The Shadow of Ashlydyat

“But, Margery, it has done her no harm. There’s a pinafore or two torn, I believe, and that’s the worst. Mrs. Pain has been exceedingly kind. She has kept her dogs shut up all the week.”

Margery’s face was working ominously. It bore the sign of an approaching storm.

“Kind! She!” repeated Margery, almost beside herself. “Why, then, if it’s come to this pass, you had better have your eyes opened, ma’am, if nothing else will stop the child’s going there. Your child at Mrs. Charlotte Pain’s! Prior’s Ash will talk more than it has talked before.”

“What has Prior’s Ash said?” asked Maria, an uncomfortable feeling stealing over her.

“It has wondered whether Mrs. George Godolphin has been wholly blind or only partially so; that’s what it has done, ma’am” returned Margery, quite forgetting herself in her irritation. “And the woman coming here continually with her bold face! I’d rather see Meta–”

Margery’s eloquence was brought to a summary end. A noise in the hall was followed by the boisterous entrance of the ladies in question, Miss Meta and Mrs. Charlotte Pain. Charlotte—really she was wild at times—had brought Meta home on horseback. Late as it was, she had mounted her horse to give the child pleasure, had mounted the child on the saddle before her, and so they had cantered down, attended by a groom. Charlotte wore her habit, and held her whip in her hand. She came in pretending to beat an imaginary horse, for the delectation of Meta. Meta was furnished with a boy’s whip, a whistle at one end, a lash at the other. She was beating an imaginary horse too, varying the play with an occasional whistle. What with the noise, the laughing, the lashes, and the whistle, it was as if Bedlam had broken loose. To crown the whole, Meta’s brown-holland dress was wofully torn, and the brim of her straw hat was almost separated from the crown.

Meta caught sight of Margery and flew to her. But not before Margery had made a sort of grab at the child. Clasping her in her arms, she held her there, as if she would protect her from some infection. To be clasped in arms, however, and thus deprived of the delights of whip-smacking and whistling, did not accord with Miss Meta’s inclinations, and she struggled to get free.

“You’d best stop here and hide yourself, poor child!” cried Margery in a voice excessively pointed.

“It’s not much,” said Charlotte, supposing the remark applied to the damages. “The brim is only unsewn, and the blouse is an old one. She did it in swinging.”

“Who’s talking of that?” fiercely responded Margery to Mrs. Pain. “If folks had to hide their faces for nothing worse than torn clothes, it wouldn’t be of much account.”

Charlotte did not like the tone. “Perhaps you will wait until your opinion’s asked for,” said she, turning haughtily on Margery. There had been incipient warfare between those two for years: and they both were innately conscious of it.

A shrill whistle from Meta interrupted the contest. She had escaped and was standing in the middle of the room, her legs astride, her damaged hat set rakishly on the side of her head, her attitude altogether not unlike that of a man standing to see a horse go through his paces. It was precisely what the young lady was imitating: she had been taken by Charlotte to the stable-yard that day, to witness the performance.

Clack, clack! “Lift your feet up, you lazy brute!” Clack, clack, clack! “Mamma, I am making a horse canter.”

Charlotte looked on with admiring ecstasy, and clapped her hands. Maria seemed bewildered: Margery stood with dilating eyes and open mouth. There was little doubt that Miss Meta, under the able tuition of Mrs. Pain, might become an exceedingly fast young lady in time.

“You have been teaching her that!” burst forth Margery to Mrs. Pain in her uncontrollable anger. “What else might you have been teaching her? It’s fit, it is, for you to be let have the companionship of Miss Meta Godolphin!”

Charlotte laughed in her face defiantly—contemptuously—with a gleeful, merry accent. Margery, perhaps distrustful of what she might be further tempted to say herself, put an end to the scene by catching up Meta and forcibly carrying her off, in spite of rebellious kicks and screams. In her temper, she flung the whip to the other end of the hall as she passed through it. “They’d make you into a boy, and worse, if they had their way. I wish Miss Janet had been here to-night!”

“What an idiotic old maid she is, that Margery!” exclaimed Charlotte, laughing still. “Good night. I can’t stay. I shall come for Meta to-morrow.”

“Not to-morrow,” dissented Maria, feeling that the struggle with Margery would be too formidable. “I thank you very much for your kindness, Mrs. Pain,” she heartily added; “but now that Margery has returned, she will not like to part with Meta.”

“As you will,” said Charlotte, with a laugh. “Margery would not let her come, you think. Good night. Dormez bien.”

Before the sound of the closing of the hall-door had ceased its echoes through the house, Margery was in the dining-room again, her face white with anger. Her mistress, a thing she very rarely did, ventured on a reproof.

“You forgot yourself, Margery, when you spoke just now to Mrs. Pain. I felt inclined to apologize to her for you.”

This was the climax. “Forgot myself!” echoed Margery, her face growing whiter. “No, ma’am, it’s because I did not forget myself that she’s gone out of the house without her ears tingling. I should have made ’em tingle if I had spoke out. Not that some folk’s ears can tingle,” added Margery, amending her proposition. “Hers is of the number, so I should have spent my words for nothing. If Mr. George had spent his words upon somebody else, it might be the better for us all now.”

“Margery!”

“I can’t help it, ma’am, I must have my say. Heaven knows I wouldn’t have opened my mouth to you; I’d have kept it closed for ever, though I died for it—and it’s not five minutes ago that I pretty well snapped Harriet’s nose off for daring to give out hints and to bring up your name—but it’s time you did know a little of what has been going on, to the scandal of Prior’s Ash. Meta up at Lady Godolphin’s Folly with that woman!”

“Margery!” again interrupted her mistress. But Margery’s words were as a torrent that bears down all before it.

“It has been the talk of the town; it has been the talk of the servants here; it has been the talk among the servants at Ashlydyat. If I thought you’d let the child go out with her in public again, I’d pray that I might first follow her to the grave in her little coffin.”

Maria’s face had turned as white as Margery’s. She sat as a statue, gazing at the woman with eyes in which there shone a strange kind of fear.

“I—don’t—know—what—it—is—you—mean,” she said, the words coming out disjointedly.

“It means, ma’am, that you have lived with a mist before your eyes. You have thought my master a saint and a paragon, and he was neither the one nor the other. And now I hope you’ll pardon me for saying to your face what others have been long saying behind your back.”

She turned sharply off as she concluded, and quitted the room abruptly as she had entered it, leaving Maria motionless, her breath coming in gasps, and the dewdrops cold on her brow.

The substance of what Margery had spoken out so broadly had sometimes passed through her mind as a dim shadow. But never to rest there.

CHAPTER XXIV.

A VISIT TO LORD AVERIL

A few days progressed onwards, and another week was in. Every hour brought to light more—what are we to call it—imprudence?—of Mr. George Godolphin’s. His friends termed it imprudence; his enemies villainy. Thomas called it nothing: he never cast reproach on George by a single word; he would have taken the whole odium upon himself, had it been possible to take it. George’s conduct was breaking his heart, was driving him to his grave somewhat before his time; but Thomas never said in the hearing of others—He has been a bad brother to me.

George Godolphin was not yet home again. It could not be said that he was in concealment, as he was sometimes met in London by people visiting it. Perhaps he carried his habitual carelessness so far as to the perilling of his own safety; and his absence from Prior’s Ash may have been the result only of his distaste to meet that ill-used community. Had he been sole partner, he must have been there to answer to his bankruptcy; as it was, Thomas, hitherto, had answered all in his own person.

But there came a day when Thomas could not answer it. Ill or well, he rose now to the early breakfast-table: he had to hasten to the Bank betimes, for there was much work there with the accounts; and one morning when they were at breakfast, Bexley, his own servant, entered with one or two letters.

They were speaking of Lady Godolphin. My lady was showing herself a true friend. She had announced to them that it was her intention to resume her residence at the Folly, that they “might not be separated from Prior’s Ash, the place of their birth and home.” Of course it was an intimation, really delicately put, that their future home must be with her. “Never for me,” Janet remarked: her future residence would not be at Prior’s Ash; as far removed from it as possible.

Thomas had risen, and was at a distant table, opening his letters, when a faint moan startled them. He was leaning back in his chair, seemingly unconscious; his hands had fallen, his face was the hue of the grave. Surely those dews upon it were not the dews of death?

Cecil screamed; Bessy flung open the door and called for help; Janet only turned to them, her hands lifted to enjoin silence, a warning word upon her lips. Bexley came running in, and looked at his master.

“He’ll be better presently,” he whispered.

“Yes, he will be better presently,” assented Janet. “But I should like Mr. Snow to be here.”

Bexley was the only man-servant left at Ashlydyat. Short work is generally made of the dispersion of a household when the means come to an end, as they had with the Godolphins: and there had been no difficulty in finding places for the excellent servants of Ashlydyat. Bexley had stoutly refused to go. He didn’t want wages, he said, but he was not going to leave his master, so long as– Bexley did not say so long as what, but they had understood him. So long as his master was in life.

Thomas began to revive. He slowly opened his eyes, and raised his hand to wipe the moisture from his white face. On the table before him lay one of the letters open. Janet recognized the handwriting as that of George.

She spurned the letter from her. With a gesture of grievous vexation, her hand pushed it across the table. “It is that which has affected you!” she cried out, with a wail.

“Not so,” breathed Thomas. “It was the pain here.”

He touched himself below the chest; in the place where the pain had come before. Which pain had seized upon him?—the mental agony arising from George’s conduct, or the physical agony of his disease? Probably somewhat of both.

He stretched out his hand towards the letter, making a motion that it should be folded. Bexley, who could not have read a word without his glasses had it been to save his life, took up the letter, folded it, and placed it in its envelope. Thomas’s mind then seemed at rest, and he closed his eyes again.

Mr. Snow soon reached Ashlydyat. “Another attack, I hear,” he began, in his unceremonious salutation. “Bothered into it, no doubt. Bexley says it came on when he was reading letters.”

With the wan white look upon his face, with the moisture of pain still upon his brow, lay Thomas Godolphin. He was on the sofa now; but he partially rose from it and assumed a sitting posture when the surgeon entered.

A few professional questions and answers, and then Mr. Snow began to grumble. “Did I not warn you that you must have perfect tranquillity?” cried he. “Rest of body and of mind.”

“You did. But how am I to have it? Even now, I ought to be at the Bank, facing the trouble there.”

“Where’s George?” sharply asked Mr. Snow.

“In London,” replied Thomas Godolphin. But he said it in no complaining accent: neither did his tone invite further comment.

Mr. Snow was one who did not wait for an invitation in such a cause ere he spoke. “It is one of two things, Mr. Godolphin. Either George must come back and face this worry, or else you’ll die.”

“I shall die, however it may be, Snow,” was the reply of Thomas Godolphin.

“So will most of us, I expect,” returned the doctor. “But there’s no necessity for being helped on to it by others, ages before death would come of itself. What’s your brother at in London? Amusing himself, I suppose. He must be got here.”

Thomas shook his head. The action, as implying a negative, aroused the wrath of Mr. Snow. “Do you want to die?” he asked. “One would think it, by your keeping your brother away.”

“There is no person who would more gladly see my brother here than I,” returned Thomas Godolphin. “If—if it were expedient that he should come.”

“Need concealment be affected between us, Mr. Godolphin?” resumed the surgeon, after a pause. “You must be aware that I have heard the rumours afloat. A doctor hears everything, you know. You are uncertain whether it would be safe for George to come back to Prior’s Ash.”

“It is something of that sort, Snow.”

“But now, what is there against him—it is of no use to mince the matter—besides those bonds of Lord Averil’s?”

“There’s nothing else against him. At least, in—in–” He did not go on. He could not bring his lips to say of his brother—“from a criminal point of view.”

“Nothing else of which unpleasant legal cognizance can be taken,” freely interposed Mr. Snow. “Well, now, it is my opinion that there’s not a shadow of fear to be entertained from Lord Averil. He is your old and firm friend, Mr. Godolphin.”

“He has been mine: yes. Not so much George’s. Most men in such a case of—of loss, would resent it, without reference to former friendship. I am not at any certainty, you see, and therefore I cannot take the responsibility of saying to my brother, ‘It is safe for you to return.’ Lord Averil has never been near me since. I argue ill from it.”

“He has not been with you for the best of all possible reasons—that he has been away from Prior’s Ash,” explained Mr. Snow.

“Has he been away? I did not know it.”

“He has. He was called away unexpectedly by some relative’s illness, a day or two after your house was declared bankrupt. He may have refrained from calling on you just at the time that happened, from motives of delicacy.”

“True,” replied Thomas Godolphin. But his tone was not a hopeful one. “When does he return?”

“He has returned. He came back last night.”

There was a pause. Thomas Godolphin broke it. “I wish you could give me something to avert or mitigate these sharp attacks of pain, Snow,” he said. “It is agony, in fact; not pain.”

“I know it,” replied Mr. Snow. “Where’s the use of my attempting to give you anything? You don’t take my prescriptions.”

Thomas lifted his eyes in some surprise. “I have taken all that you have desired me.”

“No, you have not. I prescribe tranquillity of mind and body. You take neither.”

Thomas Godolphin leaned a little nearer to the doctor, and paused before he answered. “Tranquillity of mind for me has passed. I can never know it again. Were my life to be prolonged, the great healer of all things, Time, might bring it me in a degree: but, for that, I shall not live. Snow, you must know this to be the case, under the calamity which has fallen upon my head.”

“It ought to have fallen upon your brother’s head, not upon yours,” was the rejoinder of the surgeon, spoken crossly, in his inability to contradict Mr. Godolphin’s words. “At any rate, you cannot go on any longer facing this business in person.”

“I must indeed. There is no help for it.”

“And suppose it kills you?” was the retort.

“If I could help going, I would,” said Thomas. “But there is no alternative. One of us must be there; and George cannot be. You are not ignorant of the laws of bankruptcy.”

“It is another nail in your coffin,” growled Mr. Snow, as he took his leave.

He went straight to the Bank. He asked to see Mrs. George Godolphin. Maria, in her pretty morning dress of muslin, was seated with Meta on her knees. She had been reading the child a Bible story, and was now talking to her in a low voice, her own face, so gentle, so pure, and so sad, bent towards the little one’s upturned to it.

“Well, young lady, and how are all the dolls?” was the surgeon’s greeting. “Will you send her away to play with them, Mrs. George?”

Meta ran off. She intended to come bustling down again with her arms full. Mr. Snow took his seat opposite Maria.

“Why does your husband not come back?” he abruptly asked.

The question seemed to turn Maria’s heart to sickness. She opened her lips to answer, but stopped in hesitation. Mr. Snow resumed:

“His staying away is killing Thomas Godolphin. I prescribe tranquillity for him; total rest: instead of which, he is obliged to come here day after day, and be in a continuous scene of worry. Your husband must return, Mrs. George Godolphin.”

“Y—es,” she faintly answered, lacking the courage to say that considerations for his personal security might forbid it.

“Murder will not mend these unhappy matters, Mrs. George Godolphin; nor would it be a desirable ending to them. And it will be nothing less than murder if he does not return, for Mr. Godolphin will surely die.”

All Maria’s pulses seemed to beat the quicker. “Is Mr. Godolphin worse?” she asked.

“He is considerably worse. I have been called in to him this morning. My last orders to him were, not to attempt to come to the Bank. His answer was, that he must come: there was no help for it. I believe there is no help for it, George being away. You must get him home, Mrs. George.”

She looked sadly perplexed. Mr. Snow read it correctly.

“My dear, I think there would be no danger. Lord Averil is a personal friend of Mr. Godolphin’s. I think there’s none for another reason: if the viscount’s intention had been to stir unpleasantly in the affair, he would have stirred in it before this.”

“Yes—I have thought of that,” she answered.

“And now I must go again,” he said, rising. “I wish to-day was twenty-four hours long, for the work I have to do in it; but I spared a few minutes to call in and tell you this. Get your husband here, for the sake of his good brother.”

The tears were in Maria’s eyes. She could scarcely think of Thomas Godolphin and his unmerited troubles without their rising. Mr. Snow saw the wet eyelashes, and laid his hand on the smoothly-parted hair.

“You have your share of sorrow just now, child,” he said; “more than you ought to have. It is making you look like a ghost. Why does he leave you to battle it out alone?” added Mr. Snow, his anger mastering him, as he gazed at her pale face, her rising sobs. “Prior’s Ash is crying shame upon him. Are you and his brother of less account than he, in his own eyes, that he should abandon you to it?”

She strove to excuse her husband—he was her husband, in spite of that cruel calumny divulged by Margery—but Mr. Snow would not listen. He was in a hurry, he said, and went bustling out of the door, almost upsetting Meta, with her dolls, who was bustling in.

Maria sent the child to the nursery again after Mr. Snow’s departure, and stood, her head pressed against the frame of the open window, looking unconsciously on to the terrace, revolving the words recently spoken. “It is killing Thomas Godolphin. It will be nothing less than murder, if George does not return.”

Every fibre of her frame was thrilling to it in answer: every generous impulse of her heart was stirred to its depths. He ought to be back. She had long thought so. For her sake—but she was nothing; for Thomas Godolphin’s; for her husband’s own reputation. Down deep in her heart she thrust that dreadful revelation of his falsity, and strove to bury it as an English wife and gentlewoman has no resource but to do. Ay! to bury it; and to keep it buried! though the concealment eat away her life—as that scarlet letter A, you have read of, ate into the bosom of another woman renowned in story. It seemed to Maria that the time was come when she must inquire a little into the actual state of affairs, instead of hiding her head and spending her days in the indulgence of her fear and grief. If the whole world spoke against him,—if the whole world had cause to speak,—she was his wife still, and his interests and welfare were hers. Were it possible that any effort she could make would bring him back, she must make it.

The words of Mr. Snow still rang in her ears. How was she to set about it? A few minutes given to reflection, her aching brow pressed to the cold window-frame, and she turned and rang the bell. When the servant appeared, she sent him into the Bank with a request that Mr. Hurde would come and speak with her for five minutes.

Mr. Hurde was not long in obeying the summons. He appeared with a pen behind his ear, and his spectacles pushed up on his brow.

It was not a pleasant task, and Maria had to swallow a good many lumps in her throat before she could make known precisely what she wanted. “Would Mr. Hurde tell her the exact state of things? What there was, or was not, against her husband.”

Mr. Hurde gave no very satisfactory reply. He took off his glasses and wiped them. Maria had invited him to a chair, and sat near him, her elbow leaning on the table, and her face slightly bent. Mr. Hurde did not know what Mrs. George Godolphin had or had not heard, or how far it would be expedient for him to speak. She guessed at his dilemma.

“Tell me all, Mr. Hurde,” she said, lifting her face to his with imploring eagerness. “It is well that you should, for nothing can be more cruel than the uncertainty and suspense I am in. I know about Lord Averil’s bonds.”

“Ay?” he replied. But he said no more.

“I will tell you why I ask,” said Maria. “Mr. Snow has been here, and he informs me that coming to the Bank daily and the worry are killing Mr. Godolphin. He says Mr. George ought to be back in his brother’s place. I think if he can come, he ought to do so.”

“I wish he could,” returned Mr. Hurde, more quickly and impressively than he usually spoke. “It is killing Mr. Godolphin—that, and the bankruptcy together. But I don’t know that it would be safe for him, on account of these very bonds of Lord Averil’s.”

“What else is there against him?” breathed Maria.

“There’s nothing else.”

“Nothing else?” she echoed, a shade of hope lighting up her face and her heart.

“Nothing else. That is, nothing that he can be made criminally responsible for,” added the old clerk, with marked emphasis, as if he thought that there was a great deal more, had the law only taken cognizance of it. “If Lord Averil should decline to prosecute, he might return to-morrow. He must be back soon, whether or not, to answer to his bankruptcy; or else–”

“Or else—what?” asked Maria falteringly, for Mr. Hurde had stopped. “Speak out.”

“Or else never come back at all; never be seen, in fact, in England again. That’s how it is, ma’am.”

“Would it not be well to ascertain Lord Averil’s feelings upon the subject, Mr. Hurde?” she rejoined, breaking a silence.

“It would be very well, if it could be done. But who is to do it?”

Maria was beginning to think that she would do it. “You are sure there is nothing else against him?” she reiterated.

“Nothing, ma’am, that need prevent his returning to Prior’s Ash.”

There was no more to be answered, and Mr. Hurde withdrew. Maria lost herself in thought. Could she dare to go to Lord Averil and beseech his clemency? Her brow flushed at the thought. But she had been inured to humiliation of late, and it would be only another drop in the cup of pain. Oh, the relief it would be, could the dreadful suspense, the uncertainty, end! The suspense was awful. Even if it ended in the worst, it would be almost a relief. If Lord Averil should intend to prosecute, who knew but he might forego the intention at her prayers? If so—if so—why, she should ever say that God had sent her to him.

There was the reverse side of the picture. A haughty reception of her—for was she not the wife of the man who had wronged him?—and a cold refusal. How she should bear that, she did not like to think. Should she go? Could she go? Even now her heart was failing her–