  t Transcriber's Note:
A RIGHTED WRONG.
A RIGHTED WRONG.A Novel.
BYEDMUND YATES,AUTHOR OF | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
CONTENTS OF VOL. I. | |
| CHAP. | |
| I. | Homeward bound. |
| II. | Pages from the Past. |
| III. | Discomfiture. |
| IV. | The Ideal and the Real. |
| V. | Chayleigh. |
| VI. | Half-confidences. |
| VII. | The old familiar Faces. |
| VIII. | Mrs. Carteret is congratulated. |
| IX. | What the Woman meant. |
| X. | The Letter from Melbourne. |
| XI. | Fools' Paradise. |
| XII. | Dawning. |
A RIGHTED WRONG.
CHAPTER I.
HOMEWARD BOUND.
"Good-bye, again; good-bye!"
"Good-bye, my dear; perhaps not for ever, though: I may make my way back to the old country once more. You will tell my old friend I kept my word to him:" and then the speaker kissed the woman to whom he addressed these parting words tenderly, went quickly away, and was hidden from her in a moment by all the bewildering confusion of "board ship" at the hour of sailing.
He had not waited for words in reply to his farewell; she could not have spoken them, and he knew it; and while she tried to make out his figure among the groups upon the deck, formed of those who were about to set forth upon the long perilous ocean voyage, and those who had come to bid them good-bye, some with hearts full of agony, a few careless and gay enough, a suffocating silence held her.
But when at length she saw him for one brief moment as he went over the side to the boat waiting to take him to the shore so long familiar to her, but already, under the wonderful action of change, seeming strange and distant, the spell was lifted off her, and a deep gasping sob burst from her lips.
A very little longer, and the boat, with its solitary passenger, was a speck upon the water; and then she bowed her head, unconsciously, and slightly waved her hand, and went below.
There was no one person in all the crowd upon the deck of the good ship Boomerang sufficiently disengaged from his or her own cares to take any notice of the little scene which had just passed--only one amid a number in the great drama which is always being acted, and for which a ship with its full complement of passengers, at the moment of beginning a long voyage, is a capacious and fine theatre. Selfishness and self-engrossment come out strongly in such a scene, and are as excusable under such circumstances as they ever can be.
She was quite alone in the little world of the ship; in the great world of England, to which she was going, she might find herself alone too, for who could say what tidings might await her there? in the inner world of her heart she was still more surely and utterly alone. In the slight shiver, in the forlorn glance around, which had accompanied her gesture of farewell to the man who had escorted her on board, there was something expressive of a suddenly deepened sense of this solitude.
In the cabin, which she shared with her maid only, she found this sole and newly-selected companion making such preparation as she could for the comfort of her mistress. The girl's face was kind and pleasant and handsome; but the sight of it did not lessen the sense of her solitude to Margaret Hungerford, for the kind and handsome face was also strange.
Rose Moore, whom she had engaged to act as her servant during the voyage, was an orphan girl, who wished to return to Ireland to her "friends," as the Irish people, with striking inaccuracy of speech and touching credulity, designate their relatives.
When Margaret Hungerford had lain down upon the little crib, which was to serve her for a bed during a period which would sound appalling in duration in the ears of a world so much accelerated in everything as our world of to-day is, she thought of Rose Moore, and of the difference between her own position and that of the girl who was to be her companion.
"She is going home to friends," she thought, "to a warm welcome, to a kindly fireside, and she is bringing money with her to gild the welcome, to gladden the hearth; while I--I am returning alone--O, how utterly alone!--and destitute--ah, how destitute!--I, to whom not even the past is left; I, who do not possess even the right to grieve; I, to whom life has been only a mistake, only a delusion. I am returning to a home in which I was regarded rather as a trouble than anything else in my childhood, and which I was held to have disgraced in my girlhood. Returning to it, to feel that the judgment I set aside, the wisdom I derided, was right judgment and true wisdom, and that the best I can hope is to keep them from ever finding out how terribly right they were. The only real friend I now possess I am leaving behind me here; and I am glad it is so, because he knows all the truth. Surely no one in the world can be more lonely than I."
Margaret Hungerford lay quietly in her narrow bed, while the ship resounded with all the indescribable and excruciating noises which form a portion of the tortures of a sea-voyage.
She did not suffer from them, nor from the motion. She was tired, too tired in body and mind to care about discomfort, and she did not dislike the sea. So she lay still, while Rose Moore moved about in the little space allotted to the two, and which she regarded as a den rather than a "state-room," looking now and then curiously at her mistress, whom she had not had much previous opportunity of observing.
The girl looked at a face which was not less remarkable for its beauty than for its expression of weariness and sorrow, at a figure not more noticeable for its grace and suppleness than for the languor and listlessness which every movement betrayed.
Margaret Hungerford was tall, but not so tall as to be remarked for her height; and her figure, rounded and lithe, had still much of the slightness of girlhood remaining. Her face was not perfect; the forehead was too high and too heavy for ideal beauty; there was not enough colour in the clear pale cheek; there was not enough richness in the outline of the delicate mouth. Her face was one in which intellect ruled, and thus its beauty served a master which is pitiless in its exactions, and wears out the softness and the fineness and the tinting in a service which is not gentle.
But it was a beautiful face for all that, more than beautiful for those who looked beyond the deep dark colouring of the large gray eyes, deep-set under the finely-marked brows; who looked for the spirit in their light, for the calm and courage which lent them the limpid placid beaming which was their ordinary characteristic. It was not a perfect face; but it had that which very few perfect faces possess--the capacity for expressing feeling, intelligence, the nobler passions, and utter forgetfulness of self.
To look at Margaret Hungerford was to feel that, however faulty her character might be, it at least was noble, and to know that vanity had no share in an organisation which had no place for anything small, whether good or evil. It was a magnanimous resolute face--not strong, in any sense implying roughness, hardness, or self-assertion, but evincing a large capacity of loving and working and suffering.
And she had loved and worked and suffered. The bloom that was wanting to her pure fair cheek, which touched too faintly and grudgingly her small, well-curved, but ascetic lips, had vanished from her heart as well; the slight white fingers, too thin for beauty,--though the hands, clasped over her breast as she lay still with closed eyes, were curiously small and perfectly shaped,--had been unsparingly used in many and various kinds of toil in the new land, which had been wild and rough indeed when she had come there.
The girl looked at her admiringly, and with a sort of pity, for which she had no reason to give to herself except that her mistress was a widow. Explanation enough, she would have said, and naturally; and still, there was something in the face which Rose Moore felt, in her untaught, instinctive, but very acute fashion, had been there longer than three months, which was the exact period since Mrs. Hungerford's husband had died.
Who was she going to? she thought; and did she like going home? and what was she leaving behind? Not her husband's grave, the girl knew, and felt the knowledge as an Irish peasant would feel it. No, she had not even that consolation; for her husband, who had been a member of one of the earliest-formed exploring parties who had undertaken to investigate the capacities of the unknown new continent, had been killed in the Australian bush. It was better not to think what the fate of his remains had been, better that it was not known.
What, then, was this pale young widow, who looked as though her sorrow far antedated her weeds, leaving behind her? Rose Moore was not destined to know. What was she going to? the girl wondered. In the short time she had been with her, Mrs. Hungerford's kindness had been accompanied with strict reserve, and Rose had learned no more than that she was returning, probably, to her father's home; but of even that she was not certain.
Thus the "lone woman" seemed pitiable to the gay and handsome Irish girl, and the thought of it interfered with her visions of "home," and her exultation in the money she had to take thither, and the love she was going to find.
Pitiable indeed she was.
As the long low banks of Port Phillip faded from the sight of the passengers on board the "homeward bound," not a heart among the number but yearned with some keen and strong regret, too keen and strong to be overborne by the gladness of hope and the relief of having really begun the long voyage. Not a heart, not even that of Margaret Hungerford; for she had looked her last on the land where she had left her youth, and all its dreams and hopes; where love had died for her, and truth had failed; where she had been rudely awakened, and had never again found rest.
At such a time, at such a crisis in life, retrospection is inevitable, however undesirable; however painful and vain, it must be submitted to. The mind insists on passing the newly-expired epoch in review; in repeating, in the full and painful candour of its reverie, all the story so far told; in returning to the old illusions, and exposing their baselessness; in summoning up the defeated hopes, which, gauged by the measure of disappointment, appear so unreasonable--weighed in the balance of experience, seem so absurd.
Can I ever have been such a fool as to have believed that life held such possibilities? is the question we all ask at such times; and the self-contempt which inspires it is only as real, and no more, as the pain which no scorn or wonder can decrease.
So, like one performing an enforced task, with what patience it is possible to command, but wearily, and longing for the end, and for release, Margaret Hungerford, during the early days of the long voyage from Australia to England, gazed into her past life as into a mirror, and it gave her back a succession of images, of which the chief were these which follow.
CHAPTER II.
PAGES FROM THE PAST.
The woman who was now returning to her native land after a long and painful exile looked back, in her retrospective fancy, upon a home which had external beauty, calm, and comfort to recommend it. She was the daughter of a gentleman named Carteret, a man of small but independent fortune, and whose tastes, which had been too extensively and exclusively cultivated for the happiness of his son and daughter, led him to prefer a life of quietness and seclusion, in which he devoted himself to study, and to the pursuit of natural history in particular.
Mr. Carteret, who is an old man now, might have been the original of "Sir Thomas the Good," whose wife, "the fair Lady Jane," displayed such becoming resignation on his death. Mr. Carteret, like the worthy knight, "whose breath was short, and whose eyes were dim," would "pore for an hour over a bee or a flower, or the things that come creeping out after a shower:" but he was sadly blind to the subtle processes of the human heart in the development of the human beings under his own roof, which were taking place around him.
He had lost his wife very soon after the birth of his daughter, and when his son was three years old; and within little more than a year, a resolute young woman, who had long made up her mind that a pretty little country place within easy distance of London,--for Mr. Carteret lived in Reigate,--a fair position in the county society, and a comfortable income, were desirable acquisitions, married him.
People said Miss Hartley made all the preliminary arrangements, including even the proposal, herself; and though that statement was probably exaggerated, there can be little doubt that the suggestion, that it would be an advisable and agreeable circumstance that Miss Martley should become Mrs. Carteret, originated with the lady.
She was rather young, and rather pretty; and there really was not so much to be said against the match, except by Mr. Carteret's servants, who naturally did not like it. They liked it still less when the new mistress of the establishment, emulating the proverbial new broom, swept them all away, and replaced them by domestics of her own selection.
The novel state of things was not a happy condition for Mr. Carteret. He was a gentle-natured man, indifferent, rather cold, and indolent, except where his particular tastes were concerned; he pursued his own avocations with activity and energy enough, but his easy-going selfishness rendered him a facile victim to a woman who managed him by the simple and effectual expedient of letting him have his own way undisturbed, in one direction,--that one the most important to him,--and never consulting his opinion or his wishes in any other respect whatever.
Mr. Carteret might spend time and money on "specimens," on books, and on visits to naturalists and museums; he might fill his own rooms with stuffed monkeys and birds, and indulge in the newest form of cases for impaled insects, and even display very ghastly osteological trophies if he pleased; his wife in nowise molested him. But here his power was arrested--here his freedom stopped. Mrs. Carteret ruled in everything else; and he knew it, and he suffered it "for the sake of a quiet life." He had a conviction that if he tried opposition, his life would not be quiet; therefore he never did try opposition.
The new Mrs. Carteret did not actually ill-treat the children of the former Mrs. Carteret; she only neglected them--neglected them so steadily and systematically that never was she betrayed into accidentally taking them, their interests or their pleasure, into consideration in anything she chose to do or to leave undone.
The servants understood quickly and thoroughly that if they meant to retain their places they must keep the children from annoying Mrs. Carteret, from incommoding her by their presence, or intruding their wants upon her. They understood as distinctly, that if this fact were impressed by any misplaced zeal upon the attention of Mr. Carteret, the imprudence would be as readily repaid by dismissal; and as they liked and valued their places,--for Mrs. Carteret, provided her own comfort was secured in every particular, was a liberal and careless mistress,--the imprudent zeal never was manifested.
Thus the two young children grew up, somehow, anyhow, well-fed and well-clothed, by the care of servants; but in every particular, apart from their mere animal wants, utterly neglected. People talked about it, of course; and just at first the neglect of her husband's children threatened to be a little detrimental to the popularity which Mrs. Carteret ardently desired to attain. But she gave pleasant garden-parties, at which neither husband nor children "showed:" she dressed very well; she was very kind to the young ladies of the neighbourhood who were still on their preferment; her well-trained household were discreetly silent; and she had no children of her own.
This last was readily accepted as a very valid excuse; no one thought of the total absence of wifely sympathy and womanly tenderness which the argument conveyed. Mrs. Carteret could not be expected to care about children--no one really did who had not children of their own "to arouse the instinct," as a foolish female, who fancied the phrase sounded philosophical, remarked. So the neighbourhood consented to forget Mr. Carteret's children, and that contemplative gentleman consented to remember them very imperfectly, and things were very comfortable at Chayleigh for some years.
But Haldane and Margaret Carteret grew older with those years; the little children, who had been easily stowed away in a nursery and a playroom,--judiciously distant from drawing-room, boudoir, and study,--were no longer of an age to be so disposed of. The boy must either be sent to school or have a tutor,--he and his sister had passed beyond the rule of the nursery governess,--the girl's education must be attended to.
The latter case was especially disagreeable to Mrs. Carteret. It forced upon her attention the fact that she was no longer in the first bloom of her youth. A rather young and rather pretty stepmother is capable of being made interesting, if the situation be judiciously treated; but Mrs. Carteret had never treated it judiciously, and now it could not avail.
She had nearly exhausted her rÔle of young matronhood at thirty-seven, and Margaret was then twelve years old. True, there would be a revival of its material pleasures, its gaieties and dissipations, when Margaret should be "brought out:" but Mrs. Carteret found feeble consolation in the anticipation of the pleasures and importance of chaperonage. They can only be reflected at the best; and Mrs. Carteret cared little to shine with a borrowed light.
In the mean time, she had no notion of having a gawky girl, as she called Margaret in her thoughts, always about her at home, growing old enough to interfere, and perhaps to attract her father's attention unduly and put absurd ideas into his head. Margaret Carteret was not at all gawky; but even then, at the least beautiful period of life, gave promise of the grace and distinction which, afterwards characterised her.
Mrs. Carteret made up her mind, and then informed her husband of the resolution she had taken, and the arrangements she had made. He acquiesced, as he always did; and when Margaret, startled, confused, not knowing whether to be frightened at or pleased with the novelty which the prospect offered, asked him if it was really true that she was going to school at Paris, and was not to return for a whole year, he said placidly,
"Certainly, my dear. Mrs. Carteret has arranged it all; and I have told her to be sure and ask the school people to take you to the Jardin des Plantes."
Then Mr. Carteret, who never perceived that his daughter was no longer a baby, sent her away with a pat on the head, and turned his attention to investigating the structure of a "trap-door spider's abode," which had reached him the day before, having been sent by a friend and fellow-naturalist from Corfu.
The education of Haldane Carteret had been differently provided for. It chanced that the one human being besides herself for whom Mrs. Carteret entertained a sentiment of affection was her cousin, James Dugdale, a young man who had no chance of success in any active career in life, being deformed and in delicate health--anything but a desirable tutor for a delicate retiring boy, like Haldane Carteret, people said--a boy who needed encouragement and companionship to rouse him up and make him more like other boys. But Mrs. Carteret evinced her usual indifference to the opinion of "people" on this occasion. She chose to provide for her cousin a mode of life suitable to his mental and physical constitution.
James Dugdale came to live at Chayleigh. The deformed young man had much of the talent, and all the unamiability, which so frequently accompany bodily malformation, and he inspired Margaret Carteret with intense dislike and repulsion--with admiration and some respect, too, child as she was; for she soon recognised his talent, and succumbed to his influence. James Dugdale taught Margaret as much as he taught her brother; he implanted in her the tastes which she afterwards cultivated so assiduously; but the boy learned to love him, while the girl never faltered in her dislike. When she found her lessons easily understood and soon learned at school, she knew that she had to thank her stepmother's cousin--her brother's tutor--for the aid which had rendered them light to her; but she never could bring herself to thank him in thought or word. The girl's heart was almost void of love and gratitude at this time of her life. She hardly could be said to love her father; her stepmother she neither loved, hated, nor feared; for her brother alone were all her kindly feelings hoarded up. She loved him, indeed; and, next to that love, the strongest sentiment in her heart was dislike of James Dugdale.
Time passed on, and Margaret grew up handsome, with a strongly intellectual stamp upon her face, and, in her character, self-will and impulsiveness prevailing. She liked the Parisian school--for she ruled her companions, some by love, others by fear and the power of party--and she cared little for her home, where she could not rule any one.
Her father was not worth governing; her stepmother she treated with a studious and settled indifference, forming her manner on the model of that of Mrs. Carteret, but never attempting to gain any influence over that lady, who was, however, not without a misgiving at times that when Margaret should come home "for good" she might find it rather difficult to "hold her own." Holding her own, in Mrs. Carteret's case, rather implied holding every one else's, and that privilege she felt to be in danger. It was, therefore, with but a passing reflection on the fatal obstacle which such an occurrence must offer to her maintenance of the "young married woman's" position in society, that Mrs. Carteret, when Margaret was fifteen, began to speculate upon the chances of getting Margaret "off her hands," when she should have finally left school, by an opportune marriage.
A year later, and, much to the surprise of his father, and indeed of every one who knew him except James Dugdale, Haldane Carteret proclaimed his wish and intention of entering the army. His father did not oppose; his stepmother and his tutor supported him in his inclination; the interest of a distant relative of his mother's was procured; and thus it chanced that, when Margaret came home "for good," at a little more than sixteen years old, she found her brother in all the boyish pride and exultation of his commission and his uniform.
Then Margaret's fate was not long in coming. The first time her brother came home, and while she had as yet seen little of the society in which her stepmother moved, he brought a brother officer with him, a handsome young man, named Godfrey Hungerford, with whom he had contracted a friendship--the more enthusiastic because it was the first the lad had ever experienced.
And now active antagonism arose between Margaret Carteret and James Dugdale. The girl fell in love with the handsome young officer, whose bold and adventurous spirit pleased her; whose manifest admiration had a pardonable fascination for her; who raised even her father to animation; and for whom Mrs. Carteret thought it worth while to put forth the freshest of her somewhat faded graces.
Haldane paraded and boasted of his friend according to the foolish hearty fashion of his time of life, and was delighted that his sister felt with him in this too.
But the ex-tutor, who, it appeared, was to remain a fixture at Chayleigh, conceived a profound distrust and dislike of the brilliant young man, whom he quietly observed from his obscure corner of the house--and of life indeed--and who had no notion of the scrutiny he was undergoing.
Was James Dugdale's penetration quickened by the hardly-veiled insolence of Godfrey Hungerford's manner to him--insolence which sometimes took the form of complete unconsciousness, and at others of an elaborate compassionate politeness? It may have been so; at any rate, he made his observations closely, and, when the time came, he expressed their result freely.
The time came when Godfrey Hungerford asked Margaret to become his wife; and then James Dugdale, for the only time during his long residence in Mr. Carteret's house, spoke to that gentleman in private and in confidence.
"Insist on time, at least," he urged upon Margaret's father; "think how young she is; think how little you know of this man. You have no guarantee for his character but the praise of an enthusiastic boy. For the girl's sake, insist on time; do not consent to less than a two years' engagement; and then rouse yourself and go to work as a man ought on whom such a responsibility rests, and find out all about this man before you suffer him to take your daughter away from her home--a girl, ignorant of the world and of life, in love with her own fancy. I know Margaret's real nature better than you do, and I know she is incapable of caring for this man if she knew him as he really is. It is a delusion; if you can do no more, you can at least secure her time to find it out."
"Find what out?" asked Mr. Carteret, fretfully; "what do you know about Hungerford?--how have you found out anything?"
"I know nothing; I have not found out anything," said James Dugdale. "I wish I had, then my interference might avail, even with Margaret herself; but I have only my conviction to go upon, that this man is not fit to be trusted with a woman's happiness; that Margaret is not really attached to him; and, in addition, the suggestion of common sense, that she is much too young to be permitted to settle her own fate irrevocably."
The latter argument seemed to have some weight with Mr. Carteret, and James Dugdale saw his advantage.
"Do you think," he said, "if her mother were living, she would permit Margaret to marry at her present age? Do you think, if you knew you would have to account to her mother for your care of her, you would listen to such a thing?"
This reference to his dead wife was not pleasant to Mr. Carteret. He was growing old, and he had begun of late to think life, even when surrounded by specimens, and enlivened by numerous publications concerning the animal creation, rather a mistake. So he assented, hurriedly, to James Dugdale's arguments, and the interview concluded by his promising to prevent Margaret's marriage taking place for two years, when she would be nineteen.
But Mr. Carteret and James Dugdale both knew that the real decision of that matter rested not with them, but with Mrs. Carteret, and that, if she decreed that Margaret should be married next week, married next week she inevitably would be. So the ex-tutor addressed himself to his cousin, with whom he adopted a different line of argument.
"I know you don't care about Margaret," he said; "but I do; and I know you admire Lieutenant Godfrey Hungerford, which I do not; but you care what people say of you, Sibylla, as much as any one, I know; and you will get unpleasantly talked about if the girl is allowed to marry, so young, a man whom you know little or nothing about, and who is a scoundrel, if ever there was one, or I am more mistaken than I generally am. Take care, Sibylla, your husband is notoriously under your guidance, and you will have to bear the blame if this marriage takes place too soon; it is a serious thing, and you have never been a fond stepmother, you know."
Mrs. Carteret loved her cousin, and feared him; she also had a great respect for his judgment; and he had gone to work with her in the right way. The result was satisfactory to the ex-tutor, who took himself to task concerning his own motives, but found no room for self-condemnation.
"If I could suppose for a moment," he thought, "that I am insincere in this thing--that I am actuated by any selfish feeling or hope regarding Margaret--I should hesitate; but I know I am not: my heart is pure of such self-deception; my brain has no such cobwebs of folly in it. Separated from him finally,--if I can contrive to part them,--held back from her fate for a while, by my means, at all events she will only dislike me the more. And my conviction respecting this man,--is that prejudice?--is that an unjust dislike?--is it pique, because he has good looks, and grace, and good manners, and I have none of these? Is it spite, because he has been insolent to me when he dared, and, in a covert way, more insolent still, when these simple people did not understand him? No; I can answer to myself for single-mindedness in this matter. I might not have seen so plainly had not Margaret's happiness been at stake. But I do see; I do not only fancy. I do judge; I do not only imagine."
So James Dugdale carried his point. Margaret resented his interference bitterly; she learned that his arguments had induced her stepmother to take the view to which her father had acceded; and she raged against him and denounced him as insolent, presuming, intolerable.
But she liked the idea of the long engagement, too. She was romantic and imaginative, and her bright pure young heart--all given up to what was in reality a creation of her fancy, but in which she saw the dazzling realisation of her girlish dreams--was satisfied with the assurance of loving and being loved.
The presence of her lover was happiness, and his absence was hardly sorrow. Had she not his letters? Were there ever such letters? she thought; and while she exulted in all the delicious exclusiveness of the possession of such treasures, she almost longed that the world might know how transcendent a genius was this gallant soldier whom she loved.
She was glad that Godfrey felt so much disappointment at the delay; and the impertinence of any one who interfered to prevent the fulfilment of any wish of his, no words could adequately describe. But, for all that, Margaret was extremely happy, though she did hate James Dugdale.
Her lover encouraged her in this feeling, and when he and her brother had rejoined their regiment she restricted her intercourse with the officious ex-tutor to the barest acknowledgment of his presence. James Dugdale took this mode of procedure calmly, and applied himself to the task of finding out all that was to be ascertained concerning the circumstances, character, and antecedents of Lieutenant Godfrey Hungerford.
CHAPTER III.
DISCOMFITURE.
When the engagement between Godfrey Hungerford and Margaret Carteret had lasted six months, during which time James Dugdale had contrived to learn several facts to that gentleman's disadvantage, Haldane Carteret made his appearance unexpectedly at Chayleigh. Margaret's first look at her brother revealed to her quick instinctive fears that his errand had in it something unfriendly to her love. With all the selfishness which comes of an engrossing feeling, she was insensible to any other impulse of alarm.
Margaret was right; her brother was come to unsay all he had said of Godfrey Hungerford--to tell his father that he had been deceived in his friend--to try to undo the work he had helped to do.
"He drinks and gambles, Margaret; for God's sake, don't marry a man with such vices," said Haldane eagerly to his sister.
Her father roused himself, and warned her too; but the girl was obdurate. She only knew of such things by name; they had no meaning to her as terrible realities of life; and then she had her lover's letters--the priceless, charming, incomparable letters--and they told her that her brother had come round to Dugdale's way of thinking, and had turned against him because he had interfered to keep him out of some boyish scrapes.
The strongest and most spurious of all arguments too, used to a loving foolish girl, were not wanting. If even he were guilty of some follies, granting that he was not a perfect being, could he fail to become so under her influence--could he resist such perfection as hers, become the light and guidance of his home? It is needless to repeat the flimsy foolish strain of the arguments which bewildered and beguiled the girl. She met her father and her brother with vehement opposition, and replied to everything they urged, that she alone knew, she only understood Godfrey, and she was not going to forsake him to serve the turn of interested calumniators.
This taunt, aimed at the brother, did not hit the mark. He had not the least notion to what it referred. The young man spoke frankly and gently to the infatuated girl, lamented his own easy credulity which had at first betrayed his judgment, and finally left the matter in his father's hands, only entreating him to be firm, and to take into consideration, in addition to what he had told him, certain circumstances which had come to the knowledge of James Dugdale. For himself, the pain of enforced association with his quondam friend would soon be at an end. The brigade of Royal Artillery to which he belonged was then under orders for Canada, and this was to be his farewell visit to his home.
The brother and sister parted, in sorrow on Haldane's part--in silent and sullen estrangement on Margaret's. The girl's heart was full of angry and bitter revolt, and of the keen indignation which inexperienced youth feels against those who strive to serve it against its will. They were trying to protect her from herself--to save her from the worst of evils--the most cruel of destinies; and she treated them as if they had been, as indeed she believed them to be, her worst enemies.
But they were not to succeed--Margaret was not to be saved. The girl's life at home--though no one molested her--though her father, if the matter were not pressed upon his attention, took no notice--though her stepmother was, as usual, coldly but civilly negligent of her--though James Dugdale maintained his inoffensive reserve--became intolerable to her; intolerable through its loneliness--intolerable by reason of its cross-purposes. The one thought, the one image, the one hope for which she lived was not only unshared, but condemned by those with whom she lived. The one name precious to her heart, delightful to her ears, was never spoken within her hearing--the little world she lived in ignored him who was all the world to her.
When Haldane Carteret had been three months in Canada, Godfrey Hungerford was dismissed the service for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman; and in another month, Margaret Carteret had clandestinely left her home, joined her lover, and become his wife.
The shock to her father was very severe. It was the first misfortune of his life, including his first wife's death, to which "specimens" offered no alleviation. It was not an evil which brought finality with it; and Mr. Carteret therefore found it difficult to bear. If Margaret had died, her father would have grieved for her, no doubt, but there would have been an end of it; now, though no one could foresee or foretell the end, it was easy to prognosticate evil as the result, and impossible to hope for good.
Like all men of his sort, Mr. Carteret had a great horror of the openly violent and aggressive vices of men. He was incapable of understanding the amount of suffering to be inflicted upon women by the supineness, selfishness, indolence, imprudence, or eccentricity of their husbands and fathers; but the mere idea of a woman being in the power of a man who actually got drunk, lost or won money at cards or dice, used bad language, or had any stain of dishonesty on his name, was terrible to his harmless, if valueless, nature.
Mrs. Carteret was extremely indifferent. Of course it was an unpleasant occurrence, and people would talk unpleasantly about it; but she had never pretended to care much for, or interfere with Miss Carteret,--and no one could blame her.
Of all those who had shared her life, who had seen her grow from childhood to girlhood, James Dugdale was the only one who had made Margaret Carteret's character a subject of close and loving study--the only one who understood its strength and its weakness, its forcible points of contrast, its lurking dangers, its unseen resources. He knew her intellectual qualities, he knew her imaginativeness, and understood the danger which lurked in it for her--a danger which had already taken so delusive and fatal a form. With all the prescience of a calm and unselfish affection, he feared for the girl's future, and grieved as only mature wisdom and disinterested love can grieve over the follies and illusions, the inevitable suffering and disenchantment, of youth and wilfulness.
"She has a dreadful life before her," said her misjudged and despised friend to himself, as he left Margaret's father, after the two had discussed the letter in which the misguided girl had informed him of her marriage; "a dreadful life, I fear, and believe; but, if she lives through it, and over it, and takes it rightly, she may be a noble and strong woman yet, though never a happy one."
For some time Margaret Hungerford's communications with her family were brief and infrequent. She said nothing in her letters of happiness or the reverse, and she made no request to be permitted to revisit her former home. She never wrote to or heard from her brother.
After a while a formal application was made to Mr. Carteret by Mr. Hungerford for pecuniary assistance, as he had determined to try his fortune in Australia. To this Mr. Carteret replied that he would give Margaret half the small fortune which was to have been hers on his death, but required that it should be distinctly understood that she had nothing more to expect from him.
Mr. Carteret went up to London and drew the sum he had named, 500l., out of the funds, and availed himself of that opportunity to make his will, by which he bequeathed to his son all his property, a life-interest in the greater part of which had been secured to his wife by settlement. This done, and provided with the money he had named, he went to see Margaret and her husband. The meeting was brief and final. Mr. Carteret returned on the following day to Chayleigh.
Godfrey Hungerford and his wife were to sail for Sydney in a fortnight, he told Mrs. Carteret, in reply to her polite but quite uninterested inquiries. Nor was he much more communicative to James Dugdale.
"How does she look?" he asked.
The father made no reply, but shook his head, and moved his hands nervously among the papers on the table before him.
"Already!" said James Dugdale, when he had softly left the room, and then he went away and shut himself up alone.
CHAPTER IV.
THE IDEAL AND THE REAL.
If it were possible to linger over the story of Margaret Hungerford's life--if other and later interests did not peremptorily claim attention--how much might be said concerning it? On the surface, it had many features in common with other lives; and the destruction of a fancy, the awaking to a truth, terrible and not to be eluded, is the least rare of mental processes. But the individual history of every mind, of every heart, has features unlike those of all others--features worthy, in even the humblest and simplest lives, of close scanning and of faithful reproduction. Margaret Hungerford was not an ordinary person; she had strongly-pronounced intellectual and moral characteristics, and her capacity, whether for good or evil time and her destiny alone could tell, was great.
The very intensity of her nature, which had made it easy for her to be deceived, easy for her to build a fair fabric of hope and love on no sounder foundation than her fancy, made it inevitable that the truth should come with terrible force to her, and be understood in its fullest extent and in its darkest meaning--that most full of terror and despair.
The external circumstances of her life subsequent to her marriage did not affect Margaret Hungerford so much as might have been anticipated, in consideration of her delicate nurture, her previous life of seclusion, and her habitual refinement. She was destined to encounter many vicissitudes, to endure poverty, hardship, uncertainty, solitude of the absolute kind, and of that kind which is still more unbearable--enforced companionship with the mean and base, not in position merely, but in soul.
She had to endure many actual privations--to do many things, to witness many scenes which, if they had been unfolded to her in the home of her girlhood, uncongenial as it had been, as probabilities lurking in the plan of the fixture, she would have merely regarded with unalarmed incredulity, would have put aside as things which never could have any existence.
But these things, when they came, she bore well--bore them with strength and patience, with quiet resolution and almost indifference, which, had there been any one to contemplate the girl's life, and study her character at that time, would have revealed the truth that worse things than privation and hardship had come to her, and had rendered them indifferent to her.
Worse things had come. Knowledge and experience, which had outraged her pride and tortured her love, crushed her faith, scattered her hopes, and left her life a desert waste, whence the flowers of youth and trust had been uprooted, and which lay bare to be trampled under foot of invading foes.
Margaret's delusion had lasted so short a time after her marriage that the first feeling her discovery of the utter worthlessness of the man into whose hands she had committed her fate produced in her mind was dread and distrust of herself.
Was this fading away of love, this dying out of all respect, of all enthusiasm, this dreary hopelessness and fast coming disbelief in good, was all this inconstancy on her part? Was she false to her own feelings, or had she mistaken them? Was she light and fickle, as men were said to be?
But this dread soon subsided: it could not long disturb Margaret's clear good sense. The fault was not hers; she was not inconstant, though she no longer loved Godfrey Hungerford. The truth was, she had never known him; there was no such person as her fancy had created and called by his name.
She had believed herself to be doing a fine heroic thing when she married a disgraced man, a man unjustly judged of his fellows, one against whom the world had set itself--why, she did not quite know, but probably from envy--and who therefore needed her love and fidelity more than a prosperous man could need them. It was a foolish, girlish, not unnatural delusive notion of grandeur and self-sacrifice, and, added to the fascination exerted over her by Godfrey Hungerford's good looks and artistic love-making, it had hurried Margaret to her doom.
The girl married, as she believed, a hero, with a few follies perhaps, all to be forsworn and forsaken when she should be his, to guide and inspire every moment of his life, and whose unjust penalties her love was to render harmless. What did she not believe him to be! Brave, true, generous, devoted, clever, energetic, unworldly, poetical, high-minded, and pure--the ideal man who was to disprove those horrid sayings of disappointed persons, that the lover and the husband are very different beings, and that "man's love is of man's life a thing apart."
They would prove it to be their "whole existence." Could any sacrifice be too great to make for such a prize as this? No. The sacrifice was made by him. Who would not have loved and married Godfrey Hungerford? She did not believe that any one could be so bad as to believe the accusation brought against him by a low mean clique, a set of men who could not bear to know that he was cleverer at card-playing than they were--just as he was cleverer at anything else--and who did not know how to lose their money like gentlemen. Of course, as he never could be secured against meeting persons of the sort, it was much better that Godfrey should make up his mind, as he had done, never to touch a card after their marriage.
And then how great was his love for her! How delightful was the scheme of the future, according to his casting of it! So Margaret dreamed her dream, and when the waking came she blamed herself that she could dream it no longer, and could not be lulled to sleep again.
Godfrey Hungerford has no place in this story, and there is no need to enter into details of the life he led, and condemned his wife to. He proved the exact reverse of all she had believed him. Base, mean, cowardly, in the sense of the cowardice which makes a man systematically cruel to every creature, human and brute, within his power, though ready to face danger for bravado's, and exertion for boasting's sake, or either for that of money--a liar, a gambler, and a profligate.
He laughed at her credulity when she quoted his promises to her, and ridiculed her amazement and disgust as ignorance of life, girlish folly, and squeamishness. In a fitful, "worthless" sort of way, he liked and admired her to the end; but the truthfulness that was in her prevented Margaret from taking advantage of this contemptible remnant of feeling to obtain easier terms of life. She had ceased to love him, and she never disguised the fact--she let him see it; when he questioned her, in a moment of maudlin sentiment, she told him so quite plainly; and her tyrant made the truthfulness which could not stoop to simulation a fresh cause of complaint against her.
What Margaret suffered, no words, not even her own, could tell; but the material troubles, the grinding anxieties of her life, deadened her sense of grief after a time. They were always poor. Money melted in the hands of her worthless, selfish husband. Sometimes he made a little, in some of the numerous ways in which money was to be made in colonial life, sometimes he was quite unemployed. He was always dissolute and a spendthrift.
It was hard training for Margaret, severe teaching, and not more full of actual pain, privation, and toil than of bitter humiliation. They moved about from place to place, for at each Godfrey Hungerford became known and shunned.
Villany and vice were loud and rampant indeed in the New World then, as now; but he was not so clever as the superior villains, and not so low, not so irretrievably ruffianly, as the inferior ruffians, and it fell out, somehow, that he did not find any permanent place, or take any specific rank, among them. Of necessity, suffering, both moral and material, was his wife's lot, and it was wonderful that such suffering did not degrade, that it only hardened her. It certainly did harden her, making her cold, indifferent, and difficult to be touched by, or convinced of, good, or truth, or honesty.
Of necessity, also, her life had been devoid of companionship. Too proud to tell her sorrows, and unable to endure the associations into which her husband's evil life would have led her had she been driven by loneliness to relax in her resolute isolation, she had neither sympathy nor pity in her wretchedness. But at length, and when things were going very hard and ill with her, she found a friend.
Time, suffering, and disenchantment had taught Margaret Hungerford many hard and heavy, but salutary, lessons, before the days came which brought her fate this alleviation; and she did not regret it, because it had been procured for her by the care and solicitude of James Dugdale.
Her love had died--more than died; for there is reverence and pious grief, with sweetness in its agony, and cherished recollections, to modify death and make it merciful--it had perished. So had her dislike of James Dugdale. He had been right, and she had been wrong; and though he could never be her friend, because she never could admit to him the one fact or the other, she thought gently and regretfully of him, when she thought of her old home and of the past at all, which was not often, for the present absorbed her usually in its misery and its toil.
When, in the course of their wanderings, the Hungerfords went to the then infant town, now the prosperous city, of Melbourne, Margaret sent home one of her infrequent letters to her father. Thus James Dugdale learned that the woman whose fate he had so unerringly foreseen--the woman he loved with calm, disinterested, clear-sighted affection--was at length within reach of his influence, of his indirect help.
An old friend, schoolfellow, and college chum--one Hayes Meredith, a younger man than James Dugdale by a few years--had been among the first of those tempted from the life of monotonous toil in England by the vast and exciting prospects which the young colony offered to energy, industry, ability, and courage.
Hayes Meredith possessed all these, and some capital too. He had settled at Port Phillip, and was a thriving and respected member of the motley community when Godfrey and Margaret Hungerford arrived to swell the tide of adventure and misery. To him James Dugdale wrote, on behalf of the woman whose need he divined, whose unhappiness he felt, with the instinct of sympathy.
Hayes Meredith responded nobly to his old friend's appeal. He befriended Margaret steadily, with and without her husband's knowledge; he won her affection, conquered her reserve, softened her pride, and, though her fate was beyond amelioration by human aid, he succeeded in making her actual, everyday life more endurable.
When Margaret was sought out by Hayes Meredith, release was drawing near, release from the tremendous evil of her marriage. Godfrey Hungerford, by this time utterly incapable of any steady pursuit, and seized with one of the reckless, restless fits which were becoming more and more frequent with him, joined a party of explorers bound for the unknown interior of the continent, and, regardless of Margaret's fears and necessities, left her alone in the town.
For months she heard nothing of him, or the fate of the expedition; months during which she was kept from destitution only by Hayes Meredith's generous and unfailing aid.
At length news came; a few stragglers from the party of explorers returned. Godfrey Hungerford was not among them; and the remnant related that he had been murdered, with two others, by a tribe of aborigines.
Hayes Meredith told Margaret the truth; he sustained and comforted her in the early days of her horror and grief; he counselled her return to England, and provided money for her voyage. He secured her cabin and the services of Rose Moore. It was he who bade her farewell upon the deck of the Boomerang--he of whom she thought as her only friend.
Margaret had little power of feeling, love, or gratitude in her now, as she believed, and that little was exerted for the alert, kindly-voiced, gray-haired, keen-eyed man who left her with a heavy heart, and said to himself, as the boat shot away from the ship's side, "Poor girl! she has had hard lines of it hitherto. I wonder what is before her in England!"
CHAPTER V.
CHAYLEIGH.
A bright soft day in the autumn--a day which appealed to all who dwelt in houses to come forth and taste the last lingering flavour of the summer in the sweet air--a day so still and peaceful that the sudden rustle of the leaves, as a few of their number (ennuyÉs leaves, tired of life sooner than their fellows) detached themselves, and came, gently wafted by the imperceptible air, to the ground, made one look round, as though at an intrusion upon its perfect repose--a day which appealed to memory, and said, "Am I not like some other day in your life, on which you have pondered many things in your heart, and looked far back into the past without the agony of regret, and on into the future undisturbed by dread--a restful day, when life has seemed not bad to have, but very, very good to leave?"--a day on which any settled, stern, inexorable occupation seemed harder, more unbearable than usual, even to the least reasonable and most moderate idler--a day on which the house which Margaret Carteret had forsaken looked particularly beautiful, tranquil, and inviting.
The orderliness of Chayleigh was delightful; it was not formal, not oppressive; it was eminently tasteful. Inside the house and outside it order reigned, without tyrannising. The lawn was always swept with extreme nicety, and the flower-beds, though not pruned down to a tantalising precision, bore evident signs of artistic care.
The house stood almost in the centre of the small grounds, and long wide French windows in front, and bow windows in the rear, opened on smooth grassy terraces, which fell away by gentle inclines towards the flower-garden in front, and at the back towards a pleasaunce, with high prim alleys, and bosquets which in the pride of summer were thickset with roses; and so, to some clumps of noble forest-trees, behind which, and hidden, was the neat wire-fence which bounded the small demesne.
On this soft autumnal day, the three bow windows which opened on the terrace at the back of the house were open, and every now and then the white curtains faintly fluttered, and the leaves of the creepers which luxuriously festooned the window-frames gently rustled. Far above the height of the central window, an aspiring passion-flower, rich in the stiff, majestic, symbolical blossom, stretched its branches, until they wreathed the window just above the centre bow, and aided an impertinent rose to look into the room. They had looked in ever since the one had blossom and the other leaves, but they had seen nothing there that lived or moved.
The middle room, above the suite of drawing-rooms--whose rosewood furniture, whose Ambusson carpets, and whose sparkling girandoles formed the chief delight and pride of Mrs. Carteret's not particularly capacious heart--had not been used since Margaret Carteret had left her home to follow the fortunes of her lover.
That such was the case was not due to any sentiment on Mr. Carteret's part, or any spite on that of his wife. If the former had happened to want additional space for any of his drying or "curing" processes, he would have invaded his daughter's forsaken room without the slightest hesitation, and, indeed, without recalling the circumstance of her former occupation, of his own accord; while it was quite safe from interference on the part of the latter for another and a different reason.
Mrs. Carteret's rooms were perfectly comfortable and sufficient, and she never had "staying company." She knew better. She was quite sufficiently hospitable without inflicting that trouble on herself, and she had no notion of it. Indeed, she never had any notion of doing anything which she did not thoroughly like, or of putting up with any kind of inconvenience for a moment if it were possible to free herself from it; and she had generally found it very possible. Life had rolled along wonderfully smoothly, on the whole, for Mrs. Carteret. She possessed one advantage which does not always fall to the lot of supremely selfish and heartless people--she had an easy temper.
It is refreshing sometimes to observe how much utterly selfish people, whose sole object in life is to secure pleasure and to banish pain, suffer by the infliction upon themselves of their own temper. But Mrs. Carteret was bucklered against fate, even on that side. She took excellent and successful care that no one else should annoy her, and she never annoyed herself. It would have afforded a philosophic observer, indeed, some congenial occupation of mind to divine from what possible quarter, save that of severe bodily pain, discomfiture could reach Mrs. Carteret. She was very well off, perfectly healthy, wholly indifferent to every existing human being except herself and her cousin, had everything her own way as regarded both objects of affection, had got rid of her stepdaughter, and had a very comfortable settlement "in case anything should happen"--according to the queer formula adopted in speaking of the only absolute certainty in human events--to Mr. Carteret.
This seemingly-invulnerable person had no need of Margaret's room then, and when James Dugdale said to her,
"If you don't want that middle room over the drawing-room for any particular purpose, I should be glad to have the use of it for mounting my drawings, and so on; the light is very good," she said at once,
"O yes; you mean Margaret's room, do you not? I don't want it in the least. I will have it put to rights for you at once; it is full of all her trumpery."
No third person listening to the two would ever have discerned that any matter of feeling, or even embarrassment, had any connection with the subject under mention, still less that the "Margaret" in question had so lately left the home of her girlhood on a desperate quest, which the woman who spoke of her complacently believed to be desperate.
"Yes, I mean that room," said James Dugdale in a careless tone; "but pray don't have anything in it touched. I will see to all that myself; in fact, presuming on your permission, I have put a lot of my things in there, and the servants would play the deuce if they meddled with them. I may keep the key, Sibylla, I suppose?"
"Of course," replied Mrs. Carteret; and from that moment she never gave the matter a thought, and James Dugdale had the key of Margaret's room, and he did put some sketch-books, some sheets of Bristol board, and other adjuncts of his favourite pursuit on a table, and thus formally constituted his possession and his pretext. But he seldom unlocked the door; he rarely entered the apartment, even at first, and more and more rarely as time stole on, and all his worst fears and forebodings about Margaret Hungerford had been realised.
Sometimes, when all the house was quiet, on moonlight nights, his pale face and bent figure might have been seen, framed in the window, between the branches of the passion-flower which he had trained. There he would stand awhile, leaning against the woodwork and gazing into the sky, in whose vastness, whose distance, whose sameness over all the world, there is surely some vague comfort for the yearnings of absence, uncertainty, even hopeless separation, or why is the relief of it so often, so uniformly sought?
Sometimes, but not often, he wrote in Margaret's room; one letter which he had written there had exerted a great influence upon her fate, how great he little knew. All the girl's little possessions were in the room, just as she had left them.
Tidy housemaids, with accurate ideas of the fitness of things, had come to and gone away from Chayleigh since the sole daughter of the house had taken her perilous way, according to her headstrong will, and had been disturbed, and even mutinous, in their minds concerning the "middle room." But on the whole they had obeyed orders; and James Dugdale, who had long ceased to be the "tutor," and was supposed to be Mrs. Carteret's stepbrother by the servants of late date in the establishment, enjoyed undisturbed possession of the trumpery water-colour sketches; the little desk with a sloping top, with "Souvenir" engraved in flourishes on a mother-o'-pearl heart inserted over the lock; the embroidery-frame, the bead-worked watch-pocket, and the little library which occupied two hanging shelves, and chiefly consisted of the "Beauties" of the poets, and a collection of "Friendship's Offerings" and "Forget-me-nots."
James Dugdale's thoughts were busy with Margaret Hungerford that sweet autumn day--more busy with her than usual, more full of apprehension. The time that had elapsed had not deadened the feelings with which he regarded the wilful girl, who had scorned his interference, scoffed at and resented his advice, but been obliged to avail herself of his aid.
He knew that she had done so, but he knew nothing more. And as he roamed about the garden, and the terrace, and the pleasaunce, and rambled away to where the forest-trees stood stately, idly treading the fallen leaves under his listless feet, so lately in their green brightness far above his head, he sickened with longing to know more definitely the fate of the absent girl.
"She hated me then," he said with a sigh, as he turned once more towards the house; "and she is just the woman to hate me more because she has found out for herself that I was right."
He little knew how fully, to how far greater an extent than he had discovered it, Margaret had learned the worthlessness of Godfrey Hungerford.
As he crossed the garden, a woman-servant came towards him, and asked him for the key of "the middle room." The request jarred upon him somehow, and he asked rather sharply what it was wanted for.
"We are getting the cleaning done, sir; master and missus is to be home on Saturday."
James Dugdale handed the key to the housemaid, and entered the drawing-room through the open window.
"I may as well write to Haldane," he muttered. "The Canadian mail leaves tomorrow."
When James Dugdale had written his letter, he went out again; but this time he took his way to the village, intending to post the packet, and then pursue his way to a "bit" in the vicinity from which he was making a water-colour drawing.
As he passed the inn which occupied the place of honour in the hilly little street, the coach which ran daily from a large town on the south coast to London was drawn up before the door, and the process of changing horses was being accomplished to the lively satisfaction of numerous bystanders, to whom this event, though of daily occurrence, never ceased to be exciting and interesting.
James Dugdale glanced carelessly at the clustering villagers and the idlers about the inn-door, of whom a few touched their hats or pulled their hair in his honour; observed casually that two female figures were standing in the floor-clothed passage, and that one of the ostlers was lifting a heavy trunk, of a seafaring exterior, down from the luggage-laden top of the coach; and then passed on, and forgot all these ordinary occurrences. He took his way to the scene of his intended sketch, and was soon busily engaged with his work.
When the autumnal day was drawing to its close, and the growing keenness of the air began to make itself felt, quickly too, by his sensitive frame, James Dugdale turned his steps homewards, and, taking the lower road, without again passing through the village, he skirted the clumps of forest-trees, and entered the little demesne by a small gate which led into the pleasaunce.
He had almost reached the grassy terrace, when, glancing upwards, as was his frequent custom,--it had been his habit in the time gone by, when Margaret's light figure and girlish face had often met the upturned glance,--he saw that the window was wide open, and some one was in the room; saw this with quick impatience, which made him step back a little, so as to get a clearer view of the intruder, and to mutter, as he did so,
"Those confounded servants! What can they be doing there up to this time?"
But, as he murmured the words, James Dugdale started violently, and then stood in fixed, motionless, incredulous amazement. The window of the middle room was wide open, and against the woodwork, framed by the blossoms and foliage of the passion-flower, leaned a slight figure, in a heavy black dress.
The slender hands were clasped together, and showed white against the sombre garb; the pale, clear-cut, severe young face, lighted by the last rays of the quickly-setting autumn sun, looked out upon the tranquil scene; but on every feature sat the deepest abstraction. The eyes were heedless of all near objects, fixed apparently upon the trees in the distance; they took no heed of the figure standing in rapt astonishment upon the terrace.
Not until James Dugdale uttered her name with a faltering, with an almost frightened voice, as one might address a spirit, did the face in the window droop, and the eyes search for the speaker. But then Margaret Hungerford leaned forward, and said, quite calmly,
"Yes, Mr. Dugdale, it is I."
CHAPTER VI.
HALF-CONFIDENCES.
"You cannot surely be serious--you do not really mean it?" said James Dugdale, in a pleading tone, to Margaret Hungerford, as, some hours after he had discovered her presence at Chayleigh, they were talking together in the drawing-room.
"I do mean it," she replied. "You never understood me, I think, and you certainly do not understand me now, if you think I shall remain here dependent on my father, having left his house as I did."
James Dugdale did not speak for some minutes. He was pondering upon what she had said. He had never understood her! If not he, who ever had? Unjust to him she had always been, and she was still unjust to him. But that did not matter: it was of her he must think, not of himself.
The first bewildering surprise of Margaret's arrival had passed away; the mingled strangeness and familiarity of seeing her again, changed as she was, in the old home so long forsaken, had taken its place, and James Dugdale was looking at her, and listening to her, like a man in a dream.
Their meeting had been very calm and emotionless. Margaret, in addition to the hardness of manner which had grown upon her in her hard life, had felt no pleasure in seeing James Dugdale again. She had not quite forgiven him, even yet, and, though she was relieved by finding that the first explanations were to be given to him, and not to her father or Mrs. Carteret, she had made them ungraciously enough, and with just sufficient formal acknowledgment of the service which James Dugdale had rendered her, in securing to her the friendship and aid of Hayes Meredith, as convinced her sensitive hearer that she would rather have been indebted to the kindness of any other person.
On certain points he found her reserve invulnerable; and he was not slow to suspect that she had made up her mind exactly as to how much of her past life she would reveal, and how much should remain concealed; and he did not doubt her power of adhering to such a resolution. She had briefly alluded to her widowhood, acknowledged the kindness she had experienced from Hayes Meredith, said a little about the poverty in which he had found her, and had then left the subject of herself and all concerning her, as if it wearied her, and with a decision of manner which prevented James Dugdale from questioning her further.
Her questions regarding her father, her brother, and all that had occurred at Chayleigh during her absence, were numerous and minute, and James answered them without reserve or hesitation. They chiefly related to facts. Margaret dealt but slightly in sentiment; but when she asked James if her father spoke of her sometimes, there was a little change in the tone of her voice, a slight accession of paleness which she could not disguise.
"At first, very seldom; in fact, hardly ever, Margaret, for I see you wish the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but more frequently of late. Only the day before he and Mrs. Carteret went to Bath, he--you remember his way--was showing me a peculiarly repulsive specimen of some singularly hideous insect, and he said, 'How pleased Margery would have been with that.' Quite a hallucination, if I remember rightly, but still pleasant to hear him say it, and showed me that he was thinking of you. You see this as I do?"