Young Musgrave by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXX.
 CONCLUSION.

JOHN MUSGRAVE settled down without any commotion into his natural place in his father’s house. The old Squire himself mended from the day when Nello, very timid, but yet brave to repress the signs of his reluctance, was brought into his room. He played with the child as if he had been a child himself, and so grew better day by day, and got out of bed again, and save for a little dragging of one leg as he limped along, brought no external sign of his “stroke” out of his sick-room. But he wrote no more Monographs, studied no more. His life had come back to him as the Syrian lord in the Bible got back his health after his leprosy—“like the flesh of a little child.” The Squire recovered after a while the power of taking his part in a conversation, and looked more venerable than ever with his faded colour and subdued forces. But his real life was all with little Nello, who by and by got quite used to his grandfather, and lorded it over him as children so often do. When the next summer came, they went out together, the Squire generally in a wheeled chair, Nello walking, or riding by his side on the pony his grandpapa had given him. There was no doubt now as to who was heir. When Randolph came to Penninghame, after spending a day and a half in vain researches for Nello, life having become too exciting at that moment at the Castle to leave any one free to send word of the children’s safety—he found all doubt and notion of danger over for John—- and he himself established in his natural place. Whether the Squire had forgotten everything in his illness, or whether he had understood the story which Mary took care to repeat two or three times very distinctly by his bedside, no one knew. But he never objected to John’s presence, made no question about him—accepted him as if he had been always there. Absolutely as if there had been no breach in the household existence at all, the eldest son took his place; and that Nello was the heir was a thing beyond doubt in any reasonable mind. This actual settlement of all difficulties had already come about when Randolph came. His father took no notice of him, and John, who thought it was his brother’s fault that his little son had been so unkindly treated, found it difficult to afford Randolph any welcome. He did not, however, want any welcome in such circumstances. He stayed for a single night, feeling himself coldly looked upon by all. Mr. Pen, who spent half his time at the Castle, more than any one turned a cold shoulder upon his brother clergyman.

“You felt it necessary that the child should go to school quite as much as I did,” Randolph said, on the solitary occasion when the matter was discussed.

“Yes, but not to any school,” the Vicar said. “I would rather—— ” he paused for a sufficiently strong image, but it was hard to find; “I would rather—have got up at six o’clock every day, and sacrificed everything—rather than have exposed Nello to the life he had there;—and you who are a father yourself.”

“Yes; but my boy has neither a girl’s name nor a girl’s want of courage. He is not a baby that would flinch at the first rough word. I did not know the nature of the thing,” said Randolph, with a sneer. “I have no acquaintance with any but straightforward and manly ways.”

The Vicar followed him out in righteous wrath. He produced from his pocket a hideous piece of pink paper.

“Do you know who sent this?” he asked.

Randolph looked at it, taken aback, and tried to bluster forth an expression of wonder—

“I—how should I know?”

“What did you mean by it?” cried the gentle Vicar, in high excitement;—“did you think I did not know my duty? did you think I was a cold-blooded reptile like—like the man that sent that? Do you think it was in me to betray my brother? I know nothing bad enough for him who made such a suggestion. And he nearly gained his point. The devil knows what tools to work with. He works with the weakness of good people as well as with the strength of bad,” cried mild Mr. Pen, inspired for once in his life with righteous indignation. “Judas did it himself at least, bad as he was. He did not whisper treason in a man’s ears nor in a woman’s heart.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Randolph, with guilt in his face.

“Not all, no; fortunately you don’t know, nor any one else, the trouble you might have made. But no less, though it never came to pass, was it that traitor’s fault.”

“When you take to speaking riddles I give it up,” said Randolph, shrugging his shoulders.

But Mr. Pen was so hot in moral force that he was glad to get away. He slept one night under his father’s roof, no one giving him much attention, and then went away, never to return again; but went back to his believing wife, too good a fate, who smoothed him down and healed all his wounds. “My husband is like most people who struggle to do their duty,” she said. “His brother was very ungrateful, though Randolph had done so much for him. And the little boy, who had been dreadfully spoiled, ran away from the school when he had cost my husband so much trouble. And even his sister Mary showed him no kindness; that is the way when a man is so disinterested as Randolph, doing all he can for his own family, for their real good.”

And this, at the end, came to be what Randolph himself thought.

Mrs. Pen, after coming home hysterical from Elfdale, made a clean breast to her husband, and showed him the telegram, and confessed all her apprehensions for him. What could a man do but forgive the folly or even wickedness done for his sweet sake? And Mrs. Pen went through a few dreadful hours, when in the morning John Musgrave came back from his night journey and the warrant was put in force. If they should hang him what would become of her? She always believed afterwards that it was her William’s intervention which had saved John, and she never believed in John’s innocence, let her husband say what he would. For Mrs. Pen said wisely, that wherever there is smoke there must be fire, and it was no use telling her that Lord Stanton had not been killed; for it was in the last edition of the Fellside History, and therefore must be true.

When all was over Sir Henry and Lady Stanton made a formal visit of congratulation at Penninghame. Sir Henry told John that it had been a painful necessity to issue the warrant, but that a man must do his duty, whatever it is; and as, under Providence, this was the means of making everything clear he could not regret that he had done it now. Lady Stanton said nothing, or next to nothing. She talked a little to Mary, making stray little remarks about the children, and drawing Nello to her side. Lilias she was afraid of, with those great eyes. Was that child to be Geoff’s wife? she thought. Ah! how much better, had he been the kind young husband who should have delivered her own Annie or Fanny. This little girl would want nothing of the kind; her father would watch over her, he would let no one meddle with her, not like a poor woman with a hard husband and stepdaughters. She trembled a little when she put her hand into John’s. She looked at him with moisture in her eyes.

“I have always believed in you, always hoped to see you here again,” she said.

“Come, Mary, the carriage is waiting,” said Sir Henry. He said after that this was all that was called for, and here the intercourse between the two houses dropped. Mary could not help “taking an interest” in John Musgrave still, but what did it matter? everybody took an interest in him now.

As for Geoff, he became, as he had a way of doing, the sun of the house at Penninghame; even the old Squire took notice of his kind, cheerful young face. He neglected Elfdale and his young cousins, and even Cousin Mary, whom he loved. But it was not to be supposed that John Musgrave would allow a series of love passages to go on indefinitely for years between his young neighbour and his daughter Lilias, as yet not quite thirteen years old. The young man was sent away after a most affecting parting, not to return for three years. Naturally, Lady Stanton rebelled much, she who had kept her son at home during all his life; but what could she do? Instead of struggling vainly she took the wiser part, and though it was a trial to tear herself from Stanton and all the servants, who were so kind, and the household which went upon wheels, upon velvet, and gave her no trouble, she made up her mind to it, and took her maid and Benson and Mr. Tritton and went “abroad” too. What is it to go abroad when a lady is middle-aged and has a grown-up son and such an establishment?—but she did it: “for I shall not have him very long!” she said, with a sigh.

Lilias was sixteen when Geoff came home. Can any one doubt that the child had grown up with her mind full of the young hero who had acted so great a part in her young life? When the old Squire died and Nello went to school, a very different school from Mr. Swan’s, the idea of “Mr. Geoff” became more and more her companion. It was not love, perhaps, in the ordinary meaning of the word; Lilias did not know what that meant. Half an elder brother, half an enchanted prince, more than half a hero of romance, he wove himself with every story and every poem that was written, to Lilias. He it was, and no Prince Ferdinand, whom Miranda thought so fair. It was he who slew all the dragons and giants, and delivered whole dungeons full of prisoners. Her girlhood was somewhat lonely, chiefly because of this soft mist of semi-betrothal which was about her. Not only was she already a woman, though a child, but a woman separated from others, a bride doubly virginal because he was absent to whom all her thoughts were due. “What if he should forget her?” Mary Musgrave would say, alarmed. She thought it neither safe nor right for the child, who was the beauty and flower of Penninghame, as she herself had been, though in so different a way. Mary now had settled down as the lady of Penninghame, as her brother was its lawful lord. John was not the kind of man to make a second marriage, even if, as his sister sometimes fancied, his first had but little satisfied his heart. But of this he said nothing, thankful to be able at the end to redeem some portion of the life thus swallowed up by one of those terrible, but happily rare, mistakes, which are no less wretched that they are half divine. He had all he wanted in his sister’s faithful companionship and in his children. There is no more attractive household than that in which, after the storms of life, a brother and sister set up peacefully together the old household gods, never dispersed, which were those of their youth. Mary was a little more careful, perhaps, of her niece, a little more afraid of the troubles in her way, than if she had been her daughter. She watched Lilias with great anxiety, and read between the lines of Geoff’s letters with vague scrutiny, looking always for indications of some change.

Lilias was sixteen in the end of October, the third after the previous events recorded here. She had grown to her full height, and her beauty had a dreamy, poetical touch from the circumstances, which greatly changed the natural expression appropriate to the liquid dark eyes and noble features she had from her mother and her mother’s mother. Her eyes were less brilliant than they would have been had they not looked so far away, but they were more sweet. Her brightness altogether was tempered and softened, and kept within that modesty of childhood to which her youthful age really belonged, though nature and life had developed her more than her years. Though she was grown up she kept many of her childish ways, and still sat, as Mary had always done, at the door of the old hall, now wonderfully decorated and restored, but yet the old hall still. The two ladies shared it between them for all their hours of leisure, but Mary had given up her seat at the door to the younger inhabitant, partly because she loved to see Lilias there with the sun upon her, partly because she herself began to feel the cool airs of the north less halcyon than of old. The books that Lilias carried with her were no longer fairy tales, but maturer enchantments of poetry. And there she sat absorbed in verse and lost to all meaner delights, on the eve of her birthday, a soft air ruffling the little curls on her forehead, the sun shining upon her uncovered head. Lilias loved the sun. She was not afraid of it nor her complexion, and the sun of October is not dangerous. She had a hand up to shade the book, which was too dazzling in the light, but nothing to keep the golden light from her. She sat warm and glorified in the long, slanting, dazzling rays.

Mary had heard a horse’s hoofs, and, being a little restless, came forward softly from her seat behind to see who it was; but Lilias, lost in the poetry and the sunshine, heard nothing.

“She wept with pity and delight,

She blush’d with love and virgin shame,

And like the murmur of a dream

I heard her breathe my name.

“Her bosom heaved, she stepp’d aside

As conscious of my look she stept,

Then suddenly, with timorous eye,

She fled to me and wept.”

Mary saw what Lilias did not see, the horseman at the foot of the slope. He looked and smiled, and signed to her over the lovely head in the sunshine. He was brown and ruddy with health and travel, his eyes shining, his breath coming quick. Three years! as long as a lifetime—but it was over. Suddenly, “Lily—my little Lily,” he cried, unable to keep silence more.

She sprang to her feet like a startled deer; the book fell from her hands; her eyes gave a great gleam and flash, and softened in the golden light of sunset and tenderness. The poetry or the life, which was the most sweet? “Yes, Mr. Geoff,” she said.

THE END.