CHAPTER X.

MARKED BY FATE.

It was nearly ten o’clock when Mildred drove through the village of Enderby, and saw the lights burning in the familiar cottage windows, the post-office, and the little fancy shop where Lola had been so constant a purchaser in the days gone by. Her eyes were full of tears as she looked at the humble street: happy tears, for her heart thrilled with hope as she drew near home.

“He cannot withhold his forgiveness,” she told herself. “He knows that I acted for conscience’ sake.”

Five minutes more and she was standing in the hall, questioning the footman, who stared at her with a bewildered air, as the most unexpected of visitors.

“Is your master at home?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, master’s in the library. Shall I announce you?”

“No, no—I can find him. Help my maid to take my things to my room.”

“Yes, ma’am. Have you dined, or shall I tell cook to get something ready?”

“No, no. I have dined,” she answered hurriedly, and went on to the library, to that very room in which she had made the fatal discovery of Fay’s identity with her husband’s first wife.

He was sitting in the lamp-light, just as he was sitting that night when she fell fainting at his feet. The windows were open to the summer night, books were scattered about on the table, and heaped on the floor by his side. Whatever comfort there may be in such company, he had surrounded himself with that comfort. He took no notice of the opening of the door, and she was kneeling at his feet before he knew that she was in the room.

“Mildred, what does this mean? Have we not parted often enough?”

“There was no reason for our parting—except my mistaken belief. I am here to stay with you till my death, if you will have me, George. Be merciful to me, my dearest! I have acted for conscience’ sake. I have been fooled, deluded by appearances which might have deceived any one, however wise. Forgive me, George; forgive me for the sake of all I have suffered in doing what I thought to be my duty!”

He lifted her from her knees, took her to his heart without a word, and kissed her. There was a silence of some moments, in which each could hear the throbbing of the other’s heart.

“You were wrong after all, then,” he said at last; “Vivien was not your half-sister?”

“She was not.”

“Whose child was she?”

“You must not ask me that, George. It is a secret which I ought not to tell even to you. She was cruelly used, poor girl, more cruelly even than I thought she had been when I believed she was my father’s daughter. I have undeniable evidence as to her parentage. She was my blood-relation, but she was not my sister.”

“How did you make the discovery?”

“By accident—this afternoon at The Hook. I found some papers and letters of my father’s in a cupboard below the bookcase. I knew nothing of their existence—should never have thought of searching for private papers there, for I had heard my father often say that he kept only magazines and pamphlets—things he called rubbish—in those cupboards. I wanted to put away some things, and I stumbled on a packet of letters which revealed the secret of Fay’s birth. I can come back to my duty with a clear conscience. May I stay with you, George?”

“May you? Well, yes; I suppose so,” with another kiss and a tender little laugh. “One cannot make a broken vase new again, but we may pick up the pieces and stick them together again somehow. You have taken a good many years out of my life, Mildred, and I doubt if you can give them back to me. I feel twenty years older than I felt before the beginning of this trouble; but now all is known, and you are my wife again—well, there may be a few years of gladness for us yet. We will make the most of them.”

* * * * *

All things dropped back into the old grooves at Enderby Manor. Mrs. Greswold and her husband were seen together at church on the Sunday morning after Mildred’s return, much to the astonishment of the congregation, who immediately began to disbelieve in all their own convictions and assertions of the past half-year, and to opine that the lady had only been in the South for her health, more especially as it was known that Miss Ransome had been her travelling companion.

“If she had quarrelled with her husband, she would hardly have had her husband’s niece with her all the time,” said Mrs. Porter, the doctor’s wife.

“But if there was no quarrel, why did he shut himself up like a hermit, and look so wretched if one happened to meet him?” asked somebody else.

“Well, there she is, anyhow, and she looks out of health, so you may depend some London physician ordered her abroad. They might as well have consulted Porter, who ought to know her constitution by this time. He’d have ordered her to Ventnor for the winter, and saved them both a good deal of trouble; but there, people never think they can be cured without going to Cavendish Square.”

Mildred’s strength seemed to fail her more in the happiness of that unhoped-for reunion than it had ever done during her banishment. She wanted to do so much at Enderby: to visit about among her shabby-genteel old ladies and her cottagers as in the cloudless time before Lola’s death; to superintend her garden; to visit old friends whose faces were endeared by fond association with the past; to be everywhere with her husband: walking with him in the copses, riding about the farms, and on the edge of the forest, in the dewy summer mornings. She wanted to do all these things, and she found that her strength would not let her.

“I hope that my health is not going to give way, just when I am so happy,” she said to her husband one day, when she felt almost fainting after their morning ride.

He took alarm instantly, and sent off for Mr. Porter, though Mildred made light of her feelings next moment. The family practitioner sounded her with the usual professional gravity, but his face grew more serious as he listened to the beating of her heart. He affected, however, to think very little of her ailments, talked of nerves, and suggested bromide of something, as if it were infallible; but when George Greswold went out into the hall with him he owned that all was not right.

“The heart is weak,” he said. “I hope there may be no organic mischief, but—”

“You mean that I shall lose her,” interrupted Greswold, in a husky whisper.

His own heart was beating like the tolling of a church bell—beating with the dull, heavy stroke of despair.

“No, no. I don’t think there’s any immediate danger, but I should like you to take higher advice—Clark or Jenner, perhaps.”

“Of course. I will send for some one at once.”

“The very thing to alarm her. She ought to be kept free from all possible anxiety or excitement. Don’t let her ride—except in the quietest way—or walk far enough to fatigue herself. You might take her up to town for a few days on the pretence of seeing picture-galleries or something, and then coax her to consult a physician, just for _your_ satisfaction. Make as light as you can of her complaint.”

“Yes, yes. I understand. O, God, that it should be so, after all; when I thought I had come to the end of sorrow!” This in an undertone. “For pity’s sake, Porter, tell me the worst! You think it a bad case?”

Porter shook his head, tried to speak, grasped George Greswold’s hand, and made for the door. Mr. and Mrs. Greswold had been his patients and friends for the last fifteen years, and in his rough way he was devoted to them.

“See Jenner as soon as you can,” he said. “It is a very delicate case. I would rather not hazard an opinion.”

George Greswold went out to the lawn where he had sat on the Sunday evening before Lola’s death. It had been summer then, and it was summer now—the time of roses, before the song of the nightingale had ceased amidst the seclusion of twilit branches. He sat down upon the bench under the cedar, and gave himself up to his despair. He had tasted again the sweet cup of domestic peace—he had been gladdened again by the only companionship that had ever filled his heart, and now in the near future he saw the prospect of another parting, and this time without hope on earth. Once again he told himself that he was marked out by Fate.

“I suppose it must always be so,” he thought; “in the lots that fall from the urn there must be some that are all of one colour—black—black as night.”

Mildred came out to the lawn with him, followed by Kassandra, who had deserted the master for the mistress since her return, as if in a delight mixed with fear lest she should again depart.

“What has become of you, George? I thought you were coming back to the morning-room directly, and it is nearly an hour since Mr. Porter went away.”

“I came into the garden—to—to see your new shrubbery.”

“Did you really? how good of you! It is hardly to be called a new shrubbery—only a little addition to the old one. It will give an idea of distance when the shrubs are good enough to grow tall and thick. Will you come with me and tell me what you think of it?”

“Gladly, dear, if it will not tire you.”

“Tire me to walk to the shrubbery! No, I am not quite so bad as that, though I find I am a bad walker compared with what I used to be. I daresay I am out of training. I could walk any distance at Brighton last autumn. A long walk on the road to Rottingdean was my only distraction; but at Pallanza I began to flag, and the hotel people were always suggesting drives, so I got out of the habit of walking.”

He had his hand through her arm, and drew her near him as they sauntered across the lawn, with a hopeless wonder at the thought that she was here at his side, close to his heart, all in all to him to-day, and that the time might soon come when she would have melted out of his life as that fair daughter had done, when the grave under the tree should mean a double desolation, an everlasting despair.

“Is there _any_ world where we shall be together again?” he asked himself. “What is immortality worth to me if it does not mean reunion? To go round upon the endless wheel of eternity, to be fixed into the universal life, to be a part of the Creator Himself! Nothing in a life to come can be gain to me if it do not give me back what I have lost.”

They dawdled about the shrubbery, man and wife, arm linked with arm, looking at the new plantings one by one; she speculating how many years each tree would take to come to perfection.

“They will make a very good effect in three or four years, George. Don’t you think so? That _Picea nobilis_ will fill the open space yonder. We have allowed ten feet clear on every side. The golden brooms grow only too quickly. How serious you look! Are you thinking of anything that makes you anxious?”

“I am thinking of Pamela and her sweetheart. I should like to make Lady Lochinvar’s acquaintance before the marriage.”

“Shall I ask her here?”

“She could hardly come, I fancy, while the wedding is on the _tapis_. I propose that you and I should go up to London to-morrow, put up at our old hotel—we shall be more independent there than at Grosvenor Gardens—and spend a few days quietly, seeing a good deal of the picture-galleries, and a little of our new connections—and of Rosalind and her husband, whom we don’t often see. Would you like to do that, Mildred?”

“I like anything you like. I delight in seeing pictures with you, and I shall be glad to see Rosalind; and if Pamela really wishes us to be present at her wedding, I think we ought to be there, don’t you, George?”

“If you would like it dearest; if—”

He left the sentence unfinished, fearing to betray his apprehension. Till he had consulted the highest authorities in the land he felt that he could know but little of that hidden malady which paled her cheek and gave heaviness to the pathetic eyes.

* * * * *

They were in Cavendish Square, husband and wife, on the morning after their arrival in town, by special appointment with the physician. Mildred submitted meekly to a careful consultation—only for his own satisfaction, her husband told her, making light of his anxiety.

“I want you to be governed by the best possible advice, dearest, in the care of your health.”

“You don’t think there is danger, George; that I am to be taken away from you, just when all our secrets and sorrows are over?”

“Indeed, no, dearest! God grant you may be spared to me for many happy years to come!”

“There is no reason, I think, that it should not be so. Mr. Porter said my complaint was chiefly nervous. He would not wonder at my nerves being in a poor way if he knew how I suffered in those bitter days of banishment.”

The examination was long and serious, yet conducted by the physician with such gentle _bonhomie_ as not to alarm the patient. When it was over, he dismissed her with a kindly smile, after advice given upon very broad lines.

“After the question of diet, which I have written for you here,” he said, handing her half a sheet of paper, “the only other treatment I can counsel is self-indulgence. Never walk far enough to feel tired, or fast enough to be out of breath. Live as much as possible in the open air, but let your life out of doors be the sweet idleness of the sunny South, rather than our ideal bustling, hurrying British existence. Court repose—tranquillity for body and mind in all things.”

“You mean that I am to be an invalid for the rest of my life, as my poor mother was for five years before her death?”

“At what age did your mother die?”

“Thirty-four. For a long time the doctors would hardly say what was the matter with her. She suffered terribly from palpitation of the heart, as I have done for the last six months; but the doctors made light of it, and told my father there was very little amiss. Towards the end they changed their opinion, and owned that there was organic disease. Nothing they could do for her seemed of much use.”

Mildred went back to the waiting-room while her husband had an interview with the doctor; an interview which left him but the faintest hope—only the hope of prolonging a fading life.

“She may last for years, perhaps,” said the physician, pitying the husband’s silent agony, “but it would be idle to disguise her state. She will never be strong again. She must not ride, or drive, or occupy herself in any way that can involve violent exertion, or a shock to the nerves. Cherish her as a hothouse flower, and she may be with you for some time yet.”

“God bless you, even for that hope,” said Greswold, and then he spoke of his niece’s wedding, and the wish for Mildred’s presence.

“No harm in a wedding, I think, if you are careful of her: no over-exertion, no agitating scenes. The wedding may cheer her, and prevent her brooding on her own state. Good-day. I shall be glad to know the effect of my prescription, and to see Mrs. Greswold again in a month or two, if she is strong enough to come to London. If you want me at any time in the country—”

“You will come, will you not? Remember she is all that is precious to me upon this earth. If I lose her I lose everything.”

“Send for me at any time. If it is possible for me to go to you I will go.”