Part 7

I resigned my seat, and stole a hasty glance at the other end of the room. Mrs. Rodwell was busily engaged upon her knitting, and Bruce was sitting on an ottoman close by Amy’s side; so, gasping for fresh air and one moment’s solitude, and unperceived by the laughing group of children, I left the apartment and ran hastily up to the bedroom which I had first entered. The gas was lighted there, and the fire burned warmly on the hearth, but in my present state of feeling neither warmth nor light was what I most desired. I felt as though I were choking--as though, if no relief were at hand, I must scream aloud, or dash my head against the wall, for my nerves were overstrung, and the demon of hysteria was gaining strength with every minute, and I almost feared would win the victory. But pride came to my assistance--that mighty supporter of human weakness--and flying to the window, I raised the sash and leaned my head out of it, drinking in deep draughts of the foggy night air. And as I did so, watching the bustle in the street below, and the calm stars in the sky above, I felt strength return to me,--strength, not to avoid suffering, but to suffer in patience. The tears rose to my eyes and fell quietly over my cheeks, and as they fell they seemed to dissolve the hard, dry lump which had settled in my throat and threatened to deprive me of breath. I thought of Bruce Armytage as I had known him in the past, and my tears fell fast for the loss I had sustained in him; but I thought of him also as I saw him in the present, and pride and jealousy made me dash them from my eyes, and resolve that if I died--yes, if I died of grief and love and longing combined--he should never have the gratification of knowing that I had retained one particle of my old affection for him. With which intent I hurried on my walking things, determined not to expose myself any longer to the danger of betrayal; but before I had finished doing so, Mrs. Rodwell was in the room, all anxiety to know what had occasioned my sudden absence.

“What is the matter, Lizzie? Did you feel the heat of the room? Why, my dear child, you are never going! It is only just nine o’clock.”

“Yes, dear Mrs. Rodwell, I think I had better do so. Lady Cunningham will not be late to-night, and you know how particular she is about my being home before her. Please let me go.”

“Well, dear, it must not be so long again before we see you. We must try and get up a few parties this winter, as it will be Amy’s last in the home circle. And mind, Lizzie, you are to be one of her bridesmaids; she insists upon it.”

“Ah! She is very kind, as you all are, but we will talk of that when the time comes. Good-night, dear Mrs. Rodwell. Kiss the girls for me. I won’t go into the drawing-room, such a figure as I am.”

But Mrs. Rodwell accompanied me down the stairs, conversing as she went.

“I am sorry the doctor is from home, my dear; he would have seen you round to Northampton Lodge; but he is never to be depended on from one hour to another, you know.”

“Oh, it is of no consequence, Mrs. Rodwell; I am used to going alone.”

“But I don’t half like your doing it, Lizzie: the night is so very dark, and--”

“Allow me to have the pleasure of accompanying Miss Lacy, Mrs. Rodwell,” said the voice of Bruce Armytage. We had reached the drawing-room floor by that time, and he stood on the threshold of the open door.

“No, no!” I exclaimed, as I shrank backward; “I do not desire it--I would rather go alone;” and with a hasty kiss on Mrs. Rodwell’s cheek, I ran down the remaining stairs and out at the hall door. The wind was blowing fresh and cold as I turned into the open air, and the night was very dark, but I thought of nothing but his offer to accompany me, and I hurried onward. Did he wish to add insult to injury?

But I had not gone far when I heard the sound of footsteps running after me; and I had hardly realised it was indeed himself before he was by my side, apologising for his presence by the excuse that Mrs. Rodwell had desired him to overtake me and see me home. Would I forgive what might otherwise seem an intrusion to me? I was too indignant to vouchsafe him any answer.

We walked on in silence side by side for several minutes, I with my head bent down and holding my thick cloak around me, and he vainly endeavouring to look me in the face. At last, as though making a great effort, he cleared his throat, and said,

“I suppose, after the manner in which you spoke to me at the piano this evening, my pride ought to forbid my attempting any further explanation with you, but in this case I have one feeling more powerful than pride, Miss Lacy, and I must ask you what you meant by saying that all that this world could give of solace was yours?”

“I meant what I said,” I answered abruptly, “or rather, that I require no pity from you or any other stranger. Our paths in life are widely enough divided now: let each walk in his own track, without interfering with the other.”

“That is easier said than done, perhaps,” he replied; “it is difficult in this world for people to forget what they have been.”

“It does not appear so to me.”

“Ah, perhaps you are differently, more happily, constituted than most. They told me so long ago, though I did not believe them. Will you consider an old friend impertinent for asking if that from which you derive your solace now is the same from which you derived it then? and if so, why I still find you unsettled in life?”

“You are speaking in riddles,” I replied. “I do not understand you.”

“Your present engagement--is it the same which separated us? Do not be afraid to tell me the truth, Lizzie. I have borne a good deal in my lifetime, and am proof against suffering.”

His voice was so tender and kind, so much like the voice which I remembered in the old days of our love, that it won me to listen to him quietly.

“My engagement!” I echoed in surprise. “What are you talking of? I have never been engaged--never since”--and then I halted, fearing what my revelation might suggest to him.

“What do you tell me?” he exclaimed. “What object have you in deceiving me? Were you not engaged, even before your parents’ death, to young Hassell, of Fairmead, and was it not by his father’s means that your present situation was procured for you? I little thought to meet you here,” he added bitterly. “I imagined you were married long ago, or I should have been more careful of my own feelings. And now you are engaged for the third time! How easily life runs for some people!”

“Who could have told you such a falsehood?” I said, turning to him. “It is true that old Mr. Hassell stood my friend when I had not one in the world, and that he found my present situation for me; but as to being engaged to his son, why, he is a married man--he married my own cousin.”

“Could the mistake have arisen so?” said Bruce Armytage, as he seized my hand. “Oh, Lizzie, do not be angry; think what I have gone through! When I returned home from that wretched foreign tour, during which I was not allowed to correspond with you, the first news which I heard from my own family was, that your father and mother had died some eighteen months before, and that you were engaged to Robert Hassell, and living with some old lady (no one could tell me where) until the time for your marriage arrived. I would not believe them; I rushed down to Fairmead myself to make inquiries, and reached there on the very day of young Hassell’s wedding with Miss Lacy. Do you think I was a coward not to stop and see the bride, believing her to be yourself? Perhaps I was; but I flew from the spot as though I had been haunted; and I suffered--ah, Lizzie, I cannot tell how much! It is so fearful, so awful a thing to teach one’s self to believe the heart in which we have trusted to be faithless and unworthy.”

“I know it,” I said in a low voice, which was nearly choked by my tears.

“How I have lived since that time I can hardly tell you,” he continued as he pressed my hand. (I knew it ought not to remain in his, but it was so sweet to feel it there.) “I have had very little hope, or peace, or happiness, though I have struggled on through it all, and made myself a name in my profession. And then to meet you again to-night so unexpectedly, still free, but promised to another, myself and my love so evidently forgotten, and to feel that it has been but a chance that separated us! Oh, Lizzie, it is almost harder than it was at first.”

“I am not engaged,” I answered, sobbing; “you choose to take my words at the piano as meaning so, but it was your mistake, not mine. I have lived much in the manner you describe yourself to have done--not very happily, perhaps, and finding my best relief in work. But I am glad to have met you, Bruce--glad to have heard from your own lips what parted us; and I thank you for this explanation, though it comes too late.”

“But why too late, my dearest?” he exclaimed joyfully. “Why, if you are free to accept my hand, and can forgive all that has made us so unhappy in the past, should we not bury our mutual trouble in mutual love? Oh, Lizzie, say that you’ll be mine--say that you’ll be my own wife, and help me to wipe out the remembrance of this miserable mistake!”

I thought of Amy. I looked at him with astonishment; I recoiled from him almost with disgust. Was I to accept happiness at the expense of that of my dear friends, of the only creatures who had shown me any affection during my long years of exile from him? Oh no. I would rather perish in my solitude. The very fact that he could propose it to me made him sink lower in my estimation.

“Bruce!” I exclaimed, “you must be mad, or I am mad so to tempt you from your duty. Think of all your offer involves--of the distress, the disappointment, the shame it would entail on those who have been more than friends to me; and consider if it is likely I could be so dishonourable to them as to take advantage of it.”

“I don’t understand you, my darling,” he said, with a puzzled look.

“Not understand?” I reiterated, in surprise, “when your engagement to Amy Rodwell was only settled this morning, and the preliminaries for your marriage are already being talked of! Would you break her heart in the attempt to heal mine? Bruce, we must never see each other again after this evening.”

“Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie!” he said, shaking his head, “we are playing at dreadful cross-purposes. Did it never enter into your wise little pate to inquire _which_ Mr. Armytage was going to marry Amy Rodwell? I can assure you I have no desire or intention to risk getting a pistol-shot through my heart for stepping into my cousin Frederick’s shoes.”

“And is it really--is it really, then, _Frederick_ whom she is going to marry?” I exclaimed, breathless with the shock of this new intelligence. “Oh, how can she?”

“It is indeed,” he answered, laughing. “Lizzie, did you seriously think that it was I? Why, what a taste you must give me credit for, to choose that pretty little piece of white-and-pink china, after having had the chance of such a woman as yourself! And now, what is my answer?”

What it was I leave for my readers to guess. Let those who have thirsted until life’s blood lay as dry dust in their veins, thrust the chalice of sparkling wine from their parched lips if they will: I am not made of such stern stuff as that.

LITTLE WHITE SOULS.

I am going to tell you a story which is as improbable an one as you have ever heard. I do not expect anybody to believe it; yet it is perfectly true. The ignorant and bigoted will read it to the end perhaps, and then fling it down with the assertion that it is all nonsense, and there is not one word of truth in it. The wiser and more experienced may say it is very wonderful and incredible, but still they know there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. But no one will credit it with a hearty, uncompromising belief. And yet neither ridicule nor incredulity can alter the fact that this is a true history of circumstances that occurred but a few years since, and to persons who are living at the present time.

The scene is laid in India, and to India, therefore, I must transplant you in order that you may be introduced to the actors in this veracious drama, premising that the names I give, not only of people but of places, are all fictitious.

It is Christmas time in a single station on the frontiers of Bengal, and a very dull Christmas the members of the 145th Bengal Muftis find it in consequence. For to be quartered in a single station means to be compelled to associate with the same people day after day and month after month and year after year; and to carry on that old quarrel with Jones, or to listen to the cackle of Mrs. Robinson, or be bored with the twaddle of Major Smith, without any hope of respite or escape, and leaving the gentlemen out of the question, the ladies of the 145th Bengal Muftis are not in the best frame of mind at the time my story opens to spend the day of peace and goodwill towards men together. Regimental ladies seldom are. They are quarrelsome and interfering, and back-biting enough towards each other in an English garrison town, but that is a trifle compared to the way in which they carry on in our outlying stations in India. And yet, the ladies of the 145th Bengal Muftis are not bad specimens of the sex, taken individually. It is only when they come in contact that their Christian love and charity make themselves conspicuous. Mrs. Dunstan, the wife of the Colonel, is the most important of them all, and the most important personage, too, in this little story of a misfortune that involved herself, therefore let Mrs. Dunstan be the first to advance for inspection.

As we meet her, she is seated in a lounging chair in her own drawing-room, at Mudlianah, with a decided look of discontent or unhappiness upon her countenance. The scene around her would seem fair enough in the eyes of those who were not condemned to live in it. Her room is surrounded by a broad verandah, which is so covered by creepers as to be a bower of greenery. Huge trumpet-shaped blossoms of the most gorgeous hues of purple, scarlet and orange, hang in graceful festoons about the windows and open doorways, whilst the starry jessamine and Cape honeysuckle fill the air with sweetness. Beyond the garden, which is laid out with much taste, though rather in a wild and tangled style, owing to the luxuriance of the vegetation, lie a range of snowy hills which appear quite close in the transparent atmosphere, although in reality they are many miles away.

Mrs. Dunstan’s room is furnished, too, with every luxury as befits the room of a colonel’s wife, even in an up country station. The chairs and sofas are of carved ebony wood, and cane work from Benares; the table is covered with flowers, books and fancy work; a handsome piano stands in one corner; the floor is covered with coloured matting, and in the verandah are scattered toys from various countries, a token that this comfortable home does not lack the chief of married joys, a child-angel in the house.

The mistress, too, is still young and still handsome, not wanting the capacity for intellectual nor the health for physical enjoyment, there must be some deeper reason than outward discomfort therefore for that sad far-away look in her eyes and the pain which has knitted her brow. Yes, “Mees Margie MacQueerk” (as she would style herself), has been giving Mrs. Dunstan an hour of her company that morning, and as usual left her trail behind her.

“Mees Margie” is a tall quaint, ill-favoured Scotchwoman on the wrong side of fifty, who has come out to India to keep the house of her brother, the doctor of the 145th. She is a rigid Presbyterian, with a brogue as uncompromising as her doctrine and a judgment as hard as nails. Never having been tempted to do anything wrong, she is excessively virtuous, and has an eye like a hawk for the misdoings of others; indeed she is so excellent a detective that she discovers the sins before the sinners have quite made up their minds to commit them. She is the detestation of the regiment, and the Colonel’s wife has been compelled in consequence to show Miss MacQuirk more attention than she would otherwise have done to make up for the neglect of the others. For never does Miss Maggie pass half-an-hour without hinting at a fresh peccadillo on the part of somebody else. She has a rooted conviction that all soldiers are libertines, not fit to be trusted out of sight of their wives or sisters, and if she has no new misdemeanour to relate on the part of the masters, the servants are sure to come in for their share of abuse, and so Miss Maggie MacQuirk manages to find food for scandal all the year round. Ethel Dunstan ought to know her foibles well enough to mistrust her by this time, and had the doctor’s sister come in with some new story of young Freshfield’s flirting, on Mr. Masterman’s card playing, she would have been as ready as ever to laugh at the old Scotchwoman’s mountainous molehills, and to assure her she was utterly mistaken. But Miss MacQuirk’s discourse this morning had taken a different turn. She had talked exclusively of the latest arrival in Mudlianah: lovely Mrs. Lawless, who has just returned with her husband, Jack Lawless, from staff duty in the northwest provinces, and how her beauty seemed to have addled the heads of all the men of the 145th Bengal Muftis. And there was a great deal of truth in Miss MacQuirk’s assertions, and that is what has made them go home to the heart of Ethel Dunstan. We are all so ready to believe anything that affects our own happiness.

“Deed, and it’s jeest freetful,” said Miss Margie, in her provincial twang, “to see a set of dunderheeds tairned the wrang way for the sake of a wee bit of a pasty face wi’ two beeg eyes in the meedle of it. It’s eno’ to mak’ a God-fearing woman praise the Laird that has kept her in the straight path. For I’ll no affairm that it’s by mee ain doin’ that I can haud up my heed the day with the Queen o’ England herself if need be.”

“But Mrs. Lawless is very, _very_ lovely--there cannot be two opinions on that subject,” cried generous-hearted Mrs. Dunstan. “For my own part I never saw a more beautiful face than hers, and my husband says just the same thing.”

“Eh! I nae doot it! The Cairnal’s heed is tairned like all the rest o’ them. But he cannot ca’ it reet that men should rin after a leddy that has a lawfu’ meeried husband of her ain.”

“But you have such strange notions, Miss MacQuirk. If a gentleman shows a lady the least attention you call it ‘running after her.’ We are like one family shut up in this little station by ourselves. If we are not to be on friendly terms with each other, we are indeed to be pitied.”

“Friendly tairms,” exclaimed Miss Margie. “Do you call it ‘friendly tairms’ to be walking in the dairk with anither mon’s wife? An’ that’s jeest what my gude brother saw yester e’en as he was comin’ hame fra’ mess.”

“What man! whose wife?” asked Ethel Dunstan, for once interested in Miss MacQuirk’s scandal.

“Aye! I dinna ken the mon, but the leddy was Mrs. Lawless hersel’. And her husband was at the mess the while, for Andrew left him at the table, and he was comin’ home in the dark and he saw Mrs. Lawless in her garden at the dead o’ neet walkin’ with a strange mon--a tall mon, and stout, and not unlike the Cairnal, Andrew says.”

“What nonsense, Charlie was back from mess by eleven o’clock,” said Mrs. Dunstan, with an air of annoyance. “When you repeat such stories, Miss MacQuirk, be good enough to keep my husband’s name out of them, or you may get into trouble.”

“Ah, well, Mrs. Dunstan, I only mentioned that it was like the Cairnal. Doubtless he was at mess or at home the while. It was half-past ten when Andrew retairned. But it is hairdly reet that Mrs. Lawless should be walking in her gairden at that hour o’ neet and with anither mon than her husband. I doot but one should infairm Mr. Lawless of the caircumstance.”

“Well, I advise you not to be the one,” replied Ethel Dunstan, tartly. “Jack Lawless is considered a fire-eater amongst men, and I don’t think he would spare the woman even who tried to take away his wife’s character.”

“Eh, Mrs. Doonstan, who talks of takin’ awa’ her character? I doot it’s but little she’s got, puir thing, and it ’twould be a sin to rob her of it. But it’s a terrible thing to see how gude luiks air rated abuve guid deeds, and enough to mak’ all honest men thank the Laird who has presairved them fra the wiles of the enemy. And now I’ll wish you the gude mairnin’, Mrs. Doonstan, for I have several other calls to pay before tiffin.”

And so the old scandal-monger had left the colonel’s wife in the condition in which we found her.

Of course if there had been no more truth in it than in the generality of Miss MacQuirk’s stories Ethel Dunstan would have laughed at and forgotten it. But there is just sufficient probability of its being a fact to give a colouring to the matter.