For Love and Life; Vol. 2 by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXIII.
  H.B.M.’s Consul.—Conclusion.

CLARE carried out her intentions, unmoved by all the entreaties addressed to her. She heard everything that was said with perfect calm; either her capabilities of emotion were altogether exhausted, or her passionate sense of wrong was too deep to show at the surface, and she was calm as a marble statue; but she was equally inflexible. Edgar turned, in spite of himself, into Arthur Arden’s advocate; pleaded with her, setting forth every reason he could think of, partly against his own judgment—and failed. Her husband, against whom she did not absolutely close her door, threw himself at her feet, and entreated, for the children’s sake, for the sake of all that was most important to them both—the credit of their house, the good name of their boy. These were arguments which with Clare, in her natural mind, would have been unanswerable; but that had happened to Clare which warps the mind from its natural modes of thought. The idea of disgrace had got into her very soul, like a canker. She was unable to examine her reasons—unable to resist, even in herself, this overwhelming influence; it overcame her principles, and even her prejudices, which are more difficult to overcome. The fear of scandal, which those who knew Clare would have supposed sufficient to make her endure anything, failed totally here. She knew that her behaviour would make the world talk, and she even felt that, with this clue to some profound disagreement between her husband and herself, the whole story might be more easily revealed, and her boy’s heirship made impossible; but even with this argument she could not subdue herself, nor suffer herself to be subdued. The sense of outrage had taken possession of her; she could not forget it—could not realize the possibility of ever forgetting it. It was not that she had been brought within the reach of possible disgrace. She was disgraced; the very formality of the new marriage, though she consented to it without question, as a necessity, was a new outrage. In short, Clare, though she acted with a determination and steadiness which seemed to add force to her character, and showed her natural powers as nothing else had ever done, was not, for the first time in her life, a free agent. She had been taken possession of by a passionate sense of injury, which seized upon her as an evil spirit might seize upon its victim. In the very fierceness of her individual resentment, she ceased to be an individual, and became an abstraction, a woman wronged, capable of feeling, knowing, thinking of nothing but her wrong. This made all arguments powerless, all pleas foolish. She could not admit any alternative into her mind; her powers of reasoning failed her altogether on this subject; on all others she was sane and sensible, but on this had all the onesidedness, the narrowness of madness—or of the twin-sister of madness—irrepressible and irrepressed passion.

Without knowing anything of the real facts of the story, the Thornleighs were admitted to see her, on Clare’s own suggestion; for her warped mind was cunning to see where an advantage could be drawn from partial publicity. They found her on her sofa, looking, in the paleness which had now become habitual to her, like a creature vanishing out of the living world.

“Why did you not let us know you were ill? You must have been suffering long, and never complained!” cried Lady Augusta, moved almost to tears.

“Not very long,” said Clare.

She had permitted her husband to be present at this interview, to keep up appearances to the last; and Arthur felt as if every word was a dart aimed at him, though I do not think she meant it so.

“Not long! My dear child, you are quite thin and wasted; this cannot have come on all at once. But Italy will do you all the good in the world,” Lady Augusta added, trying to be cheerful. “They, you know, are going to Italy too.”

“But not near where I shall be,” said Clare.

“You must go further south? I am very sorry. Gussy and you would have been company for each other. You are not strong enough for company? My poor child! But once out of these cold spring winds, you will do well,” said kind Lady Augusta.

But though she thus took the matter on the surface, she felt that there was more below. Her looks grew more and more perplexed as they discussed Edgar’s appointment, and the humble beginning which the young couple would make in the world.

“It is very imprudent—very imprudent,” Lady Augusta said, shaking her head. “I have said all I can, Mrs. Arden, and so has Mr. Thornleigh. I don’t know how they are to get on. It is the most imprudent thing I ever heard of.”

“Nothing is imprudent,” said Clare, with a hard, dry intonation, which took all pleasant meaning out of the words, “when you can trust fully for life or death; and my brother Edgar is one whom everybody can trust.”

“At all events, we are both of us old enough to know our own minds,” said Gussy, hastily, trying to laugh off this impression. “If we choose to starve together, who should prevent us?”

Arthur Arden took them to their carriage, but Lady Augusta remarked that he did not go upstairs again. “There is something in all this more than meets the eye,” she said, oracularly.

Many people suspected this, after Lady Augusta, when Clare was gone, and when it came out that Mr. Arden was not with her, but passing most of his time in London, knocking about from club to club, through all the dreary winter. He made an effort to spend his time as virtuously as possible that first year; but the second year he was more restless and less virtuous, having fallen into despair. Then everybody talked of the breach between them, and a great deal crept out that they had thought buried in silence. Even the real facts of the case were guessed at, though never fully established, and the empty house became the subject of many a tale. People remarked that there were many strange stories about the Ardens; that they had behaved very strangely to the last proprietor before Arthur; that nobody had ever heard the rights of that story, and that Edgar had been badly used.

Whilst all this went on, Clare lived gloomy and retired by herself, in a little village on the Neapolitan coast. She saw nobody, avoiding the wandering English, and everybody who could have known her in better times; and I don’t know how long her reason could have stood the wear and tear, but for the illness and death of the poor little heir, whose hapless position had given the worst pang to her shame and horror. Little Arthur died, his mother scarcely believing it, refusing to think such a thing possible. Her husband had heard incidentally of the child’s illness, and had hurried to the neighbourhood, scarcely hoping to be admitted. But Clare neither welcomed him nor refused him admission, but permitted his presence, and ignored it. When the child was gone, however, it was Arthur’s vehement grief which first roused her out of her stupor.

“It is you who have done it!” she cried, turning upon him with eyes full of tearless passion. But she did not send him out of her house. She felt ill, worn out in body and mind, and left everything in his hands. And by-and-by, when she came to herself, Clare allowed herself to be taken home, and fled from her duties no longer.

This was the end of their story. They were more united in the later portion of their lives than in the beginning, but they have no heir to come after them. The history of the Ardens will end with them, for the heir-at-law is distant in blood, and has a different name.

As for the other personages mentioned in this story, Mr. Tottenham still governs his shop as if it were an empire, and still comes to a periodical crisis in the shape of an Entertainment, which threatens to fail up to the last moment, and then is turned into a great success. The last thing I have heard of Tottenham’s was, that it had set up a little daily newspaper of its own, written and printed on the establishment, which Mr. Tottenham thought very likely to bring forward some latent talent which otherwise might have been lost in dissertations on the prices of cotton, or the risings and fallings of silks. After Gussy’s departure, I hear the daily services fell off in the chapel; flowers were no longer placed fresh and fragrant on the temporary altar, there was no one to play the harmonium, and the attendance gradually decreased. It fell from a daily to a weekly service, and then came to an end altogether, for it was found that the young ladies and the gentlemen preferred to go out on Sunday, and to choose their own preachers after their differing tastes. How many of them strayed off to chapel instead of church, it would have broken Gussy’s heart to hear. I do not think, however, that this disturbed Mr. Tottenham much, who was too viewy not to be very tolerant, and who liked himself to hear what every new opinion had to say for itself. Lady Mary was very successful with her lectures, and I hope improved the feminine mind very much at Harbour Green. She thought she improved her own mind, which was of course a satisfaction; and did her best to transmit to little Molly very high ideas of intellectual training; but Molly was a dunce, as providentially happens often in the families of very clever people; and distinguished herself by a curious untractableness, which did not hinder her from being her mother’s pride, and the sweetest of all the cousins—or so at least Lady Mary thought.

The marriage of “the Grantons” took place in April, with the greatest éclat. It was at Easter, when everybody was in the country; and was one of the prettiest of weddings, as well as the most magnificent, which Thornleigh ever saw. Mary’s presents filled a large room to overflowing. She got everything possible and impossible that ever bride was blessed with; and the young couple went off with a maid, and a valet and a courier, and introductions to every personage in Europe. Their movements were chronicled in the newspapers; their letters went and came in ambassadorial despatch boxes. Short of royalty, there could have been nothing more splendid, more “perfectly satisfactory,” as Lady Augusta said. The only drawback was that Harry would not come to his sister’s wedding; but to make up for that everybody else came—all the great Hauteville connections, and Lady Augusta’s illustrious family, and all the Thornleighs, to the third and fourth generations. Not only Thornleigh itself, but every house within a radius of ten miles was crowded with fine people and their servants; and the bells were rung in half a dozen parish churches in honour of the wedding. It was described fully in the Morning Post, with details of all the dresses, and of the bride’s ornaments and coiffure.

“We shall have none of these fine things, I suppose,” Gussy said, when it was all over, turning to Edgar with a mock sigh.

“No, my dear; and I don’t see how you could expect them,” said Lady Augusta. “Instead of spending our money vainly on making a great show for you, we had much better save it, to buy some useful necessary things for your housekeeping. Mary is in quite a different case.”

“Buy us pots and pans, mamma,” said Gussy, laughing; “though perhaps earthen pipkins would do just as well in Italy. We shall not be such a credit to you, but we shall be much cheaper. There is always something in that.”

“Ah! Gussy, it is easy to speak now; but wait till you are buried in the cares of life,” said her mother, going away to superintend the arrangements for the ball in the evening. So grand a wedding was certainly very expensive; she never liked to tell anyone how much that great ceremonial cost.

A little later, the little church dressed itself in a few modest spring flowers, and the school-children, with baskets full of primroses—the last primroses of the season—made a carpet under Gussy’s feet as she, in her turn, went along the familiar path between the village gravestones, a bride. There were not more than a dozen people at the breakfast, and Lady Augusta’s little brougham took them to the station afterwards, where they set out quite humbly and cheerily by an ordinary train.

“Quite good enough for a Consul,” Gussy said, always the first to laugh at her own humbleness. She wore a grey gown to go away in, which did not cost a tenth part so much as Lady Granton’s, and the Post took no notice of them. They wandered about their own country for a week or two, like the Babes in the Wood, Gussy said, expected in no great country house, retiring into no stately seclusion, but into the far more complete retirement of common life and common ways. Gussy, as she was proud to tell, had learned to do many things in her apprenticeship to the sisters of the Charity-house as associate of the order; and I think the pleasure to her of this going forth unattended, unsuspected, in the freedom of a young wife—the first smack of absolute freedom which women ever taste—had something far more exquisite in it to Gussy than any delight her sister could have in her more splendid honeymoon. Lord and Lady Granton were limited, and kept in curb by their own very greatness; they were watched over by their servants, and kept by public opinion in the right way; but Edgar and Gassy went where they would, as free as the winds, and thought of nobody’s opinion. The Consul in this had an unspeakable advantage over the Earl.

They got to their home at last on a May evening, when Italy is indeed Paradise; they had driven all day long from the Genoa side along the lovely Riviera di Levante, tracing the gracious curves from village to village along that enchanting way. The sun was setting when they came in sight of Spezzia, and before they reached the house which had been taken for them, the Angelus was sounding from the church, and the soft dilating stars of Italian skies had come out to hear the homely litany sung shrilly in side-chapels, and out of doors, among the old nooks of the town, of the angelic song, “Hail, Mary, full of grace!” The women were singing in an old three-cornered piazzetta, close under the loggia of the Consul’s house, which looked upon the sea. On the sea itself the magical sky was shining with all those listening stars. In Italy the stars take more interest in human life than they do in this colder sphere. Those that were proper to that space of heaven, crowded together, Edgar thought to himself, to see his bride. On the horizon the sea and sky blended in one infinite softness and blueness; the lights began to twinkle in the harbour and in its ships; the far-off villages among the woods lent other starry tapers to make the whole landscape kind and human. Heaven and earth were softly illuminated, not for them—for the dear common uses and ends of existence; yet unconsciously with a softer and fuller lustre, because of the eyes that looked upon them so newly, as if earth and heaven, and the kindly light, and all the tender bonds of humanity, had been created fresh that very day.

THE END.