Chapter 25

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_ CHAPTER XXV

"IN MEMORY OF
SELINA,
THE BELOVED WIFE OF PETER ASCOTT, ESQ.,
OF RUSSELL SQUARE, LONDON,
AND DAUGHTER OF
THE LATE HENRY LEAF, ESQ.,
OF THIS TOWN.
DIED DECEMBER 24, 1839.
AGED 41 YEARS."

Such was the inscription which now, for six months, had met the eyes of the inhabitants of Stowbury, on a large, dazzlingly white marble monument, the first that was placed in the Church-yard of the New Church. What motive induced Mr. Ascott to inter his wife here--whether it was a natural wish to lay her, and some day lay beside her, in their native earth; or the less creditable desire of showing how rich he had become, and of joining his once humble name, even on a tombstone, with one of the oldest names in the annals of Stowbury--nobody could find out. Probably nobody cared.

The Misses Leaf were content that he should do as he pleased in the matter: he had shown strong but not exaggerated grief at his loss; if any remorse mingled therewith, Selina's sisters happily did not know it. Nobody ever did know the full history of things except Elizabeth, and she kept it to herself. So the family skeleton was buried quietly in Mrs. Ascott's grave.

Peter Ascott showed, in his coarse fashion, much sympathy and consideration for his wife's sisters. He had them staying in the house till a week after the funeral was over, and provided them with the deepest and handsomest mourning. He even, in a formal way took counsel with them as to the carrying out of Mrs. Ascott's wishes, and the retaining of Elizabeth in charge of the son and heir, which was accordingly settled. And then they went back to their old life at Richmond, and the widower returned to his solitary bachelor ways. He looked as usual; went to and from the City as usual; and his brief married life seemed to have passed away from him like a dream.

Not altogether a dream. Gradually he began to awake to the consciousness of an occasional child's cry in the house--that large, silent, dreary house, where he was once more the sole, solitary master. Sometimes, when he came in from church of Sundays, he would mount another flight of stairs, walk into the nursery at the top of the house, and stare with distant curiosity at the little creature in Elizabeth's arms, pronounce it a "fine child, and did her great credit!" and then walk down again. He never seemed to consider it as his child, this poor old bachelor of so many years' standing; he had outgrown apparently all sense of the affections or the duties of a father. Whether they ever would come into him; whether, after babyhood was passed, he would begin to take an interest in the little creature who throve and blossomed into beauty--which, as if watched by guardian angles, dead mothers' children often seem to do--was a source of earnest speculation to Elizabeth.

In the mean time he treated both her and the baby with extreme consideration, allowed her to do just as she liked, and gave her indefinite sums of money to expend upon the nursery.

When summer came, and the doctor ordered change of air, Mr. Ascott consented to her suggestion of taking a lodging for herself and baby near baby's aunts at Richmond; only desiring that the lodging should be as handsome as could be secured, and that every other Sunday she should bring up his son to spend the day at Russell Square.

And so, during the long summer months, the motherless child, in its deep mourning--which looks so pathetic on a very young baby--might be seen carried about in Elizabeth's arms every where. When, after the first six weeks, the wet nurse left--in fact, two or three nurses successively were abolished--she took little Henry solely under her own charge. She had comparatively small experience, but she had common sense, and the strong motherly instinct which comes by nature to some women. Besides, her whole soul was wrapped up in this little child.

From the hour when, even with her mistress dying before her eyes, Elizabeth had felt a strange thrill of comfort in the new duty which had come into her blank life, she took to this duty as women only can whose life has become a blank. She received the child as a blessing sent direct from God; by unconscious hands--for Mrs. Ascott knew nothing of what happened; something that would heal her wounded heart, and make her forget Tom.

And so it did. Women and mothers well know how engrossing is the care of an infant; how each minute of the day is filled up with something to be done or thought of; so that "fretting" about extraneous things becomes quite impossible. How gradually the fresh life growing up and expanding puts the worn out or blighted life into the back ground, and all the hopes and fancies cling around the small, beautiful present, the ever developing, the ever marvelous mystery of a young child's existence! Why it should be so, we can only guess; but that it is so, many a wretched wife, many a widowed mother, many a broken hearted, forlorn aunt, has thankfully proved.

Elizabeth proved it likewise. She did not exactly lose all memory of her trouble, but it seemed lighter; it was swallowed up in this second passion of adopted motherhood. And so she sank, quietly and at once, into the condition of a middle aged woman, whose life's story--and her sort of women have but one--was a mere episode, told and ended.

For Esther had left and been married to Tom Cliffe within a few week's of Mrs. Ascott's funeral. Of course, the household knew every thing; but nobody condoled with Elizabeth. There was a certain stand-off-ishness about her which made them hold their tongues. They treated her with much respect, as her new position demanded. She took this, as she took every thing, with the grave quietness which was her fashion from her youth up; assumed her place as a confidential upper servant; dressed well but soberly, like a woman of forty, and was called "Mrs. Hand."

The only trace her "disappointment" left upon her was a slightly bitter way of speaking about men in general, and a dislike to any chatter about love affairs and matrimony. Her own story she was never known to refer to in the most distant way, except once.

Miss Hilary--who, of course, had heard all, but delicately kept silence--one night, when little Henry was not well, remained in the lodgings on Richmond Hill, and slept in the nursery, Elizabeth making up for herself a bed on the floor close beside baby and cradle. In the dead of night, the two women, mistress and maid, by some chance, said a few things to one another which never might have been said in the daylight, and which, by tacit consent, were never afterward referred to by either, any more than if they had been spoken in a dream.

Elizabeth told briefly, though not without emotion, all that had happened between herself and Tom, and how he was married to Esther Martin. And then both women went back, in a moralizing way, to the days when they had both been "young" at Stowbury, and how different life was from what they then thought and looked forward to--Miss Hilary and her "bower maiden."

"Yes," answered the former with a sigh, "things are indeed not as people fancy when they are girls. We dream, and dream, and think we see very far into the future, which nobody sees but God. I often wonder how my life will end."

Elizabeth said, after a pause, "I always felt sure you would be married, Miss Hilary. There was one person--Is he alive still? Is he ever coming home?"

"I don't know."

"I am sure he was very fond of you. And he looked like a good man."

"He was the best man I ever knew."

This was all Miss Hilary said, and she said it softly and mournfully. She might never have said it at all; but it dropped from her unawares in the deep feeling of the moment, when her heart was tender over Elizabeth's own sad, simply told story. Also because of a sudden and great darkness which had come over her own.

Literally, she did not now know whether Robert Lyon were alive or dead. Two months ago his letters had suddenly ceased, without any explanation, his last being exactly the same as the others--as frank, as warmly affectionate, as cheerful and brave.

One solution to this was his possible coming home. But she did not, after careful reasoning on the subject, believe that likely. She knew exactly his business relations with his employers; that there was a fixed time for his return to England, which nothing except the very strongest necessity could alter. Even in the chance of his health breaking, so as to incapacitate him for work, he should, he always said, have to go to the hills, rather than take the voyage home prematurely. And in that case he certainly would have informed his friends of his movements. There was nothing erratic, or careless, or eccentric about Robert Lyon; he was a practical, business-like Scotchman--far too cautious and too regular in all his habits to be guilty of those accidental negligences by which wanderers abroad sometimes cause such cruel anxieties to friends at home.

For the same reason, the other terrible possibility--his death--was not likely to have happened without their hearing of it. Hilary felt sure, with the strong confidence of love, that he would have taken every means to leave her some last word--some farewell token--which would reach hereafter he was gone, and comfort her with the assurance of what, living, he had never plainly told. Sometimes, when a wild terror of his death seized her, this settled conviction drove it back again. He must be living, or she would have heard.

There was another interpretation of the silence, which many would have considered the most probable of all--he might be married. Not deliberately, but suddenly; drawn into it by some of those impelling trains of circumstance which are the cause of so many marriages, especially with men; or, impelled by one of those violent passions which occasionally seize on an exceedingly good man, fascinating him against his conscience, reason, and will, until he wakes up to find himself fettered and ruined for life. Such things do happen, strangely, pitifully often. The like might have happened to Robert Lyon.

Hilary did not actually believe it, but still her common sense told her that it was possible. She was not an inexperienced girl now; she looked on the world with the eyes of a woman of thirty; and though, thank Heaven! the romance had never gone out of her--the faith, and trust, and tender love--still it had sobered down a little. She knew it was quite within the bounds of possibility that a young man, separated from her for seven years, thrown into all kinds of circumstances and among all sorts of people, should have changed very much in himself, and, consequently, toward her. That, without absolute faithlessness, he might suddenly have seen some other woman he liked better, and have married at once. Or, if he came back unmarried--she had taught herself to look this probability also steadily in the face--he might find the reality of her--Hilary Leaf--different from his remembrance of her; and so, without actual falseness to the old true love, might not love her any more.

These fears made her resolutely oppose Johanna's wish to write to the house of business at Liverpool, and ask what had become of Mr. Lyon. It seemed like seeking after him, trying to hold him by the slender chain which he had never attempted to make any stronger, and which, already, he might have broken, or desired to break.

She could not do it. Something forbade her; that something in the inmost depths of a woman's nature which makes her feel her own value, and exact that she shall be sought; that, if her love be worth having, it is worth seeking; that, however dear a man may be to her, she refuses to drop into his mouth like an overripe peach from a garden wall. In her sharpest agony of anxiety concerning him, Hilary felt that she could not, on her part, take any step that seemed to compel love--or even friendship--from Robert Lyon. It was not pride, she could hardly be called a proud woman; it was an innate sense of the dignity of that love which, as a free gift, is precious as "much fine gold." yet becomes the merest dross, utterly and insulting poor--when paid as a debt of honor, or offered as a benevolent largess.

And so, though oftentimes her heart felt breaking, Hilary labored on; sat the long day patiently at her desk; interested herself in the young people over whom she ruled; became Miss Balquidder's right hand in all sorts of schemes which that good woman was forever carrying out for the benefit of her fellow-creatures; and at leisure times occupied herself with Johanna, or with Elizabeth and the baby, trying to think it was a very beautiful and happy world, with love still in it, and a God of love ruling over it--only, only--

Women are very humble in their cruelest pride. Many a day she felt as if she could have crawled a hundred miles in the dust--like some Catholic pilgrim--just to get one sight of Robert Lyon.

Autumn came--lovely and lingering late. It was November, and yet the air felt mild as May, and the sunshine had that peculiar genial brightness which autumnal sunshine alone possesses; even as, perhaps, late happiness has in it a holy calm and sweetness which no youthful ecstasy can ever boast.

The day happened to be Hilary's birthday. She had taken a holiday, which she, Johanna, Elizabeth, and the baby, had spent in Richmond Park, watching the rabbits darting about under the brown fern, and the deer grazing contentedly hard by. They had sat a long time under one of the oak trees with which the Park abounds, listening for the sudden drop, drop of an occasional acorn among the fallen leaves; or making merry with the child, as a healthy, innocent, playful child always can make good women merry.

Still, Master Henry was not a remarkable specimen of infanthood, and had never occupied more than his proper nepotal corner in Hilary's heart. She left him chiefly to Elizabeth, and to his aunt Johanna, in whom the grandmotherly character had blossomed out in full perfection. And when these two became engrossed in his infant majesty. Hilary sat a little apart, unconsciously folding her hands and fixing her eyes on vacancy; becoming fearfully alive to the sharp truth, that of all griefs, a strong love unreturned or unfulfilled is the grief which most blights a woman's life. Say, rather, any human life; but it is worst to a woman, because she must necessarily endure passively. So enduring, it is very difficult to recognize the good hand of God therein. Why should He ordain longings, neither selfish nor unholy, which yet are never granted; tenderness which expends itself in vain; sacrifices which are wholly unheeded; and sufferings which seem quite thrown away? That is, if we dared allege of any thing in the moral or in the material world, where so much loveliness, so much love, appear continually wasted, that it is really "thrown away." We never know through what divine mysteries of compensation the Great Father of the universe may be carrying out his sublime plan; and those three words, "God is love," ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.

As Hilary rose from under the tree there was a shadow on her sweet face, a listless weariness in her movements, which caught Johanna's attention. Johanna had been very good to her child. When, do what she would, Hilary could not keep down fits of occasional dullness or impatience, it was touching to see how this woman of over sixty years slipped from her due pedestal of honor and dignity, to be patient with her younger sister's unspoken bitterness and incommunicable care.

She now, seeing how restless Hilary was, rose when she rose, put her arm in hers, and accompanied her, speaking or silent, with quick steps or slow, as she chose, across the beautiful park, than which, perhaps, all England can not furnish a scene more thoroughly sylvan, thoroughly English. They rested on that high ground near the gate of Pembroke Lodge, where the valley of the Thames lies spread out like a map, stretching miles and miles away in luxuriant greenery.

"How beautiful! I wonder what a foreigner would think of this view? Or any one who had been long abroad? How inexpressibly sweet and home-like it would seem to him!"

Hilary turned sharply away, and Johanna saw at once what her words had implied. She felt so sorry, so vexed with herself; but it was best to leave it alone. So they made their way homeward, speaking of something else; and then that happened which Johanna had been almost daily expecting would happen, though she dared not communicate her hopes to Hilary, lest they might prove fallacious.

The two figures, both in deep mourning, might have attracted any one's attention: they caught that of a gentleman, who was walking quickly and looking about him, as if in search of something. He passed them at a little distance, then repassed, then turned, holding out both his hands.

"Miss Leaf; I was sure it was you."

Only the voice; every thing else about him was so changed that Hilary herself would certainly have passed him in the street, that brown, foreign looking, middle aged man, nor recognized him as Robert Lyon. But for all that it was himself; it was Robert Lyon.

Nobody screamed, nobody fainted. People seldom do that in real life, even when a friend turns up suddenly from the other end of the world. They only hold out a warm hand, and look silently in one another's faces, and try to believe that all is real, as these did.

Robert Lyon shook hands with both ladies, one after the other, Hilary last, then placed himself between them.

"Miss Leaf, will you take my arm?"

The tone, the manner, were so exactly like himself, that in a moment all these intervening years seemed crushed into an atom of time. Hilary felt certain, morally and absolutely certain, that, in spite of all outward change, he was the same Robert Lyon who had bade them all good-by that Sunday night in the parlor at Stowbury. The same, even in his love for herself, though he had simply drawn her little hand under his arm, and never spoken a single word.

Hilary Leaf, down, secretly, on your heart's lowest knees, and thank God! Repent of all your bitterness, doubts, and pains; be joyful, be joyful! But, oh, remember to be so humble withal.

She was. As she walked silently along by Robert Lyon's side, she pulled down her veil to hide the sweetest, most contrite, most child-like tears. What did she deserve, more than her neighbors, that she should be so very, very happy? And when, a good distance across the park, she saw the dark, solitary figure of Elizabeth carrying baby, she quietly guided her companions into a different path, so as to avoid meeting, lest the sight of her happiness might in any way, hurt poor Elizabeth.

"I only landed last night at Southampton," Mr. Lyon explained to Miss Leaf, after the fashion people have, at such meetings, of falling upon the most practical and uninteresting details. "I came by the Overland Mail. It was a sudden journey, I had scarcely more than a few hours' notice. The cause of it was some very unpleasant defalcations in our firm."

Under any other circumstances Hilary might have smiled; maybe she did smile, and tease him many a time afterward, because the first thing he could find to talk about, after seven years' absence, was "defalcations in our firm. But now she listened gravely, and by-and-by took her part in the unimportant conversation which always occurs after such a meeting as this.

"Were you going home, Miss Leaf? They told me at your house you were expected to dinner. May I come with you? for I have only a few hours to stay. To-night I must go on to Liverpool."

"But we shall hope soon to see you again?"

"I hope so. And I trust, Miss Leaf, that I do not intrude to-day."

He said this with his Scotch shyness, or pride, or whatever it was; so like his old self, that it made somebody smile! But somebody loved it. Somebody lifted up to his face eyes of silent welcome; sweet, soft, brown eyes, where never, since he knew them, had he seen one cloud of anger darken, one shadow of unkindness rise.

"This is something worth coming home to," he said in a low voice, and not over lucidly. Ay, it was.

"I am by no means disinterested in the matter of dinner, Miss Leaf; for I have no doubt of finding good English roast beef and plum pudding on your sister's birth day.--Happy returns of the day, Miss Hilary."

She was so touched by his remembering this, that, to hide it, she put on a spice of her old mischievousness, and asked him if he was aware how old she was?

"Yes; you are thirty; I have known you for fifteen years."

"It is a long time," said Johanna, thoughtfully.

Johanna would not have been human had she not been a little thoughtful and silent on the way home, and had she not many times, out of the corners of her eyes, sharply investigated Mr. Robert Lyon.

He was much altered; there was no doubt of that. Seven years of Indian life would change any body; take the youthfulness out of any body. It was so with Robert Lyon. When coming into the parlor he removed his hat, many a white thread was visible in his hair, and besides the spare, dried-up look which is always noticeable in people who have lived long in hot climates, there was an "old" expression in his face, indicating many a worldly battle fought and won, but not without leaving scars behind. Even Hilary, as she sat opposite to him, at table, could not but feel that he was no longer a young man either in appearance or reality. We ourselves grow old, or older, without knowing it, but when we suddenly come upon the same fact in another it startles us. Hilary had scarcely recognized how far she herself had left her girlish days behind till she saw Robert Lyon.

"You think me very much changed?" said he, guessing by his curiously swift intuition of old what she was thinking of.

"Yes, a good deal changed," she answered truthfully; at which he was silent.

He could not read--perhaps no man's heart could--all the emotion that swelled in hers as she looked at him, the love of her youth, no longer young. How the ghostly likeness of the former face gleamed out under the hard worn lines of the face that now was touching her with ineffable tenderness. Also, with solemn content came a sense of the entire indestructibleness of that love which through all decay or alteration traces the ideal image still, clings to it, and cherishes it with a tenacity that laughs to scorn the grim dread of "growing old."

In his premature and not specially comely middle age, in his gray hairs, in the painful, anxious, half melancholy expression which occasionally flitted across his features, as if life had gone hard with him, Robert Lyon was a thousand times dearer to her than when the world was all before them both in the early days at Stowbury.

There is a great deal of a sentimental nonsense talked about people having been "young together." Not necessarily is that a bond. Many a tie formed in youth dwindles away and breaks off naturally in maturer years. Characters alter, circumstances divide. No one will dare to allege that there may not be loves and friendships formed in middle life as dear, as close, as firm as any of those of youth; perhaps, with some temperaments, infinitely more so. But when the two go together, when the calm election of maturity confirms the early instinct, and the lives have been parallel, as it were, for many years, there can be no bond like that of those who say as these two did, "We were young together."

He said so when, after dinner, he came and stood by the window where Hilary was sitting sewing. Johanna had just gone out of the room; whether intentionally or not, this history can not avouch. Let us give her the benefit of the doubt; she was a generous woman.

During the three hours that Mr. Lyon had been with her, Hilary's first agitation had subsided. That exceeding sense of rest which she had always felt beside him--the sure index of people who, besides loving, are meant to guide and help and bless one another--returned as strong as ever. That deep affection which should underlie all love revived and clung to him with a chidlike confidence strengthening at every word he said, every familiar look and way.

He was by no means so composed as she was, especially now when coming up to her side and watching her hands moving for a minute or so, he asked her to tell him, a little more explicitly, of what had happened to her since they parted.

"Things are rather different from what I thought;" and he glanced with a troubled air round the neat but very humbly furnished parlor. "And about the shop?"

"Johanna told you."

"Yes; but her letters have been so few, so short--not that I could expect more. Still--now, if you will trust me--tell me all."

Hilary turned to him, her friend for fifteen years. He was that if he was nothing more. And he had been very true; he deserved to be trusted. She told him, in brief, the history of the last year or two, and then added:

"But after all it is hardly worth the telling, because, you see, we are very comfortable now. Poor Ascott, we suppose, must be in Australia. I earn enough to keep Johanna and myself, and Miss Balquidder is a good friend to us. We have repaid her, and owe nobody any thing. Still, we have suffered a great deal. Two years ago; oh! it was a dreadful time."

She was hardly aware of it, but her candid tell-tale face betrayed more even than her words. It cut Robert Lyon to the heart.

"You suffered, and I never knew it."

"I never meant you to know."

"Why not?" He walked the room in great excitement. "I ought to have been told; it was cruel not to tell me. Suppose you had sunk under it; suppose you had died, or been driven to do what many a woman does for the sake of mere bread and a home--what your poor sister did--married. But I beg your pardon."

For Hilary had started up with her face all aglow.

"No," she cried; "no poverty would have sunk me as low as that. I might have starved, but I should never have married."

Robert Lyon looked at her, evidently uncomprehending, then said humbly, though rather formally,

"I beg your pardon once more. I had no right to allude to any thing of the kind."

Hilary replied not. It seemed as if now, close together, they were further apart than when the Indian seas rolled between them.

Mr. Lyon's brown cheek turned paler and paler; he pressed his lips hard together; they moved once or twice, but still he did not utter a word. At last, with a sort of desperate courage, and in a tone that Hilary had never heard from him in her life before, he said:

"Yes, I believe I have a right, the right that every man has when his whole happiness depends upon it, to ask you one question. You know every thing concerning me; you always have known; I meant that you should--I have taken the utmost care that you should. There is not a bit of my life that has not been as open to you as if--as if--. But I know nothing whatever concerning you."

"What do you wish to know?" she faltered.

"Seven years is a long time. Are you free? I mean, are you engaged to be married?"

"No."

"Thank God!"

He dropped his head down between his hands and did not speak for a long time.

And then with difficulty--for it was always hard to him to speak out--he told her, at least he somehow made her understand, how he had loved her. No light fancy of sentimental youth, captivated by every fresh face it sees, putting upon each one the coloring of his own imagination, and adorning not what is, but what itself creates; no sudden, selfish, sensuous passion, caring only to attain its object, irrespective of reason, right, or conscience; but the strong deep love of a just man, deliberately choosing one woman as the best woman out of all the world, and setting himself resolutely to win her. Battling for her sake with all hard fortune; keeping, for her sake, his heart pure from all the temptations of the world; never losing sight of her; watching over her so far as he could, consistently with the sense of honor (or masculine pride--which was it? but Hilary forgave it, any how) which made him resolutely compel himself to silence; holding her perfectly free, while he held himself bound. Bound by a faithfulness perfect as that of the knights of old--asking nothing, and yet giving all.

Such was his love--this brave, plain spoken, single hearted Scotsman. Would that there were more such men and more such love in the world! Few women could have resisted it, certainly not Hilary, especially with a little secret of her own lying perdu at the bottom of her heart; that "sleeping angel" whence half her strength and courage had come; the noble, faithful, generous love of a good woman for a good man. But this secret Robert Lyon had evidently never guessed, or deemed himself wholly unworthy of such a possession.

He took her hand at last, and held it firmly.

"And now that you know all, do you think in time--I'll not hurry you--but in time, do you think I could make you love me?"

She looked up in his face with her honest eyes. Smiling as they were, there was pathos in them; the sadness left by those long years of hidden suffering, now forever ended.

"I have loved you all my life," said Hilary. _

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