X. AUNT LYDIA…

X. AUNT LYDIA

‘Let us run to the Cottage for five minutes, and see mamma,’ said Mary, as they made their way back. ‘Fancy, Ben, she does not know you have come home!’

‘Shall we have time?’ Ben asked, making for the bank as he spoke. The path that led to the Cottage struck off from the river-side above The Willows. And it was always gaining time to make this little diversion. He had been so silent, saying nothing,--and a sense of disappointment had crept over Mary after the intense sympathy with which she felt she had been entering into all his thoughts.

But when he thrust the boat into the flowery bank, and helped her to jump out, Ben replied to her, though she had said nothing. ‘You are quite right,’ he said. ‘It is best in every way not to meet them again.’

‘Ben! I did not say a word----’

‘No,’ he answered, ‘you did not, and it was very, very kind of you, Mary. I am more obliged to you than I can say. There are some things which it is impossible to talk about. I thank you with all my heart.’

What did this mean? Mary was accustomed to a great deal of talk about everything,--more talk than meaning, indeed. And she was a little bewildered by this absence of all explanation. She would have been comforted had he opened up a little and told her how it all was. But she submitted, of course, concluding it was his mannish, unsatisfactory way. And as they went hurriedly up the lane, in the kindness of her heart she slid her hand through Ben’s arm. It was the softest, kindly touch, such as his sister’s hand might have given. Was not she his sister, nearer to him than any one else, and, little as she did understand, yet knowing more of what was in his heart,--she thought,--than any other creature in the world?

And Ben was not indifferent to that mute token of sympathy. He drew the timid hand closely through his arm. ‘My good little Mary!’ he said; but even then he said no more. No explanation came, whatever she might do or say, which was hard, but had to be borne.

And this is how it was that Mrs. Westbury, to her very great amazement, saw her daughter and Ben Renton approaching the Cottage arm-in-arm,--‘like an engaged couple,’ she said afterwards,--which gave her a curious thrill of admiration and satisfaction at the first glance. When her nephew came up to her, however, nature prevailed, and the recollection of her own agency, which nobody but herself believed in, in sending all the boys away.

‘Ben!’ she cried, and then kissed him, and held both his hands, and shed some tears of surprise and joy, ‘I am so glad to see you! I cannot tell how glad I am to see you! Have you all come home?’

‘Only I,’ said Ben; ‘but the others are coming, and Mary and I have come to fetch you, Aunt Lydia, to dine with my mother. She does not understand my noise and uncouthness, after the long spell of quiet she has had. After dinner Mary and I will bring you back.’

‘Mary and you seem to be--full of business,’ said Mrs. Westbury, more and more astonished. She had intended to end her sentence differently, but had met Mary’s eye, and paused, not quite knowing what to make of it. But she went up-stairs for her best cap, calling her daughter with her. ‘What is the meaning of all this, Mary?’ she said. ‘What does Ben mean by it? For my part, I cannot tell what to think.’

‘About what, mamma?’ said Mary; but there was a little flutter in her heart which belied her composure. ‘Ben has come home, as you see, and he came to see you, as he ought to do, and he wants you to go to dinner. I think it is all very visible what he means.’

‘It does not seem to me at all plain,’ said Mrs. Westbury; but then she put her hand into her wardrobe to get out her cap, and decided that it was best not to spoil sport by any premature remarks. It was startling to see Mary leaning so confidentially on her cousin’s arm. And Ben’s talk of ‘Mary and I’ was very peculiar; and if the will was all right, such an arrangement would be a most sensible, most admirable one. But if things were going on so well of their own accord, it might be best to let them alone, and suffer the affair to take its own course. When she found herself walking down to the river a quarter of an hour afterwards, with a maid behind carrying her cap, and Ben and Mary on each side of her, Mrs. Westbury freely expressed her surprise at the whole business. ‘I was just going to have tea,’ she cried. ‘One can’t dine late when one is alone, and Laurence has gone over to Cookesley to see some of his friends. I never thought of seeing any of you, nor of Ben at all, though I knew he was expected. And now to find myself on my way to Renton! Laurence will be struck dumb when he comes home.’

‘So Laurence is a parson now,’ said Ben. ‘How droll it will be to see him so! but pleasant for you. You can keep hold of a parson and keep him at home.’

‘Yes. I expect you to give him Renton, you know, Ben, when old Mr. Palliser dies.’

‘Well, I suppose one of us is sure to have Renton to give,’ said Ben; ‘so that Laurence will be safe anyhow. But I have no confidence that it will be me.’

‘It must be you,’ said Mrs. Westbury, indignantly. And then there came a pause, and she was helped into the boat. ‘Who are those new people at The Willows?’ she said, as she settled herself. ‘That is their boat; they are always on the water. They say she is a young widow; but I don’t think that is much like a widow. Somebody told me you knew them, Mary. Was it yourself?’

‘She was at Thorny croft at school for a little,’ said Mary, giving her mother a look. The look put a stop to the conversation; but it had to be explained afterwards, which was done somewhat at the expense of truth. The Willows’ boat had been drawn close to the bank before they passed, and Mary was less particular in steering wide of it. Millicent stood on the lawn, having just landed, with her scarlet cloak dropping off her shoulders, and waved her hand to them. ‘Good-night! How pleasant it has been!’ she cried, her voice falling softly through the summer air, still full of the slanting sunshine. ‘Good-night!’ Mary cried across the water. Ben never said a word; he did not even pause in the slow, vigorous, regular stroke which made the boat fly down the shining current. They were yards below The Willows before Millicent had finished speaking her two or three words. “Was he afraid?--was he indifferent? And while Mary’s mind was busy about this question, Aunt Lydia was forming her little theories of a very different kind. When a young man passes by a very pretty woman without so much as raising his head, it means,--what does it mean?--that some one else has secured his attention, and taken up all his thoughts. Mrs. Westbury felt as if Providence itself was heaping coals of fire on her head. She it was who had brought about the banishment of the boys, and yet no sooner had the first of them come home than he set about fulfilling her dearest wish. But no doubt it was for Mary’s sake. Mary, who had never harmed any one, who had helped and served everybody from her cradle. How bright she had become all at once!--how she had learned to chatter like the rest! It seemed curious to Mrs. Westbury that an important event should be coming about in her child’s life in which she herself had not been the chief actor,--especially that Mary should have had the sense to acquire for herself an eligible lover without any assistance. Ben did not look very much like a lover it is true, but Aunt Lydia was aware that a man in such a position is not always possessed with an insane delight, but often has a great deal to think of. She, too, was silent with the stress of her own thoughts. It was Mary who entertained them,--talking as she had never been heard to talk before,--full of wild spirits and fun. Her mother, who knew nothing of the story, did not perceive that Mary’s gaiety came on suddenly after they passed The Willows, nor that her eyes had the humid and dilated look which signifies emotion. One finds things out so much more readily when one has an inkling of the fin mot of the enigma. Mrs. Westbury did not even know there was an enigma to solve, and set down her daughter’s high spirits to what seemed to her the most natural and the most likely cause.

‘I congratulate you, my dear, upon having Ben back again,’ she said to Mrs. Renton as she kissed her. They were not very fond of each other, the two ladies; but yet, by dint of connexion and contiguity, had come to a certain habit of mutual dependence, though the support was chiefly on one side.

‘Yes,’ Mrs. Renton said, with an under-tone which was slightly querulous. ‘He is a very good boy; but a stranger in the house makes such a difference in one’s life.’

‘You don’t call Ben a stranger, poor fellow! And he is so nice. It is quite a pleasure to see him back,’ said Mrs. Westbury. ‘I thought you would have been out of your wits with joy.’

‘And so I am,’ said Ben’s mother, with a little indignation; ‘but there is nobody that has any real consideration for my weakness except Mary. She knows just how much I am able to bear. I suppose it is difficult for people in health to realise how weak I am.’

‘Well, my dear, you know I always said that if you would but make an effort to exert yourself it would do all the good in the world,’ said Mrs. Westbury; and then she went up-stairs to put on her cap. ‘I have no patience with your aunt,’ she said to Mary,--‘thinking of her own little bits of ailments, half of which are mere indulgence, when her poor boy has just come home.’

‘Poor godmamma! I don’t think she can help it,’ said Mary.

‘Nonsense, child! I have said to her from the first that she ought to make an effort. How do you think I should ever have managed had I given in? And now tell me, please, what you meant by looking at me so, twice over, when I was speaking to Ben.’

‘I did not want you to talk about Mrs. Rich,’ said Mary, turning away as the exigencies of her own toilette required. ‘He used to know her, and I was afraid you might say something----’

‘You might have left that to my own discretion,’ said Mrs. Westbury, with some offence.

‘But, dear mamma, how could your discretion serve when you did not know?’ said Mary. ‘And, poor fellow! he is so,--so----’

‘So very devoted to some one else that he could not even take the trouble to look at Mrs. Rich,--such a pretty woman, too!’ said Mrs. Westbury. ‘It seems to me, my dear, that you have made the very most of your time.’

‘Oh, mamma, how dreadful that you should say so!’ cried Mary, turning round again with flaming, crimson cheeks. ‘Surely, surely, you know me better! And Ben, poor fellow! has so much to think of. Nothing could be further from his mind. I have been their sister all their lives; it would be hard if I could not try to be a little comfort to him now.’

‘My dear, if he needs comfort, I am sure I have no objection,’ said Mrs. Westbury, with a smile; and just then Mary’s maid came into the room, and the conversation came to an end. It was this dreadful practical turn, which was in the old Renton blood, which bewildered the less energetic members of the family. But it was wonderful to see how Ben and Aunt Lydia got on at dinner. He told her more about his work, and what he had been doing, in half-an-hour than the others had extracted from him in twenty-four. And the Renton spirit sparkled in Mrs. Westbury’s eyes as she listened. ‘Even if you had not made a penny, Ben,’ she said, in her energetic way, ‘I should be so much more pleased that you had been making some use of your talents than just hanging on in the old way at home.’

‘But I have made a penny,’ Ben said, with a kindred glance;--he was pleased with the thought, which gave Mary a momentary disgust;--‘though it has cost more than it is worth in the making,’ he added, in a lower tone. And then his cousin forgave, and was sorry for poor Ben. It was dangerous work for Mary, especially as there was still the excitement of the return expedition across the river, to convey Mrs. Westbury home to look forward to. But, fortunately, there was no one visible about The Willows when that moment came;--nothing but serene moonlight, white and peaceable, unbroken by any shadow or voice but their own, was on the gleaming river. And the Rev. Laurence Westbury standing on the bank in his clerical coat,--who had been at school when Ben left Renton,--to take his mother home, and bid the new-comer welcome; and then the silent progress back down the stream in the moonlight. It surprised Mary afterwards to think how little Ben and she had said to each other, and yet what perfectly good company he had been. And thus they went on, those curious, rapid days.

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XI. ALL HOME

Laurie arrived on the Friday, coming in, in his usual unexpected way, through the window, when they were all in the drawing-room after dinner. The brothers had met in town, where Ben had paused for a day on his way to Renton, so that their greeting was not mingled with any of those remarks on changed appearance and unexpected signs of age which are general after a long absence. But when they stood thus together for the first time for seven years, the difference between old things and new became more perceptible to the bystanders. The surroundings were so completely the same as of old that any variation from the past became more clear to them. The same lamps, shaded for their mother’s sake; the same brilliant spot of light upon the tea-table, where the china and silver glittered; Mrs. Renton lying on the same sofa, in the same attitude, covered with the same Indian shawl; the same soft odour of mignonette and heliotrope, and earth and dew, stealing in at the great open window; even the same moths, or reproductions of the same, making wild circles about the lamp. ‘And Mary, I think, is the very same,’ Laurie said, looking at her with true brotherly kindness. But ‘the boys’ were not the same. Of the two it was Laurie who looked the elder. He was just thirty, but the hair was getting thin on the top of his head, and his face was more worn than it had any right to be. Ben had broadened, almost imperceptibly, but still enough to indicate to the bystander that the first slim outline of youth was over. But Laurie, though he had not expanded, had aged even in the lines of his face; and then he had grown a little careless, like the society into which he had cast himself. He was dusty with his walk, and his velvet morning-coat looked strange and wild beside Ben’s correct evening costume. Lazy Laurence still; but with all the difference between sanguine youth and meditative manhood. Mary, however, was the only one of the party who was troubled by the mystery of Laurie’s subdued tone. Mrs. Renton was not given to speculation, and Ben was occupied by his own affairs to the exclusion of all inquiry into those of others. Both mother and brother took it for granted that Laurie was just as it was natural he should be. Only Mary,--sisterly, womanly, anxious always to know how it was,--watched him with a sympathetic eye.

‘Well! here we are at home once more, old fellow,’ said Laurie, throwing himself into an easy chair near the window, when the mother had been safely conveyed up-stairs.

‘Yes, a home that always looks the same,’ said Ben. ‘I am not so sure as I used to be of the good of that. It makes one feel doubly the change in one’s self.’

‘These are his Yankee notions,’ said Laurie. ‘I suppose he has given up primogeniture, and Church and State, and everything. But Mary is an orthodox person who will set us all right.’

‘As if women might not think about primogeniture and all the rest as well as you others!’ said Mary. ‘We are the only people who take any time to think now-a-days. Ben has done nothing but make railways,--and money,--and he likes it;--he is a real Renton,’ she cried, pleased to let him know her mind on that subject.

‘And very right, too,’ said Laurie. ‘If there were not Rentons to be had somewhere how should the world get on?’

‘But I don’t care for the world,’ said Mary; ‘and I would much rather you were not fond of money, like everybody else, you boys.’

‘I am very fond of money, but I never can get any,’ said Laurie. ‘I say to myself, if I should happen to come into reputation next century, what a collection of Rentons there will be for somebody to make a fortune of,--Ben’s heirs, most probably; or that little Mary of Frank’s, who is a darling. Now that I think of it, as she is a painter’s descendant, it is she who shall be my heir.’

‘I think much the best thing would be for you to have Renton, Laurie, and heirs of your own.’

‘Thanks,’ said Laurie; ‘my brothers are very kind. Frank took the trouble to write me a long letter ever so many years ago, adjuring me by all I held dear to marry a certain Nelly Rich.’

‘It was very impertinent of him,’ cried Mary, ‘and very conceited. Nelly Rich would no more have looked at you----’

‘Showed her sense,’ said Laurie, quietly. ‘I am only telling you what actions have been set on foot for my benefit. But I never saw Nelly Rich except once, so I am not conceited; and as for Renton, no such iniquity could ever be, as that it should go past you, Ben.’

‘You speak strongly,’ said the elder brother.

‘That is one result of time, you know. One can see now, without irreverence, how wrong my poor father was. Of course we would have been wretches had we been capable of anything but obedience at the time,’ said Laurie; ‘but, looking back, one can see more clearly. He was wrong,--I don’t bear him any malice, poor dear old father! but he did us as much harm almost as was possible. And if Renton is left out of the natural succession, I shall say it is iniquity, and oppose it with all my power.’

‘It would be iniquity,’ Ben said, gravely. And then there was a pause. The three sat, going back into their individual memories, unaware what devious paths the others were treading. But for that Laurie might never have fallen into the temptation which had stolen what energy he had out of him, and strengthened all his dreamy, unpractical ways. But for that Ben might have given the Renton force and strength of work to his country, and served her,--as is the citizen’s first duty,--instead of making American railroads, which another man might have been found to do. As for Mary, the paths in which she went wandering were not her own. It did not occur to her to think of the seven years, which for her had been simple loss. Had she been living at home, no doubt, long before this she would have married some one, and been like Alice, the mother of children. But such were not Mary’s reflections. She was thinking if this had not happened Ben would have married Millicent seven years ago, and that, on the whole, everything was for the best.

They had but one other day to themselves; but during that day the house felt, with a bewildered sense of confusion and uncertainty, that old times had come back. Mr. Ben and Mr. Laurie had gone back to their old rooms; and their steps and voices, the peremptory orders of the eldest, the ‘chaff’ of Mr. Laurie, ‘who was a gentleman as you never could understand whether he was in earnest or in joke,’--turned the heads of the old servants. They, like their mistress, were upset by the new régime; the dulness of the house had been a trouble to them when her reign of utter seclusion commenced; but if it was dull, there was little to do, and the house had habituated itself to the monotonous round. And now they felt it a hardship when the noise and the work recommenced, and dinner ran the risk of having to wait ten minutes, and breakfast was on the table from half-past eight to half-past ten. ‘All along o’ that lazy Laurie, as they calls him, and a very good name, too,’ said the affronted cook. Mary had much ado to keep them in working order. ‘There may be further changes after a while,’ she said to the old butler, who had carried them all in his arms, and knew about everything, and who would as soon have cut his throat as leave Renton;--‘you must have patience for a little, and see how things turn out.’ Thus it will be seen that if the return of her cousins brought any happiness to Mary it brought a great increase of anxiety as well. And there was always the sense of Millicent’s vicinity to weigh upon her mind. She had been looking forward for years to the family reunion as the end of tribulation and beginning of a better life; but up to this time her anticipations had not been fulfilled. Anxieties had increased upon her,--one growing out of another. Instead of comfort, and certainty, and the support which she had always been taught to believe were involved in the possession of ‘men in the house,’ Mary found that these tenants had rather an agitating than a calming effect upon herself and the community in general. That she should have more trouble about the dinners was natural; but that even their mother should require to be let softly down into the enjoyment of their society, and that circumstances in general required double consideration on account of their presence, was a new idea to Mary. And then it turned out that Mrs. Renton had spoken very truly when she said a man must have something to do. Both ‘the boys’ were in a state of restlessness and excitement, not disposed to settle to anything. There was capital shooting to be had, and the partridges were everything a sportsman could desire; but somehow even Ben felt that partridges were not congenial to the occasion. And as for Laurie, he was too indolent to make any such exertion. ‘Wait till Frank comes,’ he said. ‘Frank has energy for two. If we were on a Scotch moor, indeed, where you want to move about to keep yourself warm; but it’s too hot, my dear fellow, for stumping about through the stubble. I’ll take Mary out after a bit for a row.’ And Ben’s activities, too, culminated in the same idea. Laurie lay in the bottom of the boat, sometimes puffing gently at his cigar, doing simply nothing, while Ben pulled against stream, and Mary steered him dexterously through the weeds; and then the three floated slowly down again, saying little to each other, lingering along the mid current with scarcely any movement of the languid oars. They were not very sociable in this strange amusement; but still its starts of momentary violent exercise, its dreamy charm of movement, the warm autumnal sun overhead, the delicious gliding water that gurgled on the sides of the boat, and all the familiarity and all the novelty of the scene, chimed in with their feelings. Ben was pondering the future, which was still so dark,--his unfinished work at the other end of the world,--what he would do with Renton if it came to him,--what he would do if it did not come to him,--all the range of possibilities which overhung his way as the trees overhung the river. Laurie, for his part, wandered in a field of much wider fancy, and did not take Renton at all into account, nor the chances which a few days might bring to him. What did it matter? he could live, and he had no more to think of,--no future which interested him particularly,--no hope that would be affected by the tenor of his father’s will. Sometimes his eye would be caught by a combination of foliage, or a sudden light on the water, or the turn of Mary’s arm as she plied her cords. ‘How did Mary keep her steering up while we were all away?’ he would say between the puffs of his cigar, and made up his mind that she should sit to him next day in that particular pose. Mary, for her own part, during these expeditions, was too much occupied in watching her cousins to have any thoughts of her own. What was Ben thinking of? Was it The Willows his mind was fixed on as he opened his full chest and sent the boat up against the stream with the force of an arrow out of a bow? Was it the image of Millicent that made his eyes glow as he folded his arms, and let the skiff idle on the current? And what were Laurie’s thoughts occupied about as he lay, lazy, in the bottom? Mary gazed at them, and wondered, not knowing what to think, and said to herself how much more difficult it was now to prognosticate what would become of them than it would have been seven years ago, at their first entering upon life. And thus the long day glided to its end.

On the Saturday Frank and his belongings arrived, and all was altered. Frank, so far as personal appearance went, was the least changed of all. His moustache had grown from the silky shadow it used to be into a very decided martial ornament, and he was brown with the Indian sun. Laurie had the presumption to insinuate that he had grown, which touched the soldier to the quick; but though he was the father of a family, the seven years had affected him less than either of his brothers. To be sure, he was but seven-and-twenty, and had lived a comparatively happy life. But it must be allowed that the Sunday was hard to get through. The three brothers, who were all very different men to begin with, had each got into his groove, and each undervalued,--let us not say had a contempt for,--the occupation of the other. What with India, and what with youth, and what with the training of his profession, Frank had all the unreasoning conservatism which was natural to a well-born, unintellectual soldier. And then he had a wife to back him, which strengthens a man’s self-opinion. ‘Depend upon it,’ he would say, ‘these Radicals will land us all in perdition if they get their way.’ ‘Why should I depend upon it, when my own opinion goes directly contrary?’ Ben, who had been in America, and all over the world, drawing in revolutionary ideas, would answer him. As for Laurie he would ask them both, ‘What does it matter? one man is as good as another, if not better,’ and smile in his pococurante way. The children were a godsend to them all, and so was Alice with her youthful wisdom. For Mary by this time, with three men to keep in order, as it were, and Mrs. Renton to hold safely in hand all the time, and all unsuitable visitors to keep at a distance, and the dinner to order, was about as much overwhelmed with cares, and as little capable of the graces of society, as a woman could be. She had to spend with her aunt the hour of that inevitable Sunday afternoon walk, and saw her flock pair off and disappear among the trees with the sensations of an anxious mother, who feels her nursery for the moment in comparative safety. Ben with Alice and little Mary went one way, and Laurie and Frank took another. When she had seen them off Mary turned with a satisfied mind to read to her godmother the Sunday periodical which took the place of the newspaper on this day. It was very mild reading, though it satisfied Mrs. Renton. It was her principle not to drive on Sunday, and the morning was occupied by the Morning Service, which Davison and she read together before she got up, and that duty being over the Sunday periodical came in naturally to take the place of the drive. It was very rarely that she felt able to go to church; and of all days this day, which followed so closely the arrival of her sons, was the one on which she could least be supposed capable of such an exertion. So Mary read a story, and a sermon, and a missionary narrative, and was very tired of it, while the slow afternoon lingered on and the others had their walk.

Ben and Alice, though they were in the position of brother and sister, and called each other by their Christian names, had met for the first time on the day before, and naturally were not very much acquainted with each other’s way of thinking. The woods were their great subject of discourse. ‘Frank has talked of them wherever we were,’ said Alice. ‘I am so glad to bring the children here. If we should have to go to India again it will be nice for them to remember. But I need not speak like that,’ she added, after a moment’s pause, with a sudden rush of tears to her blue eyes; ‘for if we have to go to India we must leave little Mary behind,--she is too old to go back. And I suppose if I were prudent, baby too--but I could not bear that.’

‘Why should you go back to India?’

‘Ah, we must, unless there is some money coming to us,’ said Alice: ‘you know I had no fortune. I did not think that mattered then; but when one has children one learns. Do you think there will be some money for Frank in the will?’

‘I am certain of it,’ said Ben.

‘Enough to make us able to stay at home,’ said Alice, clasping her hands. ‘It is not that I care for money, nor Frank either.’

‘But it is quite natural you should care. And I promise you,’ said Ben, ‘if there is anything I can set right, that you shall not go back to India. Whichever of us is preferred, you may be sure of that. I can answer for Laurie as for myself.’

‘Oh, I know Laurie,’ cried Alice; ‘but I did not know you,--and then perhaps Frank would not be willing;--but anyhow, since you say you are sure, I will keep up my heart.’

And in the meantime Frank and Laurie by the river-side were having their confidences too. ‘If it should come to me,’ Frank was saying, ‘I hope I shall do what is right by Ben in any case--but it will be a struggle for that little beggar’s sake.’

‘I would let the little beggar take his chance,’ said Laurie; ‘there is time enough. I don’t think you need begin to consider him yet.’

‘I should do my duty, of course,’ said Frank, ‘by Ben, who has been badly used; but I don’t deny it will cost me something, Laurie. A man does not get ties about him for nothing. If I had the chance of a home for Alice and the little ones,--even if it were not a home like this, by Jove! it would be an awful temptation,--a temptation one would scarcely know how to resist.’

‘Then it is to be hoped it will never come,’ said Laurie. ‘I don’t see how we could stand in doubt for an instant. I don’t speak of natural justice. But Ben was brought up to be the heir. There was never a doubt of his being the heir till my poor father’s will had to be read. Therefore he must be the heir now. I don’t care whether it falls to you or me. It’s as clear as daylight, and I can’t believe you would find the least difficulty in doing what was right.’

‘I should do it,’ said Frank, but he made no further protestation. In his heart he could not but say to himself that it was easy for Laurie, a man with nobody dependent on him, with no question before him such as that of returning or not returning to India, and with,--so far as any one knew,--no prospects of future happiness which depended on this decision. And Ben, too, was unmarried, and likely to be unmarried. ‘Unless he marries Mary,’ Frank said to himself. Of course if Renton fell to him he would marry, and they had all pledged themselves that Renton must fall to him, and Ben accordingly would sit down in his father’s seat, and bring in some stranger to rule over the place, and Alice and the children would have to go away. Back to India! If that were the only alternative Frank felt as if it would be impossible to do his duty by Ben. The excitement of the moment, and the fundamental simplicity of his mind, thus brought him to the strange notion that all secondary justice must have been set aside, and that it would be a question of everything or nothing to the victor. Thus the Rentons awaited, with thoughts often too deep for words, with a restrained excitement wonderful to behold, with hopes and sinkings of heart, the revelation of their father’s will; and that was to take place next day.

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XII. SUSPENSE

When the Rentons were all seated together in the drawing-room after dinner, doing their best to get through the Sunday evening, a note was brought to Mrs. Renton, to the amazement of all the family assembly. Mrs. Westbury and her son Laurence, who was curate of Cookesley, had joined them at dinner; and they were all seated in a circle round the room drinking their tea and trying to talk, and suppressing an occasional yawn with the true decorum of a family party. Sometimes there would get up a little lively talk between Mary and her mother and brother touching the gossip of the district, or Alice and Laurie would brighten into a familiar discussion of something belonging to Fitzroy Square; but then they would suddenly remark that the others were uninterested and taking no part, and the talk would come to a stop, and Mrs. Westbury would make a commonplace remark to one of her nephews, and Alice would ask the curate if he went often to the Opera, and a uniformity of dulness would fall upon the party. The Rentons were all well-bred people, and it was certainly not well-bred to enjoy one’s self in an animated way in a corner with two or three, while the rest of the company sat blank and did not know what one was making merry about. To be sure, there was Alice’s music to fall back upon; but, except to two or three of the company, that would not much mend matters; so that when the note was brought to Mrs. Renton there was immediately a little movement of interest. Ben brought one of the shaded lamps to his mother that she might read it, and Mary drew near in case her services should be wanted to write the answer, for which the butler stood solemnly waiting erect in the midst of the fatigued group.

‘It must be something very urgent indeed to write about to-day,’ Mrs. Westbury said. ‘I am old-fashioned, and I don’t think the family quiet should be disturbed on Sunday unless it is something of importance.’

‘My dear, I can’t read these dreadful hands that people write now-a-days,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I can’t get the light on it, and I am too tired to sit up. If you would read it aloud, Ben----’

Ben took the little note in his hand, and put the lamp down on the nearest table. His face was in shade, and it was impossible to tell what his feelings were. He glanced over the note for a second, and then read it aloud as his mother bade. It was a prayer to be allowed to visit the woods next morning with a friend who was going away, and it was signed ‘Millicent Rich.’ ‘I would not have dreamt of asking, knowing that you have all your people about you, and do not want to be troubled with strangers,’ she wrote; ‘but our friend is going off by the three o’clock train. We shall keep strictly to the woods, and not come near the house to worry you, when your attention must be so occupied with other things; but please let me come.’ This was what Ben read out with a perfectly expressionless voice, not even faltering over the name.

‘Of course she must come,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Mary, you must write a note for me. Say that the boys being here makes no difference, and that if she will come to luncheon and bring her friend----’

‘But, godmamma, Mr. Ponsonby is coming,’ said Mary, while Ben took up the lamp, and stood like a monument, holding it in his hand.

‘Mr. Ponsonby will not eat her, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Renton; and then there was a pause.

‘But, godmamma,’ Mary resumed after that interval, ‘don’t you think so important a day as to-morrow is,--and so much as there will be going on----’

‘Any stranger would be a bore,’ said Frank. ‘How are we to go and talk and be civil, when an hour more may see us set up or ruined----’

Here Alice plucked at his sleeve, indicating with a look of warning the stolid countenance of old Willis, who stood listening to everything. ‘If it would be any pleasure to grandmamma, I would attend to them,’ she said.

‘And I think it would be a very good thing for you all,’ said Mrs. Westbury, ‘and take your minds off yourselves a little. It is a blessing to have a stranger for that,--you are obliged to exert yourselves, and kept from brooding over one subject. I think your mother is quite right.’

‘Let us have them,’ said Laurie. ‘What does it matter? Old Ponsonby is always late.’

‘He will surely never be late on an occasion of such importance,’ said Laurence Westbury.

Mrs. Renton looked from one to another with an anxious countenance, and they came round the sofa, glad of the little interruption to that family quiet which was almost too much blessedness. Ben, who said nothing, lighted up the circle in a curious Rembrandtish way, holding his lamp so as to screen his mother; and outside stood old Willis, erect as a soldier, with unmoved countenance, waiting for the answer.

‘Ben, what do you say?’ said Mrs. Renton, with all the earnestness of a last appeal.

‘That you must do just what you like, mother,’ said Ben.

Upon which she wrung her hands in despair. ‘How can I tell what I shall like if none of you will advise me?’ she said.

‘I will attend to them, if grandmamma would like it,’ said Alice, coming to the head of the sofa. ‘And I am sure you would like it, dear grandmamma; it would give you something else to think of.’

‘So it would, my dear,’ said Mrs. Renton, ready to cry; ‘and how I am to get through to-morrow without some assistance is more than I can tell.’

‘It will take all your minds off the one subject,’ added Mrs. Westbury; ‘and of course there must always be luncheon. Mary, go and do what your aunt tells you. It will be good, my dears, for you all.’

And Ben gave a little gesture with his hand, Mary caught his eye over the glowing darkness of the shaded lamp, and went and wrote her note without a word. Ben’s face had said, or seemed to say, ‘Let them come,--what does it matter?’ And if it did not matter to him, certainly it mattered nothing to any one else. When the note was despatched, Alice sat down at the piano and played to the entire satisfaction of her husband, his mother, and Laurence Westbury. Ben settled down in a corner and took a book, till his aunt Lydia went and sat beside him, when an earnest conversation ensued; and Laurie stood idling by the window, beating back the moths that came in tribes to seek their destruction in the light, and sometimes saying a word to Mary, who, half occupied by the music and more than half by her own thoughts, sat near him within the shadow of the curtains.

‘What sort of people are those that are coming to-morrow, and why don’t you like them?’ said Laurie, under cover of a fortissimo.

‘I never said I did not like them,’ said Mary.

‘No; but I know you don’t. Who are they?’

And then the music fell low into tremulous, dying murmurs, and all was silent in the room except for a shrill ‘s’ now and then of Mrs. Westbury’s half-whispered energetic conversation with Ben. When the strain rose and swelled into passion, the talk at the window was resumed.

‘It is not they,--it is she I don’t like;--one of my old school-fellows, and the most beautiful woman you ever saw.’

‘Hallo!’ said Laurie, ‘is that the reason why?’

‘Yes, of course. We should all like to strangle her because she is so pretty,’ said Mary, with a certain rancour in her voice.

Laurie sent a great night-moth out with a rush, and then he stooped towards his cousin’s hiding-place. ‘Granted in the general,’ he said, ‘but there is something particular about this.’

What could Mary say? Her heart was quivering with that poignant sense of weakness and inability to resist fate which sometimes overcomes a woman in those secret machinations for somebody else’s good, which are so seldom successful. ‘I have done,’ she said; ‘I will try no more.’ And that was all the answer that was given to Laurie’s curiosity.

Alice had not fallen off in her playing. The piano, under her fingers, gave forth such sounds as wiled the very hearts out of the bosoms of the three who were listening. Mrs. Renton lay back on her sofa, with the tears coming to her eyes and a world of inarticulate, inexpressible feeling in her heart. Had it been poetry, the poor lady would have yawned and wished herself in bed; but now she had floated into a serene Eden,--a Paradise full of all vague loveliness, and sweetness, and unspeakable, indistinct emotions. As for Laurence Westbury, he dared scarcely draw breath, so entirely did the witchery seize him. The music to him stormed and struggled like a soul in pain, and paused and sank to give forth the cry of despair, and swelled into a gathering hope, into a final conflict, into delicious murmurs of sweetness and gratefulness and repose; there was a whole drama in it, moving the real listener with such a rapid succession of feeling as the highest tragic efforts of poetry call forth in others. While in the meanwhile Ben and Aunt Lydia talked quite undisturbed in their corner of railways and investments, and of how much Renton might be improved, and how fast Dick Westbury was making his fortune out in India; and Laurie was driving out the moths, and moralising over their eagerness to enter, and thinking of anything in the world rather than the music. Such were the strange differences of sensibility and feeling among half-a-dozen people, all of one race.

A forlorn hope that it might rain next morning, and so prevent the threatened invasion, was in Mary’s mind up to the last moment. She felt as if, having thus failed in her own person, Providence must aid her to save her cousin, the head of the house, who was of so much importance to the family, from such a snare. But Providence refused, as Providence so often does in what seems the most heart-breaking emergency, to aid the plans of the schemer. As lovely a September morning as ever shone brightened all the park and the trees under her windows as she gazed out, unable to believe that she was thus abandoned of Heaven. But there could be no mistake about it. It was a lovely day, enough to tempt any one to the woods had there been no purpose of the kind beforehand; and as if to aggravate her sense of the danger of the situation, Ben himself was visible from her window, coming up the river-path in boating costume, though it was only half-past seven in the morning. Had he been on the river already at this ridiculous hour? Passing The Willows no doubt, gazing at the closed windows, pleased with the mere fact of being near her, though at such an hour no one, Mary assured herself with a little scorn, had ever seen Millicent out of bed; and on such a day as this, when all his prospects for life hung in the balance! But, strangely enough, it never occurred to Mary in her womanish pre-occupation to think that it might be the feverish excitement of the crisis, and not any thought of Millicent, which had roused Ben and driven him to try the tranquillising effects of bodily exertion. Notwithstanding the atmosphere of family anxiety by which she was surrounded, the fact was that Millicent’s visit was ten times more important in Mary’s eyes than that of Mr. Ponsonby. The one did not cost her a tenth part of the anxious cogitation called forth by the other. No doubt the will would be read and everything settled, ill or well. Ben would have Renton, as he ought; or Frank would have it, or it would be settled somehow; but the effect of Millicent’s appearance would be to unsettle everything. It would rouse up those embers of old love which she felt were smouldering in Ben’s mind. Smouldering! How could she tell that they were not blazing with all the warmth of present passion? Else, why had he sallied out in the dawn of the morning only to pass by the sleeping, shut-up house which contained the lady of his dreams? For that he had gone out for this purpose, and no other, Mary felt as certain as if she had watched him every step of the way. But there was nothing now to be done but to submit, and to put the best face that was possible upon it. Perhaps, indeed, if anything should occur so as that Ben should not have Renton, it would no longer be an unmixed misfortune, for it would take him out of Millicent’s way.

It was hard to tell whether it was a relief or an annoyance to find a stranger at the breakfast-table when they all met down-stairs. ‘What a nuisance!’ Frank said to his wife, feeling that Ben’s right-hand man was not the sort of person to be admitted to familiar intercourse with the family at such a moment. But Mary felt, on the whole, that Hillyard’s unexpected appearance was a good thing for Ben. The stranger, who ought to have arrived some days before, had been detained, and got down to Cookesley on Sunday night, from whence it appeared Ben had gone down early to fetch him, thus explaining, to the great consolation of his guardian and watcher, his early expedition. Hillyard was very carefully dressed, too carefully for the morning, and a little impressed by the house and the circumstances. His beard had been trimmed and his wardrobe renewed before he would follow his once protégé, and now patron, to the Manor, and he was very anxious to make himself agreeable, and justify his presence.

‘I know I should not have come at such a time,’ he explained to Mary; ‘I told Renton so. Of course we have been so much together that I could not but know why he was coming home.’

‘I do not think it makes any difference,’ said Mary. ‘I am sure my aunt will always be glad to have any of Ben’s friends.’

‘It is very good of you to say so,’ Hillyard answered gratefully. And then he began to tell her what a fine fellow her cousin was, and what a head he had, and how he had mastered his profession while other men would have been gaping at it. ‘He is master and I am man now,’ he said, unconsciously using Ben’s words, ‘though I was brought up to it; and I should just like you to see the beautiful work he puts out of his hands.’

‘I daresay I should not understand it if I saw it,’ said Mary, smiling behind the urn; but she lent a very willing ear, and thought Hillyard a very nice person. Unquestionably he was a relief to the high strain of suppressed feeling which appeared in every face at the table, except, perhaps, Laurie’s, who, late as usual, came in, carrying the baby in his arms, and did not mind.

‘Here is a little waif and stray I found wandering about the passages,’ he said. ‘Little Laurie, your mamma does not care about you to-day; you had better stay with me.’

‘Doesn’t mamma care for him, the darling!’ cried Alice. And then the child was picked up, having made a rush to her arms, and set up beside her at table.

‘The heir-presumptive, I suppose?’ Hillyard said behind the urn; and Mary began to think he was not quite so nice as she had thought him before.

Then the members of the family dispersed, to kill this lingering, weary forenoon as they best could. Ben and Hillyard went out together in earnest conversation, and Laurie established himself in a shady corner of the lawn, and made a group of Alice and her children, and began to draw them; while Frank started off, as he said, for a long walk. Mr. Ponsonby had announced that he was to come by the one o’clock train; but there was another three-quarters of an hour later, and nobody who knew him expected him to arrive by the first. And at half-past one Millicent and her friend would come to luncheon. Such a conjunction of events was very terrible to think of; though, perhaps, not so alarming to any one as to Mary, who alone knew of the motives of the latter visit. She had to go about her usual occupations all the same. She could not cheat the sick expectations of her heart by joining the group on the lawn and chatting with the children, nor could she rush forth to still her anxieties by bodily exertion, like the boys. A woman, she thought to herself, is always tied to the stake. She had to fulfil all her little peaceful household occupations as if her heart was quite at ease, and had not even any sympathy to support her, for what was it to her any one could have said? They were all three her cousins, and it could not matter very deeply to her which of them got Renton; and as for Millicent, that was mere feminine jealousy, and nothing else,--so Mary had to lock up her troubles carefully in her own breast.

It was only about a quarter past one when Millicent arrived at Renton, and with her came her mother and her ‘friend,’ who was the young soldier they had seen rowing her on the river. Mrs. Renton had just come down-stairs, with Davison carrying her shawls and her worsted work, and it was to her the visitors made their way. ‘Mr. Horsman is a connexion of my poor husband’s,’ Millicent said with a decent sigh. ‘He is a brother of Sir George Horsman, whom Nelly married. Nelly is my sister-in-law, Mrs. Renton; but I suppose you know?’

‘Indeed I know very well,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘It was she who we once thought would have married Frank. Not that I am not perfectly satisfied with Frank’s wife. She is certainly nice, and suits him admirably, which of course is the great thing. But she had no money. And there was once a time when he saw a great deal of Miss Rich.’

‘She was quite a catch,’ said Mrs. Tracy,--a word which wounded Mrs. Renton’s ear.

‘I cannot say I looked upon it in that point of view; but the young people were thrown in each other’s way a great deal,’ Mrs. Renton said with some stateliness; and Millicent immediately rushed into the field.

‘I thought the Mr. Rentons had all arrived,’ she said, ‘and yet you are alone;’ and cast an angry glance at Mary, as if demanding of her where they were.

‘What has become of the boys?’ said Mrs. Renton, looking round her. ‘I have only just come down. The fact is, it is a very exciting day for them; we expect Mr. Ponsonby down immediately to read the will.’

Millicent and her mother exchanged glances. ‘Then the time is up?’ Mrs. Tracy said meditatively, and bent with increasing solicitude over the invalid on her sofa. ‘What a trial for you!’ she said, clasping her hand in sympathy. And Mrs. Renton raised to her eyes that said unspeakable things.

‘Ah! yes,’ she murmured; ‘but nobody thinks of me;’ and this balm of consolation was sweet to her heart.

They all came dropping in a few minutes later to luncheon, and Ben and Hillyard were among the first. ‘Ponsonby has not come by this train,’ said Ben, ‘but Frank is waiting at the station for the next.’ It was hard not to feel as if Frank was doing the rest an injury by waiting to have the first word with the lawyer; such, at least, was Mary’s instinctive feeling. But her heart was weighted now with a more painful anxiety still. She saw Ben give a brief, contemptuous glance at young Horsman, whose position was not a comfortable one, and her heart sunk. But then he turned away from Millicent,--avoided seeing her, indeed, in a curious, visible way, and that was a consolation. Mrs. Tracy, however, got up with effusion to shake hands with dear Mr. Renton, begging that she might have a good look at him, to see if he was changed. ‘Not at all changed,’ was her verdict. ‘Just the same generous face that once came to our help in our troubles. Mr. Renton, do you know I may say you saved my life?’

Then Millicent, too, rose, and, with a whole drama in her eyes, held out her hand to him. There was regret, remorse, and a tender appeal for pardon, and a sweet self-pity in those blue, shining eyes. They seemed to say, ‘Be kind to me! Be sorry for me! I am so sorry for myself!’ But it was hard to make out whether there was any answer in Ben’s looks. She stood so turned towards him, holding out her hand, that he had no choice but to draw near, and then she turned meaningly towards a vacant chair at her side. He could not have gone away without rudeness, and Ben was not disposed to be rude to anybody at such a moment of fate. He took the seat accordingly, though with grave looks, and then there came a gleam of triumph into Millicent’s eyes.

‘How curious we should have chanced to come here on this day of all others,’ she said, her voice sinking to its softest tones. ‘You told me of it the very last time we met; but, perhaps, Mr. Renton, you forget?’

‘Did I tell you of this?’ said Ben. ‘What a good memory you must have! but there are some things I do not forget.’

‘Ah! something unkind about poor me, Mr. Renton! but if you knew what I have had to go through since, you would not think anything unkind.’

‘I suppose we have all had a great deal to go through since,’ said Ben. ‘Seven years! it is a large slice out of one’s life; one’s ideas about most things change immensely in seven years.’

‘Do they?’ said Millicent, looking at him with soft, appealing eyes.

‘Very much,’ said Ben, with a smile; ‘so much that one looks back with amazement upon the follies one has been guilty of. A man says to himself, “Is it possible I could have been such an ass?” Are ladies not subject to the same effect of time?’

‘No;--ladies are more constant,’ said Millicent. ‘When our thoughts have turned one way, it does not matter what happens, they always keep the same. We may be obliged to change in outward appearance. We are not so free as you gentlemen are. One’s friends or one’s circumstances sway one sometimes, but in the heart we never change,--not half, oh! not a quarter so much as you.’

‘That may be. I have no experience,’ said Ben.

‘But I have,’ said Millicent, ‘and I do so want to tell you. You know I never was very happy in my circumstances, Mr. Renton. Mamma is very kind, but she does not understand one’s feelings; and when she got me abroad, she had me all in her own hands. Yes, you are quite right about the change time makes. When I look back I cannot think how I could have done it. But I was so young, and so used to obey mamma.’

‘And a very laudable principle, I am sure,’ said Ben, with a polite little bow. ‘I beg your pardon--I thought I saw my brother and Mr. Ponsonby coming up the avenue. You were saying,--something about obedience,--I think?’

‘You do not think it worth while to listen to me,’ said Millicent.

‘Oh, yes, surely,--pray go on. I am full of interest,’ said Ben.

And then the poor creature looked at him with eyes which were pitiful in the eagerness of their appeal. She was a mercenary, wretched woman, ready to barter her beauty for comfort and wealth, and a fine house and a good position; and yet there was still in Mrs. Henry Rich the same redeeming possibility that there had been in Millicent Tracy. If he would have taken her out of that slough of despond, she would have been good, have made him a true wife, have grown a gentle lady, so far as it was in her. To the bottom of her soul Millicent felt this,--just as many a poor criminal feels that in other circumstances he would have been a model of all virtue. And for her the matter was not one without hope;--marriage to a woman may always be a new life,--and the seven years had not dimmed her eyes, nor taken the roses from her cheeks. And by those roses and bright eyes and lovely looks are not a woman’s fate determined continually? Again, it was her last hope. For though admiration was always sweet, yet to be troubled with a boy like this young Guardsman, was irksome to Millicent in her maturity. And to go through a round of such boys,--flattering, wooing them, being wooed,--good heavens! was this all that fortune had in store for a woman? Therefore she made one more effort before she yielded to fate.

‘You were more interested, Mr. Renton,’ she said, with soft reproach, ‘when we talked together last,--oh, so much more interested! If I did not know you so well, I could scarcely think it was the same.’

‘That is true,’ said Ben; ‘but you taught me some things, Mrs. Rich, and I profited by the lesson. I doubt whether but for your assistance I could ever have been the man I am.’

‘Ah! then I have at least something to do with you?’ said Millicent. ‘Come and tell me, will you? It is not like London, where one was always being interrupted. In the country there is so much time for talk.’

‘But I have no time,’ said Ben. ‘After to-morrow I shall probably go away again; and when I tell you I have profited by your instructions, I think that is all I have to say.’

‘You are angry with me because of,--because of,--poor Henry,’ said Millicent, with tears coming to her eyes. ‘But ah, Mr. Renton!--ah, Ben, if you only knew!’

Ben sprang impatiently to his feet. To him, as to any other generous man, it felt like a personal pang and shame to see a woman thus humiliate herself. He made a long step towards the window, with a flush on his face. ‘Here they come!’ he said, though at the moment he was not thinking much of their coming. And then there ensued a sudden inevitable flutter in the family which affected the guests. Alice, who had been charitably talking to the Guardsman, jumped up with a little cry of excitement, and sat down again, ashamed of herself, but with all possibilities of conversation quenched out of her; and Mrs. Renton, whom Mrs. Tracy had been occupying to the best of her ability to leave Millicent free for her important interview with Ben, was suddenly overcome, and cried a little, lying back on her pillows. ‘Oh Ben, my dear! I don’t know how I am to bear it,’ she said, holding fast by her son’s hand. Laurie was the only one who was perfectly steady. He came forward immediately from the background, and raised his mother up, supporting her on his arm. ‘You will bear it beautifully, mamma, as you always do,’ said Laurie. ‘Come and give us our luncheon. You forget we are not alone.’

And he supported her into the dining-room, holding her hand caressingly in his. As for Ben, he turned and gave his arm to Millicent, ‘As if I had been a cabbage,’ she said afterwards, indignantly. None of her pathetic glances, not the soft little pressure of her hand upon his arm, gained the slightest response. His face was set and stern, full of thoughts with which she had nothing to do. Mrs. Tracy ventured to whisper as she followed, ‘Ah, how sweet it is to me to see you two together again!’ But Ben did not even hear what she said. He waved his hand to Mr. Ponsonby in the distance as he went across the hall. The beautiful face at his side had no more effect upon him than if it had been a hideous mask. He was absorbed in his own business, and careless of her very existence. Millicent, in her fury, could have struck him as he took her into the dining-room. Was this to be the end?

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

XIII. THE WILL

It was Hillyard’s behaviour at this meal which gained him the regard of the various members of the Renton family. He took such pains to attend to the strangers, and give to the agitated group the air of an ordinary party, that all of them who were sufficiently disengaged to observe his exertions felt grateful to him. Millicent sat next to Ben on one side, but Hillyard had placed himself between her and Mary Westbury on the other, and in all the intervals of his general services to the company Mrs. Rich had his attention, for which Mary blessed him. She herself, overcome by many emotions, was but a pale spectator, able to take little part in what was going on, saying now and then a languid word to the unfortunate Guardsman, but capable of nothing more except watching, which she did with a sick excitement beyond all description. Mary was so pale, indeed, and watchful and excited, that her mother was alarmed, and made signs to her across the table which she did not feel capable of understanding. ‘She will cry if she does not mind, and make a scene,’ Mrs. Westbury said to herself; and set it all down to the score of Ben, which was true enough, but not as she thought. As for Ben, he inclined his ear specially to Mrs. Tracy, who was at his other hand, and hoped she liked The Willows, and that her rheumatism was better, and a hundred other nothings. There was, it is true, nothing very remarkable about this party, looking at it from the outside. They were well-dressed people, gathered round a well-appointed table, getting through an average amount of talk, smiling upon each other like ordinary mortals; but yet underneath how different it was; Mrs. Renton was consoled, and ate her luncheon, sustained by her son Laurie’s attentions; but Mrs. Frank Renton trembled so that she could scarcely keep up the fiction of eating, and grew pale and flushed again six times in a minute, and nervously consulted the countenance of her husband, who, very silent and self-absorbed, drank his sherry, and more of it than he wanted at that hour, taking little notice of any one; then, at the other end of the table, there was Mrs. Tracy, hanging with ostentatious, artificial interest on every word uttered by Ben; and Millicent, very pale, with an excited gleam in her eyes, casting tender, wistful looks at him, which he never saw; and Hillyard talking enough for six, helping everybody, introducing a hundred indifferent subjects of conversation, which ran a feeble course half-way round the table and then died a natural death. Mrs. Westbury, one of the few people who was calm enough to remark upon the appearance of the others, concluded within herself that, after all, the strangers were a mistake. If the family party had been alone, their excitement would have been nothing beyond what was natural; but her own child, Mary, who ought at least to have been one of the calmest of the party, sat by that unhappy Guardsman pale as a ghost, once in ten minutes saying something to him, and looking as if she were about to faint; and all the others were equally under the sway of agitation and self-restraint. When this uncomfortable meal came to an end, everybody rose with an alacrity which showed how glad they were that it was over. And then there ensued another moment of supreme embarrassment. If the strangers had any sense of the position they would go away instantly, the family felt; but instead of that, Millicent moved at once to the upper end of the room, where there stood upon a crimson pedestal a bust of the last Benedict Renton, and humbly begged of Ben to explain to her who it was; and while the others stood about waiting, he had to follow and describe his grandfather, and fulfil the duties of showman, Mrs. Tracy rushing to join the group.

‘Benedict Renton--your name!’ Millicent said, with again another attempt upon his feelings, while Ben stood angrily conscious of the effort and contemptuous of the fooling, scarcely concealing his eagerness to be at liberty. ‘And this portrait, Mr. Renton? I can trace the family resemblance,’ said Mrs. Tracy. And all this while Mr. Ponsonby’s blue bag waited outside, and the family murmured, standing round in agonies of suspense to know their fate. Then once more Hillyard stood forth, vindicating his claim to be called Ben’s right-hand man.

‘Let me be cicerone,’ he said, ‘Renton, I know you are anxious to see to your business. Mrs. Rich will take me for her guide to the pictures for the moment. You know Mr. Ponsonby cannot wait, and you are losing time.’

‘If Mrs. Rich will excuse me,’ said Ben.

‘Oh, please don’t think of excuses; we can wait,’ said Millicent. ‘Mayn’t we wait to learn the news?’ and she clasped her hands softly, unseen of the bystanders, and gazed into his face. ‘Nobody,’ she murmured, lowering her voice, ‘can be more interested than I.’

‘So long as you can find anything to amuse you,’ said Ben, half frantic. ‘Hillyard, I confide it to you;’ and he had turned away, before any further dart could be thrown at him. Then there was a hurried consultation between Mrs. Renton and her sister-in-law. ‘I shall stay with them; never mind. Of course I am anxious too; but half-an-hour more or less don’t matter,’ Mrs. Westbury said, with the voice of a martyr; and when Millicent looked round she found herself standing alone with her own special party, Hillyard at her right hand, and Mrs. Westbury, with a smile of fixed politeness, behind. Ben was gone. He had made no answer to her appeal,--he had shown no inclination to linger by her side. She had put forth all her strength for this grand final coup, and it had failed.

‘I don’t think Mr. Renton has improved in politeness in his travels,’ she said to Hillyard, unable altogether to restrain the expression of her despite.

‘He has not been in polite regions,’ said Hillyard; ‘and everything, you know, must give place to business, now-a-days, even the service of ladies. You must forgive him, when you consider what it is----’

‘I have nothing to do with him,’ said Millicent, angrily. ‘I hope I never shall have anything to do with so rude a man;’ and then she paused, thinking she had gone too far. ‘You know it is not a way to treat an old friend----’

‘Poor Renton!’ said Hillyard. ‘He is so unlikely to be any the better for this anxiety, you know,--that is the worst of it; and I don’t think he has any hopes to speak of. He has made all his arrangements for going back to his work----’

‘You don’t say so!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, with a look at her daughter. ‘And I can’t believe it!’ cried Millicent.

‘But I assure you it is true. No one can know better than I, for I go with him,’ said Hillyard; ‘all our arrangements are made. But let me show you the pictures. This was Sir Anthony Renton, who was a--Master in Chancery in Queen Elizabeth’s time,’ pointing to a respectable merchant in snuff-coloured garments of the days of Queen Anne. But the visitors cared nothing for the family portraits, and Hillyard’s last shaft had told. If Ben was unlikely to have Renton, it was of no use spending more trouble upon him. They consulted together hastily for a moment, and then they turned their backs upon the pictures. ‘I have the pleasure to wish you good morning, Mrs. Westbury,’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘Since our friends are so much occupied we will take our leave. Pray give Mrs. Renton my best sympathies.’

‘It is to be hoped some one will get the money at the end,’ said Millicent, with less civility, sweeping towards the door. And thus the strangers were got rid of at last.

‘I flatter myself I did that,’ said Hillyard, with a chuckle of satisfaction. And then he, too, took his departure, and left Aunt Lydia free to join the party in the library, where the great revelation of the future fate of the family was about to take place.

The air of restrained excitement in this room was such that it would have communicated itself to the merest stranger who had entered. It was a dark room by nature; and a cloud had just passed, as if in sympathy, over the brightness of the day. The window was open, and the blind beat and flapped against it in the wind, which was a sound that startled everybody, and yet that nobody had nerve enough to stop. Mrs. Renton had been placed in an easy chair near the vacant fireplace. Alice and Mary sat formally on two chairs against the wall; and the three brothers stood up together in a lump, though they neither spoke nor looked at each other. Mr. Ponsonby was seated at the writing-table, arranging his papers and holding in his hand a large blue envelope, sealed. There was complete silence, except now and then the rustle of papers, as the lawyer turned them over. The members of the family scarcely ventured to breathe. When Aunt Lydia entered they all turned round with a look of reproach; their nerves were so highly strung that the least motion startled them. In the midst of this silence, all at once Mrs. Renton began to sob and cry, ‘I feel as if you had just come home from the funeral!’ she said, with a wail of feeble grief. There was a little momentary stir at the suggestion, so true was it; and Alice, being at the end of her strength, cried too, silently, out of excitement. As for the brothers, they were beyond taking much notice of the interruption. They were now so much wiser, so much more experienced, since the day of the funeral, the last time they had all met together in this solemn way. Now they did not know what they were to expect: their confidence in their father and the world and things in general was destroyed. By this time it had become apparent to them that things the most longed for were about the last things to be attained. Had they been all sent away again for another seven years, or had the property been alienated for ever and ever, the brothers would not have been surprised. Whether they would have submitted, was a different question. Their opinions about many things had changed. Their unhesitating resolution to obey their father’s will seven years ago, without a word of blame, appeared to them now simple Quixotism. They were scarcely moved by their mother’s tears. He had done them harm, though they had been dutiful to him. He might now be about to do them more harm for anything they could tell. The uncriticising anxiety and expectation which filled the women of the party was a very different sentiment from the uneasy, angry anticipations of ‘the boys.’ Few dead men have ever managed to secure for themselves such a vigorous posthumous opposition. In short, he was not to them a dead man at all, but a living power, against which they might yet have to struggle for their lives.

Mr. Ponsonby looked round upon this strange company, with the big envelope in his hand and an excitement equal to their own. He looked at them all, after Mrs. Renton’s crying had been quieted, and cleared his throat. ‘Boys,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘I don’t know what’s in this any more than you do. He did it without consulting me. If it is the will of ‘54 that is here, it is all just and right; but if it is any new-fangled nonsense, like what I read to you here seven years ago, by the Lord I will fight it for you, die or win!’

This extraordinary speech, it may be supposed, did not lessen the excitement of the listeners. Alice crossed over suddenly to her husband, and clung to him, taking it for granted that disappointment and downfall were involved in these words. ‘Dear, if there is nothing for us, I shall not mind!’ she cried, gazing at Mr. Ponsonby with a kind of terror. ‘Quickly, please; let us wait no longer than is necessary,’ said Ben, with a certain peremptoriness of tone. Mr. Ponsonby had settled down in a moment, after this outburst, to his usual look and tone.

‘I need not trouble you with many preliminaries,’ he said; ‘you all remember how everything happened. He sent for me a week before his death, and gave me this,’ holding up the envelope, ‘and this letter, which I have also here. When I remonstrated his answer was, “If the one harms, the other will set right.” My own impression now is, I tell you frankly, that his mind was affected. Have patience one moment. Nothing in the shape of a will, even in draft, was found among his papers, so that there is nothing whatever to set against this, or explain his intention. If it is that of ‘54 it is all right----’

‘No more!’ cried Ben; ‘let us know what it is at once.’

Then the lawyer tore open the envelope. Not a sound but the tearing of the paper and crackling sound of the document within was to be heard in the room, except one sob from Mrs. Renton, which seemed to express in one sound the universal thirst of all their hearts. Mr. Ponsonby rose up as he unfolded the paper; he stopped and gazed round upon them blankly, with consternation in his eyes. Then he opened the sheet in his hand, turned it over and over, shook out the very folds to make sure that nothing lurked within,--then caught up the torn envelope and did the same. And then he uttered an oath. The man was moved out of himself,--he stamped his foot unconsciously, and clenched his fist, and swore at his dead antagonist. ‘D---- him!’ he cried fiercely. This pantomime drove the spectators wild. When he held up the paper to them they all crowded on each other to see, but understood nothing. It was a great sheet of blue paper, spotless--without a word upon it. Mr. Ponsonby in his rage tossed it down on the floor at their feet across the table. ‘Take it for what it is worth!’ he shouted, almost foaming with rage. Frank, at whose feet it fell, picked it up, and held it in his hands, turning it over, stupid with wonder. ‘What does it mean?’ cried Ben, hoarsely. Surprise and excitement had taken away their wits.

‘Give it to me!’ said Mrs. Renton, from behind; and her son, upon whom the truth was beginning to dawn, threw it into her lap. It flashed upon them all at once, and a kind of delirium, fell on the party,--flouted, laughed at, turned into derision, as it seemed, by the implacable dead.

‘It means that there is no will. I have been keeping a blank sheet of paper for you,’ said Mr. Ponsonby bitterly, ‘for seven years.’

And then there was another pause, and they all looked at each other, too much bewildered to understand the position, as if the earth had been rent asunder at their very feet.

‘We never did anything to him to deserve this!’ said Laurie suddenly, with a voice of pain. ‘Is there no mistake?’

As for Ben, he said nothing. His eyes followed the gleam of the paper, which his mother was turning over and over in her helpless hands, as if the secret of it might still be found out. But by degrees his eyes lighted up. Almost unconsciously he made a step apart, separating himself, as it were, from the audience, placing himself by Mr. Ponsonby’s side as a speaker. There was a certain triumph in his eye. After all, he was but a man, like other men, and the heir; and his rights had been debated and questioned by everybody, himself included. There was a flush and movement of satisfaction about him,--a sudden warm blaze out of the absorbing disappointment, baffled hopes, and bitter resentment which were rising round him.

‘If there is no will,’ he said, with a deep flush on his face, and nervous gesture of his hand, ‘Renton is mine, as it ought to be. I am in my father’s place; and what has been done amiss, it is my place to undo. I cannot believe that there is any one here who doubts me.’

While he was speaking, Alice uttered a little cry. She had turned to him her white face, but without seeing him or any one. ‘Must we go back to India?’ she said, with a voice of anguish. That was the shape it took to the young pair. She was pale as marble, but Frank’s face was blazing red.

‘Hush, Alice!’ he said, fiercely; ‘that is our own affair.’

Ben made a movement towards them in his impatience. ‘I have told you you should not go back!’ he cried. ‘I am here in my father’s place to set all right.’

‘Stop a little,’ said Mr. Ponsonby, suddenly coming forward with a chair in his hand, which he placed in the midst of them, sitting down upon it, amid the agitated group. ‘You have not done with me yet. We have not come to such simple means yet. Mrs. Frank, my dear, don’t be angry, and don’t give way to your feelings. Things are not so bad as you suppose. I lost my head, which is inexcusable in a man of my profession. It was a dirty trick of him, after a friendship of thirty years. My dear young people, sit down, all of you, and listen to me.’

No one made any change of position, but they all turned their eyes upon him with looks differing in intensity, but full of a hundred questions. Frank was defiant; Alice wild with despairing anxiety; Mrs. Renton crying; Laurie soothing her; Ben very watchful, eager, and attentive. Mr. Ponsonby, however, had entirely recovered his composure, which unconsciously had a calming effect upon them all.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I lost my head, which I had no right to do; but I am coming to myself. Now, listen to me. There is no will; and Ben from this moment is master of Renton, as he says. But stop a little. The personal property remains, which is worth as much as Renton. I don’t know what I could have been thinking of to forget that. After all, there is really nothing to find fault with but the look of the thing. The money has been accumulating these seven years;--it has been as good as a long minority;--and some of the investments have done very well. The land, of course, goes to the eldest son; but the personality, as some of you ought to have known, is divided. It comes to just about the same thing. God forgive me if I said anything I ought not to have said in the excitement of the moment. It is shabby to me, but it won’t harm you, thank God! I lost my head, that was all, and more shame to me. The will of ‘54 would have come to much about the same thing.’

‘Oh, Mr. Ponsonby,’ cried Alice, with streaming eyes, thrusting herself, unconscious of what she was about, in front of them all; ‘tell me, will there be enough to keep us from going to India again?’

‘There will be twenty thousand pounds, or more,’ said Mr. Ponsonby, ‘if you can live on that; and I could, for my part.’

Alice, like the lawyer, had lost her head. She was too young to bear this wonderful strain of emotion. She threw her arms about his neck in her joy, and wept aloud, while they all stood by looking on, with such feelings as may be supposed.

She was the only one who spoke. Her husband drew her back at this point, half angry, half sullen, with his disappointment still dark in his face. ‘You had better go,’ he said to her, almost harshly; ‘you have heard all that there is to be heard. It is best we should discuss the real business by ourselves.’

‘Yes, come along,’ said Laurie, ‘all you ladies. You have heard it is all right. You don’t want to hear the accounts, and all that legal stuff. We will manage the business. I will take you back to your sofa, mother, now you know all’s right.’

‘But is it all right?’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I don’t seem to understand anything. Ben, will you come and tell me? Have they all got their money,--all the boys? And what is Frank to have for his children? Till you have children of your own, it is his boy who is the heir. Laurie is always telling me it will come right. I would rather hear it from the rest. Oh, boys! your poor father meant it for the best.’

‘It is all right, mother,’ said Ben; ‘better than we thought.’

‘Ah, but Frank says nothing,’ said the mother. ‘I will not go away till I am satisfied about Frank.’

‘You heard Alice, I suppose,’ said Frank, somewhat sulky still. ‘I do think it is a shame there is no will; but if we are to have our shares, as Mr. Ponsonby says, I suppose, mother, it is all right.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Laurie. ‘Come, and I’ll see if the carriage is round for your drive. You know how important it is you should have your drive.’

‘Your dear papa always made such a point of it, Laurie,’ Mrs. Renton said, holding her handkerchief to her eyes, ‘or else I am sure I never could have the heart to go out on such a day.’

And thus the ladies were dismissed, and the brothers held their meeting, and settled their business by themselves. It would be vain to say that they were satisfied. Frank, whose mind had been vaguely excited,--he could not tell why,--and to whom it had begun to seem inevitable that some special provision should have been made for the only one of the three who had ‘ties’ and a family to provide for, had experienced a most sharp and painful downfall. And it took him a long time to accustom himself to the idea that after all he was not wronged. It was a personal offence to him, as it had been to his wife, that Ben should look satisfied. ‘When he has Renton, I do not see the justice of Ben having his share of the money too,’ he said, with a little bitterness in his unreasonable disappointment. And Ben was half displeased to feel that it was not to be his magnanimous part to provide for his brothers, but that their own right and share remained to them as indisputably as Renton was his. His proposal was that they should return to the will of ‘54, of which Mr. Ponsonby still possessed the draft, and a great deal of discussion took place between them. It was half-past six o’clock before any of the party emerged out of the dark library, where they had spent between three and four hours. Mr. Ponsonby came out, declaring that he was tired and thirsty and half dead, and demanding sherry from the butler, who was preparing the table for dinner. They all went in and stood by the sideboard, and swallowed something to refresh themselves. ‘And, my dear boys, give me the satisfaction of hearing you say you are contented,’ said Mr. Ponsonby, ‘before dinner comes on; for I should like to be jolly, if I may.’

‘I am perfectly satisfied,’ said Laurie; ‘and Ben is happy for the first time for some years. As for Frank, he must speak for himself; he has been dreaming, and it is sometimes unpleasant to wake up.’

‘If I have been dreaming, it was not for myself,’ said Frank; ‘a man with a family is so different from you fellows; but if it will be any satisfaction to you, I think I may say I am content, since better can’t be.’

And then he went up-stairs abruptly to dress. Alice had been waiting for him long, trembling a little, and not daring to believe anything till her authorised expositor of external events came to deliver the judgment to her. It did not seem right to Alice that Frank should not be the first in any distribution of prizes or honours. And yet she was not insensible to the claims of natural justice. ‘We should never have been able to give it up if it had come to us,’ she said to herself; ‘and it would have been contrary to all traditions of the family to disinherit Ben.’

‘You always told me he was to have it,’ she said, when Frank came in, with the remnants of his sulkiness still hanging about him. ‘You used to say if it came to you, you would give it up to Ben.’

‘And so I should, of course,’ said Frank; ‘the thing is, the fellow was so self-satisfied,--with a kind of look of pleasure that we were all cut out. That was what I could not stand.’

‘But don’t you think he meant to be good to us?’ Alice said, trying hard to smoothe her savage down.

‘Good to us, by Jove! but fortunately that’s all over,’ said Frank. ‘We are safe enough. No need to worry yourself over those blessed children any more. Poor little beggar! he won’t have much to look forward to; but still you may bring him up at home, and that is all you care for, you little goose,’ the young husband said, softening over the happiness in Alice’s eyes.

‘How much shall we have, Frank?’ she asked, with a sudden relapse into prudence.

‘Let me dress now,--and go and make yourself pretty,’ he said. ‘We shall not be so badly off; there will be something like a thousand a-year.’

And thus Frank Renton too acknowledged to himself that things might have been worse, and that he was content.

But perhaps the strangest thing of all was that Mrs. Westbury withdrew into her daughter’s room, and locked the door, and had a cry, in which Mary, over-worn and over-excited, was quite disposed to share, though for a different reason. ‘I cannot understand your uncle Laurence,’ said Mrs. Westbury. ‘I am sure I am not mercenary. I have given you up to your aunt, and never grumbled, much though I wanted you; and you have given up seven years of your life to her, and he has not left you so much as a gown. I do feel it, my dear, for you.’

‘I am sure, mamma, I don’t feel it for myself,’ said Mary, with a smile. ‘One does not mind so long as all is right with the boys.’

‘The boys are all very well,’ said Mrs. Westbury, ‘but he might have left something, my dear, to you.’

‘I did not want anything, mamma,’ said Mary. ‘But godmamma will not want me so much when she has Ben, and oh, I do so long to get home!’ Poor Mary was over-done, over-worn, excited by so many diverse feelings that her power of self-command failed her at last. She put her arms round her mother’s neck, and threw, as it were, all her weight of unexpressed cares and griefs upon her. ‘Take me home, mamma!’ she said, and wept in the abandonment of weariness and disappointment, and that overwhelming despondency for which one can give no reason, on her mother’s neck.

Mrs. Westbury was a woman fond of explanations from other people, but she understood her child by instinct, ‘Yes, yes, you shall go home, my darling!’ she said, soothing her, but without any intention of carrying out her promise. It was early days, as she said to herself. Before any change was made, it must be made plainly apparent what the rest of the family meant to do.

On the whole, the dinner-table was more cheerful that night. They were all worn out with excitement, it is true, and signs of tears were about the women’s eyes; but still there was the sense that, after all, justice was once more in force, and natural law ruling their affairs. One man’s will, fantastic and unaccountable, was no longer supreme over them. Ben took his place at the head of the table with a certain glow of satisfaction. ‘I know none of you would have seen me wronged,’ he said when they were sipping over their wine. It was the first time that he had taken any notice of the often-repeated declaration of his younger brothers.

‘Not if the prize had been Great Britain, instead of Renton,’ said Laurie; ‘though, to tell the truth, the one would have been as great a bore as the other, had it come to me.’

‘Of course I should have given it up to Ben,’ said Frank; ‘but it would have been a struggle; therefore I’m very glad things have been settled as they are without my help.’

‘Bravo!’ cried Mr. Ponsonby, ‘that is the best sentiment I have heard to-night.’

‘Shake hands, old fellow,’ said Ben, holding out his hand. Laurie somehow did not count. The world would indeed have been coming to an end had he been out of temper about his rights. It was the younger and the elder who exchanged the grasp of peace and mutual amity. ‘And, remember, Renton is home to us all,’ Ben said, with moisture in his eyes. ‘Of course my mother remains here; as it has always been, with room for all.’

‘Bravo, bravo!’ said Mr. Ponsonby, ‘now is the time for generous feelings! My dear fellows, prosperity is the thing that opens men’s hearts. Don’t talk to me of the benefits of misfortune! Let a man feel he has his thousand a-year, or his five thousand a-year, safe in his pocket, and then is the time his heart warms. But I’d have Mrs. Frank come to an understanding with Mrs. Ben before I would take the invitation in too literal a sense,’ said the old lawyer, with a chuckle over his own wit.

‘I do not expect there will ever be a Mrs. Ben,’ said the heir, with an impatient movement of his head.

‘Tell me that this time twelvemonths,’ said Mr. Ponsonby; and then they all went out to the lawn to smoke their evening cigar.

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XIV. THE END OF A DREAM

If I do not enter very particularly into the family arrangements which were made after this settlement, it is because, in the circumstances, so much detail is unnecessary. Had Ben been in Frank’s position, a married man with a family, it would of course have been needful that some arrangements should have been made about Mrs. Renton’s future habitation. She herself was provided for by her marriage settlements, and had a little fortune of her own, settled on herself, which was something for the babies to look forward to; and there was a jointure-house on the estate, known by the name of the Dovecote, a pretty, small house, with a view on the river, and only a mile’s drive from Cookesley, where there can be no doubt Mrs. Renton, had there been any need for it, would have been very comfortable. But as Ben was not married, what did it matter? It was better his mother should keep house for him, as she said in her innocence, than leave him to servants. There was a consultation held in her room next morning, to the interruption of the newspaper-reading; but as this was a crisis, full of events, for once in a way she did not mind.

‘I would go to the Dovecote, my dear boy, if you thought I should be in your way,’ she said; ‘but I think I had much better stay and keep house for you, till you have a wife of your own to keep your house.’

‘I don’t think that is a very likely event,’ said Ben. ‘Of course you will keep house for me. And I think you should give the Dovecote to Frank,--that is one thing I wanted to speak to you about. I will have it fitted up, and do what I can to make it comfortable, and then you can have the children always at hand to amuse you while I am away.’

‘But you are not going away?’

Mary was quite at the other end of the room, working by the window. It was only her aunt’s worsted-work she was doing--not a very serious occupation--but it always wanted a remarkable amount of light when Ben was in the room. She was sitting there by herself, listening eagerly, with a sore feeling in her heart, as of being excluded,--she who had sacrificed so much to the comfort of the family. After all, though she was so nearly related, and had spent her life with them, she was not a Renton. Not like a daughter of the house, whose opinion would have weight and whose comfort had to be consulted. Talk of Mrs. Renton keeping the house! The meaning of that of course was that Mary was to keep house. But of Ben’s house she never would be the honorary housekeeper,--of that she was sure. When she heard her aunt’s frightened exclamation, she too looked up a little,--of course it must be only a figure of speech about his going away. Or he meant going to London perhaps, or to the moors, or something temporary. Ben came to the window, with his hands in his pockets, before he answered. Not as if he were coming to Mary. It was only the restless habit men have of wandering about a room. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking out, and addressing nobody, ‘I am going away. Of course I must go back to my work. You forget that when I came home I had not the least idea of what was to become of me. And to throw away the work I had been making my bread by for six years, would have been a great piece of folly. Indeed, the fact is,--and I hope you won’t be vexed, mother, I assure you it is quite necessary,--I am going to-morrow. I must finish what I’ve got to do.’

‘Going to-morrow!’ said Mrs. Renton, with a little shriek. Mary did not even lift up her head from her work. She kept on bending over the worsted roses as if they were the most important things in the world; but her heart suddenly had taken to flutter in the wildest way against her quiet breast.

‘Yes, Mary,’ said Ben, suddenly, ‘don’t you see that it is necessary? I must finish my work.’

Mary made him no answer, being intent on the shade of a pink, and he took a few turns about the room in his impatience; for his mother had begun to cry softly in her bed.

‘That is always the worst of talking to you women,’ he said. ‘Mother, can’t you understand? You can’t go breaking off threads in life, as you do it in your sewing. I must wind up my affairs. There are some things I must see after for myself.’

‘Oh, Ben, after I had made up my mind to something so different!’ said his mother. ‘I did not sleep a bit last night for making up how it was to be. I had quite settled in my mind what parties it would be necessary to give. We have not entertained since your poor dear father died, not once,--but now I had been thinking there ought to be a series of dinners, and perhaps a ball, to give Renton its proper place again in the county, and prove that everything is settled. And now you come and break my heart, and tell me you are going away!’

‘But, dear godmamma, he will soon come back,’ said Mary, coming to the rescue. ‘He does not mean he is to go on making railways all his life. He is going to finish his work,--that is what he said; though it is disappointing of course.’

‘Because of the ball?’ said Ben, looking at her across his mother; but Mary was not able at that moment to take her part in any encounter of wit.

‘No,’ she said, almost angrily, ‘not because of the ball. I am not young enough now to care very much for balls; but because I thought it was your turn now to take care of godmamma, and----’ Mary could trust herself no further. She went back abruptly to her work, leaving both mother and son in a state of the utmost surprise and consternation.

‘I think you are all bent on driving me wild,’ said poor Mrs. Renton. ‘It seemed as if everything was over yesterday; but now here is Ben going away, and Mary is disagreeable. And who have I to fall back upon? Laurie is very kind, but he will be going too; and Alice is nice, but I am not used to her. If Mary is to be sharp with me like this, what am I to do?’

‘I will never be sharp with you, godmamma,’ said Mary, who for the first time in her gentle life felt herself driven further than she could bear. ‘But you must remember sometimes that I have a home and people of my own. You have wanted me very much for these seven years, and you know I have never said a word,--but now that the boys have all come home, I did hope----’

She would not break down and cry,--not for the world, while Ben kept gazing at her from his mother’s bedside. But she stopped short abruptly, in the middle of her sentence, which was the only alternative, and applied herself with a kind of fury, with trembling fingers, and eyes blind with unshed tears, to the worsted work. Calculating upon her services as if she were a piece of furniture! Making all these arrangements without any reference to her! It was more than Mary could bear.

‘Ben, speak to her,’ said Mrs. Renton, faintly. ‘Oh, my dear, the boys! Of course I am fond of the boys; but what can boys do for a poor woman like me? Oh, Ben, speak to her! You would not go and forsake me, Mary, when I want you most?’

Ben did not speak, however. He was startled, and out of his reckoning. He went to the window again, and stood opposite to his cousin, and gazed down upon her, with his hands in his pockets and a look of profound concern and uncertainty on his face.

‘I won’t forsake you, godmamma,’ said Mary, with a trembling voice; ‘but surely you might think,--plan out something,--make some arrangement.’ How hard it is for a woman to assert herself, to speak out of a heart sore with the consciousness of being made no account of, and not to cry! It would have been easier for Mary to put herself down under their feet and allow them to walk over her,--as, indeed, it seemed to her she had been doing. And they did not know it! They had endured their seven years’ bondage, and it had come to an end, and all was right again; but for her the same round was to go on for ever, and nobody even was aware for what poor hire she had sacrificed her life and her youth.

‘Davison, Miss Mary says she is going to leave us,’ said Mrs. Renton, as the maid came in. ‘No, no; take it away. I could not swallow it. I am sure if I thought there was anything in the world she wanted, I would have got it for her, Davison. And I always thought she was so happy with me. No, it would choke me, I tell you. And if she was not happy with me, there are years and years that I might have got used to it; but to go and tell me now, just when I want her most----’

‘You’ll take your arrowroot, ma’am,’ said Davison, soothingly. ‘It’s just as you like it, neither too hot nor too cold. Miss Mary agoing away! That’s a fine joke. Miss Mary couldn’t stay away, ma’am, not if you was to send her. She’s a deal too fond of you. It’s just nice now, just as you like it. It’s all her fun, that’s what it is!’

‘I don’t see any fun in it,’ said Mrs. Renton, feebly. But she was consoled by the fuss, and the re-arrangement of her pillows, and the arrowroot. ‘You’ll speak to her, Davison, won’t you?--and tell her I couldn’t bear it. I am sure it would cost me my life.’

‘To be sure, ma’am, I’ll tell her,’ said the maid.

While this little scene was going on, Ben stood by the window, always with his hands in his pockets, gazing at his cousin, who worked with fury, with hands that trembled, and eyes blind with tears. She kept them from falling with a superhuman effort, but she could not see anything but great blurs of mixed colour on the piece of embroidery before her, harmless bits of worsted all dilated and magnified through the tears.

‘Do you really mean it, Mary?’ he said, looking down upon her with a look of grief, which she did not see, and yet knew of, and was stung by to the bottom of her heart.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘Ben. I can’t tell. I don’t want to give you more trouble. I don’t know what I am saying. It has all been too much,--too much!’

‘Come out into the air,’ said Ben. ‘I see it has been too much. We are all such selfish wretches, thinking only of our own concerns. Come out into the air.’

‘I think I am more fit to go to bed,’ said Mary, and the tears fell in spite of her. ‘Never mind me. I have got such a headache,--and,--a bad temper. Never mind! I think I shall go to bed.’

‘Come out to the woods instead,’ said Ben, with a brother’s tender sympathy. ‘Never mind, mother,--she will come round. It is only that she is worn out and over-done. I am going to take her out into the air.’

And so he did, though there was nothing she less desired. He took her out, giving her his arm, and suiting his steps to hers as if she had been ill. She was moved to a weary laugh, half of exasperation, when she had been thus led forth. ‘There is nothing the matter with me, Ben. Don’t make all this fuss. You make me ashamed of myself,’ she said.

‘There is something the matter with you,’ said Ben. ‘Come and sit down here, where we can have a good talk. I see now, though I was such a selfish ass as not to think of it before. You see, Mary, you have always been so much one of ourselves, that it never occurred to me to think of the sacrifice you were making in living here.’

‘It was no sacrifice!’ cried Mary. ‘Don’t make me wretched, Ben. I lost my temper, that was all. I thought you were making all your plans, as if it were to go on for ever and ever; and that I was only a piece of furniture that nobody thought of. Don’t pay any attention to me.’

‘My poor little Mary!’ said Ben, taking her hand into his. He made her sit down on the root of the beech, and bent his eyes wistfully on her, holding her hand in one of his, and with the other stroking his moustache, as is the wont of men in trouble. He saw there was something in it, more than met the eye; and he looked at her with a certain blank wistfulness. What did Mary want? If it had been anything he could fetch for her from the ends of the earth, he would have done it. If he had only known what it was!--or what would please her,--or how to soothe the nerves, which were evidently all ajar. Mary could not bear that gaze. Shame, and a sense of humiliation, and all the sensitive pride of a woman, overwhelmed her. Was there something in her heart which she would not have him discover? She put up her other hand and covered her face with it, turning away from him; and whether any sort of enlightenment might by degrees have penetrated the blank anxiety of his gaze, I cannot tell; for at that moment they were interrupted in such a way as Mary remembered to the end of her life.

All at once a rustle was audible as of some one coming,--indeed, of some one quite near; and then there was a little, light laugh. “Oh, good gracious! we have come at an unlucky moment,’ said Millicent’s voice, close at their side. Mary sprang to her feet, drawing her hand away from Ben’s, raising her flushed face in a kind of desperation. Mrs. Tracy and her daughter had just turned the corner round the beech-tree, from which Ben rose, too, with more surprise than delight. Millicent had put on a white dress, with no sign, except in the black ribbons, of her mourning. She was in the full splendour of her beauty, excited into more brilliancy than usual. ‘I am sure I am very sorry if I have interrupted anything,’ she said, with the colour rising into her cheek, and a laughing devil of malice in her eyes.

‘Yes, you interrupted a serious discussion,’ said Ben. ‘Mary is worn out, and I have been questioning her about her health. She has been shutting herself up a great deal too much, and she denies it, as all women do.’

‘How sorry I am! and you were feeling her pulse, I suppose?’ said Millicent. ‘It looked the prettiest scene imaginable, seen through the trees. You did not hear us coming, you were so pleasantly,--I mean seriously,--occupied. And have you found out what is the matter with her, Mr. Ben?’ This was said with the air half-malicious, half-friendly of the discoverer of a secret. And on the score of this pretended confidence, Millicent approached him closely, and used all her weapons against the man who had once knelt at her feet. She looked him in the face with eyes as much brighter than Mary Westbury’s as they had been in the earlier days,--with the sweet tints of her complexion increased by exercise, and by, perhaps a little excitement over this supposed discovery,--with the morning air puffing out the white frills and trimmings of her dress, and ruffling a curl which, after the fashion of the day, fell over her shoulder. The mother had immediately appropriated Mary, who, wild with shame and confusion and anger, stood at bay, and was now with difficulty restraining her inclination to burst away from the intruder, and go home and bury herself in her room, where nobody could see her hot blushes and angry tears. Ben was moved by a certain confusion, too, against his will. It was an awkward attitude, certainly, in which to be seen by any stranger eye.

‘I am not much of a physician,’ he said; ‘but we have all had a great deal of excitement lately, and Mary is worn out. I trust it is nothing more.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Millicent. ‘I know that; indeed, I had thought I might come and inquire this morning as an old friend. You forget that you told me all about it,--once. I thought I might ask, for the sake of old times, if all was right at last.’

‘You do me a great deal of honour to remember anything about my affairs,’ said Ben. ‘Are you going to the river?’ and he turned with her to go down in the direction she had been taking. ‘Have you a boat?’

‘Yes; the old gardener put us across,’ said Millicent. ‘You do not give me credit for any friendly feeling, and you always try to get rid of me, Mr. Renton. Oh, indeed, I can see it very well. I do not feel angry, for perhaps you have had provocation; though I can see it very well. But it would not do you any harm, nor me much good--except for old friendship’s sake,--if you were to answer my question. Is it all right?’

‘It is perfectly right,’ said Ben, with a little bow. ‘I don’t know that there was ever any doubt on that subject. I must thank you for taking so much interest in us and our affairs.’

‘That is all you say now,’ cried Millicent, with ready tears springing to her eyes; and tears come as readily from mortification and the passion of anger as from any other cause. ‘You would not have answered me like that once. Ah, Ben Renton, how much you are changed!’

‘I think it is very natural I should be,’ said Ben. ‘You are changed, too, Mrs. Rich; though not in anything external,--unless it may be for the better, if that were possible,’ he added, with a certain grudge in his words. The man was but a man, and they were extorted from him by the beauty which could neither be mistaken nor overlooked.

‘If I am not changed in externals, you may be sure I am changed in nothing else,’ said Millicent, turning upon him with a smile of such eager sweetness and hope, that it almost reached his heart. She, poor creature! believed she was winning him back. The thought quickened all her powers, quickened the very springs of being in her. She forgot Mary, and the attitude which for a moment had driven her to despair. So much the better if he had been Mary’s lover,--a touch of triumph the more! ‘I have had a great deal to endure since we parted,’ she went on. ‘Oh, you cannot tell all I have had to bear! And I thought time had worn me and aged me, and that you would scarcely have known me again. But nothing has ever changed me at heart.’

‘Mrs. Rich, you forget that this conveys very little information to me,’ said Ben, moved with sudden vindictiveness. ‘In those days of which you speak,--and I don’t know why you should speak of them, the recollection cannot be a pleasant one,--I remember clearly enough what a fool I made of myself. My heart was open enough,--ass as I was,--but I don’t know now, and I did not then, what were the sentiments of yours,--if indeed----’

‘I had one!’ cried Millicent. ‘Oh, that you should say this to me! And yet I feel that I deserve it. I acted as if I had none. What can I say or do to make you know how sorry I am? Sorry is too poor a word. Oh, Ben, I know I ought not to say it; but if either then or now you could have seen into my heart----’

Her eyes were shining through her tears; her cheeks glowed with soft blushes; her look besought, implored, entreated him. Poor soul! she said true. If he could have seen into her heart, then or now, this is what he would have seen there:--If Ben Renton will lift me out of all the necessities of my scheming, wretched life,--if he will give me plenty, money, luxury, comfort, what my soul sighs for,--then I will do my best to love him. I will be a good wife to him,--I will be good in my way,--I will,--I will,--I will! She had said all this to God many a time saying her prayers, and this is what her heart would have said to Ben, with a kind of desperate ingenuousness,--innocence in the midst of guile. And he looked at her, and the man’s soul was shaken within him. Something of the truth became visible to him;--not the ineffable charm of love. If it had been very love that shone in her eyes,--however his finer sense had been revolted by its over-frankness,--no doubt he would have fallen a victim. For he had loved her once, and she had never been more beautiful, perhaps never so beautiful in her life. He was touched by her loveliness, by her eagerness, by the pitiful intensity of expression in her eyes. Take me,--save me!--she seemed to be crying to him: and, good heavens! to think what one gleam of this fire, one such look, would have been to him once! Ben grew confused in himself, half with recollections, half with pity; and the softness of success and restoration was in his mind,--even of triumph,--for had not he won a victory, and silenced all opposers? His voice faltered as he answered her, if answer it could be called.

‘It is a long time ago,’ he said; ‘one’s very body and being alter you know, they say, completely in seven years.’

‘But one’s heart never changes,’ murmured Millicent. And that was the moment when Mrs. Tracy, feeling that the conflict was not progressing, chose to come in like a watchful goddess, who sees that her champion’s arms do not prevail.

‘My dear, we are taking Mr. Renton away from his cousin,’ she said, ‘and from talking over family matters; but since we have done so, could you not persuade him, Millicent, to come over to us to luncheon? You might go on the water a little; you are so fond of it; and then lunch would be ready. Mr. Renton, you must not think it strange that we are anxious to see a little of such a kind friend as you are. I always say your ready kindness saved my life.’

Millicent turned sharp round, and involuntarily clenched her hand, as if she would have struck her mother. ‘It is all over now!’ she said to herself; and never had the battle been so nearly won. As for Ben, the sound of the new voice woke him up in a moment. He gave himself a little shake, and recovered his self-command. Good heavens! to think how near a step it had been to falling helpless into the syren’s snare!

‘Thanks; but we must turn back when we have seen you to your boat,’ he said; and lingered to let Mrs. Tracy join them. ‘I have no time for any such pleasures. My mother thinks it hard enough already, and I must give her what little time remains. I am going away to-morrow.’

‘To-morrow!’ said Mrs. Tracy, with a half-sneer and a look at her daughter, to which Millicent, flushed, and pouting, and angry, made no reply. ‘Then is it a mistake, after all? I thought I heard you say all was right. I beg your pardon, I am sure----’

‘About the property it is all right,’ said Ben; ‘but I am not the idle fellow you once knew me. Those were the only six months I ever absolutely threw away in my life. And I can’t give up my work in a moment because I have got back my rights.’

‘It was a pity you threw away those six months you speak of,’ said Millicent. ‘Come, mamma; why should we trouble Mr. Renton to go with us to the boat? Of course he must have a great deal to talk of,--to his mother,--and to Mary,--his own people. We are strangers, and have no claim upon him.’

‘There are some things which one gives all the more freely because there is no claim,’ said Ben, with good-nature. ‘The path is rather rough here. Mrs. Tracy, give me your hand.’

‘Thank you, I want no help!’ Millicent cried, when he turned to her, and she sprang over the gnarled mass of roots, and ran down the path to the green river-bank. She stood there, framed in by the thick foliage, her white figure standing out against the light of the river,--a picture not to be easily forgotten. Emerald green below,--green, just touched with points of autumnal colour, here and there a yellow leaf above;--gleams of blue sky looking through;--one long line of light reflecting all the darker objects, the river, with one boat lying close to the grassy margin; and in the midst the beautiful, flushed, brilliant creature, full of passion, and mortification, and an angry despair. She did not think it worth while now to hide the strong emotions in her mind, but stood with her face turned to them as they followed, humiliated, yet defiant,--the crown of all the scene, and the only discord in it. Poor Millicent! her eyebrows lowered, her eyes shone; her colour was high with the shame of her defeat; and yet, beyond the angry glance in her eye, there was a tear, and the corners of her mouth drooped; and, scarcely concealed by the hard, little laugh of artificial gaiety, a sob was sounding in her throat.

‘Good-bye,’ she said, almost roughly, ‘Ben,--I will never call you so again! I wish you luck of your good fortune. It makes a great difference to most people in this world.’

‘Good-bye,’ said Ben, taking her hand almost against her will. ‘It makes little difference to me. What has been done has been done by nature and years. If you should ever want help or counsel that I can give---- Well, let us say nothing about that. Good-bye----’

‘For a time,’ Mrs. Tracy added, with her bland smile, taking his hand in both hers,--‘till our meeting again.’

And Mary, whose feelings all this time had been more overwhelming than can be described, and who had followed mechanically, with an instinct of being there to the last to see what direful harm might happen, stood passive by his side, not knowing if she were in a trance or a dream; and saw the boat push off into the shining river. Mrs. Tracy turned and waved her hand to them, bland to the last. But Millicent never turned her head. Once only, just as the boat shot past the long drooping branches of the willow which closed in the view, she looked round sharply and saw them; and the rowlocks sounded hollow and loud, and with another stroke the boat was gone. Neither of them have ever seen that beautiful face again.

Ben stood for some time after they had disappeared on the same spot, forgetting everything, gazing out upon the vacant stream and vacant sunshine, in a curious vacant way. If it had been put to him, he would never have confessed how much moved he had been. Perhaps he was himself unconscious of it. But nature made a pause in him, manifesting the convulsion, in her own way, when this woman, who had influenced it so strangely, passed for ever out of his life.

‘Are you fond of Coleridge, Mary?’ he said to her without any preface, quite suddenly, as they went up the steep bank.

‘Of Coleridge, Ben? What an odd question! Why do you ask?’

‘Do you remember what he says? And what a curious sense he had of the things that are inexpressible,--

‘How there looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright, And how he knew--‘

‘No, I don’t mean that,--not so bad as that!’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Mary, with a little shiver; and she took hold of his arm with an instinctive desire to show him her sympathy. Very well did she know what he meant; or at least thought, hoped she did; but denied it with characteristic readiness. He pressed the soft, sisterly hand to him when he felt it on his arm. Certainly, there was a great sympathy between them, though nothing more. And he did not say another word to her of the subject of the conversation which this last meeting had blotted out as if it had never been. They did not talk of anything, indeed, but went home together, with a silent understanding of each other in which there was certainly some balm.

Understanding each other! which meant that the woman,--partly,--understood the man, and had it in her heart to be a little sorry for him in respect to the conflict through which he had come; and a little, a very little,--which was more remarkable,--sorry for the other woman thus finally foiled and done with; but that the man had no comprehension at all of the woman, and gave no particular thought to her, except so far as was conveyed in a tender, kindly sympathy for poor little Mary. Her life must not be made a burden to her any longer by his mother’s drives and her worsted work. That was all the progress Ben had made in the comprehension of his cousin’s heart.

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XV. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

On the next morning Ben went away without a word, no repentance of his intention or lingering desire to postpone it having apparently crossed his mind. He took leave of his mother the night before, for he was going away early. ‘It will not be for seven years this time,’ he said, as he kissed her, and was going to kiss Mary, too,--a formula which his cousin, with a pang of mortification in her heart, felt might be better dispensed with. ‘Nay; I shall see you in the morning,’ she said, half terrified lest the blood which she felt to be scorching her cheek might ‘make him think anything.’ What should it make him think? She puzzled him a little, it must be allowed; but he was not the kind of man who can think of many different things at one time. His mind had been absorbed with the business which brought him to Renton. It was absorbed now with thoughts of what he had to do in the winding-up of his own affairs. Now and then it flitted vaguely across his perception that Mary had something on her mind which, one time or other, it would be his business to see into. Dear little Mary! Ben was very fond of his cousin. If she had wanted a hair from the beard of the Cham of Tartary, or a golden apple from the Tree of Bliss in the gardens of the Enchanted Isles, he would have done all a man could do to get it for her. But he did not know now what she wanted, or if she wanted anything,--and that was one of the matters which could wait till he came home.

Laurie, too, was going away with Ben, though only to town; and the night before they left was a night of talk and recollections more than the separated family had yet permitted themselves. It was true that Hillyard put himself singularly in their way. Perhaps he had not had all the advantages of the Rentons; but still he was a gentleman, though much knocking about the world had taken some of the outside polish off him, and he had never shown any inclination to intrude upon their private talk, or make himself a sharer in the family communings,--never till now. Perhaps it was because they were just setting off again, and Ben’s family came in for the attendrissement, which might have been more justly bestowed upon his own. But it was ridiculous that he should plant himself by Mary, occupying her attention, and pouring forth his confidences upon her, as it seemed to him good to do. They were all gathered together in the drawing-room as they had been so many times before, after Mrs. Renton went to bed, with the windows open as usual, the lights shaded, the languor of the night and its wistfulness and soft content and melancholy stealing in; the half-darkness and the soft breathing of the night air, and the fluttering moths about the lamp, were all accessories of the picture which nobody could forget. And there was a mysterious gloom about the walls and the roof, owing to the shades on the lamps, which gave a more distinct character to the half-visible faces, each in its corner, and to the brilliant circles of illumination round every light. They had begun to talk of their father, and this last event in the story of his will, which was so strange, and so unlike all his previous life.

‘One would like to know what he meant by it,’ said Laurie. ‘Poor, dear old father! If there had been something dependent on the issue of our probation; if there had been a reward for the man that had used his talent best, like you, Ben; or for the man who had given him an heir, like Frank; but all to end in this aimless way! We have always thought ourselves very sound in the brain, we Rentons, or I know what one might be tempted to think.’

‘That is what I have thought all along,’ said Frank.

‘It is not for us to say so, at least,’ said the elder brother. ‘I believe illness coming on had confused his mind. They say it does. I don’t think he can have been quite clear what he was doing. And then he remembered at last, and was sorry,--don’t you recollect?’

‘My poor father!’ said Laurie. And then there was a pause; and in this pause, through the dimness and the stillness, came the sound of Hillyard’s voice, too low to be distinguishable, coming from Mary’s corner, addressed to her with a volubility and eagerness which struck them all with amazement. He had not meant to be so audible; and when, after the first silence, a little laugh burst from Alice at the one voice thus brought into prominence, he faltered and stopped too, as people do under such circumstances. What could he be finding to say to Mary? and what could Mary be thinking of to listen to him? were the half-angry thoughts that flashed over Ben’s mind. Of course he was a guest here, and everybody’s equal. Yet still, it seemed to Ben as if, on the whole, this was bad taste, to say the least, on Hillyard’s part.

But Alice, though she had laughed at the sound of the solitary voice which continued when they all dropped, was eager to let loose her opinions, too, on the other subject. ‘I cannot see what other will could have been just, now,’ she said. ‘If he had told you something to do, it would have been different. But he gave you nothing to do; and how were you to know what he wanted? It was not Laurie’s three princes, after all.’

‘And, now I come to think of it, I don’t believe in my three princes,’ said Laurie. ‘I have not a doubt they fought it out when papa was out of the way. Fancy two elder brothers giving in to a fellow because he had the marvellousest little dog that ever was seen! It came to natural justice, you may be sure, at the end, and the strongest had it. And it has come to a kind of natural justice with us, so far as law allows. Poor old father! One used to feel as if he must be so much wiser than we were. And it proves he was as confused as the rest, and saw just as short a way before him, and stultified himself, half-knowingly, like one of his own sons.’

‘Don’t!’ said Ben, with a voice of pain. He was more angry with his father than soft-hearted Laurie ever could have been, and consequently was less able to talk of it. ‘Thank heaven!’ he cried, suddenly, ‘I don’t suppose it has done any of us any lasting harm.’

‘No,’ said Laurie, out of the silence, after a pause, ‘no more harm than we should have done ourselves, anyhow, for our own hand.’

And somehow, in the room, there was the sound of a sigh; whom it proceeded from it would be hard to tell--six people all gathered together of a soft autumn evening, and not too much light to betray them, it would be strange if there was not more than one who sighed. But Alice, in the shade, slid her hand through her husband’s arm, and said joyously, ‘It has done us no harm, Frank!’ ‘Because we would not let it,’ he whispered back again, brushing her soft cheek with his moustache. Yes, that was the secret. Have your will, anyhow, whether fortune permits or no; and in the long run the chances are you will come out just as well as your neighbour, who allowed fortune to constrain him, and will have had your will and your happiness into the bargain; bad social morality, perhaps, but just as good fact as any other. The young soldier and his wife had their little triumph unsuspected by the others, who heard but a momentary whisper in that corner, which was drowned by Hillyard’s more forcible whisper, always conversing with Mary. What did the fellow mean by it? Ben was so disgusted by this ‘bad taste’ of his friend, that he got up and stepped out on the lawn, with some murmur about a cigar. And the other men all rose and joined him, though not with any enthusiasm. When they had all trooped out, he stepped back for a moment, and held out his hand to his cousin.

‘Is it really the case, Mary, that I am not to bid you good-bye to-night?’

‘No,’ Mary said, drawing back, with a shy hesitation which he did not understand; ‘do you think I would let you go away,--so far,--and not make your breakfast for you the last morning? This is only good-night.’

‘Good-night, then,’ he said, but held her hand still. ‘What was that fellow, Hillyard, so voluble about?’

‘That fellow!’ said Mary. ‘I thought he was your great friend. Indeed, it was mostly you he was talking about.’

‘A poor subject,’ Ben said, only half satisfied; and then she drew her hand away from him, and he went off with a half-suspicious glance at her, and a certain sense of uneasiness, to join the men outside.

A parting in the morning is of all things in the world the most detestable. He who would have a tender farewell, and leave a soft recollection behind him, let him depart by the night train,--the later the better,--when there is no inquisitive light to spy out, not only the tear, but even that humidity of eye which tells when tears are coming. Mary’s eyes were in this condition when Ben rose from his hurried breakfast, and came up to her in the full light of day, and of Mr. Hillyard, who lingered, though nobody wanted him. She had kept behind the urn, feeling that, after all, had she stayed up-stairs and watched him going away from her window, it would have been less unsatisfactory. ‘You’ll write and let me know how things are going on,’ Ben had said, not feeling particularly cheerful himself, but yet approaching the best part of the wing of a partridge to his mouth. ‘Oh, yes, of course I will write, as usual,’ Mary said, and he gave a nod of satisfaction as he ate. To be sure, he had to eat before he started. And then she added, ‘You’ll let us know as soon as you arrive.’ And he nodded again over his coffee-cup. It was to give him his breakfast she had got up,--and what else was there to be expected? And when the dog-cart was at the door, Ben wiped the crumbs carefully from his moustache, and went up to his cousin, and took her hand, and bent over her. ‘Good-bye, Mary,’ he said, kissing her cheek, ‘take care of yourself. I’ll write a line from town before we start. I’m very sorry, now it has come to the last. Good-bye!’

‘Good-bye, Ben!’ she said, unable to articulate another word. The blood seemed all to stagnate about her heart. Up to this moment there had always been a possibility of something happening,--something being done or said. But now it was all over. A certain haze came over her eyes, and yet she could see him looking back at her as he went to the door, with an indefinable expression. She stood and held by the back of the chair, looking out of the window before which the dog-cart was standing, forgetting for the moment that there was any one else in the world.

‘Good-bye, Miss Westbury,’ said a voice at her ear.

Mary turned round with an impatience it was scarcely possible to disguise. ‘Oh, Mr. Hillyard, I beg your pardon! I thought you were gone. Good-bye!’ she said. He was standing holding out his hand with his eyes bent on her, and a glow in them such as even a woman agitated with feelings of her own could scarcely mistake.

‘Good-bye, Miss Westbury. I shall never forget the days I have spent here,’ he said, and stooped over her hand, as if----

‘Hillyard! do you mean to stay all day?’ cried Ben from the dog-cart, in a tone which was not sweet.

‘Indeed, you will be late for the train; you have not a moment to lose,’ cried Mary, withdrawing her hand.

He muttered something, she could not tell what,--nor, indeed, did she care. ‘Not farewell yet,’ was it he said? But what did it matter? The interruption had so far roused her that she felt able to go to the window and smile and wave her hand to Ben. Hillyard was still holding his hat in his hand, trying to attract her attention, when the dog-cart disappeared down the avenue. Then Mary sat down and gazed straight before her, with that poignant sense of unreality which such a moment gives. Five minutes ago he was there; and now here was vacancy, silence,--a blank in which life lost itself. Five minutes, and all the world changed! Her brow was burning and heavy with tears unshed,--an ache which seemed physical, so hard the strain and pain it produced in her, went through her heart. And a whole long day to go through, and the birds singing merrily, and the sun shining, and old Willis on his way to remove the remains of Ben’s breakfast, and to spread the table for the family that remained! ‘It don’t seem no good, do it, Miss Mary, to have master home so short, and he been so long away?’ Mary started to her feet at the words. No good indeed?--perhaps harm, if one dared say so!--deeper blank and silence after the momentary movement and the light!

And now to think it was all over, and that there remained nothing but the old life to be taken up again and gone on with just as before! If it had been night, when one could have shrouded one’s-self in one’s own room, and cried or slept, and forgotten one’s-self! But it was day,--early morning,--with a whole heap of duties to be performed, and people to look on while she was performing them. And Mary felt sick of it all,--the duties, and the daylight, and the life. Laurie, who thought early rising idiotic, went by a much later train, at what he called a rational hour. And then the house was left in its old quiet, but for the presence of Frank and Alice and the children, which no doubt made a great difference. When Mary went to her godmother with the newspaper she was questioned minutely about Ben’s departure and his looks. ‘Did he eat any breakfast, Mary?’ Mrs. Renton said, putting her handkerchief to her eyes.

‘He ate a very good breakfast,’ said Mary, with a slight sense of humour, but on the whole, a greater sense of something like displeasure. Yes, he had been quite able to eat breakfast, though he was going away!

‘And enjoyed it, poor fellow?’ said his mother. ‘Ah, if one only knew when he would eat his next meal at Renton? And was he cheerful, my dear, or did he feel it very much? Poor Ben! None of you think how hard it is upon me!’

‘You have Frank, godmamma,’ said Mary, ‘and if he settles in the Dovecote it will be very nice for us all. And there is Laurie close at hand whenever you want him, and no one could be more kind than Laurie----’

‘But neither Laurie nor Frank is Ben,’ said Mrs. Renton with decision, drying her eyes--which, alas! as her niece felt to the bottom of her heart, was most true. And then Mary read the papers, all the bits of news, as she had done any day these seven years. Had there been any break in the endless round, or had she only dreamed it? It seemed so hard to know: for the interruption, with all its agitations and pleasures, had vanished, and everything was as it had been before. Except, indeed, that Frank and Alice made the dinner-table cheerful, and took the heavy duty of the drive off Mary’s hands, which was a relief for which she should have been more grateful. But even that showed the difference between her own life and that of Frank’s wife, though Mary, had she not been driven to it, was not given to such comparisons. For her there was but the usual monotonous promenade over the well-known, too well-known country; but Alice was taken to the Dovecote, and even the invalid grew interested about the changes necessary, and the furnishing and decorations of that abode. ‘The Frank Rentons’ had all the pleasant excitement of settling down before them. And Mary felt that it was very wicked and unwomanly of her to desire any excitement, or to feel so wearily conscious of the want of interest in her own existence. Would it be much better in the cottage with her mother, who in all these years had learnt to do without her, and whose whole mind was absorbed in her curate-boy? Perhaps that would not be any better. And, anyhow, it was evident that there was nothing to do in the meantime but to submit.

There was, however, an excitement awaiting Mary much nearer than she had any expectation of. It came to her just two days after Ben’s departure, in the afternoon, when once more Alice and the children had gone to accompany Mrs. Renton in her drive, and she was alone in the drawing-room, with the window open as usual,--that window by which everybody went and came,--everybody, that is to say, belonging to the family. Mary was reading, seated in her favourite chair, half buried in the curtains, when it seemed to her that a shadow fell on her book,--a very familiar accident. It must be Frank, she thought, looking up; but to her great amazement she saw it was Hillyard standing with a deprecating, anxious look before the window. She made a spring from her seat with that one thought which fills the mind of a preoccupied woman to the exclusion of all personal courtesy and consideration. Something must have happened to Ben! ‘What is it? for God’s sake, tell me! tell me!’ she said, rushing out upon him, dropping her book, and holding up her clasped hands.

‘Nothing, Miss Westbury,’ he said, putting out his hand to take hers, with the humblest, softest tone,--a tone amazing in its gentleness from such a big-bearded, unpolished man. ‘I was only waiting to ask you whether I might come in.’

‘But you are sure there is nothing wrong with--my cousin?’ Mary cried; and then recollected herself, and was covered with confusion. ‘I beg your pardon; but seeing you so suddenly it was natural to think of Ben. I felt as if you must have brought bad news, Mr. Hillyard; don’t think me very silly--but godmamma may come in any moment from her drive--you are sure there is nothing the matter with Ben?’

‘Nothing at all. I left him a few hours ago, very well and very busy,’ said Hillyard; and then once more he added in the same soft, subdued, disquieting tones, ‘Will you let me come in?’

‘Yes, surely,’ said Mary, though she was trembling with the sudden fright. ‘But it is so strange to see you. Is there any change in your plans? I thought you were to go to-day.’ And then a wavering of light and colour came over her face suddenly in spite of herself. This man, who had no possible business at Renton, surely could not have come alone!

‘I begged for another day,’ said Hillyard, following her into the room. ‘I daresay I was a fool for my pains. It may be years before I return again. I asked for another day.’

‘I am sure godmamma will be very glad,’ said Mary, courteously; ‘but somehow it was very startling to see you, and not Ben.’

And she gave a momentary glance out, as if still she expected the other to appear. Such a reception to a man who had come on Hillyard’s errand was like frost to a brook. It bound him, shrank him up within himself. He stood looking at her with a half-stupefied, wistful gaze, saying nothing. Ben; always Ben! Was that the only thought in her mind? Was it possible she could see him thus, and meet his eye, and not see his errand was altogether apart from Ben?

Mary, however, was so much occupied with her tremor and start, and curious little flutter of expectation, that it did not occur to her as strange for some minutes that her present companion said no more. She took his silence with the composure of perfect indifference. She was not even curious about him, further than concerned her cousin. Why should she be curious about Mr. Hillyard? But at last it did strike her that politeness required that she should speak to him. And, looking up, she caught the expression of his face and of his attitude all in a moment, and the ardent light in his eyes. Such a look is not to be mistaken. With a sudden rallying of all her blood to her heart, and steadying of her nerves for an utterly unforeseen but unmistakable emergency, Mary faltered and stopped in her intended speech, waiting for what was to come.

‘Miss Westbury,’ he said, ‘I might as well tell you at once that I see what a fool I am. I have my answer before I have spoken. You think no more of me than if I were Ben Renton’s horse, or his dog, or anything that belonged to him. I see it quite plain, and I might have seen it before I went away on Wednesday; but there are things in which a man cannot be anything but a fool.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Hillyard?’ said Mary. ‘I hope I have not been rude. You are a stranger to us all. It is only through Ben we have known you; and it was natural when I saw you that I should think of my cousin. If I have hurt your feelings I am sure I beg your pardon.’

In all this she was talking against time, hoping that Frank or somebody would come in.

‘No,’ he said; ‘I know I had no right to think of anything else. Of course I am a stranger. Ben’s dog,--that is about it! I am not sneering, Miss Westbury. I should not have minded your calling me so when I came.’

And there he stood, turning his eyes away from her, a big strong man of the woods as he looked, abashed and disconcerted, like a chidden child. He gazed out blankly, pulling his beard, with a flush of such quick mortification and downfall as a boy might feel when he sees his hasty projects fall to nought, and yet a deeper pang underneath than any boy could bear. Altogether the man looked so humbled and sore and sad, silenced in the very moment of effusion, that Mary’s heart was moved. She was sorry for him, and remorseful for her own indifference. It seemed almost needful to let him say out his say by way of consolation.

‘We all called you Ben’s friend,’ she said; ‘his best friend, whom we have heard of for years. Nobody else could have come among us at such a time. You must not think I mean anything disrespectful or unkind.’

Then there came a great burst of words from him. ‘That was what I thought,’ he said; ‘that you had been used to hearing of me; that I might have been to you as an old friend. I too have heard of you for years. And look here, Miss Westbury; you may scorn me, but I must say it, I have been in love with you for years. I used to see your letters, and think there was a woman, if one could ever hope to get within speech of her! And then I came here. I ought never to have come. My heart was full of you before, and you may think what it was when I saw you. Don’t stop me, please; it is better now that it should all come out. You were kind to me, as you would have been to any stranger; but you did not know what was in my mind, and I did, and went on fire like a fool. There now, I see how it is. I won’t grieve you by asking anything. Only give me your hand and say you forgive a rough fellow for taking it upon him to love you, before he ever saw you; and behaving himself like an ass when he did.’

‘Mr. Hillyard, I am so sorry,’ said Mary, with tears in her eyes. ‘I did not mean,--I never thought,--It is me whom you must forgive,--if you can.’

‘You!’ said the strange man. ‘God bless you! that’s what I say. You and forgiving have nothing to do with each other.’ And then he took her hand between both his, and gazed down upon her with a fond, lingering, sorrowful look, as if he were getting her face by heart. ‘I don’t know why I came,’ he said, muttering to himself; ‘I knew it would be exactly so,--just so. And yet I wanted you to know----’

And then the man seemed suddenly to forget her presence altogether. Standing there, holding her hand, he might have fallen into a dream so perfectly still was he. But her hand was lost, buried between both his, held fast, while she stood perforce by him. And yet there was no force in it, no rudeness, but only a profound melancholy silence,--a sacrifice of the hidden sweetness he had been cherishing in his life.

‘Mr. Hillyard,’ she said, softly, ‘you must say good-bye to me and let me go.’ And then he woke up and came to life.

‘The other hand too,’ he said, ‘for this once. Good-bye, and God bless you! It’s all I’ll ever have for my love. God bless you! Good-bye!’

He did not even kiss her hands, but held them fast; and then let them drop, and turned, stooping his tall head through the white curtains, and went out as he came in. Mary stood looking after him with an indescribable sensation. Was he really gone, this man who had been nothing to her barely an hour since, and now was part of her life? or was it a dream altogether, an invention of her fancy? His heavy foot ground upon the gravel for two or three steps while she stood in her amazement looking after him; and then he stopped, and turned round, and came back. But he did not attempt to come in. She on the one side of the white curtains, and he on the other; stood for another moment and looked at each other, and then he cleared his throat, which was husky. ‘I am not coming back,’ he said, ‘I have just one word to say. If there should ever be a time when you might think,--not of me, I don’t mean of me, for I’m a stranger as you say,--but that a man’s love and support might be of use to you,--they say women feel that sometimes, if things don’t go altogether as they wish,--then let me but know, hold up only your little finger, Mary,--there! I’ve said it for once,--and I’ll come if it were from the ends of the earth!’

And then, without another word or look, he went away.

Was this the excitement she had been wishing for, and blaming herself for wishing? Mary ran up to her room in terror of meeting any one, with her heart beating wildly in her breast. Here was an incident indeed, to diversify a dull afternoon, a dull life with! She was so touched and excited, and moved by compassion and surprise and regret, that the effort upon her was not much less than if Hillyard’s extraordinary suit had been that of a man to whom her heart could have responded. She sat down and hid her face in her hands, and got rid of some of her excitement in tears, and went over the strange scene. How strange a scene! For all these seven years,--her best and brightest,--Mary had never heard the voice of love. Now and then a tone of that admiration and interest which might have come to love had just caught her ear from the outside world, but she had been drawn back into her retirement and the deeper tone had never followed. And now, all at once, here was passion of such a kind as seldom startles a woman’s ears in these days. An utter stranger an hour ago, and now,--happen what might, should she never see the man again,--a bit of her life! Mary’s head swam, and the world went round with her. ‘They say women feel that sometimes, if things don’t go altogether as they wish.’ What did he mean? Had he read in her heart more than others could? Was she one to fall into a longing for some love and support, some awakening and current of activity in her life, after all youthful dreams were gone? The suggestion moved Mary with a humbling sense of her own weariness and languor, and senseless disappointment, and longing for she knew not what. She was not one of those women to whom somebody’s love is indispensable,--if not one, then another. With a cheek burning with shame, and eyes hot with tears, she rose up and went down again to her duties, such as they were. Henceforward she was determined she should suffice to herself. This, after the first shock of emotion, was all the effect poor Hillyard’s sacrifice upon her altar had on Mary. That he should have seen that all was not going altogether as she wished! After all, what better had most women to do with their lives, than to tend a real or imaginary invalid, to order dinners, to read newspapers, to go out every afternoon for a drive? And she had perfect health, and a beautiful country, and plenty of books, and all the poor people in Renton parish, to occupy her. To think with all that, there might come a time when she would want a man’s,--any man’s,--love and comfort! The counter-proposition, that a man should some time in his life long to have a woman by him, does in no way shock the delicacy of the stronger creature. But what woman is there who would not rather die than acknowledge personally for herself that a man is necessary to the comfort of her existence? In the abstract, it is a different matter. Poor Hillyard! the immediate result of his pilgrimage of love, and hopeless declaration, was to move Mary Westbury, in a wild flame of indignation at her own unwomanliness, to the task of contenting herself, energetically and of set purposes, with all the monotonies of her life.

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XVI. WHAT IT ALL MEANT TO LAURIE

When Laurie Renton arrived in town, he went with the story of his family’s fortune and his own, as was natural, to the padrona, who had now a double interest in the tale. She had already heard of it in a letter from Alice; but such a narrative is naturally more full and satisfactory by word of mouth.

It was in the same house, up the same stairs, in the same studio, that Laurie sought his friend. Everything was seven years older, and the hair growing thin on the top of Laurie’s head, and Alice the mother of children; but neither Mrs. Severn nor her studio was much changed. She had attained, when we saw her first, to that table-land which lies in the centre of an innocent and healthful life, and on which Time, if he does not stand still, moves with such equal and steady steps, that it is difficult to trace his progress; and as many more years were probably before her ere there would appear in the padrona any such marked signs of the passage of years as those which had already left their stamp on Laurie in his youth. There might be a few white threads among her hair, at least she said there were; but for all that any one could have told, she might have been wrapped in some enchanted sleep for all those years, instead of working, and thinking, and sorrowing, and taking such simple pleasures as came to her. The pleasures had been less and the sorrows greater since Alice left her; but now Edie had grown, as everybody said, a great girl, and the mother’s heart was stirring into life in her development, to prepare for herself another crisis and sacrifice. It was years now since Laurie had returned from his first self-banishment to Italy. He had come back and he had been away again from time to time, but he had always returned here,--‘home’ as he liked to call it,--and for a long period there had been nothing in the character of his feelings which made it painful to him to come. How this was he could not tell. When he went away on that forlorn journey to Rome he had felt as if he never could look again upon the woman whom he loved with all his heart, but who, as nature herself indicated, could never be more to him than a friend. She could not be his,--never,--though everything in heaven and earth were to plead for him,--and the only thing for him to do was to rush away from her, and bury himself and his unhappy love out of sight for ever. These had been his feelings when he went away;--but, somehow, they did not last. Slowly, by degrees, he and his heart came back to her without any anguish or despair in them. When he returned, and went half-tremblingly to see if he could bear the sight of her, Laurie found, somewhat to his astonishment, that the sight, instead of driving him wild with disappointed affection, soothed and consoled and softened him as nothing else could do. Perhaps, had it been possible that she should become any other man’s wife the sensation would have been different; but there had long ago ceased to be any strong wish on the matter in Laurie’s mind. The old custom of hanging about her house came back upon him. He would come and talk to her of all his own concerns, and of a great many of hers, by the hour together; and not of realities only, but of fancies,--everything that came into his head. There was the strangest transposition of ordinary rules in their intercourse. While he lounged about, and talked and poured out all his mind, she would be working on steadily, pausing to note her effects,--now and then calling him into counsel on some knotty point, responding to his thoughts, understanding him even when he but half-uttered his meaning, giving him a certain proof of perfect sympathy and friendship, more soft and tender than ordinary friendship,--and yet never stopping in her work. Had they been of the same age, such a thing of course could not have been possible; but on the vantage-ground of a dozen additional years the woman stood calm and steadfast, and the man too, his boyish fit of passion over, was calm. No doubt there was a whisper at one time in the artists’ quarter that Mrs. Severn was going to make a fool of herself and marry a man young enough to be her son. But as time disproved that matter, the world, which after all is not such a stupid world, but acknowledges, after due probation, the privileges that can be safely accorded to the blameless, held its tongue,--or only jeered innocently by times at the friendship. ‘Such things are impracticable generally, and dangerous, you know, and all that. It is all very well to talk of friendship; but one knows it always falls into love on one side or the other. I really do believe an exception ought to be made for the padrona and Laurie Renton,’ was what was said in Fitzroy Square. And as the two took matters with perfect composure, and never looked as if they supposed either the world or the Square to have anything to do with it, the unusual bond between them soon came to be considered a matter of course. It was not such a bond that the man was always at the woman’s apron-strings. He went away, sometimes for months together, and travelled about in that half-professional, half-dilettante way that suited Laurie; and then he wrote to her, and next after Alice’s, Laurie’s letters were looked for in Mrs. Severn’s house. And I will not say that there was not now and then just a word in them which the padrona passed over when she read these epistles to the boys, and which made her half smile, half sigh with a curious mingled sense of regret, and amusement, and pleasure. He would say, when he was describing something to her, ‘If you were but here, padrona mia, I should want no more.’ Foolish fellow! as if she ever could be with him, as if it would not be the height of folly and weakness, and overturn of the whole rational world and all the modesties of nature. But yet, so long as it evaporated in a harmless sigh like this, it hurt no one,--not Laurie, who perhaps loved his wanderings all the better for that soft want in them; and not her, as she doubled down the page at that point with a half-laugh. And when he came home the first place he went to was the Square. To be sure, such a friendship put all thoughts of marrying out of Laurie’s head, as Mrs. Suffolk, who thought everybody should marry, sometimes deplored. ‘Unless you send him away, padrona, he will always be just as he is. He will never think of any other kind of life,’ she would say to her friend. ‘My dear, he has no money to marry on,’ the padrona would say,--and so Laurie’s heart had always found a home and every kind of support and consolation and sympathy in Fitzroy Square.

And, to tell the truth, the money had been rather a difficult point with him now and then. To live upon two hundred a-year when you have been brought up a Renton of Renton, is a matter which requires a great deal of consideration. But Laurie, fortunately for himself, had no expensive tastes, and he painted some pictures, and, what was more remarkable, sold some; and even found himself on the line at the Academy, thus carrying out his highest dreams. But it did not give him the gratification, nor cause the stir he had once anticipated. It was a small picture, a little bit of Italian air and sunshine, and Slasher gave it a little paragraph all to itself in the ‘Sword;’ but the people whom he had once pictured to himself finding out his name in the catalogue, and calling heaven and earth to witness that Laurie Renton had done something at last, had by this time forgotten all about Laurie Renton, or he had forgotten them, which came to the same thing. And candidly in his soul, Laurie allowed, that had not old Welby been on the hanging committee, probably it never would have reached ‘the line;’ and had not Slasher been a friend of his, would never have been noticed in the ‘Sword.’ But it sold for a hundred pounds, which was always an advantage. The picture was called ‘Feliciello, on Tiberio,’ and was the picture of a dark-faced Capriote guide, on one of the highest points of his island, pointing out to a fair English girl the points in the wonderful landscape round. It was Edie Severn, who had never been there, with her golden hair streaming round her, who was the English girl. But handsome Feliciello had been studied on the spot. And Mr. Rich of Richmont,--always a great patron of the fine arts,--gave Laurie a hundred pounds for it, and thought it one of his greatest bargains. ‘This picture has a story,’ he would say to his guests; ‘it was painted by a gentleman, the son of one of my neighbours in the country, a man who had never been brought up to make his living by art. It is quite a romance; but I hear matters are settled, and that he has come into his share of the money, and will paint no more, and I think I was very lucky to secure this. My daughter, Lady Horsman, will tell you all about it.’ ‘About the picture painted by a gentleman?’ Nelly would say, on being questioned. ‘Most painters that I know are gentlemen. Papa means to infer that he is not much of a painter, I suppose.’ For Lady Horsman was not fond of the Rentons, and had never cared to cultivate their society. ‘If you get my lady on painters she’ll talk till midnight,’ Sir George said out of his moustache. He did not know the difference between a sign-post and a Titian, and thought the one quite as pretty as the other; but he was the head of one of the oldest families in Christendom, and Master of the Hounds in his county, and a great many other grandeurs; and, so far as I know, Nelly had the full value for her fifty thousand pounds.

This, however, is a digression a long way out of Fitzroy Square. Laurie went to the padrona with his story, and found her still in a state of excitement over Alice’s letter,--the second since the event,--with something in it about Dovecote, which was the last new possibility. She had just been taken to see it, and her letter was full of an enthusiastic description of its beauties. ‘Think, mamma, of a lovely little house close to Renton, with a lawn sloping to the river, and a cow, and a pony-carriage, and I don’t know what,’ the young wife wrote in her delight. ‘And Frank thinks he may afford himself a hunter, and there is the sweetest honeysuckle room for Edie and you!’ The padrona, being mother to the being upon whom this glorious prospect was opening, was more interested at first in the Dovecote than in anything Laurie had to say.

‘To think one has only to take the train and be with her in an hour,--after being so far away for,--a lifetime!’ the padrona said, with tears in her eyes.

‘Only six years,’ said Laurie; ‘but never mind; after Alice has had her turn perhaps you will think of me.’

‘When you know I always think of you!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘it becomes you to be exigeant, Laurie! and you are not going to have a cow, and a pony-carriage, and everything that is most delightful on the face of the earth. Think of Alice having a cow! You are so terribly blasé, it does not seem to strike you. And Edie is out, the child, so that there is no one to be glad but me.’

‘It does not strike me at all,’ said Laurie. ‘If she had a dozen cows, I think I could bear it. But some day I must take you to see Dovecote, padrona, since you like it so much.’

‘I wish they had had Feliciello,’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘if one had known you were all to be so well off,--it would have pleased Frank.’

‘Frank will like some of those vile chromos just as well,’ said Laurie. ‘I’ll buy him a few, I think. And I mean to bring Ben to see you to-night; then you will know us all. Not that there will be any intense gratification in that; but you’ll like Ben. He is made of different stuff from the rest of us. There is more in him. He is not so cheeky as Frank; and he is another sort of fellow, to be sure, from a good-for-nothing like me.’

‘Laurie, there is something the matter,’ said the padrona, turning upon him with her palette in her hand. She knew all his tones like the notes in music, and heard the far-off quiver of one of his fits of despondency already vibrating in the quiet. ‘Is not this as good for you as for the rest?’

‘Oh, yes, quite as good,’ he said abruptly, with his eyes on her work. ‘You are putting too much yellow in that light.’

‘Am I? but that is not the question. Laurie, never mind the light, but tell me what is wrong.’

‘I must mind the light,’ he said. ‘If I can’t put you right when you get into a mess, what is the good of me? It’s all wrong and it’s all right, padrona mia, and I don’t know that it matters much one way or another; but I don’t quite like your shadows. With that tone of light they should have more blue in them,’ he went on, gazing at the picture and shading his eyes with his hand.

‘But it will make a great difference in your life,’ said Mrs. Severn, putting down her tools and drawing a chair near to where he sat.

‘That is just it,’ he said; ‘it will make no difference to speak of. It is a great thing for Ben; and for Frank, too, it will be everything. You can see that clearly. But what difference will it make to me? More money to spend, perhaps, and better rooms to live in; but no sort of expansion or widening-out of life. That’s not possible, you know. It was put a stop to once, and no change that I know of can effect it now.’

‘You cannot mean to reproach me, Laurie?’ said the padrona.

‘No,’ he said, still fixedly gazing at the picture; ‘I don’t reproach you. Being you, perhaps you could have done nothing else. I am not complaining of anybody; but this is how it is,--you see it for yourself.’

‘Laurie, listen to me,’ she said, with eagerness, laying her hand on his arm. ‘I have wanted to speak to you for long, and never liked to begin the subject. You must make an effort to break this spell. I did not say a word as long as you were poor,--for what could you do?--and I thought I was always some consolation to you; but now that you have money enough, and can make a new beginning,--Laurie, do you know, I think it would be better for you to go away from me.’

‘What, go away again?’ he said, with a half-smile, ‘as I did when I went to Rome? No, there is no such occasion now.’

‘Of course there is no such occasion now,--that dream has passed away, as all dreams do,--but, Laurie, for that very reason I speak. Even what you were so foolish as to wish then you don’t wish now.’

She made a momentary pause, but he gave no answer. It was quite true. He was not in love with her any longer,--though she was the creature dearest to him in the world. Nor did he any longer want to appropriate or bind her closer to himself. He would not have admitted this change in words, but it was true.

‘I don’t think in the least that you have ceased to care for me,’ she continued; ‘but it is different,--it is not in that way. And you are getting not to care much what happens. We talk over it, and come to our conclusions; and after that, good and evil are much the same to you. That is why I think you should go away,--not to Italy, as you did before, but out of this neighbourhood, to some place like the one you used to live in, and go back into the world.’

‘Why, I wonder?’ said Laurie. ‘The world and I had never much to say to each other. And at least I have some comfort in my life here.’

‘Too much, a great deal,’ said the padrona, with a smile. ‘You know you can always come to me, whether it is a pin that pricks, or a storm that overtakes you. I am fond of you; and you can always reckon on my sympathy.’

‘Always!’ said Laurie, stooping to kiss the hand she had laid on his arm.

‘Yes; but that is not good for you,’ said Mrs. Severn, hastily withdrawing her hand. ‘Now is the moment to preach you Helen Suffolk’s little sermon. She says you will never marry so long as you are constantly here.’

‘Marry!’ said Laurie, looking at her, and then turning his head away with a half-contemptuous impatience.

‘Well, marry. Why should not I say so? If I have stood in your way, unwillingly, unfortunately, once, why should that shut up all your life? Laurie, if I were to ask you to reconsider all this, and make a difference,--for my sake?’

‘I could not marry even for your sake,’ he said, turning to her with a sudden laugh; ‘though there is no other inducement I would do so much for. Tell me something else to do to show my devotion, and let everything go on as it was before.’

‘Not as it was before,’ said Mrs. Severn. ‘This atmosphere might be good enough for you when you were poor. At least, it did you no harm; but now I want you to go back into the world.’

‘You want me to be wretched, I think,’ said Laurie. ‘I have got used to this atmosphere, as you call it; and it suits me. But I have forgotten all about the world. What have I done that I should be sent back among people who have forgotten me, to mix myself up with things in which I take no interest? Padrona, in this you do not show your usual wisdom. Let us return to the question of the light.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘It is because I am anxious about you that I speak. This is such a point in your life; a new beginning,--anything you please to make it,--and you feel yourself how hard it is to think that it will make no difference. Laurie, what I want you to do is to break this thread of association, and turn your back upon the past.’

He turned and looked at her as she spoke, and their eyes met;--hers earnest and steady; his with a smile, which was full of tenderness, and a kind of playful melancholy dawning in them. ‘But that is not what I want you to do,’ he said, the smile growing as he met her gaze. She turned away with a little impatient exclamation. It was not the kind of reply she had looked for.

‘You are provoking, Laurie,’ she said. ‘You have regained the ground you stood on seven years ago, and why should you refuse to recall the circumstances too?’

‘And make the seven years as if they had never been?’

‘I think you might, in a great measure,’ said the padrona, with a little flush on her cheek, ‘though you laugh. Nothing has happened in those seven years. Yes, I grant you, you have felt some things as you never did before, and learned a great many things. But nothing has happened, Laurie. Nothing has occurred either to tie up your freedom in any way, or to leave rankling recollections in your mind. There has been no fact which could fetter you. Indeed,--for all that has come and gone,--your life might be safer to begin anew than that of any man I know.’

‘Well, that is hard!’ said Laurie, with more energy than he had yet shown; ‘the present is not much, the future I take no particular interest in, and you ask me to agree that there is nothing in the past! What has been the good of me altogether, then? Nobody will say that it has been worth a man’s while to live in order to produce ‘Feliciello.’ Padrona, this is very poor consolation,--the poorest I ever knew you to give.’

‘I did not mean it so, Laurie.’

‘No, you did not mean it,’ he said; ‘you did not think that the past,--such as it is,--is all I have. Of course I might now go back to Kensington Gore, as you tell me, or somewhere else; and go to a few parties next season, perhaps. Fine fate! Didn’t I tell you how I used to anticipate people finding my name in the Academy catalogue, and standing and staring at Laurie Renton’s picture? and now I can’t, for the life of me, remember who the people were I so thought of! That’s encouraging for a return to old ways. Let’s say no more about it,’ said Laurie, getting up and following his friend to her easel. ‘After all, the boys and Edie shall have some pleasure out of the money, and then it will not be quite lost.’

‘The boys and Edie must not get into the way of looking to you for pleasure,’ said the padrona, quickly; ‘neither for you nor them would that be good.’

‘There it is now!’ cried Laurie, ‘proof upon proof how little I am the better for what has happened. You cannot work for ever, padrona; but if I had all the gold-mines that ever were dreamt of you would not take anything from me; and what is the good of my having it, I should like to know?’

‘No, I would not take anything from you,’ she said, with a momentary smile; but it was a suggestion that made her tremble in her fortitude whenever it was made. ‘Laurie,’ she said, with a little gasp, turning to him for sympathy, ‘when I cannot work I hope I shall die.’

‘But one cannot die when one pleases, that is the worst of it,’ said Laurie. ‘I hope you will, padrona mia,--and I too,--and then, perhaps, one might have a better chance for a new life.’

This was not cheerful talk for a new beginning; but the amusing thing about Laurie, and, indeed, about the pair thus strangely united, was, that after all this had been uttered and done with they both became quite cheerful; and, a quarter of an hour afterwards, were planning an expedition to Dovecote, taking Renton by the way, with all that enjoyment of the idea of a country excursion which is so strong in the laborious dweller in towns. The vision of gliding rivers and autumnal trees swept over Mrs. Severn’s mind like a refreshing wind, carrying away all the vapours. For a time, she thought no more either of that twilight life which Laurie had chosen for himself, and of which she felt herself partly the cause, nor of her own anxieties, but went on painting, reducing the yellow tone in her light, and modifying her shadows, and full of cheerful discussion of the day and the way of going. To the moment its work or its thought; and to the next, why, another thought, another piece of work; and so forth, as pleases God. This blessing of temperament,--special gift of heaven to its beloved,--belonged more or less to both. The artist-woman had it in its perfection, which was the reason why she had got through so much hard labour and so many struggles with eye undimmed and spirit unbroken; and Laurie had it in a degree which had done much to lead to the unsatisfactoriness and imperfection of his life, which is a strange enough paradox, and yet true. For in the padrona, this power of dismissing care and living in the hour was accompanied, as it often is, by the strongest vitality and energy of constitution, by a natural delight and pleasure in exertion, and by the perpetual, never absent spur of necessity. Whereas in Laurie’s case it was associated with the meditative, contemplative soul; the mind that is more prone to thinking than to doing; a slower amount of life in the veins, and an existence disengaged from necessities and responsibilities. Temperament had more to do with the matter than had that early blunder in his life for which the padrona never forgave herself. ‘If I had not stood in his way he would have made a life for himself, like other men,’ she would say to herself, with an ache in her heart, yet with that touch of tender gratitude to the man who had it in him to pour himself out like a libation on her path, which a woman cannot but feel, however undesired the sacrifice may be. I am afraid to acknowledge it, but the truth is that such a libation is very grateful to a woman. There is in it the most exquisite, tragical, heart-rending pleasure. Not that one would not regret it with all one’s heart and soul, and do everything that one could, like Lancelot, to turn aside the rising passion. But even to Lancelot was not that self-offering of the lily-maid, though he would have given his life to prevent it, an exquisite sweetness and sorrowfulness, a combination of the deepest pain and gratification of which the soul is capable? Such an act raises the doer of it,--be it man or woman,--out of the level of ordinary humanity, and envelopes the receiver of the offering in the same maze of tenderest, most melancholy glory. Something of this feeling the padrona had for her Laurie, who had given her his life like a flower, without price or hope of price in this world. And yet, I think, temperament was at the bottom of it, and the sacrifice, and the sweetness of it, and all the subdued tones of his existence which had followed, were more to him than the brighter daylight colours of ordinary existence, even though he might feel the absence of those fuller tones now and then, once in a way.

But to some extent Laurie acted upon Mrs. Severn’s advice. As luck would have it, his old rooms at Kensington Gore, having passed through many hands in the interval, proved to be vacant about this time. And Laurie secured them, and fitted up all his old fittings, his carved brackets and velvet hangings, and all the contrivances that had been so pleasant to him; and had his bow-window once more full of flowers, and looked out once more upon the gay park and the stream of carriages as from an opera-box. But the ladies who looked up at his window once had passed away and given place to others, who knew not Laurie, or had forgotten him, and asked each other who was the man who stared so from that window? And from Kensington Gore to Fitzroy Square is a very long walk to be taken every day. And though, to be sure, there are plenty of studios about Kensington, into which an amateur may drop, yet these are grand studios, flanked by drawing-rooms, with ladies to be called upon, and the flavour of society about. It is true that Suffolk lives in that refined neighbourhood now, having made very rapid progress since the days when Mr. Rich bought ‘The Angles,’ and Laurie put the studio in order for the reception of the patron, and got cobwebs on his coat. ‘They were very nice, those old days, after all!’ Mrs. Suffolk says, when they talk it over; but they have now a spruce man-servant,--more spruce, though not so well instructed as old Forrester, Mr. Welby’s man,--to move a picture that has to be moved, and open the door to the patrons and patronesses. And Laurie for one, to whom a man-servant is not the badge of grandeur and success which it is to Mr. Suffolk, rather preferred, I fear, the state of things in the old days, when they all clustered about Fitzroy Square.

But the padrona has not removed from No. 375, though she has been tempted and plagued to do so on all sides. Frank, who would prefer to have a mother-in-law (since such a thing he must have) in a habitable part of the town, is very energetic as to the advantage it will be to Edie when she grows up. And Alice recommends it with wistful eyes, as so much nicer for the air, not liking to say a word against the home of her youth. Mrs. Severn thinks it would be unkind to Mr. Welby to withdraw from him; and it would cost a great deal of money; and then there would be new carpets wanted for new rooms, and quantities of things; and, last of all, would not it be a still greater clog upon Laurie and hindrance to him, in the possibility of his heart disengaging itself from all the pleasant bonds of the past? I think, however, that the thing which will finally resolve the point will be Frank’s success in the competition for a Foreign Office clerkship, for which he is going in. None of his people have any doubt of his success; and, in that case, the boy may be trusted to make his mother’s life a burden to her so long as she remains in Fitzroy Square. But what is to be done with Mr. Welby, and Forrester, to whom it would now be impossible to live out of sight of Edie and the boys, and withdraw themselves from the gradually increasing authority of the padrona, I don’t know.

Laurie’s sketch of the ‘Three Fairy Princes’ turned up out of a packing-box when he took back his belongings to Kensington Gore; and he hung it in the placer of honour over his mantelpiece. There anybody may see young Frank pushing forth towards the Indian towers and minarets, with a coronet hanging in a haze over the distant prospect; and Laurie himself, with his goods and chattels hung about him, and his lay-figure gazing blank over his shoulders, trudging towards the pepper-boxes of the National Gallery; and Ben scaling the rocks, like Mr. Longfellow’s Alpine hero, with the nymph on the summit beckoning him,--not to eternal snows and supernatural excellence, but to Renton and the House of Commons. Frank has not got the coronet; nor Laurie, except in the very mildest accidental way, the glories of the Academy. But who is to tell what is waiting for Ben? At least, there is only another chapter to do it in, and the story is all but told.

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XVII. CONCLUSION

The day of Hillyard’s visit was full of trial and excitement to Mary. To live in a household where everything is talked of freely, with the consciousness of having various matters of the deepest interest entirely to yourself, is not an agreeable position in any case; and to feel yourself thrilling through every vein with the concussion of a recent shock, while yet you are compelled to put on the most commonplace composure, is more trying still. Mary, however, had been used to it for some time back, if that was any alleviation. She only had known, or rather suspected, the ancient connexion between Ben Renton and the beautiful Millicent. She alone had had the excitement of watching their meeting after so long an interval. She only had understood the passage of arms between the two; and she had witnessed their parting, which to her was of ten-fold more interest than even the great interest which the family had in common. And now, her spectatorship in Ben’s romance being over, here had suddenly sprung up a romance of her own, so completely beyond all expectation that even now she could scarcely believe it had been real. Mary could not have betrayed Ben’s secret to any one; but had her mother been at hand, or even had her godmother been less pre-occupied, I doubt whether she could have kept poor Hillyard’s to herself. For it was her own, and in the excitement of the moment she might not have remembered that it was the man’s also, and a humiliation to him. But, as it was, poor Mary had not the opportunity of relieving her mind. Mrs. Westbury was away, and Alice took her share in nursing Mrs. Renton, entering into it with a certain enjoyment of the task. There were even moments when she thought Mary unsympathetic, and was sorry for ‘poor grandmamma,’ bringing with her a fresh interest in the ailments and the alleviations, such as was scarcely possible to the nurse who had been going through it all for seven years. Mary consequently at this extraordinary moment of her existence had lost all her habitual quiet, and all those possibilities of communication which had ever been open to her. She herself and her personal being was floated away, as it were, on the current of ‘the Frank Rentons.’ They had come into the house like an inundation, and left no room for anything but their own cheerful beginning of life,--their arrangements, their new house, their children, what they were going to do. The two women who had lived there so long in the silence were carried away by the vigorous young tide; and Mary, hiding her individual concerns in her own mind, lived for the rest of that evening a strange, abstracted, feverish sort of existence, like a creature in a dream, hearing the cheerful voices round her, and the lights shining, and figures flitting about, but only awaking to take any part in it when she was called upon energetically to come out of her abstraction. The position altogether was so strange that she kept asking herself which scene was real and which was a dream;--either this was the reality,--this evening picture, with Frank talking to his mother on the sofa, and Alice working in the golden circle of the lamplight, and the urn bubbling, and gleams of reflexion shining from the tea-table in the corner; or else the other scene, with Hillyard standing sunburnt, and bearded, and impassioned, telling her he had loved before he even saw her,--saying, if some time, any time she should want a man’s love and support---- One thing was certain, they could not both be real; she had been dreaming them,--or else she was dreaming now.

Nor yet was Mary’s excitement over for the night. When the evening post came in, a letter was brought to her, which at the first glance she saw was in Ben’s handwriting. Well! there was nothing surprising in that. Of course Ben would write, though she had not expected it so soon. But the contents of the note were such as to raise to a climax her sense of being in some feverish dream. This is what Ben said:--

‘DEAR MARY,--I want to speak half-a-dozen words to you before I go. I have heard something to-day which has taken me very much by surprise, and I cannot leave England without seeing you. But I don’t want to disturb my mother with a hurried visit and another parting. If you will be at the beech-tree on the river-walk to-morrow morning at eight, I will come down by the first train and meet you there. Don’t refuse me. It is of great importance. In haste,

‘Yours, B. R.’

Mary’s head went round and round as she sat,--hearing Frank’s voice talking all the while, and Alice pouring out the tea,--and read this note. The question changed now, and seemed to be,--they or Ben; which was the phantom? But the paper and the writing were very real,--so real that she could see it had been written in excitement, and was blurred, and betokened a scratching and uncomfortable pen, which is a thing that no imagination would be likely to invent. When she had put the extraordinary note away in her pocket,--fortunately she had not said out loud, ‘Here is a letter from Ben,’ as on any other day she would have done,--Mary’s mind went hopelessly into abstraction. She gave up the tea-making to Alice gratefully and without an effort, though in general she did not like her prerogatives invaded. She never uttered a word to help on the conversation. She had to be recalled as from a distance, when anybody spoke to her. Things had come to such a pitch that she seemed to lose her individual consciousness altogether. To have violent love made her one day by a man whom she scarcely knew, and to meet her cousin Ben clandestinely the next morning by the great beech, to talk over something of importance, which concerned only her and him, and nobody else in the family,--the earth seemed to be going off its pivot altogether to Mary. She felt that now nothing would surprise her. If Mrs. Renton had suddenly proposed to her to walk to town, or Frank that she should swim across the river, it would have seemed to her perfectly natural. But to meet Ben by stealth at the great beech at eight o’clock! Could she have mistaken the words? For one moment a sort of gleam of eldritch fear came across her, and a reminiscence of the amazing manner in which the familiar forms of the nursery arranged themselves in the mind of little Alice in Wonderland in the story. Could it be that Ben was to start on his long journey to-morrow by the first train, and could the great beech be the name of the ship? Mary was so completely thrown off her balance, that this idea actually occurred to her. And then she felt that they must all have remarked that she had got a letter, and had thrust it stealthily into her pocket. Altogether, the evening swam over her somehow, she could not tell how. And then there was the stir of Davison’s entrance, and Mrs. Renton’s going to bed. And then Frank disappeared to smoke his cigar, and Alice, finding her companion uncommunicative, sat down at the piano, and began to play softly to herself, as she had been wont in the old days at home; and silence, broken only by sounds which helped to increase all the mists, and made her feel a safety and comfort in the retirement of her thoughts, fell upon the quiet house.

Next morning Mary was awake and up before any one was stirring. She did not herself think that she had slept all the night; but she was still young enough to consider an hour or two’s wakefulness a great matter. And she was as much afraid of Ben’s visit being found out, as if he had been the most illegitimate of visitors. She was out soon after six, while the grass was still quite wet with dew, and went wandering up and down the river-walk like a ghost, under the cloistered shade of those great trees which, as yet, let no sunshine through. There was something in the air at that early hour which told that summer was waning, and Mary was chilly with nervousness, which had all the effect of cold. She went all the way down to the river-side, and basked in the sunshine which lay full on the open bit of green bank, by way of overcoming the shivering which had seized her. The world was so still, the birds so noisy,--which rather heightens than impairs the stillness,--the paths so utterly vacant and suggestive, that fancy continually caught glimpses of something disappearing behind the trees. Now it would seem a gliding dream-figure, now the last sweep of a robe just getting out of sight. The ghostliness of the early morning is different, but not less profound, than that of the night; and at six o’clock the Renton woods were as mysterious, as dim under the great shadows of the trees, as any enchanted wood. The sunshine went all round them, drying up the dew on the open bank, and chasing the mists and chills of night; but the river-walk was all brown and grey, and full of clear, mystical distances and windings, broken by upright shafts of trees. Any one might have appeared suddenly at such an hour in such a place. People out of books, people out of one’s own straining fancy, people from the other world. And though it was Ben, and no other, for whom Mary Westbury was waiting, yet her imagination, over-excited, was ready to see anything. And she was alarmed by every waving leaf or bough that swayed in the morning air. If anybody should discover this tryst! If it should be known that Ben had come in this sweet inconceivable sort of way to see her! Had he been a tabooed lover, whose discovery would have involved all sorts of perils, Mary could not have been more afraid.

It was half-past seven before he came,--as indeed she might have known,--since that was the earliest moment at which any one could come by the first train. She could see him coming for a long way, making his way among the trees. He had not come in by any gate, but through some illegitimate byway known to the Renton boys and the poachers, so lawless were all the accessories of this extraordinary stealthy meeting. He came along rapidly, making himself audible by, now and then, the sound of the gravel sent flying by his foot, or the crackle of a fallen branch on the path. And then he came in sight, walking very quickly, with a look of abstraction, wrapped in his own thoughts. He was close upon the bank before he caught sight of Mary, whose grey gown was easily lost sight of among the branches,--then he quickened his pace, and came forward eagerly.

‘You here,’ he said, ‘Mary? I thought I should be too early for you,’ and held out both his hands for her.

‘I was so much surprised,--so anxious to know what it was. I have been out for nearly an hour, I think,’ said Mary. ‘I could not sleep.’

‘Did I startle you?’ said Ben. ‘Not half so much, I am sure, as I was startled myself. But if I have made you uneasy I will never forgive myself,’ he went on, looking closely into her face.

What could have made that difference in his look? He had always been kind,--certainly he had always been kind,--but he had never looked at her before in that wistful, anxious way. He had been protecting, superior, affectionate; but such was not his expression now.

‘Oh, it does not matter!’ said Mary; ‘but, of course, since it is something important enough to bring you from town like this,--and at this hour---- Tell me, please, and put me out of pain.’

What he did was to draw her arm closely through his own. ‘Come this way,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to be seen or interrupted. There is a corner down here where we shall be quite safe. It was very good of you, Mary, to come.’

‘Oh, Ben,’ she cried, ‘don’t talk so, you frighten me! You never were so gentle, so soft to me before. Tell me what it is. It must be something terrible to make you look like this. What is wrong?’

‘I don’t know if there is anything wrong,’ he said. ‘It depends upon your feelings altogether, Mary; only I never had thought of,--anything of the kind,--never! It came upon me like a thunder-clap. To be sure. I might have known. You could not but be as sweet and as pleasant in the eyes of others as you were in mine----’

‘Ben, don’t talk riddles, I entreat of you,’ said Mary. ‘I cannot make this out to-day. A shadow would frighten me to-day. I have had too much to bear,--too much,--‘

‘Sit down here,’ he said, tenderly; ‘you must not be frightened. There is nothing to hurt you. It is only me that it can hurt. Mary, Hillyard came to me yesterday, and said,--I suppose by this time you must know what he said?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, first with a violent blush, and then growing suddenly hot.

‘Of course, I ought to have known it,’ said Ben. ‘I used to read him your letters, like an ass, never thinking. I was furious yesterday; I thought it presumption and insolence. But, of course, that was nonsense. The man is as good as I am. The fact is, I suppose I thought that no other man but myself had any right to think of you.’

‘Ben!’ Mary cried, trembling with a sudden passion, ‘you never thought of me! How can you say so? or what is it you would have me understand? I feel as if you were mocking me,--and yet you would not come all this way, surely, to mock me!’

‘Then, I did not think at all,’ he went on, without any direct answer. ‘I felt that no man had any right,--and I was a fool for thinking so. Mary, the fact is, it ought to be you and I.’

‘What ought to be you and I?’ she faltered, lost in confusion and amazement.

He was standing before her, not lover-like, but absorbed, pressing his subject, and paying no special regard to her. ‘It ought to be you and I to build up the old house. No. I cannot think any man has a right to come in and interfere. But only just there is this one thing to be said. Whatever is for your happiness, Mary, I will carry out with all my might. If you should set your heart on one thing or another, it shall be done; but still that does not affect the question,--it ought to be you and me.’

‘For what?’ she asked again.

‘For what? Oh, for more than I can tell,’ said Ben; ‘to build up this old house, as I told you,--to get through life. I must always have felt it, though I did not know. And here is this fellow come in with his wild backwoods way, and thinks he can win you off-hand. I don’t say a word if it is for your happiness; but I know it should be you and me.’

And then there was a pause, and Ben walked up and down the little vacant space in front of the seat he had placed her in, with his eyes bent on the ground, and his face moody and full of trouble. As for Mary, she sat and gazed at him, half-conscious only, worn out by excitement and wonder, and the succession of shocks of one kind and another which she had been receiving, but with a soft sense of infinite ease and consolation stealing over her confused heart. It was that relief from pain which feels to the sufferer like positive blindness. She had not even known how deep the pain in her was until she felt it stealing in upon her,--this ineffable ease and freedom from it, which is more sweet than actual joy.

‘Ben,’ she said at last, when she could get breath. ‘It is very difficult for me to follow you, and you confuse me so that I don’t know. But, about Mr. Hillyard you are all wrong. I never saw him till Monday. I never thought about him at all. I was very sorry. But it is not as if I could blame myself. I was not to blame.’

‘To blame! How could you be to blame?’ said Ben, and he came and stood before her again, gazing at her with that strange look which Mary did not recognise in him, and could not meet.

‘I should never have mentioned it to any one,’ she said. ‘I would not now, though you question me so. But only it is best you should not have anything on your mind. Is,--that,--all?’

It was not coquetry which suggested the question; it was her reason that began utterly to fail her. She did not seem to know what it was he had said besides,--though he had said something.

‘Ah!’ he cried vehemently, and then paused and subdued himself, ‘all except my answer, Mary,’ he said, softly stooping over her.

‘Your answer? You have not asked me anything. Oh, Ben,’ she cried, suddenly getting up from her seat, with her cheeks burning and her eyes wet, ‘let there be no more of this. It was all the feeling of the moment. You thought something had happened which never, never could happen, and you felt a momentary grudge. Don’t tell me it was anything else. Do you think I forget what you told me once up at the beech about her?’ Mary cried, waving her hand towards The Willows. ‘You did not mean to tell me; but I knew. And the other day---- When you say this sort of thing to me it is unkind of you; it is disrespectful to me. I have my pride like other women. Let us speak no more of it, but say good-bye, and I shall go home.’

‘Then you do not even think me worthy of an answer?’ said Ben; and the two stood confronting each other in that supreme duel and conflict of the two existences about to become one, which never loses its interest; she flushed, excited, suspicious; he steadily keeping to his point, refusing to be led away from it. And why Mary should have resisted, standing thus wildly at bay,--and why, when she could stand no longer, she should have sunk down on the seat from which she had risen, in a passion of tears, is more than I can tell. But that finally Ben did get his answer, and that it was, as anybody must have foreseen, eminently satisfactory to him at last, is a matter about which there can be no doubt. I do not know even whether he offered any explanations, or justified himself in the matter of Millicent. I am inclined to think, indeed, that at that moment he took no notice of it whatever; but only insisted on that reply, which, when nature was worn out and could stand against it no longer, came. But the victor did go into certain particulars, as with Mary’s arm drawn closely through his he led her again up that bank which, in so much excitement and uncertainty, half-an-hour before he had led her down.

‘I can’t tell you the fright I was in yesterday,’ he said. ‘It suddenly flashed upon me in a moment how mad I had been. To leave you here so long, open to any assault, and to be such an ass as to bring a man down who had eyes in his head, and was not an idiot?’

‘I wish you would not swear,’ said Mary. ‘The strange thing is that you should like me, and yet think me of so small account that any man,--a man I had only known for three days----’

‘Hush!’ he said, drawing her to him. ‘When a man’s eyes are opened first to the thought that another man has gone off express to rob him of his jewel, do you think he pauses to be reasonable?’ and then they looked at each other and were silent, there being more expression in that than in speech.

‘But the jewel was no jewel till yesterday,’ said Mary, making the kind of objection which women love to make, ‘and who knows but it may be paste to-morrow?’

‘My dear,’ said Ben, ‘my only woman in the world! might not a man have been beguiled to follow a Will-o’-the-wisp till he cursed and hated such lights, and chose darkness instead,--and then all at once wake up to see that his moon had risen, and that the night was safe and sweet as day?’

I suppose it was the only bit of poetry which Ben Renton was ever guilty of in his life; and it was perfectly successful. And they went on and continued their walk to the beech-tree. Mary’s eyes were blind with sweet tears; but then, what did it matter? was not he there to be eyes to her, through the winding of the tender morning path? And as they reached the trees, the sunshine burst into the wood all at once with something like a shout of triumph. If it was not a shout, it came to precisely the same thing, and caught a branch here and a twig there, and made it into burnished gold, and lit up the far distance and cloistered shade into all the joyous animation and moving stir of life.

‘Must you go now?’ Mary said, clinging to him a little closer, ‘must it still be secret? is no one to see you now?’

‘I must still go away,’ he said, ‘no help for that, Mary; but in the meantime I am going home with you to tell them all about it. I shall still catch my ship if I go by the next train.’

He was received with subdued consternation by the household, which jumped instantly to the conclusion that something had happened; but there is an instinct in the domestic mind which is almost infallible in such matters; and before Mrs. Renton had even been told of the unexpected arrival of her son, Davison had said to the housekeeper, ‘He’s come down at the last to settle it all with Miss Mary. Now didn’t I tell you?’ and Willis had recorded his opinion that, on the whole, there wasn’t nothing to say again it. ‘A little bit of money never comes amiss,’ he said; ‘but she was used bad in the will, never to have no compensation. And, on the whole, I agrees with Ben.’

Such was the decision of the house, conveyed in language, kind, if familiar, just five minutes after the entry by the window into the dining-room, where the breakfast-table was prepared for the family, of the betrothed pair. Mary’s gown was wet with the dew, and she ran up-stairs to change it, leaving Ben alone to receive the greetings of his brothers, who appeared at the same moment. ‘I thought you couldn’t resist coming down again, old fellow, before you left for good,’ Frank said in her hearing, as she rushed to the covert and sanctuary of her own room. He was not so discriminating as the intelligent community below stairs.

And then, in that strange golden forenoon, which seemed at the same time one hasty moment and a long day, full of events, Mrs. Renton, amazed, found her son again stooping over her, and received the astonishing news. It was some time before she could take it in. ‘What,’ she said, ‘Mary? I will never believe it is Mary. You are making fun of me, Ben.’

‘It is a great deal better than fun, mother,’ he said. ‘I could not go till it was settled; and now there is only ten minutes or so to kiss us and bless us, and thank me for giving you such a daughter. She has been a daughter to you already for so long.’

‘Of course she has,’ said the bewildered woman. ‘Mary! it’s like your sister. I can’t think it’s quite right, do you know, Ben. I should as soon have thought of you marrying Alice, or----’

‘Frank might object to that, my dear mother,’ said Ben.

‘But, Mary--you are sure you are not making one of your jokes? And after all, I can’t think what you see in her, Ben,’ Mrs. Renton said, with a little eagerness. ‘She was never very pretty,--not like that beautiful Mrs. Rich, you know, or those sort of women,--and not even very young. She must be seven-and-twenty, if she is a day. Let me see, Frank was born in July, and she in the December after. She will be seven-and-twenty on her next birthday. And nothing to make up for it---- ’

‘Except that there is nobody else in the world,’ said Ben, smiling at Mary, who had just come into the room.

‘Nobody else in the world! I don’t know what you mean. Not to say a word against Mary, but you might have done a great deal better, Ben.’

‘And so he might, godmamma,’ said Mary, with the gravity of happiness, though Ben had her hand in his.

‘Yes, my dear,’ said Mrs. Renton, in perfect good faith, ‘a great deal better. You always have the sense to see things. If I were you, I would reflect a little longer before I announced it, or did anything more in the matter, Ben.’

The answer Ben made to this proposal was to draw his betrothed close to his mother’s bedside within his own supporting arms. ‘Give her a kiss, mamma, and say God bless you,’ he said, bending down his own face close to Mary’s. And the mother, quite confused and bewildered, did as she was told, crying a little, and not knowing what to think. And before any one knew, Ben was gone again, off by express to join the steamer which sailed from Liverpool that night. He had just time; everything belonging to him having gone on before with poor Hillyard, who knew nothing about this morning’s expedition. And before noon the episode was all over, and the Frank Rentons once more in the foreground, and Mary reading the newspaper as if such a wild inroad of romance into the midst of reality had never been.

‘My dear, it is not that I am not as fond of you,--fonder of you than of anybody,’ Mrs. Renton said, when poor Mary, for one moment, owing to a paragraph about a shipwreck, fairly broke down; ‘but it does not seem somehow as if it were quite proper. And we can’t shut our eyes to it that he might have done better. It feels as if there was never to be any satisfaction in the boys’ marriages. I had a fortune of my own, and so had your grandmother; but everything now is going to sixes and sevens----’

‘Don’t say anything more about it, godmamma,’ said Mary, with an outburst of pent-up agitation, and the nervous panic that seizes a weakened mind. ‘Oh, how can we tell what may happen in the meantime? Let us say nothing more till he comes home.’

‘Well, to be sure, he might change his mind,’ said Mrs. Renton, as Davison came in with her arrowroot. And for half-an-hour or so that satisfactory conclusion, and the adding of another teaspoonful of port, on account of the excitement she had been going through, put a stop to the conversation, and gave Mary time to draw breath in peace.

But if the reader of this history hopes to be humoured by a shipwreck at this late period of the narrative, it is a vain expectation. The winds blew, and the sea rose, but Ben Renton got safely out to Canada, and came safely home. I am sorry to have to say that his last great piece of work did not pay nearly so well as he had expected it to do; and the business, which he made over to Hillyard, was, owing to the state of the colony at that moment, of less value than had been anticipated; but at the same time patience alone was wanted to realise all possible hopes. I have been obliged to ask the reader to take Ben’s success for granted all along, as it would have been simply impossible to introduce details of engineering enterprise into a work of this description; and, indeed, to tell the truth, I fear I should not have sufficiently understood them to set them forth with any distinctness. But whether Hillyard will have patience, and keep up the energy which Ben put into the business, is a very doubtful matter; and it is just as likely as not that he may turn up again at the old club, which is the only luxury he keeps up, as rough, as insouciant, as careless what becomes of him, as on the first day Ben met him, after the weird of the Rentons had begun. Mary might have made another man of him perhaps; but who knows? Temperament is stronger than circumstance,--stronger than fortune,--stronger even than love.

Ben Renton came home, as I have said, as safely as most men come home from Canada. And everything occurred as it ought to have occurred. I would add that they lived happy ever after, if there had been time to make such a record. But the fact is, that it is too early yet to be historical on that point; and for anything anybody can tell, the Rentons may yet come to be very wretched, and give occasion for other chapters of history; though, in common with all their friends, I sincerely hope not. Benedict Renton of Renton stood for the county of Berks, in the late election, with politics perhaps slightly tinged by his life in the other world, but failed by a few votes, notwithstanding the interest attaching to him,--Berks, like many other counties, being of the opinion that a good, steady, reliable bumpkin, who will do whatever he is told, is a more satisfactory legislator than a man who has spent his youth in objectionable exercises, such as writing, and thinking, and moving about the world. Frank Renton, true soldier and constitutional Tory, is one of those who hold this opinion. But I do not despair of seeing Ben in Parliament yet.

And thus the story ends; being like all stories, no history of life, but only of a bit out of life,--the most amiable bit, the section of existence which the world has accepted as its conventional type of life, leaving all the profounder glooms and the higher lights apart. As in heaven there can be no story-telling of the present, for happiness has no story,--there, perhaps, for the first time, the mouth of the minstrel may be opened to say or sing what is untellable by the frankest voice on earth. But till then we must be content to break off after the fairy chapter of life’s beginning, the history of Youth.

THE END.

LONDON:

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