TWO LOVE LETTERS.
PROUDLY as Beatrix had carried herself while she was face to face with her father, her firmness gave way all at once when she left him, and she burst into a flood of tears.
She went upstairs, intending to go straight to her own room. She did not want to exhibit her grief before kindly Miss Scales. She shrank from her governess’s sympathy—would not for worlds have told her secret, or bared her wounds, or allowed Cyril’s affection to be canvassed or criticised. She wanted no one’s sympathy or advice, and had fully made up her mind as to her future course.
‘If he will be steadfast to me I will be true to him,’ she said within herself. ‘I laugh at the thought of poverty if it is to be shared with him.’
In the dimly lighted corridor she stopped suddenly, with a start of surprise. Something had happened which she had never known to occur before. The key was in the lock of her mother’s room,—that sealed chamber, the picture of which was more dimly painted on her memory than a dream of past years—the room she had so languished to see.
Without a thought of whether it were right or wrong she ran to her room at the other end of the corridor, fetched a candle, and went back to her mother’s door.
The door was unlocked. She took out the key, went in, and locked the door inside, to secure herself from interruption.
‘Dear room,’ she said, looking round in the dim light. ‘Yes, I remember it better now—and mamma sitting there in that low chair by the fire—and I lying on that white rug with my toys scattered about. Ah, what happy days! The soft fleecy whiteness used to remind me of snow. And then when I was tired of play mamma used to take me into her lap and sing to me. Oh, how I loved her! No, there is no love like that—no love so sweet, so strong, so holy! Mother, if you could come back to me for a few short years I would give up Cyril. I would sacrifice that newer love for the old one—for the old love was dearer, sweeter, closer, better.’
She flung herself on her knees beside the empty chair, and sobbed out her passionate grief. It seemed to her almost as if there were sympathy in that contact—a kind of sympathy which comforted her soul. To these dumb things which breathed of her mother’s presence she could pour out her sorrow, she could lay bare her heart. No pride restrained her here.
So she remained for a long time, till her passion had almost worn itself out in weeping. Then she rose and looked round the room, and then slowly examined each once familiar object, candle in hand. The dust lay white upon everything, and the spider had spun his gauzy draperies from curtain to curtain.
Yes. Everything was as she had faintly remembered it. There stood the Japanese cabinets, with their rich raised work representing dragons, and birds, and fishes, and golden trees, and golden bridges, and golden temples, all golden on a shining black ground. How often she had stood before one of those cabinets, admiring the strange creatures!
‘Are they all gold when they are alive, mamma?’ she had asked once, ‘and do they swim in black water?’
There stood the frame, with the Berlin wool roses which she had watched slowly creeping into life under her mother’s white hands. She lifted the tissue-paper covering, and looked at the flowers, with awe-stricken eyes. All these empty years had scarcely faded them—and yet the hands that had wrought them were dust.
The centre table was covered with books, and desks, and dainty workbaskets, all the trifles of a woman’s daily life—just as Mrs. Harefield had left them.
Beatrix opened a blotting-book. There was a letter begun in a woman’s hand—her mother’s doubtless. The sight of it thrilled her, for it was the first scrap of her mother’s writing she had seen since she was old enough to distinguish one style of penmanship from another.
The letter was dated in the year of her mother’s death.
‘The Water House, September 10th, 1840.
‘DEAR MRS. DULCIMER,
‘We should have been very pleased to come to you on the 22nd, but Mr. Harefield has made up his mind to leave for Italy on the 18th, so you see it would be impossible. Thanks for your kind advice about little Trix. I agree with you that she is far from strong, and I am happy to tell you that Mr. Harefield has consented to my taking her with me this year. A winter in the South will——’
Here the letter broke off. Mrs. Dulcimer had called, perhaps, and rendered its completion unnecessary. Beatrix could just remember that Mrs. Dulcimer used to call rather often in those days.
The key was in one of the Japanese cabinets. Beatrix unlocked it, and looked inside. There were two rows of shallow drawers, with tarnished silver handles. In the first she opened there was a velvet covered miniature case which Beatrix recognised with a start. It was the one which her mother had taken out of her hand one day.
She opened it and looked at the pictured face exquisitely painted on ivory. It was such a face as one sees in the pictures of the old Italian masters—darkly beautiful—the lips proud and firm—the nostrils exquisitely chiselled—the eyes Italian.
‘Was this Antonio?’ Beatrix asked herself, ‘and who was he? And why was his influence evil in my mother’s life?’
She pursued her examination of the room. What was this small brass inlaid casket on a table between the windows? It was a neat little medicine chest with stoppered bottles. She took them out one by one. They were for the most part empty. But one, labelled laudanum, poison, was three parts full. She put them back into their places and shut down the lid. ‘I wonder whether mamma used to take laudanum, as I have done sometimes, to kill pain?’ she said to herself.
The morning-room opened into the dressing-room, which communicated with the bedroom.
But the door between the morning-room and dressing-room was locked. Beatrix could explore no further.
She unlocked the door, restored the key to its place on the other side, and returned to her own room. She looked at her watch, and found that it was half-past ten. She had been an hour in that chamber of the dead.
She locked the door of her own room, just in time to escape a visitation from Miss Scales, whose gentle tapping sounded on the panel five minutes afterwards.
‘Are you going to bed, dear?’ inquired the duenna.
‘Yes, Miss Scales, love. Good night.’
‘Good night, dear.’
Beatrix stirred the fire. The autumn nights were getting chill and shivery. It seemed as if the river became an embodied dampness at this time of the year, and stole into the house after nightfall, like a spectre.
She took out her desk, and in that firm and almost masculine hand of hers began a letter to Cyril.
‘Dearest,’ she began.
No other name was needed. He was her dearest and only dear.
‘DEAREST,—My father has told me his decision. It is just as I said it would be. He will bestow no blessing upon our love. He has sworn to disinherit me if I marry you. He is quite resolute, and will never change his mind, he assures me. Nothing you or I could do would soften him. If you marry me you will marry a pauper. I am to be penniless.
‘Is your mind made up, Cyril? Are you true and steadfast? If so you will find me firm as rock. Poverty has no terrors for me. I would marry you, dearest, if you were a farm labourer with a dozen shillings a week. I would work, drudge, and wash and mend, and be your happy wife. I have told my father as much as this. I have told him that I renounce his money and his lands—that I am ready to be your wife whenever you choose to claim me—that the loss of all he has to leave cannot make me swerve by one hair’s breadth from my purpose.
‘Do you think me bold, Cyril, or unwomanly, for writing thus frankly? If you do please pardon me, as Romeo pardoned Juliet, because I have not “more cunning to be strange.” Write to me, dearest. I am forbidden to go to the Vicarage any more while I remain under my father’s roof; so I have little hope of seeing you. Write and tell me what you wish.
‘Your ever affectionate
‘BEATRIX.’
What was Cyril Culverhouse to do on receiving such a letter as this of Beatrix Harefield’s, after his promise to her father that he would hold no further communication with her? To leave such a letter unanswered was impossible to any man. To break his word and answer it in an underhand manner was impossible to Cyril Culverhouse.
The woman he loved declared herself all his own. She held the sacrifice of fortune as a feather weighed against his love. She was ready to be his wife, unfettered, unburdened by the wealth which had never entered into his views or desires. The loss of that wealth would weigh as lightly with him as it did with her. But could he be so selfish as to take this impetuous girl at her word? Could he say to her, ‘Sacrifice all things for my sake, fortune and duty, your father’s estate and your father’s regard. Disobey and defy your father at my bidding?’ Could he, whose mission it was to teach others their duty, so far violate his own?
Cyril told himself that he could not do this thing. He was a man who had built his life upon principle, and though, in this case, passion urged him strongly to do wrong, principle was stronger, and insisted upon his doing right.
He asked advice from no one—not even from his cousin Kenrick, who had found out the secret of his heart.
This is what he wrote to Beatrix within three hours of the delivery of her letter, hours which he had given to deepest thought:—
‘MY BEST AND DEAREST,—How can I thank you enough for your noble letter, and for its dear assurance that fortune ranks no higher in your esteem than it does in mine? How can I answer you conscientiously, and with a strict adherence to the hard path of duty—and not seem to answer coldly?
‘If I could answer you as my heart prompts I should say, “Let us begin our life journey at once.” I have no fear of the issue. Were I a fatalist, I should feel myself strong enough to conquer adverse fate, with you by my side. Believing as I do in a Divine goodness governing and guiding all things, I can survey the future with infinite reliance, feeling certain that all things will be well for us if we only cleave to the right.
‘It would not be right, dearest, for me to profit by the impulse of your warm heart, which prompts you to make so large a sacrifice for my sake. You are but just emerging from childhood into womanhood, and you can hardly measure the losses you are at this moment willing to incur. Let us wait a few years, love, and if time and experience confirm your present purpose, most proudly and gladly will I take my darling to my heart, free from the splendid burden of wealth. Let us wait at least till you are of age, and then, if you are still true to your purpose of to-day, you will be justified in choosing for yourself. No father has the right to impose his wishes upon a child where a life’s happiness or misery is at stake, but he has the right to do his uttermost to prevent an unwise choice. Your father has done me the injustice to think me a fortune-hunter. He might be justified in thinking me something less than an honourable man, if I were to take advantage of your guileless nature, which knows not worldly prudence or the thought of change.
‘Love, I dare not write more than this. I dare not let my heart go out to you, as it would, in fondest words. I want to write soberly, wisely, if possible. Wait, dear love, for two little years, and, with God’s help, I shall have won a better position in my profession, a home which, although humble compared with your father’s house, may be not unworthy of a true and loving wife.
‘During those two years of waiting we shall have to live apart. I have promised your father that I will make no attempt to see or communicate with you till after your twenty-first birthday. Even to convey this letter to you I shall have to appeal to his generosity. I shall not break that promise. Dear as my work in Little Yafford has become to me, I shall leave this place as soon as I can hear of an eligible curacy elsewhere. Hitherto my work has been only a labour of love. Henceforward I am a man anxious to succeed in my profession. I do not mean that I am going to sacrifice my Divine calling to the desire to win a home for my sweet wife,—only that I shall, so far as may be justifiable, seek to improve my position.
‘Farewell, dearest. Remember that while I hold myself bound to you, I leave you free; and, if the future should show you a fairer life than that which I can give you, you have but to send me one line, “Cyril, the dream is ended,” and I will submit, as to the will of God.
‘Yours till death,
‘CYRIL CULVERHOUSE.’
This letter Cyril enclosed in an envelope, addressed to Mr. Harefield, with the following note:—
‘DEAR SIR,—I promised not to write to your daughter until after her twenty-first birthday. She has written to me, and I cannot leave her letter unanswered. I must appeal to your kindness therefore to give her the enclosed letter, read or unread, as it may please you. There is not a word in it that I should blush for you to read, yet I shall be grateful if you deliver the letter unread. I cannot think that you will refuse to make this concession, as, if you do so, you will place me in the position of having received a noble and self-sacrificing letter from your daughter, and of leaving it wholly unacknowledged.
‘Your obedient servant,
‘CYRIL CULVERHOUSE.’