Fated to Be Free Part 63

"Who could help wis.h.i.+ng to be of use under such circ.u.mstances? Am I not enough thanked by seeing you all better?"

"I hardly know how I could have presumed to intrude here and disturb you and--and trouble you with such things as I can say--when you are come home for an interval of rest and quiet. Emily, if I had lost her, poor little girl, I never could have lifted up my head again. It was hard on that blameless little life, to be placed in such peril; but I suffered more than she did. Did you sometimes think so? Did you sometimes feel for me when you were watching her day and night, night and day?"

"Yes, John, I did."

"I hoped so."

"But now that the greatest part of the sorrow is over, fold it up and put it away, lay it at the feet of the Saviour; it is his, for He has felt it too." When she saw his hands, that they had become white and thin, and that he was hollow-eyed, she felt a sharp pang of pity. "It is time now for you to think of yourself," she said.

"No," he answered, with a gesture of distaste. "The less of that the better. I am utterly and for ever out of my own good graces. I will not forgive myself, and I cannot forget--have I only one mistake to deplore?

I have covered myself with disgrace," he continued, with infinite self-scorn; "even you with your half divine pity cannot excuse me there."

"Cannot I?" she answered with a sweet wistfulness, that was almost tender.

He set his teeth as if in a pa.s.sion against himself, a flash came from the blue eyes, and his Saxon complexion showed the blood through almost to the roots of the hair. "I have covered myself with disgrace--I am the most unmanly fool that ever breathed--I hate myself!" He started up and paced the room, as if he felt choked, whilst she looked on amazed for the moment, and not yet aware what this meant.

"John!" she exclaimed.

"I suppose you thought I had forgotten to despise myself," he went on in a tone rather less defiant. "When that night I asked you for a kiss--I had not, nothing of the kind--I thought my mind would go, or my breath would leave me before the morning. Surely that would have been so but for you. But if I have lived through this for good ends, one at least has been that I have learned my place in creation--and yours. I have seen more than once since that you have felt vexed with yourself for the form your compa.s.sion took then. I deserve that you should think I misunderstood, but I did not. I came to tell you so. It should have been above all things my care not to offend the good angel so necessary in my house during those hours of my misfortune. But I am destined never to be right--never. I let you divine all too easily the secret I should have kept--my love, my pa.s.sion. It was my own fault, to betray it was to dismiss you. Well, I have done that also."

Emily drew a long breath, put her hand to her delicate throat, and turning away hastily moved into the window, and gazed out with wide-opened eyes; Her face suffused with a pale tint of carnation was too full of unbelieving joy to be shown to him yet. He had made a mistake, though not precisely the mistake he supposed. He was destined, so long as he lived, never to have it explained. It was a mistake which made all things right again, made the past recede, and appear a dream, and supplied a sweet reason for all the wifely duty, all the long fealty and impa.s.sioned love she was to bestow on him ever after.

It was strange, even to her, who was so well accustomed to the unreasoning, exaggerated rhapsody of a lover, to hear him; his rage against himself, his entire hopelessness; and as for her, she knew not how to stop him, or how to help him; she could but listen and wonder.

Nature helped him, however; for a waft of summer wind coming in at that moment, swung the rose-branches that cl.u.s.tered round the window, and flung some of their white petals on her head. Something else stirred, she felt a slight movement behind her, and a little startled, turned involuntarily to look, and to see her cap--the widow's delicate cap--wafted along the carpet by the air, and settling at John Mortimer's feet.

He lifted it up, and she stood mute while she saw him fold it together with a man's awkwardness, but with something of reverence too; then, as if he did not know what else to do with it, he laid it on the table before an opened miniature of Fred Walker.

After a moment's consideration she saw him close this miniature, folding its little doors together.

"That, because I want to ask a favour of you," he said.

"What is it?" she asked, and blushed beautifully.

"You gave me a kiss, let me also bestow one--one parting kiss--and I will go."

He was about to go then, he meant to consider himself dismissed. She could not speak, and he came up to her, she gave him her hand, and he stooped and kissed her.

Something in her eyes, or perhaps the blush on her face, encouraged him to take her for a moment into his arms. He was extremely pale, but when she lifted her face from his breast a strange gleam of hope and wonder flashed out of his eyes.

She had never looked so lovely in her life, her face suffused with a soft carnation, her lucid grey-blue eyes full of sweet entreaty.

Nevertheless, she spoke in a tone of the quietest indifference--a sort of pensive wistfulness habitual with her.

"You can go if you please," she said, "but you had much better not."

"No!" he exclaimed.

"No," she repeated. "Because, John--because I love you."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

THE TRUE GHOST STORY.

_Horatio._--"Look, my lord, it comes!"

Hamlet the Dane.

Valentine was at Melcombe again. He had begun several improvements about the place which called for time, and would cost money. It was not without misgiving that he had consented to enter on the first of them.

There was still in his mind, as he believed, a reservation. He would give up the property if he ever saw fit cause.

Now, if he began to tie himself by engaging in expensive enterprises, or by undertaking responsibilities, it might be impossible to do this.

Therefore he held off for some little time.

He fell into his first enterprise almost unawares, he got out of his reluctant shrinking from it afterwards by a curious sophistry. "While this estate is virtually mine," he thought, "it is undoubtedly my duty to be a good steward of it. If, in the course of providence, I am shown that I am to give it up, no doubt I shall also be shown how to proceed about these minor matters."

He had learnt from his uncle the doctrine of a particular providence, but had not received with it his uncle's habit of earnest waiting on providence, and straightforward desire to follow wherever he believed it to lead.

Valentine came almost at once under the influence of the vicar, Mr.

Craik, the man who had always seen something so more than commonly mysterious about the ways of G.o.d to men. Mr. Craik wanted Valentine to restore the old church, by which he meant to pull it almost to pieces, to raise the roof, to clear away the quaint old oaken galleries, to push out a long chancel, and to put in some painted windows, literally such, pictures of gla.s.s, things done at Munich.

When Valentine, always facile, had begun to consider this matter, a drawing of the building, as it was to look when restored, was made, in order to stir up his zeal, and make him long for a parish church that would do him and the vicar credit. He beheld it, and forthwith vowed, with uncivil directness, that he would rather build the vicar a _crack church_ to his mind, in the middle of the village, than help in having that dear old place mauled and tampered with.

Mr. Craik no sooner heard this than he began to talk about a site.

He was a good man, had learned to be meek, so that when he was after anything desirable he might be able to take a rebuff, and not mind it.

In the pleasant summer evenings he often came to see Valentine, and while the latter sauntered about with a cigar, he would carve faces on a stick with his knife, walking beside him. He had given up smoking, because he wanted the poor also to give it up, as an expensive luxury, and one that led to drinking. Valentine respected him, was sure the scent of a cigar was still very pleasant to his nostrils, and knew he could well have afforded to smoke himself. That was one reason why he let himself be persuaded in the matter of the site (people never are persuaded by any reason worth, mentioning). Another reason was, that Mr.

Craik had become a teetotaller, "for you know, old fellow, that gives me such a _pull_ in persuading the drunkards;" a third reason was, that there was a bit of land in the middle of the village, just the thing for a site, and worth nothing, covered with stones and thistles. Mr. Craik said he should have such a much better congregation, he felt sure, if the church was not in such an extremely inconvenient out-of-the-way place; that aged saint, who was gone, had often regretted the inconvenience for the people.

Valentine at last gave him the site. Mr. Craik remarked on what a comfort it would have been to the aged saint if she could have known what a good churchman her heir would prove himself.

But Valentine was not at all what Mr. Craik meant by a good churchman.

Such religious opinions and feelings as had influence over him, had come from the evangelical school. His old father and uncle had been very religious men, and of that type, almost as a matter of course. In their early day evangelical religion had been as the river of G.o.d--the one channel in which higher thought and fervent feeling ran.

Valentine had respected their religion, had seen that it was real, that it made them contented, happy, able to face death with something more than hope, able to acquiesce in the wonderful reservations of G.o.d with men, the more able on account of them to look on this life as the childhood of the next, and to wait for knowledge patiently. But yet, of all the forms taken by religious feeling, Valentine considered it the most inconvenient; of all the views of Christianity, the most difficult to satisfy.

He told the vicar he did not see why his grandmother was to be called a saint because she had gone through great misfortunes, and because it had pleased her to be _trundled_ to church, on all Sundays and saints' days, besides attending to the other ordinances of the church and the sacraments.

When he was mildly admonished that a site seemed to presuppose a church, he a.s.sented, and with one great plunge, during which he distinctly felt, both that his position as landlord was not to be defended, and that this good use of the money might make things more secure, he gave a promise to build one--felt a twinge of compunction, and a glow of generosity, but blushed hotly when Mr. Craik observed that the old church, being put in decent repair, and chiefly used for marriages and for the burial service, it might, perhaps be a pleasing testimony, a filial act, to dedicate the new one to St. Elizabeth, "Simply in reverend recollection, you know, Melcombe, of that having been--been your grandmother's name."

"No, I shouldn't like it," said Valentine abruptly. Mr. Craik was not sure whether his evident shrinking was due to some low-church scruple as to any dedication at all, or whether the name of the sainted Elizabeth had startled him by reminding him of self-renunciation and a self-denial even to the death, of all that in this world we love and long for. This Elizabeth, his grandmother, might have been a saintly old woman in her conversation, her patience, her piety, for anything Valentine knew to the contrary, but he had hold now of all her accounts; he knew from them, and from investigations made among the tenants, that she had held a hard grip of her possessions, had sometimes driven shrewd bargains, and even up to her extreme old age had often shown herself rather more than a match for some of those about her. Things to be done by others she had seen to with vigilance, things to be done by herself she had shown a masterly power of leaving undone. Her property had considerably increased during her term of possession, though in ordinary charity a good deal had been given away. All was in order, and her heir whom she had never seen was reaping the fruits of her judgment and her savings; but whether she ought to be called a saint he rather doubted.

He had returned to Melcombe, not without shrewd suspicions that his cousin was soon to be his brother-in-law. A letter following closely on his steps had confirmed them. Some time in September he expected a summons to be present at the wedding; he wished after that to travel for several months, so he allowed Mr. Craik to persuade him that his good intentions ought not to be put off, and he made arrangements for the commencement of the new church at once.