidently from the life. Wilmet was the lovely matronly presiding spirit; Stella, the damsel in the place of one of the beautiful boys in the foreground of the School of Athens, though it had been hard to make her look naughty enough for the first. Gertrude, to her great amusement, recognised Lady Caergwent: 'So that's the use you make of your countesses?'

'It arose a good deal out of a talk with her about the dedication of our powers; and she sent me a horrible photograph to do her bad self by.'

'I declare you must have got Ethel's nut-cracker photograph for the original of that forbidding astronomical female with the compasses. Why! her improved state is Ethel herself, only not quite sweetly odd enough. Did you mean it?'

'No; I only found it coming like Dr. May.'

'She shall sit! And I'll be one of the wicked ones, whenever you please.'

'Then you must be a good one too.'

'Oh! I don't promise that. It is much flatter. Let me be the one who is taking off Urania Ethel's gestures. I declare you are too clever; the constellation you've turned up on the globe is vulpecula et anser.'

'No, you fancied that, Gertrude.'

'No such thing! See the stars really make a little W just like it in the sky, and observe the moral. Instead of a he-fox running off with the goose, the vixen will thus run away with the gander.'

Cherry had not laughed so much for weeks, Lance not for a year. Stella's shoulders shook over her German exercise, and her voice suggested: 'It ought to have been in the Southern Hemisphere, for the world turned topsy-turvy.'

'The Southern Hemisphere is stupid, where it got out of sight of the dear old funny folks that named the stars. What shall we have in the world set right?'

'Andromeda on the rock,' said Stella, 'and Perseus coming to let her out!'

'There's Perseus then coming down the walk,' said Gertrude.

'I hope that's me!' said Lance.

'Then you must be Anser!'

'Anser!' said Cherry. 'If he appears at all, it must be as Athene's Owl.--What great eyes you have, my dear!'

In a moment she dashed into her first draught an owl, comically resembling Lance; 'the twinkling blink in its eyes looking out of that indefinite bushiness,' as Gertrude said.

'Against the beard movement, Miss May?'

'There's only one moustache in the family!'

'Diplomatic,' laughed Cherry.

'Not wholly,' said Gertrude. 'One does go by one's brothers; and I like to see people's expression.'

'But,' said Lance, 'I trust at least I'm the owl of the church tower, though I can't hoot any longer.'

'Athene's ought to be prying down with superior contempt upon the ladies in the Academy.'

'Inspecting them!' said Cherry. 'Hearing them pronounce vicissim we-kiss-im in turns, and making a note.'

'I declare,' cried Gertrude, 'I've got the very man for the bad owl. How lucky I brought my photograph book!' She flew back to her room, and returned in a moment with her album. 'I brought it to show Geraldine our New Zealand children, and Leonard's pupils,' she said; 'but just look here. Transplant him, Cherry!'

The photograph represented a handsome, complacent looking, gentleman-like man, with certainly large eyes and an aquiline nose, and bushy beard, but nothing else owl-like about him.

'Who is he? What has he done?' asked Cherry.

'Done! He's a school inspector! Don't you have inspections here? Not under Government? O thrice happy people! If ever you do wish to see my dearly beloved sister Ethel in the position of a toad under a harrow!'

'But why, you have got her harrow in your book?'

'He isn't our proper district harrow,' said Gertrude. 'He's badderer and wusserer nor that! He's my sister Mary's brother-in-law, and Tom's bosom friend!'

'Worse and worse!' said Cherry, laughing.

'Exactly, for he comes down for Sundays! He is the youngest of the Cheviots by a good many years, born after they had got prosperous, and cockered up beyond all measure--went and got everything a man could go in for at Oxford--horrid fellow--and then turned school inspector, and writes smart articles in Harvey Anderson's Magazine.'

'Rupert Cheviot; I know the fellow's style,' said Lance; 'but may I ask why he is in your book?'

'Because Mary gave me the book, and stuck him in so fast there's no eradicating him; but I shall paste him over before long. Luckily, he generally talks to Ethel. They are always fighting, and I believe she likes him; and he doesn't know what to make of such a clever woman being so narrow, you see.--Now, an' you love me, Cherry, put him up there--an owl, inspecting the Academy!'

Just then, Angela burst in to say that Major Harewood wanted Felix to come and see about the new barn, and Felix had sent to ask if Miss May would come out before the warmth of the short day was past.

'That's hard,' said Lance, as she went; 'you'll lose the light.'

'Never mind, there will be plenty of time. The pensive face is what I want. It can be rather fine.'

'Rather!' in an indignant tone.

Lance slept in the third room in the corridor, opening into Clement's, as Clement's did into Felix's--an arrangement convenient in the earlier stage of his convalescence, and enabling Clement still to take care that his fire never was let out.

'I say, Clem,' he said, from his bed, the next morning, 'you haven't such a thing as a spare razor--mine were left at Marshlands.'

'No, I haven't.'

'I wish you would see if Felix has.'

'Are you mad, to want to begin shaving now?'

'Not at all. It had better be done before it gets thicker, and I have to go out.'

The application brought Felix in, demanding, 'Are you gone crazy, Lance?'

'I thought I might as well titivate myself for the tithe dinner this evening.'

'You need not trouble yourself about that. You'll not dine with us; and if you did, the farmers would excuse you. I thought you were only too glad of an apology for cultivating that furze brake.'

'One may as well be fit to be seen.'

'Exactly my sentiments,' said Felix; 'but you must submit for the present. If you say any more, I shall lock up all my razors from the raving lunatic.'

'Yes,' added Clement. 'Would you like an axe at the same time, to cut off your head?'

Lance subsided; and Felix walked back to his room, and smiled to the risk of his own cheeks over his shaving, as he muttered, 'Tithe dinner, quotha?'

The tithe and rent dinner were always combined soon after Christmas, and the Squire and Vicar had agreed that it was best not to make it a wholesale entertainment at the Rood, but to have a civilized party in the Priory, bringing the guests into the drawing-room afterwards. The numbers of superior tenants were not sufficient to make this unmanageable, and the compliment was appreciated. One or two elderly men might have preferred devouring the value of their tithe at the inn, and enjoying subsequent tobacco and spirits, but most liked the being treated as gentlemen; and the evening was always an odd mixture of boredom, amusement, and gratification.

The audit occupied most of the day, and the dinner was at the primitive hour of six, the ladies of the house appearing thereat. Gertrude, who was worked up to think it capital fun, was warned to deck herself in her best; and she rejoiced that Ethel had enforced preparations for possible gaieties, so that she could appear in a pink silk, presented to her for Mrs. Rivers's last public occasion, and a wreath of clematis.

Her splendours were not thrown away, for the Squire met her on the stairs, and exclaimed, 'That's right, I'm grateful to you;' and next moment she saw Mrs. Harewood uncloaking, and revealing the black velvet her husband always urged on her, and a set of pearls that had not seen the light since the last old aunt retired into old-maidenhood. The Vale Leston opinion was that Mrs. Harewood was the finest woman to look at who had existed since her great-grandmother, Lady Geraldine.

Lance was in the drawing-room when the ladies came in after dinner, shaking out their plumes and relating their experiences. Angela had talked hunting with a young farmer whom she wanted to allure into the choir, though Cherry doubted whether Clement would like to have him there. Cherry had given Mr. Hodnet an account of the Caergwent wedding, in which Penbeacon had had so much share, and had received a lament over Mr. Harewood's absence that winter. 'He was a gentleman that was strong in the pulpit.'

'That's his tincture of Irish eloquence, and the go that he has in him!' said Angela.

'I believe the poor people do prefer his preaching to Clement's,' said Wilmet.

'On the variety principle, I believe,' said Cherry.

'Of which they never get enough,' said Angela.

'After all,' said Cherry, 'inherent poetry does tell more than one guesses upon an audience.'

'Ah, ha!' said Lance; 'I've got a novelty in that line for you.'

'From Will? You don't mean that you've been revelling in the second post?'

'Ay! Some one fetched it from Ewmouth, just as your knives and forks began to clatter. I was just thinking what notes predominated, when in came this budget from San Remo. It is satisfactory to hear that while my Lord and my Lady think it the dullest place in the world, our two lovers find it simply delicious.'

'Is that the subject of the poem?'

'It might be,' said Gertrude.

'Only it would be hard on my Lord and my Lady,' said Angel.

'The question would be,' said Cherry, 'how long it takes to be so used to one another that localities cease to be indifferent.'

'How long does it take, Wilmet?' saucily asked Angela.

Wilmet did not choose to answer; and Stella's voice quietly mentioned how Lizzie Bruce and her lover broke off their engagement after being shut up together for a whole wet Sunday.

'How very lucky for them!' said Gertrude.

'They agreed it would be impossible to spend life together,' said Cherry. 'But what is the poem, Lance?'

'The Song of the Electric Wires.'

'Nonsense!'

'They do sing,' said Gertrude. 'I have often wished one could make something of those Æolian-harp sounds.'

'Have you?' said Lance. 'I've tried ever so often to get them on the violin. I'll show you.'

It was the first time he had spoken of touching his instrument; but Wilmet intercepted Stella, who was going as a matter of course to fetch it, by saying the sound would make the farmers expect a dance.

'So much the better,' said Angela. 'One waltz with Harry Palting, and my victory would be complete.'

'It seems,' proceeded Lance, 'that poor Bobbie held herself ready to start off with Bill in case I had been worse; and when the telegraph relieved their minds, the reaction showed itself in these verses.'

'Which Bobbie was there to secure,' added Cherry. 'I wonder how many of his get lost for want of her to copy them out, and make him polish them.'

'When a man hasn't a spark of vanity he misses a very good working machine,' said Lance.

'Spurring machine, you mean,' said Gertrude.

'Let me have them, Lance; you can't read them,' interposed Cherry.

Strange as was the subject, there was a wild airy grace about the lines, by turns joyous and pathetic, and really going well to the fitful music of the winds upon the wires. Lance went up to the piano, and struck a note or two; and that wonderful power he possessed over the instrument brought the very expression, if not the sound, and made Gertrude exclaim with delight, 'Oh! do make a song of it with a piano accompaniment; I am sure you can.'

'If you tell me I can,' said Lance, flushing and smiling, though perhaps aware of more technical difficulty than she knew; but the opening of the dining-room door, and the warm greeting of his brother's tenants, broke off his promise.

He worked so hard and so merrily the next day in preparing the Christmas-tree for the schools, in spite--foolish fellow!--of warnings, chills, and catches of breath, that at the moment of projection, he was quite overcome by the throng, noise and glare, and forced to beat a hasty retreat to the drawing-room, whither Miss Bridget Hepburn soon pursued him.

Finding him for the first time on the sofa, looking worn out she viewed his assurances that he was really much better as a melancholy delusion, and warned him against being beguiled by false hopes out of that blessed frame of mind. John Harewood, divining what she was about, presently came in to the rescue; not that he could remove her, for she was burning to communicate a semi-confidential piece of information, namely, the intended marriage of Mrs. Fulbert Underwood to Mr. Smiles, whose sickly wife had been dead about a year. The other two sisters were communicating the same intelligence to any one they could catch in anything like privacy all the evening. It was not at all unsatisfactory intelligence, for on the strength of Clement's appointment having caused his resignation, Mr. Smiles had expected him to supply all his most pressing needs, from educating his son to paying for his wife's funeral. The worst of it was that it was hardly credible that Mrs. Fulbert would be so foolish as to bestow her handsome jointure upon him and his seven children; but as he had just taken a curacy in a popular watering-place, there might be attractions; and at any rate, Clement would be exempted from finding funds for his move.

Lance could not help feeling that if to be weary of everything and indifferent to the future were a blessed frame, he had certainly lost it, and it made the subsequent night of pain and distress all the less endurable, as well as the captivity to bed and blisters that ensued; nor was it till Sunday evening that he could return to the painting-room, where all the family collected as they dropped in one by one from Evensong and the subsequent choir-practice, and stood and lounged about in the Sunday gossip, deaf to all to the manner born.

Felix came in last, having been looking at his letters, for he never had time to do more than glance at a few of the more interesting in the morning.

'It is true,' he said quietly.

'What, about Mrs. Fulbert? Has she written?'

'Yes; a great deal about the love she always had for Mr. Smiles's dear little family, and an entreaty to me not to deprive her of the three hundred a year that she was to forfeit by remarriage.'

'Was she? cried Bernard. 'How jolly!'

'So it seems, though I had forgotten it. She keeps all the settlement, of course.'

'I remember about it,' said Clement. 'Her husband begged his father to do something for her; and he detested her so, poor woman, that it went very much against the grain with him, and by way of some solace, he must have made this charge on the estate contingent on her remaining a widow.'

'You'll never go on with it, Felix!' exclaimed Angela.

'I hope it will not break off the match,' added Cherry. 'There are some people whom one would willingly bribe to keep out of one's way.'

'They do it knowingly?' said Gertrude.

'I imagine so; Smiles managed to know most things.'

'Ay!' said Angela. 'But you see he went on precedents. He knew what Alice Lamb had effected, and had some personal experience of this Vicar!'

'Felix! you are not going to be so absurd!' expostulated Bernard. 'Why, it would keep a hunter!'

'Or a curate,' said Angela.

'Still more amusing to you, Angel,' retorted Bernard.

'But, Felix, do promise me you'll do nothing foolish. For my personal satisfaction,' pleaded Angela.

'That is a promise no one can be warranted in giving, Angela.'

'He's afraid of himself!' cried Angela. 'She has only to get him into a corner--like Alice.'

'Then it is well I am going away to-morrow.'

'Very unreasonable,' muttered Lance.

'What, to be so soft--I think it is indeed! I don't care for the money, but how those critters will triumph!'

'He never said they would have it,' said Cherry.

'Oh! if he is only teasing.--What are you going to do, Felix?'

'I do not know. I must look at the terms of the will.'

Gertrude looked triumphantly at Angela, as much as to say, 'Could you not trust his common sense and justice?'

But Felix put a stop to the conversation by asking Lance whether the usual Sunday evening hymns would be too much for him.

'Not at all,' he said, 'provided Angela would sing nothing she had not studied;' and then finding Gertrude took this as a hint, he was dreadfully distressed, and nearly implied that dissonance from her was better than harmony from any one else. She, on the other hand, was as ever, greatly impressed with the sweetness of Felix's voice, and refused, as they went down to supper, to believe that Lance's could be better.

'I do not know that it is in what you heard to-night,' said Cherry; 'but Lance had some notes that none of them could come near, except--' and there she paused, thinking of the voice that still at times she longed for with inexpressible longing.

Gertrude was full of pity, though disappointed to find that Mr. Underwood was going away so early that he bade her good-bye as well as good-night, in spite of her protestation that she should be up to see him off, and binding over Stella, who was always the morning star of early travellers, to wake her in time for his 6.30 breakfast.

It was not far from that time when Felix, coming into Lance's room, was struck with his refreshed and brightened look even at this his worst time, a sort of indefinable look of hope and recovery.

'You have had a good night?'

'Yes; I slept till just now. I believe this last bout of mustard has done me a power of good. The tightness is gone as it never went before.'

'That's the best news I've heard yet.'

'Better than Mrs. Fulbert?'

'Oh, I was coming to that. I have looked at the abstract of the will this morning, and I don't feel myself in the least bound to continue the annuity. Then I have been going over things this week; and what with the falling in of the Blackstone lease, and the winding up of the Rectory business, I shall be likely to get into smooth waters sooner than I expected. So if you can hold on to the end of the year, I will then, if all goes right, do whichever you please--give up the concern at Bexley to you, or let you have an allowance to enable you to go on with your music.'

'Have I been grumbling?' said Lance.

'Can't one see a thing without its being grumbled at one? It is a hard life, yours, Lancey. I did not understand how hard till I took this taste of it, and I am heartily grieved at having let you go on under it till you broke down. I must try some other plan for you when you can go back.'

'No, no; don't upset Mrs. Frog. Summer will be coming, and I prefer her to Mrs. Lamb any day. Give her my love, and tell her I'm mending. Not that I see any sense in your going,' he added, but somehow a little less freely than usual.

'You want to see Lamb's report of the speeches at the sessions? Any commands?'

'Yes; I want some music-paper, and my portfolio of violin music. If you are sending any books, it might come at once. And tell Ellis he had better not attempt that anthem from the Creation next Sunday, unless Speers is come home to take the tenor.'

'I might do that.'

'You don't mean to stay over Sunday?'

'It is of no use to be always running backwards and forwards; I like a Sunday at the old place now and then,' said Felix. 'Good-bye, Lancey; let me find you twice yourself when I come back!'

'I could not thank the old Giant,' said Lance, when Cherry looked in on him; 'but will you tell him, I feel as if he had taken out the stopper that bunged me up from everything. Only it is absurd of him to go into banishment just when this place is so uncommonly pleasant?'

Cherry thought she could guess, and that it was not so entirely distrust of Mr. Lamb's capacity as it was convenient for the family to suppose. And after all, Lance was protesting from dutiful habit of unselfishness, but it may be doubted whether he really was quite as sorry as usual to part with his brother.

The early rising to see him off had been effected; but his absence did not disturb the good spirits of the party. Lance was gaining ground quickly, and resumed more of the ordinary family habits every day--sustaining his spirits the better when left behind on their all going out, because Gertrude May did not unite with Angela in abusing the weather for not bringing a skateable frost, and far less in running wild after a sight of the hunt. Nay, she decidedly snubbed that great handsome idle fellow Bernard for abusing Felix and the Fates for not mounting him, and sat soberly at home at her music lesson, when he and Angela went off upon the chestnut and Ratton, to see the meet and bemoan themselves. Gertrude had been slow to exhibit her music before the Underwoods, and had good-humouredly justified Angela's exaggerated excruciation, owning that she had never had any teaching worthy of the name. Lance had diffidently offered a few hints, and they were not accepted as Angela was wont to receive his criticisms; so they developed into instruction, delightful to both, even though much of it consisted in unlearning!

And when the little niece had rallied, and Dr. May fetched his daughter home, Lance did not flag, but was once more the bright Lance of former days, and spent his time between Pursuivant work and labour over some musical achievement, dividing himself between a blotted score, his violin, and piano, using by preference Theodore as a critic, with Stella to interpret his gestures.

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XLII. A HALCYON DAY

'They had been much together; and one for ever bears A name upon the loyal heart, and in the daily prayers; The other but remembers, when the pleasant hours are past, That something has been sending them so sweetly and so fast.' S.M.

On Whit-Monday forenoon 'Mr. Underwood' was announced in the drawing-room at Stoneborough, and Gertrude May's face, which had at first clouded at the pre-prandial intrusion of any visitor, brightened at the name, but lost a little eagerness when the entering visitor proved himself to be only Lancelot, shaven now all but his moustache, and with an air of entirely recovered health, justifying his declaration that he had no desire to see the Doctor professionally, and had been quite well ever since his return to Bexley at Easter. He was now on his way to keep his holiday at home, but had made a deviation 'to show that I have tried to obey you,' he said, proffering to Gertrude a roll of music, the stiff paper cover beautifully and delicately adorned with a daisy border, with pen-and-ink etchings in the corners illustrating the receipt of telegrams for weal or woe, and the first bars were made to resemble the wires and posts, the notes, the birds perched thereon, the whole being of course William Harewood's poem set to music. So beautiful and elaborate was the finish, that Gertrude was startled and confused; the meaning flashed on her, and the sudden recoil roused the contradictoriness of her nature. The earnest look abashed and frightened her, and with a sort of anger she coldly said, 'Very pretty, very nicely got up.'

'I think it may suit your voice,' said Lance wistfully.

'Thank you' (more nervously, and therefore more coldly), 'we will order some copies.'

Lance, after a moment's pleading gaze, dropped his eyes, coloured, and stammered, 'Not that.'

Ethel came to the rescue with praise of the etching, but this availed little; Gertrude spoke not a word, and Lance, though making some kind of reply, clearly did not know what he was saying, and presently took leave, in spite of Ethel's entreaties that he would stay to the early dinner, and to see her father. He made answer in a bewildered voice about not meaning--and getting home; shook hands, and was gone.

'That was not gracious, Daisy,' said Ethel.

'I'm sure I didn't want it,' said the spoilt child.

'You need not have hurt him.'

No answer but scarlet colouring.

About half-past three he was at the Priory, just as the whole party and Charles Audley besides were standing on the lawn, with rugs and cloaks betokening boating intentions. His first impulse was to shrink away like some wounded animal, but he had been spied, and was eagerly hailed--'O Lance! just in time! Here's the four-oar coming out! Clem and Angel want to go up the river to Tranquillity Bridge, and we are taking them.'

Lance would have done anything rather than betray his wound, so he took his place in the boat, and tried to shake himself into the present; but Felix thought he looked tired, and would not let him take an oar against the stream. Then it occurred to Cherry to ask whether he had had anything to eat. No, he believed not; but he was resolute that he wanted nothing, not even a draught of cider, which Angela mischievously recommended as they passed the 'Hook and Line,' a little tea-garden public-house, a favourite Sunday resort of Ewmouth idlers, and a great scandal and grievance to the Vicar, but secured, like other abuses, by a lease. A boat, belonging no doubt to some holiday-makers, was moored at the steps; but as it was the day of a great Maying at East Ewmouth, most observers of 'tide time' were likely to be there absorbed.

Angela amused herself with wild proposals to Charlie Audley to repair thither in disguise together, talking nonsense that greatly annoyed Clement, and was far from pleasing Felix or Cherry; but she was in so reckless and defiant a mood, that they could only hope that she might work it off at the oar. Her arms were strong as well as long, and rowing was a pastime she loved, having been franked as an A B S ever since she had taken lessons at a swimming-bath. The day was delicious, with clouds chasing one another so as to make fleeting lights and shadows on Penbeacon and the hills beyond; the clear brown water sparkling in ripples or lying in deep pools, shadowed by the woods that came down to the bank in the early green of spring, flowering may, mountain ash, and wreaths of blushing eglantine overhanging the margin, or where the space was open, revealing meadows all one golden sheet of buttercups, while the fringe of the stream was the feathery bogbean and the golden broom, mixed with tall sword leaves of the flag and the reed.

Shaded at length by a picturesque high-backed one-arched bridge, the boat waited while Clement and Angela went on their cottage visiting.

Charlie did not, as Cherry expected, invite Lance to promenade the bank with a cigar, but applied himself to helping Stella in collecting a grand nosegay of every sort of flower and grass within reach. The others remained in the boat: Lance leaning over the gunwale dreamily watching the ripples, apparently half asleep, lulled by the monotonously sweet humming of Theodore, and the songs of the birds in the woods; Cherry was sketching, and Felix rested musingly.

'Tranquillity Bridge,' he said. 'I always fancy it must have been named by some pious builder imbued with the spirit of the Pilgrim's Progress.'

'An unconscious poet,' said Cherry.

'Yes. Such a tranquil rest, amid such perfect peace and loveliness, without one discordant element, is one of the choicest boons of life.'

Lance swallowed a sigh; and Cherry answered, 'The very movements and sounds are all peace, though full of life.'

For a gold-billed moorhen was swimming among its little ones at the margin of the reeds at the bend of the river, and a sapphire kingfisher darted across the arch.

'Halcyon days,' said Felix.

'Oh no! Halcyon days precede storms.'

'Maybe they give strength for them. Times like these are surely foretastes of perfect bliss.'

'How does that prepare for storms?'

'Not only by calming nerves and spirits, but by giving some experience of the joy beyond--ay, and sense of love and confidence in Him who has made all so exquisite for our delight.'

It seemed to come from his heart, drawn forth by the grateful enjoyment of that sweet Whitsun hour.

Cherry held up her finger as a ring-dove began to coo from the thicket, making fit answer to one thus resting in the Feast of the Comforter; Theodore cooed in return, and the bird seemed to be replying. Even the tumult of pain and grief in Lance's breast was soothed by the spirit of the words and scene, while he felt the contrast, like an abyss, between himself and the others.

But when the rest of the party came gaily back with talk and laughter, inaction had become intolerable to him. He wanted to take Angela's oar, but she would not hear of giving it up, and Felix resigned his, while Cherry owned that she preferred having him at the helm when going down the river.

Theodore, with a shout, held out his hands for Stella's flowers, and she gave the whole into his hands, Charlie for a moment looking disappointed; but as the twins sat together, and the little fellow drew out the flowers singly and dropped them into his sister's lap, while she whispered their names, it was evidently perfect joy to both. Some, such as the bright spires of broom, he greeted with a snatch of nursery song, though otherwise the pair were scarcely audible as long as the nosegay lasted, and that was for a long time; but when Stella had made it up again, only leaving the broom to him, he returned to his usual hum, and this time with the tune of 'The strain upraise,' which had been practised that morning for Trinity Sunday, and which met the sound of the bells ringing for Evensong.

'That's rather too much!' exclaimed Angela. 'We shall be taken for some of the pious, a singing of hymns.--Come, Tedo.'

'No, no,' said Felix, 'I'll not have him interfered with.' And he hummed the tune.

'That's always the way when Baby goes out with us,' muttered Angela, audaciously singing out at the top of her clear soprano--

'Six o'clock is striking, Mother, may I go out? My young man is waiting, To take me all about.

First he gives me apples, Then he gives me pears; Then he gives me sixpence, To take me round the fairs;'

thus effectually silencing both the others, the one from sense of discord, the other from serious displeasure. At that moment, shooting from behind the bend of the river where stood the Hook and Line, came the other boat. Excited probably by the song, the young men in it shouted 'Come on! Who'll be first! We'll take a couple of your sweethearts aboard, to make fair play! We'll have your nightingale!'

'Next he gives me bacon And eggs to fry in the pan, And no one there to eat them But me and my young man.'

sung they lustily, as on they came, as fast as the current, assisted by twelve vigorous arms, could carry them.

A few strokes would have gained the garden landing-place, but the pursuers' velocity was reckless. One moment as they passed the eddy of the junction of the Leston, and the end of the four-oar swung round into the middle of the river, there was a shock, a shriek of many voices; and just as John and Wilmet Harewood were crossing the lawn to return to their own cottage, they beheld both boats upset, and fifteen persons struggling in the midstream.

Even as the collision took place, Felix had seized Theodore, and after both had been drawn down for a second, rose again, making vigorous strokes with one arm for the bank, reaching that of the churchyard, where it was built up high and steep; but with one of the violent efforts of a supreme moment, he grasped a branch of the overhanging willow tree, swung himself up by one arm till his feet had a hold, and he could launch himself partly over the iron rail, and deposit his burthen on the grass, when climbing over, he reached down and dragged up Geraldine from the arm of Clement, who had closely followed him.

By that time both the other sisters were safe; Charles Audley, thoroughly at home in the water, had directed himself more skilfully, holding Stella by her shoulder, to the garden landing-place, further off, but of easier access. Indeed, she had not lost the power of helping herself, when Wilmet's arms clasped her on the steps; and only a few moments later, Angela, who had kept herself afloat, was likewise landed, with very little aid from Charles.

Lance's rescue was harder. He could not swim at all, sank twice, and rose the second time a little way down the stream, where John Harewood grappled him and brought him to the steps, helpless and at first unconscious. Of the other boat's crew, two reached the bank alone, another had saved his fellow, a fifth clung to his oar, and was guided ashore by Clement, a sixth was drawn out insensible by young Audley; the last was still missing, and John, Charles, one of the other lads, and old Tripp, were all striving to find and rescue him. Four figures lay insensible, three more were struggling back to life--the servants rushing down; Wilmet, supporting Lance in his gasping efforts, took the command. 'Angel, Stella--don't wait, back to the house. Change instantly.--Amelia, go with them, give them something hot, never mind what, and put Miss Underwood to bed.--Yes, Clement, carry her to her room; and you--don't do anything else till you have changed--Felix, we'll take Tedo to the laundry; it is hot, and flannels can be warmed sooner.--Golightly, you and Martha take this one.--You two the other.--Follow Mr. Underwood--Yes, dear Lancey, you are better. They are all safe. Shall I help you up? That's right. Lean on, my dear, more than that; don't be afraid, I'm strong enough; there, you get on very well.'

Before they had made many steps, a shout proclaimed that the last sufferer had been found; and while he was carried between his friend and Tripp, Wilmet hastily insisted that her husband should hurry home and change his clothes before doing anything else, and relinquishing Lance to Charlie to be helped up-stairs, hastened to the scene of action in the laundry, where the four lifeless figures were stretched on the ironing tables. The other three young men were sent to be between blankets till their clothes could be dried; and Felix, after having laid down his unconscious burthen, lingered for a moment, till Wilmet ordered him off to change his dripping clothes, when he obeyed without a word.

Clement, half-dressed, was finding garments for Charlie, and insisting that bed was the place for Lance, when there was a sudden call at his door, and as he opened it Angela stood before him, exclaiming, 'Come this instant!' and as he followed her flying steps, he beheld Felix on the stairs, sitting propped against the balusters, holding a handkerchief to his mouth covered with blood. He had been standing, supporting himself against the post at the bottom, when Angela had first found him, and had so far helped him up; but the effort had evidently been agonizing, and increased the bleeding so much, that she had tried to place him safely, and hurried for aid. He could do nothing for himself, but Charles Audley coming to their assistance, they brought him to his room door, where Angela, crying, 'Ice! ice is the thing!' dashed away to the offices, where she heard voices.

'Miss Angela, you mus'n't come here.'

'Quick, Martha, the key of the ice-house.'

'Hice-ouse! bless you, Miss Hangela, 'tis 'ot as is wanted.'

'It is ice for the bleeding. It's a blood-vessel! It is Felix. I must have the key.'

But Martha, always despising Angela, and now all the more with her hair streaming below her waist, simply did not hear, and hurried away with her flannels. Angela rushed after her, but only heard, 'You can't come here.'

As she was raising her voice for a more peremptory cry, she saw John Harewood returning. He understood in a moment, made entrance, obtained the key, and while she fetched the ice, he hurried to the scene of the most pressing and grievous need.

By the time she brought the ice, the drenched clothes had been removed, and Felix was in bed, and the remedy she had obtained did at last check the flow of blood, but there was not only exhaustion but evidently very severe pain. 'Where?' He put his hand to his right side; and at that moment, to their infinite relief, they found among them Dr. Thomas May, the professor, who--on his way home from a visit to his friend the chemist--had been met in the village and brought to their aid even before Page, who was out on his rounds.

The verdict of the first moment was that the hæmorrhage was not from the lungs, and indeed the patient showed no difficulty in speaking after the first faintness. Had he felt the hurt on throwing himself over the rail? He thought so, but could not recollect; it only became disabling when he tried to go up-stairs, and that brought the bleeding--'but Theodore! Pray go to Theodore!'

There was no withstanding his anxiety, only the Professor directed the unsuccessful endeavour to make the posture easier, and ordered fomentations as the only present alleviation, except perfect stillness. No judgment could be formed as yet, and he therefore gratified the ardent desire faintly breathed forth, while the great drops of pain stood on the brow. 'Please, see Geraldine! And when Theodore comes round, bring him here! Clem, see it is so; he will be pacified in sight of me.'

Clement promised, and made it plain that it would be better for both; and then he took the young doctor first to Geraldine, who, once in bed, could not leave it without assistance, and was chained there in terrible anxiety, with Stella as her messenger; but her agony of suspense was her chief ailment, and after saying all he conscientiously could to soothe her, Dr. Tom was guided to the laundry, where he vanished.

Long, long was news watched for from thence. Even those who went in quest of hot water learnt nothing, till at last Charlie heard that one of the young men was reviving, and presently he was carried up to the spare room.

Another quarter, another half-hour dragged by. Felix renewed his entreaty for Theodore's presence, but messenger after messenger returned not. First John went and came back no more, then Clement was called for and never returned, and Felix became so restless under the impression that Wilmet would choose to put the child to bed unhappy in Sibby's room, that Lance could only carry down his mandate to the contrary. Then when the next access of watching and anxiety was visibly increasing the suffering and danger, Angela left Stella in charge, and went herself to represent that the dire suspense must be relieved before it did further harm.

The ear was in a state of agonized tension, and caught a sound. 'Open the door, Stella. Hark!'

She obeyed. There were voices; Wilmet's--Clement's. 'You go!'--'He will bear it best from you!' they said.

She heard no more, for Felix had started up on his elbow, and the blood had again rushed to his lips. She called for help. All were about him, there was no checking it, for seconds--for minutes. His face was deathly, his hands cold. Clement, holding him on his breast, whispering prayers, felt him more prone and feeble every instant; all believed that a life was ebbing away far more precious than the little feeble spark so easily quenched.

When a respite came, it was with a hand on the pulse, and with an anxious face, that the doctor durst signify to them that this was relief--not the end as yet; but as Clement laid the head back the furrows of pain had cleared, the brow had smoothed, the breath came without the stifled groans, the position was less constrained, and when Angela ventured to say, 'He looks more comfortable,' there was an air of assent and rest, the worst of the pain was evidently relieved for the time.

Stella stole away with the tidings to poor Geraldine, whom she found sitting up in bed, trembling so that the whole framework shook, and totally unable to move from it, without the appliances that assisted her lameness. Before long, Wilmet was able to attend to a representation of her condition, and could bring her wonted remedies, and what was even better, her strong soft arms to enfold the little frail quivering frame, and her sweet, steady, full voice to assure her that Felix was undoubtedly better, and not suffering near so much.

And when Cherry was quieted, and Wilmet would have returned, the little handmaid said, in an imploring voice, 'Where is dear Tedo? mayn't I go to him now?'

'My dear child!' exclaimed Wilmet, in pitying consternation, 'then you don't know?'

Cherry saw what was implied! How else could the helpless darling have been left by all!

'It is so?' she said.

Wilmet bent her head.

Stella gave a kind of moan.

'Yes,' Wilmet said, 'It is nearly three hours since. The Professor said there might be hope for two. One young man is getting better at last, Page is with him. We went on trying--John says for two hours and a quarter, and Sibby is going on still; but there is no hope now; and when I heard about Felix--Stella, dear child, where are you going?'

'Mayn't I help Sibby?' The voice was so plaintively imploring, the eyes looked so mournfully earnest out of the loose damp mass of dark brown hair, that it seemed cruel to answer, 'Stella, dear dear little one, indeed you must not, you can't go there.'

Instinctive obedience recalled her; but still she pleaded, 'He must get better! He was such a little moment under water! I think he is afraid to open his eyes because I am not there, nor Brother. Do let me try! I'm sure he would know me.'

'Stella, sweet, indeed I would let you if I could; but you can't go to the laundry, there are strange men about, and they are making up a bed for young Light; he can't be moved. The hope is quite gone, my dear, it was such a feeble little tender life.'

'And there could have been no pain or fright,' said Cherry.

But she broke off, as poor little Stella collapsed with her face between her hands, sitting on the floor, lost in her hair, not speaking, only a great stifling smothering sob heaving up, as if the oppression of her first grief were crushing, nay strangling her.

Wilmet knelt down to gather her into her motherly arms, and whisper comfort, but this was not what she wanted; she somehow slid away, stood up, and said, 'Please, may I go into my own room? I want to be by myself.'

'To your room and your bed, my dear,' said Wilmet. 'I am going to send you both some tea.'

Cherry only had visits from the maids, with tea that refreshed her, but from which Stella in the inner room turned away. The summer twilight had passed into night before a long black figure looked in. 'Asleep, Cherry?'

'Oh no, Clem! I knew you would come.'

'I am sorry not to have come before, but there has been so much to do.'

'And he?'

'Tom May thinks his pulse stronger, and was struck by the look of rally about his face when we came back after supper.'

'Who is there now?'

'Wilmet and the Professor. May will let no one sit up who has been in the water. I care the less because with my door open it is almost like being in the same room.'

'But he is better?'

'Not in pain,' said Clement; 'and May thinks that there are no ribs broken, though there is a great bruise. Much may be only violent sprain, and it may be only some unimportant vessel that has given way; but he is too weak and tender yet for anything like examination. However, as long as the bleeding does not return, he is gaining every hour.'

'It was that dreadful scramble up the bank!'

'That quite accounts for it; and he must have twisted himself as he threw himself over the rail. No one could have done it in cold blood, even without dear Baby's weight.'

'And after that he pulled me up! Clem, it was you that saved me, and yet I could not thank you if--O Clem!' She laid her head on his shoulder, struggling with horror at the bare notion of life without Felix.

He was very sorry for her. He had always loved her the best of his sisters, yet he felt himself so inadequate to fill to her the place of their eldest, or even of the lost Edgar.

'My poor Cherry!' he said, stroking her damp hair; 'but thus far God has been very gracious to us, and we will take hope, and trust Him. Think how much worse it might have been. So many in danger, and the only one taken so surely gone home!'

'Ah! I can only think how happy we were so short a moment before. He said halcyon weather came to bear us through storms; but oh! it makes it worse.'

'You will not think so when you see our little one's countenance, sealed with his Alleluia! The vacancy is gone, and there is a wonderful depth in his face, as if his Ephphatha had come to the guileless lips. Sibby and I have been dressing him in his surplice, and laying him under the Cross in the Oratory with his broom blossoms in his hand. Sibby says he was still clutching them when Felix gave him to her. Poor Sibby, she says her heart stood still then; but she would not cease from trying to restore him till long after we all knew it was vain; and when I made her desist, for the sake of young Light, who must be kept quiet, I thought she would have broken her heart; but at last she seemed to feel the soothing awe of the dear little face; and she has got her beads, and means to keep her vigil over him all night.'

'Does he know?'

'Wilmet fancies not, and is on the watch for his asking; but I am sure he understood, when I thought he was fast going, and told him Theodore was "safe home." I am sure it made it easier;' and as Cherry winced and shuddered, he added, 'This calmness after the suspense was over was really what did him most good. He is better every hour, and no one else of ourselves at all the worse except Lance. When the alarm was over, we found him shivering violently, and hardly able to hold up his head. I believe that his danger was the greatest of all, and that he could not have been saved but for John; the stream was carrying him down against the bridge.'

'O Clem! help me to be thankful! But is not one poor fellow really taken?'

'Yes, a fine young lad about Bernard's age. He had been under water so long, that we never had much hope; but the whole frame seemed so made for vigour, that Page thought there might be a return, and went on with Krishnu's help for four hours--nor did Sibby leave off till after that. They were a party of clerks and shopmen from Spiers and Hart's. The four who are gone home are very subdued and grateful. The father of one came out in a fly and took them all back, though I thought it rather a risk for the lad who had been so long insensible.'

'Then there is one in the red-room.'

'He had had some blow, and was too much done up to move; but Page says he will be all right to-morrow. I am more afraid for the one in the laundry, and have got Kerenhappuch to sit up with him. The poor boy who is lying by our dear child was a clerk of Hart's; Audley was going to see about sending to his people. He went off in his skiff a couple of hours ago.'

'There's eleven o'clock! O Clem, I ought not to keep you from resting.'

'This is rest, Cherry.'

'Only leave me something to rest on.'

'What shall I say to you?'

'What you like. There are matches.'

'I need not read.'

And he murmured over her Psalm, Collect, thanksgiving, and prayer, half quoted, half from his own heart, and then stood to give her his blessing of peace, and his kiss, which left her hushed, softened, comforted, attuned to meet whatever might be coming.

Again he was at her door in early morning, with tidings of reassurance. Felix had spent a quiet night, without recurrence of bleeding, and though too feeble almost for speech, and unable to make the least movement without pain, he had so far surmounted the first danger, that Professor May meant to go away on the return of the carriage he had sent home at night, and, unless telegraphed for, would not come again till Thursday, only enforcing absolute quiescence though not forbidding speech. Clement had seen a great improvement in looks, and Wilmet had consented to lie down on her husband's coming to take charge of the patient.

'And Lance?'

'He is getting up to come to Church, though he has had a bad night, and he looks anything but fit for it. He says he must come even if he has to go back to his bed.'

'Surely it is too great a risk.'

'So I told him, but he declares he has caught no cold, and that it is all headache and feverishness, which fresh air will relieve. I don't know, but I can't withhold him.'

'Whit-Tuesday! I had forgotten. Sunday seems to have been ages ago!'

'And how are you, Cherry? Did you sleep?'

'In a sort of way; I am quite well, if only any one would come and help me to get up! I can't bear lying here any longer. Do try to send me one of the maids. I can't disturb that poor little dear; she is asleep at last. Take my heart with you, Clement! After all, it is a sacrifice of thanksgiving this morning.'

Clement was wont to gather his small daily congregation in the Lady Chapel, where never since the family migration had the early Holy-day Celebration been so scantily attended. It was in unison with the many beyond that he made his Commemoration, his oblation, his intense intercession, in the dewy light of the early summer morning, his apparently low yet really powerful deep-pitched voice sounding far down the aisles and among the pillars in the nave.

The blessing echoed beyond the enclosing screen, and presently Lance rose from his knees and moved slowly westwards. If for a space he had felt some of the joy of holy comfort on the renewal of the sacrifice of self, soul and body, love and hope, before the Lord of life and death, yet he was more conscious of the oppression of the sickly odour of the drooping greenery and faded flowers that hung trailing on column and poppy-head, and which compelled him to leave the Church, though every step down the nave seemed to increase the load of sorrow, anxiety, and wounded affection, beneath which head and heart had burnt and throbbed the long night through. If he had reinforced patience and resolution, he could not yet feel the benefit.

A slight sound made him raise his eyes. Whom did he see catching at a bench for support, with white cheek and dilated eye? Whose voice exclaimed, 'You! you safe then!' Whose hand, so strangely cold, grasped his with convulsive eagerness, as her lips formed but did not utter the inquiry, 'Who?'

'Our poor little Theodore,' he said. 'My brother is better this morning.'

'Theodore! I never thought of him!' she gasped. 'Two lives--one in great danger--the note said--Tom's man could not tell which--I could not bear it--I had behaved so ill to--'

And she was cut short by a violent though hushed fit of weeping, while he exclaimed incoherently, 'No! no! don't think--I was a fool--oh! don't cry--don't--it is all over now--and this is so good and precious! Oh! please don't cry! Come in to Cherry! Take my arm.'

'Oh!' between her sobs, in a panting whisper. 'I never meant that. But I should have died if I had not come with the carriage to find out. I went in here to wait. I meant no one to know.'

'You must come in now. Cherry is well, and up.'

'I can't! I ought not! Don't let any one know.'

'Indeed you must come in! Think of the comfort to Cherry. Besides, you will hear of them all. Come.'

The tone was most persuasive, and Gertrude felt that she must yield; indeed, she trembled so much as to need the support of his arm as he took her along the cloister into the darkened house, up the stairs to the Prior's room, where he was glad to find preparations for breakfast; and placing Gertrude on the sofa, he was knocking at Cherry's door, when he heard the tap of her stick as she came along the gallery from a visit to Felix.

She had only been allowed to give him ocular demonstration that she was well and afoot, and exchange a kiss and five fond words; but the welcoming smile of gladness had so enlightened his face, that she was cheerful enough to be able to meet Lance's eager face and gesture as he threw his arm round her, whispering, 'She's here, Cherry. She's come in May's carriage. That most dearest--!'

And before she had fairly recollected who was most dearest to Lance, she was borne away into the room, to see tearful eyes, and crimson face, find them hidden against her, and be almost stifled in Gertrude May's embrace.

The explanation was made in more detail than in the church. Tom May, on finding that he must stay, had scribbled a pencil-line to his wife--'Terrible boat accident; two lives gone, fears for two more. Send the other horse for me to-morrow morning.'

The groom was only sure that it was the Squire of whom scarcely a hope was given, and another brother drowned, which he could not say, except that it was not the clergyman. Dr. May and Ethel were spending the night at Abbotstoke; and Gertrude, after hours of tossing under remorse for her discourtesy, and misery of suspense, found waiting unendurable, and obeyed the impulse to rise and go with the carriage.

'Indeed,' she said, looking up to Lance, 'it was very wrong. I could not believe anything so exquisite had been done for me.'

'As if anything--'

'But haven't I been punished!' she went on, not pausing. 'Oh! to think I never--never could unsay it, nor ask your pardon!'

'Pardon!' he gasped, turning as red as before he had been pale, and holding a chair for support; and before he could say another word, the impulsive girl cried, 'And oh! it is all my selfishness, bothering him when he looks so dreadfully ill.'

'No, no,' broke out Lance, afraid he was frightening her away, and still almost beside himself. 'This is perfect healing.'

'Don't talk nonsense,' broke in Cherry, half comprehending, but a good deal alarmed, and therefore assuming authority with some peremptoriness; 'the truth is, you are both famished, and must have some breakfast this instant.' She poured out coffee, and then moved to provide eatables. Lance's instinct was of course to help her, but his hand shook so much that he had to relinquish the bread-knife. 'Yes,' said Cherry, as she took it from him; 'no wonder! When did you eat last?'

'I--can't tell. Somebody made me swallow something hot and abominable when I came in, and my head has never stopped going round ever since; but I don't care now.'

'No doubt it saved you from something worse.--You know he was longer in the water than any of us.'

'I don't know anything,' said Gertrude. 'I thought Mr. Underwood--'

Then it had to be explained--that is, as much as Cherry and Lance knew. 'Some tipsy fellows racing us--the shock--the helpless plunge;' then Cherry had felt the instant security of Clement's arm, and was drawn up the bank.

'How beautiful it was!' said Gertrude softly, 'that care for poor little Theodore first, and then you!'--and softer tears came into her eyes. 'It is just like all his life.'

'Just,' they both said, gratefully.

'And how does he look?'

'Perfectly white, dear fellow--lips and all,' said Cherry; 'and he speaks so slowly, and only just above his breath; but his eyes watch one about with all their grave brightness.'

'Grave brightness,' whispered Gertrude to herself, while a sweet satisfied look passed over her face. 'Did he know how it was with the poor little one before he--was ill?'

'No,' said Lance; but he could now add that when Felix had seen Clement about to go to church, he had said, 'Remember me, and give thanks--above all for dear Baby.'

Never perhaps had Gertrude shown such soft shy tenderness; and Lance confirmed the trust that Theodore could scarcely have felt a pang, for he said that in his own case the drowning had been far preferable to the coming back to life, when Wilmet had seemed a cruel tormentor.

'Who was it that brought you out?'

'Who, Cherry? I never asked!'

'Oh!' emphatically exclaimed Gertrude; then in a murmur under her breath, 'or what would it not have been to me?'

'It was John Harewood,' said Cherry.

There was a knock. Professor May, at his principal patient's entreaty, had come to inspect Miss Underwood. His amazement at the spectacle of her companions was unbounded, and did not make him merciful to Lance, whom he meant to have next visited in bed, and whose throbbing pulses, varying complexion, heavy eyes, aching limbs, palpitating breath, and untasted meal, all indicated that he ought to have been there. The reproof was not like the rough uncompromising scolding Rugg was wont to bestow; but with quiet irony Dr. Tom impressed on Lance that getting up had been a recklessly foolish pastime, in which he might have been permitted to indulge so far as his own insignificant welfare was concerned, but that he could not be permitted to inflict another serious illness on his family. The only thing that was proper by them was immediately to repair to his bed, and there await the upshot of his imprudence, so as to mitigate the effect as much as possible.

And then summarily carrying off his sister, Tom began as soon as they were outside the gate, 'This is simply the most extraordinary proceeding I ever heard of.'

Gertrude held her tongue.

'May I ask whether my father is in the habit of permitting these freaks when he is visiting his patients?'

'I beg your pardon,' she answered. 'I forget the unapproachableness of your patients when they are my dearest friends.'

'Oh, indeed!' Then presently, and as if for fear the groom should hear--'Les demoiselles font beaucoup de choses mal à propos à l'heure qu'il est, mais je vous conseille de ne pas avouer votre préférence à si haute voix.'

'I don't care,' she said, scorning the veil, 'who knows that I glory in appreciating heroism.'

'The heroism of getting upset in a boat!'

She deigned no reply; and he waited, trusting to her feminine nature to make her begin again, but silence was her only refuge from angry tears or words, and she kept it till the Church Ewe station was in sight.

'Thank you,' she said. 'I'll go home by train.'

He had visits to make, and was glad to be quit of her, but with elaborate cold care came to the station, found that a train was nearly due, and waited with her. He must have done so for the purpose of saying, 'Mind! these are estimable persons, but that is no reason for dropping self-restraint.' Then, as her pout nettled him, 'Nothing is more disgusting or unmaidenly than pursuit of one in a lower walk of life.'

'Walks of life are what men make them.' And they treated each other with dignified silence till the train came.

'Well,' said Dr. May, on hearing his son's story, 'the Press is king now-a-days, and one daughter is his tribute.' The Doctor still liked to tease Tom.

Meantime, Lance, in no condition to resist, had betaken himself to his own chamber, but only to find the housemaid had left the bed in the most approved sanitary state--so long as it was not to be lain on. Not sorry for a dispensation from captivity, he extracted his private horse-hair pillow from the pile of bed-clothes, and came back to the painting-room, where Cherry cleared her large sofa, and covered him up with her Indian silk quilt, he smiling blissfully, and observing, 'Isn't she the dearest girl in the world?' Cherry might have heard a great deal, had it been possible to her to sit and talk when innumerable messages were coming for her. When she had answered the first, he began again with 'So sweet and generous.' Then came the second which involved a note. When she looked at him again, he only smiled. She next had to go down to the kitchen; and on her cautious return she found him asleep, breathing like a child, and a colour--not fever--coming into his cheek.

'Poor fellow!' she sighed to herself. 'I wonder if there is any hope for him; but if the notion only bears him through to-day, it is a blessing!'

Poor Cherry! Such as this was all the nursing she was good for. Her nerves made her not to be trusted alone in a sick-room, not to do equal damage to herself and the patient; and she could only sit with the door ajar, writing notes, and acting as referee to countless questions, all in an undertone out of respect to Lance's slumbers.

And there meanwhile sat Angela, trusted to fan Felix, refresh him with a strawberry or spoonful of iced lemonade, bathe his face with eau-de-cologne, or catch his slightest wish, cares so congenial, that she liked them for a stranger, how much more delightful for 'my brother;' and though she knew more clearly than anyone save John and Clement how precarious his state was, youthful buoyancy viewed the danger as the cause of future triumph. To be a lady-doctor was surely her vocation! What a pity Charlie was heir to a baronetcy! And he had finally saved her--though she had kept herself afloat--he might be allowed the honour of her rescue; and if it made him her fate, Lady Audley, M.D., should obtain a magnificent triumph over conventionality, far beyond all her former conceptions.

When Clement came into the room at noon, she would not give up her place. Felix looked up to him, and said, 'You are seeing to things!'

'Yes--' interrogatively.

'Try how near that willow it can be.'

'I will.'

'How about the inquest?'

'At the Rood this afternoon. Never mind about that.'

'Only see there is no injustice to those poor lads! It was our own doing;' and as Clement looked amazed, 'if our boat had not swung round;' but the earnestness with which the words were spoken brought a thrill of pain that cut him short; and they wiped his brow, and sprinkled him with scent, and watched anxiously till the lines about the eyes and mouth began to relax, and he smiled thanks back, then closed his eyes.

Clement left the room unheard, for the heat of the day compelled the opening of window and doors. He had only just became conscious that from the moment of the accident he had never had leisure to consider the cause; and he went across to the painting-room, where he did not find Cherry; but Lance awoke at his entrance, sat up, and in answer to his apology and inquiry pronounced, 'There's wonderful virtue in sleep. I don't think any of the ills Tom May threatened me with are coming to pass.'

'Your head?'

'No worse than I'm well used to, thank you. How is it in there?'

Clement told him what had just passed, adding, 'What do you remember?'

'My notion,' said Lance, 'was simply that we were overtaken by a lot of scamps too excited to perceive what they were about, and egged on by Angel's unlucky song.'

'I doubt the "excitement" being of the technical kind, unless the water had a very sudden sobering effect.'

'Indeed! Well, considering that you were in your shirt-sleeves, their not perceiving that we weren't in their style was not so wonderful. So Felix says we ought to have cleared them. Ay, I do remember the swinging round now.'

'An oar must have missed the stroke, and brought her stern foul of the other.'

'He must have seen who it was,' said Lance.

'Yes, but as the point is to exonerate these fellows, there seems no need to drive it close home among ourselves.'

'No, she need never know exactly what she has done,' said Lance.

'I did not say she never should,' returned Clement; 'but the public need not. In fact, we have nothing to say. Felix, in the stern, may have seen, but I did not.'

'And Charlie Audley?'

'If he knows no more positively than we do, you may be sure he will not draw inferences. I wonder he has not been here yet, by-the-by.'

'You don't mean to forewarn him?'

'Certainly not.'

'No, it would not be right. All we determine is that it shall not be known through us, if we can keep truth and justice without,' said Lance; 'and if appearances are to be trusted, he is likely to be as ready--or more so--to shield her as any one of us.'

'I believe that is as great an absurdity as any of the rest,' said Clement, gloomily.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLIII. PRINCESS FAIR-STAR

'But the little Stars we found (out) Down amongst the Underwood.' Jean Ingelow.

Even while Lance and Clement were in discussion, Charles Audley had paddled up the river, and mooring his little craft at the landing-place, had taken the path to the garden.

There, beyond the cedar, so as to be hidden from any one upon the river, sat Stella, decking a cross with lilies-of-the-valley and white lilacs. Scamp was lying by her, and her doves parading and cooing on the grass and cedar boughs beside her; but the utter droop and dejection of her young figure were altogether out of keeping with the summer surroundings; the shining head was bowed, and the heavy eyelids with broad red rings around them showed that she had wept and wept on for hours. She did not hear the step on the soft grass, for her low sad voice was murmuring, 'My Tedo, my darling, my baby, is this the last thing I shall ever do for him?'

Then Scamp wagged his tail and crested his ears in greeting, and the doves circled about, and perched higher upon the cedar tree, while Charles, holding one of the flat sweeping boughs back, stood looking down at her, as hardly knowing how to greet her, and with a tear gathering in his eyes. She stood up, and looked up to him meekly and sweetly, with a touching sort of welcome, as she held out her hand, saying simply, 'You saved me, and I never thanked you yesterday.'

Instead of speaking, Charles lifted the little hand in both his to his lips and cheek for a moment, as if nothing else could express how he prized that chance; but if Stella thought at all, it was that it was a kind action of comforting.

'Your brother is better,' he said, having inquired at Page's door.

'Yes, he is better. I saw him, and he just spoke; but he does look so bad!'

'He will soon mend now,' said Charles, with the confidence of one who knew nothing about it. 'And you are all alone?'

'They are all busy or resting or something, and I want to do it all for Theodore myself--my own own darling!' The last words were a moan to herself, as she sat down in her low chair and resumed the little cross.

'May not I help a little?' softly entreated Charles, sitting down on the grass and quietly handing her the flowers, ready arranged in bunches, with a leaf. She did not speak, but seemed to like it. There was a loneliness about her that again struck him, so that he could not help half blaming those who had left her to herself; and to account for their absence asked after Lance.

'He is up, but he seems very poorly still,' she said; 'he is lying down in the Prior's room.'

'And they have left you all to yourself?'

'I like to be alone. Nobody did care for him like me. They were all very kind to him. I don't think he knew the sound of a rough word, my dear little gentle Tedo! but nobody understood him like me, nobody could make him understand--' and she rocked herself backwards and forwards under the load of her first real grief. It was very sad to the young man to watch, and he hardly knew what to say, as again he took her hand. 'Well, now he can't have any troubles, you know, Stella, he's a great deal happier than ever you could make him.'

'Oh yes, I know that. Only it is foolish. I can't think how he gets on all alone! I know it is very wrong, but if Felix or I had gone with him it would not seem so strange for him. Yes, it is very silly,' she added, half laughing, but crying again, 'but it will seem hard to fancy he does not want me.'

'He is not the only one to want you,' muttered Charles.

'Oh no! There are plenty of them. I want to be thankful, indeed I do, but no one ever can be so dear! Never mind,' she added in her unselfishness, perceiving that her exceeding sorrow was causing grief and perplexity, 'it can't be helped; I do know he is happy, and I'll learn to bear the being left alone.'

'Never! if dearest love can make up to you--dearest, sweetest little one!' cried Charles. 'There!' as he took both her hands, and her wistful wondering eyes were raised, 'don't you see some one who wants you every moment, and that all your brothers put together can't love you a quarter as much as I do? There! there! Only do just promise, Stella, never to talk again of being left all alone while you have Charlie.'

'I don't think I can,' said Stella, in a dreamy wondering voice, 'for you are so kind.'

'And you'll let me try to comfort you?'--a dangerous proposal, for he did not in the least know how he should have set about it if she had not answered, 'I think you do,' as if it rather surprised her, bringing such an approach to caressing as would have startled her at any moment when her heart was not so yearning for tenderness and sympathy. And there was a reaction the next moment, as finding herself guilty of forgetting Theodore and his cross, she gave a moan of pain--'Oh, my Tedo!' and went on with her work; but she let him wait on her with the flowers, and now and then a little squeeze of the hand, and he knew he must be content with that much. Presently she said that she ought to make something for 'that other poor one, or it would look so unkind when his mother came.' In this task she could brook more help, and she spoke more over it, with a sweet soft languor that had an infinite pathos, as if somehow the acute anguish of her loss had been softened, and she were resting in the strange new peace which she did not yet know for joy, but which had filled her heart. She was so very young, so very pure, so very unconscious, that Charlie, almost as young and not much less simple and innocent, was as tender and reverent of her and her grief, and the state of her guardian brother, as though she had been one of her own white flowers--those last sprays she let him take from her hand when all was done, and they went together to carry the wreaths and crosses to the Oratory.

The large heavy curtains that separated the hall from the long room were let down, and the screen, a tall wooden one, as usual cut off the Oratory. Here the chairs had been removed to make room; and close under the Cross, to the eastward, were the two tables that had been covered with white to receive the two who had so lately gone forth full of life.

On one of the chairs sat Cherry, endeavouring to obtain some record of that unearthly loveliness of expression, chiefly for Felix's sake. She had just done all she durst, and produced a drawing that would not look like such an utter failure away from the original, when these two came in, Stella leading the way in gentle awe, very sad indeed, but still not with that utterly drooping downcast look of leaden grief which had in the morning shrunk from all comforters who could only believe, not enter into, the intensity of her mourning for her twin.

Cherry, in the corner, almost hidden by the chairs, could not tell whether her presence were perceived; but in truth the child was so simple, that she would probably have done exactly the same whether her sister was present or not, and Charles had no eyes for aught save her. She knelt down for a moment, with her face in her hands; then she kissed the white brow set in fair hair, and seemed to expect Charles to do the same, as a great favour to him, after which she let him help her to lay her cross with the wreath round it on the breast, and change the now closed Star of Bethlehem that lay under the waxen fingers, as well as that withered spray of broom. Once more she knelt, and whispered the Lord's Prayer: and he did the same, imitating her in everything, a grave kind of light on his young brow. It was very solemn and beautiful to see them, and Cherry watched them almost with awe.

When they rose, Stella placed her decorations on the longer broader form on the other table, but whispered that Clement had bidden her not to look at that face.

They went away hand in hand, and parted upon the lawn, for precious as each other's presence was, they, in their reverence and inexperience, felt as if his coming in to the family meal might be an intrusion, which neither could propose. So he bade her tell her brothers that he should meet them at the Rood.

'I shall hardly see you just yet,' he said, 'though I shall come to the door every day, but never--never think yourself alone, dearest, dearest, dearest one!' And after holding both the little hands for some moments in his, he drew her up to him for one second, then was gone.

No one saw Angela standing at the garden door, with contracted brows and bitten lip. As she crossed the hall, there was an entrance at the front door; but she darted up-stairs, and it was Stella who first greeted Bernard, who had been telegraphed for by Charlie, and came home awed, subdued, and terribly alarmed by the report he had heard at Church Ewe. 'But I see it was all clack, after all, and no harm done,' he said, as he looked at his little sister's face. 'Only why do you frighten a fellow by having all the blinds down?'

And Stella, horrified at her own disloyalty, could hardly find utterance to explain that it was but too true; and when she led Bernard to the Oratory, somehow it was all the happy and glorious side of her twin's removal that dwelt with her, while he, who had been in a rough way very fond of the little helpless one, and had never faced death before, broke entirely down with 'Poor little chap! I wish I'd been better to him! I meant to have got him a new thingumijig last half--but I spent--I wish I hadn't now. It seems so odd not to hear him humming.' And he yielded at last to a fit of crying; and when Stella spoke softly of the present joyful songs, he said, 'Ay! ay! that's all very well for you that were always good to him, and never kicked him about; but if I'd only known--'

And yet it had always been the most hopeful part of Bernard's character that he had never been really unkind to Theodore, and very rarely even impatient, even when teased by a fit of imitation.

The mid-day meal was the first family assembly since the same hour the previous day, and it did not collect all the members at the same time. Angela was only sent down after every one else had done, constrained by Wilmet's command, enforced by a word from Felix. Cherry had lain in wait for her, to ask necessary questions about her mourning, for no circumstances were likely to make Angela brook the having orders for her dress given without consulting her.

'There's a box of hats and bonnets in Sibby's room, if you would look at them. The bonnets are all one worse than another; but if you would see if you would like one like mine or like Stella's--'

Angela jumped as if she had been stung. 'Stella's! certainly not.'

'I have not chosen a very childish one for her. This will make her more of a woman.'

'Don't go chattering on!' broke out Angela. 'Don't you think I've not got enough upon me without your worrying me out of my life with that little humbug!'

'I don't think you know what you are saying.'

'You don't, Cherry. That's the way people are always taken in by a little sham softness and simplicity. I hate such snakes.'

It struck Cherry that Angela must have drawn the same conclusion as had occurred to her for one moment as she saw the hands clasped. The bitter word applied to their darling Fair-Star offended her not a little, but she made a great effort to ask kindly, 'Has anything vexed you, Angel?'

'Vexed!' as if the word were utterly inadequate. 'No, not one thing more than another! Have done, Cherry! You mean it well, but I can't stand it!--No more! I've had enough to keep me going;' and she threw down her knife and fork, and gulped down a tumbler of beer.

'You need not hurry. Wilmet is with Felix.'

'As if I didn't know that!'

There was a look and tone about her as if she were brimming over with inconceivable misery, to which every word added; and Cherry felt quite powerless to deal with her as she darted up-stairs.

And just then came the feet of many men, treading as gently as they could. John Harewood regretted for a moment that Stella and Clement had not delayed their arrangements till after this inspection, yet it might be well that these rougher spirits should see how little gloomy they had made the sleep of the innocent. The young men too were evidently struck by seeing that their comrade had not been neglected any more than the child of the house, and Stella's cares were thus not thrown away.

Clement, Bernard, and John Harewood had just crossed the churchyard, and were turning up the road to the village inn, when Clement perceived that Angela had joined them, and turning back to her, he said, 'My dear, you are not thinking of coming?'

'I am.'

'There is no need. Here are quite witnesses enough.'

'No. No one knows what I do,' she said, with face as hard set as marble.

'Has Felix spoken to you?' he said, understanding better.

'Only what you heard. That was enough.'

'It is a right purpose, Angela,' he said, kindly: 'but really you need not expose yourself to this. We can quite exonerate the others by showing that our boat swung round at the last moment, and that is all that signifies. We neither saw nor knew why.'

'And I did,' said Angela.

To check her was plainly impossible. There was the sort of seared look of misery about her face which had before struck Cherry, as if she were perfectly indifferent what might happen to her, and hardly heard what was said; and Clement could only make a gesture indicating that he had no choice, when he met the astonished glances of the others.

The Rood was almost as old as the Priory itself, and the inquest was held in a curious old pannelled room. The other boat's crew had brought an attorney to watch the proceedings, evidently anticipating that undue blame would be imputed to them, to the damage of their character even if nothing more came of it.

The first to tell his story was the Reverend Edward Clement Underwood, who merely explained the manner in which they were seated, the sudden challenge from the six-oar, and how just as he had thought the boat clear, he had felt whirled round in the eddy, the boat was struck in the stern, and went down. His brother Theodore was instantly taken out; Francis Yates, the other sufferer, not till the last, he could not say how long.

Charles Audley then spoke of the shouts and violence of the pursuit--admitting, however, that it would have been harmless had not the boat turned so as to expose her stern in the midst of the two streams. An oar must have missed the stroke, but whose it was he could not say; and he finally mentioned having brought out poor Yates, who had been sucked down by the eddy, and carried to the opposite bank. The Coroner asked in a complimentary voice whether he had not been more successful in other cases; and Charlie, colouring, allowed that he had brought two more out of the river.

There Angela started up. Clement had tried to keep her till she was called for, but the Coroner, seeing her agitation, courteously expressed himself willing to take her evidence. Her cheeks were crimson, and she spoke breathlessly. 'I only want to say it was nobody's fault but mine. They would not have raced with us if I had not begun singing. And then they would have cleared us, but I got frightened when we came to the meeting of the currents, and my stroke failed. That made the stern swing round. And I am ready to take the consequences.'

'No consequences need be apprehended, Miss Underwood,' said the Coroner, a kind old man. 'No one can impute blame to a young lady for a very natural alarm; and every one must feel this voluntary explanation extremely honourable to you.'

He was making a cruel cut if he had only known it, but he was full of consideration for her; and the young men themselves gave their evidence in a very different style from the defensive and offensive one intended; nor was the question of their sobriety, on which they had brought up the landlord of the Hook and Line, even alluded to, before the verdict of accidental death was returned.

Clement had the feeling that this was the most generous action of Angela's life, and yet she had carried it out in so defiant a manner that it was not easy to give her full credit; and before he could address her, she had sped away, between skimming and striding, and was across the churchyard before he had reached the door.

Bernard relieved himself by a low whistle.

'Well,' said Charlie, 'I thought her pluck indomitable. I never supposed that she capsized us.'

'Why, whom did you think it could be?'

'Well, if you must know, I thought Lance just the spoon to do it--a musician, and he'd been looking moon-struck all day.'

'Much you know about Lance! Why, I'd have taken my oath beforehand it was nobody's doing but Angel's. It's just the way with that sort of girl that runs into what she's no call to--'

Lance meantime was having a brief transaction with the reporter of the Ewmouth paper, and then was detained by warm expressions from the other boat's crew, who had been quite disarmed, and were eager to tell of their sorrow and their sense of the kindness and 'handsomeness' of the treatment they had received--speaking to him, indeed, a great deal more freely than they could have done to his brother the Vicar, as a being far less removed from their own sphere, and giving him valuable data for dealing with their comrade, young Light, who still lay very ill. Clement had visited him in the morning, and had found him gruff and reserved, and showing decided objections to clerical visits as such.

These lads seemed more careless than free-thinking, as they allowed that Light certainly was; and they were now much impressed, and eager to speak of poor Yates's steadiness and goodness. Indeed, he had not even meant to go to the Maying, and they had been in the act of chaffing him for the abstinence which they now longed to have shared. It was the greater comfort, because his poor mother had just been brought over by her son's master, who would take charge of her till the funeral. She was in the strange mixture of fuss and grief that never shows to advantage, and when taken to see her boy was divided between gratitude at the honours paid to him and dread of their novelty, and the ground where it was easiest to meet her was his real dutifulness and affection.

Attention to the poor woman and other calls hindered Clement from any interview with Angela, whom indeed he hardly saw till the night vigil which he was to share with her. The day had not been unfavourable, except from the exhaustion produced by the afternoon heat; and Bernard's brief visit had exceedingly dismayed him. He declared that he had never seen any one look like that but a fellow who had been really killed by a disastrous blow at foot-ball, and put all his auditors in the lowest spirits by a series of tragic anecdotes; until Mr. Page, at his evening visit, declared that he saw more real improvement than he had dared to expect.

Felix could not bear to see two watchers losing their whole night's rest; and as Angela was unpersuadable, Clement, to content him, lay down dressed on the bed in the next room, and being thoroughly tired, was fast asleep, when in the middle of the night an access of pain returned, probably from some inadvertent movement in slumber. Felix forbade Angela to summon his brother; but ere long the agony increased so much, that, with a lip stiff and straightened by the struggle to suppress a cry, he said, 'Help me!' and as thinking he wanted to change his posture, she offered her arm and neck, he released another sob of anguish, and answered, 'No! no! Say--prayers--what I can't recollect.'

Her lips quivered, but no sound came. However, Clement, with true nursing instinct, had been roused, and stood over him, uttering at intervals the supplications after which he had been feeling in the distraction of acute pain, and the look of having lost something passed away. The fomentations were renewed; and at last, just as Lance was dressing to go for Mr. Page, a faint but free voice said, 'Don't go, it is getting better;' and in ten minutes more, the paroxysm had passed into a sweet sleep, which lasted till long after morning had risen.

Clement would not leave him again, but Angela refused every sign of dismissal, and sat cold, hard, stiff as a statue, with open fixed eyes, and cheeks so wan as to be almost green in the light of dawn. He watched her with almost as much anxiety as the sleeper; and when at four o'clock their watch was relieved by John and Wilmet, he followed her to her own door, and said, 'Angel, my dear child, I am afraid you are very unhappy.'

'Well, why not? Good-night, or morning.'

'Should we not both be better able to rest if you would let me do what I can for you?'

She laughed--a horrid painful scornful laugh it was. 'Much good that would do. Such a trouble as this!'

'Yet, Angel, would you but try! There is no grief or penitence too vast--'

The laugh again. 'So one says till one tries, and then one finds that one hates it all! all! all! No, I tell you, Clement, I won't be bothered now! I can't stand it.'

And she locked her door.

Even Felix, who in spite of that one attack was evidently stronger, must have remarked her manner, for he asked Wilmet whether there were anything amiss with Angel. 'She is grieving over her share in the accident,' said Wilmet. 'I hope it may be a turning-point with her.'

No doubt he thought over this; for later in the day, when Angela was sponging his face and hands with warm water, and exclaimed at sight of a red mark on his arm, 'Did you hurt yourself there, Felix?' he answered, 'No, it is the old scald. Do you remember our talk then?'

'You can't go on as you did then,' she hurriedly said.

'Then don't look as you did then,' he said. 'Remember, visible results are often merciful aids to correction.'

She perpetrated a hard stiff smile; and from that time shunned being left alone with him, and sometimes when the exterior family thought her in the sick-room was really shut up in her own, for she avoided the presence of the others as much as possible, and when among them showed an irritability and unkindness to Stella that Cherry could hardly bear to see. She could hardly answer an inquiry after Felix from her with common courtesy, and roughly took things out of her hands to prevent her bringing them into the room, when a moment's sight of her sweet face would have been no harm but rather good to her patient.

By Thursday much of the pain, tenderness, and disability to move were gone; and Tom May was well satisfied, not only thinking the first danger over, and ascribing the chief remaining damage to a sprain, but wishing that Felix should be lifted to a couch, where he could be a good deal cooler than in his bed. It was lucky that Wilmet and Cherry had resisted Clement's desire to present all the old Squire's invalid machinery to the hospital, for there was great comfort in the easy-going wheeled couch with angles of every inclination on which he was brought to the window. Bernard longed to draw up the blind, instead of his 'seeing nothing but that black cross and the old trumpeting angel under it,' as he said.

'My trumpeting angel is a dear friend,' said Felix. 'He says a great deal.'

Felix was obedient to the order to be moved, and showed that he was less prostrate in strength than had been anticipated; but his passiveness struck those who knew him best as not so much the langour of weakness as of sorrow. What Clement had rightly deemed no ill news in what seemed his own last struggle, was a sore grief in his recovery. Little Theodore's loving dependence was greatly missed, and saddened the thought of returning to the family.

Nor was he the only mourner. The first practice of the choir-boys without him ended in a positive howl; one of them was reported to have said Master Theodore was a little angel among them; and the intimation of Stella's desire for broom blossom brought in such an accumulation of golden flowers as might have covered the whole family.

Sibby added to Clement's perplexities by announcing her intention of not going to mass any more barring at Church. She would cast in her lot with her own children, the darlin' above all that was the Lord's own lamb; and she hadn't need go further, when here was Master Clem, as good a praste as any of her own clergy that was.

Though this was precisely Master Clem's own view, he could not tell whether he were encouraging an act of schism or an act of Catholicity; and he had not much choice, for praste as she owned him, he knew that the least opposition would make him in his old nurse's eyes no more than the long white boy she had victimized and allowed to be victimized by all his brothers. He wondered whether to write to the Priest at Ewmouth, who had certainly never attended to Sibby like his brother at Bexley, nor exerted himself to encourage her weekly tramp to mass. Altogether, though touched and warmed, he was by no means so elated about his convert as Clan Hepburn would have thought proper.

Those good ladies, in spite of their belief that there was a regular chapelle ardente round poor Theodore, and that the Vicar and the Papist woman spent their time there in telling beads and sprinkling holy-water, were too kind-hearted not to come daily to inquire, and some one always went down to them. On Friday, when they were shown into the drawing-room, they found Angela kneeling by the hearth, burning some papers in the fire-place.

'Felix was better,' she said; 'he was being dressed, and was to be taken into the painting-room, it was so much cooler;' but even as she spoke, the hard silent misery of her face went to their hearts.

'You look sadly worn, my dear,' said Miss Bridget kindly. 'I hear you are the best of nurses, but you must not be overtired.'

'Oh! nothing hurts me!' with her horrid little laugh.

'Fatigue of body is a rest to pain of mind,' said Miss Isabella; 'but there is even a better rest, if you only knew your way to it, my poor child.'

'And I fear it is studiously overlaid and concealed,' sighed Miss Bridget.

Angela looked from one to the other; then exclaimed, 'There's not a bit of help or comfort in anything! It is of no use talking. Nothing--nothing will ever touch it.'

The vast grief she meant, and Miss Isabella understood her. 'Yes, truly there are times when all we have trusted in falls--falls away and leaves us alone.'

'And hating the humbug!' cried Angela, though even as she spoke she was startled at her words; but the hard wretchedness of the past days, when all she had been wont to hear of as comfort seemed but child's play to the intensity of her grief, had exacerbated her against the whole system in which she had been bred, so that the very sight of Clement brought an angry sense of mockery.

Miss Bridget was shocked at the language; but her sister understood better. 'Yes, Bridget, the dear child is feeling the desolation that sooner or later comes to all who have been content with unrealities! Most cruel, but better than the delusion.'

Bridget quoted, 'He feedeth on ashes; a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?'

'Ashes! ashes indeed!' cried Angela passionately, as she looked at the black paper with grey crumbling edges that had once been a song, where she thought she met Charlie's heart. 'The more one cares the more hateful it all grows!' and she crushed the fragments into tinder with the paper as she spoke.

'Dear, dear girl!' cried Isabella Hepburn; 'even as you crush that paper, throw aside all these vain shows that cannot profit, and simply cast yourself where Help is to be found!'

The real tender kindness, the promise of help, attracted the heart weary of its misery, and yet spurning all the love and help that had longed to aid all these days. She could in some strange way open to a fresh person when the heart was closed to her own kindred; besides, it was better to have the circumstances blamed than herself, and the effect of the good lady's appeal was to make her groan, with tightly compressed hands, 'Oh! no one can tell--no one can reach near the depth of this unhappiness. Think what I have done! and what it has cost me! And then it all seems--words--words--words--'

'Words--yes, till you find Him only in whom is Power to comfort. Is he not rousing your heart by this utter destitution and powerlessness to comfort, so as to bring you at once to lay the load on Him?'

The fervour of her voice carried force; and Angela said, 'If I could--Not to find it all words again--'

'Poor child! Did He ever turn from such as come to Him? Take your Bible in your hand, and at the foot of the Cross--not the material cross, of which you have been taught to make a plaything, but the spiritual Cross--cast your sorrows and your sins; believe, and be healed.'

'Believe! believe!' broke forth the girl. 'I suppose I do believe! I very nearly didn't when I found it all sounded so inadequate and empty!'

'He only can be her Teacher,' whispered Miss Bridget; but her sister, with true warmth of love and hope, said, 'He is teaching her;--but, dear Angela, we will do our best by praying for or with you, or pointing the way to the best of our power.'

At that moment Stella came in, and after quietly giving her hand to the visitors, she said, 'Please, Angel, Clement wants to know if you have the key of the walnut-press.'

'No! I don't know,' she crossly said, after feeling in her pocket in vain.

'Most likely it is in the pocket of your blue skirt,' said Stella. 'May I go and look?'

'No! I won't have my things pulled about! I don't believe it's there. What does he want?'

Stella reluctantly answered, 'We are getting the Church ready; he wants the pulpit-banner with the triangles.'

To the visitors this sounded like profane play at such a time. 'Poor child!' they said; 'are these the devices that fritter away the deep lessons of grief?'

'Stella has devices enough,' muttered Angela under her breath; but the little maiden answered, 'We don't want to be sad;' but, spite of the pensive gentle tone, it seemed to the Hepburn sisters mere levity and desire to escape sorrow.

However, they rose to take leave, telling Angela they would always be at her service; and as she accompanied them through the hall, came Clement on the wake of his messenger, in distress for the key. She dashed impetuously up-stairs--found it where Stella had suggested, and flew down again with it.

'There! I've done with it! I'm sick of it all!'

'What?' asked the astonished Clement.

'I loathe it all,' she repeated. 'It is all of a piece--all ashes instead of bread.'

'You are not mimicking the Hepburns,' said her brother. 'I beg your pardon,' he instantly added.

'Mimicking! No, but like them I have learnt to rate all this frippery at its worth! If you had any depth of feeling, you would loathe it as I do. But that's the way you palter with truth and reality--deceiving and deceived.'

The voice and flash in her eyes directed these last words on Stella; but cutting short the reply that Clement was beginning, she again flew up-stairs, leaving the other two aghast.

'This is a new phase!' said Clement.

'I wonder if grief drives people into a sort of distraction,' said Stella, in a tone of excuse.

'Had the Hepburns been talking to her?'

'Yes; I thought she looked, when I came in, as if they had been some comfort to her.'

'Ah!'

She had never heard such a sigh from him. In amaze she said, 'They are so good. I thought great troubles made little differences be forgotten.'

'True! It is their genuine goodness that makes me fear.'

'If that made her quite--in earnest?' asked Stella.

'I wish Mr. Fulmort could have come before Monday!' ejaculated Clement. 'She's past me!'

Then it struck him that he was talking to little Stella as to a woman, and looking to see whether she had become one, he saw new depths in her eyes. 'Well, Stella, if she deserts I must trust to you,' he said. 'Have you seen much of her state of mind?'

'Not much,' said Stella. 'I think,' and her eyes filled with tears, 'that it is so much worse for her than for any of us--that she is like one bruised all over, who can't bear the least touch, and it comes on her all the more to-day, because she has been occupied by Felix hitherto, and now he wants her less.'

'But is not she specially unkind to you, Stella?'

'Oh! don't call it that. I believe she can't bear to see me, because I put her so in mind of dear Baby.' And the bright tears dropped.

The simple-hearted child had no idea of any deeper and more personal cause of irritation; nor was it possible to pursue the subject, for whereas the innocent's entrance to Paradise was not to cost the central feast of the Christian year one wreath, Angela's defection threw much toil upon her. The funeral was to be late on the Saturday afternoon, for the convenience of poor Yates's friends; and all must be finished before, with the help of Bernard, Lance, and Will Harewood, who had come down, like the brother he was, and was a welcome assistant to Clement, just as Angela's secession seemed like the last straw that would break the camel's back!

The best exhilaration was perhaps an occasional visit to the painting-room, where Felix and Geraldine were so peacefully thankful to be together again, that they hardly breathed a word to one another. And there was comfort too in finding how much the tone of young Light was softening from its hard defiance. Lance, who had a good deal of experience, and was to the young tradesmen at Bexley much what he had been to the choristers at Minsterham, had devoted himself to the sick lad, and had certainly produced an effect upon him.

Felix was recovering strength quickly. As there was an awkward step into the painting-room, he begged the next day to perform the journey on his own feet; and though he needed both the balustrade and Clement's arm, and was still sharply pained by any sidelong movement, this was wonderful progress in so few days. Here he meant to be during the funeral, and to hear the service through the window opening into the transept. There were many dissuasions, but he was for the first time resolute on his own will, both to listen and to be alone. 'It is not nearly so likely to overcome me,' he said, 'as if any one were with me. I shall lie quietly back, and listen as to a most soothing strain!'

'Yes,' argued Cherry; 'but why risk it?'

'I cannot do the last thing for my boy, but it is the nearest I can come to it! The son of my right hand, as Father said! So he has been; I only know now what an incentive his dependence was, and how this loosens me from the world.'

'Please don't say that! We have been too much frightened, and you are getting well so fast.'

'I think so!' he acquiesced, but without much elasticity. 'Yet it was a great element of thankfulness that night, and is so still, though the air seems empty without his constant music.'

Many a note of praise was to come to his ears that day, as the choir preceded their little member across the lawn to the Church gate. Their voices predominated in the Psalms; and the Lesson, read by Mr. Colman, the vicar of poor Yates's parish at Ewmouth, was almost inaudible through the window; but the Lord's Prayer at the graves came to his ear like 'the voice of many waters;' and the final hymn, the same which had been last on Theodore's lips, was sung by the tones of a multitude, and thrilled mightily through the summer air.

Felix was not the worse, though afterwards three doctors came up and tormented him, ending by allowing him to do whatever suited his own feelings and discretion, only bidding him not persevere in what pained him, and to rest thoroughly between every exertion. He asked no questions, and seemed quite satisfied; but Clement was more explicit in his inquiries in private, and was told that where there was so little power of examination, it was impossible to certify whether any harm was done beyond the undoubted sprain, and that this might make itself felt for months, even years, without anything but muscles being in fault; nor could either of the May physicians detect any cause for alarm, except a vague impression that the countenance was more changed than was accounted for by the pain or loss of blood. There had been from the first an indescribable stricken look, less evident now as the face varied with animation, but recurring in repose, and taking away that youthfulness that had endured so long.

Nothing of all this was said beyond Clement's study; the others remained happy in the verdict of remarkable improvement. Dr. May had brought a note from his daughter.

DEAREST CHERRY,

I long to come, and dare to think I should be welcome, but Tom will not let Papa bring me. At least I know it is all right. I knew it would be. Lives with so many bound up in them are not so lightly wrenched away. The world cannot grow dark by losing the selfless. All my soul is with you. Your dear little Theodore has not lived in vain. Your ways--all of you--to him have been bitter reproof to me. Write to me all I cannot pick out of Papa. I hope Lancelot is looking better. Tell him I shall try his 'Lightning Messages,' as soon as I can play them without my eyes swimming or my voice getting upon the howl.

With my dear love, Your affectionate G.M. MAY.

Cherry gave the note to Lance to read, expecting to hear no more of it; but he brought it out in the late evening as she was settling some Pursuivant business with him, in preparation for his departure by the early train on the Monday. 'Do you want this?' he asked.

'You may keep it if you like.'

He sighed, holding it close. 'I say--does he know--the Squire?'

'Of her coming over? No; I don't think any one saw her.'

'He ought. I had begun to think so before, but this note convinces me on whose account she came.'

'I don't imagine she knew she came on any one's account in particular.'

'All the nicer of her, but so much the worse for me. Look here, Cherry. Did you know I had been at Stoneborough on Monday? Well, she showed plain enough how it was. Every hope seemed gone--crushed--done for. I was so dazed, that if you said it was I who upset the boat, I shouldn't wonder. I had lived upon the thought ever since Christmas. O Cherry, I do love her so!' cried the poor lad, quite beyond his usual reserved self-control.

'Yes; she is very bright and sweet,' said Cherry, by way of sympathy.

'The Daisy! the light of every place she goes to!' he went on. 'How different she made it all last winter! and I was fool enough to think--Well, it is no good to talk of Monday morning, but it was just falling from Paradise to the abyss; and all the night after I was savage with them all for having dragged me back--nearly mad more than once, I believe. Then in the morning, when I had just stumbled out into church, not able to put two thoughts together, but with only sense enough to know that if I laid my love and my life on the Altar as best I could, God would take them and make the right thing of them somehow--I looked up, and saw her in the morning sunshine clinging to me--the dear thing--then I did believe God had given her to me.'

'Dear Lance! still--'

'No; I understand now. The fancy bore me up from I don't know what, till I had got myself in hand again; but when I look at it reasonably, I see she was glad to find me alive, out of common humanity, and because she thought she had vexed me; but as to the real feeling, this note shows plainly enough where that goes.'

'If it were so, there would hardly be such openness of expression.'

'Do you think so?' (eagerly, then catching himself up). 'No; it is only that the consciousness has never been brought out.'

'I don't believe he will ever voluntarily bring out anybody's consciousness.'

'Then he ought! Why is he to debar himself from happiness, and disregard other people's feelings? I tell you, it is positively wrong to keep hanging about him and hampering him. You would do much better to leave him to be happy, and come and let us get on together as we can at home. You might make it just tolerable!'

'My poor Lancey,' said Cherry, smiling, 'things are hardly so far advanced; but if they were, you would be my best dependence.'

'But you'll tell him? And let no fancy stand in the way of his--of their happiness.'

'Tell? You mean of her coming over? Very well, if you think it right. Nay, indeed, it is not the wish to keep him to myself, but the assurance of his resolution--and, dear old Lancey, I don't like your going back to the old mill without the bird in your bosom.'

He hid his face in both his arms as he sat over the table, but recovering himself, said, 'Never mind! Hoping for him is some hope, and there's too much on hand for being down in the mouth. It will all come right somehow,' he repeated, secure in that faith, even under his sense of disappointment; but after all, is not a generous consent the best balm in disappointment?

After this conversation, Cherry and Lance were struck, amid a somewhat astonished congregation, when the next day, the Vicar in his pulpit gave out in his clear ringing voice, like a trumpet proclamation, his text, 'And His Banner over me is Love.'

The church was quite full. The beauty of its musical services had of late rendered it a resort from Ewmouth, and the present occasion had attracted every one connected with the persons concerned in the accident, as well as many of the curious. Mr. Colman, whose despair was the young clerkhood of Ewmouth, had protested against having to preach; and indeed Clement felt that he had a word to say, for had not the week been one of intensified feeling, and deepened experience? Yet even his brothers and sisters were not only sorry when they found this task unexpectedly lapsing on him, but feared that he was hardly adequate to the occasion. In general he was a careful preacher, very exact, and rather tediously accurate in citing arguments, much given to similitude and mystical interpretation, and instructive and interesting in a certain degree; but without much fire or individuality, and, as the Hepburn clique asserted, deficient in the root of the matter.

But his voice made Cherry look at him, and his countenance not only glowed with unusual colour, but had a dignity and impressiveness that assured her that she should hear something different from usual, after a text so unlikely for a funeral discourse.

After twice proclaiming that Banner under which he served, he slowly and distinctly spoke those other words, '"One shall be taken and another left. They say unto Him, Where, Lord?" Yes! Strange, startling, arbitrary, as seem often the calls to the soldiers in Christ's army, each is at its true time, for the choice is made in Love.' Then came the description of the mighty host, of their Leader and their conflict, steadfast in the Name that the day's Feast glorified, going forth conquering and to conquer, but, strange contradiction! under the Banner of Love. Love, by which their Captain had won, the work to which all were enlisted, the weapon wherewith each was to fight. Love had been their Captain's weapon, but they needed another, namely, Faith--for who could fight for a vision--who, without reliance on his general? Cause and Captain, and His power to save to the uttermost, were dwelt on in a few ardent words; and then came the picture of the serried ranks, standing fast in one army, warring as one band against darkness, foulness, cruelty, and all other evils, each fighting his individual battle in private, yet even thus striking as much for the cause as for himself. So they stood, soldiers in a campaign, aware that any moment might snatch them out of the ranks, yet also aware that not one would be taken save at the right moment when his warfare had come to the crisis. Our forefathers of old believed in glorious maidens who floated over the battle-field as choosers of the slain, and bore hero-spirits away to the Home of Triumph in chariots of light, to dwell among the brave. Like them we believe in the Triumphant Home, where dwell the brave who have stood steadfast in faith, joyful through hope, rooted in charity, bright in purity, dashing down the arrows of temptation that glint against their armour. Like them, we believe in a Chooser of the slain, bearing us, one by one, from our several posts, with longer or shorter warning, exactly when our warfare is accomplished, our individual battle is, or ought to be, won.

'Is or ought to be! That is the point. That is it on which depends the awful question, "Where, Lord?" which He who has seen beyond the grave, left unanswered. Where? Less than a week ago, on one of the days especially given to us for joy and gladness, in the very height of our mirth, came the moment of danger to fifteen of us. For thirteen of us, thanks have been today returned. "Where, Lord?" has not been said of us, but has not its echo been with us? Where? When I look back on duties neglected, on self-complacencies, on purposes fulfilled on the surface but not in the spirit, on cold-hearted devotions, on a thousand treasons against the Banner of Love, I can only cry out, "Where Lord?" and bless Him that it is the Lord my Redeemer, Who looks mercifully on His unprofitable servants, of whom the question is asked, and Who has spared me for a little space. He calls in due season. But whether the summons be welcome or the reverse, does not depend on its finding us in sunshine summer pleasure, or upon a bed of pain. No--it depends on whether we are really in our camp, our face to the foe, our ensign above us, no treason or desertion at heart. Then, spite of short-comings and failures, with the Banner over us that is Love, we shall know that death is victory; and "Where, Lord?" will be answered for ever by "Him Who liveth and was dead, and is alive for evermore."'

Felix, from his window, caught the texts, and noted the breathless hush. The Vicar of Ewmouth said, as he took leave, 'Thank you. You have touched hearts I could not reach.'

And Lance followed Clement to the library, and begged for the sermon for the Pursuivant. 'I know they would read it at Bexley, and if they care for it as I do, it ought to tell. I never heard you go on like that!'

'Here are my notes, but they will do you little good; I could not write last night.'

'You came up late enough, though!'

'I had to make it up in thought and prayer.'

'A better thing, it seems,' said Lance. 'It is a sermon to set one going, however things look!'

He was nearly at Bexley the next morning by the time Felix had fulfilled his intention of coming down-stairs, and had taken his seat in the Squire's chair before the writing-table, but with his back to the door whence the musical hum would never more issue. Cherry wanted to have put it off; and Clement had proposed an exchange of sitting-rooms; but he had said such things were best faced at once, while no association made much difference.

Cherry was with him, looking over the letters of inquiry and condolence, and sorting out those which she would answer at once, or he undertake by degrees--looking too at the first Pursuivant in which for at least twelve years he had had no share, and which, he said, told him more about the accident than he had yet known.

'Lance has fared better than could have been hoped,' he said. 'I feared for both chest and head.'

'I believe he was very ill the first night,' said Cherry.

'Then--was it my fancy, or did not I hear Gertrude May's voice?'

'How could you hear it?'

'Through the open window, at the hall-door, as Tom May was going. Did she come over with the carriage, good girl?'

'Yes; but we never guessed that you knew it.'

'Many things were borne in on me in a passive sort of way,' said Felix, 'and among them the trust that she was as good an elixir to the boy as in the winter.'

'Quite true! I believe the glow she excited saved him from an illness; but he has come to another conclusion since.'

'Well--what?'

'I should not tell you, but for his entreaty. He thinks she cares less for him than for you.'

'Nonsense! He may put that out of his head, poor boy.'

The colour mounted in his bloodless cheek, but the decision of the tone satisfied Geraldine.

At that moment, however, the door was gently opened, and Stella, her cheeks more deeply tinted than their wont, quietly said, 'Brother, Captain Audley is here. He wants to know whether you are well enough to see him.'

Cherry divined what was coming; but Felix exclaimed, 'Captain Audley! How kind! Tell him I am quite ready.--But you had better make yourself scarce, Cherry; the poor man has met one lady already, and I can't answer for the consequences of his falling in with another.'

There he was interrupted by her contention with his instinctive impulse to rise and give her his arm--a token of improvement; for whereas yesterday he had apologised whenever she crossed the room without him, to-day he began getting up, but was checked by the twinge betrayed by lips and brow, and as Lord Gerald had been fortunately left ashore, Cherry professed to have her most constant supporter.

Another moment, and Captain Audley crossed her, and bowed to her, as she repaired to the drawing-room, from the window of which she saw the two young things, not idling--Stella never dawdled--but cutting flowers, and filling the whole stock of vases which she had brought out, to renew the cheerfulness of the house for its convalescent master.

The sight was pretty, but Cherry wondered whether she ought to go out and protect her little sister's peace, deciding however, that whatever harm there was must have been done already, and that accessibility was her best condition for the present; and so she sat down to begin some of the numerous letters, though their subject was most incongruous with that of her anticipations, and she wrote with divided attention, till Felix came into the room.

'Cherry,' said he, deliberately placing himself on the settee, 'Had you any notion of this?'

'Only the last day or two, very dimly. Has it come to anything?'

'That I want to ascertain. Which did you think it was?'

'The poor little star, I'm afraid.'

'Why afraid?'

'Because there must be breakers ahead, and that poor little dear need not have been molested for years to come.'

'Is she molested?'

'Look! Ah, no! you can't turn; but if you could see them on the lawn!'

'She is such a child. She might be with him as simply as with Will.'

'I'm afraid that is over. Is not the Captain dead against it?'

'No; that's the odd thing. She seems to have vanquished him on the spot by one glint of her bonnie blue een, and he has not the heart to say No; but the worst of it is, he has no power.'

'He should not have let his son loose here.'

'So he allows, and that I saw clearer than he--which I did not, for my suspicions were in another direction, and I fear not without cause, on one side at least.'

'That's the horrid part of it!'

'So persuaded was I, that I went on at cross-purposes at first, and had to ask point-blank which of my sisters he meant, but I don't think I betrayed Angela. What is to be done about her?'

'Oh! tiresome love! Why could they not let you alone a little while? I think Angela has some notion, and that it must be what has made her so very queer.'

'Perhaps! I thought it was her share in the disaster, poor girl!'

'That would not have made her almost spiteful to poor little Stella.'

'Where is she now?'

'Gone to the penny-club business as usual.'

'I hope this will be over before she comes back. I must speak to my little one, only first let me hear what you think about it. The Captain has been most straightforward with me. He explained that he never was a favourite at home, and his marriage was a case of extorted consent. His wife was never cordially treated, and he could not forget the slights she received. Neither party wanted the other, and he had got into his lonely yachting existence, when, unluckily for him, his elder brother's death has rendered him and his boy important. The widow lives with the old people, and he thinks they want Charlie to marry the daughter. They want him to spend his vacations with them, and he is always shirking.'

'I have heard him bemoan himself.'

'The worst of it is, that if the old people take offence, they are likely to leave the bulk of the property to the grand-daughter. The Captain says he hates it all, and would freely let it go; but at Charlie's age, it would not be right to let him incur such a forfeit blindly.'

'They are both too young for anything.'

'Precisely so; but the thing must be either suffered or not, and it is a mere subterfuge to call it nothing, and let him be always about here. If the child knows nothing, the boy's mouth could be stopped, at least till he has taken his degree. I came to see whether that be still possible. You think not? Well, I have some hope of her simplicity. If not, what think you of this? We tell them they are a couple of babies, and bind the fellow to keep away somewhere till he has taken his degree, when it will either have blown over, or he can judge whether to take to a profession and endanger his prospects, and there will be some test whether he really cares for the poor little dear.'

'I'm afraid there is trial for her any way!'

'The difficulty I foresee, is in keeping the Captain up to anything. If he were set against it, our part would be much easier; but he seems to have surrendered at first sight of our Fair-Star, and he is weaker, more impulsive, and undecided than I could have conceived.'

'He has been indulging his feelings all his life. I should not wonder if Charlie were the more sensible.'

'Our other baby! So! I must see how far it has gone.'

'No! I'll call her. Don't move.'

'A shocking reversal,' resigning himself, 'but I believe you had rather. I don't mind walking; it is getting up and sitting down that beats me. Don't startle the child. There's still hope that he has not stirred the waters.'

Cherry had no such hope, as she stood at the conservatory door, calling Stella. Both came up to her; and as she sent the girl to her brother, Charlie looked at her with an anxious 'Well?' as the colour deepened in his honest face.

'I think your father is in the study,' she evasively said.

'Come, now, Miss Underwood, I am sure you know all about it. What sort of a chance have I?'

'I don't think you ought to have any chance at your age. Indeed, Charlie, I do wish you had let it alone for the present.'

'I assure you, I didn't know I wasn't going to let it alone; but what could I do when I found the dear little darling crying enough to overset a mill-stone? One couldn't but do one's best to comfort her; and when I found I had really got over the line, and been making sheer love, I could not but have it out and go on with it.'

'Then was it only that moment?'

'No! no! no! I'd known her for my Star, my light, my darling, ever since I can't tell when; but of course I knew what a shindy there would be, and as long as I could come here and look at her, I could have gone on quietly till I was of age, and could fight it out. Only when it came to her being lonely--'

'Do you think she knew it for what you say?'

Charlie shrugged his shoulders, laughed, and coloured.

'And your father?'

'That is comical,' he said confidentially. 'He was dead against it! hummed and hawed, called me no end of fools, said I should be cut off with a shilling, and told me how my grandmother bullied my poor mother. I'd hard work to haul him here, and he said it was only to beg the Squire's pardon, cram full of objections. Well, there was the darling girl gathering forget-me-nots in the garden, with Scamp and the doves round her. "That's she, bless her!" says I. "Is it she?" says he; and with that, he whips out of the skiff, leaving me to moor it, you see, looks her full in the face--I believe he hadn't seen a young lady to look at since my mother died--"Are you Charlie's little Stella?" says he; and behold, there he is, giving her a regular paternal kiss, before I could get quit of the boat. And when one's own father is all right, who is to make objections?'

Stella's examination had been short. Felix held out his hands, took hers, and gazing into her blushing face, said, 'Look at me, my child, and tell me if you know what Captain Audley is come for.'

She hung her flower-like head, and answered, 'I think I do.'

'And what do you think of it?'

'O Brother,' the eyes overflowed, 'I didn't know it was that, when he came and was so good to me, or I would not have been so unkind in all the trouble. I only thought how nice he was. Indeed it was not forgetting Tedo.'

'No, indeed, my sweet; that was the last thing I meant. Only, since you do know the meaning of it, tell me--whether you like it.'

'Like! O Brother! It did just seem to take away all the unhappiness. I couldn't help it, you know!'

'Ah! No, no, my dear, you didn't hurt me. Now will you be patient, so as not to get Charlie into trouble, and trust me?'

'Trust you, Brother?' in a tone of wonder, as if it would have been impious to do otherwise; and then she faltered, 'I thought Captain Audley didn't mind it much--for, Brother, he kissed me.'

'He is ready to like you with all his heart; but he has a father too, and can't do all he pleases. So you may have to be kept waiting to grow older.'

'Oh yes,' said Stella; 'I know I'm too young, and I could not go away from everybody for a long long time.'

So the edict was given in form, with more assumption of authority on Felix's part than had been his wont towards his sisters' lovers; but he saw it was the best way to spare the little maid from what might prove trifling and end in disappointment, and the young lover from unfair usage of his grandparents, and its punishment. Someone must be resolute, and the father would not; so the brother had to depict the impossibility of fostering an attachment between an undergraduate and a child, under the certainty of displeasing the head of the family.

Charlie argued that it was hard his father's consent should not suffice--that he cared not for the property--he would go to his uncle in Australia, become printer's-devil at Bexley--anything to be free to win his Cynosure, while his father seemed far more disposed to applaud him than to say, Nonsense; and it fell to Felix to explain that whatever course Charlie might decide on, it must not be till his Oxford career was ended, and that till then there must be neither engagement nor correspondence, and the vacation must be spent elsewhere, since daily meetings in present circumstances would be a wrong towards all parties concerned.

Captain Audley could not gainsay that this was both reasonable and honourable, and even reminded Charlie of an invitation from Lord Liddesdale, to pay a visit at his foreign embassy in the long vacation. Meantime there was to be nothing to bind either party; but as Charlie had to return to Oxford that night, a parting interview was allowed in the drawing-room, in which he raved a good deal, and she was very quiet and rational.

Then Felix was left to repose, which he so sorely needed as to have to give up both coming in to dinner, and driving to meet Mr. Fulmort.

'Sisters' lovers are tough customers,' he said. 'Thank you, Cherry,' as she elevated the front and lowered the back of his chair, so as to render it a couch; 'it is well for me that you would have nothing to say to the sculptor.'

She kissed him silently; and as she looked at the pallid sunken face, with the eyes closed, she recollected her declaration that he must be more to her dead than any other man alive, and though far from retracting the sentiment, she wished she had uttered nothing so ill-omened.

The effect on Angela was the present anxiety; and it was impossible not to feel it staved off by the announcement, through a school-child, that she was staying to dine and spend the rest of the day at Miss Hepburn's. Whatever this might portend, it was a present relief to Cherry, though Clement looked very gloomy upon it; and the Vicar of St Matthew's had not been many hours in the house before Cherry, rather to her own surprise, found herself invited into Clement's library, to assist at a council over the perplexing girl.

Neither brother nor sister could say more than that, up to the moment of the accident, she had been in her usual state of ultra-observance and ultra-gaiety, alike wilful and exaggerated, and that on finding herself the real delinquent in the fatal catastrophe, she had petrified into hard fierce reserve. On Sunday alone had she been at Church, and then had been absent from the Feast where all the family had met; she had thrown over all the little ecclesiastical offices that had been her pride and pleasure, and repelled all sympathy, except perhaps that of the ladies to whom she had been most opposed, and whom she had derided and contemned for years. Indeed, she might be said to have hoisted their flag, for the cross round her neck had been discarded, and her hair had descended from the stupendous fabric which no asseveration would avail to persuade the Miss Hepburns to be of native growth, and was now coiled about her head--with an effect, certainly, preferable in itself, save for the signification. Things were come to a droll pass, that the absence of Angel's lofty coiffure should be complained of by one vicar to the other; but Mr. Fulmort had been Angela's first guide, who had prepared her for Confirmation and Communion, and Clement had from the first looked to him to deal with her; but Mr. Fulmort was scarcely encouraging. 'Nothing will be gained by forcing me on her,' he said. 'If I cannot draw, driving will be of no avail.'

'If Miss Isabella has got hold of her,' said Cherry, 'she is likely to imitate the people in books whose first act of virtue is shunning their priest; and when Angel's conscience gets on the side of perverseness, there is no saying what she will not do.'

'One is so in the dark!' said Clement.

'I think I can guess the process,' said the elder clergyman. 'Only actual experience teaches that no system is infallible.'

'Of all plans of education, I should have chosen hers!' said Clement.

'So we trusted to the framework!'

'And how admirably it has answered with Robina, and many more.'

'As far as we see; but this is what I imagine this poor child's history. She has more vehemence and energy than depth, and her musical taste found ritual so congenial, that excitability passed for devotion, in spite of the lack of trustworthy fruit of submission or self-discipline.'

'I believe it did.'

'So she is in a manner justified in complaining that she was allowed to trust to the shell alone. She has been content with the outward form all this time; and when real sorrow makes her find its failure, she is naturally distrustful of the whole teaching that was to her mere surface work.'

'Nothing could be more ungrateful, or improper, than to charge it on you, Sir,' cried the younger vicar.

'Less unjust than you think, though there may be some human nature in it too. When my sister collected those girls, we thought, like most who try experiments, that we had a set of puppets, on whom certain wires must produce certain results--and if we saw untoward specimens, charged it on the want of our system.'

'The system is not ours, but Divine.'

'There was a Divine system in the Wilderness, but with how many did it succeed?'

'According to that,' said Clement, 'nothing would be anybody's fault.'

'And,' said Geraldine, 'did it not succeed with all the mighty men who overlived Joshua?'

'True; but even of that generation, who had never seen Egypt, there were many who lacked faith to drive out the Canaanites. It is the same story over and over again. People who have been led out of something like Egypt, are apt to think those secure who have never been from under the shadow of the Cloud, and have known no bread but manna. We forget how much depends on being "mixed with faith in the hearers."'

'Faith cannot be given from without,' said Clement.

'Certainly not; but looking back at our dealing with our earlier pupils, I suspect that we worked away with the peculiarities we had newly discovered, rather than with the great universal foundations. I am sure we did so with you, Underwood: though happily there was stuff enough beneath to prevent us from doing more than make you unnecessarily priggish.'

'Geraldine can testify that that was done to your hand, Sir,' said Clement, laughing. 'I believe I should have made any place I cared for odious in the ears of my family.'

'We did not know how much party spirit we infused, fancying that once in our groove all must go right. Now, I believe Angela ought to have been held back. She would have done better in a commonplace well-principled school.'

'I don't think her teachers were deceived in her,' said Cherry.

'No; but the observances which she genuinely enjoyed deceived herself. Probably at a dull bare service she would have been naughty and uninterested, but then she would have known her religion for what it was worth. I don't say that I see what ought to have been done, if we could begin over again; but I do see that she has found out her unreality in the time of distress, and concludes that the fault is in what we taught her. To use another metaphor, she thinks that because the Cross has been decked with flowers, it has been no Cross at all; but I trust she is learning the way thither.'

'By casting aside the means?' said Clement.

'Because to her they had not been means, but mirages. If I understand rightly, this is her first true awakening.'

'But is it to be a regular case of conversion?'

'I hope so. I pray so.'

'Is she to be left to these women, to learn contempt for the Sacraments and the Church?'

'Are they Churchwomen?'

'After a fashion! I don't believe they hold a single Catholic doctrine.'

'They never say the Creed--eh?'

Clement looked abashed.

'If she were likely to be led into an act of schism, it might be needful to interfere; but if they seem to be bringing her to the sense of repentance and individual spiritual contact, which is the essential need, resistance would do more harm than good.'

'Why should she not come the right way?'

'Do you remember Ezekiel's pure springs, which the evil shepherds had fouled with their feet, so that the flock could not drink thereof? Without classing you among evil shepherds, whatever I may do with myself, is it not natural to turn from what has been without benefit?'

'By her own fault. And is she to follow their ways, without check or warning?'

'They are communicants?'

'Four times a year. Frequent Celebrations seem to them superstitious and formal.'

'And irreverent,' added Cherry.

'Is it not doubtful whether our poor girl have been reverent? Should not we perhaps be keeping her back for a time?'

'Not for their reasons.'

'No; but if she be in the way to what she needs and we have failed to afford her, it seems to me that while it is within the Church, we had better abstain from distracting her attention by trying to make her do things in our own way.'

'Our way, Sir?' said Clement, whose mind was never rapid; 'it is the right way. I cannot understand sitting still to see my sister carried off into ultra Low Church.'

'Better that than incur the risk of taking party spirit for zeal and diverting her attention from vital religion to the excitement of persecution.'

'There's nothing that would gratify her more,' said Cherry.

'It is exceedingly mortifying,' added Mr. Fulmort, 'to see one's own child going over to a rival battalion, which disesteems our ensigns and war-cries; but by your own account it is no worse--the army is all one. And for ourselves, nothing can be more wholesome. I wish it all fell on me, since the mismanagement began with me; but unluckily it comes most heavily on you, both as brother and parish-priest.'

Clement was of course disarmed and humbled. 'No doubt you are right, Sir: I will try to accept the personal vexation as my due; I did not know how much it biassed me. Shall you take no notice?'

'I shall express the interest I feel as old friend and guide, but I shall not insist on confidence.'

He could afford to bide this time, for he contrived to give a parson's week, on finding how heavily this sad Whitsuntide had told upon Clement, coming at the end of a clergyman's hardest half-year. Change could not be had, for Felix was not fit for a journey, and was still so much disabled as to be unable to put on his clothes unaided; but nothing could be better for both brothers than the presence of this friend, bringing them fresh interests from the great arena of conflict between good and evil, and giving warm sympathy and satisfaction to their efforts in their own field. One of his scholars, at least, he confessed to have far surpassed his expectations. He had never expected to see his tall, docile, self-complacent chorister all the man that the Vicar of Vale Leston Abbas had become; but on the other hand, Angela, once almost his devotee, eluded him by every means in her power, and never willingly opened her lips in his presence. When at last he succeeded in catching her, and expressing surprise that she was rushing away when the church-bell was ringing, her reply was, 'I've done with those things!'

'With prayers?'

'With heartless forms.'

'So I should hope.'

'Let me go, Mr. Fulmort; I don't want to be ungrateful, but it is all one great mistake.'

'I am afraid you have found it so.'

His tone was sad, and made her exclaim, 'You feel it too, then? Oh, come and learn as I have learnt--see as I have seen!' Some men would have laughed at this sudden reversal of the order of things; but Mr. Fulmort felt the matter far too seriously, and the sound of inquiry he emitted encouraged her to go on. 'Oh; the hollowness of my old life--the utter lack of all aid or light when the hour of darkness came--the misery, the agony, that racked me all day and all night, when all you told me to trust to proved broken reeds. Would that I could proclaim to all what it was to see at last in Whom--in what assurance lies peace!'

'Yes, my child,' he said. 'There truly lies the only hope. May you be able to grasp it firmly, and for ever, and render the fruits of faith and repentance apparent in your life.'

'I shall never put my trust in my own works again. I hate them--I loathe them.'

'You cannot do better than repent, and bring them for forgiveness.'

'To the foot of the Cross?'

'Certainly.'

'Then you really see the hollowness and emptiness of the system of thinking them pardoned by a man's voice?'

'Did I ever tell you they were?'

She was a little conscience-stricken, but rallied enough to say, 'It is the whole principle of auricular confession, to which nothing shall ever bring me back. Not the utmost persecution!' and as he smiled a little, she added, 'It was all form and human intervention.'

'If you can say so from personal experience, Angela,' he replied, 'it proves how lamentably I have failed to express my doctrine and intention, and how vain it is for me to try to converse with you. Indeed, I only attempted it because I knew you had had a great shock, and were unhappy.'

'Unhappy till I turned my back on the world and its vanities, and beheld the true and simple way of salvation! Would you but let me show it to you!'

'My dear child, do you think I have feebly tried to follow my Master all these years, and never seen it? If I have so totally failed in guiding you to it, my words alone were in fault, and it is well that the one Truth has been brought to bear upon you. I thank Him for it, and pray that some day you may be led to full truth.'

There he quitted her; and she could report that Mr. Fulmort had tried to get her under his direction again, and that she had almost brought him to own the emptiness of the system that he inculcated. That he did not was, Miss Martha decided, wholly owing to the Old Adam.

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XLIV. THE FIDDLER'S RANCH

'The Vater Unser that I said Before I went to school, The prayers come ringing in my head Like ripples in a pool.' Veritas.

Angela's conversion, as her friends did not scruple to term it, had this happy effect at least of extinguishing her passion (if so it might be called) for Charles Audley. It was swallowed up in the general excitement; and once or twice Cherry had reason to think she had persuaded herself that she had voluntarily renounced him among other earthly vanities, such as her chignon, her church decorations, and her balls.

If she still felt any jealousy of Stella, it only showed itself in a pitiful contempt of the poor little unawakened creature, so contentedly deluded by ceremonies, and drifting into the jaws of this wicked world; but it was memorable that though she always opposed Stella's opinion, were it only on the weather, she never attacked her direct, nor reproached her, probably out of a certain discomfort which the little maid's simple answers always gave her.

Stella was Clement's mainstay this summer in the thousand and one inconveniences caused him by Angela's conscience in the thousand and one parish affairs in which she used to be his prime helper, but where she now disentangled the material and the spiritual, after the example of her advisers, though with a sauciness and vexatiousness of which they were incapable. Luckily no idea of pining after Charlie seemed to occur to Stella, and she devoted the time once spent on poor little Theodore to the many tasks that Angela had left on her hands and considered just fit for such a foolish little thing.

Any secrecy as to the possible relations with Charlie had proved unachievable, at least within the family. Charlie might be banished, but his father carried on the courtship with unblushing assiduity, viewing Stella as his special property, and being never happy without seeing her two or three times in a week. In truth, after so many years of morbid seclusion, the society of a family home--such as he had never known--was so delightful to him, that he could not stay away, and almost exposed himself to suspicion of being in search more of a wife for himself than his son.

The Kittiwake, where never woman had set foot, and where Charlie, in spite of Angela's bantering solicitations, had never ventured to invite her, was urgently pressed on the whole party for any excursion imaginable; and when it became evident that both the Captain and Stella greatly wished it, the seniors consented to a day's sail along the coast, it being decided in council between Wilmet and Cherry that sea air might bring freshness back to Felix's looks.

The morning was all that could be wished, but the post brought an appointment from a man of business to see the Squire respecting some land which was to be secured in East Ewmouth, for the foundation of buildings that might serve to Christianize the straggling population there, making a fresh district from both parishes. For it was to this purpose they had decided to devote the tithes cut off from Vale Leston, since the new tenements actually stood in that parish, and the work at home was now forward enough to enable the extension to be made.

Great was the lamentation at this inopportune arrival; but Felix owned himself glad of it, and did not look equal to a long day's fatigue. Clement also remained to assist at the consultation, and after the conference, walked to the spot with the agent.

Returning soon after the hour for the second post, Clement went to the study, where, as he entered, Felix, who was seated at his writing-table, lifted up his face from his supporting hand, very pale, and with eyes swimming in tears, but with a look of rest and relief that reminded the Vicar of that which had responded to the tidings that their little Theodore was beyond the reach of harm. He held up something, saying, 'Look!'

'The photograph of my father.'

'See there,' pointing to the corner.

'T.E.U. Edgar's copy! Is he found?'

'Thank God! There is hope that the lost is found!' He rested his head against Clement, heaving a mighty irrepressible sob, physically painful, but full of relief. Those two had become inexpressibly much to one another during these four years, and far more during the last six weeks.

'From Travis?' asked Clement presently, observing the handwriting of the letter on the table.

'Yes, good faithful fellow! Would you read it to me, Clem? I cannot get on;' and he cleared his eyes of the blinding tears. 'I could only see that there was hope at the last.'

'Of finding him?'

'Not here. No. He begins by telling us the dear fellow is dead. I think it was something violent, and that he tried in vain to save him. Let me hear, that we may see whether there be anything we can spare Cherry.'

Clement thought Felix even less fit for any shock or agitation than his sister, but he could only make him lie back on his couch, whence he watched with earnest eyes for every word.

The narrative is, however, here given more fully than it could be written, especially as one portion of the history was reserved for Marilda alone.

Ferdinand Travis had inherited a considerable claim to mining property in the south-eastern portion of California. He had gone to America, intending to dispose of it, but had ended by settling down there, naming it Underwood, and doing his best to exert an influence for good on the lawless races he found around him. He had enough in common with them to obtain a partial success where another would have failed; his little township was thriving, and to some degree civilized, and he had even been able to obtain the building of a church and residence of a clergyman with a kind of mission to the Indians. All around him was safe and peaceable; but between him and the nearest cities on the Pacific lay a tract subject to the forays of a tribe in the tiger stage that precedes the abject decline of the unhappy red-skins. The district was gradually becoming settled, but neither village nor traveller was secure from horrible raids and savage massacres, and save by letter-carriers, who trusted to speed, the region was seldom traversed except by parties numerous enough to protect themselves.

Such a surveying party Ferdinand had joined, intending to transact some affairs at San Francisco; and on the third day of his journey, when descending a steep hill-side, the war-shouts of the Indians were heard, and presently about thirty beplumed and painted savages were seen evidently triumphing after a victory.

The travellers scarcely uttered a word, but settled themselves in their saddles, and drew their revolvers, then charged the foe with the full impetus of a down-hill gallop. It was the affair of a moment; the Indians threw themselves on their horses and scoured away like the wind, while the new comers found that they had been exulting over the slaughter of only two men and one little child, whom they had been proceeding to mangle after the custom of their tribe. One victim was quite dead, and already scalped and scored; the other, though senseless, stripped, and gashed in many places, was still breathing, as was the child--a boy of six or seven, though shot through the breast, and the mark of the scalping-knife already begun on his head.

The keen wiry dauntless fellow, who acted as guide, driving two of the party in a much enduring waggon, opined that they came from Fiddler's Ranch, about two miles off, and recognized the living one as the Fiddler himself--the best company, he guessed, between this and the Atlantic. It was a service of danger to lift the bodies into the vehicle, for the Indians might be hovering about in ambush to fall on the rescuers in great numbers; but the transit was safely performed; up to the stockade and ditch protecting the township called Fiddler's Ranch, whence issued a population of the rudest description, vituperating the Indians, and bewailing 'poor Tom the Fiddler and little Jerry, the smartest, cutest little critter that side of the mountains.' 'Pretty nigh gone, stranger; bring him in, lay him by the side of his father; those brutes of Injuns fix their work off too handsome--best if neither opens his eyes again.'

A low frame-house, the outer half-store, also post-office, newspaper office, photographic studio--such was the place into which the father was carried, Ferdinand following with the child into an inner room, where were some appliances of comfort, a neatly ordered bed, a few chairs, a table, and some drawings fastened to the wall--among them a photograph that arrested Ferdinand's attention. Had he not gazed at the likeness from his bed in Mr. Audley's room? did he not know it in the family parlour, and in Clement's cell at St Matthew's? It was the likeness of Edward Underwood!

He turned hastily to the bed. Yes, the face, weather-stained yet ghastly, overgrown with neglected beard, stained with blood and dust, still showed the delicate chiselling of eyebrow and nose, the Underwood characteristic!

Such remedies as the Ranch afforded produced tokens of reviving power, and Ferdinand could not believe the wounds necessarily mortal. The rest of the party were about to pursue their journey, and through them he sent the most urgent entreaties and liberal promises that could induce a surgeon to take his life in his hand, and cross that dreadful waste. The signature of F.A. Travis was well known in the West.

While Ferdinand was washing away the soil from the face once so fair and brilliant, bringing out more of the familiar features, consciousness returned in groans; and when at last the lids were raised, and showed the well remembered deep blue eyes, the first word that struggled articulately from the lips was, 'Jerry! Baby!'

'Here!' Ferdinand laid the nerveless hand on the little flaxen head, still motionless.

That was enough at first, but as the tide of life began to flow more freely, Edgar called the child again; and as no answer came, used his hand to feel, writhed his head to look. 'Jerry!--what--asleep? They've not hurt him!' The last words in a tone of full sense and anguish.

'He does not seem to suffer,' said Ferdinand. 'I have sent for a doctor, and I trust to keep you both up till he comes.'

'A doctor! Here?' with a contemptuous groan. 'Help me, I must see him!' with a vain effort for a fuller view of the child, who was on a sort of crib by his side, lying with closed eyes, and a beautiful waxen death-like face. 'Lift me!'

It cost sobs of agony, though that seemed lost in the intense gaze. 'Is his wound there?' he asked, looking at the bandaged head.

'That was the scalp-knife, but it has done little harm. The wound is here, but the ball passed out at the back.'

'And is here,' said Edgar, laying his hand on his body. 'I had him before me on my horse, as we always went, my brave boy! One week more, and we should have been beyond the miscreants' reach!' and he sank back with a piteous wailing moan, too weak and shattered for demonstrative grief, though utterly crushed. 'Put him by me,' he added presently; 'if there be any life left in him, he will like it.'

'I am afraid of hurting you.'

'Nothing will make much odds now. We are both done for, and I am glad it is both, if it was to be. My poor little chap, we couldn't do without each other!'

Then, as Ferdinand placed the child where his restless hand could stroke the cheek, tender parental pride revived. 'A jolly little face, isn't it? if you saw it like itself. Oh, if I could see those eyes open for once!'

There seemed a revival of strength; but with the knowledge of the bullet-wound and the six frightful gashes of the Indian knives, Ferdinand felt that a few questions must be risked, lest this should be a delusive rally, and speech suddenly fail. 'You know me, Edgar?'

'Fernan Travis! Ay. You're not much altered! But how did you know me? I'm not much like the swell I used to be! Ah! I see!' as Ferdinand signed towards the photograph. 'How are they all?'

'All well, when last I heard. Longing only to hear of you.'

'Better not.'

'And this is your boy. His mother?' he added, with more hesitation; and it brought a fierce look.

'Never had one in any real sense. She left him at ten months old--always hated him. But he's all right. You'll find the certificate in that old green case.'

'Of his baptism?'

'No. Such matters don't come handy here, and she wasn't one to concern herself about them. I don't know that she was the better for that! No: it's my marriage lines! I kept them for his sake, though I gnashed my teeth at them often enough.'

'Pray let me baptize him!' entreated Ferdinand, with an imploring accent, contrasting so curiously with his bronzed face and black beard, that Edgar again smiled, saying, 'You've not turned parson?'

'No, but this is a case of necessity.'

'Oh! all's one to me,' interrupted Edgar, with a sort of instinctive sneer to cut short a Clementine discourse; 'since this business must come to their ears at home, they may as well be at peace about one of us.'

'And his name?'

'His eyes--you'll never see them--but they have so much little Cherry's wistful look, that I've called him Gerald; you may tack Felix to it. No mockery! He's been the happiest little soul that ever was born, happiest maybe if he goes on as he is, knowing nothing about it.'

As Fernan repeated the Lord's Prayer, first learnt from Lance, the tears gathered and softened Edgar's eyes, and made a mist as he saw the pale brow sprinkled, and heard the Holy Name.

'You said that once for him. Let me hear the old echo again. I wanted to teach him, but it never came right.'

Ferdinand was so thankful that the doxology came from his heart, though at the moment he saw that the poor child had been almost baptized in blood, for Edgar's caresses had displaced the bandage and some bright red drops had started, and mingled with the water, and he could not help silently tracing the cross with his finger before kissing and wiping it away, and re-adjusting the handkerchief. 'He is warmer,' he said. 'See, his lips are less deathly.'

'The death flush,' said the father.

'It need not be. I will try the brandy again. I thought we got a little down before.'

'I tell you he shall not be tortured! Why should he wake to an hour's conscious misery? I could not bear it! I say I will not have it done!' and he stretched out his hand as in protection.

'Nay, why should not he live? There can hardly be any vital part here, and it has just missed the spine. Let me try!'

'To make him a wretched orphan. Another burthen to Felix.'

'That need not be a scruple now.'

'He has not married Marilda after all!'

'No; but he has come into the property.'

He was surprised at the effect of his words, 'What! what! Felix! Vale Leston?'

'Yes, he has been living there these four years.'

'Not married?'

'No.'

'Then that child is heir to all! Bless me! Felix at Vale Leston! It makes one believe in a Providence at last.'

He anxiously watched Ferdinand's endeavours to restore his little son, as though divided between the wish for his life and the apprehension of his visible suffering; but though the stimulant was certainly swallowed, and produced a slight revival of pulse, the lethargy continued.

Edgar's own wounds, except the rifle-shot in the body, were the lacerations with which the Indians mark their victims, not mortal in themselves; but he never admitted any hope for himself, and though for one day and night his recovery seemed possible, after that the wounds assumed an appearance which the experienced inhabitants, many of them fugitive Secessionists, pronounced to be fatal.

He talked a good deal at times, and was eager to hear all Fernan could tell him about home; and though he gave no connected history, it was possible to piece together the sad story of his life from his rambling talk.

The sight of Spooner, the manager, in a cab, had convinced him that his forgery had been detected, and he could hardly credit the assurance that it was known to no creature save Marilda and Ferdinand himself, whom she had instantly despatched to assure him of pardon and secresy.

'No! did Polly do that? A golden girl I knew she was; but that's sublime! Yet I might have known she had held her tongue, since Felix and Cherry are alive and well! Good old girl. I say, Travis, you must have her after all. She deserves it!'

His relief was intense, when he thought of his son, in finding no brand affixed to the name he had never dared own again, except at the two most unhappy events of his life, his duel and his wedding.

'Ourselves, our souls, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice,' he said. 'Those were little Lance's words--the chief reason he assigned for burying himself at Bexley. A fanatic craze of course, but I never got the words out of my head, and I'm sure I've been the sacrifice, soul and body, though not what you'd call a holy or a reasonable one! Well, whatever hindered him, it was well for him!'

He explained that Allen had been a feeble speculator, but plausible, of personal good faith, and perniciously sanguine. His schemes had chiefly devoured Thomas Underwood's legacy, while as to the other debts, Edgar treated them lightly, and though he was much moved at Geraldine's exertions to pay them, he called it an infatuation in Felix to have allowed it.

After his flight to Ostend, Edgar had joined Allen's company at Strasburg. Failure had disgusted him with painting, and the free wandering life had long fascinated him, while with the Zoraya he had a standing game at coquetry. Though her name was Hungarian, she was almost stage-born, and her nationality was harder to analyze than Ferdinand's. She had sung ever since she could speak, and been bred to the boards, but as, in spite of her splendid beauty, she lacked dramatic talent, and her voice had been too early strained, she was never more than a third-rate prima-donna, with airs and graces that were Edgar's sport and titillation, while to her he was the handsomest and most gentlemanly man in the company, with wit and breeding of which she was half afraid.

When Edgar found that the unhappy occurrence at Pau was known, he asked eagerly after Alice, blessing the kindness that had brought her home; but he lived where life was held too cheap to make him greatly heed blood-guiltiness; nor had he deemed the wound more than the just penalty of forcing the duel on him, viewing the fatal result chiefly as an accident. But Zoraya had seen Alice shriek and faint, and Edgar falter and blush, and knew that this pretty English doll had been the cause of his killing his man. Thenceforth passion and jealousy awoke in her, and made her whole being centre in the determination to turn his trifling into earnest. Her beauty became more striking, her songs more effective in the absorption of her soul, and her eager pursuit became as often oppressive as amusing. When he had remained in Egypt with the apparently dying Major Harewood, nothing could persuade her that the Englishman was not connected with Alice; and when he joined the troop again, she hailed him like a truant slave returned to his bondage.

Why had he not broken from it? Had the telegram announced Felix, he could not have helped lingering for a sight of his face in spite of everything; but Wilmet, in her cold severity, and her grief too, he could not encounter, especially as Zoraya had threatened to descend upon him and 'imagine the meeting.'

So he drifted back to the 'company,' which had by force of custom become a sort of home, and was his sole resource. 'Rattle-snake and frog,' he said; 'of course the frog succumbs at last.'

But that had not been till the retirement of the Allens had left him to the mercy of the Prebels, and when the absence of Mrs. Allen's unimpeachable respectability left the company at the mercy of scandal; and a little exaggeration of evil report, with a few tears and heroics, brought him passively to surrender his hand to his pursuer, and they were married in New Zealand before proceeding to America to 'star it' in the Southern States.

Even then his affectionate nature would have opened to family love; but with the attainment of her object, Zoraya's passion ceased, and she viewed him as a master to be resisted. His ideal of a wife had been formed on very different women, and incensed her imperious temper; and when her violence was met by cool sarcasm, she was lashed to frenzy. Her repugnance to motherhood completed his disgust. He deliberately told Fernan that first and last he had never seen a spark of even animal yearning towards the infant, only angry impatience of the discomfort and inconvenience, and contempt of the pleasure it gave him. She was enough among the advocates of advanced women's rights to learn to admire her own scorn of maternity, and but for an old negress, whom he had hired on the poor little thing's unwelcome entrance into the world, its chances of life would have been few.

So they had rubbed on, till at Chicago Edgar had fallen ill with inflammation on the chest and throat, and was left voiceless, hovering on the verge of decline. He was still confined to his room when he received a note from Zoraya to inform him that she could not be burthened with the support of an invalid, and had therefore made other arrangements, in pursuance of which she enclosed a deed of divorce. To him it was liberty, and satisfaction that she had not heart enough to rob him of his child, but it was also destitution. However, there was compassion enough for the sick and deserted vocalist to render landlord and doctor merciful, and he was allowed to liquidate his debt by taking portraits as soon as he could reach the drawing-room of the boarding-house and wield his crayons.

'I don't know whether the divorce would hold water at home,' he said; 'but keep it, to guard the boy. If he is heir to anything she will scent it, like a vulture, carrion. Stay, while I can sign it, you draw up a form, giving the custody of him to my brothers, and forbidding her having anything to do with him.'

He was uneasy till this was done. His success at Chicago had given him hopes of gaining a livelihood with his brush, but he soon found photography too strong for him, and could meet with no employment as a violinist. His health was too much shattered for settled exertion, and though he said little of his struggles and sufferings, they must have been frightful, as he dropped from one failure to another, striving as he had never striven before, till he actually became a teamster to a party prospecting far West. 'I can't think how they came to take such a screw!' he said; 'but I believe they forgave me my child for the sake of my fiddle. Such a child as it was too, not eighteen months old, but never fretting for a moment. Most of the way I carried him strapped on my back, and always felt his little hand in my beard, and heard his voice in my ear as blithe as a katydid, and he was always ready to play, till he was a regular pet-kitten among them. Ah, well, Jerry, you and I have had good times together. How will he ever stand the high polite at home? Pah! You must have him out now and then, and let him breathe the prairies, and gallop after the buffaloes.'

It had ended in Edgar's settling down on this spot, having found the Editor of the 'Soaring Eagle of the Far West' closing with a favourable offer at the other end of the Continent. 'Tell Felix I took to his trade,' he said. 'Take home a sheet or two to be preserved alongside of the Pursuivant in the family archives. It is dated Violinia, a free translation of Fiddler's Ranch. Before I came, it used to be Broken-head Ranch; but it got the other name when I took to playing to hinder my boy from hearing more foul tongues than I could help. Take Lance my violin. He may some day make it over to Jerry, if he has a turn that way, though maybe he had best not.'

Perhaps nothing he said was sadder than this, considering what music could have been to him.

It appeared that though the wonderful spring of health in that salubrious air had made his first years there enjoyable, he had begun to feel the lack of all good influences as his child grew older. What he heard with indifference from his comrades, was shocking when echoed from the tender lips that brought back the thought of home; and when Gerald began to ask those deep questions of why and wherefore, life and death, that we only cease to wonder over as we grow used to them, Edgar, who had never reflected before, only undergone a few intellectual impressions and influences, answered as one bewildered; and when the fair head nestled to him, longed to see it bent over the clasped hands, like the heads so like it at home. He tried to teach; but prayers, cast off half a life-time ago, came not at his beck, and the very framework of the religion he had never attended to, and then thrown aside, had almost passed from him. Fragments floated before him, and his perplexity became longing to clear his mind; and when the foul habits and language of the Ranch came prominently before the child's growing perception, he had resolved to remove to where order and decency prevailed. He had answered an advertisement offering employment as an editor in a more advanced settlement, and was in the act of riding to an isolated station to collect his debts before his departure, when the attack had been made.

It was as if he had been just turning back from the husks which the swine did eat, and making his first step from the far country; and perhaps he thought so himself, for when Fernan's kindness as well as his own suffering had demolished his proud irony, he said, 'A fellow like you carries his Bible as a charm. Read me the old story of the younger son. It is not an original idea to ask for it, but the cadences have rung in my head ever since that "Pater noster" of yours.'

It was as if the old irreverence must still tinge whatever he said. Very perplexing it was. Was it repentance, that self-condemnation for wasted kindness? Was it faith, that increasing craving for Gospel messages? Was it prayer, the entreaty for the forms whose words, all broken, haunted the memory of the clergyman's son? He showed neither fear nor regret; he knew he had his death-warrant, he had made a bad business of life, and was weary of it--he, his thirty-second year not yet complete--he, the most gifted of the brothers. He sent no direct message, either to ask pardon for himself, or protection for his child--perhaps he was too secure of both to feel the need, for he spoke more and more of Felix and Cherry--nay, seemed to be talking to them when fever obscured his mind. Over and over recurred Lance's answer, 'a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice,' as if it had been the riddle of his life--or again the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, running into 'I will arise and go to my Father.'

The loving hearts must trust to the Father, Who can meet the son even while yet a great way off. And it was well for them that kind Ferdinand dropped the veil over the day when the doctor came too late for alleviation, though in time to save the child, as the lethargic trance gave way, and the moan of 'Daddy, daddy!' began. The last conscious light of the father's eyes met those of the boy; his last word replied to the feeble call. So Edgar Underwood passed away, and Ferdinand buried him beneath a pine-tree, amid many evidences that he had endeared himself to the rude spirits around, who mourned him in their rough sort, with many an anecdote of his ready wit and good-nature, and many another of little Jerry's drollery, simplicity, or courage.

The doctor recommended transporting the child to Sacramento before recovery of his senses should aggravate the danger of the journey. The spine, though not actually touched, had received a shock, and would require most careful treatment, beyond his own skill. So a bark cradle like that of a papoose, had been constructed, and slung to Ferdinand's shoulders so that he could raise it in his arms and break the jolting of the waggon over the roadless waste. When clasped in a pair of kind arms, with a beard to put his hand into, and a soothing voice to hush his moan, he did not waken to miss his father, though more than once he asked how soon they should arrive, and many times begged to go to bed.

The best surgeons of Sacramento and San Francisco had consulted over the little fellow, and pronounced that the spine had escaped by so little that the nerves would long feel the shock, though it might be outgrown in time. They thought he might be removed as soon as the external wounds were healed and the constitution had somewhat rallied. A nurse had been obtained, but at present the boy would endure no attendance but Ferdinand's, and seemed satisfied and lulled into a half-conscious doze by his English voice and accent.

All that Edgar had said about his son being Felix's next heir was omitted in the letter; but Ferdinand said he supposed that Felix would wish the boy to be brought home as soon as he could safely travel, but if not, he should be sure of a loving home at 'Underwood.' If he were not to be received, a telegram should be sent to Sacramento, but there would probably be time for a letter, since weeks might pass before a move would be prudent. Of course, too, all respecting the forgery was suppressed, and only written to Marilda, who was attending her mother on her yearly visit to Spa.

Clement read the letter through without pause or remark, though his voice shook and thickened when he read of Edgar feeling about for the Lord's Prayer, and Fernan helping him. Truly, the last had been first, and the first last. He was disappointed too, not to find more to justify the hope that his brother had evidently gathered.

Felix lay back all the time, his eyes fixed with a kind of unseeing steadiness on his own photograph of his father, hanging against the wall. His hands were clasped over his breast, sometimes trembling slightly, but never unlocking. 'Thank you,' he said; 'there seems nothing to keep from Cherry.'

'She might imagine much worse things if she did not see the letter.'

'If we prepare her, and give it to her to read, it will be almost a comfort. Call her in when they come home. No, I will, or she will take alarm for me.'

Care for Cherry seemed his first thought; and Clement said, 'It is well we never told her what we thought about the Australian report. How much it has spared her!'

'Ay; mark the time, Clem! It was spring, five years ago, just when you and I began those prayers, that he was left with a little child to lead him. How often that is brought about!'

'I am glad he named the child after Cherry,' said Clement, willing to blink the full reply, for never having been able to love Edgar as did his elder brother, he could not as entirely 'believe all things and hope all things.' He felt the terrible deficiency, knowing that Ferdinand would have put foremost whatever truth would allow him to say.

The indirect reply made Felix shrink from that heart's core of the subject, unwilling to hear the faint qualified hope that conscience would suffer his brother to utter, dashing the comfort that he had embraced.

With a heavy sigh he began to lament the great unhappiness that had come upon one so formed for light and sunshine. Edgar and Lance had always been of the same temperament and tastes, and yet they had been the two arrows, shot by the same hand, but of such different course.

'A very sinister blast came on one!' said Clement.

'Yet, change their places,' said Felix. 'Lance would at fifteen have stood the foreign college, and I doubt if the Minsterham choir would have been good for Edgar!'

'The real key lies in those words that haunted poor Edgar. The sacrifice must be to One or to the other--the Rood, or the heavier weight,' said Clement.

'Heavy indeed!' sighed Felix, as if the severity cut him, giving way to a sobbing groan. 'Such a life, and such a death! Our father's pride--the flower of us all! O Edgar, our nursery king, that it should have come to this! What would not I give to have been where Travis was, if only to cry, Alas! my brother!'

And as the beautiful features, gallant bearing, and winning speech, so affectionate when most blameworthy, came over him, his enfeebled state broke down his ordinary reserve, and sorrow had its course.

Then came a long stillness while Clement wrote to Lance; but when the bell rang, Felix rose to accompany his brother; and when Clement, perceiving how painfully he moved, would have dissuaded him, he made his usual answer, that 'After a time, there is no use in favouring a strain.'

His management of himself was right, for after the quiet little service, almost a duet between the brothers, in which both could afford to falter or choke when the De Profundis came among the Psalms, Clement found him standing under the willow-tree, quite himself again, as he looked at Theodore's little green bed, with Stella's wreath of white roses. No doubt his thoughts were on the lone unhallowed grave parted from them by half the world; but he would not risk his self-control again, and took Clement's arm without speaking.

The twilight of the July evening was falling when the waggonette came to the door with rippling laughter and merry voices, calling to the two brothers who stood in the porch.

Clement went forward and lifted Cherry out, then left her to Felix. It was too dark to see faces; but silence was already taking effect, and when she found herself beckoned into the study, she knew her brother was strongly moved, and was too sure of the cause by intuition to utter her former cry, 'Is it Edgar?' only she trembled as Felix made her sit down on the sofa, and placing himself beside her, said, 'My Cherry, our long waiting is over;' and then while her fingers closed on the hand that held them, he calmly told her the facts.

She bore it better than he had expected, unknowing how he himself absorbed her chief anxiety. Indeed, the hours which had intervened had brought him to so resigned and thankful a tone, that it almost hid from her the full force of his tidings. She asked for the letter, and then rose in search of light.

'You would like to go to your room,' he said, and gave her his arm, both too much absorbed to remember that he had not helped her upstairs since the accident. When he had kissed her, and shut her into her room, he leant for some seconds on the rail, and his face was contracted by suffering, more physical than mental.

He was at the evening meal, and so was Cherry. She would not have her supper sent up, she wanted to be in his presence, and be supported by it. She was so far stunned, that the horrors that would yet haunt her for many a night had not dawned on her imagination; but when he said, 'It is well,' she felt it so, but she needed to look at his face to be soothed and comforted--yes, though it was terribly pale. The colour, save in chance flushes, had never come back, and to-night the whiteness was like marble, but the quiet strength and peace seemed to hush, bear her up, and quell the wailings of her heart.

And when John Harewood came full of anxious inquiry, he really thought the tidings had overcome them less than his own wife, who had never quite recovered the effect of her exertions at the accident, and coming home over-tired, had been quite crushed by the intelligence--the more because, like those whose judgment was stronger than their yearning over Edgar, she did not trust much to those few tokens of penitence. And Angela was not withheld from loudly blaming Fernan for not having, as she assumed, insisted on proclaiming the sinner's Hope, and when assured, that no doubt he must have done so, though he did not set down his own words, she shook her head, and said, 'How could he, when he did not know it himself?' There she was silenced by Felix, and went to the Hepburns for sympathy.

For the rest, the family spoke little of the new loss. Felix quietly busied himself in the arrangements that the discovery of of his new heir made him think desirable. Mrs. Fulbert's remarriage, and the lapse of her annuity, made him better able to carry out his plans at once; and if his heir were not Clement, it was necessary to make the arrangements more definitively.

Of course the little Gerald was telegraphed and written for. He must be welcomed and loved, but he was on the whole dreaded as much as hoped for. The Mays spoke of the self-reliance of the best-trained colonial children; and what could this poor boy be--the deserted son of the singing-woman--but at best a sort of 'Luck of Roaring Camp.' Wilmet infinitely pitied Geraldine, and rejoiced that the river lay between, to keep Kester and Edward out of the way of corruption.

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