CHAPTER XVIII
THE BOX WITH THE LAUREL-WREATH
SPEID rode home without seeing a step of the way, though he never put his horse out of a walk; he was like a man inheriting a fortune which has vanished before he has had time to do more than sign his name to the document that makes it his. But, in spite of the misery of their parting, he could not and would not realize that it was final. He was hot and tingling with the determination to wear down Lady Eliza’s opposition; for he had decided, with Cecilia’s concurrence or without it, to see her himself, and to do what he could to bring home to her the ruin she was making of two lives.
He could not find any justice in her standpoint; if she had refused to admit him to her house or her acquaintance, there might have been some reason in her act, but she had acknowledged him as a neighbour, invited him to Morphie, and had at times been on the verge of friendliness. She knew that, in spite of any talk that was afloat, he had been well received by the people of the county, for the fact that he had not mixed much with them was due to his own want of inclination for the company offered him. He was quite man of the world enough to see that his presence was more than welcome wherever mothers congregated who had daughters to dispose of, and, on one or two occasions of the sort, he remembered that Lady Eliza had been present, and knew she must have seen it too.
As he had no false pride, he had also no false humility, for the two are so much alike that it is only by the artificial light of special occasions that their difference can be seen. He had believed that Lady Eliza would be glad to give him Cecilia. He knew very well that the girl had no fortune, for it was a truth which the female part of the community were not likely to let a young bachelor of means forget; and he had supposed that a man who could provide for her, without taking her four miles from the gates of Morphie, would have been a desirable suitor in Lady Eliza’s eyes. Her opposition must, as he had been told, be rooted in an unknown obstacle; but, more ruthless than Cecilia, he was not going to let the hidden thing rest. He would drag it to the light, and deal with it as he would deal with anything which stood in his way to her. Few of us are perfect; Gilbert certainly was not, and he did not care what Lady Eliza felt. It was not often that he had set his heart upon a woman, and he had never set his heart and soul upon one before. If he had not been accustomed to turn back when there was no soul in the affair, he was not going to do so now that it was a deeper question.
The curious thing was that, though it went against himself, he admired Cecilia’s attitude enormously; at the same time, the feeling stopped short of imitation. While with her he had been unable to go against her, and the creeping shadow of their imminent parting had wrought a feeling of exaltation in him which prevented him from thinking clearly. But that moment had passed. He understood her feelings, and respected them, but they were not his, and he was going to the root of the matter without scruple.
For all that, it was with a heavy heart that he stood at his own door and saw Macquean, who looked upon every horse as a dangerous wild beast, leading the roan to the stable at the full stretch of his arm. With a heavier one still he sat, when the household had gone to bed, contrasting to-night with yesterday. Last night Whanland had been filled with dreams; to-night it was filled with forebodings. To-morrow he must collect his ideas, and send his urgent request for an interview with Lady Eliza Lamont; and, if she refused to see him, he would put all he meant to ask into writing and despatch the letter by hand to Morphie.
In his writing-table drawer was the chain with the emerald and diamond ends, which he had left there in readiness to give to Cecilia, and he sighed as he took it out, meaning to return it to its iron resting-place in the room by the cellar. What if it should have to rest there for years? He opened the little laurel-wreathed box and drew out the jewel; the drop of green fire lay in his hand like a splash of magic. Though he had no heart for its beauty to-night, all precious gems fascinated Gilbert, this one almost more than any he had ever seen. Emeralds are stones for enchantresses, speaking as they do of velvet, of poison, of serpents, of forests, of things buried in enchanted seas, rising and falling under the green moonlight of dream-countries beyond the bounds of the world. But all he could think of was that he must hide it away in the dark, when it ought to be lying on Cecilia’s bosom.
He replaced it in its box, shutting the lid, and went to the writing-table behind him to close the drawer; as he turned back quickly, his coat-tail swept the whole thing off the polished mahogany, and sent it spinning into the darkness. He saw the lid open as it went and the chain flash into a corner of the room, like a snake with glittering eyes. He sprang after it, and brought it back to the light to find it unhurt, then went to recover the box. This was not easy to do, for the lid had rolled under one piece of furniture and the lower part under another; but, with the help of a stick, he raked both out of the shadows, and carried them, one in either hand, to examine them under the candle. It struck him that, for an object of its size, the lower half was curiously heavy, and he weighed it up and down, considering it. As he did so, it rattled, showing that the fall must have loosened something in its construction. It was a deep box, and its oval shape did not give the idea that it had been originally made to hold the chain he had found in it. It was lined with silk which had faded to a nondescript colour, and he guessed, from the presence of a tiny knob which he could feel under the thin stuff, that it had a false bottom and that the protuberance was the spring which opened it. This had either got out of repair from long disuse, or else its leap across the floor had injured it, for, press as he might, sideways or downwards, he could produce no effect. He turned the box upside down, and the false bottom fell out, broken, upon the table, exposing a miniature which fitted closely into the real one behind it.
It was the carefully-executed likeness of a young man, whose face set some fugitive note of association vibrating in him, and made him pause as he looked, while he mentally reviewed the various ancestors on his walls. The portrait had been taken full face, which prevented the actual outline of the features from being revealed, but it was the expression which puzzled Gilbert by its familiarity. The character of the eyebrows, drooping at the outer corner of the eyes, gave a certain look of petulance that had nothing transient and was evidently natural to the face. He had seen something like it quite lately, though whether on a human countenance or a painted one, he could not tell. The young man’s dress was of a fashion which had long died out. Under the glass was a lock of hair, tied with a twist of gold thread and not unlike his own in colour, and the gold rim which formed the frame was engraved with letters so fine as to be almost illegible. He tried to take out the miniature, but he could not do so, for it was fixed firmly into the bottom of the box, with the evident purpose of making its concealment certain. He drew the light close. The sentence running round the band was ‘Addio, anima mia,’ and, in a circle just below the hair, was engraved in a smaller size these words: ‘To C. L. from R. F., 1765.’
He was face to face with the secret of his own life, and, in an instant, he understood the impression of familiarity produced upon him by the picture, for the ‘R. F.’ told him all that he had not known. There was no drop in his veins of the blood of the race whose name he bore, for he was no Speid. Now all was plain. He was Robert Fullarton’s illegitimate son.
He sat in the sleeping house looking at the little box which had wrecked his hopes more effectually than anything he had experienced that day. Now he understood Lady Eliza; now he realized how justifiable was her opposition. How could he, knowing what he knew, and what no doubt every soul around him knew, stand up before his neighbours and take Cecilia by the hand? how ask her to share the name which everyone could say was not his own? how endure that she should face with him a state of affairs which, for the first time, he clearly understood? He had been morally certain, before, that the bar sinister shadowed him, but, though he could have asked her to live under it with him when its existence was only known to herself and to him, the question being a social, not an ethical one, it would be an impossibility when the whole world was aware of it; when the father who could not acknowledge him was his neighbour. Never should she spend her life in a place where she might be pointed at as the wife of the nameless man. Ah, how well he understood Lady Eliza!
But, thoroughly as he believed himself able to appreciate her motives, he had no idea of the extraordinary mixture of personal feeling in which they were founded, and he credited her with the sole desire to save Cecilia from an intolerable position. Though he never doubted that those among whom he lived were as enlightened as he himself now was, the substance of the posthumous revival of rumours, attributed by many to gossip arising from Mr. Speid’s actions after his wife’s death, was, in reality, the only clue possessed by anyone.
By an act the generosity of which he admired with all his soul, his so-called father had legitimized him as far as lay in his power. No person could bring any proof against him of being other than he appeared, and in the eyes of the law he was as much Speid of Whanland as the man he had succeeded. He admired him all the more when he remembered that it was not an overwhelming affection for himself which had led him to take the step, but pure, abstract justice to a human being, who, through no fault of his own, had come into the world at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, whatever his legal position, he was an interloper, a pretender. He had identified himself with Whanland and loved every stick and stone in it, but he had been masquerading, for all that. What a trick she had played him, that beautiful creature upon the wall!
That the initials painted on the box and engraved on the frame inside were C. L. and not C. S. proved one thing. However guilty she had been, it was no transient influence which had ruined Clementina. Had any chance revealed the miniature’s existence to Mr. Speid, it would have explained the letter he had received from her father after his own refusal by her, and it would have shown him an everyday tragedy upon which he had unwittingly intruded, to his own undoing and to hers. Like many another, she had given her affections to a younger son—for Robert, in inheriting Fullarton, had succeeded a brother—and, her parents being ambitious, the obstacle which has sundered so many since the world began had sundered these two also. Mr. Lauder was a violent and determined man, and his daughter, through fear of him, had kept secret the engagement which she knew must be a forlorn hope so soon as he should discover it. When chance, which played traitor to the couple, brought it to light, the sword fell, and Robert, banished from the presence of the Lauder family, returned to Fullarton and to the society of his devoted elder brother, who asked no more than that the younger, so much cleverer than himself, should share all he had. The miniature, which he had gone to Edinburgh to sit for, and for which he had caused the little box to be contrived, was conveyed to Clementina with much difficulty and some bribery. He had chosen Italian words to surround it, for he had made the ‘grand tour’ with his brother, and had some knowledge of that language. There is a fashion, even in sentiment, and, in those days, Italian was as acceptable a vehicle for it to the polite world as French would be now. She yielded to circumstances which she had no more strength to fight and married Mr. Speid a couple of years later; and she kept the relic locked away among her most cherished treasures. She had not changed, not one whit, and when, at her husband’s desire, she sat for her portrait to David Martin, then in the zenith of his work in the Scottish capital, she held the little box in her hand, telling the painter it was too pretty to go down to oblivion, and must be immortalized also. Martin, vastly admiring his sitter, replied gallantly, and poor Clementina, who never allowed her dangerous treasure to leave her hand, sat in agony till it was painted, and she could return it to the locked drawer in which it was kept. There was a vague hope in her mind that the man she had not ceased to love might, one day, see the portrait and understand the silent message it contained.
Meanwhile, at Fullarton, Robert, who had been absent when Clementina came to Whanland as a bride, was trying to cure his grief, and, superficially, succeeding well enough to make him think himself a sounder man than he was.
He went about among the neighbours far and near, plunged into the field-sports he loved, and, in so doing, saw a great deal of Mr. Lamont, of Morphie, and his sister, a rather peculiar but companionable young woman, whose very absence of feminine charm made him feel an additional freedom in her society.
At this time his elder brother, who had a delicate heart, quitted this world quietly one morning, leaving the household awestruck and Robert half frantic with grief. In this second sorrow he clung more closely to his friends, and was more than ever thrown into the company of Lady Eliza. To her, this period was the halcyon time of her life, and to him, there is no knowing what it might have become if Clementina Speid had not returned from the tour she was making with her husband, to find her old lover installed a few miles from her door. Was ever woman so conspired against by the caprices of Fate?
Afterwards, when her short life ended in that stirring of conscience which opened her lips, she confessed all. She had now lain for years expiating her sin upon the shore by Garviekirk.
And that sin had risen to shadow her son; he remembered how he had been moved to a certain comprehension on first seeing her pictured face, without even knowing the sum of the forces against her. Little had he thought how sorely the price of her misdoing was to fall upon himself. It would be a heavy price, involving more than the loss of Cecilia, for it would involve banishment too. He could not stay at Whanland. In time, possibly, when she had married—he ground his teeth as he told himself this—when she was the wife of some thrice-fortunate man whose name was his own, he might return to the things he loved and finish his life quietly among them. But not this year nor the next, not in five years nor in ten. He had no more heart for pretence. This was not his true place; he should never have come to take up a part which the very gods must have laughed to see him assume. What a dupe, what a fool he had been!
He would not try to see Cecilia again, but he would write to her, and she should know how little he had understood his real position when he had asked for her love—how he had believed himself secure against the stirring-up of a past which no one was sufficiently certain of to bring against him; which was even indefinite to himself. She should hear that he had meant to tell her all he knew, and that he believed in her so firmly as never to doubt what the result would have been. He would bid her good-bye, irrevocably this time; for she should understand that, whatever her own feelings, he would not permit her to share his false position before a world which might try to make her feel it. He thought of the lady in the Leghorn bonnet, who had sat on the red sofa at the Miss Robertsons’ house, and whose chance words had first made him realize the place Cecilia had in his heart. How she and her like would delight to exercise their clacking tongues in wounding her! How they would welcome such an opportunity for the commonplace ill-nature which was as meat and drink to them! But it was an opportunity he would not give them.
So he sat on, determining to sacrifice the greater to the less, and, in the manliness of his soul, preparing to break the heart of the woman he loved—to whose mind the approval or disapproval of many ladies in Leghorn bonnets would be unremarkable, could she but call herself his.
In less than a week he had left the country, and, following an instinct which led him back to the times before he had known Scotland, was on his way to Spain.
END OF BOOK I