CHAPTER IV.—HER OWN THOUGHTS.

Mrs Clifford had not much time to think that night, and the impression went off her when she was in her lover’s company—which was very nearly always; for, long before this had been thought of, Tom Summerhayes had been the soul of everything at Fontanel. She had come so gradually to consult him about everything—to take his counsel upon small and great that happened—that it seemed only natural now that he should belong to her; but after Loo’s little scene a variety of annoyances came upon Mary—indications of the world’s opinion—evidences that it did not seem so natural to other people as to herself. Even Charley’s schoolboy letter was rather dreadful to his mother. The boy bestowed his approbation upon her match, and was to stand by her, too, in Loo’s very vein; and the mother felt more humbled by thus obtaining the consent of her children than she would have been by the sacrifice of all she had in the world. Still it never came into her head to give up her marriage—never, perhaps, till a day or two before, when things were much too far advanced for any drawing back, and when she sat alone by her fire, with her desk open before her, late at night when all the household were asleep. In her desk were various little matters which had been treasures to Mary Clifford. She took them out with trembling hands—a withered flower, given to her, oh, so long ago, when she was little more than a child, and preserved with girlish romance; a little ring made of hair, which she had worn in her days of betrothal; a little faded drawing, made by herself at the same period, of her early lover; and last and most important of all, some letters—not many, but very tender—the love-letters of her youth. How she had cried over them many a sad day after her Harry died; how she had gradually forgotten them again and left them in their safe concealment; how of late she had rather avoided the place where they were, and shrank from touching the little desk that contained them; and now, at last, upon the eve of her second wedding, here they were all spread out before her, to be disposed of somehow. Mary’s treasures! she had heard them called so—had called them so herself. What were they now?

Poor, little, soft, tender-hearted woman! There was no passion in her. She was in love with all her heart, but it was affectionately, not passionately, or else she never could have opened that desk. She took out the flower, and cried, and looked at it; then, with a hasty impulse, put it softly on the fire, and watched it blaze into sudden ashes, and cried again, and felt guilty to her heart. “I was such a child,” she said to herself in her tears, and took a kind of melancholy comfort from thinking how young she had been when she was first a bride. Then she looked at her own drawing, which was not the least like him, and thought with a compunction of her Harry. Poor Harry! All this bright house, all these dear children, were his as well as hers; but he was put away in the family vault, poor fellow, and nothing was henceforward to belong to him in this living world—not even the name he had given her, not her thoughts, not any of her heart. She cried over that too like the rest. She put up the ring in a little parcel for Loo—she laid aside the portrait for little Harry. She tried to indemnify him by making over all those little mementoes, which it troubled her to look at, to his children. Then she took up the bundle of yellow letters and timidly opened one of them, and read a few sentences. There she read of the young love that was never to die, never to know change. Poor Mary put them away again with a sob almost of terror, and hastily locked up the desk, and resolved to put it away somewhere out of sight. She could not examine any further into those “treasures” which had become ghosts. She drew her chair to the fire, and shivered in her thoughts. She was a simple-minded woman, not wise, but moved by every wind of feeling. It came to her mind just then to recollect how, in her first widowhood, she had taken comfort from the thought that Harry was near and saw her tears for him, and knew how faithful her poor heart was. Now that thought was too much for Mary’s strength. She gave a cry of helpless terror when it occurred to her. Alas, for that immortality of union which comforts the heart of grief! What if Harry met her at the very gates of heaven when she got there, and claimed her, she who was going to be another man’s bride? Sitting alone in the night, with all the household asleep, and such thoughts for companions, it was not wonderful if a panic seized upon Mrs Clifford’s heart. Poor Harry, who had loved her so well, appeared like a pursuing spectre to the soft little woman. If it was true that she belonged to him for ever and ever, how could she dare to love Tom Summerhayes? and if she did not belong to him for ever and ever—he who had loved her to the end, and had never done anything to forfeit her affection—what was the hereafter, the heaven where love, it appeared, could not be immortal? These fancies wrung poor Mary’s heart. She did not know any answer to make to them. The question put by the Sadducees nohow answered her case. She who blushed before her children, how could she ever look Harry in the face? She felt herself an infidel, trembling and crying over that everlastingness which had once given her such consolation. That Harry could ever cease to love her, nature contradicted as impossible. He was in heaven, far off, unseen, fixed in solemn unchangeableness in all the elevation of love and grief he died in, never to alter; and she?—— Step by step unconsciously that elevation of grief and love had died away from her in the changing human days, and now here she sat weeping, trembling, thinking with awe of Harry, wondering how he would claim her hereafter, how she could dare name his name when she was another man’s wife. Poor little trembling soul! She stole away to bed when she could bear it no longer, and sought refuge in sleep with the tears still in her eyes, some grand and desperate resolution of making a sacrifice of herself being in her mind, as was natural. She had troubled dreams, and woke up quite unrefreshed in the morning, which was very unlucky that day of all others, because the lawyers were coming, and all her business affairs were to be settled before her marriage. However, Mrs Clifford could not remember at her first waking what it was which had thrown such a cloud upon her; and when her thoughts of the previous night did return to her mind, they were neither so intolerable nor so urgent as they had been. In the daylight, somehow, those gates of heaven, at which Harry might be standing to claim her, looked a very far way off to the bride of Tom Summerhayes—there was no such immediate certainty of Harry’s existence anyhow, or of the kind of interest he might take in her proceedings; and the philosophy of the question did not recur to her mind with those puzzling and hopeless speculations. She was a great deal more content to accept the present and to postpone the future—to let hereafter take care of itself—than she had been at night. She put away the desk with Harry’s letters in a dark vacant upper shelf of a bookcase in her own dressing-room; there, where she could not even see it, it would no longer witness against her. It was a sunny morning, and the children came in all fresh and rosy to say their prayers, and there was a note from Mr Summerhayes on the breakfast-table, naming the hour at which the law people were to arrive. Mrs Clifford had recovered her colour and her spirits before they came; she was a little agitated, and looked very pretty in the commotion of her heart. Hers was a position very peculiar and interesting, as Mr Gateshead himself, the old family solicitor, suggested, as he read over the deed she was to sign. He was perfectly pleased with the arrangements altogether, and said that Mr Summerhayes had behaved most honourably and in the most gentlemanly way. It was very clear that _his_ motives were not mercenary. The deed Mrs Clifford had to sign was one by which Fontanel and all its dependencies was settled upon her eldest son, she retaining the life-interest in it which her husband had meant her to have. Mr Summerhayes, who had been brought up for the bar, had himself advised Mr Gateshead in the drawing up of this important document. The new bridegroom was anxiously solicitous that the children should be portioned and the property distributed exactly as the family agent, who knew poor Clifford’s mind, would have advised him to settle it; and the deed was irrevocable and framed in the most careful manner, so that no ingenuity of the law could make it assailable hereafter. It was so rigid in all its provisions that poor Mary wavered a little over it. She thought it scarcely fair that _he_ should be shut out entirely from every interest in all this wealth, which, at the present moment, belonged absolutely to herself. It was Mr Summerhayes himself who put, with a certain gentle force, the pen into her hands, and pointed exactly to the spot where she was to sign. “I have _you_, Mary,” he said in her ear, as he leant over her to keep the parchment steady; and Mary Clifford signed away all her power and secured her children’s rights, with “a smile on her lip and a tear in her eye,” feeling to her heart the delicious flattery. What she possessed was nothing to him—he had _her_, and a kingdom could not make him happier. So said the tone of his whisper, the glance of his eye, and the echo of her heart. This living Love which stood by her side, securing so carefully that Harry Clifford’s wealth should go to Harry Clifford’s heirs, and seeking only herself for its own, completely swallowed up poor Clifford’s ghost, if that forlorn spirit might by chance be cognisant of what was passing. Mary remembered no more her qualms and misgivings; and the prospect before her—now that the very children had got used to it, had ceased either to oppose or to stand by her, and had fallen into natural excitement about the approaching festivities, the guests who were to be at Fontanel, the new dresses, the great event about to happen—looked as bright as the glowing day.