CHAPTER XVII ‘BUT IN SOME WISE ALL THINGS WEAR ROUND BETIMES.’

For fifteen days and nights Churchill Penwyn watched beside his wife’s bed with only such brief intervals of rest as exhausted nature demanded; an occasional hour, when he allowed himself to fall into a troubled slumber, on the sofa at the foot of the bed, from which he would start into sudden wakefulness, unrefreshed, but with no power to sleep longer. Even in sleep he did not lose consciousness. One awful idea for ever pursued him, the expectation of an inevitable end. She, for whom he could have been content to sacrifice all that earth can give of fame or fortune, she with whom it would have been sweet to him to begin a life of care and toil, his idolized wife, was to be taken from him.

London physicians had been summoned, two of the greatest. There had been solemn consultations in Madge’s pretty dressing-room, the room where she had been so utterly happy in the first bright years of her wedded life; and after each counsel of medical authorities, Churchill had gone in to hear their verdict, gravely, vaguely delivered,—a verdict which left him at sea, tempest-tossed by alternate waves of hope and fear.

There had come one awful morning, after a fortnight’s uncertainty, when the great London physician and Dr. Hillyard received him in absolute silence. The little grey-haired Seacomb doctor turned away his face, and shuffled over to the window; the London physician grasped Churchill’s hand without a word.

‘I understand you,’ said Churchill. ‘All is over.’

His calm tone surprised the two medical men; but the man of wider experience was not deceived by it. He had seen that quiet manner, heard that passionless tone too often before.

‘All has been done that could be done,’ he said kindly. ‘It may be a comfort for you to remember that in days to come, however little it lessens your loss now.’

‘Comfort!’ echoed Churchill, drearily. ‘There is no comfort for me without her. I thank you for having done your uttermost, gentlemen. I will go back to her.’

He left them without another word, and returned to the darkened room where Madge Penwyn’s brief life was drifting fast to its untimely close, under the despairing eyes of her sister Viola, who from first to last had shared Churchill’s watch.

But seldom had either of these two won a recognising glance from those clouded eyes,—a word of greeting from those parched lips. Only in delirium had Madge called her husband by his name, but in all her wanderings his name was ever on her lips, her broken thoughts were of him.

At the last, some hours after the doctors had spoken their final sentence and departed, those tender eyes were raised to Churchill’s face, with one long, penetrating look, love ineffable in death. The wasted arms were feebly raised. He understood the unexpressed desire, and drew them gently round his neck. The lovely head sank upon his breast, the lips parted in a happy smile, and with a faint sigh of contentment, bade farewell to earthly care.

Tearless, and with his calm, every-day manner, Churchill Penwyn made all arrangements for his wife’s funeral. The smallest details were not too insignificant for his attention. He opened all letters of condolence, arranged who, of the many who loved his wife, should be permitted to accompany her in that last solemn journey. He chose the grave where she was to lie—not in the stony vault of the Penwyns—but on the sunny slope of the hill, where summer breezes and summer birds should flit across her grave, and all the varying lights and colours of sky and cloud glorify and adorn it. Yet, in those few solemn days between death and burial, he contrived to spend the greater part of his time near that beloved clay. His only rest—or pretence of rest—was taken on a sofa in his wife’s dressing-room adjoining the spacious chamber, where, beneath whitest draperies, strewn with late roses and autumn violets, lay that marble form.

In the dead of night he spent long hours alone in that taper-lit bedchamber, kneeling beside the snowy bed—kneeling, and holding such commune as he might with that dear spirit hovering near him, and wondering dimly whether the dream of philosophers, the pious hope of Christians, were true, and there were verily a world where they two might see and know each other again.

Sir Nugent Bellingham had been telegraphed to at divers places, but having wandered into inaccessible regions on the borders of Hungary, to shoot big game with an Hungarian noble of vast wealth and almost regal surroundings, the only message that reached him had arrived on the very day of his daughter’s death. He reached Penwyn Manor, after travelling with all possible speed, in time for the funeral, altogether broken down by the shock which greeted him on his arrival. It had been a pleasant thing for him to lapse back into his old easy-going bachelor life—to feel himself a young man again—when his two daughters were safely provided for; but it was not the less a grief to lose the noble girl he had been at once proud and fond of.

The funeral train was longer than Churchill had planned, for his arrangements had included only the elect of the neighbourhood. All the poor whom Madge had cared for,—strong men and matrons, feeble old men and women, and little children,—came to swell the ranks of her mourners, dressed in rusty black—decent, tearful, reverent as at the shrine of a saint.

‘We have lost a friend such as we never had before and shall never see again.’ That was the cry which went up from Penwyn village, and many a hamlet far afield, whither Madge’s bounty had penetrated—where the sound of her carriage wheels had been the harbinger of joy.

Churchill had a strange pleasure, near akin to sharpest pain, as he stood in his place by the open grave on a sunless autumn morning, and saw the churchyard filled with that mournful crowd. She had been honoured and beloved. It was something to have won this for her—for her who had died for love of him. Yes, of that he had no doubt. His sin had slain her. Care for him, remorse for his crime, had sapped that young life.

A curious smile, cold as winter, flitted across Churchill’s face as he turned away from the grave, after throwing a shower of violets on the coffin. Some among the crowd noticed that faint smile, wondered at it.

‘Before another week has come, I shall be lying in my darling’s grave.’

That was what the smile meant.

When he went back to the Manor House, Viola, deeply compassionating his quiet grief, brought his son to him, thinking there might be some consolation in the little one’s love. Churchill kissed the boy gently, but somewhat coldly, and gave him back to his aunt.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you meant kindly by bringing him to me, but it only pains me to see him.’

‘Dear Churchill, I understand,’ answered Viola, pityingly, ‘but it will be different by and by.’

‘Yes,’ said Churchill, with a wintry smile, ‘it will be different by and by.’

He had received Justina’s letter—a noble letter, assuring him of her unwillingness to impoverish him or to lessen his position as lord of the manor.

‘Give me any share of your fortune which you think right and just,’ she wrote. ‘I have no desire for wealth or social importance. The duties of a large estate would be a burden to me; give me just sufficient to secure an independent future for myself and the gentleman who is to be my husband, and keep all the rest.’

Churchill re-read this letter to-day, calmly, deliberately. It had reached him at a time when Madge’s life still trembled in the balance, when there was still hope in his heart. He had not been able to give the letter a thought. To-day he answered it. He wrote briefly, but firmly,—

‘Your letter convinces me that you are good and generous,’ he began, ‘and though I ask, and can accept nothing for myself, it emboldens me to commit the future of my only son to your care. I surrender Penwyn Manor to you freely. Be as generous as you choose to my boy. He is the last male representative of the family to which you claim to belong, and he has good blood on both sides. Give him the portion of a younger son, if you like, but give him enough to secure him the status of a gentleman. His grandfather, Sir Nugent Bellingham, and his aunt, Miss Bellingham, will be his natural guardians.’

This was all. It was growing dusk as Churchill sealed this letter in its black-bordered envelope—soft grey autumn dusk. He went down to the hall, put the letter in the postbag, and went out into the shrubbery which screened the stables from the house.

There had been gentle showers in the afternoon, and arbutus and laurel were shining with raindrops. The balmy odour of the pines perfumed the cool evening air. Those showers had fallen upon her grave, he thought, that grave which should soon be reopened.

He opened a little gate leading into the stable yard. The place had a deserted look. Grooms and coachmen were in the house eating and drinking, and taking their dismal enjoyment out of this time of mourning. No one expected horses or carriages to be wanted on the day of a funeral. A solitary underling was lolling across the half-door of the harness-room smoking the pipe of discontent. He recognised Churchill and came over to him.

‘Shall I call Hunter, sir?’

‘No, I want to get a mouthful of fresh air on the moor, that’s all. You can saddle Tarpan.’

A gallop across the moor was known to be the Squire’s favourite recreation, as Tarpan was his favourite steed.

‘He’s very fresh, sir. You haven’t ridden him for a good bit, you see, sir,’ remonstrated the underling, apologetically.

‘I don’t think he’ll be too fresh for me. He has been exercised, I suppose?’

‘Oh, yes, sir,’ replied the underling, sacrificing his love of truth to his fidelity as a subordinate.

‘You can saddle him, then. You know my saddle?’

‘Yes, sir. There’s the label hangs over it.’

Churchill went into the harness-room, and while the man was bringing out Tarpan, put on a pair of hunting spurs, an unnecessary proceeding, it would seem, with such a horse as Tarpan, which was more prone to need a heavy hand on the curb than the stimulus of the spur. The bay came out of his loose box looking slightly mischievous, ears vibrating, head restless, and a disposition to take objection to the pavement of the yard, made manifest by his legs. The Squire paid no attention to these small indications of temper, but swung himself into the saddle and rode out of the yard, after divers attempts on Tarpan’s side to back into one of the coachhouses, or do himself a mischief against the pump.

‘I never seed such a beast for trying to spile his money value,’ mused the underling when horse and rider had vanished from his ken. ‘He seems as if he’d take a spiteful pleasure in laming his-self, or taking the bark off to the tune of a pony.’

Away over the broad free expanse of grey moorland rode Churchill Penwyn. There had been plenty of rain of late, and the soft turf was soft and springy. The horse’s rapture burst forth in a series of joyful snorts as he felt the fresh breeze from the broad salt sea and stretched his strong limbs to a thundering gallop.

Past the trees that he had planted, far away from the roads that he had made, went the Squire of Penwyn, up to the open moorland above the sea the wide grey waters facing him with their fringe of surf, the darkening evening sky above him, and just one narrow line of palest saffron yonder where the sun had gone down.

Even at that wild pace, earth and sea flying past him like the shadows of a magic lantern, Churchill Penwyn had time for thought.

He surveyed his life, and wondered what he might have made of it had he been wiser. Yes, for the crime by which he had leaped at once into possession of his heart’s desires seemed to him now an act of folly; like one of those moves at chess which, lightly considered, point the way to speedy triumph, and whereby the rash player wrecks his game.

He had won wife, fortune, position; and lo! in little more than two years, the knowledge of his crime had slain that idolized wife, and an undreamed-of claimant had arisen to dispute his fortune.

The things he had grasped at were shadows, and like shadows had departed.

‘After all,’ he said to himself, summing up the experience of his days, ‘a man has but one power over his destiny—power to make an end of the struggle at his own time.’

He had ridden within a few yards of the cliff. His horse turned, and pulled landwards desperately, scenting danger.

‘Very well, Tarpan, we’ll have another stretch upon the turf.’

Another gallop, wilder than the last, across the undulating moor, a sudden turn seaward again, a plunge of the spurs deep into the quivering sides, and Tarpan is thundering over the turf like a mad thing, heedless where he goes, unconscious of the precipice before him, the rough rock-bound shore below, the wild breath of the air that meets his own panting breath, and almost strangles him.

Sir Nugent Bellingham waited dinner for his son-in-law, sorely indifferent whether he eat or fasted, but making a feeble show of customary hours, and household observances. Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock, and no sign of Churchill Penwyn. Sir Nugent went up to Viola’s room. It was empty, but he found his daughter in the room which had so lately been tenanted by the dead, found her weeping upon the pillow where that placid face had lain.

‘My dear, it is so wrong of you to give way like this.’

A stifled sob, and a kiss upon the father’s trembling lips.

‘Dear papa, you can never know how I loved her.’

‘Every one loved her, my dear. Do you think I do not feel her loss? I have seen so little of her since her marriage. If I had but known! I’m afraid I’ve been a bad father.’

‘No, no, dear. You were always kind, and she loved you dearly. She liked to think that you were happy among pleasant people. She never had a selfish thought.’

‘I know it, Viola. And she was happy with her husband. You are quite sure of that?’

‘I never saw two people so utterly united, so happy in each other’s devotion.’

‘And yet Churchill takes his loss very quietly.’

‘His grief is all the deeper for being undemonstrative.’

‘Well, I suppose so,’ sighed Sir Nugent. ‘But I should have expected to see him more cut up. Oh, by the way, I came to you to ask about him. Have you any idea where he has gone? He may have told you?’

‘Where he has gone, papa? Isn’t he at home?’

‘No. I waited dinner for an hour and a half, and went in alone (learning that you were too ill to come down) and ate a cutlet. It was not very polite of him to walk off without leaving any information as to his intentions.’

‘I can’t understand it, papa. He may have gone to town on business, perhaps. He went away suddenly just before—before my dearest was taken ill—went one day and came back the next.’

‘Humph,’ muttered Sir Nugent. ‘Rather unmannerly.’

There was wonderment in the house that night, as the hours wore on, and the master was still absent, wonderment most of all in the stables where Tarpan’s various vices were commented upon.

Scouts were sent across the moors—but the night was dark, the moors wide, and the scouts discovered no trace of horse or rider.

Sir Nugent rose early next morning, and was not a little alarmed at hearing that his son-in-law had not returned, and had gone out the previous evening for a ride on the moor.

It was just possible that he had changed his mind, ridden into Seacomb, and left Tarpan at one of the hotels while he went on by the train which left Seacomb for Exeter at seven o’clock in the evening. He might have taken it into his head to sleep at Exeter, and go on to London next morning. A man distraught with grief might be pardoned for eccentricity or restlessness.

The day wore on, as the night had done, slowly. Viola roamed about the silent house, full of dreariest thoughts, going to the nursery about once every half-hour to smother her little nephew with tearful kisses. His black frock and his artless questions about ‘Mamma, who had gone to heaven,’ smote her to the heart every time she saw him.

Sir Nugent telegraphed to his son-in-law at three clubs, thinking to catch him at one of the three if he were in London.

The day wore on to dusk, and it was just about the time when Churchill had gone to the stables in quest of Tarpan yesterday afternoon. Viola was standing at one of the nursery windows looking idly down the drive, when she saw a group of men come round the curve of the road, carrying a burden. That one glance was enough. She had heard of the bringing home of such burdens from the hunting-field, or from some pleasure-jaunt on sea or river.

There was no doubt in her mind, only a dreadful certainty. She rushed from the room without a word, and down to the hall, where her father appeared at the same moment, summoned by the loud peal of the bell.

Some farm-labourers, collecting seaweed on the beach had found the Squire of Penwyn, crushed to death among the jagged rocks, rider and horse lying together in one mangled mass.

The trampled and broken ground above showed the force of the shock when horse and rider went down over the sharp edge of the cliff.

A fate so obvious seemed to require no explanation. Mr. Penwyn had gone for his gallop across the moor, as he had announced his intention of doing, and betrayed by the thickening mists of an autumnal evening, his brain more or less confused by the grief and agitation he had undergone, he had lost ken of that familiar ground and had galloped straight at the cliff. This was the conclusion of Sir Nugent and Viola, and subsequently of the world in general. The only curious circumstance in the whole business was the Squire’s use of his spur, a punishment he had never been known to inflict upon Tarpan before that fatal ride. This was commented upon in the stable, and formed the subject of various nods and significant shoulder shrugs, finally resulting in the dictum that the Squire had been off his head, poor chap, after losing his pretty wife.

So, after an inquest and verdict of accidental death, Madge Penwyn’s early grave was opened, and he who had loved her with an unmeasured love was laid beside her in that peaceful restingplace.

Justina did not deprive little Nugent of his too early inherited estate. A compromise was effected between the infant’s next friend, Sir Nugent Bellingham, and Justina’s next friend, Maurice Clissold, and the baby-squire kept his land and state, while Justina became proprietress of the mines, the royalties, upon which, according to Messrs. Pergament, were worth three thousand a year. Great was the excitement in the Royal Albert Theatre when the young lady who had made so successful a debut in ‘No Cards’ retired, on her inheritance of a fortune.

There was a quiet wedding, one November morning, in one of the Bloomsbury churches—a wedding at which Matthew Elgood gave the bride away, and Martin Trevanard was best man—a quiet, but not less enjoyable, wedding breakfast in the Bloomsbury lodging, and then a parting, at which Mr. Elgood, affected at once by grief and Moselle, wept copiously.

‘It’s the first time you’ve been parted from your adopted father, my love,’ he sobbed; ‘and he’ll find it a hard thing to live without you. Take her, Clissold; there never was a better daughter—and as the daughter, so the wife. She’s a girl in a thousand. “Ay, the most peerless piece of earth, I think, that e’er the sun shone bright on.” God bless you both. Excuse an old man’s tears. They won’t hurt you.’

And so, with much tenderness on Justina’s side, they parted, the bride and bridegroom driving away to the Charing Cross Station, on the first stage of their journey to Rome, where they were to stay till the end of January. There had been a still sadder parting for Justina that morning in the quiet house between Kentish Town and Highgate, where the bride had spent the hour before her wedding. Muriel had kissed her, and blessed her, and admired her in her pretty white dress, and so they had parted, between smiles and tears.

When bride and bridegroom were comfortably seated in the railway carriage, travelling express to Dover, Maurice took an oblong parcel out of his pocket, and laid it in Justina’s lap.

‘Your wedding present, love.’

‘Not jewels I hope, Maurice.’

‘Jewels!’ he cried, with a laugh. ‘How should a pauper give jewels to the proprietress of flourishing tin mines? That would be taking diamonds to Golconda.’

She tore open the package with a puzzled look.

It was a small octavo volume, bound in ivory, with an antique silver clasp, and Justina’s monogram in silver set with rubies—a perfect gem in the way of bookbinding.

‘Do not suppose that I esteem the contents worthy the cover,’ said Maurice, laughing. ‘The cover is a tribute to you.’

‘What is it, Maurice?’ asked Justina, turning the book over and over, too fascinated with its outward seeming to open it hastily. ‘A Church Service?’

‘When one wants to know the contents of a book one generally looks inside.’

She opened it eagerly.

‘A Life Picture! Oh, how good of you to remember that I liked this poem!’ cried Justina.

‘It would be strange if I forgot your liking for it, dearest. Do you remember your speculations about the poet?’

‘Yes, dear, I remember wondering what he was like.’

‘Would you be very much surprised if you heard that he is the image of me?’

‘Maurice!’

‘I have given you the only wedding gift I had to offer, love—the first fruits of my pen.’

‘Oh, Maurice, is it really me? Have I married a poet?’

‘You have married something better, dear; an honest man, who loves you with all his strength, and heart, and mind.’

Three years later and Maurice’s fame as a poet is an established fact, a fact that grows and widens with time. Mr. and Mrs. Clissold have built themselves a summer residence, a house of the Swiss chalet order, near Borcel End, where Muriel lives her quiet life, her father’s placid companion, harmless, tranquil, only what Ph?be the housemaid calls ‘a little odd in her ways.’

Justina and Viola Bellingham are fast friends, much to the delight of Martin Trevanard, who contrives somehow to be always at hand during Viola’s visits to the chalet. He breaks in a pair of Iceland ponies for that lady’s phaeton, and makes himself generally useful. He is Viola’s adviser upon all agricultural matters, and has quite given up that old idea of establishing himself in London. He rides to hounds every season, and sometimes has the honour of showing Miss Bellingham the way—an easy way, for the most part, through gates, and convenient gaps in hedges.

The old-fashioned neighbours who admired Martin’s mother as the model of housewives, indulge in sundry animadversions upon the young man’s scarlet coat and Plymouth-made top-boots, and predict that Martin will never be so good a farmer as his father: a prophecy hardly justified by facts, for Martin has wrought many improvements at Borcel by a judicious outlay. The trustees of the estate have renewed Michael’s tenancy on a lease of three lives, which will in all probability secure the farm to the house of Trevanard for the next half-century.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Clissold have set up their nursery by this time, an institution people set up with far less consideration than they give to the establishment of a carriage and pair, but which is the more costly luxury of the two; and nurses and ladies at the chalet are sworn allies with the young Squire and his nurse from the Manor House, where Viola is mistress. Sir Nugent Bellingham comes to Cornwall once in three months for a week or so, yawns tremendously all the time, looks at accounts which he doesn’t in the least understand, and goes back to his clubs and the stony-hearted streets with infinite relief.

Happy summer-tides for the young married people, for the children, for the lovers! Sweet time of youth and love and deep content, when the glory and the freshness of a dream shineth verily upon his work-a-day world.

THE END.

J. AND W. RIDER, PRINTERS, LONDON.