Mary Marston

CHAPTER XVI.

THE MORNING.

At Thornwick, Tom had been descried in the yard, by the spying organs of one of the servants—a woman not very young, and not altogether innocent of nightly interviews. Through the small window of her closet she had seen, and having seen she watched—not without hope she might be herself the object of the male presence, which she recognized as that of Tom Helmer, whom almost everybody knew. In a few minutes, however, Letty appeared behind him, and therewith a throb of evil joy shot through her bosom: what a chance! what a good joke! what a thing for her to find out Miss Letty; to surprise her naughty secret! to have her in her power! She would have no choice but tell her everything—and then what privileges would be hers! and what larks they two would have together, helping each other! She had not a thought of betraying her: there would be no fun in that! not the less would she encourage a little the fear that she might, for it would be as a charm in her bosom to work her will withal!—To make sure of Letty and her secret, partly also in pure delight of mischief, and enjoyment of the power to tease, she stole down stairs, and locked the kitchen door—the bolt of which, for reasons of her own, she kept well oiled; then sat down in an old rocking-chair, and waited—I can not say watched, for she fell fast asleep. Letty lifted the latch almost too softly for her to have heard had she been awake; but on the door-step Letty, had she been capable of listening, might have heard her snoring.

When the young woman awoke in the cold gray of the morning, and came to herself, compunction seized her. Opening the door softly, she went out and searched everywhere; then, having discovered no trace of Letty, left the door unlocked, and went to bed, hoping she might yet find her way into the house before Mrs. Wardour was down.

When that lady awoke at the usual hour, and heard no sound of stir, she put on her dressing-gown, and went, in the anger of a housekeeper, to Letty's room: there, to her amazement and horror, she saw the bed had lain all the night expectant. She hurried thence to the room occupied by the girl who was the cause of the mischief. Roused suddenly by the voice of her mistress, she got up half awake, and sleepy-headed; and, assailed by a torrent of questions, answered so, in her confusion, as to give the initiative to others: before she was well awake, she had told all she had seen from the window, but nothing of what she had herself done. Mrs. Wardour hurried to the kitchen, found the door on the latch, believed everything and much more, went straight to her son's room, and, in a calm rage, woke him up, and poured into his unwilling ears a torrent of mingled fact and fiction, wherein floated side by side with Letty's name every bad adjective she could bring the lips of propriety to utter. Before he quite came to himself the news had well-nigh driven him mad. There stood his mother, dashing her cold hailstorm of contemptuous wrath on the girl he loved, whom he had gone to bed believing the sweetest creature in creation, and loving himself more than she dared show! He had been dreaming of her with the utmost tenderness, when his mother woke him with the news that she had gone in the night with Tom Helmer, the poorest creature in the neighborhood.

"For God's sake, mother," he cried, "go away, and let me get up!"

"What can you do, Godfrey? What is there to be done? Let the jade go to her ruin!" cried Mrs. Wardour, alarmed in the midst of her wrath. "You can do nothing now. As she has made her bed, so she must lie."

Her words were torture to him. He sprang from his bed, and proceeded to pull on his clothes. Terrified at the wildness of his looks, his mother fled from the room, but only to watch at the door.

Scarcely could Godfrey dress himself for agitation; brain and heart seemed to mingle in chaotic confusion. Anger strove with unbelief, and indignation at his mother with the sense of bitter wrong from Letty. It was all incredible and shameful, yet not the less utterly miserable. The girl whose Idea lay in the innermost chamber of his heart like the sleeping beauty in her palace! while he loved and ministered to her outward dream-shape which flitted before the eyes of his sense, in the hope that at last the Idea would awake, and come forth and inform it!—he dared not follow the thought! it was madness and suicide! He had been silently worshiping an angel with wings not yet matured to the spreading of themselves to the winds of truth; those wings were a little maimed, and he had been tending them with precious balms, and odors, and ointments: all at once she had turned into a bat, a skin-winged creature that flies by night, and had disappeared in the darkness! Of all possible mockeries, for her to steal out at night to the embraces of a fool! a wretched, weak-headed, idle fellow, whom every clown called by his Christian name! an ass that did nothing but ride the country on a horse too good for him, and quarrel with his mother from Sunday to Saturday! For such a man she had left him, Godfrey Wardour! a man who would have lifted her to the height of her nature! whereas the fool Helmer would sink her to the depth of his own merest nothingness! The thing was inconceivable! yet it was! He knew it; they were all the same! Never woman worthy of true man! The poorest show would take them captive, would draw them from reason!

He knew now that he loved the girl. Gnashing his teeth with fellest rage, he caught from the wall his heaviest hunting-whip, rushed heedless past his mother where she waited on the landing, and out of the house.

In common with many, he thought worse of Tom Helmer than he yet deserved. He was a characterless fool, a trifler, a poetic babbler, a good-for-nothing good sort of fellow; that was the worst that as yet was true of him; and better things might with equal truth have been said of him, had there been any one that loved him enough to know them.

Godfrey ran to the stable, and to the stall of his fastest horse. As he threw the saddle over his back, he almost wept in the midst of his passion at the sight of the bright stirrups. His hands trembled so that he failed repeatedly in passing the straps through the buckles of the girths. But the moment he felt the horse under him, he was stronger, set his head straight for the village of Warrender, where Tom's mother lived, and went away over everything. His crow-flight led him across the back of the house of Durnmelling. Hesper, who had not slept well, and found the early morning even a worse time to live in than the evening, saw him from her window, going straight as an arrow. The sight arrested her. She called Sepia, who for a few nights had slept in her room, to the window.

"There, now!" she said, "there is a man who looks a man! Good Heavens! how recklessly he rides! I don't believe Mr. Redmain could keep on a horse's back if he tried!" Sepia looked, half asleep. Her eyes grew wider. Her sleepiness vanished.

"Something is wrong with the proud yeoman!" she said. "He is either mad or in love, probably both! We shall hear more of this morning's ride, Hesper, as I hope to die a maid!—That's a man I should like to know now," she added, carelessly. "There is some go in him! I have a weakness for the kind of man that could shake the life out of me if I offended him."

"Are you so anxious, then, to make a good, submissive wife?" said Hesper.

"I should take the very first opportunity of offending him—mortally, as they call it. It would be worth one's while with a man like that."

"Why? How? For what good?"

"Just to see him look. There is nothing on earth so scrumptious as having a grand burst of passion all to yourself." She drew in her breath like one in pain. "My God!" she said, "to see it come and go! the white and the red! the tugging at the hair! the tears and the oaths, and the cries and the curses! To know that you have the man's heart-strings stretched on your violin, and that with one dash of your bow, one tiniest twist of a peg, you can make him shriek!"

"Sepia!" said Hesper, "I think Darwin must be right, and some of us at least are come from—"

"Tiger-cats? or perhaps the Tasmanian devil?" suggested Sepia, with one of her scornful half-laughs.

But the same instant she turned white as death, and sat softly down on the nearest chair.

"Good Heavens, Sepia! what is the matter? I did not mean it," said Hesper, remorsefully, thinking she had wounded her, and that she had broken down in the attempt to conceal the pain.

"It's not that, Hesper, dear. Nothing you could say would hurt me," replied Sepia, drawing breath sharply. "It's a pain that comes sometimes—a sort of picture drawn in pains—something I saw once."

"A picture?"

"Oh! well!—picture, or what you will!—Where's the difference, once it's gone and done with? Yet it will get the better of me now and then for a moment! Some day, when you are married, and a little more used to men and their ways, I will tell you. My little cousin is much too innocent now."

"But you have not been married, Sepia! What should you know about disgraceful things?"

"I will tell you when you are married, and not until then, Hesper. There's a bribe to make you a good child, and do as you must—that is, as your father and mother and Mr. Redmain would have you!"

While they talked, Godfrey, now seen, now vanishing, had become a speck in the distance. Crossing a wide field, he was now no longer to be distinguished from the grazing cattle, and so was lost to the eyes of the ladies.

By this time he had collected his thoughts a little, and it had grown plain to him that the last and only thing left for him to do for Letty was to compel Tom to marry her at once. "My mother will then have half her own way!" he said to himself bitterly. But, instead of reproaching himself that he had not drawn the poor girl's heart to his own, and saved her by letting her know that he loved her, he tried to congratulate himself on the pride and self-important delay which had preserved him from yielding his love to one who counted herself of so little value. He did not reflect that, if the value a woman places upon herself be the true estimate of her worth, the world is tolerably provided with utterly inestimable treasures of womankind; yet is it the meek who shall inherit it; and they who make least of themselves are those who shall be led up to the dais at last.

"But the wretch shall marry her at once!" he swore. "Her character is nothing now but a withered flower in the hands of that woman. Even were she capable of holding her tongue, by this time a score must have seen them together."

Godfrey hardly knew what he was to gain by riding to Warrender, for how could he expect to find Tom there? and what could any one do with the mother? Only, where else could he go first to learn anything about him? Some hint he might there get, suggesting in what direction to seek them. And he must be doing something, however useless: inaction at such a moment would be hell itself!

Arrived at the house—a well-appointed cottage, with out-houses larger than itself—he gave his horse to a boy to lead up and down, while he went through the gate and rang the bell in a porch covered with ivy. The old woman who opened the door said Master Tom was not up yet, but she would take his message. Returning presently, she asked him to walk in. He declined the hospitality, and remained in front of the house.

Tom was no coward, in the ordinary sense of the word: there was in him a good deal of what goes to the making of a gentleman; but he confessed to being "in a bit of a funk" when he heard who was below: there was but one thing it could mean, he thought—that Letty had been found out, and here was her cousin come to make a row. But what did it matter, so long as Letty was true to him? The world should know that Wardour nor Platt—his mother's maiden name!—nor any power on earth should keep from him the woman of his choice! As soon as he was of age, he would marry her, in spite of them all. But he could not help being a little afraid of Godfrey Wardour, for he admired him.

For Godfrey, he would have rather liked Tom Helmer, had he ever seen down into the best of him; but Tom's carelessness had so often misrepresented him, that Godfrey had too huge a contempt for him. And now the miserable creature had not merely grown dangerous, but had of a sudden done him the greatest possible hurt! It was all Godfrey could do to keep his contempt and hate within what he would have called the bounds of reason, as he waited for "the miserable mongrel." He kept walking up and down the little lawn, which a high shrubbery protected from the road, making a futile attempt, as often as he thought of the policy of it, to look unconcerned, and the next moment striking fierce, objectless blows with his whip. Catching sight of him from a window on the stair, Tom was so little reassured by his demeanor, that, crossing the hall, he chose from the stand a thick oak stick—poor odds against a hunting-whip in the hands of one like Godfrey, with the steel of ten years of manhood in him.

Tom's long legs came doubling carelessly down the two steps from the door, as, with a gracious wave of the hand, and swinging his cudgel as if he were just going out for a stroll, he coolly greeted his visitor. But the other, instead of returning the salutation, stepped quickly up to him.

"Mr. Helmer, where is Miss Lovel?" he said, in a low voice.

Tom turned pale, for a pang of undefined fear shot through him, and his voice betrayed genuine anxiety as he answered:

"I do not know. What has happened?"

Wardour's fingers gripped convulsively his whip-handle, and the word liar had almost escaped his lips; but, through the darkness of the tempest raging in him, he yes read truth in Tom's scared face and trembling words.

"You were with her last night," he said, grinding it out between his teeth.

"I was," answered Tom, looking more scared still.

"Where is she now?" demanded Godfrey again.

"I hope to God you know," answered Tom, "for I don't."

"Where did you leave her?" asked Wardour, in the tone of an avenger rather than a judge.

Tom, without a moment's hesitation, described the place with precision—a spot not more than a hundred yards from the house.

"What right had you to come sneaking about the place?" hissed Godfrey, a vain attempt to master an involuntary movement of the muscles of his face at once clinching and showing his teeth. At the same moment he raised his whip unconsciously.

Tom instinctively stepped back, and raised his stick in attitude of defense. Godfrey burst into a scornful laugh.

"You fool!" he said; "you need not be afraid; I can see you are speaking the truth. You dare not tell me a lie!"

"It is enough," returned Tom with dignity, "that I do not tell lies. I am not afraid of you, Mr. Wardour. What I dare or dare not do, is neither for you nor me to say. You are the older and stronger and every way better man, but that gives you no right to bully me."

This answer brought Godfrey to a better sense of what became himself, if not of what Helmer could claim of him. Using positive violence over himself, he spoke next in a tone calm even to iciness.

"Mr. Helmer," he said, "I will gladly address you as a gentleman, if you will show me how it can be the part of a gentleman to go prowling about his neighbor's property after nightfall."

"Love acknowledges no law but itself, Mr. Wardour," answered Tom, inspired by the dignity of his honest affection for Letty. "Miss Lovel is not your property. I love her, and she loves me. I would do my best to see her, if Thornwick were the castle of Giant Blunderbore."

"Why not walk up to the house, like a man, in the daylight, and say you wanted to see her?"

"Should I have been welcome, Mr. Wardour?" said Tom, significantly. "You know very well what my reception would have been; and I know better than throw difficulties in my own path. To do as you say would have been to make it next to impossible to see her."

"Well, we must find her now anyhow; and you must marry her off-hand."

"Must!" echoed Tom, his eyes flashing, at once with anger at the word and with pleasure at the proposal. "Must?" he repeated, "when there is nothing in the world I desire or care for but to marry her? Tell me what it all means, Mr. Wardour; for, by Heaven! I am utterly in the dark."

"It means just this—and I don't know but I am making a fool of myself to tell you—that the girl was seen in your company late last night, and has been neither seen nor heard of since."

"My God!" cried Tom, now first laying hold of the fact; and with the word he turned and started for the stable. His run, however, broke down, and with a look of scared bewilderment he came back to Godfrey.

"Mr. Wardour," he said, "what am I to do? Please advise me. If we raise a hue and cry, it will set people saying all manner of things, pleasant neither for you nor for us."

"That is your business, Mr. Helmer," answered Godfrey, bitterly. "It is you who have brought this shame on her."

"You are a cold-hearted man," said Tom. "But there is no shame in the matter. I will soon make that clear—if only I knew where to go after her. The thing is to me utterly mysterious: there are neither robbers nor wild beasts about Thornwick. What can have happened to her?"

He turned his back on Godfrey for a moment, then, suddenly wheeling, broke out:

"I will tell you what it is; I see it all now; she found out that she had been seen, and was too terrified to go into the house again!—Mr. Wardour," he continued, with a new look in his eyes, "I have more reason to be suspicious of you and your mother than you have to suspect me. Your treatment of Letty has not been of the kindest."

So Letty had been accusing him of unkindness! Ready as he now was to hear anything to her disadvantage, it was yet a fresh stab to the heart of him. Was this the girl for whom, in all honesty and affection, he had sought to do so much! How could she say he was unkind to her?—and say it to a fellow like this? It was humiliating, indeed! But he would not defend himself. Not to Tom, not to his mother, not to any living soul, would he utter a word even resembling blame of the girl! He, at least, would carry himself generously! Everything, though she had plunged his heart in a pitcher of gall, should be done for her sake! She should go to her lover, and leave blame behind her with him! His sole care should be that the wind-bag should not collapse and slip out of it, that he should actually marry her; and, as soon as he had handed him over to her in safety, he would have done with her and with all women for ever, except his mother! Not once more would he speak to one of them in tone of friendship!

He looked at Tom full in the eyes, and made him no answer.

"If I don't find Letty this very morning," said Tom, "I shall apply for a warrant to search your house: my uncle Rendall will give me one."

Godfrey smiled a smile of scorn, turned from him as a wise man turns from a fool, and went out of the gate.

He had just taken his horse from the boy and sent him off, when he saw a young woman coming hurriedly across the road, from the direction of Testbridge. Plainly she was on business of pressing import. She came nearer, and he saw it was Mary Marston. The moment she recognized Godfrey, she began to run to him; but, when she came near enough to take notice of his mien, as he stood with his foot in the stirrup, with no word of greeting or look of reception, and inquiry only in every feature, her haste suddenly dropped, her flushed face turned pale, and she stood still, panting. Not a word could she utter, and was but just able to force a faint smile, with intent to reassure him.