MEANWHILE Sir William Markham had been strangely employed. He came home to get himself brushed free of the dust of his journey; but when he got to the house he thought of that errand no more. He asked for his letters as if these were all that he was thinking of. And you may suppose that in a house which knew the importance of letters, and was aware of all the momentous issues of neglect in that particular, Sir William’s letters were carefully arranged on the table in the library. He asked for them, which was unnecessary, and looked so full of business and importance, that Brown found “a screw loose” in his master too. This was not his usual aspect when he came home. Then the busy statesman allowed himself a holiday. Even when he was in office (much more being in opposition), he had put off his burden of official cares, and had strolled up the avenue with his wife without caring for his letters. When Brown answered respectfully, “They are in the library, Sir William;” within himself that functionary shook his head and said, “There is something wrong.” Sir William went into the library, which was large and dim and cool, the very home of quiet leisure and comfort—and closed the door after him with a sense of relief. His letters were all laid out on the table, but he did not so much as look at them. He sat down in his usual chair, and leaned his head in his hands, and gazed into the blank air before him. Was this all he had come for? Certainly he did nothing more: gazed out straight before him and saw nothing; sat motionless doing nothing; paused altogether body and soul. He was not aware yet of the second visitor who had arrived; but he was in no doubt about the first. He did not require to ask himself what his old friend,—whose name had tingled through and through him, though he had professed that he scarcely remembered it—wanted of him. That early chapter of his life which he had put away entirely, which he had honestly forgotten as if it had not been, came back to him in a moment, no longer capable of being forgotten as he sat by his daughter’s side in the little pony carriage. He had not meant any harm in putting it so entirely from him. But nothing is ever lost in this tenacious world. Bury a secret in the deepest earth, and some chance digger, thinking of other things, will bring it up without intending it. Exercise even the most innocent reticence about your own affairs, matters in which you have a perfect right to judge for yourself, and some time or other even this will come up against you like a crime. What harm had he done by burying in his own heart a little inconsequent chapter of his life, an episode that had come to an end so soon, that had left so few results behind? What results had it left? The only one had been promptly and conclusively taken off his hands. He had never felt it; he had never been conscious of any responsibility in respect to it. But that which had seemed to him nothing but a broken thread at twenty-five, was it to reappear against him at sixty like a web of fate perplexing and entangling his feet? A cold dew came out upon his forehead when he thought of his wife. Were she to hear it, were she to know, how could he ever again look her in the face? And yet he had done her no wrong. There had been no harm, no evil intention in his mind. Half inadvertence, and half a dislike to return to a matter which was an irritation to his orderly mind, as well as a recollection of pain—an incident that had come to nothing, a false beginning in life—were the causes of his original silence about his own youth and all that was in it. A man who marries at forty, is it necessary that he should unfold everything that happened to him at twenty-five? and he had been done with it all; had closed the chapter altogether so very long ago. That it should be re-opened now was intolerable. But yet Sir William knew that he must bear it; he must subdue all signs of annoyance, he must receive his unwelcome visitor as if he were pleased to see him, and ascertain what he wanted, and steal, if possible, his weapons out of his hands.
These were the thoughts in his mind as he sat alone and pondered, arranging his ideas. He had known what it was to be much troubled by public business in his day, but he had experienced little trouble with his own. All was orderly and well regulated in his private affairs: no skeletons in the cupboards, nothing anywhere that could not meet the eye of day. This was the very sting of the present occurrence to him. A secret! That he should be convicted of a hidden chapter of early indiscretion, of having taken a foolish step which might have coloured all his life! Though it was no wrong to her, his wife could scarcely fail to think it a wrong, and he could not but suffer in the estimation of everybody who heard of it. Already, was he not humiliated in his own eyes? But for this pause which enabled him to rearrange his thoughts, to settle his plan of operations, he felt that he must have been overwhelmed altogether. At last, with a sigh, he got up and prepared himself to issue forth out of his sanctuary, and meet the dangers that threatened him; he to be threatened with dangers of such a sort!—It was intolerable—yet it had to be borne. He went out to meet the party which he could hear coming up the avenue. Brown looked at him with suspicious eyes as he came into the hall. Could Brown know anything? did everybody know? Even Lady Markham, he thought, looked at him strangely, almost with alarm. But it is unnecessary to say that this was all in Sir William’s imagination. No one had as yet associated any idea of mystery with him. His wife only thought he was weary with the work of the session, and looking pale. She was standing talking to Colonel Lenny, waiting till Alice should draw up at the door. Sir William, with a faint gleam of returning pleasure, stood on the top of the steps and waited too; but then he was confronted by the vision of the pink bonnet by his daughter’s side. A pink bonnet! who had been talking of a pink bonnet? He came down slowly, half afraid of this and everything else that was new.
“In good time, Markham,” said Colonel Lenny, waving his hand; “here is another old friend come to see you. She is changed more than you are. From a girl, and a pretty one, she has grown an old woman, and that’s not a thing to be permitted; but an old friend, my dear fellow, and more than an old friend. Can’t you see it’s Katey? Katey, my wife?”
“Katey!” Even Sir William’s steady nerves gave way a little. His eyes seemed to give a startled leap of alarm in their sockets. For a moment the impulse in his mind was to turn and fly. Lenny was bad, but his wife was a hundred times worse; and she looked at him, leaning out of the pony carriage and holding out her hands as if she meant to kiss him; but that was more than flesh and blood could bear. “Katey!” he said; “I cannot believe my eyes. Is it Katey Gaveston after all these years? I know I’ve grown an old man, and everything has changed, but——”
“You never thought to see the like of me such an old woman? Ah, Will, but it’s true. I am Katey Gaveston, as sure as you stand there. I came after him, to stop him from making mischief. He don’t mean it—we know that; but he’s just as simple as ever. He blurts everything out.”
This speech went through and through Sir William. The light seemed to fail from his eyes for a moment; but when he looked round all was as before—Lady Markham talking to Brown, and Alice to the groom, who had come for the pony carriage.
“Hush!” he said, instinctively, with a shudder, giving her his hand to help her to step out. “Hush!” Then, making a little effort over himself, he added, “We are to have time, I hope, to talk over old stories quietly—at our leisure—no need to go back in a moment from the present to the past.”
“Nearly forty years—it’s a long way to go back,” she said. “We’ve grown old folks; but it’s better to take our time and talk it all over quietly, as you say. Yes, yes, quietly; that is by far the best way.”
Mrs. Lenny nodded till her bonnet seemed to fill all the atmosphere with pink mists of reflection, and laughed, filling the air with reverberations of sound, just as her bonnet did with flickering of coloured light; but she did not throw her arms round him in sisterly salutation; this was something saved at least.
Then he led her in ceremoniously to the great drawing-room, which was carefully shaded and cool and luxurious after the blaze outside. It was sweet with great bowls of late roses, full of flowers of every kind—a stately room such as Mrs. Lenny was not accustomed to see. She stopped short with a cry of admiration.
“What a lovely place! What a beautiful—beautiful house!” Then she put her handkerchief to her eyes. “To think, poor dear, who might have been the mistress of it all!” she said.
Sir William cast an alarmed glance behind him, but his wife was too far off to hear.
“You must recollect,” he said, “that then I had no house at all—no place to make—any one the mistress of. I never expected then to be master here.”
Mrs. Lenny sat down and wiped her eyes.
“It is a beautiful house,” she said. “I’ve been into the park, and seen a great deal; and when I think of all that’s come and gone, when I remember that you were nothing but a poor man, Will Markham, just as poor as all the rest of us—and to see you now, like a prince, with your lovely wife, and her sweet family—oh! I know you’ll forgive me, my dear lady; if your heart is as sweet as your face, you’ll forgive me; but I can’t help thinking that what is given to one is taken from another; and of them that never had a chance of happiness—them that are dead and gone—and the place where they might have been—remembers them no more.”
Lady Markham, who could not shut her heart to any distress, came and sat down by her and took her hand.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “When I have any sorrow it always comes upon me afresh in a new place.”
How far she was from knowing what her visitor meant!
Mrs. Lenny looked up surprised. Then two big honest tears burst out of her eyes, and her whole face lighted up with a smile.
“You are a darling,” she said, seizing Lady Markham’s soft hand in both of hers, “with a heart as feeling! But I am not crying for anything in particular, my dear—only out of excitement, and the strangeness of everything. You must not be so sorry for me.”
Here Colonel Lenny interposed, and pointed out to Lady Markham the tea-table which was awaiting her.
“Give her a big cup, my dear lady; that is what makes Katey happy,” he said. “What would she be without her tea? We men take something stronger, I don’t deny it; but we’re not so dependent upon anything. I could live without my smoke, and I could live without my drink—times have been when I’ve lived without eating too; but I can’t fancy my wife without a tea-pot.”
“Not altogether without eating, I hope. Take some cake now,” said Lady Markham, smiling, “to make amends.”
“I will have the cake,—but yes, altogether without eating—for as long as it lasted—that was two days; the time is apt to feel long when you’ve nothing to eat. I’ve always thought the more of breakfast and dinner and all the little bits of ornamental eating and drinking that we make no account of, since then. Oh I’ve told all about it to the boys. I’m getting to an end of my stories,” said the colonel. “Roland begins to know them better than I; he says, ‘That’s not how you told it before.’ That boy is as sharp as a needle; he’s the one you should make a lawyer of, my dear lady. Now Harry’s a born soldier; he’s up to everything that wants doing with the hands. Put him before a lion, and he’ll face it, that little fellow; and he takes in every word you say to him. But Roland by Jove, cross-examines you as if you were in a witness-box: ‘You said so-and-so before,’ or ‘How could you do that when you had just done so-and-so?’ He’s as keen as an east wind.”
“That is a very biting metaphor,” said Lady Markham; but it did not occur to her that the colonel was talking against time to beguile her attention and keep the conversation which was going on at the other side of the room undisturbed. There it was Sir William who was serving Mrs. Lenny with the tea his wife had poured out.
“She knows nothing,” he said, in a low tone. “I did not think it was worth while telling her. For God’s sake do not let her surmise it now.”
“I wouldn’t if I could help it, Will; but the boy—there’s the boy.”
“What boy? You mean Philip’s boy?”
Mrs. Lenny put out her hand and grasped his.
“Haven’t you heard? Philip’s dead, and the property all sold up, and nothing left for one belonging to him. He never learnt, like the rest of us, to scrape and save. It’s all gone—every penny. There was not so much to begin with, when you think upon it; and there he is, without a son.”
“My God!” said Sir William under his breath. He was not a man given to oaths, but he was suddenly overwhelmed by the danger that over-shadowed him which he had not thought of before. The evil he had feared was as nothing in comparison. He grew pale to his very finger-nails. “This is why you have come to me?” he said.
“Nothing but that—do I want to bother you? but he must be thought of, too. Will, the boy must not lose his rights.”
“He must be provided for,” said the baronet, gloomily; “but he has no rights.”
“Will! do you mean to bring his mother out of her grave? No rights! We came in friendship, but we’ll go in anger if there is any meaning in you to disown the boy.”
“I cannot say any more now,” said Sir William, hastily. “I will talk to Lenny to-night.”
“I don’t put my faith in Lenny for that matter. Will, you must satisfy me.”
“I will, I will, Katey! For God’s sake no more.”
Alice had come up to them in her easy grace of youth. She heard, if not the words, yet the tone in which they were said; and her father got up hastily and got behind the stranger to whom he was speaking so seriously, but who smiled upon the girl from her great chair.
“Come and talk to me, my pretty,” Mrs. Lenny said. “Your father and I have been reminding each other of things we had both forgotten, and they’re not such pleasant things as you. Come and cheer us up, my bonnie dear.”
Lady Markham was very well content to see the close conversation that was going on between her husband and this new guest. It took a great burden off her mind. This time she had made no mistake—the claim of the old friendship was real. No suspicion of any kind entered her thoughts. She leaned back in her chair with a grateful sense of relief, and felt glad that she had sent orders by Brown that Mrs. Lenny was to be put into one of the best rooms, thus promoting the colonel too. There remained only one little difficulty: Mrs. Lenny’s pink bonnet was a very fine article indeed, but she could not come to dinner in it. Where was she to find a toilette for the evening, since all her luggage, Lady Markham knew, consisted of a bag which she had left with the lodge-keeper? Lady Markham herself was somewhat particular about dress. She wondered privately what it would be best to do, as she leant back in her chair and listened to the colonel talking of Roland and Harry. She must put on, she concluded, the plainest article in her wardrobe, that Mrs. Lenny might not feel uncomfortable, and she must give Alice a hint to do the same. Thus the alarming sensations aroused by this meeting subsided, to all appearance.
“Yes, you did quite right; they are old friends, very old friends,” Sir William said from his dressing-room, in answer to his wife’s question. “Did I never tell you I spent two years in Barbadoes? Indeed I suppose I had almost forgotten myself. My uncle had left some property there, and not being of much consequence then I was sent out to look after it. It came to nothing, like most West Indian property. The Gavestons were a family of handsome girls. I—saw a good deal of them; most of the young Englishmen who were there frequented their house. Lenny among the rest. I scarcely recollected his name; but Katey Gaveston of course I was bound to know.”
“She implied, I think, that there once had been some—flirtation between you,” said Lady Markham, with a smile.
“Ah!” said Sir William—his voice sounded harsher than usual, though he was painfully civil and ready to explain—“perhaps there might have been—something. It is nearly forty years ago—it is not of much consequence to any one now.”
“No—you don’t think I mind,” she said, this time with a soft laugh. But he did not respond. He had not finished dressing, and he was very particular in his attire. His wife had taken a slight liberty, she felt, in disturbing him. Did she not know that he liked perfect tranquillity in that moment of preparation for dinner? It would not have occurred to him to put on a black neck-tie, or change the usual solemn dignity of his appearance on account of any visitor. Lady Markham was glad that her own very simple dress escaped notice, at least.
The other pair meanwhile were comparing notes in their rooms, where Mrs. Lenny’s preparations for dinner were by no means so simple as Lady Markham had supposed. The bag, on being opened, had proved to contain what she called “an evening body,” much trimmed with lace and ribbons. She regarded this article with great complacency as she pinned the ribbons across her bosom.
“I hope you don’t feel that you’ve any call to be ashamed of your wife, Lenny,” she said. “I hope I’m fit to sit down with my lady, or the Queen herself if she were to think of asking us. There’s the good of a real, excellent black silk, it does for anything; in the morning it’s one dress, in the evening it’s another. My Lady Markham will think I have trunks full when she sees me. She’s a sweet woman; I thought so before, but I think so more than ever now, to see the handsome room she’s put us in. That proves her sense. She can see I’m not one of the common sort. She doesn’t know anything about the connection, and she sha’n’t know it through me, to vex her, the pretty dear. She doesn’t even know he was ever in the island. After all, it’s a long time ago. She shall never hear a word of it through me.”
“That would be all very well,” said the colonel, “if there was only you and I; but you forget there’s another to think of.”
“I don’t forget; but there’s a deal more to think of than I supposed. Why shouldn’t he stay where he is? It’s the life he’s used to. And what would he do here? Money will never be wanting; and a little money would make him a great man where he is. Don’t interrupt me with your reasons, Lenny. He’s my flesh and blood, not yours; and I won’t do it, I haven’t the heart to do it. A lovely woman, and a pretty family as you could see. Don’t you know there’s the heir grown up—Paul they call him? If it had been but a small boy I shouldn’t have minded. And the other, what does he know about it? It can’t hurt him, what he doesn’t know. And he isn’t at an age to change his habits. He’s no lad—he’s a man as old as you or I.”
“Twenty years younger, and more.”
“What’s twenty years?” said Mrs. Lenny, indignantly. “He’s not an old man, if you please, but neither is he young. He’s a man at his best—or his worst, perhaps. We haven’t seen him since he was a boy. All’s fixed and settled about him. And to change his country, and his condition, and his way of living all in a moment!—who could do that? scarcely the best man that ever was. He wouldn’t know how to behave; he wouldn’t understand what was expected of him. He’d be miserable—and so would the others too.”
“I can’t argue with you, Katey,” said her husband; “you’re so used to having your own way. I won’t attempt to argue with you; but I know what’s justice—and justice must surely be the best.”
“Oh, justice!” cried the colonel’s wife, “where do you find it in this world? Is it justice that you’re only lieutenant-colonel of a West India regiment, when you ought to have been a general in the army? Don’t speak to me. I know you better than any one else does, and when I say that’s what you’re fit for you may be sure I’m not flattering. Does a man get flattery from his wife? We may get justice in another world, and I for one hope for it; but not here. And here’s just a case where justice would do more harm than good. It would do harm to both sides, and punish everybody. It would be real injustice and cruelty, and all that’s bad; and would you be the one to force it—and I to recommend it? No, no; I tell you no!”
“I can’t argue with you, Katey,” her husband repeated. “Have it your own way. It’s not my flesh and blood, as you say, but yours. But if it turns out badly, and you repent after——”
“Bless us all,” cried Mrs. Lenny, starting to her feet, “there’s the dinner bell!”
“I would advise you to put your cap on straight,” was all the colonel said.
When this couple entered the dining-room, Mrs. Lenny felt proudly that she had achieved one of the successes of her life. Lady Markham looking up at her as she marched in on her husband’s arm, with flowers rustling on her cap and lace on her shoulders, gave one look of bewildered admiration, Mrs. Lenny thought, then glanced at Alice to communicate her wonder. (“I knew she’d think I’d brought my whole wardrobe,” she said to the colonel after, “and for that matter, that is fit to be seen, so I have.”) The “evening body,” the lace, and the ribbons took Lady Markham altogether by surprise; and it cannot be said that her own simple toilet was appreciated by her visitor. But Mrs. Lenny was very kind after dinner, and explained the simple artifice to her hostess, by way of giving a lesson to one of the best dressed of women.
“You look very nice in your muslin, my dear,” she said, “and so does that pretty darling, that would look well in anything; but when you come to my time of life it makes a difference; and roaming about from place to place how could I have room for muslins? not to say that washing is a ruination. I have one evening body made with good black silk. It costs a little more at the time, but what does that matter? And there you are, both for morning and evening, quite set up.”
“It is a very admirable plan, I am sure,” Lady Markham said, with great seriousness, checking with a look the laugh that was in Alice’s eyes. The children were in the drawing-room, all four of them, very ready to make friends with their beloved colonel’s wife.
“I feel as if I had something to do with them. I feel as if I were their grandmother, though I never had a child of my own,” she said. Thus everything went harmoniously in the drawing-room, though the ladies were all a little curious to know what kept the gentlemen so long over their wine. Sir William’s coffee grew cold; he had never been known to be so late before.