“So let my singing say to you,

‘Our hearts are pilgrims going home;

Love’s kingdom shall most surely come

To all who seek Love’s will to do.’”

“Daydreams.”—A. Gurney.

In the course of the next four months Ralph’s powers of letter-writing improved amazingly, and thanks to those love letters and to the bright merry life in the Hereford household Evereld’s engagement proved a happy one although she and her lover could only spend two Sundays together during the whole time. They knew each other so well already however that there was no risk of any misunderstanding between them, and the waiting-time was too short to be very irksome.

As for Bride O’Ryan she proved herself a friend worth having, threw herself into all Evereld’s interests with delightful eagerness, and teased her just enough to add a little salt to the entertainment.

The Lord Chancellor kept them for some time in suspense, and furnished Bride with endless food for merriment. “He is a very formidable guardian,” she protested, “and when once you get into his clutches it’s very hard indeed to get out again. I wonder you dared to appeal to him.”

“It was the only thing to be done,” said Evereld, “but I do wish he would be quick and give his consent.”

“I have always heard,” said Bride provokingly, “that when once things get into chancery they stay there for years and years. Remember how it was in Bleak House.”

“Well at any rate Mrs. Hereford says the Lord Chancellor is most kindhearted,” said Evereld. “And I know he is fond of reading novels, so he ought to take an interest in the romances of real life. And particularly he ought to like Ralph, for they say he himself had dreadful struggles at the beginning of his career when he was a young barrister on circuit.”

However at length the consent was given and it was arranged that, as Macneillie’s company were not giving any performances in Holy Week, Ralph and Evereld should be married on Palm Sunday.

Evereld like a wise little woman was determined not to waste her substance in the purchase of a trousseau which would be an endless trouble in their wandering life.

“I have plenty of clothes already,” she protested. “All I shall need is a nice warm cloak in which I can walk to the theatre in the evening—a respectable dark sort of garment—and of course my wedding dress; I won’t be a frumpy bride in a travelling costume.”

“No, have a gown like the bride in Blair Leighton’s picture ‘Called to arms,’” said Ralph who had come up from Bristol to spend a Sunday at the Hereford’s directly they had returned to London. “It’s a thousand times prettier than any of the ugly modern fashions.”

Evereld did not know the picture but she promised to do her best to copy it, and with the help of a clever American maid of Mrs. Hereford’s, and Bridget’s ready assistance, and the advice of all the female members of the household, her skilful fingers succeeded in turning out a very good reproduction of the artist’s design at about a fifth of the cost of an ordinary wedding dress.

“Even had I not lost my money,” she said to Bride, “I don’t think I could have borne to spend much just on clothes when so many people are ruined and half starving from the failure of all these companies.”

That was the greatest shadow that was cast over the happiness of the two lovers. The appalling accounts of the trouble caused by Sir Matthew’s wrong doing, the knowledge that many of the victims had literally died from the shock, that many more had lost their reason, that thousands were reduced to dire poverty and distress could not but affect them.

Evereld was touched too by a very kindly but sad letter from Lady Mactavish. It contained one sentence which puzzled her not a little.

“What does Lady Mactavish mean by speaking of the help you gave Sir Matthew?” she enquired, a week before their wedding day, as she and Ralph sat together in the library where in December they had had that first “business interview.”

“What does she say about it?” asked Ralph.

“Here is her letter, it is a message to you;—‘Tell Ralph that I shall never cease to be grateful to him for the help he gave my husband. It saved his life.”

“Well,” said Ralph, “I suppose I am free to speak of it since she mentioned it to you. He came to me at Southampton, indeed I met him on my way back from Whinhaven,” and going through the whole story he made her understand exactly what had taken place. “To this day I don’t know whether I did right. But if the same thing were to happen again I should still probably help him. It was the dread of letting one’s private hatred and resentment bias one against helping a desperate man. As a matter of fact he has by no means escaped punishment by escaping from England. I don’t believe there is a corner of the earth where he will long remain unmolested. He will lead a miserable, hunted life far worse than the life Bruce Wylie leads in gaol, and with nothing really to look forward to. But I think he was in earnest when he said that night he would put an end to himself if they arrested him. And I have never regretted the little I did to shield him from discovery.”

“You wouldn’t have been yourself if you had acted differently,” said Evereld. “But it must have been hard work to decide.”

“I hope I may never again have such a decision to make,” said Ralph. “And all the time there was the maddening remembrance of what he had made you suffer. What a strange, complex character he had: there was a sort of greatness about him all the time. I suppose that was how he deceived people in such an extraordinary way,—he managed to deceive himself. Even now a sort of panic seizes me lest he should somehow interfere between us. I shall never feel at rest about you till we are safely married.”

“Next Sunday,” she whispered. “Where shall you be all this week?”

“At Manchester,” he replied “and as ill luck will have it there is a matinÉe of the new play and an evening performance of ‘Much Ado’ next Saturday. However there will be plenty of time to sleep in the train, and I will meet you somewhere for the early service.”

“Let it be at the Abbey then, that seems specially to belong to us. Bride and I often go there and we can meet you just by the Baptistry at the west end.”

“What time is the wedding to be? I have not even learnt that yet,” he said laughing.

“Mrs. Hereford arranged that it should be at two, that will leave us plenty of time to catch our train, and I have not told anyone where we mean to go. That is our secret.”

“Yes, we will keep that dark,” said Ralph. “Otherwise it may be creeping into the papers. Did you see there was a paragraph about Sir Matthew Mactavish’s late ward in yesterday’s ‘Veracity’?”

“Yes. We couldn’t help laughing over it, but I hope Janet and Minnie won’t see it. Oh, Ralph! what a nightmare the past is to look back on! and how happy and safe I am with you!”.

Now that all was arranged, she seemed perfectly at rest, able even to enjoy all the manifold little plans and the cheerful bustle that heralded the wedding-day. But Ralph down at Manchester spent a feverishly anxious week, and found it difficult indeed to concentrate his mind on his work. Most managers would have lost all patience with him, but Macneillie with the genial breadth of mind and the rare patience that characterised him took it all very quietly, and perhaps in his secret soul rather enjoyed the sight of such unusual and unsullied enthusiasm.

By the time Saturday arrived, Ralph had become very “ill to live with.” He wandered about the house imagining that he was busy packing but contriving to forget half his possessions. He could hardly stir without singing or whistling, and he would have neglected to put in an appearance at “Treasury” if Macneillie himself had not reminded him.

“You are like your namesake Sir Ralph the Rover,” said the manager, who had been answering his correspondence as well as he could to a running accompaniment of Ralph’s voice.

“He felt the cheering power of spring,

It made him whistle, it made him sing—”

“We won’t finish the quotation. But my dear fellow you will be quite played out to-morrow if you go on at this rate.”

“How about the train?” said Ralph. “That’s the thing that bothers me. Shall we ever get through to-night in time to catch the mail?”

“For pity’s sake don’t begin to fuss about that already!” said Macneillie with a comical expression about the corners of his mouth. “It’s a mercy that marrying and giving in marriage are not every-day occurrences or a manager’s life would not be worth living.”

“I’ll promise never to do it again, Governor,” said Ralph with mock penitence.

“Well well,” said Macneillie with a patient shrug of the shoulders, “it all comes in the day’s work. You will understand now how to render Claudio’s words ‘Time goes on crutches till love have all his rites.’”

Ralph thought it extremely obnoxious of the Manchester folk to have petitioned for a performance of “Much ado about Nothing” on this particular day, and though he acted Claudio very well it was always to him an uncongenial character. Macneillie’s Benedick was however considered one of his best parts and though perhaps he enjoyed playing it as little just then as Ralph enjoyed going through the wedding scene on the eve of his own marriage, he was the last man to let his private feelings interfere with his work either as actor or as manager.

The play was carefully rendered, and after a most uncomfortable rush and scramble, Ralph, thanks chiefly to the help of his many friends in the company, found himself at the station just as the Scotch mail steamed up to the platform. Whether Macneillie would arrive in time seemed doubtful, however as the guard’s whistle sounded he emerged from the booking office, and with his usual imperturbably grave face sprang in while the train moved off.

Ivy Grant and Myra Brinton had packed up a most tempting little supper for the two and had taken care to see that it was not forgotten in the hurry of the last moment; and Macneillie, who always retained the power of enjoying a holiday under any circumstances, proved a very genial companion until the advent of another passenger at Crewe, when they relapsed into silence and settled down to sleep.

The night was stormy; torrents of rain washed the windows, and the wind howled and moaned as the train sped on through the darkness. Ralph tried in vain to follow the example of his two companions who, quite oblivious of their surroundings slept composedly through all the din. He was far too much excited to lose consciousness even for a minute. The carriage lamp was shaded and, in the dim light, visions of Evereld kept rising before him.

She was a little girl once more, in a black frock, and with soft, bright hair falling about her shoulders.

“Are you not hungry?” she said to him confidentially as they stood together, strangers and yet somehow already friends, in a drearily grand London drawing-room.

Again she was sitting beside him on the stairs, a fairylike little figure in white, eating ice pudding supplied to them by the goodnatured Geraghty. “I somehow think your father and mine will be talking together to-night?” she said, her sweet blue eyes looking as though they could see right into that spirit world of which she spoke.

On thundered the train, and yet another vision rose before Ralph. He was in Westminster Abbey and there before him he suddenly saw a face which took his heart by storm—the face of his old playfellow grown into gentle gracious womanhood. Then the same face, but with wistful love-lit eyes was lifted up to his outside the house in Queen Anne’s Gate kindling hope in his heart and filling him with a glow of happiness which had carried him through the pain of the parting. These same love-lit eyes and a yet more wonderful response of soul to soul rose in vision before him as he recalled a certain summer afternoon by the sea shore. What did it matter to him that the cold spring wind raged round the carriage piercing every crevice, or that the hail-stones rattled angrily against the glass! He was far away from it all, seeing blue waves and the mellow brown side of a boat and Evereld’s blushing face. The memory of that August day lasted him all the rest of the way to London; then in the chilly dawn they made their way to the nearest hotel, where the order of things was reversed for Ralph at last fell sound asleep on a sofa in the reading room and it was Macneillie who was wakeful and saw visions of the past—visions that he dared not dwell upon because with them there came the maddening recollection that he was close to Christine, that it would be the easiest thing in the world, yet the most fatal, to go that afternoon and call upon her. What was she doing? How did she struggle on in the difficult life on which she had embarked? All the craving to know, all the longing to serve her must be crushed down in his heart. Alone she must dree her weird. Alone he must bear the anguish of her pain and his own bitter loss.

Almost involuntarily, those hard views of God from which years ago he had been rescued by Thomas Erskine’s book “The Spiritual Order,” returned now to him, flooding his mind with rebellious thoughts.

Why did all this misery come to him? Why were the mistakes and sins of others visited upon him? Why were the ways of God so unequal? Other men prospered. Other men had the desire of their hearts granted. Why was he for ever to be thwarted? For years he knew that he had made strenuous efforts to live uprightly, yet there seemed nothing before him but sorrow; while over yonder there was a mere boy of one and twenty about to gain after the briefest of struggles the woman he loved.

The Tempter had however defeated his own object by introducing the thought of Ralph Denmead. Macneillie’s heart was too large for jealousy to harbour in it. Jealousy can only rest long and comfortably in narrow, and cramped hearts where self love and petty absorption in trifles has contracted the space.

As he glanced across the room he saw that the sunlight was streaming full upon the sleeper, he got up and lowered the blind pausing for a minute by the sofa to look at his companion. Ralph was sound asleep, and his untroubled, boyish face was worth looking at if only for its peace. To Macneillie it suggested many thoughts. He remembered his first impression of Ralph, lying in the last stage of misery on the banks of the Leny, and he delighted to think that partly by his aid the lad had battled through his difficulties and had got his foot firmly planted on the ladder of success.

There is nothing so strange in life as the manner in which a kindly deed re-acts in a thousand subtle ways on the doer. And now, as had been the case before, Macneillie was lured back to life by the one he had helped long ago. The hard thoughts passed, he stood there in the bright spring morning strong once more in the belief that the eternal patience of the All-Father schools each son in the best possible way.

Sitting down to the writing-table he filled up a couple of hours with answering the letters of the previous day, then when the time came, set off with Ralph to the Abbey and finding the way to the Baptistry unbarred waited there beside the busts of Maurice and Kingsley, lifted a degree nearer to that Light and Love of which their epitaphs spoke by the struggle he had just passed through.

They were joined here by Mrs. Hereford, Bride, and Evereld, and Macneillie thought he had never seen anything more winning than Evereld’s eager welcome of her lover. He felt very much in harmony with their happiness as they all went together into the choir, and indeed throughout the day the depression which had overwhelmed him since he had received the bad news at Brighton was banished by the unalloyed bliss of the two who were just stepping into their goodly heritage of mutual love and companionship.

It was a thoroughly unconventional wedding with merely the merry Irish family in the house, with Bride and the two little Hereford girls for bridesmaids, and Macneillie and an old school fellow who had returned from Canada just in time to be Ralph’s best man, as the only outsiders.

Of course, when at two o’clock they drove to the church, it was crowded with spectators, for the marriage of the heiress who had been defrauded of her fortune by Sir Matthew Mactavish had found its inevitable way into the hands of the paragraph-mongers. But then, as Macneillie remarked, a marriage ought to take place before a congregation, and it would have been a thousand pities if this particular marriage had been smuggled through in secret at some chilly hour of the morning in an empty church.

“As it was,” he added, “some idle London folk had the chance of singing ‘All people that on earth do dwell’ to the old hundredth, and that’s a chance that doesn’t often come to us in these degenerate days of flabby modern hymns. All the women, moreover, will go away persuaded in their own minds that the conventional wedding dress of modern days is ugly and that the old-world dress of Mrs. Ralph Denmead is far more artistic.”

There was one thing, however, which baffled the Press. It described the service with gusto, and gave the most elaborate details as to the dresses, but it could not discover where the Bride and Bride-groom intended to spend the honeymoon. It was reduced at length to the desperate expedient of a good round lie, and said that they left en route for the continent.

Ralph and Evereld, who had kept this detail entirely to themselves, laughed contentedly as they read this fable in their snug little sitting-room at Stratford-on-Avon.

“We knew a trick worth two of that,” said Ralph. “Fancy rushing off to the Continent for a week! It never seemed to occur to anyone that Stratford was the ideal place for an actor’s honeymoon. We are not going to leave our Mecca entirely to the Yankees.”

Evereld hoped she thought enough of Shakspere as they wandered about the quaint old place and enjoyed the bright spring weather in the lovely country around.

“It was a delightful thought of yours to come here,” she said, “one likes to have a beautiful background for the happiest time of one’s life. But after all, darling, it’s very much in the background, we should really be as happy in the black country.”

“Of course,” said Ralph laughing. “And there’ll be plenty of the black country to come by and bye. You have no idea what dreary towns we have sometimes to go to. Are you not afraid when you look forward to that sort of thing?”

“Not a bit,” she said with a radiant face. “Don’t I know now what the song means when it speaks of ‘The desert being a paradise’? That used to seem such nonsense in the old days! But with you Ralph———”

She was interrupted. They had been walking beside the pollarded willows by the river, Evereld’s hands were full of the early spring flowers, cowslips and primroses and delicate white anemones which they had gathered in the country. She looked up, for a daintily dressed little lady suddenly stood before her, having deserted a camp-stool and easel though she still retained palette and brushes in one hand.

“Miss Ewart!” she exclaimed with a faint touch of American intonation which instantly recalled Evereld to Glion. “I am so delighted to meet you again, and in this spot of all others, this sacred shrine which you lucky English people possess, though we would give millions of dollars if we could but transplant it right over the ocean!”

“How glad I am to see you!” said Evereld warmly. “I shall never forget your kindness last September. May I introduce my husband to you? Mr. Denmead, Miss Upton.”

“Ah,” said Miss Upton shaking hands with him, “I congratulate Mr. Denmead very warmly. And to think that the third volume which you were to have sent me in America should greet me here by the banks of the Avon! It is delightful!”

“You have not gone back as soon as you expected,” said Evereld.

“Well, no. You see the storm at Glion somehow cleared the atmosphere and many things were altered by it sooner or later,” said Miss Upton her bright eyes twinkling with fun. “In fact, thanks to you, another romance began there, and next year when Mr. Lewisham has taken his degree at Oxford, why he’ll be coming over the ocean to New York, and we have an idea of following the good example which you and Mr. Denmead have set us.

“How glad I am!” said Evereld. “That is charming. Some day we all four ought to meet at Glion, for it is hard that I should have any disagreeable associations left with that lovely little place. You ought to see it Ralph.”

“Why not plan a meeting here on one of Shakspere’s birthday’s? We may possibly be here for some of the performances in the Memorial theatre.”

“Yes, that’s a better idea still,” agreed both Evereld and the American girl.

And after walking back to the town together they parted on the best of terms.

That evening a note and a little packet were brought to Evereld. They were from Miss Upton.

“Just one line in great haste,” the letter ran, “we are off to Woodstock to-night, being as they call us true Yankee rushers. You told me you were not going to set up house yet awhile, but wherever you are I know you will drink afternoon tea as you did in Switzerland. Stir your tea with these Stratford Memorial spoons and drink to our next merry meeting in the birthplace of the Swan of Avon. With all good wishes

“Yours cordially,

“Minnie K. Upton.

“I hope my romance will have as satisfactory an end to its third Volume as yours.”

“What a jolly sort of girl she seems,” said Ralph as Evereld read him the note, “but that postscript is all wrong, darling. We are not at the end of things, we are only just at the beginning.”