Читать книгу A Mad Marriage - May Agnes Fleming - Страница 19

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t the window of one of her private rooms, Lucia, Lady Dynely, sits in deep and painful thought. The fair, smooth brow is knit, the delicate lips are compressed, an anxious worried light is in her pale-blue eyes. It is Thursday evening; she is dressed early for her reception, and in her flowing silks and soft, rich laces, looks a very fair patrician picture. But the slender, ringed hands are closely locked, as in physical pain; mentally or bodily, you can see, she suffers as she sits here.

The twilight of the May day is closing—a soft primrose light fills the western sky—a faint young moon lifts its slender sickle and pearly light over the Belgravian chimney-pots—a few stars cluster in the blue. A silvery haze hangs over the streets—the "pea-soup" atmosphere of dingy London is softly clear for once, and the gloomy grandeur of these West End stuccoed palaces is tenderly toned down. The room in which Lady Dynely sits is her sleeping room, an apartment as beautiful and elegant as wealth and taste can make a room. About it, however, there is this noticeable—there is but one picture. That picture is a portrait, painted en buste—it is as though that portrait were held so dear no other picture must be its companion. It is a portrait of Eric Alexis Albert, Lord Viscount Dynely, and twenty-first Baron Camperdown.

You pause involuntarily and look at his pictured face; it is one that at any time or in any place must strike the most casual observer, if only for its beauty. Either the artist has most grossly flattered his subject, or Eric, Viscount Dynely, is an uncommonly handsome man. The face is beautiful—with the beauty of a woman—its great drawback that very womanliness. The curling hair is golden, the eyes sapphire blue to their deepest depths, the features faultless, the smiling mouth sweet and weak as a girl's. There in its nook of honor this portrait hangs by night and day in Lady Dynely's room, the last object her eyes look on at night, the first that greets them when they open to the new day. He is her idol—it is not too much to say that—her hope—the very life of her life. At present he is abroad, has been for over a year, and is expected home now daily. His majority comes in August, and it is to be celebrated down at Dynely with feasting and rejoicing, with the slaying of huge bullocks, and the broaching of mighty vats of ale.

But to-night in the misty May gloaming it is not altogether of her darling and her idol my lady sits thinking. Surely all thoughts of him should be bright and pleasant—is not his majority at hand—is he not to marry her pet, France Forrester, and live happy ever after? But the thoughts she thinks as she muses here are neither pleasant nor bright.

All her life long, Lady Dynely has been a weak woman, timid and vacillating, good, gentle, charitable, but wanting "back bone." Her son inherits that want. You may see it in his smiling, painted face. Her mind drifts about irresolutely now. She thinks, first of all, of the grave, bearded artist, met yesterday in the Royal Academy.

How like these deep grave eyes to other eyes, passed forever out of her world—how like and yet how unlike. How like the voice—deeper, graver in its timbre, and still the same. Even a slight trick of manner, characteristic of Gordon Caryll, in shaking impatiently back his fair hair, this artist had. It was odd, it was almost painful, this passing likeness, and yet it made her well disposed toward this Mr. Locksley, made her absolutely anxious lest he should fail to put in an appearance at her reception to-night.

Gordon Caryll! all at once as she sits here, that long ago moonlight night is before her again. She sees the huge fish-pond, a sheet of silver light at their feet; she sees his tall figure casting its long shadow on the velvet sward, sees herself, pale and shivering, clinging to his arm, as she listens to that sombre story of man's reckless passion and woman's shameful deceit. Again his hands clasp her own, again his farewell sounds in her ears.

"I will take nothing—not even my name. I leave it behind with all the rest when I sail for India next week."

He had gone; and far away under the burning Indian sky, six feet of ground held perhaps what had once been the cousin she loved.

"Ah, poor Gordon!" she sighs, and then for a while her train of thought breaks, and there is a blank.

It is taken up again; that same night and her husband's death-bed is before her. The dimly-lighted chamber of the inn, the man wounded unto death, and she kneeling beside him, listening to his dying words. Dying words so dreadful to hear, that, in the soft warmth of her room now, she shivers from head to foot as she recalls them. That terrible night has stamped its impress upon all her after life.

Slowly and wearily her mind goes over all that came after. The solemn and stately funeral, the sad droning service, the bare bowed heads of the mourners, and she herself in her widow's weeds, white and shuddering, but weeping not at all, her little azure-eyed golden-haired boy by her side. He is dressed in black velvet, but not a shred of crape, and people wonder a little at this strange neglect. His mother would have it so—almost passionately she had torn off the band and shoulder-knot of crape they had placed upon the baby viscount, and had caught him to her breast, crying wildly:

"Oh, my Eric! my baby! my baby!"

They buried the dead lord of Dynely Abbey—laid him beneath the chancel of Roxhaven Church, where scores of dead-and-gone Dynelys lay. There was a tablet of wonderful beauty and cost erected above him, with a long inscription, setting forth his virtues as a man, a magistrate, a husband, a father. "And his works do follow him," said the glowing record. Was it in bitter satire they had added that, she wondered, or was it ominously prophetic?

All was over, and then into Lady Dynely's life came a weary gap—a blank of months. Months when she sat alone in the grand, luxurious, lonely rooms, white and still, never crying, never complaining, borne down by the weight of some great and hidden trouble. Her health failed under it. By spring she was the veriest shadow, and the family physician shook his professional head, and ordered immediate change; Italy, the south of France, a milder climate, cheerful society, change, etc., etc. She refused at first peremptorily, then all in a moment changed her mind, left little Eric in charge of his governess and the housekeeper, and started upon her travels. Not to Italy or France, though; but, to the intense disgust of her maid, to Ireland. Ireland, of all places in the world, and to the wildest of all wild Ireland—Galway.

She had some object in view—Hortense, the maid, could see that; some object that lent a glow to her pallid cheeks, a light to her dim eyes, an energy to her listless movements, that marvellously astonished that handmaiden. In the claddagh on the Galway coast her Irish journey came to an end.

She left her maid behind her the day of her arrival in the town, and went on alone to this wild village of Galway fishermen. She made her way to the cabin of one Mickey Gannon, and came among them, in their squalor and their poverty, almost as a visitant from another world. Her apology for entering came to hand readily enough.

"It had begun to rain"—her seal jacket was drenched; "might she seek shelter here for a few minutes, until the storm abated? She was a tourist exploring the west." That was her faltered excuse.

They gave her the best seat and the cordial welcome for which the Irish heart is famous, and which bursts out even in their national motto, Cead mille failthe. They gave her the place by the fire, and drew back in respectful silence to gaze at the pale, fair English lady.

There seemed to be a dozen children, more or less, swarming about the cabin. With keen anxiety in her eyes, Lady Dynely looked from face to face, and finally her gaze lighted and lingered on one. It was a little lad of seven, rather more of a tatterdemalion, if possible, than even the rest, with a shaggy crop of red, unkempt hair, and two big blue eyes, round with wonder as midnight moons.

"Are all these children yours?" she asked the matron of the house; but that lady shook her head; she could not speak a word of the Sassanach tongue.

"But, sure Biddy can spake the English illegant," suggested the father of the family; and Biddy was summoned—a strapping lass with rose-red cheeks, gray eyes, jet-black hair, and a musical brogue—a very siren of western Ireland. Biddy came, made a bashful courtesy to the quality, and stood waiting to be questioned. My lady repeated her query.

"Are all these your brothers and sisters, my good girl?" with a smile; "so many of them there are."

"All but one, yer ladyship—the red-headed gossoon beyant in the corner. He's me sisther's chile," responded bashful Biddy.

"Oh—you have a married sister then?" Lady Dynely said.

"Not now, yer ladyship—sure she's dead, God be good to her, an' it's poor Terry's an orphan this many a day."

"An orphan?" her ladyship repeated, still gazing very earnestly at Terry, who, quite overcome with bashfulness, put one grimy finger in his mouth and turned a very dirty little face to the wall. "It is rather hard upon your father, having to provide for his grandchildren, isn't it? Is—" Lady Dynely paused, and over her pale face there flushed a crimson light,—"is the lad's father dead?"

Biddy shook her head, and her blue, handsome eyes flashed angrily.

"I don't know, yer ladyship, an', savin' yer presence, I don't care. Oh! but it was the misfortinit day for this house whin that black-hearted villain iver set fut in it!"

"Did he—" again she faltered—"surely he did not deceive your sister?"

Biddy looked at her, and drew her fine figure—a figure that had been left, like Nora Crena's, to "shrink or swell as Heaven pleases"—to its full height.

"Desave her, is it? He was her husband, if that's what yer ladyship manes, married by Father O'Gorman, himself, in the parish chapel beyant. Oh, faith! he knew betther than to come palaverin' here widout the ring. He was an Englishman—bad cess to him wheriver he is—kem here for the fishin' one summer, an' met Maureen on a summer evenin', comin' home from a fair. Oh, wirra! that he iver laid eyes on her! sure from that day he was at her heels like her very shadda."

"Was she handsome, this sister of yours?" Lady Dynely asked, with curious interest in this lowly romance.

"The purtiest girl in Galway, an' that's a big word. Och! but wasn't he afther her hot fut, mornin's, noon, an' night, an' niver a day's pace wud he give her, till she said the word, an' they wint up to Father O'Gorman, an' were married."

"And then?"

"An' thin he tuk her away wid him, an' for a year or more we seen nor heerd nothin' av aither av thim. Sure poor Maureen cud naither read nor write. An' thin all at wance she kem back one fine mornin' wid Terry there, a weeny baby in her arrums, an' from that day to this we niver seen hilt nor hair av her fine English husband. The curse o' the crows an him this day!"

"He deserted her?"

"Sure he did. What else cud ye expect, a fine illegant gentleman like that, as bould as brass an' as rich as a lord, an' herself wid nothin' at all but two blue eyes an' a purty face."

"A lord, did you say?" Lady Dynely repeated. "Surely he was not—"

"I don't know what he was," said Biddy, shortly; "no more did Maureen. He called himself Dennison, an' was married by that name. But, maybe it wasn't—sure the divil himself cudn't be up to the desate av him. Och! Father O'Gorman warned her, but she wudn't be warned. An' that day six months, afther she kem back, she died here wid Terry in her arrums, an' a prayer for him, the villain av the world, on her lips."

"And the child remains here since? A fine boy, too. Come here, Terry—here's a shilling for you."

But Terry, altogether aghast at such a proposal, shrank away into his corner and glued his grimy countenance to the wall.

"Arrah! Come here, Terry, come here, avic, an' spake to the lady," said Biddy, in persuasive accents. Then, as the dulcet tones produced no effect, she whipped him up bodily with one strong, round arm, and bore him over to be inspected.

"Sure, thin, he's dirtier than a little baste," said Biddy, with considerable truth. "It's himself does be rowlin' undher the bed wid the pig from mornin' till night."

Lady Dynley smiled in spite of herself. Terry's face was really picturesque, frescoed so to speak, with dirt. She held out a handful of loose silver, which Terry grabbed with ravenous eagerness.

"Would you part with the child?" she asked, after a pause, and Biddy regarded her with silent wonder. "I may as well acknowledge it," her ladyship went on, her delicate face crimsoning painfully. "I once knew this—this child's father. He has spoken of him to me, recommended him to my care. Hush!" she said authoritatively as she saw Biddy about to flame forth; "not a word. He is dead. In the grave let his sins rest with him. Suffice it to say, I will take this boy and do better by him than you can ever do. In fact—so far as I may,"—she paused, and grew very white—"so far as I may," she repeated, steadfastly, "I will atone for his father's wrong. If you decline to let him go—well and good—I shall trouble you no more. If you consent, you shall be amply repaid for all the trouble and expense of the past. I will take him, educate him, and treat him in all respects as my own—yes, as my own son. Now, tell your parents, and bring me word this evening. Go to the inn in the village and ask for Lady Dynely."

She arose and left the cabin. The rain had ceased, and with the look of one who had done a hard and humiliating duty, Lady Dynely went back.

That evening Biddy came. Her ladyship was very good, and they would humbly accept her offer. It had been a hard season in the Claddagh—only for that they would never have let Terry go. There was but one stipulation—Terry must be brought up in the faith of his mother.

Next day Lady Dynely started on her return journey, with Terry washed and clothed, and looking a new little being, in her train. She went to Dublin, and there for good and all dismissed the maid who had accompanied her. All clew to Terry's antecedents must be lost. In the Irish capital she engaged another who would act as nurse to Master Terence, and maid to herself for the present, and pursued her journey to England.

She went to Lincolnshire, and there left her charge. It was her native place, and the Vicar of Starling was an old friend. With the vicar and his family the lad was placed. The vicarage lay down in the dreary fen country, with flat, dank marshes all about it—the flat sea, lying gray and gloomy beyond the sandy coast. He was a poor man, rich only in many daughters, and Lady Dynely's proposal that they should bring up Terry was gladly accepted. Her account of him was brief. He was Terence Dennison, the orphan son of a distant cousin of her late husband. An Irish cousin—a very distant cousin—still a cousin, and as such, with a claim upon Lord Dynely's widow. He was poor and utterly alone in the world. Would Mr. Higgins take him as one of his family, let him grow up among them, educate him and accept in return—

The offer was munificent in Mr. Higgins' eyes—the bargain was closed there and then, and little Terry Dennison's life began anew.

He could not tell these good people much about his early life—he was a slow child, but they could easily see he had been brought up among the very poor. Until he was fifteen he remained at the vicarage—then he went to Eton with little Eric, Lord Dynely, and the two lads got acquainted. That Christmas for the first time he spent the vacation at Dynely Abbey, and thenceforth alternately passed his holidays at the vicarage and the Abbey. It would be hard to say which the boy liked best. At the vicarage, Mr. and Mrs. Higgins had been as father and mother to him, and there was little Crystal, his baby sweetheart, the prettiest fairy in all Lincolnshire. But at the old ancestral Abbey dwelt the angel of his life, Lady Dynely. It was wonderful—it was pathetic, the admiring love and veneration Terry Dennison had for this lady. Of all women she was the most beautiful, of all women the best. He could now realize all she had done for him, and it filled his slow soul with wonder, the greatness of her goodness. From the depths of poverty and misery she had descended like an angel of light to rescue him.

All that she did for her own son she did for him; he had even more pocket money than Eric. This Christmas she gave him a gold watch, the next a pony—she loaded him with costly presents and kindly words always. Costly presents and kindly words, but never once—no, not once, one caress. Instinctively she shrank from this boy she had adopted with a look absolutely of repulsion—absolutely of terror at times. This Terry did not notice. I have said he was slow, but his heart yearned vaguely sometimes for just one touch of her white, slim hand on his shaggy, tawny head—for just one of the kisses she lavished on her son. He envied Eric—thrice happy Eric—not his beauty, not his title, not his wealth; ah, no! but one of these motherly embraces showered on him like rain. Eric shook her off, impatient, boy-like, of kisses and fondling, and then Lady Dynely would see Terry's round, Celtic eyes lifted wistfully to her face with the longing, pathetic patience you see in the eyes of a dog. This love, little short of worship, grew with his growth—to him she was the perfection of all that was purest, fairest, sweetest, noblest, among women. He never put in words—most likely he could not—one half the veneration with which she inspired him. And partly for her sake and partly for his own, for the gallant and golden beauty that charmed all hearts, he loved Eric, as once upon a time Jonathan loved splendid young David—"With a love surpassing that of women."

Terry grew to manhood, went up to Oxford, reached his majority, and then his benefactress bestowed upon him the crown of his life, the desire of his heart, a commission in a crack regiment. He could have cast himself at her feet and kissed the hem of her garment, so grateful was he, but he only turned very red indeed, and looked foolish and awkward, after the fashion of your big-hearted men when they feel most, and stammered incoherently two or three stupid phrases of thanks.

"No, don't thank me, please," Lady Dynely said hurriedly. "I can't do too much for you, Terry. You—you are a relative of my late husband's, you know. In doing this I am only doing my duty."

"Only her duty." Ah, she made him feel that, feel it ever. Always duty, never love.

"Five hundred a year has been settled upon you, also," her ladyship went on; "this, in addition to your pay, will probably suffice for you. Your habits are not expensive, Terry," with a smile; "not like Eric's for instance, who spends more in a month for bouquets and kid gloves than you do in a year. But if it should not suffice, never hesitate to draw upon me freely, and at all times. My purse is open to you as to my own son."

"Madame, your goodness overpowers me," is all poor Terry can answer, and there is a choking sensation in his throat, and tears, actual tears, in the boy's foolish blue eyes.

She sits and looks at him as he stands before her, big, broad-shoulders, sunburned, healthy, not in the least handsome, not in the least graceful or refined, with the grace and refinement that is her darling Eric's birthright, but a gentleman from head to foot. She takes his hand and looks at him with wistful eyes.

"Terry," she says, "I have done my best for you, have I not? I have tried—yes, Heaven knows I have—to make you happy! And you are happy, are you not?"

Happy! he—Terry! A curiously sentimental question, surely, to ask this big dragoon, with his hearty face and muscular six feet of manhood. It strikes Terry in that light, and he laughs.

"Happy!" he repeats. "The happiest and luckiest fellow in England. Haven't a wish unsatisfied—give you my honor, wouldn't change places with a duke. Happy! by Jove, you know I should think so, with a commission and five hundred a year, and the pot I made on Derby, and—er your regard, you know, my lady. Because," says honest Terry, turning very red again and floundering after the fashion of his kind in the quagmire of his feelings, "your regard is worth more to me than the whole world beside. I ain't the sort of a fellow to speak out—er—um—what I feel, but by Jove! I do feel you know, and I'm awfully grateful and all that sort of thing, you know. And," says Terry, with a great burst, "I'd lay down my life for you willingly any day!"

And then he pulls himself up, and shifts uneasily from one foot to the other, and looks and feels thoroughly ashamed of himself for what he has said.

"I know that, Terry," her ladyship answers, more touched than she cares to show. "I believe it, indeed. You are of the sort who will go to death itself for their friends. The motto of our house suits you—'Loyal au mort.' One day I may call upon that loyalty, not for myself but for Eric. One day, Terry, I may remind you of your own words, and call upon you to redeem them."

"When that day comes, my lady," he answers, quietly, "you will find me ready."

"Yes," she went on, not heeding him, "one day I may call upon you to make a sacrifice, a great sacrifice, for Eric and for me. One day I shall tell you—" She paused abruptly, and looked at him, and clasped her hands. "Oh, Terry! be a friend, a brother to my boy! He is not like you—he is reckless, extravagant, easily led, self-willed, wild. He will go wrong—I fear it—I fear it—and you must be his protector whenever you can. Let nothing he ever does, nothing he ever says to you, tempt you to anger against him—tempt you to desert him. Promise me that!"

He knelt down before her, and with the grace a Chevalier Bayard might have envied, the grace that comes from a true heart, lifted her hand to his lips.

"Nothing that Eric can ever do, can ever say, will tempt me to anger—that I swear. For his sake, and for yours, I will do all man can do. You have been the good angel of my life. I would be less than man if I ever forgot your goodness."

She drew her hands suddenly from his clasp, and bowed her face upon them.

"The good angel of your life!" she repeated, brokenly. "Oh! you don't know—you don't know!" Then as suddenly, she lifted her face, took Terry's between her two hands, and, for the first time in her life, kissed him.

He bowed his head as to a benediction; and a compact was sealed that not death itself could break.

With a start Lady Dynely awakes from her dream. The soft darkness of the spring night has fallen over the great city; its million gaslights gleam through the gray gloom; carriages are rolling up to the door, and Terry Dennison goes down the passage outside, whistling an Irish jig. She rises. As she does so, her eyes fall upon her son's picture. The light of a street lamp falls full upon it, and lights it up in its smiling beauty.

"My darling!" she whispers, passionately, "my treasure! what will you say to your mother on the day when you learn the truth? It is due to you, and ah! dear Heaven! it is due to him. Poor Terry! poor, foolish, generous Terry!—who holds me little lower than the angels—who loves me as you, my heart's dearest, never will—what will he think of me when he learns the truth?"